Excerpt: The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free

By Paulina Bren

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free
By Paulina Bren
Simon & Schuster, 2021
336 pages

There were two types of office-bound women. There were the secretaries who flooded New York’s shiny new skyscrapers in the 1920s and then hung on as best they could through the Great Depression. And then there were the women who had not just jobs but careers. Betsy Talbot Blackwell, or BTB, as she signed herself, was one of them. She wore a hat at all times, without fail, so much so that one newspaper claimed she even wore it in the bathtub. She would pull out the Scotch at 5:00 p.m., “when the sun is over the yardarm,” she’d say. She was a Republican amid a sea of New York liberal literati, who were her staff. While women were still climbing their way into the workforce, grasping one widely spaced rung at a time, there was a handful of women in the 1930s and 1940s that already had seats at the men’s table. Blackwell, editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle, was one of them. BTB directed so many other career women—her employees, her proteges, her readers—to the Barbizon that she would tie the reputation of Mademoiselle magazine to the hotel forever, so that the fate of one followed that of the other, and the hallways of both became shelter as well as testing ground for generations of ambitious women.         

Betsy Talbot Blackwell was never willing to reveal her true age but her staff guessed she’d been born in 1905, and indeed there is a photograph of her as a small girl, taken around the same year that the Unsinkable Molly Brown survived the Titanic. Betsy is dressed in the dropped-waist Edwardian fashion of the time, hat on, clutching her doll, staring at the camera. Her penchant for hats started early. Fifty years later she would fondly recall that same hat: “I remember it well—a kind of golden brown upholstery velvet, trimmed with mink bandings and heather. The coat matched it . . . the whole ensemble was quite elegant. You can see I was fashion conscious at the age of six, or whatever it was. . . .” BTB’s father, Hayden Talbot, was a newspaper correspondent and playwright, while her mother, Benedict Bristow Talbot, an artist, was one of the first known stylists and taught her daughter about “all things beautiful and visual.”

Everyone needs an origin story, and BTB’s included the hat—as well as a pair of golden slippers. She spied them in a shop window and was determined to have them, but being only fifteen, she needed a job to pay for them: for three weeks, during her Easter vacation from New Jersey’s Academy of Saint Elizabeth, BTB worked as a comparison shopper for Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue. She was hooked. When she graduated high school, she got a job as a fashion reporter for a trade magazine, and in 1923—at the height of flapperdom—she joined Charm magazine, eventually becoming the fashion editor there. Two years after joining Charm, she got married, but her husband did not believe a wife should work, and she soon had the marriage dissolved. Remarrying in 1930, she chose a man who was not bothered by a working wife, mostly because, she said, his first wife had not been one and so he was clueless about what that meant.

In 1935, Street & Smith, the pulp publishers who put out Charm, decided to start a magazine called Mademoiselle. The daughter of the vice president of Street & Smith, a student at the prestigious all-girls Emma Willard School in Albany, complained that she and her classmates were fed up with Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. With only haute couture on the one hand, or else sewing patterns on the other, the existing women’s magazines catered either to rich ladies with lavish funds or frumpy middle-class housewives with a sewing machine. The Emma Willard girls wanted a magazine with youthful fashion that cared about the problems of young women like themselves. It was, as BTB would later say, an entirely suicidal proposition: not only was it the Depression, but there was no such thing as a youth market, and young women especially had no status, no leverage, no disposable income, no purchasing power, nothing. If that were not bad enough, the first issue, in February 1935, came out with a front cover featuring a poorly rendered illustration of a girl with enormous eyelashed eyes and a puckered mouth. It was a complete disaster, and the only people to buy it were men who thought it was a saucy girlie mag: soft porn circa 1935. Horrified, Street & Smith employees were sent out into the streets to wrestle the publication back from news vendors.

That’s when Blackwell, now around thirty years old, was called in. On a miserable February morning, she was summoned by her old employer, Street & Smith, to the CBS Building and shown offices that were the size of “2 ¼ rooms.” They asked her to come on board this fast-sinking ship. The salaries on offer were low, even by Depression-era standards, expenses nonexistent (pilfering from the stamp box was the only way to reimburse yourself), and the offices minuscule. It was the mid-1930s, and skirts were long and felt hats large and raffish, pulled down over one eye. Trench coats were in too. BTB agreed to give it a go.

There was no March 1935 issue of Mademoiselle; the magazine only returned to newsstands in April, revamped under BTB’s keen eye and iron hand. She changed around the entire magazine and introduced America to the first-ever magazine makeover (on a Boston nurse named Barbara Phillips). Blackwell directed her staff to avoid “Prize Recipes, Romantic fiction written with a stencil. Articles on how to handle six-year-olds, etc. Stuffed shirts. Sublime acceptance of everything the publicity men tell you, and the apparently general assumption that all young women in America actively interested in fashion are either nieces of J. P. Morgan or slaves to [sewing] patterns.” The magazine was entirely geared toward younger women, from seventeen to twenty-five, from high school to early married. Two years later, in 1937, Blackwell was promoted to editor-in-chief, and became “BTB.”

Despite the hats, BTB was no fashionista. In fact, she seemed to be perpetually “dressed for a ladies’ tea.” She was often referred to as homely; and while she was no beauty queen, photographs do show a well-presented woman with dark hair cut to just above the collar, with greenish Bette Davis–like sunken eyes, and a carefully lipsticked mouth. She looked something like a squishy, middle-aged Judy Garland. Her love of shoes, not just hats, was legendary and a central motif in her office, down to the custom-designed shoe wallpaper in her private bathroom and the collection of miniature shoes all about. The office itself was gloriously green: green walls, green carpet, the chairs were upholstered in green, her English desk was painted green, and there was even a green telephone. And then there was the pink, Mademoiselle’s signature color. The stationery was pink, the parties were pink, and the invitations to the parties were pink.

Her golden rule was that “the staff must get younger every year, even if it kills them in the process.” But even if the directive was meant as a joke, it held a fundamental truth: Mademoiselle’s readership was going to remain young, even as BTB and her staff did not. So she came up with the Mademoiselle College Board. The idea was to have hundreds of female college students throughout the United States relaying back to the New York offices the latest trends and news and consumable desires. In one fell swoop, BTB not only brought in the voices of the young women who were the magazine’s target readers but also, not so incidentally, reaped the enormous financial benefits of having scouts with their ears to the ground who could feed information to BTB. She then held that information hostage over her advertisers, who were desperate for this level of marketing data. No one had ever done anything like it before. After establishing the College Board, she permanently recast the August issue of Mademoiselle as the College Issue, soon nicknamed “the bible” because no college girl would deign to return for her fall semester without consulting it for what to wear, read, and think in the coming school year. What BTB had effectively done was turn “dreadful” August, known for its sluggish advertising and even worse newsstand sales, entirely on its head.

She soon followed with yet another ingenious idea: the guest editor program. She hit upon the idea at a meeting with a very contemporary ring to it: a small group of staff members was discussing what to feature for prom-wear in the upcoming August College Issue. The College Board editor, just three years out of Vassar, said, “Well, I can tell you what I wore to the junior prom.” A nineteen-year-old who was at the meeting turned to the twenty-five-year-old Vassar graduate and, with a sneer, replied, “How could you know what anyone would wear today?” This gave BTB pause: “If the Vassar graduate was on the shelf, what about us? That did it.” Mademoiselle’s guest editor contest was born.

Later, the Los Angeles Times would insist that the famous editor-in-chief Blackwell “took plain young women to New York, where she put them in stylish clothes, restyled their hair and makeup and then put their pictures in her magazine.” But the guest editor contest was far more complex, prestigious, and powerful. The Mademoiselle GE program was the most sought-after launching pad for girls with literary and artistic ambitions. Throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, college dormitory rooms were busy with girls working on essays and short stories and artwork they hoped Mademoiselle would publish or, better yet, would make them a summer guest editor. If you were lucky enough to be one of the chosen twenty, you were brought to New York for the month of June to shadow senior editors at Mademoiselle and to stay—of course!—at the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

The perfect guest editor (much like the perfect reader) was spelled out in the magazine’s tagline: The Magazine for Smart Young Women. The “smart young woman” was ready for both a poetry reading and a college party and needed to know what to wear to both. She liked to dress well but without spending a fortune: Mademoiselle was the first to turn the spotlight away from Paris fashion, to focus on American designers and actually print the prices of the clothes it featured, most of them midrange and accessible. It did so timidly at first—"GADABOUT CARDIGAN. 100% wool and kid mohair . . . About $4”—but soon enough was defiantly listing the price of clothing down to the last cent. Advertisers went crazy for the College Issue idea, so much so that when BTB was sharing a cab with a fellow editor from another magazine, she asked if they didn’t have some fiction in a bottom drawer to sell her so she could fill up the magazine’s pages now bloated by advertising. But in fact it was not just the August College Issue; each issue of Mademoiselle was hypnotic for the college girl because it was never just about fashion. ABC news reporter Lynn Sherr—herself one of the chosen, in the summer of 1962—summarized its appeal: “If you were young and your head was filled with literary aspirations, you read Mademoiselle.”

The February 1954 Mademoiselle issue would famously have just two headlines on its front cover: “Romantic fashions for spring, for brides, for tall girls” and “Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.” The publishers originally refused to let Mademoiselle devote twenty pages to the late Dylan Thomas and his verse play, Under Milk Wood, never yet published. But BTB put down her foot and argued that, contrary to what they thought, it would sell fashion, and if they didn’t let her go ahead with it, she would be resigning at 5:30 p.m. that same day. She got her way, and the intellectual value of Mademoiselle surged yet again, along with its profits. It was BTB’s genius in combining the frivolous with the serious that ultimately hooked readers and differentiated the magazine from all others on the newsstand. BTB reasoned that her readers were studying the literary masters in college and so why insult them with anything less in their favorite magazine? Mademoiselle became a prolific publisher of foreign authors such as Alberto Moravia and Eugene Ionesco, as well as creating a space for young avant-garde writers who had nowhere else to go.

But BTB was a businesswoman first and foremost, and taking this intellectual route was also financially expedient: she did not have the budget for bestselling authors, which forced the fiction department to find up-and-coming writers at rock-bottom prices, including Truman Capote, James Purdy, Flannery O’Connor, and Edward Albee. Between the just-discovered writers and the affordable fashions modeled by young collegiate types, the magazine fed the desires of ambitious, pretty, creative young coeds, and the guest editor program was the honey to the bees. In the years ahead, it would entice future writers Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, Diane Johnson, Mona Simpson, Meg Wolitzer, Janet Burroway, as well as actress Ali MacGraw and fashion designer Betsey Johnson. Each of them walked the hallways of Mademoiselle; all of them spent their nights at the Barbizon.

It was back in 1944, toward the end of World War II, that BTB decided that the “Millies,” as the guest editors would later be called, needed to be housed at the Barbizon. On the one hand, the Barbizon fit the image that Mademoiselle projected; on the other, housing the GEs there was also the best way to convince their parents to give permission for their young daughters to go to New York alone, unchaperoned, often traveling cross-country, by plane and by train, to get there. Because when that telegram from BTB arrived, congratulating you on having won one of the coveted spots in the guest editor program and inviting you to be in New York by the first day of June—even if it meant missing final exams and graduations, there was not one college girl out there who would refuse. The Barbizon helped allay the parents’ concerns: their daughters would be appropriately accommodated in a highly reputed and well-secured hotel for women, with curfews, stern front-desk receptionists, a watchful doorman, and a strict policy of never letting men, any men—not fathers, nor brothers, and certainly not boyfriends—anywhere near the bedroom floors. The Barbizon was not just a hotel with rooms, it was protection for young women, and just as it had in the 1920s and 1930s, so too in the 1940s still, protection meant freedom. In the case of the young GEs, it meant the freedom to come to New York and get a head start on their own lives as career women.

From THE BARBIZON: The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren. Copyright © 2021 by Paulina Bren. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc

Paulina Bren is an award-winning historian and a professor at Vassar College, where she teaches international, gender, and media studies. She received a BA from Wesleyan University, an MA in international studies from the University of Washington, and a PhD in history from New York University.