Paulina Bren. Photo / Supplied
The Barbizon: The New York Hotel That Set Women Free
by Paulina Bren (Two Roads, $38)
The Barbizon, founded in 1927, was a hotel located on East 63rd St, in Manhattan's Upper East Side. It had 720 single-occupant rooms spread over 23 storeys and advertised itself as "New York's Most Exclusive Hotel Residence for Young Women", many of whom were on their first visit to the metropolis. Did it provide needed and safe accommodation? Was it a recipe for trouble? Or was it something completely different?
Paulina Bren explores the hotel's history in her new book, The Barbizon: The New York Hotel That Set Women Free. The extraordinary cast list includes young actors, like Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford and Grace Kelly, writers like Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, as well as future models, secretaries, and businesswomen. With a focus on arts, the Barbizon was a safe haven for aspiring women when they were faced with the pitfalls of big-city living for the first time.
No man was permitted above the lobby level and residents' rooms were strictly out of bounds to visiting males. Anyone wanting to get to the floors above had to pass the scrutiny of the sharp-eyed manager, Mrs Mae Sibley, who vetted her residents with a notorious A, B or C scale and who would turn away many suitors who wanted to present themselves as tradesmen, doctors, or even gynaecologists.
Bren's book is a lively anecdotal account. The Barbizon gives each era a particular focus. From the "Redoubtable" Molly Brown, who survived the sinking of the Titanic, to the 1940s with its need to provide exclusive secretarial services for the supremos of the war-effort, to the gloved, pill-box-hatted and high-heeled Mademoiselle magazine interns in the 1950s, and to the notorious Sex and the Single Girl years of the early 1960s, it provides a full coverage.
Actress Grace Kelly lived there in the early 50s and Bren explains the movie star's much-celebrated dreamy gaze was more a consequence of a very bad case of myopia – without her glasses, she simply could not see. Her best friend, Carolyn Schaffner, dressed and behaved like she had somewhere to go from her very first day in New York and was approached by an agent a week later. She would become one of the era's most in-demand models with a still-emblematic silhouette. Think 1950s – think Carolyn.
Bren focuses on Mademoiselle, the influential fashion magazine, and its annual intake of "guest editors", young college-age women selected through competition. Future poet Sylvia Plath is given ample coverage and Bren reveals her early personality to those mainly familiar with her later, now-notorious, suicide as Mrs Ted Hughes. The now well-known writer Joan Didion arrived at the Barbizon for her own Mademoiselle internship and shivered for three days, too scared to call the front desk to find out how to switch off the air-conditioning because she had no idea how much to tip if they came to help.
With its exploitation of available archives as well as interviews and oral histories, Bren assembles a comprehensive account of an institution and its importance. As a professor of media studies and gender, she is alert to nuance. Her book lends itself to snap-shotted glimpses of women in their formative years. There might be too much focus on Plath but it is more than compensated by the wide interest of its women's stories.
Reviewed by David Herkt