Checking In! Grace Kelly, Little Edie, Liza Minnelli, and the Untold History of the Barbizon Hotel for Women
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, requests for rooms at the Barbizon Hotel for Women grew exponentially. Meche Azcarate from Mexico, for example, was forbidden by her mother to stay anywhere other than the Barbizon. But even if left to her own devices, she would never have wanted to stay anywhere else; she loved “the atmosphere of a sorority house,” where “you can never run out of bobby pins.” The hotel manager Hugh J. Connor, with the help of assistant manager Mrs. Mae Sibley, was now finding it a challenge to coordinate all the various reservations. Together they calculated that close to “100 famous fashion models, radio and television actresses” along with many more “stage and screen hopefuls, girls studying art, music, ballet and designing” were residing at the Barbizon at any given time.
Phyllis Kirk, lead actress in The Thin Man television series, stayed at the Barbizon at her mother’s insistence. Shirley Jones, later to star as David Cassidy’s on-screen mother in The Partridge Family (as well as become his real-life stepmother), was dropped off at the Barbizon by her parents with $200 in her pocket. Sure enough, she walked into the weekly open auditions for all the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway shows, and the casting director, upon hearing her sing, sent everyone else home. Judy Garland insisted her daughter, Liza Minnelli, stay at the Barbizon and drove the staff crazy by calling every three hours to check up on her, and if she wasn’t in her room, they were ordered to go find her.
The postwar Barbizon now staked its claim as New York’s “dollhouse,” as the place to spy shapely young females, made all the more alluring by being tantalizingly out of reach in their sequestered, women-only lodgings. The dollhouse was a place many men dreamed of. Even J. D. Salinger, the elusive author of the 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, hung about the Barbizon coffee shop to pick up women. He was often there after his girlfriend, Oona O’Neill (daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill), married Charlie Chaplin without warning. Chaplin could make her laugh; Salinger could not. But Salinger had other attributes. One Barbizon resident recalled that “I’d never encountered such intensity in a person.”
Many men tried to breach the Barbizon’s security cordon. Sibley was used to being called to the reception desk to speak to someone claiming he was a doctor on call to see one of the hotel guests: “No doubt he’ll be 20 years old and will take care that I see part of a stethoscope sticking out of his pocket. It’s the oldest gag in the Barbizon.”
Carolyn Schaffner was the kind of young woman that a man might dress up in hospital scrubs to try to see. Carolyn, of Steubenville, Ohio, looked a lot like Audrey Hepburn, with pale skin and black hair that shone as if it had been brilliantined. She wanted one thing: to get out of smog-covered Steubenville. Carolyn understood that dreams needed to be worked at. She studied fashion magazines, models’ expressions, hand gestures, and when it was time for the town to choose its Queen of Steubenville in celebration of its 150-year anniversary, Carolyn canvassed. She went door-to-door making her case, even as she was known to be the prettiest girl in town. She understood one cannot leave dreams up to chance. As the winning queen, riding in the parade, hoisted high, waving to the people of Steubenville, she was offered the choice of a trip to Hollywood for a screen test or $500. Carolyn chose the cash. It was 1947, and she was 19 years old when she boarded the train to take her to New York; no one in her family came to see her off because her mother had to stay home to make dinner for her stepfather.
It took Carolyn one full day to travel by train from Ohio to Penn Station in New York. She did not know much about New York, but enough to flag down a yellow cab and ask for the Barbizon. It’s what all the fashion magazines she studied so earnestly told her: the Barbizon was the only place to stay for a young girl new to the city. She went in through the revolving doors and looked about her. Walking up to the front desk, she asked to see someone about a room. Sibley appeared and asked for Carolyn’s references, which—being as well organized about her life as she was—she had brought with her. With the Depression long over and the postwar boom in place, Sibley, at the Barbizon since 1936, was heavily invested in her vetting system. A former front-desk employee recalled that Sibley’s “first test of getting in, after she knows you can pay, seems to be how pretty you are.” Sibley would say she looked out for the hotel’s exclusivity; others would say she commodified the young women who came through the Barbizon’s doors, knowing full well that their attractiveness added to the notoriety of the hotel.
Sibley laid out the rules to Carolyn: no liquor in the rooms, preferably no late nights out, or certainly not enough of them in a row to set off alarm bells about possible improprieties. In the afternoons, free tea was served, particularly handy for those low on funds—although Sibley did not say as much—and there were card games, backgammon, and lecture series in the evenings. Carolyn knew about the no-men-allowed rule but was surprised to hear that after sundown, male elevator operators were switched out for female ones.
Carolyn found her room sparse and small. But although the tiny room felt “like being in a closet,” she did not mind; the floral drapes and matching bedspread gave everything a homey feel. She took off her shoes, sank her stockinged feet into the green carpet, and reached for the speaker box above the bed: she turned the knob, and classical music hummed through the room. She had found escape at $18 a week.
Young women of varying backgrounds and means slept within the walls of the Barbizon. There were the Carolyns, the girls from nowhere, both literally and figuratively, but there were also the debutantes. In the infamous documentary film Grey Gardens, as Little Edie Beale and her mother Big Edie Bouvier, cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, battle it out in their derelict Hamptons home among far too many cats, Little Edie longingly reminisces of her time at the Barbizon. She lived there from 1947—when Carolyn also arrived—to 1952, dabbling in modeling, waiting for the chance to make it in show business. Just as her lucky break was about to happen (or so she believed), she was yanked back to the Hamptons by her mother, who claimed she could no longer afford the bills but in fact feared being left alone. (The notorious cats first began to accumulate while Little Edie was staying at the Barbizon. Years later, she would write to a friend: “They were given to mother by a client of my lawyer brother who lived near us. Mother trained them—they were house pets. I was living at the Barbizon and had a job at the time. The cats had nothing to do with me though everyone always blamed me for everything!”)
But it was the Carolyns, not the debutantes, who truly understood that their time at the Barbizon offered a finite window of opportunity—while they were still young, pretty, desirable, driven.
Those assets could lead to secretarial positions, to modeling gigs, to acting jobs. Yet all the women at the Barbizon shared the same goal: marriage. As bold as one might be, however big one might dream, as a young woman you knew that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was marriage. Even if a part of you longed to be an actress, a writer, a model, an artist. The debutantes did not have to travel far to meet eligible bachelors (there were plenty enough within their own milieu), and so the Barbizon meant a little fun, perhaps some notoriety or success before marriage. But the Carolyns were there to make it in New York: to become something and meet someone. Back home was the life that the Carolyns’ mothers had, and that was the last thing they wanted for themselves.
From the first day in New York, Carolyn dressed as if she were going to work even as she had nowhere to go. Wearing white gloves, she headed out into the streets alongside the droves of other young ladies of the Barbizon, but whereas they headed to offices and studios and training schools, she wandered the streets, exploring. It was during her city wanderings that Carolyn came upon the Horn & Hardart automat on 57th Street and Sixth Avenue. The automat was the fast-food chain restaurant equivalent of its day, and Carolyn loved it immediately.
It was only a week after arriving, as she sat and daydreamed at Horn & Hardart, that a man came up to her and asked to sit down. He told her he was a photographer and that she’d be perfect for the camera. He asked if she had ever considered modeling, and if she would like to meet the famous modeling agent Harry Conover. Carolyn, being the small-town girl she was, but also the young woman who knew she had a finite window at the Barbizon, said she would indeed like to meet Conover. The photographer wrote down an address—52 Vanderbilt Avenue. She took the slip of paper.
Carolyn had been getting to know the city and also the Barbizon’s residents. Every Monday, she carefully studied the week’s events of social teas and lectures, typed out by the hotel’s social director, a former Barbizon resident herself, and slipped under each hotel room door at the start of the week. She had spoken to some guests; others she recognized only by sight. There was one young woman she had seen leaving the Barbizon: a round-faced teenager with light brown wavy hair, in a black coat and matching hat with blue flowers attached. She saw her again as she was unlocking her room on the ninth floor. In fact, the young woman was in the room right next to Carolyn’s: they were neighbors.
Carolyn reached out her hand. “I’m Carolyn from Ohio, Steubenville,” she introduced herself.
“I’m Grace, Grace Kelly, from Philadelphia,” said the other girl. She said she was studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Grace and Carolyn became fast friends. Grace had arrived at the Barbizon two months earlier, yet she already seemed like a New York native, in part because her uncle was a playwright in Manhattan and she had often come up from Philadelphia to visit him. Grace followed theater obsessively, just as Carolyn did fashion, studying sewing patterns and making her own clothes—a wardrobe of skirts and blouses and a pair of gloves that were, admittedly, a bit too tight but still manageable if she didn’t try to move her fingers about too much.
They were a case of opposites attract. Counter to the always fashionable Carolyn, Grace wore horn-rimmed glasses, without which she could not see; later in her short but enormously successful film career, by taking off her glasses, she exuded a sensuous dreaminess that was in fact plain old myopia. Her favorite go-tos were tweed suits, skirts, and cardigans, echoes of her upper-class Philadelphia upbringing.
Yet the two friends also dressed in opposition to their personalities; while the fashionable Carolyn was quiet and shy, the frumpy Grace was poised and boisterous. Her parents had wanted her in college instead of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but, as luck would have it, the influx of GIs back from the war meant college placements were in high demand, and the GIs got priority. So, when Grace failed to get into Bennington College, it was her chance to break away from her parents’ expectations. She eventually convinced them to let her go to New York. Her father, Jack Kelly, stipulated one condition, which was nonnegotiable: she would have to stay at the Barbizon.
Each day, Grace headed to class, intent on impressing her teachers. Carolyn had to do something too. The day after she met that photographer, she made her way to 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, just behind Grand Central Terminal. It could have gone terribly wrong: part of the reason for staying at the Barbizon, even if you paid a bit more, was that the doormen, along with the rest of the staff, protected you from “wolves,” those men on the prowl on the streets of New York. But when Carolyn came into the office, she was indeed introduced to Harry Conover, his dark black hair slicked back. Much like his former boss, John Powers, Conover sought out the natural “clean-scrubbed” beauties, not the emaciated models of the runways. He famously advised his models to eat what they wanted because “returning servicemen want a good, well-rounded bundle, not a matchstick.” To find the all-American girl, he had scouts at all the East Coast college campuses during fraternity weekends and relied heavily on regional festivals and beauty contests.
Conover sat Carolyn down and explained to her that there were pretty girls all over New York, but it was those who were willing to pound the pavement, to do the time, who had a chance at getting somewhere. Carolyn already knew how to persevere; that’s how she had gotten herself out of Steubenville. And so she gladly did the rounds. At the client’s office or showroom, or wherever they had asked the Conover agency to send her, she presented herself for a no-holds-barred evaluation. It would have broken down a dozen other young women, hearing what they had to say about her, speaking as if she were not standing right there, but Carolyn listened carefully and learned what to correct.
Her first serious job was a two-page spread in Junior Bazaar, where she was surrounded by the accoutrements deemed necessary for a young wife—dirty laundry, laundry basket, iron, ironing board. This first big modeling job quickly led to more bookings, until she was working steadily. Carolyn’s comp card, the card she handed out to clients with her exact sizes and measurements, had a photograph of her in a fitted suit and hat looking up at a shop window of Lord &Taylor’s department store—and in that window was another photograph of her, wearing a wedding dress. It was very clever. When she again encountered the photographer who had first approached her at the automat, he asked her point-blank if she would go away with him—not for a date, but for a weekend.
“No,” she said, avoiding his eye, thinking how she had been both right and wrong when he had sat down next to her at Horn & Hardart. She hurried home to the safety of the Barbizon.
From The Barbizon by Paulina Bren. Copyright © 2021 by Paulina Bren. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
You Might Also Like
