The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

a swinging door. A horde of hands swooped down at me and lifted me to unsteady feet.” About to lose the top of her dress, she reached down to discover that in fact she’d lost her mother’s stole, until what she thought was a pounding in her head turned out to be Oscar tapping her shoulder to let her know he’d found the stole draped around the fire hydrant. That night, Gael fell asleep under her narrow bed, the stole wrapped around her head, one end trailing out the open window. The next morning, the door opened suddenly and one of the Barbizon residents tossed a dozen Clark Bars at her, with the declaration, in lockjaw upper-class drawl, that “peanut buttah always shrinks mah head beautifully the mawnin’ aftah.”

Janet Burroway had had her own good time, although entirely sober. She was among the very youngest in guest editor history, and also a teetotaler. But instead of being embarrassed that she could not hold up to the likes of Gael Greene, Janet basked in the attention she received from being “eighteen, a virginal Methodist Phoenix freshman who had never had a cigarette or a drink.” Early the next morning, around the time that Peggy was whizzing around town in the MG, Janet returned to the Barbizon and wrote home: “If the Mlle. staff doesn’t know how to write a magazine, they certainly know how to throw a dance.” The evening had started right: she had done her hair as Enrico Caruso had advised after her session with him at the College Clinic (“a middle part, a deep wave on either side of it, and one side pulled farther back than the other”), and it behaved, much to her surprise. She was a hit as the only girl who didn’t drink at a cocktail party. The decor for the St. Regis rooftop party reminded her of a Hollywood supper club with “pink quilted walls, 2 orchestras, a waiter for every 4 people.” Mademoiselle “bless their hearts” had sat her next to “a very unpretty intellectual boy who talked fascinating serious politics and Europe and literature all the way through dinner.” She danced with the pretty boys. Nevertheless, at the end of the evening, she held out for the “unpretty intellectual boy,” a Fulbright scholar on his way to Oxford named Dick Aldridge, to offer to take her home. He did so, in a hansom cab through Central Park. “This,” she wrote home, “is the New York I had in mind!”

Thereafter, the New York Janet had in mind became inextricable from Dick Aldridge, who, she noted, now seemed less unpretty (in the same way her Barbizon room now felt less small). She started to spend all her free time with him, often visiting with his family as well in their grand New York apartment. She promised her mother to find out his religion, and reported back the “violently important information; he is protestant.” Assuring her parents further, she wrote: “I know that you think New York is a big, tough, frightening city, but even people who live all their lives in back-lawn-less apartments manage to raise kids who don’t belong to street gangs and turn into second-story men.” Dick Aldridge did not belong to a street gang, nor was he a burglar; he belonged to a very rich and respectable family—his father was a prominent New York gynecologist, and his mother was English, strict, brought up in India. Dick had, much to Janet’s admiration as well as envy, already published his poetry in the New Yorker, and the New York Times had compared him to Robert Frost. Peggy would remember her rushing into the Barbizon one night: “I’ve got a date with an important poet!” This convinced Peggy even more that Janet was “never shy of blowing her own horn.” But in fact nothing could have been further from the truth; just like the others, she was wracked with insecurity that would come to a head at the end of the month. (In 1968, the actress Cybill Shepherd too would sit in her room at the Barbizon “wondering how I would ever make it in this vast city just stockpiled with brilliant people.”)

On top of the parties, the month of June 1955 had included a tour of the New York Times offices, a get-together with designers at the Empire State Building, lunch at Saks Fifth Avenue, and more. It was all rounded off with the traditional group photo for the August College Issue, everyone wearing the same mandatory outfit. For 1955, all twenty of the guest editors sat in stadium bleachers, grinning widely at the camera. This year’s outfit was horrendous: a pin-tucked shirt buttoned to the very top with a heavy wool skirt. It made the 1955 GEs look like nineteenth-century governesses. Jane Truslow raved to the magazine’s readers: “More N.Y. firms rolled out crimson carpets, entertaining us so royally that even the most calorie-conscious among us flung caution into the Hudson! Yet our impression of the city was also a collection of snapshots: Peggy La V. zipping down Park Avenue in a green MG… Joan’s expression when she learned she’d won both U. of California short story contests… all twenty of us sleepily staggering out of taxis at Columbia’s Baker Field at 6:45 A.M. (a unique experience—few of us had ever been photographed at dawn yelling ‘Cheese!’ to an echoing, empty stadium!).” Ultimately, what they had been, as Peggy perceptively noted, was “a traveling focus group,” letting the editorial staff know what was on trend, the prettier among them working as free-of-charge models at the runway show at the Astor and on the pages of the August College Issue.

Behind the smiles of that final group photograph, however, there were the sorts of insecurities that only Mademoiselle’s guest editor program could stir up. The guest editorship had tested Sylvia Plath two years earlier; but in fact each June, college girls came to New York only to discover that there were others like