The list of women who stayed at the Barbizon hotel looks like who is the Royalty of Hollywood and literature.Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Tippi Hedren, Liza Minnelli, Ali Macgraw, Jaclyn Smith or literary stars such as Sylvia Path and Joan Didion were some of the celebrities who began to frequent it when they were not yet known.And that is why we are not surprising that we have heard so little about the hotel.While the Chelsea hotel in New York has been documented countless occasions as a meeting point for great rock and roll figures, Barbizon's history has never been told.
This information vacuum has been remedied with the publication of a new and fascinating book The Barbizon, The New York Hotel Hotel Set Women Free (El Barbizon, the New York hotel that released women), from the historian Paulina Bren.And, with a little luck, we can anticipate a miniseries of success.HBO has been made with television rights in a millionaire agreement, after a close offers war, and Emilia Clarke, of Game of Thrones, will be in charge of production.If we take the book as a starting point, the series will give us great moments.He has enough glamor for Mad Men to seem boring.
The fascinating book of Bren tells the story of this hotel-residence for women, from the construction of the building in 1927, located at number 140 on 63rd Street, in the Upper East of Manhattan, until its conversion into an apartment building valued inSeveral million in 2007.But it is also a brilliant social chronicle of multiple layers on the ambition of women and a city in rapid evolution during the twentieth century.
"It was exciting to have a container from which multiple stories could be told," says Bren."The idea that there was a place to which outstanding women attended, and not so prominent, in search of a safe, respectable and glamorous roof is fascinating.Without a doubt, this image of New York gives me nostalgia ”.
It is a story that could have fallen into oblivion if it were not for Bren's tenacity."After my last book, which was about communism in Europe in the 70s and 80s, I thought: 'It will be great, there will be a lot of easily available sources and will be in English.'.I went to the New-Cork Lahistoric archives, where they have concrete hotels files, but when they gave me the Barbizon folder, there was hardly anything in it.Until then I had not realized that many people had already tried to write a history of the hotel, but they had surrendered ".
Why had no one bothered to conserve the information?"I imagine that the reason is that it is a story about young women, who were not considered important".Only when Bren discovered that the American monthly magazine Mademoiselle had used the hotel as a residence for their young editors visited New York, could finally begin to rebuild their colorful story.These young and brilliant graduates in the university, who are now between 80 and 90 years old and who retain their acuity and ingenuity, shared with anecdotes of their passage through this place.
In the 20s and 30s, when many young people arrived in New York after World War I, the Barbizon was announced as a hotel that protected the young workers of the predatory men, the "New York Wolves".After the great depression, it was a sanctuary for young people for another reason."Working women were suspected since it was perceived that they took a job to a man, of the 'true support of the family'", explains Bren."If you walked through New York and it seemed that you were going to work, you could perceive enough hostility.".However, some showed their perseverance.The respectable School of Secretariat Katharine Gibbs occupied three plants of the hotel for its students, since it was filled with young women "determined to become typing to leave the United States from small cities".
However, the decade that Bren has explored with more interest is the 50."It was a time when women were supposed to be deeply refined and correct, but there was a bubbly sexuality," says the historian.
It was precisely then when Grace Kelly stayed at the Barbizon.It arrived in September 1947, while studying at the American Dramatic Art Academy.During the day, the actress wore little suggestive and rebel sets, but at night the thing changed."Grace Kelly, always identified with sweetness and chastity, she was fond of dance to the rhythm of Hawaiian music through the barbizon halls, and was given to scandalize her residence companions doing topless," writes Bren."Rumors about their sexual appetite and promiscuity abounded".
It is not surprising that "the dollhouse" was a place with which many men dreamed.JD Salinger, the elusive author of The Guardian among the rye.It was passed through a Canadian hockey player, while Mae Sibley, the severe deputy director of the hotel, who watched the place as a fortress, got used to men calling the reception and said they were doctors who had received a call forAttend one of the clients.Many of the men trying to climb the rooms.
Sylvia Path arrived at Barbizon as one of Mademoiselle's guest editors in the summer of 1953.He was down from his "lovely individual room", with a "carpet that occupied the entire room, pale beige wallcloset and an enameled white bowl that grew as a convenient mushroom from the wall, "he wrote in a letter he sent to his family.Path especially excited "the radio on the wall, the phone next to the bed...And the views! ".
In the end, New York did not provide the fairy tale that I expected.Path faced the heavy double standards of the 50s."I was overflowing with desire and had a real feeling of how unfair it was that men could act according to their lust, but she didn't," says Bren.Unfortunate for her workload in Mademoiselle and disappointed by the lack of available men, Path documented "New York's lost dream" in his novel, La Campana de Cristal, which was published a decade later, just before he died in his lastSuicide attempt: "I went from my hotel to work and to the parties and from the parties to my hotel and back to work as a numb trolebús".
On his last night at the Barbizon, Path threw from the roof of the hotel the clothes he had selected so carefully for his practices in Mademoiselle."I think he tried to discard his obsession for what he considered superficial," explains Bren."But I couldn't help following fashion, appearances, social norms".
Joan Didion was recorded in the Barbizon in June 1955, two years after Path, with the cohort of invited editors of Mademoiselle that year, accompanied by her friend Peggy Laviolette (now Peggy Powell)."They gave us contiguous rooms that were tremendously small.It was like a major school of women, "says Peggy, who is now 87 years old.The fact that it was a hotel only for women had reassured Peggy's mother.But was the barbizon really so strict?"My God, yes, they did room controls every night," he says.
In the hotel lobby the action was developed, as fun as in any Broadway work, with a wide balconequally likely, to see the quotes of others, "writes Bren."On Saturday nights, the lucky Barbizon (the Grace Kelly, so to speak) went down to the lobby, dressed in velvet and skins, where the men with whom they had cited,".
The demand for the tiny individual barbizon rooms grew throughout the 1940s and 1950s.Eileen Ford, founder of Ford Models, used the hotel as a pension for the girls who had just signed and arrived in New York.Judy Garland insisted that her daughter, Liza Minnelli, stayed there and drove the staff crazy calling every three hours to know how her liza was.
With his elegant direction at the Upper East Side, or to say that the hotel clients were middle class and white.But in 1956 a talented dancer and artist, Barbara Chase, was the first African -American host of the hotel, another of the winners of the Mademoiselle contest."He says he felt welcome," says Bren."Although nobody mentioned the hotel pool because it was only for White, and when South clients came to visit Mademoiselle's offices, Barbara had to hide.It was preferable that some clients did not see it, that understood ".
In 1958, before being a famous actress, Ali Macgraw was also in Barbizon.But even for the brightest and most ambitious, his career was in the background."In the 50s you could come to Barbizon and you knew that you would have a great time, but also that this time was finite and that marriage and children were your final goal," explains Bren, pointing out that in the 50s one of each one of eachThree women was married at age 19: "If you were pretty or you had talent you could endure a little more, maybe until the end of the twenty one, but even that was risky".
"Eileen Ford was famous for gathering models whose career was already finishing and organizing meetings with rich and sucking European people with a title," says Bren.But not all Barbizon residents were so focused on getting married."I wanted changes in the way women did things.I thought I had everything and had it, "says Peggy, who became the journalist he had dreamed, and his summer in Barbizon turned out to be an incredible launch platform.
Ironically, it was the beginning of the feminist movement of the 60s that meant the death of Barbizon, by questioning the need to enclose women in a hotel only for them.The hotel remained during the 60s, after achieving the right to remain only for women, but the occupation rates chopped.The brilliant young women of the 70s, who dreamed of the ecstasy of the Studio 54 disco, did not have time for the monotonous individual rooms of Barbizon and the touches of remaining that, at this point, seemed terribly outdated.Valentine's Day of 1981 came the end of the 54 years of life of the Barbizon Hotel.
The hotel had served as a refuge for young and ambitious women for decades, although not all the dreams of the Barbizon guests came true."Many of the women who stayed at the Barbizon have starred in success stories, but for many of them it was not so, there was a darker and sad side," Bren underlines."I was struck by the story of Gael Greene, who was there in 1955 with Joan Didion, and who returned in 1957 as an intrepid reporter of the New York Post to discover the scandalous lives of 'single and sad women'".
For younger residents, "the women", as the older residents were called who lived in the hotel for years, and who continued to sit in the lobby with their curlers and shoes, embodied everything in which they did not want to become.Bren does not believe they are stories of failure.
"One of the young people who stayed at the hotel in the early 80.That is an achievement '.And I also felt that, the mere fact that they had come to New York, although their experience was not what they expected, the fact that they had overcome all those obstacles to reach this city ... I take off my hat ".
Throughout several hotel reforms, first for a Dutch hotel brand, Klm Tulip, in 1984, and then by hotelier Ian Schrager, "women" could still be found, after a secret door, in an enclave that remainedintact.Legally, they could not be evicted.The hotel was remodeled once again, like luxury apartments, in 2007.The latest women of Barbizon were reared again, in flats inside the building, in what is now called Barbizon/63, where Ricky Gervais and the Italian jeweler Nicola Bulgari have luxury apartments.At the moment, there are still five original Barbizon women.
"It is incredible that a whole new project around it has been rebuilt," says Bren."Now they live in small very elegant apartments paying the same rent as when they entered".
For many of his contemporaries, the dream of the 50s of marrying and living in houses on the outskirts turned out to be an poisoned chalice and many turned to the valium to numb the boredom.Meanwhile, those "single and sad women" had come to do the one who may be one of New York's most precious trophies: an apartment in Manhattan with a low rental and cannot climb.
The Barbizon: The New York Hotel That Set Women Free, by Paulina Bren, has just been published in English.
Translated by Emma Reverter
