Bachelor Girl

now safely say that for certain of these girls, the search for a mate may take an entirely unpredictable path. They are waiting. Even if this, from any reasoned point of view, allows their options to give way.”

One popular holding pattern was to take up residency inside a parent-approved, high-rise nunnery. The YWCA offered small rooms for rent, these regarded as a bit declasse, and even less glamorous were the barebones old-style boardinghouses. Most nervous first-time emigres fantasized about the exclusive all-girls hotels on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, specifically the Barbizon, a serene Italianate landmark on Sixty-third Street that was to rooming houses what Smith and Wellesley were to colleges. As the familiar ads read, “Some of the world’s most successful women”—and that included Grace Kelly and Gene Tierney—“have been Barbizon Girls.”

The copywriters left out an essential word: briefly.

A nineteen-year-old resident explained to one of the many afternoon papers, for one of the many “Barbizon Life” stories: “It is the place where you go when you leave something—college; your immediate family; your old life. And for that it’s perfect—as long as you don’t stay too long.” (The oldest resident, usually juxtaposed in photos with a young freckled preppy type, was in her eighties. She was famous for playing the house pipe organ at the afternoon teas.)

In 1958 Gael Greene, then of the New York Post, wrote an extensive ten-part series devoted to her twenty-three-year-old life at the Barbizon, attempting to do for the high-rise residence hotels what Dorothy Richardson had done for shabby lodging quarters fifty years earlier. Like so many other recent graduates, Greene had come to the city “seeking something indefinable—something to do. A rent-paying job, romance, the alchemy that will transform an ordinary girl into an extraordinary woman.”

What she found at her first destination, the glamorous Barbizon, was an overheated planet of lonely women, spinning in an orbit that paralleled that of the city but did not overlap. As she wrote,

…a phone that does not ring. Tears of Homesickness. Gentle smiles of resignation… these are the marks—worn bravely and bravely concealed—by girls and young women alone. There are thousands in every corner of every city. They have no one habitat. Many live in cells—at the “exclusive Barbizon Hotel for Women,” at the Salvation Army’s Evangeline House, at the YWCA. I have lived among them. Each cell is an island. Each island is surrounded by depths of fear:

Fear of Failure

Fear of Spinsterhood

Fear of Sexual assault in a Subway station

And those unknown, inexplicable fears that dull the complexion and glaze the eye.

The day Greene arrives, one floor mate warns, “It’s not easy to make friends. Don’t think you’re going to meet just hundreds of boys or that you’ll meet the One.”

She doesn’t. She doesn’t really meet anyone, except Oscar the famous doorman, who gets her name wrong. She goes out for lone walks and contents herself with small gestures such as buying and polishing an improbably shiny red apple. She sits on her bed and brushes her hair or writes a letter. Her actions are in some form repeated in every small room around her, except in those where a drunken girl is crying or smashing glass objects. To escape the sound (they’ve learned from experience that going in results in one-sided four-hour conversations), residents leave the floor and wander off to do what Barbizon girls do when they haven’t scored a date on a Saturday night. They sit in a room filled with young women wearing nightgowns and watch television. Sometimes, after stations have gone off the air, Barbizon girls, Gael Greene among them, watch the network’s test pattern.

PLAYING IT SINGLE

On television during the mid-to late 1950s, single women showed up in the familiar guises. They were older widows saddened or made sarcastic by life; busybody aunts, maids, older sisters, teachers, or mistress-of- ceremonies types who sang and introduced guests or “gave testimonials,” meaning they held and caressed the sponsor’s product and spoke about it for up to a full five minutes. On commercials, single women were either invisible or ethereal, creatures disconnected from physical life. They never appeared in their apartments or houses or in their offices. We never saw their front steps, their kitchens, their cats. They were pictured only in fantasy scenarios—standing next to Chevrolets and gesturing, waving from magically flying Chevrolets, and dressed most often in evening gowns. The single woman had no place in a domestic scheme, unless she was a spinsterly grandmother or one of those ascendant female consumers, the teenager.

The single woman in 1950s television lived on the sitcom. Here, she almost always played a grown woman who behaved like a perky superannuated teenager. She lived at home, usually with a widowed parent, held a clerical job, and either matchmade crazily for everyone in the cast or became the subject of matchmaking by everyone in the cast. Consider three prime-time examples:

• My Little Margie. A precursor to Gidget, minus the surfing element and smirky cuteness. Margie, played by Gale Storm, whose name promised something slightly more dramatic, lives with her widowed father; although she is supposed to be twenty-one, she seems at times to be about twenty-seven and at others thirty-five. The plotlines can be reduced to two conflicts. First, Daddy can’t control his overgrown baby as much as he’d like, and, second, Margie can’t control Daddy. She doesn’t like his girlfriends and often tries deliberately to spoil his dates. Gidget with a Freudian undertow.

• Private Secretary. Here we meet single girl Susie McNamera, the top secretary to important talent agent Peter Sands. Naturally, Susie is in love with Peter but not fully aware of it as she organizes every facet of his existence, including the arrangement of his paper clips and assessing the merits, so sadly few, of his dates. Eventually, she realizes that she wants to marry Peter and plots with the receptionist to change her image. No one, including a resident expert at the Museum of TV and Radio, is too sure what happened next because the show went off the air suddenly.

• Meet Millie. Secretary Millie Bronson lives with her widowed mother, whose job in life is finding Millie a suitable husband. Millie has a boyfriend, Johnny, who is the boss’s son. But knowing what comes of such class-crossing arrangements, Mom is ever on the lookout, and so is the requisite house beatnik, Alfred Prinzmetal, an artist who does nothing but comment, often to Millie, whom he has deemed worthy of his erudition. This was one of the first shows to establish a principle that would long exist on TV if rarely in life: Everyone loves the single girl. She is the adorable needy human equivalent of a stray pet others want to domesticate.

In fifties films, the single woman turns up most often as a recognizable spinster (Kim Novak in Picnic; The Rainmaker with Katharine Hepburn) or as the exceptional quirky character, in the upper-class division Katharine Hepburn (Desk Set; Pat and Mike), and in the working-class, Judy Holliday. In It Should Happen to You, she’s a girl—a “goil”—who becomes famous by advertising herself on a billboard; in Bells Are Ringing, she works for an answering service, playing a special part for all her clients.

But rarely is the spinster, the shy single sister, the center of the action. As in literature, the spinster serves to better set off the lustrous qualities of the married, engaged, or just physically beautiful star. Either that, or she’s a witch (Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle) or a monstrous bitch (Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar or just about anything else).

If a film had a single woman at the center, then the central question concerned sex and, specifically, whether or not she had any before marriage. One of the most popular films of the late fifties, Marjorie Morningstar, was based on a lengthy Herman Wouk novel set in the 1930s that told in excruciatingly minute detail the whole story of an aspiring actress from a traditional Jewish family that migrated “up” from the Bronx to Manhattan. Marjorie, part princess, part bohemian, struggles with everything—her mother’s prudish interference in her career and snobbish views of boyfriends; the embarrassment and love she feels for her lower- class Jewish relatives; and then the boyfriends themselves, who are so numerous and detailed they need their own book.