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

A young woman who was welcoming everyone exclaimed: “You’re the ’53 editors!” It made them feel like survivors of the Titanic. They took the thick folders offered to them: press releases and a paperback edition each of The Bell Jar, as if they didn’t already own one. Roses were everywhere—a nod to the rose that Sylvia famously held in her hand for her “Jobiographies” photograph, taken right after she had been crying from being called out by BTB. The former GEs chatted among themselves, and at least two of them admitted they still had the god-awful kilt they wore for the group star-formation photo shoot. The Sylvia Plath film being promoted had left a bad taste in their mouths, and they were reluctant to discuss it. Already The Bell Jar had sullied their memories of their summer together, and now this—a film in which they all came off as closeted lesbians, or at least that’s how they saw it. Anne Shawber was used to the sort of speculation that unfurled around Sylvia; she and her husband had been living in England just when “the great Sylvia Plath fad was beginning.” Looking back, Anne blamed much of Sylvia’s breakdown on Mademoiselle and the way in which they had bungled the editor matchups. Anne had graduated with a journalism degree and would have jumped at the chance to be guest managing editor, but instead they had had her shadowing the shopping editor, a role for which she could not care less, while Sylvia was forced to do the kind of detailed-oriented work for which her artistic temperament was unprepared, let alone her typing skills.

The 1953 guest editors’ last Barbizon reunion was in 2003—this time to celebrate them, rather than the Mademoiselle GE contest or Sylvia. Eight showed up at the hotel, now called the Melrose. Some of the former editors were there too. Gigi Marion, who had worked in the College Board editorial department, recalled how she went up to Smith College to chat with Sylvia to see if she was suitable. Sylvia had written to her mother after that day’s afternoon tea that she was no longer sure she would get a spot; the other contestants had been more qualified than she had imagined they might be. Marion had seen their meeting differently: she could tell Sylvia would be good but she was “on the cusp a little on how she might fit in. Her behavior was almost a performance, which I found a bit of a problem. You might be there another day and find an entirely different personality.” Marybeth Little, the pregnant College Board editor at the time, remembered only “a nice effervescent way about her,” but then so many of the others had that too, she added. It was what Edie Locke had said too: they were all the same. One generation, one type of girl, in many ways.

But while Sylvia had been frozen in time, immortal blond hair and bright red lipstick, the others had not. When Laurie Glazer expressed regret over not yet having written a novel, another of the group tried to comfort her. She said: “There’s still time.” “It passes, darling,” Laurie replied. After the reunion, one GE wrote to the others: “Do you find it as unpleasant as I that the reunion would not have taken place had Sylvia not stuck her head in the oven?” Dinny Lain/Diane Johnson noted that the nineteen who remained from that summer were called “survivors,” “implying, perhaps, a faintly suspect, overbearing, and slightly inappropriate tenacity to life.”

This would be the last time they gathered at the Barbizon. The eight “survivors” sat out on the hotel terrace where once Sylvia had laid out after a dip in the Barbizon pool when she had been feeling particularly low. They blinked into the setting sun as they reminisced about a time and a New York that, for both better and worse, was long gone.

CHAPTER NINE

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From Women’s Hotel to Millionaires’ Apartments

The Barbizon coffee shop figured in many stories of the hotel. It is where the writer J. D. Salinger hung around, picking up the hotel’s young residents. It is where Sylvia Plath sat drinking coffee on the morning of the Rosenbergs’ execution, angry at the world’s indifference. Here, model Astrid Heeren poses with coffee and cigarettes, a model’s staple, in 1964.

Ironically, it would be the onset of the 1960s women’s movement that would sound the death knell for the Barbizon. The residential hotel built in the 1920s on the promise of women’s independence and the nurturing of their artistic talents and all-around ambition would become a casualty of that very same goal. The movement would call into question the need for sequestering women: What was the line between aiding women’s growth and independence in a no-man environment, protecting them in a man-free zone, and cloistering them from the world and its gendered realities?

Change was in the air. In September 1959, Mademoiselle contacted beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg at 170 East Second Street, in New York’s Alphabet City. As a “gesture at the beginning of a new decade,” the editors were reaching out to a number of “young creators” who over the past several years had “voiced significant protests against entrenched attitudes.” They wanted a piece from Ginsberg and others for the January 1960 issue. The result was “Seven Young Voices Speak Up to the Sixties,” and it began with an editorial note: “Whatever one may think of them, certainly if more voices like these speak up, lively and idiosyncratic, we may look forward to the decade with cheerful curiosity.” The January 1960 issue created tremendous buzz, with Joyce Johnson, girlfriend of Jack Kerouac, claiming that Mademoiselle had just given “several thousand young women between fourteen and twenty-five” a “map to a revolution.” The magazine was as forward-thinking as ever, anticipating change that was only just on the horizon.

The following month,