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

in the 1930s, referenced the “perennial spinster” (“the single gal”—in Brown’s parlance) “whose bed the morning after a sexual adventure will always be made up… while coffee for two drips in the Silex and toast pops out of the electrical toaster.” Just as much of a throwback was Brown’s rediscovery of female ambition. Brown told her young readers to wear clean lingerie every day, to mix up various styles and periods of furniture for flare and sophistication, to stop “being a slug” and get out there. Joan Didion followed Brown on her Los Angeles book tour for an article in the Saturday Evening Post, where she pointed out that Brown’s battle cry was “old-fashioned ambition so increasingly uncommon that her young readers will recognize it only from early Joan Crawford movies.” In other words, the repression of female sexuality and ambition during the 1950s had been such that Helen Gurley Brown was being revolutionary by being retrograde.

In 1963, one year after Sex and the Single Girl hit the bookstores, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. While the two authors would disagree on what constituted women’s liberation, both understood that a woman without an independent life would suffer in a variety of ways. Betty Friedan wrote that women were being advised “how to catch a man and keep him,” while simultaneously taught “to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents.” Friedan was right. In one of Betsy Talbot Blackwell’s many marketing surveys, a student at Radcliffe in 1956 repeated the mantra she had fully absorbed: “Our dedication is to marriage and the family—the roots from which are nurtured stable individuals and a stable society.” This declaration by a young woman at one of the country’s most competitive universities was coming almost twenty years after Mademoiselle’s first Careers Issue in 1938, aimed at all the new women in the workforce. It was as if there had been a nationwide brainwashing that had lasted two decades plus.

While Helen Gurley Brown made a name for herself by advocating late marriage and fun sex, Friedan caused a stir by pointing out that the most pressing question women were now asking themselves was also the most censured: “Is this all?” It was the verbal articulation of the physical gesture that Janet Burroway had witnessed, and understood, in Plath’s London house just three years earlier, in 1960, when Sylvia had “shoved” their newborn at her husband, Ted Hughes. It was not a statement about motherhood; it was a statement about the raw deal, the dashed hopes, the quashed dreams.

For decades, the Barbizon had been the place to go if you were a woman like Sylvia and so many others asking yourself this very question: “Is this all?” By the mid-1960s, over 350,000 women had stayed at the Barbizon since the hotel had first opened its doors in 1928. More than 50 percent arrived because of word of mouth back home in small-town USA, while the rest were compelled by the hotel’s print advertisements that presented a world in which everyone was forever young and surrounded by friends in a city that could look terrifying from afar. Actress and Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith, then known as Ellen Smith, arrived at the Barbizon in 1966 from Texas to study at Ballet Arts in Studio 61 at Carnegie Hall. Like so many Barbizon residents, Jaclyn had worked on her parents for months before they let her go, making her promise she would never use the subway (she never did). Five years after Joan Gage had been turned back in her slacks, the Barbizon remained “very proper”—heels expected, slacks still forbidden. There were still the same tiny beds “like cribs,” the same flowered blue bedcovers and matching curtains. But Jaclyn was a small-town girl, like so many residents at the hotel, and she did not mind the old-fashioned ways that continued to be promoted as suitable for the hotel’s residents: as far as she was concerned, the Barbizon coffee shop was good and friends were plentiful. She spent time with the model Dayle Haddon and the dancer Margo Sappington. In the summer they would all go up to the rooftop to sunbathe. For Jaclyn, the hotel represented “a time of rules and anticipation,” which suited her just fine. But in the two years she spent there, the hotel and New York would also teach her an “emotional independence” that she would rely on for years to come; the ability to fend for herself, not only financially but emotionally. In many ways, it’s what Helen Gurley Brown and Betty Friedan were trying to teach to their millions of readers too.

Indeed, even as there was change afoot, and some began to balk at the outmoded notion of a women-only anything, the Barbizon was still the catalyst for the kind of transformative coming-to-New-York story that the hotel prided itself on and was not shy about publicizing through advertisements and magazine puff pieces. There was the case, for example, of Dana from Michigan, a dancer with “luminous eyes” who returned to the Barbizon, stopping off at the coffee shop after her dance rehearsal at the Juilliard School, still dressed in tights. The composer Gian Carlo Menotti, whose studio was two blocks away, and who liked to take his coffee breaks at the Barbizon coffee shop, called over the waiter, who knew every resident’s vocation as well as her aspirations, and asked about Dana. Menotti then scribbled a note on a paper napkin and had the waiter bring it over to her: “If you’re interested in participating in the Spoleto Festival in Italy, call this number.” She did—once she had told a better-informed friend about the note, who marched her right over to the nearest telephone. Betty Buckley, later the stepmother on the classic television show Eight Is Enough, arrived at Grand Central Terminal from Texas, registered at the Barbizon, and was out the door in fifteen minutes exploring the city. That very day, she happened to walk