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

All but one bridesmaid quit their careers to raise families. In the rough climate of the 1960s, with its intense questioning of values, there were some jarring breaks. All but one bridesmaid have been divorced. Two are twice divorced. Their ’50s romantic ideas were strained in the ’70s feminist movement.” Sylvia Plath and her roommates were no different. Writer Diane Johnson’s marriage lasted until 1965. Anne Shawber’s marriage to People magazine founding editor Dick Stolley would dissolve in the face of his philandering, yet too late for Anne to restart her life. As their perfectly plotted lives started to show cracks, it was at first hard not to look toward Sylvia’s seemingly perfect one. She had acquired a husband, children, and, it appeared, a career as a poet and writer.

For the women who spent the summer of 1953 with her at the Barbizon, she became their glue over the years, but also their albatross, their burden, a shadow that moved along with them through their lives even after she had ended hers. For Laurie Glazer, it started when Sylvia was still alive, and Laurie suddenly spied one of Sylvia’s poems in a national magazine: “How annoying of her to haunt me from (glamorous) England, even as I sat reading her poems, my apartment overflowing with diapers and unfulfilled literary dreams.” The haunting became more commonplace after Sylvia’s suicide, and later the 1971 American publication of The Bell Jar. Laurie was standing in line at the grocery store when she picked up a magazine, flipped to yet “another nervous peon” of Plath, and was suddenly faced with their group photo in Central Park, star formation and tartan kilts. She thought: “I see that Sylvia Plath is still at the top of the star and I’m still at the bottom.” Then, weighed down by her grocery bags, she walked to her car and wondered “if Sylvia is haunting the other eighteen ex-guest editors in the photo.” It wasn’t just the burden of everyday life that got to Laurie, it was also her “anonymity.” Even in the pages of The Bell Jar she had been erased: “Here was Sylvia’s disc jockey incident. (But, where was mine?) Here was Married Girl—we’d been so sorry for her—and here was Nice Girl. (Was Betsy me? No.) Nor the Towering Hayseed, lean and beige as a wheat stalk, who’d been transformed.… Twenty girls into a fictional [twelve] and no me in sight.” As for Carol LeVarn, Sylvia’s best friend and next-door neighbor at the Barbizon, she tossed away her copy of the novel, riled up by a “combination of pain and embarrassment.”

Each generation has its couple, Janet Burroway speculated: the Victorians their Brownings, the flappers their Fitzgeralds. The 1950s generation had their Hugheses. Sylvia was the “trapped wife at the beginning of the woman’s movement”; “she was not taken seriously”; she was “judged melodramatic, hysterical. She was not heard.” Many guest editor “super achievers” who, like Sylvia, dreamed of greatness and worked hard for it, set it aside for marriage, husband, children, only to find themselves at the end of this haloed trajectory with divorce, depression, and, again like Sylvia, thoughts of suicide. This was really the long shadow of Plath for them: that she had avoided the missteps that the other women of the 1950s would have to endure. Laurie Glazer, in 1973, would write to Neva: “I wonder how many of us went along with the ’50s tide… being wife/mother/chief cook & bottle washer… and then, nodding vertically through The Feminine Mystique!”

The Barbizon Hotel, like Sylvia, would continue to haunt the 1953 guest editors: The Bell Jar had not only fictionalized and immortalized them but also the Barbizon (“the Amazon”). They were all now tied together inextricably. Some of the remaining guest editors would congregate at the Barbizon three more times in the coming decades. The first was in 1977 for the fortieth anniversary of Mademoiselle’s guest editor program. Neva Nelson, in a fit of patriotism, entered the Barbizon lobby wearing a polyester red, white, and blue striped dress. The magazine had hung portraits of its past famous GEs to view as you walked up the stairs to the mezzanine, where the now retired Betsy Talbot Blackwell held court on a settee. Neva’s choice of polyester patriotism made her feel out of place until Edie Locke, the Jewish refugee and former fashion editor who was now the editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle, put her at ease, complimenting her on her small white purse, a fashion note Neva had at least hit on key. Once everyone had a drink in their hand, the 1977 crop of guest editors was introduced one by one in the main lobby of the Barbizon as everyone peered down at them from the mezzanine, applauding loudly.

The new GEs bore little resemblance to Sylvia, Neva, Janet, Laurie, and the others from 1953. There were now fourteen again, instead of twenty, and three of them were men. In 1972, under pressure to bring equality to the workplace, Edie Locke had agreed to open up the guest editor contest to men (although finding men who wanted to participate was another matter altogether). Nor were the female GEs enthusiastic about this nod to equality, ironically powered by the burgeoning women’s movement. One 1972 GE, a student at Radcliffe, asked, “Why give men places on the board of a women’s magazine? Consider the difficulty women have in landing high-placed jobs on men’s magazines.” The eleven female guest editors were still staying at the Barbizon, while the three male GEs, barred from the women-only hotel, had rooms at the Tudor Hotel on Forty-Second Street. In the Mademoiselle offices, they no longer reported to Cyrilly Abels but to the new managing editor—Mary Cantwell. The 1953 guest editor Laurie Glazer, just glad to get out of the house, booked a room at the Barbizon, and partied all night.

In 1979, Neva and the others once again walked into the Barbizon, this time for the promotion of a new film about Sylvia Plath.