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

in February, four African American college students famously sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter reserved for whites in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave. In November, a young John F. Kennedy was elected president, taking office in 1961 with a challenge to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you,” but “what you can do for your country.” Women flocked to the civil rights and anti-war movements, yet, more often than not, they found their job was to make coffee while men “made politics.” A women’s movement slowly began to percolate alongside those countless cups of coffee.

In 1961, the birth control pill was introduced. It would prove to be revolutionary for sexual relations and gender equality, but the effect was not immediate by any means. To get a prescription for the pill, you still had to be married, or pretend to be married. Judith Innes, Radcliffe College graduate and Barbizon resident, managed to get hold of the pill under false pretenses but that was hardly enough protection. The ideas by which Sylvia Plath and her cohorts’ sexual desires had been directed and controlled remained firmly in place: the assumption was that men were sexual and therefore blameless. Blame, in all sorts of ways, lay with women. Men got excited, and either women had to put in their best effort to prevent that from happening or else, if they failed, take care of his “pain.” Stories of classmates and friends caught in a dark room alone with a man, who would push her down on a table, were commonplace. Tippi Hedren, the dazzling blond star of Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds, was discovered at age fourteen by Minnesota’s Donaldson’s department store. On her twentieth birthday, she flew out to New York, checked into the Barbizon, and signed with Eileen Ford. While peddling Sego, a diet drink, the one-hundred-pound Tippi was discovered by Hitchcock, who liked to bring in relative unknowns to play lead roles, in part because they were easier to prey upon. Tippi understood this unequivocally once the first live shoot was over and she looked at herself in the mirror: the ravens and magpies, ordered by Hitchcock for the film, had gouged her cheek, just missing her eye. But one didn’t even need to be a Hitchcock to have that kind of power over women.

The Barbizon, therefore, was still a safe place, and a necessary one, even as optically the world was starting to change. Joan Gage, a budding writer, arrived there in 1961 looking gray and emaciated; she had just about survived her college final exams with the help of cigarettes, coffee, Mars bars, and Dexedrine, the popular diet-pill that was in fact over-the-counter speed. But the toxins were worth it. She had made it to New York, and the city would prove to be transformative. Joan, who was from the Midwest, mistakenly drank the shrimp cocktail at La Fonda del Sol, but was also introduced to her first communist at the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas’s favorite haunt, and even learned how to eat an artichoke. She liked to wear “slacks,” which was hardly an issue anymore for most young women, but the Barbizon fashion police at the front desk were having none of it, and when she tried to stride briskly across the lobby in them, from the elevator and out the front door, they ordered her right back before she could sully the hotel’s reputation.

The year 1962 saw the publication of the notorious Sex and the Single Girl, which, like the January 1960 Mademoiselle issue, was channeling the zeitgeist. Before ascending to editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, copywriter Helen Gurley Brown became famous for her outlandish self-help book, in which she called for a sexual revolution of sorts. She advised women to make the radical decision to marry much later in life (as she herself had). “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life,” Brown wrote. “During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course… but they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.” Referencing the outcome of far too many women who had married in the 1950s, she added: “Isn’t it silly? A man can leave a woman at fifty (though it may cost him some dough) as surely as you can leave dishes in the sink.” The book, endorsed by the somewhat unlikely duo of Hollywood star Joan Crawford and burlesque entertainer Gypsy Lee Rose, changed the conversation or, certainly, forced one onto America—much like the 1953 Kinsey Report on female sexuality had done.

That said, Helen Gurley Brown was still seeped in the value system of the 1950s. A woman should do anything to look good, she berated: a high-protein diet, dress purchases over food purchases, nose jobs, wigs, artful makeup. Your surroundings too were an important extension of your image and not to be overlooked. An effective mantrap of a single gal’s apartment required a good TV for him (although not so big that it would take time away from you), a brandy snifter whimsically filled with cigarettes, sexy cushions, a well-stocked liquor cabinet. But it was also a tight ship: any liquor downed by your prince was to be replaced by him, and twenty restaurant dinners on him equaled one home-cooked meal from you. Within this morass of questionable advice, there was a message that young women at the Barbizon had long known: a single woman had to be able to provide for herself. Sexual freedom only came with economic freedom. The flappers knew that; the Gibbs girls knew that; the Powers models knew that.

What Helen Gurley Brown was advising—such as that a sleepover date might enjoy breakfast in bed the following morning, preferably a glass of half clam and half tomato juice with a wedge of lemon, an omelet surprise, toast, and coffee—was not exactly new. It just hadn’t been said so publicly for decades now. The novelist Mary McCarthy, writing