On the lower floors, cramped pink-and-green dormitory rooms sheltered aspiring models and actresses, and a roster of future stars passed through before they were famous: Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Lauren Bacall, Liza Minnelli, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman. The girls got afternoon tea for free and could load up on finger sandwiches if they didn’t have a generous date or their paychecks couldn’t cover a trip to the Automat for lunch that day. There was a gym and a swimming pool, a library, and two lounges where the residents could bring their male guests for conversation and a little light flirting until the manager appeared to kick them out at ten o’clock.
The Barbizon was where Mademoiselle magazine housed its summer guest editors, including Sylvia Plath in 1953, who ten years later would thinly veil the Barbizon as the “Amazon” in her novel The Bell Jar, calling it a place populated by “girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.”8 When Kitty Foyle arrives in New York, she lives at the “Pocahontas,” a dreary dormitory for women that offers room and meals for just a few dollars a week, and represents a rather less glamorous version of the Barbizon. “It sounds like a cat house,” Kitty says with characteristic bluntness, “but that’s what the West Side called an economical apartment hotel for dames only.”9 Models at Eileen Ford’s agency were housed there from the 1940s, but it was also a training ground for more pedestrian, if polished, employment, with Katharine Gibbs’s “posh secretarial school,” as Plath called it, taking up several floors in the building. It remains a signature of its era; in Marvel’s series Agent Carter, set in postwar Manhattan, the protagonist Peggy (after passing muster with the snooty staff) takes a room in yet another fictionalized version, the Griffith Hotel.
One of the chief selling points of these women’s hotels, for long-term and short-term shelter, was the community they offered, which even Marjorie Hillis acknowledged was useful for a solo traveler: “I make no claim that it’s particularly gay to eat alone in any strange city,” she wrote.10 If for some reason breakfast in bed, her ever-reliable first choice, was neither available nor desirable, a bacon roll might do very well for breakfast at any of the many branches of Schrafft’s—where “the timidest female would feel perfectly comfortable alone,” and her soigné sister “couldn’t complain of a girls’ boarding-school atmosphere.”11 No real New Yorker would have needed this explanation. For most of the twentieth century, until the restaurants vanished from the city’s streets in the 1980s, Schrafft’s was a byword for female-friendly dining, a chain of affordable but genteel establishments that filled the gap between masculine taverns and expensive French restaurants where one dined strictly à deux. From the 1920s and intermittently for the next forty years, The New Yorker could run jokes under the heading “Overheard at Schrafft’s” and trust that every reader would recognize the particular brand of woman they featured: respectable, rotund, and always mildly displeased about something or other.
According to restaurant historian Paul Freedman, Schrafft’s was one of several restaurants that attempted in the early twentieth century to fill the gaping middle in New York dining, catering to the middle class, at middling prices, in the middle of the day. But women needed more than a place that was open and affordable, especially in an era when their unaccompanied presence in public spaces was still a novelty. Schrafft’s at first did not serve alcohol, and in keeping with assumptions about women’s eating preferences presented a dainty menu long on ice cream, fruit salad, and cucumber sandwiches. The formula was a hit and offered a haven for women on lunch breaks, in the middle of shopping expeditions, and otherwise in need of a respite from male-dominated society.
The longevity and success of the chain has been attributed to its founder, Frank Shattuck’s “fanatical” dedication to quality control, which ensured that every branch in the empire (by 1950, more than fifty in New York State, and more in Boston, Philadelphia, and across New Jersey) felt as welcoming and elegant as the original city branch in the heart of Ladies’ Mile. Shattuck employed women as managers as well as waitresses, and gave them a modest share of the profits and maternity leave. No feminist and certainly no progressive—he banned “foreign”-sounding foods, and the restaurants discriminated against nonwhite patrons—Shattuck nevertheless realized the enormous, untapped commercial value of women as consumers.12
Like Schrafft’s writ large, Marjorie Hillis’s New York was a feminine place. Most of her book was aimed at helping women navigate it in style and comfort, which meant dressing the part and being sure to take as much time as necessary for rest, recovery, and the kinds of body, face, and hair treatments that some people might call self-indulgence, but that Marjorie called simple common sense. The girl who left no time in her sightseeing schedule for a wash and set, a manicure or a massage, or no room in her budget for a stylish new hat, was doomed to find the city exhausting and sadly lacking in the unexpected-dinner-date department. A truly smart woman was always prepared for such a possibility. “My own optimistic opinion is that it’s foolish to go anywhere, ever, for more than twenty-four hours without full evening regalia,” Marjorie advised. “You never know what might turn up, thank Heaven, and I, for one, would a lot rather bring a dress I didn’t wear than refuse a party because I hadn’t brought the right clothes.”13 The successful case studies in New York, Fair or No Fair were those who planned ahead just enough to make the most of their stay, like the resourceful Miss R., a Southern belle who shocks her family by announcing a solo trip to New York. Well aware that “knowing nothing at all can get you far, especially if you’re small in stature and have large brown eyes,” Miss R. doesn’t bother to study up on the subway map or the opening times of museums. Instead, she prepares for her trip by packing her prettiest clothes and gathering a list of men she can contact in town—“friends or relations of her worried acquaintances”—and on the train divides them into an A, B, and C list according to their availability and eligibility. She doesn’t get much further than the A-list of the young and unmarried, and comes home convinced of the friendliness and hospitality of the dangerous northern city.14
If a visitor was caught short without her full regalia, she could seek out expert advice. “Call Vogue about clothes or jewels,” Marjorie suggested, loyally. “The editors are out in the shops constantly. They know what’s new and who has it.”15 Or she could enlist a guide, a sign of the city’s flourishing entrepreneurial spirit: Marjorie recommended three college girls who ran tours out of the former home of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, the skinniest house in the city—75½ Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. These possibilities aside, a taxi driver could be as good a tour guide as anyone. In her “paean” to this New York stalwart, Marjorie listed among the cabbie’s invaluable services the ability to “[find] places when you only half know the address, [get] bags, bundles and intoxicated gentlemen through doors, and [abet] romance.”16
If her reader’s trip was geared to work rather than romantic adventure, there was also an expert waiting for her. Career Tours, a sign of both the novelty and the necessity of paid work for women, took visitors behind the scenes of a welcoming workplace. They were organized by the American Woman’s Association, headed by Anne Morgan, the philanthropist daughter of J. P. Morgan, and were headquartered at the Science and Education building at the World’s Fair. The tours—some 135 of which had been scheduled by late May 1939, before they officially began in June—started from the association’s midtown offices. Their purpose was to “provide opportunities for business women who have come to New York for the fair to visit also metropolitan places of business in which their own professions are practiced,” according to one newspaper. The Career Tours Committee kicked off its activities with a ceremony at the fair on June 5, featuring a speaker who had been selected as the “Woman of 1939” out of nominations from the public, a diverse field that included Margaret Sanger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and Edna Woolman Chase. In the end, the jury honored a real-li
fe “girl reporter,” New York Times journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick, for the “accuracy and brilliancy” of her reporting from “the troubled European world,” and for having “helped to establish the woman correspondent as a settled institution.”17 The organizers published a commemorative book, but lest anyone be swept away by the celebratory mood, the president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women used the occasion to sound the alarm to her audience that “a wave of public hysteria” was pushing back against married women’s right to work outside the home. “If we deny women freedom of opportunity we will only create a parasite class,” she warned. It was a prescient observation, anticipating the backlash against working women that would, after World War II, expand to encompass single as well as married women, and which would take a new feminist revolution to overturn.
On the whole, however, Marjorie’s New York was a city of pleasures, not professional or cultural obligations. Her attitude toward the Riverside Park monument of Grant’s Tomb was typical of her approach to all statues and “sights”: “Look at this one if you want to, but don’t say I told you to.”18 Statues, after all, were not why anyone came to New York. She knew that her reader was there for the unique thrills that her hometown couldn’t offer, and directed her to restaurants like the one in the newly transformed Hampshire House on Central Park South, where her friend Dorothy Draper had made over the decor “with great éclat.”19 The Algonquin offered both an affordable lunch and the opportunity to gawk at the “celebrities” who gathered in the dining room—even if they, or their tables, unfortunately “can’t be tagged, like the animals in the zoo.”20 The mystique of the Algonquin Round Table, forged by Dorothy Parker and her journalist friends back in the 1920s, was still a potent draw. Celebrities were as much a part of the appeal, even of the point of New York, as the “superfine” collection of paintings at the Met or the “glamour of Broadway,” which “radiates across the country”21 —or indeed, the World’s Fair itself.
Nightlife City
The glamorous nightlife that was bringing tourists flocking to New York in the late 1930s was a new staging of a constantly evolving scene, ushered in with the end of Prohibition. It didn’t appear overnight. Repeal was official at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 5, 1933, when Utah finally voted to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment—smack in the middle of cocktail hour, but nobody danced in the streets. There were no parties like those boisterous, last-gasp affairs that marked December 31, 1920, Prohibition eve; the New York Times reported that the city celebrated “with quiet restraint,” while the Herald Tribune took a dig at the law’s failure. “There was no novelty about drinking,” it pointed out, “so the citizenry, by and large, stayed at home.”22 Alcohol had become so central to the city’s public life during the previous thirteen theoretically abstinent years, that the chief concern of most New Yorkers after repeal was whether legal liquor would cost more than bootleg sauce.
As much as anything, repeal was an effort to lift the nation’s gloomy spirits at the end of a terrible year, in which the economic mood kept dropping to new lows, then finding room to fall even further. Despite the muted celebrations that accompanied the change in the law, repeal did herald a new era in New York City’s life of leisure and pleasure. Prohibition had wrenched apart the pleasures of drinking and dining out—restaurants without wine were dreary places, and nobody went to speakeasies for the food. But after repeal, the underground drinking dens that packed in the scofflaws and drained their pockets lost their grip on the market, along with the mafia that had controlled bootlegging and bars from Greenwich Village to Harlem. Those who could afford to eat out, and to wash their steak down with wine, now wanted to show off to the world. Within a few short years New York had reestablished itself as a place where restaurants and cabarets offered a spectacle to rival Broadway.
The Hotel Astor’s 1933 New Year’s Eve party was an early sign of where things were heading. Despite a steep cover charge, hundreds of people showed up determined to out-swank their neighbors. “Twelve months ago, high hats were decidedly in a minority,” noted a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “Today, toppers are in the ascendancy. The black-tie tuxedo has once again become informal, and full evening dress, with the white tie and tails, is in full force for evening appearances in public.” It looked like a movie, or like magic, since “no one seems to know just where the money is coming from.”23 In the mid-1930s, New York nightlife was all froth and fantasy. Café Society, a mirage between Depression and war, lit up Broadway at night in lights as bright as the midnight sun.
The champion of this revolution was a Swedish immigrant and impresario named Nils T. Granlund, known as N.T.G., who showed a flair for publicity and promotion from an early age, advertising local revues and writing a society column before he was out of his teens. As the publicity man for the Loew’s theater chain in the 1920s, N.T.G. invented the modern movie premiere and the film trailer. His tactics were resolutely populist—when he needed to draw a crowd to a languishing venue, he knew that nothing worked better than a chorus line of underdressed dancers. (The title of his 1957 memoir, Blondes, Brunettes and Bullets, gives a taste of his style.) After repeal, N.T.G. saw that there was better money to be made by offering an extravagant but not out-of-reach night out to hundreds of guests, rather than gouging a reckless few. He began transforming hotels’ languishing ballrooms into spectacular restaurants with cabaret entertainment, and throwing open the doors to hundreds of gawping diners, both locals and, increasingly, tourists. His Swedish-themed Midnight Sun cabaret, followed by the Hollywood and the Paradise, set the tone, decked out in chrome-bright polish and swooping Art Deco curves to evoke the sleek lines of a cruise ship.24
If you weren’t able to conjure up the cash to indulge in person, the radio and movies let you peek in the window. Radio stations broadcast big-band showpieces live from hotels and cabarets, while Hollywood packaged up and sold the cabaret back to its live audiences via a new wave of song-and-dance movies. Busby Berkeley’s hits 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 leaped clear off the New York cabaret stage into a fantasy world of their own, while Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in movies like 1935’s Top Hat, danced their way to romance across the gleaming openness of a “Big White Set,” a style for which the studio RKO Pictures became legendary. These elaborate sets in turn became an inspiration for the interior design of cabarets and for women’s evening fashions. There was a rage for floor-skimming silver and gold gowns in silk, lamé, and sequins, the work of designers like Adrian and Madeleine Vionnet, which blazed to life on the black-and-white screen, draped over the angular and athletic bodies of starlets like Katharine Hepburn. The wavy, platinum blonde hairstyles worn by icons like Jean Harlow, and innumerable imitators, were also a trick to catch the light and the camera’s eye. And of all the drinks that could now be openly ordered, none matched the sparkling mood like champagne.
But no matter how elegant her gown, the Live-Aloner could not sweep onto the dance floor without a partner. Single women were unwelcome at the ritziest night spots—the Stork Club, El Morocco, and the Colony—as New York’s see-and-be-seen nightlife was still an exclusive affair. Bouncers—often ex-gangsters and semi-reformed bootleggers—kept the genders strictly balanced and guarded the door against lone females and so-called hen parties. Even if they were visiting from out of town and paying to stay in the best hotels, unaccompanied women could find themselves excluded from the public lounges and stylish ballrooms of those very hotels.
The prejudice against lone females in public was enough of a problem that for a few years in the late ’30s, an agency known as the Guide Escort Service operated in New York to unite wealthy “extra women” with underemployed men (and part them from their cash). The rent-a-gent service was founded in 1935 by a young and imaginative midwestern transplant named Ted Peckham, who saw an opportunity when he overheard two wealthy dowagers at the Plaza Hotel complaining that they couldn’t go out on the town alone. The idea that rich women were sitting idle at
nights and young, presentable men like himself were stuck indoors due to a lack of funds struck Peckham as unjust, so he summoned his considerable charm to persuade the manager of the Waldorf-Astoria to back his escort scheme. With the help of publicity from the New York Times, where he was working in the subscription sales department, Peckham’s agency took off. It was so successful that he traveled to Paris, London, Vienna, and Budapest to launch overseas branches, saving jet-setting single American women the indignity of being turned away from the most glamorous spots in the world.25
In New York, Fair or No Fair, Marjorie Hillis gave Peckham’s service a glowing review, describing it as though it were an opportunity to star for an evening in your very own Hollywood spectacle. “The young men have college educations, perfect manners, and impeccable evening clothes,” she promised. “They will take you where you want to go, dance with you or not, as you prefer, and be faultless companions. What’s more, if you feel that you’ll be happier accompanied by a Kentucky Colonel, a French Marquis, or a Hungarian Count, he will be supplied.”26
The Extra Woman Page 17