The Breaching of the Barbizon

A bastion of virtue and beauty goes coed

On St. Valentine's Day (heh! heh!), to the strains of All the Way (get it?), a male guest registered and was duly admitted to Manhattan's Barbizon Hotel. In earlier times, last week's ceremony would have been like welcoming a satanic nuncio to St. Patrick's Cathedral. Since its founding in 1927, the Barbizon had been one of the few places in Gomorrah-on-Hudson where a girl could take her virtue to bed and rest assured that it would still be there next morning. As the late Sylvia Plath wrote of the Barbizon in The Bell Jar--she called it the Amazon--the hotel was a place "for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn't get at them and deceive them."

O temporal O mores! It has been some years since young women needed or wanted such protection. As a near convent in an area of singles bars, the once elegant hotel had sadly declined before its purchase last year by a partnership that includes the Oberoi Hotels of India, Asia's largest hotel chain. While reserving a wing for the 113 women who still live there (some of them for more than 40 years), the new owners have started to remodel the 22-story building as a conventional hotel open to everyone.

In its heyday the Barbizon was both legend and landmark. Innumerable were the tales of ardent swains who essayed in vain to penetrate the upper floors disguised as doctors or dads. Mae Sibley, a bright-eyed sprite who was the hotel's assistant manager and housemother to the girls, kept close tabs on their comings and goings. A girl needed three good references to be considered for admission, and then was graded by such criteria as family, looks, dress and demeanor.

The Barbizon harbored the greatest concentration of beauty east of Hollywood. Its residents, paying as little as $12 a week for their pink-and-green, 9-ft. by 12-ft. cubicles, ran largely to aspiring models and actresses. Many ran far, among them Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Bel Geddes, Dorothy McGuire, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman. Eileen Ford stabled her young models at the Barbizon. The Katharine Gibbs secretarial school reserved three floors for its students.

Afternoon tea was on the house; its bite-size sandwiches were the day's main meal for many strivers. There were musical evenings, a swimming pool and a gym, a library and--not least--two lounges where girls and boys could play Glenn Miller records or backgammon, or subtler games of eye and inflection. Until Mae Sibley arrived at the stroke of 10 p.m. and announced that it was time for the gentlemen to withdraw. Good night, Miss Sibley. Good night, Barbizon. -

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