Famous haunt:
The New York hotel that set women free
Paulina Bren delves into the fascinating history of the New York hotel The Barbizon, home to some of history’s leading women
Built in the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel became the place to stay for ambitious, independent women and hosted Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford and Liza Minnelli.
Throughout the years, magazine advertisements for the Barbizon Hotel emphasized this point: “OH! It’s great to be in NEW YORK … especially when you live at the Barbizon for Women”. The tagline was always the same, assuring in its tenacity: New York’s Most Exclusive Hotel Residence for Young Women. But magazine pieces also warned of the wolves, those men who roamed New York’s streets on the lookout for pretty, naive, young things, and the Barbizon promised both protection and sanctuary. Yet that wasn’t the only reason America’s young women wanted to stay there. Everyone knew the hotel was packed full with aspiring actresses, models, singers, artists, and writers, and some had already gone from aspiring to famous. Rita Hayworth had even posed for Life magazine in the hotel’s gymnasium, beside the pool, looking both sexy and impertinent.
But first, this new arrival had to get past Mrs. Mae Sibley, the assistant manager and front-desk hawk, who would look her over and ask for references. In addition to having to be presentable (preferably attractive), and with references attesting to her good and moral character, Mrs. Sibley would quietly mark a potential resident as an A, B, or C. A’s were under the age of 28, B’s were between 28 and 38, and C’s, well, they were over the hill. More often than not, the girl from out of town with a Sunday school hat and a nervous smile was an A. But this first hurdle was the easy one.
Once Mrs. Sibley had approved of her, and handed her a key, a room number, and a list of the do’s and don’ts, she would take the elevator up to the floor with her room, her new home, where no men were allowed, ever, and contemplate what to do next. The room was a step up for some and a step down for others. But for all the young women at the Barbizon, the narrow bed, dresser, armchair, floor lamp, and small desk, all crammed into a tiny room with a floral bedspread and matching curtains, represented some sort of liberation. At least at the beginning.
The Barbizon was New York’s most famous women’s hotel, constructed in 1927 and eventually converted into multimillion-dollar condominiums in 2007. The story of the hotel is at once a history of the singular women who passed through its doors, a history of Manhattan through the 20th century, and a forgotten story of women’s ambition. The hotel was built in the Roaring Twenties for the flocks of women suddenly coming to New York to work in the dazzling new skyscrapers. They did not want to stay in uncomfortable boarding houses; they wanted what men already had – exclusive “club residences”, residential hotels with weekly rates, daily maid service, and a dining room instead of the burden of a kitchen.
Other women’s hotels sprang up in the 1920s too, but it was the Barbizon that grabbed hold of America’s imagination. It would outlast most of the others, in part because it was associated with young women, and later, in the 1950s, with beautiful, desirable young women.
The hotel was strictly women only, with men allowed no farther than the mezzanine lobby, on weekend nights called “Lovers’ Lane”, as couples hovered in the shadows,
embracing behind the foliage of strategically placed potted plants. The reclusive writer, J. D. Salinger, while no wolf, hung around the Barbizon coffee shop and pretended to be a Canadian hockey player. Other men got strangely tired and needed to rest up at the very moment when they crossed Lexington Avenue at Sixty-Third Street, and the Barbizon lobby seemed a perfect place for respite. Malachy McCourt, brother of the author of Angela’s Ashes, as well as a handful of others claimed to have made it up the stairs to the carefully policed bedroom floors; while other men tried and failed, dressing up as plumbers and on-call gynaecologists, much to the amusement (and wrath) of Mrs. Sibley.
The Barbizon’s residents read like a who’s who: Titanic survivor Molly Brown; actresses Joan Crawford, Grace
Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Jaclyn Smith, Phylicia Rashād; writers Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Diane Johnson, Gael Greene, Ann Beattie, Mona Simpson, Meg Wolitzer; designer Betsey Johnson, and many more. But before they were household names, they were among the young women arriving at the Barbizon with a suitcase, reference letters, and hope. Some of them had their dreams come true, while many did not. Some returned to their hometowns, others holed up in their Barbizon rooms and wondered what had gone wrong. Each of them expected their stay to be temporary, a holdover until they had established themselves, given voice to their ambition, their aspirations. But many found themselves still there, year after year. These holdouts would become known to the
Clockwise from left: Barbara Chase, the first African American hotel guest; editor Betsy Talbot Blackwell (right) and young women of the year; New York from the hotel. younger residents as “the Women,” harbingers of what was to come if they did not move on and move out.
In the 1970s, as Manhattan temporarily turned from glitzy to derelict, the Women gathered nightly in the lobby to comment on the younger set, offering them unsolicited advice on the length of their skirts and the wildness of their hair. They had even more to say when, in the 1980s, no longer able to support the original vision of a womenonly sanctuary, management opened the hotel to men. But despite their threats to leave, the Women remained. When Manhattan remade itself into a hot property market, and the Barbizon underwent its own last reimagining from hotel to multimillion-dollar condominium building, the Women got their own refurbished floor, where the remaining few still live, in what is now called Barbizon/63. They share a mailbox alongside another current resident, British actor and comedian Ricky Gervais.
The Barbizon Hotel for Women, when it opened its doors in 1928, never needed to say it was intended for white, middle- and upper- class young women: the address on the Upper East Side said it, the advertisements depicting a typical resident said it, the required reference letters of a certain kind said it. But in 1956, a student at Temple University, a talented artist and dancer by the name of
Barbara Chase, appeared at the Barbizon. She was most likely the first African American to ever stay at the hotel. Her time there was without incident, although she was shielded not only by her good looks and accomplished résumé but also by Mademoiselle magazine.
The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Talbot Blackwell, a force field in New York’s publishing world, although a staunch Republican among the liberal literati, had brought her to New York for the month of June as one of the winners of the magazine’s prestigious guest editor program. No one was sure if the Barbizon would let Barbara Chase in. But they did, even if they failed to mention the swimming pool in the basement. Back in the Mademoiselle offices on Madison Avenue, Betsy Talbot Blackwell would usher Barbara out of the room when Southern clients showed up to meet with that year’s young guest editors.
The Barbizon and Mademoiselle magazine were in many ways symbiotic, catering to the same kind of women, being at the forefront of change, often radically so, only to find themselves eventually overtaken by shifting interests and priorities among the very women to whom they catered. It is therefore impossible to tell the story of the Barbizon without also stepping along the corridors of the Mademoiselle offices. In 1944, Betsy Talbot Blackwell had made the decision that the winners of the guest editor program – brought to Manhattan for June to shadow the magazine’s editors by day and to indulge in fancy dinners, sparkling galas, and sophisticated cocktail parties by night – must stay at the Barbizon. The contest attracted the crème de la crème of young college women, and opened the Barbizon doors to the likes of Joan Didion, Diane Johnson, Gael Greene, Meg Wolitzer, Janet Burroway, Lynn Sherr, and Betsey Johnson. But it was Sylvia Plath, Mademoiselle’s most famous guest editor, who would also bring the greatest notoriety to the hotel. Ten years after her stay there, and shortly before her final, successful suicide attempt, she would disguise the Barbizon as “the Amazon,” spilling out its secrets in her famous novel, The Bell Jar.
The brainy guest editors, Mademoiselle’s contest winners, shared the hotel with students from the famous Katharine Gibbs secretarial school, who resided across three floors of the hotel, with their own “house mothers” and curfews and teas. These young women in their white gloves and perfectly perched hats, regulation attire for a Gibbs girl, were synonymous with the new opportunities for the small town girl who could not act, sing, or dance her way to New York but who sure could type her way out of her hometown and into the glitz and glamour of
Madison Avenue.
But it was the presence of models, first working for the Powers agency and then many escaping to the new Ford agency, run by two daring women out of a shoddy brownstone, that solidified the Barbizon’s reputation as a “dollhouse”. Yet behind the walls in which these serial dating, kitten-heeled glamour women resided, there was also disappointment. Writer Gael Greene returned to the Barbizon two years after her initial stay there as a guest editor alongside Joan Didion, this time to document everyone who wasn’t considered a “doll”: she called the overlooked residents the “Lone Women”. Some were lonely enough to commit suicide: often on Sunday mornings, because as one of the Women noted, Saturday night was date night … or not. And Sunday was sorrow. The Barbizon management, Mae Sibley and manager Hugh J. Connor, made sure the suicides were hushed, seldom appearing in the papers. They knew that appearances mattered above all else and it was better to advertise the
Barbizon’s most glamorous resident, Grace Kelly, than it was to advertise the forlorn.
By the time the Barbizon opened its doors to men, the very premise upon which it had been built – that women’s ambitions, however large or small, could best be supported in single-sex residences with daily maid service and no chance of being pushed back into the kitchen because there wasn’t one – seemed outdated. So why do I wish a place like this had existed when I came to New York after graduating from college? And why do women-only spaces, supportive of women’s ambition, keep springing up? Women did not come to the Barbizon to network but that’s what they did anyway. They helped each other find work, they talked over problems with one another, they applauded each other’s successes and gave solace to those with disappointment and heartbreak.
This is an edited extract from The Barbizon by Paulina Bren, Hachette. On sale now.