Afraid the managing editor of Mademoiselle would reject me, I arrived at the interview prepared to reject her, and the entire fashion industry, first. Before she could shame me with her chic, I would shame her with my chill. I put on the pink Brooks Brothers shirt, the black-and-white gingham skirt, and entered 575 Madison Avenue determined to be dégagé. Now, when I visualize myself in that lobby, waiting for the elevator under what I believed was an Arp but wasn’t, I am touched by the sight of me: my feet uncertain in high heels and my gloved hands clutching one of my mothers cast-off purses. But I, though dimly aware that suede was unsuitable in summer, probably thought I looked swell.
Cyrilly Abels, Sylvia Plath’s Jay Cee, was a homely woman in her forties with a low smooth voice and a box of Kleenex carefully positioned next to the chair at the left of her desk. The Kleenex was not for her but for the younger members of the staff, who tended to cry in her presence. Miss Abels would give the box a little push, a tissue would be withdrawn, and the resultant honk would proclaim to the gang in the bullpen just outside her door that once again C.A. had drawn tears. Calling her C.A., though not to her face, was how they defended themselves against her implacable certainties.
Since only she and the editor-in-chief, Betsy Talbot Blackwell, were known by their initials, however, I figured “C.A.” magnified rather than diminished. That is one of the reasons I never referred to her other than as Miss Abels. The second is that I needed no defense. Skilled as Miss Abels was at finding others’ sore spots, she never made a serious search for mine. When, years later, a friend who had suffered dizzy spells and crying jags in C.A.’s employ asked why I was one of the few who had not, I laughed and said, “I wasn’t sick enough to interest her.” Half the office—the half that lived in Miss Abels’s sphere—was, as everyone said then, “on the couch.” Only the fashion editors were presumed immune from neurosis. They weren’t thoughtful enough.
Even so, I was exactly the sort that Miss Abels liked to hire: a graduate of a women’s college and obviously not a slave to fashion. She herself had gone to Radcliffe and every fall bought two simple wool crepe dresses, princess-line to show off a bosom of which she was rumored to be very proud, and an absolutely correct coordinating coat from Trigere. After a few minutes’ conversation, during which I made it clear that I read a lot and she made it clear that she was a close personal friend of every writer worth knowing, she sent me to the promotion department, to meet the press editor. He, swayed by my plea not to put me through a typing test because I would die on the spot, said, “You kids!,” laughed, and hired me anyway.
That afternoon I met the young man I was to marry, in Central Park. He was wearing the navy blue serge we called his Puerto Rican revolutionary suit, which he’d bought for job interviews, and carrying peanut-butter sandwiches, one for each of us. “I’m so proud of you,” he said, and I, because there was no father to say that to me anymore, felt tears quickening behind my eyes.
We had met my junior year in college, in the living room of my dorm. He, just back from his junior year abroad, was lean and dark and had a copy of Orlando in the pocket of his beige raincoat. When, along with the girl who lived across the hall and a fraternity brother of his at Wesleyan, I wriggled into his old Plymouth, he studied my backside and said, “Guess we’ll have to get you a girdle.” Ten minutes into our acquaintance and he had taken over. I couldn’t have been more grateful.
The action at Mademoiselle was up front, where the editorial offices were. The promotion department, where I worked, was down the hall. A lot of the staff up front was around my age; here I was with my elders, except for a girl named Audrey, who strangled her every word. I thought it was a speech defect. It was, I found out later, something called Locust Valley Lockjaw, which I had never heard before because the girls afflicted with it went to schools like Bennett Junior College and Finch rather than Connecticut, where the accents were mostly West Hartford and Shaker Heights. I have heard it countless times since, and have always found behind it someone who called her mother “Mummy” and grew up with good furniture.
There was a pretty woman named Joan, too, who lit her cigarettes with Stork Club matches and spoke in hard, fast sentences. And a much older woman named Jean, the promotion director’s secretary and the only person in the department who could take shorthand. Only the promotion director and the editor-in-chief had real secretaries. The rest of the editors had to make do with people like me: forty words a minute, a habit of obedience, and a willingness to start at $195 a month.
Audrey never spoke to me or to anyone else in the office—she was forever on the phone, conversing through clenched teeth—and Joan spoke only to be rude. Jean’s mind was on her shorthand, her filing, and her home in Queens. So when I talked, which was seldom, it was only to my two bosses: Joel, the press editor, and Hugh, the special projects editor, middle-aged men whom I would not have dreamed of calling Joel and Hugh.
All I ever did for Hugh, who was tall and thin, with the spine of a Grenadier guard and several impeccable pinstriped suits, was order theater tickets, make restaurant reservations, and type the occasional letter. The letters were personal, not professional—I think he wanted their recipients to realize he had a secretary—and in one of them he introduced himself by a completely different name, something that smacked of the Baptist Church and parents named Hazel and Dwight. Until that moment I thought only movie stars changed their names, and I had spent long hours in childhood wondering how to abbreviate mine for a possible marquee. But changing one’s name, or having had it changed by one’s father or grandfather, turned out to be kind of a New York thing. So, if you were a woman who had a career as opposed to a job, was having three names: Christian name, maiden name, and married name. Mademoiselle was a monument to three-named women, although sometimes the married name was that not of the present husband but of one or two back. A lot depended on euphony.
Joel kept me busier. For him I clipped and read and typed the letters he had painstakingly written out in longhand because I feared dictation. Once, when there was an extra seat at something called a Fashion Group luncheon, to which he assured me I must go because it was the most professional fashion show I would ever see, he scurried around the office and found me a hat. None of the “ladies,” as I was learning to call them, would have gone to Fashion Group without a hat, and B.T.B., true to the legend, often wore one at her desk.
The luncheon, as they all were and still are, I guess, was in a hotel ballroom. The younger fashion editors wore Seventh Avenue, the most powerful of the older editors wore whatever had debuted on the Paris runways a few weeks before, and the store buyers wore too much. Carmel Snow, who was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar; spoke. Or maybe it was Andrew Goodman, who was, the ladies said, “a great merchant.” The one had a small head, a slight sway, and a thick Irish accent; the other ended a speech on the American woman’s fashion needs with a ringing “If she wants satin, give it to huh. If she wants cotton, give it to huh.” They are the only speakers I remember from what turned into years of going to Fashion Group luncheons.
Joel sent me on little errands, too, but most of the time I sat at my desk, listening to the occasional ring of a phone, to Audrey’s tortured vowels and Joan’s café society snarls.
Life in the promotion department was strange, silent, and lonely. But at least it was safe. Up front was a foreign country. C.A. was a slicked-up version of the ladies on the Connecticut College faculty, but the rest of the country’s citizens were like nothing I had ever known before.
The fiction editor, Rita Smith, was the younger sister of Carson McCullers. A plump woman with sad brown eyes and an alcoholic past, she was forever rushing to Nyack, where “Sistuh” moaned and reigned. Afraid of elevators, Rita climbed the stairs to Mademoiselle’s sixth-floor offices, would not travel on a subway unaccompanied, and believed that her constantly burning, and forgotten, cigarettes would one day set fire to the whole building. Every evening after five, her assistant searched their office looki
ng for a telltale cinder. Finding none, she would send Rita home relieved. “Sistuh,” I was reliably informed, had ruined Rita’s life.
Leo Lerman, the entertainment editor, sat in a sort of railed-off den behind an enormous mahogany desk, taking phone calls from Marlene Dietrich and Truman Capote. A plump, bearded man, he lived in a house so assertively Victorian it defied the century, which was the point, and had a collection of friends so dazzling I am still dazzled by it. I knew about them only by hearsay, however, from the acolytes who clustered about his desk and giggled over his every word. Stiff-necked and shy, I studied him more or less from afar, wondering at a social life that was so busy he kept his invitations in a faille shoe rack—each little bag represented one day—on the back of a closet door.
C.A.’s editorial assistants, all of them tall, brainy, and badly dressed, had long, hilarious lunches at a restaurant called Barney’s and spoke out of the sides of their mouths. The chief assistant’s husband was planning to run for mayor of New York on the Labor Party ticket, provided he could get enough signatures on a nominating petition. When she, older than the others and deliberately plain as porridge—her looks were in themselves a political statement—showed up at my desk with the petition, I wouldn’t sign. No way was I going to get the chair.
The head of the fashion department, a scant-haired fluttery woman in her forties, was said to ask her maid to iron her stockings. I’d also heard that she had had Greta Garbo and—here the speaker’s voice deepened to signal a significance lost on me—her “friend” for Sunday dinner, and that Garbo had carved. That any of these fascinating people might have anything to say to me, or I to them, was past imagining.
A week or two after my arrival, Joel sent me across the border for the first time. I was to take a press release to the fashion copy editor, a tall, rather handsome woman with eyes that rolled like a maddened stallion’s. Kathy was temperamental—she had thrown a telephone book at a hairdresser named Enrico Caruso because she didn’t like the way he had cut her hair, and had led a kind of peasants’ revolt against management—so Joel said, “Approach her carefully.”
Past the college and career department I walked, past the pretty, peppy girls who wrote about working in Washington and living in Georgetown and the pros and cons of joining a sorority. Past the fashion department, with its clothes racks and ringing phones and editors who wore necklace piled upon necklace and Italian shoes. Past the deep green room—she called it her boudoir—in which B.T.B., who was also rumored to wear ironed stockings, proofed copy with a bright red pencil (C.A. used blue) and broke out ice cubes and a bottle of vodka every day at noon. Past the bullpen where C.A.’s assistants were talking smart talk. To Kathy’s office, where I paused at the open door.
She was typing, and she kept on typing until the sun went down and the lights came on all over Manhattan. Or so it seemed. Cold sweat trickled down my back and my stomach fell to my knees, but still I stood, incapable of advance or retreat. Finally she looked up. “Don’t you know any better,” she asked in a voice that rejected reply, “than to disturb a writer while she’s working?”
I muttered something about her door being open, put the press release on her desk, and scuttled back to kindly Joel. But I had learned a lesson, which, unfortunately, I forgot by the time I traveled on to Vogue. To survive eight hours of producing “tangerine linen crossed with a lime-green slice of belt” or “Mrs. Randall Oakes, an enchantment of a woman with a gallant list of good works to her credit,” it is necessary to call it “writing.”
Still, I wanted to do what Kathy did. Or what Nancy and Rachel in the college and career department did. Or what Jane in C.A.’s bullpen did. I wanted to write something. I didn’t care what, nor did I care about bylines. I just wanted to see something that had been in my mind transformed into print. I wanted to see a miracle.
2
THE CORNER OF Fifty-seventh and Madison is still quite glamorous, what with Tiffany’s down the street and Hermès and Chanel around the corner. But it seemed even more so when 575 Madison housed Mademoiselle and Charm, the building across the street housed Harper’s Bazaar, and the Checker cabs were forever unloading magazine editors, who were sometimes ugly but always chic.
At lunchtime the editors-in-chief were dining at places like L’Aiglon, on bifteck haché and Bloody Marys. C.A. was in the Bayberry Room of the Drake Hotel with the writer of the moment, Dry Sack for an apéritif and something wholesome, like calves’ liver, for the entrée. The copywriters and other literary types were eating saucisson at the French Shack, unless they were at Barney’s knocking back martinis. I, with as yet no office pal, was dining alone at Henry Halper’s Drugstore.
Which is not to say that I was sitting at some rundown soda fountain picking at tuna salad on white. Henry Halper’s was where all the young fashion editors went for a quick bite (they were always either going to or coming from “the market”) and employed a middle-aged black man just to push one’s long-legged chair in to the counter. The egg salad sandwich, which was heaped with watercress, was “the best in New York.”
So was the devil’s food cake at Hamburg Heaven and the coconut cake at the Women’s Exchange and the sundaes at the Schrafft’s on Fifty-seventh Street, where one could see the famous designer Charles James sitting with his right leg crooked up under him and his hands flying about like frightened birds. The people at Mademoiselle and Charm and Bazaar, people around whom my ears were like morning glories or the big horn of an old Victrola, had made finding “the best in New York” their life’s work. Some choices were obvious; others were not. I had thought, for instance, that if you wanted a pair of gold earrings, you should go to Tiffany’s. Not at all. You went to a little place called Olga Tritt.
Out of the office I would saunter at noon—Joel was never too fussy about when I came back—and cross the street to Halper’s or go around the corner to Hamburg Heaven, where one slid into a wooden chair whose right arm curved around to form a little table. The men who worked at Hamburg Heaven were black, with the classy mien of sleeping-car porters, and the customers wore gold circle pins and spoke of Junior League dances and wedding receptions at the Georgian Suite.
Then it was up to Bonnier’s, to look at the Swedish glassware, or over to Bonwit’s for the ladies’ room, or down to Steuben for a chat with a classmate who worked there. Never once did I spend a cent except for lunch, because I had no money whatsoever, and never did I go to the art galleries, because I didn’t know about them. I simply drifted, studying the pretty girls in their Anne Fogarty dresses—they had “wallpaper waists,” Mademoiselle said, and “great flous of skirts”—and wondering if I could ever look that bright, that bouncy, that New York. The humidity stuck my hair to my head and my face turned red and sweaty and my lips moved in silent conversation with somebody who wasn’t there—my father, usually, and sometimes my grandmother. Never mind. I had done what I had planned to do since I was—oh, God—twelve, I guess. I had given my small town the back of my hand.
I wish I could say that as a child I had lain in bed listening to the siren song of train whistles. But no trains had come to our town since the Hurricane of 1938 had torn up the tracks, and the old station had been a small bottling plant for as far back as I could remember. Or that I could claim to have read my parents’ New Yorker for hours on end and dreamed of strutting down West Forty-third Street. But the only magazines that came to our house were my mother’s copies of American Home and Better Homes and Gardens, and although I longed for my father to subscribe to Life and The Saturday Evening Post and thus realize my dream of a proper American dad, he persisted in reading novels (mostly Graham Greene) and poetry (mostly Yeats). My father was very Catholic and, despite a Scottish father, very Irish.
No, what pulled me to New York, apart from the young man I was to marry, was my father’s promise. “Don’t you change, don’t you dare change,” he would say when I came home from school in tears because I hadn’t been elected to this or that or because somebody had call
ed me a showoff for writing so many book reports. “Someday you’ll live in a place where there are lots of people like you.” My guess is he meant academe, a world that he revered and that he believed welcomed the chatty, the gaffe-prone, the people with more brains than sense. But I, bored with tests, bored with papers, and cursed with a mayfly’s attention span, thought of something speedier. I thought of a world in which you “raced” to the subway, “hopped” the shuttle, “grabbed” a cab. Infatuated with its pace, I thought of New York.
Now here it was, sprawled, half-dressed, in the heat. And here I was, opening my eyes every morning in a “studio” that had once been the kitchen of an 1840s row house and, only a few weeks after I’d gotten off the train at Grand Central, racing for the subway.
As I was racing uptown, the young man I was to marry, B., was racing downtown from the railroad flat on Ninety-sixth Street he shared with a friend named Jerry and an art historian named Sidney, with whom he was splitting the $28-a-month rent. He was going to his job in the mailroom of an advertising agency. The Puerto Rican revolutionary suit had been put aside with his first paycheck, and now he was wearing gray flannel and a black knitted tie. The tie, he said, was “sincere.”
The money, everybody said, was on Mad Ave; B. had once written a short story whose hero had “come to harvest in the golden field of advertising.” He had wanted to be a writer then, and most of all he had wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald. But now he wanted to be Maxwell Perkins. Or Edmund Wilson. Or Malcolm Cowley. He knew about every little magazine that ever was. He knew about Broom and transition and the Black Sun Press; he knew about Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon; and like everyone who spent his junior year abroad, he came out of Paris with a copy of Tropic of Cancer hidden under his train seat. He gave me Tropic of Cancer to read and I tried, I really tried, but he might as well have asked me to dash a communion wafer to the floor. Mrs. Grundy I was, he said, as he chipped, chipped, chipped away at my stubborn puritanism. One might have thought he’d have gone for somebody more his type. But the truth is, I was his type.
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 2