Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  * * *

  Two years after she began working for Mrs. Ryckley, nothing had changed. Bessie was still up before dawn serving as a nanny at home and working in salons every day of the week, and though the tips were nice Bessie thought it was time for a raise. It wasn’t long before a man came into the shop and gave Bessie the opportunity she needed. He was checking that all employees were of age. Without skipping a beat, Mrs. Ryckley assured the man that Bessie, who had taken to wearing her hair tied up in an attempt to look older than her thirteen years, was sixteen and that she was the girl’s legal guardian. Satisfied, the man left, and Bessie promptly maneuvered her employer into a quiet corner.

  “I will go on full pay as an operator, or I will leave,” she announced.

  Mrs. Ryckley was struck by Bessie’s ingratitude; she was teaching the girl a trade, she should be grateful. But Bessie stood her ground, confident she could manipulate the situation to her advantage. She calmly told Mrs. Ryckley that the clients who came to see her brought in about two hundred dollars every week, meaning she brought more business to the shop than she was compensated for. These regulars, she continued, would surely follow her to another shop if she left. If Mrs. Ryckley wanted to keep these clients, Bessie would happily continue living at the family house rent-free, but she wouldn’t take care of the children or cook. She would keep working in the salons, but she’d have a retainer of thirty-five dollars6 a week plus commission, and she’d work regular hours, just like every other stylist. Then she laid down her trump card: Bessie told Mrs. Ryckley she’d overheard her conversation with the inspector, and that she wouldn’t hesitate to use the falsified information to ruin her reputation if need be. Mrs. Ryckley had to admit defeat, and Bessie realized the power that came with confidence.

  Now fourteen, Bessie was already a striking young woman, equal parts feminine and tomboy. She dressed in fashionable, well-made clothes that flattered her budding figure, and her experience in the salons meant she could style her hair in a way that drew attention to her large brown eyes. She was also gaining something of a reputation as a rebel, attending church nearly every Sunday morning, then hanging around behind the local grocery store in the evenings smoking cigarettes with her male friends. Men were inexorably drawn to her, including a tradesman ten years her senior named Robert Harvey Cochran. Their courtship was accelerated when Bessie became pregnant within weeks of their meeting, and the pair married in Blakely, Georgia, on November 14, 1920.

  It wasn’t long before a traveling salesman stopped by the salon and unwittingly presented Bessie with another opportunity to advance her career. The man came to the shop selling Nestle permanent wave machines, and as he talked to Mrs. Ryckley, he mentioned there was a store in Montgomery, Alabama, to which he could sell one if only he could offer an expert technician in the deal. The Nestle wave process took about six hours and used a dozen two-pound, chemically treated brass hair rollers heated to over 210 degrees Fahrenheit. The rollers were suspended with counterweights so they wouldn’t burn the client’s scalp, giving the client a look akin to Medusa during the process and polished waves after. It was finicky, but Bessie was adept at the system. Seeing a chance to get even farther from her family and the mill town, she told the man she was the expert he needed. He was somewhat doubtful that this young, pregnant girl was the expert he needed, and Bessie had to admit that she might need to take care of her family first.

  The new Mr. and Mrs. Cochran went to Florida, first to Robert’s hometown of Noma then on to Bonifay, where Bessie’s family had relocated. There, less than four months after their wedding and three months before her fifteenth birthday, Bessie gave birth to a son, Robert H. Cochran Jr., on February 21, 1921. Within months the young family moved clear to the other side of the state and settled in Miami.

  The marriage wasn’t a happy one. Bessie loved her baby boy with his blond curly hair and sweet disposition, but she still wanted more from her own life. And so, less than a year after they moved to Miami, Bessie traveled alone with Robert Jr. to DeFuniak Springs, Florida, where Ira and her oldest brother, Joseph, were working at the W. B. Harbeson Lumber Mill. Leaving her baby with his grandparents, she took a job giving Nestle permanent waves in the salon in the Nachman & Meertief department store in Montgomery, Alabama. Her son and her marriage remained a secret.

  Once again, Bessie quickly accumulated a roster of loyal clients. Even the salon’s floor manager, Mrs. Lerton, was taken by Bessie’s quick wit and even quicker hands and took the girl under her wing. Picking up where Miss Bostwick and the Madam had left off, Mrs. Lerton taught Bessie about sewing, furthered her cooking lessons, and helped introduce her to the local social scene. By seventeen, Bessie had enough money to buy a Ford Model T. The manual, however, was so technical she could barely understand it, so she studied the engine until she figured out how it worked and became her own mechanic. She also took dance lessons that she put to use when friends or clients invited her out for a social evening. Though on the surface Bessie was beginning to live the life of luxury she’d dreamed of back in Bagdad, she lacked stability. She was bouncing between homes, living off and on with family in DeFuniak Springs for stretches at a time, often with her favorite brother, Joseph, and his wife, Ethel Mae. Sometimes she brought Robert Jr. with her and other times she left him with her parents.

  Watching Bessie flit around between Montgomery and DeFuniak Springs, Mrs. Lerton began to push the girl toward a more stable life. She wanted the girl to study nursing, but Bessie protested. She liked the lifestyle that came with working in the salon, and though she was literate, she worried she wouldn’t be able to keep up with lessons. She doubted any hospital would accept a grade-school dropout at all. But Mrs. Lerton was adamant and talked the training director at St. Margaret’s Hospital into admitting Bessie as a student.

  Never satisfied with anything less than an all-out effort, Bessie approached nursing with the same dedication she had everything else. Instead of slogging through complicated medical texts, she memorized the lessons and committed the layout of surgical instruments to memory. She was enthralled by surgery, fascinated with how the procedures worked and never put off by the blood. This, coupled with her continued insistence on absolute cleanliness, made her a favorite assistant among surgeons. On her days off, she gave the patients haircuts and learned how to give a straight razor shave. The only thing she didn’t complete was the license exam; she was so self-conscious of her poor writing skills that she never made her new career official. All the while, her husband, Robert, was nowhere to be seen, and it wasn’t long before real cracks started showing in the marriage. Locals in DeFuniak Springs often saw Bessie spending time alone with the local grocery store owner, Will Meigs. Robert, meanwhile, sought the companionship of another young woman, Ethel May Mathis. When Bessie learned of the affair, she moved home with four-year-old Robert Jr. to DeFuniak Springs and promptly filed for divorce.

  In the spring of 1925, the days were warm enough that four-year-old Robert Cochran Jr. was left to play by himself out in the backyard of his grandparents’ house. Somewhere in the yard on the afternoon of Friday, May 29, he found a matchstick, and in playing with the little wooden piece set fire to some paper. In an instant, his clothes became engulfed in flames. A neighbor spotted the emergency and rushed over, burning his hands as he did his best to rip off the boy’s flaming clothes. Bessie was called back to the house, and she arrived to find physicians attending to her son, but it was too late. The boy was so badly burned he couldn’t be saved. The only thing to do was keep him comfortable. The family moved him to his bed, where he regained consciousness long enough to tell his mother and grandparents what had happened. Bessie stayed sitting on the edge of his bed all afternoon, but before the day was out, Robert Jr. was gone.

  Two days later, Bessie buried her son beneath a small, heart-shaped headstone in the local cemetery. Then she packed some of his things away in a trunk and tried to pack her sadness away with them, but she couldn’t. Depression settled in as she tr
ied to return to work, but her failed marriage only made things worse. Her own divorce filing had been dismissed for lack of proof of Robert’s infidelity, but Robert succeeded in ending their union. He filed for divorce claiming Bessie had committed adultery on or around November 20 of the previous year, 1924. Bessie didn’t fight it. Instead, she presented herself at the Circuit Court of Montgomery County in Alabama and submitted to the judge’s interrogation about their relationship. The divorce was finally granted on February 5, 1927, three months before Bessie’s twenty-first birthday.

  Between Robert Jr.’s death and her divorce, DeFuniak Springs held more pain than happiness for Bessie. It was time to move again, this time to Mobile, Alabama, where her aunt Amanda had a spare room near another salon. But within a year, Bessie was back in DeFuniak Springs. Her whole family had fallen ill with influenza and needed care. Her sisters Mamie and Myrtle survived, but her father didn’t; Bessie helped the family bury Ira in the local cemetery close to Robert Jr. Her brother Henry died not long after in a Coast Guard accident, and she buried him, too. When she left town again, she didn’t go far, just eight miles west to Pensacola, where there were high-end salons and it was a short drive home.

  Pensacola failed to cure Bessie’s malaise. She put her own money into the poorly run Le Jeanne Beauté Shoppe, but her co-owner proved to be an unsavvy business partner. Although she enjoyed the social scene and nights spent dancing with the handsome young ensigns from the nearby navy base, when they told her about the marvelous airplanes they were learning to fly she felt even more restless. She needed to get out into the air herself. She took to the road selling dress patterns from town to town, and though she reveled in the romantic freedom that came with the open road, she knew that it was a dead-end job. She tried to further her career by studying the latest techniques at a beauty school in Philadelphia but found she knew more about trends and techniques than her teachers. Nothing was making her truly happy.

  In the span of a decade, Bessie had been married and divorced, welcomed a son then buried him. She had buried her father and her brother. Her sisters and beloved brother Joseph were all raising their own families, and the only family Bessie had left was her mother, with whom she continued to clash. DeFuniak Springs held nothing but painful memories for Bessie. She decided the time had come to make a clean break.

  * * *

  One midsummer day in 1929, twenty-three-year-old Bessie arrived at the train station in Pensacola. Her worldly possessions were packed into suitcases, and her life savings was tucked away in her pocketbook, including the money she’d gained from selling her Model T. She bought a ticket and boarded a train heading north.

  Watching the countryside stream past the window, she decided to reinvent her past. She would tell people that she was an orphan, that the Pittmans had taken her in but never really cared for her. This would explain her lack of family ties. She would never admit to knowing her biological family and would instead tell people that her foster parents, Mollie and Ira, had been so poor and unloving that she had been forced to leave the house at eleven years old to find work. She also decided never to tell anyone about her marriage or her son, though she couldn’t bear to erase Robert Jr. entirely. He was her happiest memory. She needed to keep him with her somehow, so decided to keep the only thing she had left that they had shared: a name. She would remain a Cochran to keep her little boy alive in her heart, though she would tell people she’d picked the surname at random running her finger through a phone book. As the train sped further north, Bessie Pittman faded into obscurity.

  When she arrived in New York City days later, she retained Bessie’s skill as a hairdresser and nurse, her obsession with cleanliness, and her moxie, but nothing else. No one would ever know Bessie Pittman, she’d decided, but the world would absolutely know Miss Jacqueline Cochran.

  1 About $31 in 2019.

  2About $2.50 in 2019.

  3About $113 in 2019.

  4About $38.50 in 2019.

  5About $201 in 2019.

  6About $810 in 2019.

  Chapter 2

  New York City, Summer 1929

  New York City was like nothing Jackie had ever seen. She marveled at the lights that made the city bright even at night. There were more cars on one road than she had seen in her entire life. Skyscrapers stretched high above her, and the skeletons of new ones being built seemed to disappear into the clouds. Walking down Broadway brought back memories of Broad Street in Columbus, but everything was so much bigger and grander. She was surrounded by noise—engines roaring, streetcars rattling, horns honking, dogs barking, and even music. Huge crowds raced along as though propelled by some unseen energy, unafraid to push past cars and dodge around horses in their immaculate clothes. Everyone she saw seemed to exude effortless wealth. Far from daunted, Jackie felt energized.

  It didn’t take long for her to find a room to rent in the back of a restaurant. For three dollars a week, she had an apartment to herself with a private shower, access to the kitchen that sat outside her door, and a view of Central Park. She cleaned the room from top to bottom before unpacking. As a final touch, she stuck a strip of felt over the crack at the bottom of the door to keep out food odors. When she was done, she looked around, satisfied with her little haven in the big city.

  “Start at the top, Jackie.”

  She repeated this mantra to herself as she walked to Charles of the Ritz. Located inside the Ritz Hotel on the corner of Madison Avenue and 46th Street, the salon was famous in the beauty industry. Beyond styling, the shop had developed its own cosmetics line that it sold to New York’s social elite through its multiple locations. It was the world Jackie wanted to be a part of, so it was where she needed to work.

  Jackie found the salon as posh as its reputation. The floor was patterned marble. The walls were lined with wood and glass shelves filled with elegant displays of perfumes and makeup. Mirrors made the room feel more spacious. Jackie filled out an application slip and asked to speak with the salon’s owner, Charles Jundt. Mr. Charles was a nearly fifty-year-old mustachioed German man from Alsace-Lorraine who, after working as a hairdresser in both Paris and London, had immigrated to the United States nearly twenty years earlier. As the owner of Charles of the Ritz, he was the driving force behind the salon’s sterling reputation. When he came out to meet Jackie, he sized up the twenty-three-year-old self-proclaimed expert at permanent waves and transformations.

  “Little girl,” he began, “what can you do?”

  “I can do everything,” Jackie replied.

  “You don’t look old enough to be an expert,” he said dismissively.

  Jackie stood her ground. She explained she’d been working in salons for more than a decade and insisted that she could, in fact, do everything, and some things probably even better than he could. Then she asked for a job, offering to take a fifty-percent commission in lieu of a salary.

  Mr. Charles chuckled at her brash confidence. He considered her for a moment, noticing her long blond hair that was expertly curled. “You’ll have to cut your hair,” he said as though testing how badly she wanted to work for him.

  “I wouldn’t cut my hair for you even if you promised to turn your whole business over to me,” she shot back, deeply put off by his arrogance. With that, she turned on her heel and walked out the door.

  The next day the phone in Jackie’s apartment rang. Mr. Charles had changed his mind. Impressed by her determination, he was willing to offer her fifty-percent commission and would let her keep her hair, but Jackie steadfastly refused to work for a man who even jokingly attempted to impose on her personal rights. She turned down his offer then set out to his rival salon, Antoine’s. Founded by Polish hairdresser Antoni Cierplikowski—known simply as Monsieur Antoine—the original Antoine’s in Paris was a favorite of stars like Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, and Edith Piaf. When Monsieur Antoine started doing women’s hair “à la garçonne” he launched the bob to worldwide fame. As soon as he opened a salon in New York’s Saks Fif
th Avenue department store, his Parisien cachet followed. To Jackie’s delight, the manager at Antoine’s hired her on the spot with the understanding she would have to prove herself through her work.

  Before long, Jackie had a steady roster of clients so wealthy they asked her to follow them to Miami Beach in the winter months so she could work at Antoine’s sister salon and style their hair year-round. With nothing keeping her in New York, Jackie bought a little Chevrolet and began splitting her years between the two cities.

  * * *

  By the spring of 1932, both New York and Miami Beach had changed. The whole country was feeling the effects of the stock market crash of 1929 as the economy hit its lowest point. Banks failed, reducing the money supply. The value of the dollar rose as wages dropped and jobs disappeared altogether. As business generated less revenue, the ripple effect forced both business and personal bankruptcies. People sold their most prized possessions in a desperate attempt to feed their families while farmers’ crops sat rotting. But the women who frequented Antoine’s in New York and spent the winters in Miami Beach experienced far fewer effects from the Depression. They were wives of businessmen and politicians so could still afford their dyes and permanents, which meant Jackie was able to work full-time and maintain the dual-city lifestyle to which she’d grown accustomed. Some clients even became friends. Though Jackie the grade-school dropout turned stylist might have been firmly in a different social class than these wealthy wives, there was no stigma around Jackie being a career girl, especially when that career afforded her the financial freedom to live the life she wanted. Jackie, a lover of parties, went out to lavish supper clubs three or four nights a week, where she could dine and drink cocktails with friends and dance to a live orchestra. More often than not, the nights would end in a casino, where Jackie kept herself to strict rules. She didn’t gamble unless a friend loaned her money, which she repaid in full if she won, and she always went home alone at midnight.