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

snooty and thinks she’s the cat’s meow.” Barbara was there for the same reason as all the other GEs: “to have a good time, wear great clothes, and be an editor.” Nor was she wrong in her evaluation of everyone’s reactions. Fashion editor Edie Locke, who had arrived in New York during World War II as a teenage Jewish refugee from Vienna, understood that in many ways the decision to invite Barbara Chase to the guest editor program was part of the Mademoiselle staff’s desire to be the “first,” to always deliver “the first,” and in this case to do so with a pat on their backs for their liberal impulses. And they expected gratitude in return, which Barbara had no interest in offering.

The 1956 Mademoiselle August College Issue is stamped with this same ambiguity; a clumsiness in presenting America’s first-ever black woman on the pages of a mainstream (“white”) fashion magazine, coupled with her invisibility. Barbara’s presence is never remarked on in the August 1956 issue. She is simply there, often in badly overexposed snapshots that turn her blackness into smudged, indiscernible features. Yet there are articles that pepper the fat tome of a college issue that inadvertently speak to her presence (or was it intended as subtle provocation?). A multipage fashion pictorial is called “Forecast for Saturday night: Black,” and features some of the white GEs, dressed in black, beside jazz musicians, most of them white but some black. Barbara remains out of sight. Another article is about integration and its problems at the University of Alabama following student demonstrations, and then mob violence, against its first “Negro student,” at a time when “Southerners as conscientious as William Faulkner have urged that integration is morally right but emotionally unacceptable at the present time.” Among the people the Mademoiselle staff writer for the article visits in Alabama is a group of college boys putting together a radio piece on the past week’s events, which has to be vetted by the administration, which approves of everything except that the black student is referred to as “Miss Lucy”: “Most white Southerners object to Negroes being called ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Mr.’ ” Many students at the University of Alabama had recoiled at the way in which Miss Lucy dared to arrive on campus: well-dressed and in a Cadillac. In a sense, Barbara Chase had dared to arrive the same way in New York.

Barbara breezed through the city, the Barbizon, and the Mademoiselle parties and luncheons as if she belonged. In part because she assumed all the parties, even the gala at the St. Regis (where she was coupled with “her type”: blond and blue-eyed), were simply normal for New York. Betsy Talbot Blackwell’s apartment, and the traditional June party there, did make an impression, however; Barbara remembered the beautiful art deco building on Park Avenue, and waiters with white gloves handing out champagne in wide coupe glasses, their shape designed to keep the bubbles bubbly longer. But Barbara did not seem particularly taken by the one gathering that made some of her cohorts swoon. One GE was instantly in awe as they entered Helena Rubinstein’s three-floor apartment on Park Avenue, where the legend “was perched on a handsome sofa at one end of a long room, wearing an elaborate Chinese dress and exquisite, embroidered shoes.” Small by birth but shrunken by age (she was in her eighties at this point), Rubinstein’s “feet dangled, almost like a child’s, barely touching the floor.” She took the guest editors from room to room, showing off her art collection: “To my darling Helena from Pablo”… “With affection, Salvador.” Of course the previous year, in 1955, guest editor Janet Burroway had scoffed at the mediocrity of the collection, and perhaps Barbara, already a talented artist, did not think much of it either.

Even as Barbara’s demeanor suggested insouciance to some, not everything went smoothly. She never spotted another African American anywhere near the Barbizon, let alone inside it, but she was treated civilly, the only telltale sign of segregation being that no one ever mentioned there was a swimming pool in the basement. Then again, she did not know how to swim and so she did not care that it was off-limits to her. In the Mademoiselle offices, Betsy Talbot Blackwell remained vigilant: “She would pull me behind a palm or run me out of the room for some sudden reason if there were Southern clients.” But she never sat Barbara down to explain the realities of white Southern sensibilities because it was a given and needed little explanation. BTB and Barbara were both blunt and it became their mutual language. If BTB had a potential problem on her hands because of Barbara’s race, she told her, and in turn, Barbara told BTB what she thought she should or should not do about it, depending also on what the other editors said or did.

But when it came time for the College Clinic, the extravagant fashion show in which the GEs paraded down the runway in the fashions scheduled to appear in the College Issue, and buyers watched and mingled, drinking liberally, BTB did not mince words: “Barbara, we can’t put you in the fashion show because we have these people who are going to make a big fuss.” They left it at that; Barbara did not argue. She spent the fashion show backstage, under the rafters: “They literally hid me.” But it did not enrage Barbara. Her mother, a black Canadian Catholic brought up in a convent, had failed to convey the difficulty of being black in 1950s America. Or maybe it was all Barbara’s doing. Years later her mother would note: “The problem with you, Barbara, is you don’t know you’re colored.”

In the annual rite of passage in which the guest editor-in-chief breezily summarized the Millies’ whirlwind month of June, Barbara’s appearance in this list of girly delights is only one line: “There were afternoons at the Museum of Modern Art, afternoons lost on the subway, and