What a perfect home for Darby McLaughlin, daughter of a mother from hell. It was a godsend for wealthy parents who didn’t want to untie their daughters in Manhattan and for young women who weren’t ready to start their own business. While I roamed freely around Manhattan, my Barbizon friends observed a draconian curfew and dress code. The hotel resembled a glamorous and expensive dorm, complete with stricter rules when she lived at Mount Holyoke College.

Davis did her homework well because they describe 1950’s Barbizon perfectly. What stories each had to tell Fiona Davis is not exaggerating. Throughout my career I have met numerous senior secretaries who graduated from Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School after living in Barbizon. Living in Manhattan in the mid-1960s, I met three young women who lived there after graduating from college. When I heard about a book about the Barbizon Hotel for Women I couldn’t wait to read it. However, as Rose’s obsession grows, the ethics of her investigation grows more murky, and neither will remain the same when the shocking truth finally emerges. It’s too heady a combination for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby’s upstairs neighbor, to resist, not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. More than half a century later, the Barbizon condominium is gone, and most of its former guests forgotten.īut rumors of Darby’s involvement in a fatal skirmish with a hotel maid in 1952 are as sure to flow through the building’s hallways as the melancholy music emanating from the old woman’s rented apartment. However, when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she discovers a whole new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin used there, the amazing sounds of bebop and even the possibility of romance. Arriving at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, Darby McLaughlin is everything her model agency roommates are not: plain, shy, nostalgic and totally convinced that she doesn’t belong, an image the models have nothing to disappoint.

The dollhouse by fiona davis