Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [106]
“Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home,” she writes. “The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all—as well as what she’d be up to in that room of her own…On 116th Street, the superintendent knew it…. He spread the word among neighbors that the Glassmans’ daughter was ‘bad.’ His imagination rendered me pregnant.”
Actually, what she did was to live there (and in many other places), to hang around with important male artists who spoke mostly to each other, and to work. She supported her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, when he was around, as well as anyone else currently in the Jack entourage. It’s what the girls did. Every morning, long before the men were up, with their hangovers and artistic visions, supportive Beat girls left the confines of the Village, took a train, and, as Johnson writes, “emerg[ed] into the daylight at Fiftieth Street [where] I’d feel I’d been swept up into an enormous secretarial army advancing inexorably upon Madison Avenue…as part of this army, I typed, read manuscripts, answered the phone, ate egg-salad sandwiches in the downstairs luncheonette (I’d learned very quickly how to locate the cheapest item on a menu).”
Her own books and stories were published, although no one, including her, made much about it. The Beat girls who became famous did so for extreme and daring acts, like Elise Cowen’s. Joyce’s beloved and dearest friend, she threw herself through her parents’ living room window, a suicide at twenty-eight.
At about the same time, Rona Jaffe published her best-selling novel The Best of Everything, the classic three-girls-come-to-the-city story, and forerunner of the Jackie Susann blockbusters. Her mother grieved. It was 1958, and a career put such a damper on a possible marriage! Then the book was turned into a film with Hope Lange as the aspiring editor and model Suzy Parker as the second of her roommates; Joan Crawford even put in an appearance as the bitch spinster boss who keeps them overtime at the keyboards. It was a huge hit. But “poor Rona!” as a family friend said to her mother. “With the film sale…all that money, now she’ll never get married.”
A popular magazine feature during these years—adapted as a late newsreel short subject—was the photo essay I think of as “Girl Comes to the City.” Panel by panel, we watch the new girl arrive and get settled. She meets her roommates, gets a job, fights for a stool at the pushy luncheonette counter, and accepts that she will not find a seat on the subway. These features always included a shot of the girl in a bathrobe, hair twisted up in a towel, as she prepared for a date. No one has ever looked so excited while painting her toenails.
In other shots of her at a desk, or stopped on the street, waiting to cross, she looks sad. Months have passed and she’s learned a few things—about married men, wolves, loneliness—and she wonders perhaps if she shouldn’t just pick herself up and go home. Then the last panel. Girl in the tiny shared living room, staring out at the skyline or, more realistically, at fire escapes and squat brown water tanks. The scene is so hypnotic that she has the essential epiphany: There is so much here to see and to learn that to return home, where she’s seen and learned all there is to know, would be a kind of death.
I’m sure some looked at these pictorials and saw a titillating but pointless risk. Others saw a travel poster on which