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

the afternoon Barbara walked home alone in the rain ‘to meditate’ after Julie Harris’s last matinee of The Lark…” Perhaps, like others at the Barbizon, Barbara was lonely. Yet as the guest editors of 1956 stand in an X formation around an outsize weathervane, looking up at the camera (the group shot was always aerial), dressed this year in matching red rain slickers, Barbara looks happy, a wide grin on her face.

Barbara Chase, quite possibly the first African American woman to ever reside at the Barbizon, posing with her fellow Mademoiselle guest editors in 1956.

It would be another five years before Mademoiselle had its next “first.” In 1961, Willette Murphy, an African American college student, appeared on page 229, modeling a collegiate outfit—“Lamb, pied with stripes, with herringbone tweed—that’s the scramble worn by senior class president Willette Murphy, ’61. The cardigan is white pretend lamb lined in gray striped silk, the blouse matches lining, the shaped skirt is black and white tweed.” Willette Murphy was the first black model to appear in an American fashion magazine; even the New York Times took note of this momentous stride in civil rights. But Barbara had already been there a full five years earlier, even if hidden under the rafters.

When the guest editor program was over, BTB secured a paid summer internship for Barbara at Charm magazine. She could not afford to stay on at the Barbizon; moreover, without her affiliation as a star guest editor at Mademoiselle, most likely she would not have been as welcome. She went home instead to Philadelphia, getting up at 6:00 a.m. daily to catch the Amtrak to Penn Station. She was “in seventh heaven” working in layout, pasting shoe illustrations by Andy Warhol (which is how he then paid the rent). Barbara would later regret discarding the Warhol illustrations they did not use. But it was Barbara’s time at the Barbizon and Mademoiselle that proved to be life changing. In the “We Hitch Our Wagons” series, in which each GE picked one person they most wished to interview, Barbara had chosen Leo Lionni, Fortune’s art director. As she wrote in her “Hitch My Wagon” interview piece: “Born in Holland of Italian parents, Mr. Lionni’s major criticism of America is that ‘there’s no room left for living because we spend so much of our lives being entertained.’ In art as in life ‘there are certain emotions involved. You can’t be cute and decorative with everything.’ ” Leo Lionni saw something in Barbara, and he helped her secure a John Hay Whitney fellowship at the American Academy in Rome that same year.

Barbara would later write, “I was leaving to explore the world outside just as the United States was looking inwards and exploring its own Apartheid, which would leave it never the same again. I had no idea at the time that what was named the Civil Rights Movement was heading towards a summit point in the world which would render it unique. And I would experience it from an altogether different vantage point—a Yankee in Western Europe, a ‘foreigner in a foreign land, and finally an American in Paris.’ Philadelphia’s Grace Kelly married European Prince Rainier, Marilyn Monroe married Jewish intellectual Arthur Miller, Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy, James Baldwin published The Fire Next Time, Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Affluent Society. In Europe, I would meet them all in time.” And Barbara, intentionally borrowing from Betsy Talbot Blackwell, would take on an extra name rather than discard her earlier one when she married. She became Barbara Chase-Riboud, renowned visual artist, bestselling novelist, and award-winning poet.

On the surface, Barbara Chase’s unique experiences and successes suggest few parallels with the Barbizon’s Lone Women. But their shared common denominator was visibility. Neither Barbara nor the Lone Women were visible, let alone represented, in popular images of the Barbizon. Nor, for that matter, on the pages of Mademoiselle. Both the Barbizon’s residents and Mademoiselle’s readers were expected to be young white women, wives-in-waiting, fun, perky, and popular. And not everyone was.

If Barbara Chase and the Lone Women exposed the cracks in this 1950s false ideal, then Sylvia Plath cataloged the toll it took trying to achieve that ideal. It was a toll shared by many women, and it would eventually mobilize them to demand change.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“T

HE

P

ROBLEM

T

HAT

H

AS

N

O

N

AME

”

Sylvia Plath and the 1950s, In Memoriam

The famous 1953 Mademoiselle guest editors, with Sylvia Plath at the very top of the star. Her legacy—and suicide—would continue to haunt them, as would the Barbizon, to which they returned several times over the years.

At first glance, Sylvia Plath betrayed little of her inner struggle. Laurie Totten, who had traveled with her from Wellesley, Massachusetts, to the Barbizon, found Sylvia to be “a typical coed” with “nothing remarkable about her.” In some ways, Sylvia was very much of her time. Mary Cantwell, who would go on to write the Manhattan Memoir trilogy, was much like Sylvia: both were from East Coast women’s colleges, thereby belonging (as a guest editor had sardonically noted about Sylvia) to the “East Coast intelligentsia.” Mary Cantwell would arrive in New York in July 1953, just a month after Sylvia had left. That summer was hot, stifling, the humid air un-inhalable. Mary Cantwell, like Sylvia, craved New York at the same time that she feared it. She was “afraid to take the subway, afraid to get lost, afraid even to ask the women in the office where the ladies’ room was,” so afraid that instead she would leave her office and use the bathroom at the Bonwit Teller department store around the corner.

The Seven Sisters Placement agency, catering to graduates from the elite East Coast women’s colleges, sent Mary out to interview with Mademoiselle’s managing editor, Cyrilly Abels: the very editor whom Sylvia had shadowed the previous month, whom Sylvia would rename Jay Cee in The Bell Jar, describing her