Bachelor Girl

Single-girl stories always included such confessions, worries, or an authorial caveat, as if it was the writer’s responsibility to list all contraindications for this radical trial drug called independence. Most of the pieces concluded with a haunted question: “Even now, in black moments, they ask, ‘What am I doing here?’” or “Why should I stay? Who’d notice that I was gone?” “What if there is no one here for me?” or “Is this… it?” But there were also breakthroughs. Entree to a key social circle. A new man. Better, several men. And there were always the women who—damn it all!—went out and battled to become the serious “girl” who did not type. (Typical tale: As late as 1968, famed NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg was told by a potential employer, a friend, “Nina, you know we have our girl already.” Nina, successfully, went and became the Girl somewhere else.)

Even the average single woman now had, as the Reader’s Digest said, “a shot at life previously unimagined. Today’s plain Janes have opportunities their spinster aunts never did—trips to Europe, a Peace Corps assignment in Asia, interesting jobs in research or government. And in all these places they have a chance to display a mettle that may attract a man who might otherwise have been addled by a momentary attraction to a dumb blonde.”

They also had a bit of fun. Many became expert at blowing off whole afternoons at foreign films or in Lord & Taylor’s. And gradually, whether they liked the idea or not, young single women began to go out in mixed groups. When asked where they were going, no one said, “On a date.” The new reply was “Just out.”

THE SINGLE STRIP

The “swinging” singles scene began with a simple and unglamorous realization: Young people were lonely. Families had begun their slow dissolve, shown the first fresh results of divorce, corporate transfers, migrations south and, of course, the familiar, now more frequent announcement “I’m off to the city, Ma, bye!” Many magazine stories and essays began this way: “The girl or boy who lived next door or two towns over has gone, off to school in the East, to Europe, or New York City.” It was a cliche—any reference to a girl next door had long been a cliche— and yet it was in some undeniable way true. “Anonymity” replaced “togetherness.”

In his 1965 book, The City Is the Frontier, Dr. Charles Abrams, the head of Columbia University’s urban-planning department, warned that the city was unprepared for the “convergence” of all these anonymous strangers. How would people meet? Not on the street, where a strict taboo prevented eye contact and conversation. The city, Abrams advised, would have to open to singles, to build special housing, unique public meeting places, become in some sense what he called a “trystorium.” Thus began a small singles industry. At the start there were simple “pay parties,” mimeographed telephone lists, and gimmicks—restaurants with phones at the tables so that if a girl wished, she might call a man seated elsewhere, or “wash-a-terias,” Laundromats that served Cokes and played records. In late 1964 Mike O’Harro, an ensign who had founded a private dating “association,” organized a computerized list of forty-seven thousand singles nationwide. “I had the idea at a party I threw in Virginia,” he told Newsweek. “I realized that every person at this party, everyone did different things, and they were all lonely. I was lonely, and it occurred to me that it had to be true in other places.”

Along with others who’d had the single epiphany, he began to stage regional activities. To be single in Denver at the time might have meant attending a “woodsie,” a weenie roast and dance party up in the Rockies. In New York, couples met at rooftop “drinks parties”; roofs had been declared among the “new mating frontiers.” “Causes” were also big—work for a candidate, attend many fund-raisers. Single visionaries took it further, plotting apartment complexes for singles only, miniresorts that would include pools and tennis courts, bars and lounges placed everywhere for optimum mixing.

Grossinger’s, the venerable Catskills resort, had held its first singles weekend in 1961. By the mid-sixties there was barely a resort or a cruise line that had not imitated the package. By 1965, single life was said to generate somewhere between twenty and fifty million dollars per year. And those figures grew as whole neighborhoods “went single.” Manhattan’s East Side, starting at East Thirtieth Street, heading up to Ninetieth and stretching from the East River all the way to Fifth Avenue, was christened “the singles ghetto,” a minicity of new high-rises and older buildings where girls learned a few quick rules about real estate. (“No one wanted to rent to three girls—three girls was a brothel,” says one marketing analyst, now fifty-six. “You claimed two and kept the third as a constantly recurring cousin from home. Or a stew.”) Thousands of actual stews, secretaries, ad copywriters, sports columnists, “just regular guys with jobs” filled out the area—780,000 of them, according to one insurance company. (There was in fact a real “stew zoo.” The address, as well known as the Barbizon Hotel’s, was 345 East Sixty-fifth Street. During the mid-1960s, the building was 90 percent stewardess-occupied.)

On weeknights residents filled the restaurants and movie theaters; on weekends, they filled the bars— Maxwell’s Plum, Mister Laffs, TGI Friday’s—a collection that stretched out along five crowded blocks of First Avenue. By midnight on Saturday, it seemed that someone had thrown a frat party without realizing a street fair was already under way. Newsweek called it “the body exchange.” Others likened it to a zoo, a “place made up of hands, hands, HANDS grabbing at you.” Or waiting on you. It became one of the city’s much-repeated mating tales that J. Walter Thompson employees actually competed for waiter and bartending jobs after hours. As one explained, “Where else am I going to meet chicks?”

The bar strip was also ground zero for journalists assigned to this generation’s singles beat. The standard device was to catch bits of conversations between couples who’d “connected,” as if on The Dating Game, and had invariably misheard each other’s names. The strategy, then, was to follow the strangers—one long-haired eyelinered female, one preppy male wearing bell-bottoms—as they moved in on each other and, if the reporter got lucky, left the bar together. But there were other scenes and other stories, and many girls could not stand the meat market that was the Upper East Side. Some preferred Village bars or jazz clubs or the scenes at Max’s Kansas City, Cheetah’s, or the Electric Circus, where there was less date making than dancing and for the shy a lot of visual distraction—Warholian performance art; the first of the sparkly-ball light shows—also much potential single-girl sex. Sometimes right there.

“Wherever you went out in the 1960s, and I went, just went, wherever—it was very dark,” says Julie, now forty-nine, divorced, and the mother of two kids she adopted on her own.

It was the bars that were labeled “singles” bars that were the creepiest, I thought. Little red candles, all those guys with the open shirts and this glob of hair sticking out. People dressed alike. I liked places where there was more of a circus-y diffused scene… these bars really were meat markets…. I can remember at Maxwell’s, or one of them I got dragged to this one time, being afraid of going to the bathroom because I had inadvertently made eye contact with this manly-man kind of guy at the bar and I was afraid he would misinterpret my walking toward the bathroom as a cue…. It seemed so predatory.

WHERE HAVE OTHER SINGLES GONE?

At the time, of course, an enormous slab of the American single population was not in singles clubs of any kind, but still in college. Some would avoid the singles scene by getting married the day after graduation. But the MRS. degree had already begun its slow fade from the curriculum. “When I started school in 1965, we wore plaid skirts and had proper dates and had parietals,” says Sally Hoffe, a fifty-four-year-old lawyer, never wed and now a single parent. “By the time we left we were dressed in flowing scarves and ragged jeans and many of us had no makeup on except maybe a crescent moon on our forehead. We had thrown out hair dryers…. Sex—we just had it. And unless you got pregnant or caught VD, the tone—at least with certain people anyway—the whole subject was casual as can be.”

In March 1966, Time devoted its Education section to a story on the younger “free sex movement,” what was largely a Berkeley phenomenon that had been around in some form since 1960. Printed below an extremely dark and blurry photo: “As they do at countless collegiate parties everywhere, the couples wriggled to the watusi and gyrated to the jerk, while recorded drums and saxophones resounded in the dimly lit