The bachelor girls in question were usually models or Rockettes; starlets, including Tina Louise; debutantes; the serious young career women “who work in the budding communications field;” and sometimes shockingly “open” rising stars. Like “Queen of the Bachelor Girls” Kim Novak. In two columns, she was pictured with four different men, including one South American dictator and a “Negro” entertainer (Sammy Davis, Jr.). She was also pictured all alone, sitting back in a chair, eyes closed, her bare feet up so that a reader had to remark both at her casual mien and her flaming red pedicure.
Bachelor girls like Kim, it was solemnly reported, “play by their own rules.”
For example, good for three columns, they dated married men. “Sure, I mean, course we do,” one BG told an eager reporter. “If only for the convenience! They don’t stay. They don’t make a fuss. In some ways it’s the ideal date.” One “Swedish girl” interviewed for the husbands series told the News that “other girls laugh at me because I don’t understand why they would go with a husband. They can’t see that it is a problem.” The Americans defended themselves. They were not immoral but “regular” women “making the most of a difficult situation”—not meeting the right men, perhaps not yet ready to—and, as another put it, “We are not evil. We are tired of sitting home on the weekends…. What does it mean to be immoral? We are just living the lives we have and we happen not to have husbands…. I do not think that for this reason we are going to hell.”
Surprisingly, the author of one 1959 story sided with them. Sort of. “Today in the midst of the rootless, unmarried groups that gravitate to a large city, a girl finds that it is often ‘square’ to be good. Besides, she herself isn’t quite sure anymore what is good and bad, and neither is anyone else…. there is not a dropping off of morality. Just a shift in emphasis.”
Others disagreed entirely. In 1959, the Juvenile Aid Bureau, a social agency that had previously dealt largely with runaways, was charged with “easing the flow of incoming girls to New York City.” As one bureau official explained, “We spot a girl getting off a bus or a train and wandering the streets. We question her.” Under an obscure piece of municipal legislation called “the Girl Terms Act,” they could further “hold her until her family can be queried. If there is no family, or, as is often the case, the family does not want the juvenile back, and if the girl has no immediate relations in New York to claim her, we will send her back to the point of embarkation on her ticket.” In 1959 the JAB reported returning 350-plus suspicious-looking girls (that meant oddly dressed girls, slutty-looking girls; those too young and those not white).
Everyone acknowledged that most of these girls would find their way back in. At best they’d get clerical jobs they’d quickly lose, becoming rootless “wandering types.” Or they’d become prostitutes and drug addicts. Worse, they might become bohemians.
ON THE BEAT
The Beat generation is one of those mythical twentieth-century constructs that we associate with a loose conglomerate of crazy brilliant men. Jack Kerouac and his male muse, Neal Cassady; Allen Ginsberg, of course, and William Burroughs—and all the lesser luminaries who floated into and out of their lives, novels, and poems from their days at Columbia University, circa 1945 through the 1960s. But floating around in the background, handing out invitations to poetry readings, discussing art and writing, were a lot of intriguing young women—Hettie Cohen Jones, Joyce Glassman Johnson, Elise Cowen, and poet Diane diPrima, among many uncelebrated others.
These never quite became household names, but many of the onetime Beat girls went on to become writers and artists, just like the men. And some turned out to be chroniclers. It’s these women who later wrote the best memoirs of Beat life in New York City and San Francisco. And as much as these stories and the memoirs—How I Became Hettie Jones; Minor Characters; Beat Girl—re-create the joy ride of Beat life, they are also historical documents of what it was to be young and single in the 1950s and to have blatantly ignored the rules. Many, like Joyce Johnson, began life as middle-class girls, from “decent” families who lived in Upper West Side apartments that had grand pianos, shelves filled with the “great” books, and well-kept furniture. In Minor Characters, her 1983 memoir, Johnson writes better than anyone, ever, about the female double life, the one that started for her at age thirteen, with furtive trips into the Village, and continued as she moved out of her parents’ house at twenty-one, radically taking her own place.
“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.