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

them, but better versions—more talented, more ambitious, and in more emotional flux. And of course prettier. The yearly parade of overachievers, of well-dressed, well-maintained A students who planned on becoming writers and artists, were faced with tough realities when they switched from their college campuses to the bustle of Mad Ave and the likes of managing editor Cyrilly Abels scratching out their copy with her signature blue pencil.

When Janet Burroway had first stepped off the plane in New York, she was confronted by a billboard of “a gigantic VIVECA LINDFORS… in cerise neon.” It seemed serendipitous: Janet had already picked Viveca, a Swedish-born actress currently performing on Broadway, to interview for the popular “We Hitch Our Wagons” feature in the magazine’s College Issue. This interview was to be the highlight of Janet’s month in New York. In the August 1955 issue, there is a photograph of Janet with Viveca Lindfors (a high-boned, dark-haired attractive woman in flamboyant bohemian layers) alongside the interview. Viveca has her hands placed in front of her, as if she had paused thoughtfully midsentence. Janet, sitting opposite, listens, her legs crossed, fully concentrating, it seems, and yet oddly self-conscious, as if she is concentrating on concentrating, on seeming to concentrate, her small hat perched on her head, her arms also crossed on top of her crossed legs. She holds a clipboard that looks much like the ones Mademoiselle gave out at its College Clinic.

Relaying the experience to her parents, Janet wrote that Viveca had said: “People all want to be happy nowadays. Why? You don’t learn anything by being happy. Wisdom comes from unhappiness.” Janet puzzled over why during the interview she had insisted so much on contradicting this statement, even as it was something she had always believed as well.

In mid-June, she confessed in a letter home—on Mademoiselle pink letterhead—that much of her initial “violent unhappiness” in New York had been because of that interview with Viveca Lindfors. Janet had planned to impress the actress with her “flip sincerity,” and the photographer was shouting “face the camera, baby,” and someone else was taking efficient notes, and Janet had a lapful of typed questions that she couldn’t care less about and a serious case of nerves: “I asked about schools, and she spoke about the beauty of her art, I asked about her life in Sweden, and she spoke about the wisdom in unhappiness.” Janet fumbled to find the right words, and at one point, Viveca, the famous actress whose image had welcomed Janet to New York, turned to her and said: “You don’t listen, do you?” and it was as if “she had slapped me in the face.”

A couple of weeks later Janet finally saw Anastasia, the Broadway play in which Viveca was starring. “I was so ashamed because I hadn’t known what an artist she was,” Janet confided. She forced herself to go backstage after, even as there was nothing she wanted to do less; the “hard-faced, hoarse-voiced” woman guarding the stage door relented when Janet began to cry, begging to see Lindfors. It was a turning point: Viveca let her in and apologized immediately for being “short” during their interview, for failing to remember that Janet was young and nervous. Janet in turn confessed that Mademoiselle had wanted her to stress her interest in theater, yet what she really wanted to do was to become a writer. In a sense, by finding the courage to return to Viveca Lindfors, despite the debacle of an interview, Janet allowed herself to come into her own.

Soon after, it was time for them all to leave. The 1955 guest editor program ended at the end of June, as it did every year. But New York had left an indelible impression. Writing to her parents from her Barbizon room, Janet Burroway summed it up: “An Arizona girl sits in Arizona and New York is a distant gleaming—or, rather, glittering—place where all these things happen and if she could just get there she might find out that it does glitter all the time, and that she could be part of it, and that her life could be more important than PTA president and 3 kids and dishes. So—she gets to New York, and the really most amazing thing is that, unlike COLLEGE, THE THEATRE, MODELING, HAVING A POEM PUBLISHED IN SEVENTEEN, BEING A DESIGNER, and all the other things, it does glitter up close like it does from a distance, and the important people are real, and she could be part of it and could be one of them.” New York had revealed the possibilities.

Peggy and Joan parted ways too. Joan—intentionally planning for an adventure on her way home—decided to take a circuitous trip back to California by train. She wrote to Peggy: “Brief rundown on activities since I left you at The Exclusive Barbizon yesterday morning; I arrived at Grand Central and couldn’t get anyone to carry my bags, tell me where to go, or even look at me. As it neared 10 a.m., I got so upset and I just stood in the middle of the place with all these people rushing around me and unobtrusively crying.” She eventually made it onto the train to Boston, from where she headed to Quebec, then Montreal, and eventually Chicago, where she boarded the sleek Zephyr to cross the country back west: “I didn’t want to leave New York, but I certainly want to get home now. I’m certainly glad, however, that I’m taking this trip—what a lesson in clinical pathology.”

For Peggy’s amusement, Joan cataloged the groping, the unwanted passes, the perverted whispers on the lawn of the Boston Common, and the overconcerned fellow passengers shocked to see a young woman traveling the tracks alone. But once home: “Sacramento is killing me. I’ve never been in a place where everything moved so slowly and so aimlessly. Everyone seems to be frozen in exactly the same spot I left them in, 6 weeks ago.” Her boyfriend, Bob, the car salesman’s son