A Dash of Daring by Penelope Rowlands

Author:Penelope Rowlands
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

A teenage Lauren Bacall on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, March 1943

“The next day I went marching into Mrs. Snow’s office,” Edson said. “‘I know you hated him,’ I said.

“‘I know those Irishmen,’ Carmel replied, seething as she did so. ‘They were brought up on potatoes and that’s all they’ve ever known.’” When Edson asked Kavanagh about the experience, his response was eerily the same. “I know that kind of woman,” he said. “She should be whipped every day of her life.” So much for the sentimental Irish. Carmel tended to view some Irishmen with suspicion, even advising a startled young New York buyer named Jeanne Eddy, who would later become a fashion designer, to steer clear of her rich and well-connected, upper-class Irish beau and spend more time with a less impressive (on paper, at least) American admirer instead.

In the absence of any news—fashion or otherwise—from Paris, there was space to fill, and Carmel decided to expand the magazine’s theater coverage, promoting Edson to the job of theater editor. Such a job would be unlikely on a fashion publication today, but it was all part of Carmel’s philosophy. As she once said: “It is not by chance that the Bazaar published fiction and articles on travel and the theatre and movies and music in its pages. All these go to make up the climate of fashion, and to be in fashion one must be very aware of the weather. ”

Frances McFadden left the magazine for the rest of the war, heading to London where she worked as an editor at the Office of War Information. Eleanor Barry Ryan fetched up at a couple of unlikely spots, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she worked as inspector, and at a New Jersey munitions factory. Carmel, too, when she could manage it, did her bit, giving speeches, visiting with women war workers, even, at one point, launching a ship during Barry’s tenure at the navy yard. Barry recalled her arrival there with amusement: “Suddenly, when Carmel walked in with her blue hair and immaculate white gloves, there was a chorus of wolf whistles over the racket.” No doubt she adored the fuss, but her mind was increasingly elsewhere. McFadden’s absence was a real loss. Without her, Carmel noted, the magazine “continued on momentum, it sometimes seemed to me.” Just as, during World War I, Carmel had longed to follow her sister to Europe, she yearned, once again, to be in the midst of it all, like McFadden. “And almost as if this time a younger sister had preceded me, again I wanted above everything to get abroad, too.”

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