A Conversation with Michael Callahan

A Conversation with
MICHAEL CALLAHAN
So how does a boy from working-class Northeast Philadelphia in
the 1970s end up writing about three girls living in New York’s
most glamorous address in the 1950s?
As most people do, I think I’ll blame my mother. She’s always been
a voracious reader. Every night after dinner she would sit in our
living room, pour herself a cold beer, and read a novel. For years I
thought that’s what all moms did. But she favored these “sweeping
sagas,” as my brothers and I called them, these broad multigenerational soap operas from writers like Susan Howatch and Fred
Mustard Stewart. One day when I was about 14 and tired of the
Hardy Boys, I went foraging through our bookcase in the dining
room and plucked out a copy of Peyton Place. Not exactly the kind
of reading a 14-year-old should be imbibing, but these things
happen. I had never read anything like it. And I was instantly
captivated: by the writing, by the forbidden nature of it, by the
melodrama. I started reading all of these sudsy novels, from the
highbrow of James Baldwin and Irwin Shaw to the lowbrow of
Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon. I was my mother—without the
nightly glass of beer.
© Evan Schapiro
How did you specifically come to a novel about the Barbizon?
Back in 2006 I was working on a story about the 50th anniversary of the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince
Rainier for Philadelphia magazine, and in reading all of the background material I came across the fact that
Grace had lived at the chic Barbizon Hotel for Women in the late 1940s. It got me curious as to who else had
lived there before they became famous. Digging a bit, I discovered a treasure trove of women. Later, I pitched a
story on it to Vanity Fair, which was published in 2010. It got me thinking that the Barbizon in the 1950s would
make an ideal setting for a novel like the ones I had gobbled up as a teenager.
So that’s where the title comes from?
The title comes from the fact that during the 1950s every woman who lived at the Barbizon knew Grace Kelly
had also lived there, and they wanted to be her: mysterious, gorgeous, desired, witty, cultured, stylish. Naturally,
most fell far short. But she was the face of the hotel for decades.
The three main characters seem like very different types of young women to be thrown together.
Yes, which was the genius of the Barbizon. The place was packed with would-be sophisticates, but they were all
very different. You had your Mademoiselle magazine interns, which Laura represents; your secretarial school
students, which Dolly represents; and your glamour girls, which Vivian represents. It was a very interesting
melting pot of pillbox hats and pearls.
And then there were “The Women.”
“The Women” were the ones who stayed, and never married.
When I was researching the magazine article, one of the best
quotes I got was from a feminist historian who told me that “if
you were 25 and still living at the Barbizon, it was over.”
That’s insane to consider today—that you would be
considered an old maid at 25.
How much research went into the novel?
Well, I had done a significant amount for the magazine piece,
so I felt I knew life inside the Barbizon cold. What took a lot
of time was the rest of it: what were the fashions, the movies,
the slang, the restaurants? But I lucked out with talking to so
many women who had lived in the Barbizon, and who had
such vivid memories of it. It was a rite of passage for a certain
type of young woman in mid-century America.
Grace Kelly in 1955
Who were some of the women you spoke to?
Oh, there were a lot. And I wanted to talk to all different kinds. Cloris Leachman was amazing—she had details
down as if she had just been living there the week before. Ditto for Cybill Shepherd. As a teenager I was
obsessed with Shelley Hack on Charlie’s Angels, and I suspected she had lived at the Barbizon. So I got to
indulge in meeting her for an interview. She was eloquent and lovely and amazingly insightful.
Are any of the characters in the novel based on any of these famous ladies?
There are bits and pieces of some of them, but for the most part each just sprang from my imagination. But I
definitely wanted to tell the stories of the different castes that lived inside the hotel. And as with any author,
each of the girls has a bit of me in them. Which is odd to say about three young women in 1950s Manhattan
from the mouth of a middle-aged guy from Philly, but there you go. Laura’s yearning to be a writer is very
similar to my own at her age; Vivian’s sarcasm is mine. And God knows Dolly’s fruitless romantic past and
comfort-food eating are also mine.
What did you learn, writing about this period?
I think I came to understand why we cling to this fierce nostalgia for the 1950s. There was a lot wrong with the
nation, in terms of equality and tolerance and the role of women. But I think there were also a lot of things that
we have come to miss today: a sense of genuine glamour in places like New York, a time where men dressed as
well as women did, and no one was going to the office with wet hair and flip-flops. The more I researched, the
more I understood why programs like Downton Abbey and Mad Men have become such cult shows in this
country. There is this sort of deep wistfulness for the civility and beauty that came with all of that, even if much
of it is so much frosting on an ugly historical cake.
Who were your influences?
Well, obviously Grace Metalious and her aforementioned Peyton Place, the deconstruction of which turned out
to be my first piece for Vanity Fair. Mary McCarthy’s The Group, and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything.
They were just incredible stories of women finding their footing at a time when those stories were not really
told. And the films of Douglas Sirk: Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows.
They’re incredible cultural histories, all dressed in A-line skirts and accessorized by chintz furniture. Of course,
it probably didn’t hurt that I watched every episode of Knots Landing, too.
Every episode? Didn’t that run for, like, a decade?
Fourteen years, 1979 to 1993. It’s scary that I know that. I made it a condition of taking a job at my college
newspaper that I would not have to work Thursday nights so I wouldn’t miss it. Can you imagine? But that was
a show that was all about melodramatic storytelling, and the proof that it was done well is evidenced by the fact
it ran so long. How many shows today run fourteen years? Not many.
Do you have a favorite novel?
I do, but it will seem like an odd choice to most people, because it’s a children’s book. It’s The Witch of
Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare, which was published in 1959 and won the Newberry Medal for
children’s literature. It’s the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who comes to the Colonies in the late 1600s from
colonial Barbados, where her English grandfather has died, to live with Puritan relatives she has never met. As a
boy who felt withdrawn and an outsider for much of his childhood, it spoke to me in a way no other book really
has. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed my life, and how I looked at the world.
Maybe people will look at 1950s New York differently from reading your novel.
I doubt that. And that’s not the aim, really. I simply wanted to write a book like the ones I like to read, a story
that will take you through an airplane ride or a few days on the beach.
What was your writing process?
Well, I was working full time as an editor and writer, so that made it tough. Because the last thing you feel like
doing when you come from work is …writing. What you really want is to order take-out and watch a rerun of
Law & Order: SVU. But I made a rule: No eating dinner, no watching TV, until I sat down and wrote 500
words, every night. If I wrote 1,000 words, I could bank a night off. But I had to have 3,500 words written every
week. I needed that sort of enforced discipline to get it done.
Sounds onerous.
It is. But years ago I interviewed Mary Higgins Clark, the bestselling suspense novelist. I mean, she wrote
Where Are the Children?, her first novel, when she was a thirtysomething widow with five young kids. She told
me she got up every morning at 5 and wrote longhand before her children got up for school. She said that a lot
of people thought she was a terrible writer, but she
shrugged it off—she knew there were a lot of people
who wrote better than she did. “But,” she told me, “I put
my butt in the chair every day and actually do it.” That’s
half the battle. Maybe more than half. It’s really, really
difficult to enforce that kind of regimen on yourself,
especially when you’re not even sure you’re going to
get published. I mean, sticking to a gym routine is hard,
but at least you see the results in the mirror. You write
your first novel and you pray some editor will like it
enough to wager the reading public will, too. But you
also risk that you spent a year and a half of your life on
a vanity project no one will ever see.
Barbizon Hotel for Women, today