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

from nondescript Bakersfield, California, whom she was finding as tedious as ever, was not helping the situation: “I wish I were in New York,” she declared. Joan knew what she wanted, even if she could not have it just yet. In the “Meet This Year’s Millies” profiles for the August College Issue, Didion had written of herself: “Joan spends vacations river-rafting and small-boating in the picture-postcard atmosphere of the Sacramento Valley.” Her interests included wanting to read “almost any book published” and also publishing one of her own. As Peggy recalled, in the following year as a senior at Berkeley, Joan took the prize money from her two most recent writing contest wins (as Jane Truslow had noted on Mademoiselle’s pages: “Joan’s expression when she learned she’d won both U. of California short story contests…”) and bought AT&T stock, starting her own investment fund before she had even finished college.

Peggy remained in Manhattan; she had written in her Mademoiselle profile that she had a “yen to stay in New York” and had brought along her senior lifeguard certificate “in case I can’t find a job in my field.” While Peggy was searching for a job, Joan suggested, with youthful insensitivity, that since Mr. Smith, the president of Mademoiselle’s publisher, Street & Smith, had just died while they were all in New York that June, she should present herself as a worthy candidate for a certain job that had recently opened up: “Think of the publicity for next year—in their column of ex-guest editors.” Then, going in for a second dig, Joan added: “Is Burroway returning to Barnard, and to ‘motor’ through the Adironacks [sic] with that stuffy young man and his family?” Considering that Joan Didion was finding her boyfriend, Bob, “hopeless,” she might well have preferred to have been at Barnard, in New York City, with a stuffy young man.

Editor-in-chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell helped Peggy get a job at Living, a magazine also owned by Street & Smith, but Peggy could no longer afford the Barbizon on her starting salary. Instead, she found a room at the less glamorous East End Hotel for Women. While she waited for the room to free up, Jane Truslow invited her to stay with her in an apartment on Fifth Avenue that belonged to an uncle and aunt. “If you don’t mind we’ll live in the servants’ quarters,” she explained. The apartment, with furniture covered in white cloths while Jane’s aunt and uncle were at their summer residence, had its own elevator and, it seemed to Peggy, endless rooms. Two servant bedrooms and bathrooms had been left uncovered for Jane’s use. The two former GEs made nightly dinners and went to the theater as much as they could, cheap standing-room tickets only.

Less than two years later, Peggy LaViolette would return to California. Now it was Joan Didion’s turn to head back to New York, in fact to Vogue, where this time she had parlayed another prestigious writing contest win into a job. She was once again in the same building as the Mademoiselle offices; it was 1958, and the future actress Ali MacGraw was one of the twenty guest editors. (The stunning MacGraw, chosen for her artwork, would, without previous precedent, feature on the front cover of that year’s August College Issue.)

Joan sat in her Vogue office and wrote to Peggy, reminiscing about the day they had flown together on the Golden Gate in 1955, arriving at the Barbizon, where she thought she was seeing the Brooklyn Bridge from her room because it was “the only bridge I’d ever heard of.” She had thought Peggy was “decidedly a femme du monde” because at least she had flown before. “Talk about innocents abroad.”

While living in New York this second time, Joan Didion ventured up to Boston to visit Jane Truslow, the former guest editor-in-chief and Peggy’s summer roommate in 1955. Jane’s husband, Peter Davison, poetry editor at the Atlantic and a former lover of Plath, had been in England a year earlier looking for writers, and was told “about this marvelous American girl who was not only the center of a literary set but was a kind of mélange of Daisy Miller, the Girl of the Golden West, and Zuleika Dobson.” This “marvelous American girl,” a transatlantic femme fatale and renegade, turned out to be none other than Janet Burroway. Joan Didion, seemingly bristling with envy, even as Janet was no longer with the “stuffy” Dick Aldridge, offered up a quick slap: “About all Jane could find to say about [Janet’s novel] was that Peter said it had its moments.”

Joan, Peggy, Gael, Janet, and Jane would take markedly different paths in life. But they were all shaped by their time in New York. Janet had concluded that while she did “not always love this city,” its “pull” on her was “fantastic; even apart, I think, from Dick, though he is all mixed up with it.” New York had started to build her confidence but also poke holes in her previous beliefs. By the end of June, she had decided, with youthful élan, that she could, if she wanted, if she lost twenty pounds, be a model, or even “penthouse rich,” but the world of fashion and merchandising was out for sure: “It’s cheap and false and grabby and greasy, and I will design my own clothes, thank you, and have no part of it.” At the same time, she was also seeing that all her prizes and awards in the past had “inflated my ego so high that I couldn’t see over the top of it,” and she was now “having a rough time because I’ve measured my worth by these prizes, and it shakes my foundations.” The guest editor program was a testing ground from which even the very best emerged changed.

It was a singular and necessary environment. Within the pages of Mademoiselle, editor-in-chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell had manufactured and then tended to America’s new cult of youth: a land of makeovers