The Barbizon Paulina Bren (read along books txt) 📖

the Barbizon did not hesitate to say they would call her back at midnight. Late nights were nothing out of the ordinary for Barbizon residents like Nanette, unlike for the unfortunate ones placed on the curfew list by their parents or else for the Gibbs girls, with their own house mothers who ensured they went early to bed, fresh for morning classes.

One of Nanette Emery’s many telephone messages from the front-desk staff.

Everything was at Nanette’s fingertips at the Barbizon: without ever leaving the building, via a small corridor off the lobby, she could access Nate Scollar’s drugstore or buy new novels at Miss Crystal’s, and if she had been artistically inclined, she could even have exhibited her work on the mezzanine gallery free of charge. If anything were to go wrong, there was always the Barbizon’s new bespectacled manager, Hugh J. Connor, a little like a boring uncle but a caring one. He sent flowers to guests who were sick and offered $5 and $10 advances to those waiting for funds. If parents wanted him to dish out a weekly allowance, he did. His know-how of both New York and business was also on offer, and he had recently helped a Fort Wayne native with a dress shop on East Fifty-Fourth Street set up a second location.

Mrs. Mae Sibley, assistant manager and front-desk monitor, swung between role of mother hen and strict enforcer. It was she who pulled aside any young residents who were returning home to their rooms too late too often; she would ask them what their parents might think, and then if nothing changed, suggest that their room would shortly be needed, which would bring a torrent of tears and pleas for forgiveness. Doorman Oscar Beck was 220 pounds of overwrought enthusiasm, who took delight in holding open cab doors for the Barbizon’s resident ladies and welcoming them home as reliably as a puppy. When men would drive by the hotel, hollering at Oscar to give them some numbers, he would call out the number for the hotel’s front desk—Templeton 8-5700. One Ohio resident explained that Oscar, with a thick German accent that he had never shed, “burbles and gurgles, and no one knows quite what he says, but the impression is that you’re just about the prettiest thing on earth.”

Oscar Beck, the Barbizon’s longtime doorman.

Nanette did not need Oscar’s extra encouragement, nor Sibley’s warnings or Connor’s advice. As soon as she arrived in New York, she transformed from the serious young woman talking politics at the April College Forum to a girl about town. Assigned to be guest editor of health and beauty (“health” had been added to “beauty” as part of the war effort—a gesture to move away from the frivolous), on the very first day she lunched with her editor, the famous Miss Bernice Peck, whom she found “startlingly wonderful and frank.” Miss Peck, who would end up being Mademoiselle’s beauty editor for twenty-four years, was not wracked by the need to be or stay beautiful, and consequently injected humor into the battle for beauty, turning her back on “solemn” discussions of “what cream you rubbed into your navel.” Nanette finished her first day by dining with three other GEs in the Barbizon’s main dining room, which the hotel brochure she had studied nightly before arrival described as “reflecting an Old Charleston atmosphere” with “pastel colors and delightful flower murals of Southern inspiration.” Dinner entrées cost anywhere from 55 cents to $1.50. After dinner, Nanette and her new friends went off to explore the hotel’s sundeck, then took a stroll to the Waldorf Astoria and made their way up Fifth Avenue, ending with ice cream at Schrafft’s, the go-to restaurant chain for women at that time, its interiors intentionally designed to evoke the gentility of an upper-middle-class WASP household. Nanette felt perfectly at home.

In fact, within a matter of days, Nanette had made herself entirely at home in Manhattan. During one breathless evening, she managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Delmonico’s Officers’ Club, where she and another of the GEs were photographed with their dates for a fashion shoot titled “prize date dress.” Next came a formal dance, which the girls left at 10:30 p.m. to grab a cab to the Barrymore Theatre, where Nanette interviewed Katharine Cornell for the “We Hitch Our Wagons” feature, a perennial favorite in the Mademoiselle August College Issue, where each GE interviewed someone famous who inspired them. Nanette was photographed sitting with the actress, whose dogs lounged on both their laps. “Flash bulbs flashing, the Cornell Daschunds, Illo and Looney, and scintillating conversation with la Cornell,” Nanette wrote breathlessly in her diary. (Other GEs chose more judiciously, one interviewing the artist Marc Chagall—communicating in French and “American” with “wild gestures and leaping eyebrows”—and another the writer and German refugee, Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann.) Then back to the famed Delmonico’s restaurant at 11:45 p.m. and a double date with two brothers, a marine and an army officer, and finally, in the early morning hours, over to “a German restaurant where someone was playing a piano and everyone was singing Irish songs. Knockwurst sandwiches and coffee.” Nanette was on a postwar rampage of fun, lightness, and frivolity.

Along the way, she collected memorabilia like an out-of-control tourist—from the Plaza’s Oak Room, which, by tradition, was reserved until 3:00 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays for gentlemen only; from the Persian Room, its calling card saturated with sumptuous reds and golds, where Bob Grant and his orchestra played after 9:30 p.m. for a $1.50 cover charge; from the Cotillion Room at the Pierre hotel, where Myrus, the Man with the X-ray Eyes, the Wizard of Mental Telepathy, performed, answering pressing questions that guests wrote out on small pieces of white cardstock. When General Ike Eisenhower rode down Fifth Avenue to mark US victory in the war, Nanette and the other thirteen GEs joined the crowds: “Standing room was at a premium so we hailed the general