A Mademoiselle guest editor position came with tremendous prestige. Offered annually to just twenty college students, it was one of the few literary internships available to women in the 1950s. (Most of the young women who lived alongside Plath that summer at the Barbizon Hotel were attending Katharine Gibbs secretarial school—a fate she dreaded.) Sylvia had begun dreaming about the internship in November 1952, when she attended a talk at Smith by a representative from the magazine. After she won a spot, Mademoiselle sent her a promotional primer on the magazine’s history. Founded in 1935, it was the only American magazine that catered exclusively to “smart young women” in “the 18-to-30 age group with above average education and taste.” By 1953, Mademoiselle was indeed recognized as the thinking women’s magazine: 79 percent of its half-million readers had a college background. There were nods to sexual equality—it was the first magazine to publish a “Jobs and Futures” department where “the career girl” could search for advice, and nearly all of its senior staff members were women. Later, the magazine would publish Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. But in 1953, Mademoiselle considered itself a pioneer in other areas. Among its “long and impressive list” of firsts, Plath read the following in its promotional primer:
“MLLE was the first fashion magazine to state specific prices with every fashion shown, first to tell the reader where to buy it country-wide.”
“MLLE was the first magazine to turn an ugly duckling into a swan, making completely practical application of hitherto theoretical beauty principles.”
“MLLE was the first magazine to make Christmas shopping easier by adding, in December 1940, a shopping-order strip at the side of each gift page.”4
For all of Mademoiselle’s boasting about its literary merits—the magazine published Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, W. H. Auden, and Truman Capote—its ethos was more in line with Ladies’ Home Journal than The New Yorker. Departments included “Bridal Information, Please,” “Cooking Hints for Young Housekeepers,” and “MLLE’s Advance Patterns.” Janet Burroway, a 1955 guest editor, remembered Mademoiselle’s editor in chief, Betsy Talbot Blackwell, “waving her cigarette holder, adjuring us to ‘Believe in Pink.’ ”5 Laurie Glazer, a guest editor who became friendly with Sylvia that summer, remembered Blackwell saying, “For now, let’s put all our sparkle, shall we?, into our fashion copy.”6 Jane Truslow, a 1954 guest editor, regarded these women as “a bunch of clowns.” Abels seemed “foggy even then,” while Blackwell was “sullen” with a “smoker’s cough.” Jane could not imagine “taking them seriously or being disillusioned by them subsequently.”7 But Talbot and Abels were two of the most important editors in New York, and Plath took them very seriously indeed.
Nearly all of the bulky, 380-page August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle, which Plath edited that June, comprised fashion ads or fashion photo shoots featuring thin white women in expensive, waist-cinching clothes. Apart from a few short features, the issue resembles a catalog. The many ads for tight girdles and cone-shaped bras suggest a throwback to the corsets of the Victorian age and its attendant restrictions. Gone are the loose clothes and androgynous looks of the flapper era, and the bold, military-cut suits of the 1940s. Only a handful of the ads in Mademoiselle’s August issue featured women wearing pants. One ad for Jantzen showed a tightly girdled young woman playing tennis in what was supposed to be more breathable undergarments (“anyone for beautiful form in action?”). The ads reveal how difficult it was for women of this era simply to move.
Sylvia had assumed that literary doors would open for her at Mademoiselle, but she found herself corralled into fashion editing—the literary equivalent of women’s work. Mary Cantwell, who worked at Mademoiselle in August 1953, explained the division neatly. She was too shy to approach “real” writers at cocktail parties: “Working for a fashion magazine, however distinguished its fiction, separated me, in my eyes and doubtless in theirs, from the literati.”8 Cantwell remembered her initial contempt for the young Mademoiselle staffers who called themselves “writers,” yet she soon regarded them with more sympathy. “To survive eight hours of producing ‘tangerine linen crossed with a lime-green slice of belt’…it is necessary to call it ‘writing.’ ” Sylvia’s senior-year Smith roommate, Nancy Hunter Steiner, remembered Sylvia calling her Mademoiselle work “artificial and banal.”9 In The Bell Jar, Esther thinks, “Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.”10
One of the first letters the new guest editors received reminded them to bring hats and gloves, silks and shantungs, and an evening gown. The novelist Diane Johnson, Sylvia’s peer that summer, remembered, “We were to be ladylike, made up, dressed up, and chaperoned as we went into the office each day, hatted of course.”11 They were told to keep to the Upper East Side and to stay away from the “jazzy” joints; the magazine recommended dancing at the Plaza or the St. Regis Hotel and dining at one of the pre-approved Italian, French, Viennese, and German restaurants on the Upper East Side.12
Mademoiselle’s breezy talk of evening gowns and silk revived Sylvia’s class anxieties. Under the stated salary of $150 on her orientation letter, she wrote, “subtract room and board,” and she underlined a section on tipping waiters 15 percent and cab drivers 10 percent.13 On the list of recommended restaurants for guest editors, she put a checkmark next to the cheapest, Hamburger Heaven, which sold burgers for fifty-five cents.14 She underlined another section that reminded guest editors that the magazine would not pay for taxis to appointments or events before ten p.m.15 No matter—she would walk.
* * *
SYLVIA ARRIVED at Grand Central Station on May 31, 1953. Two “muscular” soldiers carried her bags, called her a taxi in the “predatory crowd,” and escorted her all the way to the lobby of the Barbizon Hotel. She told her mother she was “touched” by the soldiers’ chivalry, though the gesture underscored the assumption that unchaperoned women needed protection in New York.16
As did the Barbizon itself. Located on the Upper East Side, on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street, the seven-hundred-room hotel was a way station for ambitious young women. Opened at the height of the Jazz Age in 1927, it was supposed to function in loco parentis—there were curfews and sign-in sheets, and no men were allowed past the ground floor. The Barbizon was not the only hotel for women in New York City, but it was the most exclusive. One needed three letters of recommendation to secure a room, and even then prospective tenants were screened for appropriate dress and manners. The hotel promoted itself as the glamorous home of Ford models and movie stars like Grace Kelly, but most of its guests hailed from small towns and cities. The building’s style pleased anxious parents and their young, freedom-seeking daughters: with its towering twenty-three stories, coral façade, Moorish curves, and Romanesque columns, it appeared both commanding and exotic. Inside there was a swimming pool, library, squash courts, recital rooms, a formal dining room, sun deck, and solarium. Delicate finger sandwiches were served at afternoon tea each day, and a social director organized bridge and backgammon tournaments. As one observer wrote, “The hotel had the feel of a particularly luxe convent, which was hardly accidental. The expansive lobby, accented by potted ferns, Oriental carpets, and antique English lanterns, contained a sweeping staircase that led to the mezzanine, from which girls could peer down over latticed-wood railings to evaluate prospective dates below.”17
Sylvia called the hotel “exquisite” and gushed with childlike enthusiasm about the elevator ride.18 Her small, single room—1511—was on the fifteenth floor, with green carpet and beige walls, a dark green bedspread, and matching curtains. There was a desk, dresser, radio, telephone, and small sink. Shared bathrooms were down the hall, and there was no air conditioning. Plath would leave her windows open all day and night in what turned out to be one of the hottest summers in New York City’s history. (Some of the guest editors that summer recalled that the
y “sat around in the nude hoping for drafts.”)19 The view impressed her more than the room: “From my window I look down into gardens, alleys, to the rumbling 3rd Avenue El, down to the UN, with a snatch of the east [sic] River in between buildings!” She relished the novelty of blaring horns, which she described to Aurelia as “the sweetest music.”20 They reminded her how far she had come from Wellesley, even though her room was next to that of Laurie Totten, who lived only two blocks away from Sylvia’s home. Laurie had visited Elmwood Road two weeks before when she learned Sylvia had also won a guest editorship. They sat on Sylvia’s bed talking whimsically about their ambitions as summer light streamed into the second-floor windows—two brainy young women enjoying their success before anything was demanded of them.21
Sylvia met the other guest editors that first night in Grace MacLeod’s room, where they spoke about colleges and jobs.22 The young women hailed from a diverse set of colleges. Barnard, Smith, and Bryn Mawr sent students, while Janet Wagner, who showed up in a long, floral-patterned “granny dress,” was from Knox College in Illinois. She thought Plath looked down on her for her midwestern accent, and she called Sylvia “an Ivy League snob.” Janet was not the only one who felt this way. Another guest editor from that year, Neva Nelson, felt that Sylvia assumed an aura of “Ivy League superiority” over the women from the small colleges.23
Sylvia had intended to wear a new suit on her first day, but a sudden nosebleed wrecked her blouse. She worried that the brown linen dress she changed into did not look professional, but her sartorial anxiety receded as she took the elevator up to the sixth floor of 575 Madison Avenue. There, she spent the day meeting various editors, including Rita Smith, Carson McCullers’s sister. After Betsy Talbot Blackwell introduced “the girls” and doled out schedules for the rest of the day, the group broke for coffee. Everyone took the elevator to the downstairs lobby, “talking and laughing,” Neva recalled, “to relieve the built-up tension.”24 After the break, Sylvia joined Neva in the elevator back up to the office. The two began gossiping about Blackwell—or “BTB,” as she was known—and some of the other editors. Sylvia called them “a motley crew,” while Neva compared Blackwell, with her fair skin and freckled arms, to an “Irish washerwoman.”25 Neva heard “a snicker” from some of the others behind them in the elevator and instantly realized her mistake.26
Neva and Sylvia were soon summoned to Blackwell’s office, where they received a dressing down. “She seemed to be quite upset that we would be so ungrateful to say such hurtful things about her and the other editors and to say them publicly on an elevator was just not acceptable,” Neva recalled.27 Blackwell told Neva she had been against her winning a position from the beginning, and told Sylvia the only reason she won the contest was because Aurelia had sent Cyrilly Abels so many well-trained secretaries over the years. She even suggested that Aurelia had done Sylvia’s assignments for her before ushering the shaken girls out of her office. “Sylvia wasn’t given the chance to stand up for herself, leaving it open as to whether she’d done the work herself or not,” Neva said. “We both just sat there like mute, chastised children until we were dismissed.”28 The two ran to the bathroom and sobbed. Neva did not think Blackwell was responsible for Sylvia’s breakdown that August, but, she said, “we did leave that room with our self-esteem greatly diminished”; she felt Blackwell’s “harsh evaluation” “drove” Plath to prove her wrong.29 Many of Sylvia’s peers agreed that she was the hardest-working guest editor that summer. Laurie Glazer thought Plath “one of the most driven women I ever knew. We were all ahead of ourselves for the era—feminists, though we didn’t recognize the word.”30 Diane Johnson would credit Plath for inspiring her to take her writing more seriously, and to adopt the habits of a professional writer. “It was, in fact, the example of ‘Sunday at the Mintons,’ Sylvia Plath’s winning story in the guest editor contest, that made that point to me and changed my life,” Johnson later wrote.31
Neva and Sylvia were still crying in the bathroom when they were called for a photo shoot with Herman Landshoff for a “Jobiographies” feature. They got themselves “under control,” then walked together to the photographer’s studio, where the photo props were supposed to represent their career ambitions. When Sylvia said she wanted to be a poet, Landshoff sat her down on a sofa next to a bowl of fruit and handed her a rose. She managed to subvert the sentimental bric-a-brac: she smiled but held the rose limply, upside down.32 Plath satirized the photographer’s patronizing attitude in The Bell Jar: “Come on, give us a smile,” he tells a distraught Esther. “Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.”33 Roses, like the moon, would eventually become an ominous symbol in Plath’s poetry. “I can still see the hurt and tears in Sylvia’s and my pictures,” Neva said, sixty years later.
That afternoon, Plath lunched at the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue with Blackwell and Abels. The meal could not have been relaxing, but she tried to enjoy it. The Drake Room was then one of the swankiest restaurants in Manhattan, with a dazzling belle époque interior and bustling bar. Sylvia, as always, set the scene for Aurelia: “It was thrilling: sat in dark plush room, sipped sherry, plowed through enormous delectable chef’s salad, discussed writers, magazines, all sorts of exciting things.”34 Ann Burnside, a fellow guest editor, claimed that Sylvia ate an entire bowl of caviar by herself that afternoon. The story sounds apocryphal, but Plath did write about a similar episode in chapter 3 of The Bell Jar, where Esther devours a bowl of caviar by herself at the Ladies’ Day luncheon. Esther explains her behavior, without apologies, in the context of her class background: “It’s not that we hadn’t enough to eat at home, it’s just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, ‘I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound.’ ”35 Caviar was freighted with class symbolism for Plath. Her grandfather had given her small, surreptitious tastes in the kitchen of the Brookline Country Club, but she could never get enough. Now she was finally on the other side of the table. Ann felt “shocked and embarrassed” for Sylvia and avoided her for the rest of the month, but Cyrilly Abels was unfazed. Plath finished her teacher-poet assignment back at the office, then returned to the Barbizon, where she unpacked the rest of her clothes and ate a “late, exhausted supper” in the hotel coffee shop.36
Her second day went more smoothly. A collegiate fashion show at the Roosevelt Hotel, complete with Princeton a capella singers, delighted her; she found the clothes “exquisite” and “lush.” Afterward, there was lunch at Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, with its echoing, vaulted interior. So far the “plush” Mademoiselle lunches had not disappointed.37 She began to hope she was shrugging off her first impression. That afternoon she attended a makeover for the guest editors at Richard Hudnut’s Fifth Avenue salon, where, she told Aurelia, she “refused drastic cutting” and kept her neat pageboy intact: “still look like me. Alas.”38
Later that day, Sylvia and the other guest editors proceeded to the Mademoiselle conference room, where they donned their uniforms for a group photo: long wool kilts, penny loafers, buttoned-up white blouses, and beanies. Most of them thought these “collegiate” outfits looked ridiculous. The shoot lasted for hours in Central Park in 94° heat. The women cursed and sweltered, as Laurie Glazer Levy remembered, in “prolonged humiliation” while the demanding photographer made them readjust their positions to achieve a perfect star formation.39 Plath wrote the accompanying catchy copy, which glossed over the day’s discomforts: “We’re stargazers this season, bewitched by an atmosphere of evening blue. Foremost in the fashion constellation we spot Mlle’s own tartan, the astronomic versatility of sweaters, and men, men, men—we’ve even taken the shirts off their backs!”40 Plath probably had fun with the caption, but this was not the sort of writing she wished to pursue. A verse from a popular 1950s Smith song captured her dilemma:
We’re ready to wow Life, Time, Fortune and L
uce.
We’ve energy, brains, and when we turn on the juice,
Our style is so subtle it drives men to tears.
But we’re doing the copy of ads for brassieres.41
Mademoiselle had made Plath guest managing editor, one of its most prestigious positions, but she was disappointed she had not been made guest fiction editor, which would have been a more natural fit. Still, she wrote Aurelia that she had resigned herself to the work and now loved it. She was reading manuscripts by Elizabeth Bowen, Noël Coward, and even Dylan Thomas, and boasted that “the other girls just have ‘busy work’ to do, but I am constantly reading fascinating manuscripts and making little memo comments on them.”42 She even got to sign her own name to rejections. “Sent one to a man on the New Yorker staff today with a perverse sense of poetic justice.”43 In theory, she was getting good experience that would help her as editor in chief of the Smith Review. But Plath always preferred writing her own stories to overseeing the writing of others. A week into her internship, she wrote to Dick of her “aversion for fashion magazines.”44
Red Comet Page 37
