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

as well as overnight stays for the businesswoman on the go who would be grateful for a man-free night. He turned the oak-paneled recital room into a meeting room. The Barbizon library was closed and added on as rental space for the health club that had taken over the basement swimming pool, where Rita Hayworth had once posed for Life magazine. The library books were moved to the “date rooms” on the mezzanine. As a nod to the old days of white gloves, teas, and formal dances, and to the nineteenth-century Barbizon art movement after which the hotel was named, Teitelbaum hung a framed Impressionist print of a young girl wearing a flowered bonnet in each room.

With that done, he organized a fiftieth anniversary party for the hotel, and while Princess Grace Kelly of Monaco did not attend, she did send a letter confirming that she had “wonderful memories of the three years I spent at the Barbizon.” But do what he might, it was clear that those were bygone days. The hotel had changed from “a fresh-faced starlet to a withered spinster.” The only former-resident-turned-celebrity to show up for the party was 1950s actress Phyllis Kirk, who appeared with Vincent Price in the 3D horror House of Wax. Phyllis reminisced about Oscar the doorman and the afternoon teas on the mezzanine. The hotel’s manager from 1944 until 1972, Hugh J. Connor, also at the party, recalled how Judy Garland would call him obsessively to check on the whereabouts of her daughter, Liza Minnelli.

In some ways, the only thing the Barbizon still had going for it was its idiosyncrasies. Kim Neblett, once checked into the Barbizon, learned to love its quirkiness. She was a fashion model and while she had just made $1,000 for the week, the previous year, her first in the New York, she had made only $1,062 in total. There was one month when she was so broke she could not afford her room and instead slept on the floor of a friend’s room. Yet the hotel said nothing even as it forwarded her calls to her friend’s room where she “secretly” lived until she was able to earn enough to book a room again. She embraced the diverse age range of residents, “even the crazy old ones,” that helped fuel “weird scenes” day and night such as “screaming at six o’clock in the morning.” She had found that if you started laughing at all the various incidents, then the crazy ones began to laugh too, and, she insisted, in this way everyone found some equilibrium. She saw a certain heroism in the Women, the ladies who had stuck it out all these years: “They are still in New York. They may be hiding at the Barbizon in their little cubbyholes, but they are still here in New York. That’s something.”

Writer Meg Wolitzer did not see it quite so generously. Her hair fragrant with Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo, that “1970s beauty mainstay,” Wolitzer arrived in 1979 with the very last set of guest editors at Mademoiselle. Even though BTB was no longer at the helm, the GE program had continued. Wolitzer wryly observed that the Mademoiselle offices mirrored the Barbizon hotel perfectly, both “wanting to be current and to compete, yet clinging to the wholesome collegiate sensibility that we, the guest editors, were meant to embody.” But of course the 1979 college editors did not embody these bygone sensibilities.

The hotel’s decline, its wear and tear in both appearance and service, manifested in various ways: on her first morning, Wolitzer was awoken by the hotel maid “slamming her fist against my door like a D.E.A. agent.” She opened her eyes, pulled back the orange-and-yellow bedspread (one of Teitelbaum’s improvements) and took in her grim, narrow room. She was not impressed. The hotel’s only saving grace for her was its legacy. Wolitzer had Sylvia Plath on her mind. In fact, Wolitzer was very much sharing the same space that Sylvia had occupied twenty-six years earlier for the simple reason that nothing had changed since: there were still only 130 rooms that came with a private bathroom; 94 with a shared bathroom; and 431 rooms—the cheapest kind, the kind in which the guest editors lived, described to Nanette Emery in 1945 by Phyllis Lee Schwalbe as a “dormitory-hotel life”—with access to hallway bathrooms.

But this was 1979 New York, not 1953 New York, and the bankrupt city reminded Wolitzer of “an episode of Kojak.” Two years earlier, New York had been terrorized by the Son of Sam killing sprees that left six dead and seven wounded, Times Square was one of the most crime-ridden areas of the city, and the only reason to go to Bryant Park was to buy drugs or sex. Gone were New York’s glory days, or so it seemed in that grim decade. As if to match the city’s mood, Meg Wolitzer and her fellow GEs brought an irreverence to the same Mademoiselle magazine assignments that had once thrilled Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Gael Greene, and so many others. At a Scent Seminar at Revlon, they were asked to sniff various perfumes and describe what the scent conjured up for them; one GE pretended to be deep in thought while she rattled off the tagline for Revlon’s competing Charlie perfume—“I would say it’s kinda free, kinda wow!” she declared to those gathered around the table. At a Milliken Textiles breakfast at the Waldorf Astoria, they giggled when Ginger Rogers was, literally, wheeled out. For the annual GE makeover event, Meg and her friends were brought to Saks Fifth Avenue in their “rumpled, Barbizonian, sleep-encrusted worst.” A male GE had his beard replaced with a “ ’70s gaystache,” that was quite becoming, while Wolitzer, post-makeover, cried out, “I look like a prostitute!” On the last night, they all trailed up to the Barbizon roof, just as Sylvia Plath had done on her last night, and held an impromptu ceremony in her honor. They would be the very