Before there was such chick lit classics like Valley of the Dolls, Bridget Jones Diary, and Sex and the City, there was Rona Jaffe’s iconic The Best of Everything. Several years ago, I did a retro review of Ms. Jaffe’s book Class Reunion. I decided to revisit the book that launched Jaffe’s writing career back in 1958.
The Best of Everything focuses mostly on several young women living and loving in New York City. They all work in some capacity at Fabian Publishing. Caroline Bender (who might be considered the main character) is a recent graduate from Radcliffe and has just had her heart broken because her fiancé has married another woman. April Morrison is naïve lass hailing from Colorado. Gregg Adams (yes, a woman named Gregg) is an aspiring actress. And Barbara Lamont is a struggling single mother trying to make it after a divorce.
The Best of Everything takes place in the early 1950s. The career women are all career gals, and the men are all cads. The women in the typing pool all try to evade the advances of lecherous Fabian executive Mr. Shalimar. And Caroline especially has to deal with the bitchy and imperious older female editor Amanda Farrow. Remember this is a time where women were just supposed to deal with sexual harassment (long before the #MeToo movement), and there was no idea of a sisterhood in the workplace.
Caroline especially has ambitions that go beyond the typing pool. She starts reading stories sent into Fabian and shows a great deal of potential to be a top notch editor. But Amanda often tries to put a damper on Caroline’s aspirations, and not surprisingly, Amanda also has trouble keeping secretaries. And though Barbara struggles as a single mother, she shows promise as a writer, and is writing columns for a women’s magazine.
But it’s love and romance that are the women’s true calling. Remember, this is the fifties, and a woman’s highest calling with being a wife and a mother. The ladies make there way through the thorny world of dating. Caroline pines for her former fiancé. And even though there are other available men to date, Caroline jumps at the chance when her former fiancé comes back into her life. Is he going to leave his wife for her or is Caroline just going to be some hookup in the big city?
April naively thinks the society man she is dating will marry her when she announces her pregnancy, but instead he takes her to a dodgy abortionist to get rid of it. Barbara desires to get married again, but is leery after going through a divorce. Won’t men think she’s a fallen woman because she’s a divorcee and a single mom? And Gregg becomes obsessed with a producer and begins to stalk him. It doesn’t end very well for her. It seems only the women’s Fabian co-worker, Mary Agnes, has grabbed the the brass ring of true womanhood. She gets married and soon after is blooming with child.
And as The Best of Everything commences, there are no specific happy ending and things aren’t tidily wrapped up in a bow. It leaves you guessing. Will these ladies find love and success in the workplace or is “having it all” a fairy tale? How will these ladies navigate the 1960s? How will they react to the sexual revolution, civil rights, the women’s lib movement, and the Vietnam war? We don’t find out, but we can speculate.
Published 65 years ago, The Best of Everything was quite shocking and risqué. It featured a cast of women characters who desired careers at a time when women were only supposed to desire husbands, babies, and domesticity in the suburbs. Jaffe was brutally honest in her depiction of women in a particular time in big city America. A lot of things have changed since the early fifties for women, and sadly, a lot of people are trying to shove us back to that time. The Best of Everything is a primer on how women are fully-dimensional human beings with desires in the boardroom and the bedroom. The Best of Everything is both timeless and timely.
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