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

as the woman with the great mind but the “plug-ugly” face. Mary Cantwell was less intimidated by Abels than Sylvia had been. In her view, Abels was basically “a slicked-up version of the ladies on the Connecticut College faculty,” a “homely woman in her forties with a low smooth voice.” Mary Cantwell, who did not consider herself glamorous, and being sure of rejection by the magazine and its fashionistas, decided she would reject them before they could reject her. To demonstrate she was above the frivolity of a women’s magazine, she arrived for her interview in a plain pink Brooks Brothers shirt and a black-and-white gingham skirt. Her plan was to “shame” the Madison Avenue managing editor with her “chill.” But Mary was exactly the type of young woman that Cyrilly Abels liked to hire: a simile of herself—a smart woman from a good women’s college, and no slave to fashion. Abels proscribed to the rule that every autumn one buys no more than “two simple wool crepe dresses, princess-line to show off a bosom of which she was rumored to be very proud, and an absolutely correct coordinating coat from Trigère.” During the interview, Mary made it clear she had read a lot, and Abels made it clear she was a close friend of all the writers that Mary read. With that out of the way, she hired Mary Cantwell. It was a lucky if “improbable” break considering Mary had no real skills, and some of her college classmates had already gone off to Katie Gibbs to acquire them.

The Street & Smith building on Madison between Fifty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh Street contained not only Mademoiselle but also Charm, and with Harper’s Bazaar across the street, Checker cabs “were forever unloading magazine editors, who were sometimes ugly but always chic.” Mary soon learned to differentiate between the editors and the secretaries not only by the cabs but also by the fixedness of their hats: an editor never removed her hat, and Betsy Talbot Blackwell was the most hatted of them all. Lunch, much like hats, helped define the editorial pecking order: the editors-in-chief frequented L’Aiglon, where they ordered “biftek hache” and Bloody Marys. Cyrilly Abels was to be found more often than not in the Bayberry Room of the Drake Hotel lunching with the writer of the moment: “Dry Sack [sherry] for an aperitif and something wholesome, like calves’ liver, for the entrée.” The copywriters and other literary types nibbled on saucisson at the French Shack, or else knocked back martinis at a restaurant called Barney’s. Even then, finding “the best” of anything was a badge of honor among the magazine women: those in the know would never buy a pair of gold earrings at Tiffany’s but instead at a little place called Olga Tritt, on East Fifty-Seventh, where even the Duchess of Windsor shopped. Clothing, just like hats and food and jewelry, was hierarchical: “The younger fashion editors wore Seventh Avenue, the most powerful of the older editors wore whatever had debuted on the Paris runways a few weeks before, and the store buyers wore too much.”

Mary Cantwell, who did not have nineteen other guest editors to keep her company, was forced to fend for herself in the lunch hierarchy in which she had no footing. Even as she had the fresh, young look of a girl in a Pepsi-Cola ad, she dined alone at Henry Halper’s drugstore: it was where “all the young fashion editors went for a quick bite (they were always either going to or coming from ‘the market’).” The drugstore “employed a middle-aged black man just to push one’s long-legged chair in to the counter. The egg salad sandwich, which was heaped with watercress, was ‘the best in New York.’ ” There were also other “bests” that the magazine women had discovered: the devil’s food cake at Hamburger Heaven; the coconut cake at the Women’s Exchange; sundaes at Schrafft’s on Fifty-Seventh Street. Hamburger Heaven, practically across the street from the Barbizon, was a staple, “where one slid into a wooden chair whose right arm curved around to form a little table” and “customers wore gold circle pins and spoke of Junior League dances and wedding receptions at the Georgian Suite.” Sylvia Plath and Neva Nelson had often gone there for the fifty-five-cent burgers. In The Bell Jar: “… Heavenly Hamburger… where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.”

On the one hand, postwar New York had the look of new beginnings, and young women like Sylvia Plath, Mary Cantwell, and others were anxious to start the lives they had dreamed about for so long. On the other hand, the all-female Time-Life magazine clippers were told they could never be reporters, and the women’s fashion magazines paid a pittance because everyone assumed you’d soon be gone, wedded, pregnant; or else that you had what was called “mailbox” money coming in from parents and grandparents, with no worries as to your next paycheck. In 1951, a petition went around the offices of Mademoiselle, signed by all fifty-five employees (most of whom were women), asking that instead of a Christmas party they get a bonus. Several people, getting into the spirit of things, asked that the word “bonus” be substituted for “charity.” Betsy Talbot Blackwell was not amused.

Mary Cantwell was placed in the promotions department as assistant to the press editor. One of her first tasks was to go through the newspapers and look for articles on Sylvia Plath’s suicide attempt in the crawlspace of her mother’s house. Sylvia’s disappearance had turned into a national missing-person hunt—Smith Girl Missing!—until she was found, the worse for wear but alive. Two hundred national articles in total, and Mary’s job was to cut and paste the clippings into her press editor’s scrapbook for reasons she could not understand. She puzzled over whether this was good or bad publicity for the August College Issue, which was now on newsstands, and