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

different speeds depending on the color of one’s skin. Artist and Mademoiselle guest editor Barbara Chase had been a pioneer when she stayed at the Barbizon in 1956, most likely the first black woman to have done so, but over ten years later, things had barely changed. Phylicia Rashad, the actress who would play Mrs. Huxtable in The Cosby Show, arrived at the Barbizon in 1968 as a sixteen-year-old for a summer stint with the prestigious Negro Ensemble Company. One of the hotel’s few African American residents, her first room, blue, was unnecessarily large and expensive, and so she switched to a yellow room, the kind that Sylvia Plath had, with the signature floral bedspread and matching curtains and a shared bathroom. New York had an active art scene, which thrilled Phylicia, but as to race, “it felt like you were living in America,” which meant she was surrounded by segregation and white people wherever she went, especially at the Barbizon on New York’s Upper East Side. While the 1960s was a decade of questions and slowly shifting values, it would be the disco decade of the 1970s when real change would start to become visible. Ironically, it did not bode well for the Barbizon.

On August 26, 1970, Helen Gurley Brown marched down Fifth Avenue with Betty Friedan. They were joined by the photogenic Gloria Steinem, cofounder of Ms. magazine, who in 1963 had gone undercover as a Playboy bunny, exposing the sexism and racism in that organization, and arguing that in fact all women were routinely treated as Playboy bunnies. Ten thousand women, the younger ones in jeans and T-shirts, the older ones in summer floral dresses, marched with these three feminist icons. It was the Women’s Strike for Equality, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920, which granted women the right to vote: it had also been the impetus for the construction of women’s hotels in the 1920s. Brown, Friedan, and Steinem linked arms with a group of veteran suffragettes, and the march swelled as bystanders joined them, some marchers hoisting signs that read: “Don’t iron while the strike is hot!” and “I am not a Barbie Doll!” Men stood on New York’s sidewalks and watched; some heckled, one wearing a brassiere on Forty-Fifth Street, others shouting “Bra-less traitors!” at them as they made their way down Fiftieth Street.

It was the beginning of a new era, and it was marked at Mademoiselle by the end of the old one. Editor-in-chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell was stepping down from her post. A lifetime smoker, her coughing fits were now ear-shattering. Incoming guest editors were told to pretend they could not hear what sounded like a freight train passing through, although BTB liked to say this was her way of announcing her entry. She was now called “Mother” by much of the staff, but she had continued to move along with the times, to insist on Mademoiselle’s trailblazing “firsts.” Just the previous year she had “O.K.’d my first four-letter word in copy.” In her parting “Editor’s Memo” to the magazine’s readers, she cataloged her journey from 1935 to the present: “The birth and growth of nylon and TV, of zippers and jets and no-iron fabrics and the big wig habit… of ‘Black is Beautiful,’ revolution on campus, and Women’s Lib. The era has brought us a whole new vocabulary: the UN and A.A., freeways and hippies, ballpoints and Beatles, consumerism and communes, rock ’n’ roll, smog, test-tube babies, ethnic everything. In fashion, pantsuits have become staple wear for women—unforeseeable as late as the 1940s, as have micro-miniskirts, bikinis, bodystockings, hotpants.”

Her send-off was drawn out, with honorary dinners and personalized gifts, including spring flowers from actress and former guest editor Ali MacGraw (also a onetime roommate of Gloria Steinem’s), who thanked Betsy for igniting her career by putting her on the front cover of the 1958 August College Issue. The cherry on the cake (which was pink, of course) was a party thrown in her honor by Condé Nast, the magazine’s publisher after Street & Smith, on the rooftop of the St. Regis hotel, everything adorned with pink roses. Even with all the well-wishers around her, BTB must have paused to remember the guest editor balls that had taken place on that same rooftop every June from 1937 on. But she understood this was a new era: Edie Locke was going to be the new editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle, forgoing BTB’s trademark hats, cigarettes, and Scotch.

But it was not new beginnings for everyone. The Barbizon began to falter. A residential hotel built for the New Woman of the 1920s was now less alluring. For those looking for a husband, it was a place bereft of men. As one former resident complained: “I don’t know why girls interested in meeting men and having a life of their own would ever choose to live in a place like that. When they date, they can’t have people up—they drop the boys at the door.” For those looking for the quintessential New York experience, as countless young women before them had, there was now something stodgy about the Barbizon, embodied by its older residents, “the Women” (as they had always been called by the hotel’s young residents). The Barbizon’s cultural programs, which had once included concerts, recitals, and plays, were now reduced to a television set on the mezzanine floor. Free afternoon tea continued in the “dark Tudor cavern above the lobby,” but hardly anyone bothered to show up these days. Those who did were mostly the elderly ladies gathered around one of their own, Mrs. Anne Gillen, who played the hotel organ from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. dressed in pearls and a pillbox hat, while the younger ones who had nowhere else to go gathered around the hotel’s social director, who thought it was fun to play a game coming up with categories of horses. Just as this was a time of confusion for many, so was it for the Barbizon.