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

but the subtext was there: Lone Women could also turn into very unhappy, and even very desperate women. There had been suicides at the Barbizon over the years, but the hotel was good at keeping that quiet. Over the decades, only a few had been leaked to the press. In March 1934, a Mrs. Edith La Tour, thirty years old, came in from Bayside, Queens, registered at the hotel in the morning, and by evening had jumped, leaving behind a note: “I can’t stand the pain any longer.” In April 1935, Harriet Bean, a twenty-seven-year-old from Chicago who had been in the city for two years, died of an intentional overdose of sedatives. Only the Chicago Daily Tribune cryptically noted that, “about two months ago she had undergone an operation”—presumably an illegal abortion. In 1939, twenty-two-year-old Judith Ann Palmer, former University of Chicago coed, was found dead in her room at the Barbizon, a self-inflicted bullet to her head. She left two notes. One, “To Whom It May Concern,” pointed out that there was $30 in the dresser drawer to pay for funeral expenses; the other was addressed to her mother, residing at a residential hotel in Chicago. From the 1940s on, it seems the Barbizon Hotel for Women largely figured out how to keep its suicides out of the press.

The suicides continued nevertheless, even if the press coverage did not. Regina Reynolds arrived at the Barbizon very soon after the Unsinkable Molly Brown had sung her last aria there. Asked about the suicides, Ms. Reynolds guessed there had been about fifty-five over the years she lived at the Barbizon. On Sundays, one looked out the window to see if the coroner was there. It was always Sundays because Saturday was date night, and then came disappointment. Some women would hang themselves from the curtain rods. Malachy McCourt himself knew of at least three women who committed suicide at the Barbizon in the mid-1950s. “Two took an overdose and one threw herself out the window. That was kept hush-hush. Carol Andrews was her name? She was going out with a guy… and he dumped her.”

The pressure to be a certain way, to look a certain way, to marry by a certain age, was intense. Malachy’s first wife, a model, moved to the Barbizon to escape her parents, who lived nearby on Park Avenue. Most of the models suffered from bulimia, she discovered, with long lines in front of the bathrooms. Gloria Barnes Harper, with lagoon-blue eyes, left Wellesley College after freshman year because she had been signed as a Ford model, and like other young Ford models, she went to stay at the Barbizon. She witnessed a different kind of desperation among her hallmates—hunger, but not self-inflicted. They would come to her room each evening—she, the Ford model who had appeared on the cover of Life magazine before she had even graduated from high school—to see if she could get them a date that night. A date, a real date, meant a real dinner; no date meant saltine crackers.

It was the hypocrisy of the decade that struck Malachy McCourt the most. Particularly when it came to sex: “virginal” women were well versed in using “the French lever,” and if that failed, as condoms do, there were illegal abortions in the places one would never want to go, that left you with infections, if you survived them at all. “The Barbizon had the aura of the Eisenhower era,” he said. “Respectability was the order of the day. There was so much to be ashamed of as a woman. But you could redeem yourself by taking a job as a secretary or marrying.” But sometimes you just couldn’t redeem yourself.

There was so much that was hidden away in the 1950s. In those days, on the respectable Upper East Side of Manhattan, there were whispers of roommates who were “dykes, queers, fruits, and pansies,” as Malachy recalled, and rumors that they had “Negro blood.” Racial pejoratives were tossed about without a second thought. The Upper East Side was New York’s whitest of white enclaves. Malachy would later write of New York at this time: “The summer of 1956… blacks were invisible. Chinatown was an exotic venue for the tourists, with just a whiff of danger. Greenwich Village was a draw for the wide-eyed, with its bohemians and beats and the queers who shamelessly kissed and held hands out in the open.” Malachy was both right and wrong: because it was precisely in the summer of 1956 that Barbara Chase arrived at the Barbizon.

Women everywhere were defined by men. But women at the Barbizon were also defined by their whiteness, except that it was never spoken of because it was assumed. White Americans, regardless of their class, had always found common cause in their whiteness; it was the one sure thing they had. Even if you had no money or access, you still had your whiteness and the privilege that granted. The phrase “free, white, and twenty-one” became popular in the 1920s, and was used in the 1930s in a string of movies. For example, in the 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, a conversation between a socialite and a stranger takes place inside a speakeasy:

ENIGMATIC STRANGER

You mind if we stay here a while, or must you go home?

The woman pulls back, eyes wide, insulted.

YOUNG SOCIETY WOMAN

There are no musts in my life. I am free, white, and twenty-one.

The phrase persisted throughout the 1940s and 1950s: even Sylvia Plath had a character in The Bell Jar utter it. The racist saying had its roots in an 1828 law that stopped property ownership from being a prerequisite for suffrage. Voters merely needed to be free, white, and twenty-one (and of course men, but that was somehow overlooked when the phrase reemerged). Dorothy Dix, America’s first advice columnist, was the one who recycled it during the 1920s and presented it on a platter to young white women as