THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 63
construction. The modern amenities
and the neo-Gothic style of the sky-
scraper were designed to appeal to
young women from the middle and
upper classes; the limited access for
men and the letters of recommenda-
tion that the Barbizon required of
guests were meant to appease their
parents. Those parents wanted to be-
lieve that the hotel was run like a nun-
nery, but for their daughters it was
more like a sorority. For more than
three decades, Mae Sibley, officially an
assistant manager and unofficially the
front-desk bouncer, screened for what
she called “the right kind of girl,” as-
signing letter grades to would-be res-
idents based on their age and their looks:
A’s were for women under twenty-eight,
while those over thirty-eight were lucky
to get C’s.
The Barbizon was named for a
school of naturalist painters in nine-
teenth-century France, but its glam-
orous clientele quickly earned it the
nickname the Dollhouse. When the
hotel opened, in 1927, flappers and new
women were all the rage—and also a
reliable source of outrage. Women had
won the right to vote in 1920, but their
appetite for other rights generated a
backlash, including new laws and reg-
ulations meant to control their lives
before and after marriage. Hotels reg-
ularly refused to accommodate female
travellers who arrived alone after dark,
the implication being that any such
woman was a prostitute. New York is
thought to have had more speakeas-
ies during Prohibition than anywhere
else in America, and some of the most
notorious among them were run by
women, including Mary (Texas) Gui-
nan, a gunslinging movie star turned
hostess, and Belle Livingstone, a stage
actress who’d had four husbands and
ran nearly as many wet night clubs,
most of them shut down by the Feds
almost as fast as she opened them.
(Though not before she had suppos-
edly served Al Capone, John D. Rocke-
feller, an English duke, and Russian
noblemen—on the same night.) When
alcohol became legal again, in 1933,
some bars banned women entirely,
and others required them to have an
escort if they wanted to drink. By
then, women were attending college
and entering the workforce at higher
rates than ever before; in response,
half the states in the country made it
illegal for them to hold a job if they
were married.T
he Barbizon pitched itself as a
kind of middle ground between
the old and the new, offering young
women a safe and respectable place to
stay, while also offering them entrée
into whatever sort of life they desired:
careers, if they wanted to be working
women; cosmopolitan dating pools, if
they were looking for a husband. The
hotel had club rooms for some of the
Seven Sisters schools, and it cultivated
special relationships with certain em-
ployers and institutions—which, taken
together, suggest the range of occupa-
tions that women of this particular class
were allowed to pursue at the time.
Students from the Katharine Gibbs
Secretarial School, for instance, had a
private dining room and lived on two
floors of the Barbizon while they learned
typing and shorthand and attended
what some people considered charm
school. They were required to don hats
and white gloves; they studied art with
László Moholy-Nagy and literature
with Mark Van Doren. Until the Civil
War, secretaries were mostly male, but
“Gibbs girls” were part of the wave of
women who feminized the field.
Besides the “Gibblets,” the Barbi-
zon was home to a number of Powers
models, women who were under con-
tract with the John Robert Powers
Agency. Many of these women had
used beauty-pageant winnings to buy
their bus tickets to New York and as-
pired to appear in Sears or Montgom-
ery Ward catalogues. All the models
who signed with Powers got the same
matching black hatbox and filled it
with the accessories and makeup that
they carried to shoots around the city.
As prestigious as it was to be part of
what is thought to be the world’s first
modelling agency, Powers models could
not always make a living from the in-
frequent gigs and irregular income. Take
Celeste Gheen, who was profiled in
this magazine in 1940. Her early years
with Powers were rough: nearly half
her wages went to covering the weekly
eleven-dollar Barbizon rent, and she
went home to Cleveland after a ner-
vous breakdown. She returned to NewYork, spent another few years building
up her reputation, and eventually av-
eraged fifteen or twenty hours of work
a week, having become the face—or
the limbs, or the lips—of five ciga-
rette brands, Spam, Texaco, Oldsmo-
bile, Log Cabin syrup, Schaefer’s beer,
Bayer aspirin, Bon Ami cleanser, Sim-
mons Beautyrest mattresses, and Hell-
mann’s mayonnaise. (She once made
fifty-five dollars by taking a full-body
bath in Colman’s mustard.) But even
successful models struggled between
paychecks and were frustrated by how
long agencies took to pay them. One
night at the Barbizon, a woman named
Eileen Ford listened to a friend com-
plain about these conditions and de-
cided that agencies should treat the
models—rather than the photographers
or the advertisers—as their clients. She
founded her own agency, which went
on to represent the likes of Candice Ber-
gen, Martha Stewart, Christie Brink-
ley, and Brooke Shields.
A common venue for the work of
these models was women’s magazines
like Mademoiselle, which was founded
in 1935 and not long afterward devel-
oped a guest-editor program that of-
fered college students internships in
New York, during which they stayed at
the Barbizon. The editor-in-chief Betsy
Talbot Blackwell increased the maga-
zine’s circulation more than fivefold,
and cultivated a new readership, which
ranged from teen-age girls to career
women. She published Truman Capote,
Flannery O’Connor, and Edward Albee,
among others, and made the internship
program one of the most prestigious in
the country, decreeing that “the staff
must get younger every year, even if it
kills them in the process.”
The Millies, as the guest editors
were known, numbered one or two
dozen each summer. Many went on
to writing careers, including Joan Di-
dion, Sylvia Plath, Gael Greene, and
Meg Wolitzer. In her novel “The Bell
Jar,” Plath fictionalized Mademoiselle
as Ladies’ Day and the Barbizon as the
Amazon, including details from her
own fateful last night at the hotel,
when she threw every article of cloth-
ing she had brought to the city off the
roof, a gesture some Millies saw as a
catharsis, others as a sign of despair.
Didion began her essay “Goodbye to