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

into a rehearsal hall for the final auditions for the Broadway musical 1776. She waited her turn, figuring that since she was used to singing fourteen shows a day for $75 a week at a Texas amusement park, she could manage this. She got the job, and in one day had basically gone from Grand Central to the Barbizon to Broadway. The same year, a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout, Lorna Luft, Liza Minnelli’s half sister, was also at the Barbizon, just as her older sister had been years before at their mother, Judy Garland’s, insistence. A few weeks later, she too landed a role on Broadway, in the musical version of Lolita.

Young women continued to check into the Barbizon, but they weren’t the only residents to call it home. By the 1960s, the hotel harbored a more eclectic mix of women. A 1963 Saturday Evening Post article noted, “Tenants this year include a sizable band of aristocratic 70 year olds and one aged 80; a Playboy bunny; a perennial candidate for New York state office; a stunt girl; a model who sells Hong Kong junks on the side; a grande dame who has been playing the Barbizon pipe organ on the mezzanine every evening since 1935; and one fashionable merchandising student who shall be memorable for her name alone—Lady Greenslit.” The perennial candidate for New York state office was Alice Sachs, a book editor. She was in fact the hotel’s longest-residing guest, having moved to the Barbizon when they still dressed in evening gowns for dinner on the terrace. A staunch Democrat in the heavily Republican stronghold of the Upper East Side, she nonetheless persevered in her candidacy, once getting local Chinese restaurants to pass out special fortune cookies urging customers to vote for her.

Betsey Johnson, the future fashion designer famous for costume-like wearable fantasies, was at the Barbizon in 1964 as a Mademoiselle guest editor. She was assigned to their fabric library, which was something all fashion magazines had at the time: a cataloging room for thousands of pieces of fabric. D. J. White, its director, left on maternity leave, and Betsey Johnson was asked to stay on. She took the fabrics that no one was using and started to design her own clothes—T-shirts, T-shirt dresses, hand-crocheted fabrics, and velvets—which she sold out of the Condé Nast bathrooms, figuring that everyone who worked at Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vogue, and Brides eventually had to go to the bathroom, which is where she cleverly left a little catalog of her clothes.

One of Jaclyn Smith’s friends, who would often visit her on the sixth floor, was Melodee. Melodee was the kind of young woman in which the Barbizon specialized: small-town girls who had asked themselves Friedan’s key question: “Is this all?” Young women like Melodee, if they could not sing, dance, act, or model their way out, would type their way out of small-town America. Melodee left behind her fiancé in Florida to attend secretarial school in New York. Her mother had accompanied her to the hotel, which was helpful because in the early fall especially, the Barbizon would receive about a thousand applications, and at best only half the applicants would get rooms. As her mother was registering her at the hotel, Melodee hatched a plan with two other young women who had just gotten there too: the Beatles were arriving at the Hotel Astor that very day, and they were going to catch a glimpse of them. Once their mothers had all left, and the three young women had quickly unpacked, they ran over to the Astor to join thousands of other screaming fans. While the Beatles never showed up, it did make their first day in New York memorable. (On that very same day, Mademoiselle’s flamboyant Leo Lerman, who had replaced George Davis, and who always had his finger on the cultural pulse, announced to his assistant, Amy Gross—years later tapped by Oprah to be editor-in-chief of O Magazine—“For the April issue, we’re going to be doing a boys band from England called the Beatles.” Amy looked at Leo, “a cross between a rabbi and Oscar Wilde,” whom she adored and whose cultural compass she usually trusted, and thought to herself that with a name like “the Beatles,” the band was doomed to fail.)

Days after moving into the Barbizon, Melodee discovered Malachy’s. It was certainly no-frills, she told her new friends back at the hotel, but it was a real singles bar. With so many possibilities on offer in New York, Melodee soon broke off her engagement back in Florida and began to date, quickly learning how best to hedge her bets. She had a system: she would get ready, wait for her date to call up from the Barbizon lobby, have a friend pick up the phone and say she had stepped out for a moment while Melodee dashed to the mezzanine to see who was on the lobby phone. If she liked what she saw, she would run back to get her bag. If she did not, she either hid in her room or sneaked out of the Barbizon through its coffee shop exit.

After the secretarial course was over, Melodee found work at an advertising agency, where she would arrive each morning in full sixties fashion: miniskirt, poor-boy sweater, Mary Jane shoes, and false eyelashes. But while fashions had changed radically from the 1950s cinched waists and swinging petticoated skirts, that did not mean everything else had. On her first day at the Ted Bates advertising agency, two account executives tossed money on her desk and told her to go buy them cigarettes. The first time they did it, she went; the second time, she refused. Her refusal was the kind of small gesture that, accumulatively, would lead to the change that the January 1960 issue of Mademoiselle had laid out to its readers as a possible road map. The personal was becoming political, and for Melodee, having money tossed at her was very personal.

Change, however, moved at