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The first time I heard of “The Best of Everything,” Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel about a gaggle of striving twentysomething women working in publishing and living in crummy New York City apartments, it was as a brief mention in the pages of another book. I was in my early twenties at the time, also working in publishing, and also living in a crummy New York City apartment. My bedroom was so cramped that the most comfortable reading position involved lying on the bed and dangling my feet out the adjacent window; I spent an entire summer that way, reading Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel, “Heartburn.” Ephron’s narrator, a jilted food writer named Rachel Samstat, finds herself rummaging through her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s credit-card bills for evidence that he is cheating on her. “I felt like a character in a trashy novel,” Ephron writes. “I even knew which trashy novel I felt like a character in, which made it worse: The Best of Everything. At least I wasn’t going through the garbage, but that was only because it hadn’t turned out to be necessary.” The day after reading that throwaway line, I went to the Strand and bought a copy of Rona Jaffe’s book.
“The Best of Everything” is not really a trashy book at all. It was a best-seller soon after it landed on shelves—complete with a blockbuster tie-in movie—and it does cover the sometimes trash-adjacent subjects of sex and blind dates and day drinking and backstabbing betrayal and bitchy bosses and whispered secrets between girlfriends. But Jaffe did not set out to write a frivolous potboiler. What she set out to do, as she wrote in 2005, shortly before her death, was to capture something unspoken and ardent about the working girls of her generation. “I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile,” she wrote. “I had no idea what a chord it would strike for millions.”
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Jaffe was only twenty-five when she wrote “The Best of Everything,” but she had lofty literary ambitions. She first sent short stories to The New Yorker when she was only nine years old. (They were rejected by this magazine, Jaffe later wrote, because “the editors thought I was an adult who couldn’t write.”) “The Best of Everything” is the début novel of a young writer who is still finding her voice, but there are moments in it in which her style is as sharp and smooth as a nail file. It is a surprisingly fresh book sixty-five years later, even though some of its references are dated (who has three-Scotch lunches anymore?), because it was so puckeringly fresh when Jaffe first wrote it. It is the work of someone who had something new to say and said it, at exactly the right time.
There are those who say that intensely timely writing can never be timeless, but “The Best of Everything” disproves this theory; it is because Jaffe was writing so insistently for her own generation, and for the thousands and thousands of workingwomen wading through typing pools who had never before seen themselves represented in fiction, that the book still carries a whiff of desperate conviction. Jaffe’s voice is full of verve and energy and urgency; it feels as oxygenated and crisp as cold seltzer. It is apparent from even the first paragraph that Jaffe knows exactly who she is writing about and who she is writing for. There is a swaggering confidence right out of the gate:
That gut punch of a last sentence! The delightful, hyperspecific details! Here is a writer who really knows her subject, because she has been her subject. Jaffe herself worked at a publishing house, and she must have known from experience just what it is like to carry a sad, floppy sandwich to work in a department-store bag. Jaffe must have assumed that, if she had soldiered through a depressing desk lunch, then hundreds of other women had, too, and she made a radical choice simply by deciding that their interior lives were worthy of fiction. She saw the countless young women around her, click-clacking away on memos outside their bosses’ offices—the go-fetch-it girls who were generally considered bystanders to the action—and put them in the center of it. Instead of simply taking dictation from someone else, she chose to dictate her own reality.
“The way all this happened sounds itself like a novel,” Jaffe wrote, of the book’s strange path to publication. Jaffe was born in Brooklyn in 1931 to an affluent Jewish family, was raised on the Upper East Side, and lived near Central Park for most of her life (other than a short jaunt to Radcliffe College). Her maternal grandfather, Moses Ginsberg, was an immigrant turned real-estate mogul who built the glamorous Carlyle Hotel, which opened in 1930. Her mother, Diana, was a domineering socialite who brought to her marriage to Jaffe’s father, an elementary-school principal named Samuel, a sizable family fortune. Jaffe had the kind of berries-and-cream upbringing that tends to suction people into stasis and turn them stale. She could have just married a balding accountant, kept house in a classic six, and walked a poodle up and down Madison Avenue for the rest of her days. Instead, she was a precocious child with designs on becoming a novelist.
After graduating from Radcliffe, in 1951, Jaffe snagged a job at Fawcett Publications, which would later serve as the model for the fictional Fabian Publications in “The Best of Everything,” and worked her way up the corporate ladder for a few years, reaching the position of associate editor before she promptly quit to try her hand at writing full time. By chance, when she went to visit her friend Phyllis Levy one day at the offices of Simon & Schuster, she happened to meet the Hollywood producer Jerry Wald, who mentioned that he was looking for the “modern-day ‘Kitty Foyle’ ” to adapt into a picture. Jaffe went to the library to read Christopher Morley’s 1939 novel about a salesgirl who sleeps her way around Manhattan and found it laughably lacking in insight. “I thought it was dumb,” Jaffe wrote. “He doesn’t know anything about women. I know about women.” Shortly thereafter, Jaffe and Levy took a trip to Los Angeles and met Wald for lunch; during the meal, Jaffe took her shot. She announced that she was already writing the hot new “working girl” book. Wald said that if she’d write the manuscript he’d turn it into a major motion picture.
It takes a certain kind of guts—or insanity—to sell a Hollywood movie of a novel that you haven’t even written yet, but Jaffe worked quickly. The book more or less came tumbling out of Jaffe’s hands—she typed the entire manuscript, all seven hundred and seventy-five pages of it, in just five months and five days. Part of the freedom she felt in her writing mirrored a newfound freedom she felt in life; she got her book advance and moved out of her parents’ apartment once and for all. “As soon as I got out of the house,” Jaffe told the Times, in 2003, “it was like a cannon going off.” (Her mother was less thrilled that Jaffe was leaving; Diana openly wept and then proceeded to drop in on her daughter constantly. Throughout the years, Jaffe’s parents followed Jaffe around, joining a temple across the street from one of her apartments, and moving a block away from another. She may have been able to escape in her fiction, but in real life it was not so easy.)
In order to write the book, Jaffe interviewed about fifty of her peers about their experiences working as secretaries and assistants in the city. What she got back was a mélange of ambition and weariness, sexual harassment and sexual escapades, homesickness and determination. She tossed it all into the book, ultimately creating four characters who stood in for the dozens of women she spoke to along the way.
I have heard Jaffe’s novel described more than once as “ ‘Sex and the City’ if it were written in 1958.” This description, though enticing, is not exactly accurate. To be fair, the similarities are seductive: both stories follow four (white) women in the Big Apple who know their way around a bon mot as they navigate the treacherous waters of money and men. But “Sex and the City,” for all its pleasures, is a work about established women mostly in their thirties who are years removed from fetching anyone lunch and who almost never take the subway. The women of the show are unsettled in love but set in every other way; in one episode, Carrie Bradshaw quips, “In New York, they say, you’re always looking for a job, a boyfriend, or an apartment. So, let’s say you have two out of three and they’re fabulous.”
When “The Best of Everything” opens, our protagonist, Caroline Bender, doesn’t have a boyfriend. Her fiancé, Eddie Harris, has recently left her for a prep-school classmate whom he reëncountered on a steamship to Europe. She doesn’t have an apartment—she is still living with her parents in a shabby (fictional) New York suburb called Port Blair. She is embarking on her first day in the typing pool at Fabian Publications, a semi-reputable house that produces, among other things, a pious Christian magazine called The Cross and a line of dime-store novels called Derby Books. She is already jaded about having to work at all. Caroline gains an ambitious streak later, but she really took the job just to distract herself from heartbreak. “She wasn’t sure that being a secretary in a typing pool could possibly be engrossing,” Jaffe writes, “but she was going to have to make it so. Otherwise she would have time to think, and would remember too much. . . .”
Caroline’s wariness about her new workplace sits in stark contrast to the eagerness of April Morrison, a go-getter with platinum hair who starts on the same morning (though April arrives late, having overslept). Whereas Caroline arrives at the office in gray, April shows up for her first day wearing a “baby-blue gabardine suit” that makes her look like a milkmaid. “Caroline almost expected to see her carrying a sunbonnet,” Jaffe writes. (Jaffe was a master of the subtle burn; she describes one milquetoast man whom Caroline dates as having “moist, anxious eyes,” another as looking like a “shaved Teddy bear.”) April is a pie-eyed dreamer from a Western town called Springs who is such a romantic about New York City that she constantly makes excuses for it. She feels lucky to live in a tenement studio over a “winter garden,” which is really just a cement square filled with rusty old chairs. She has to sleep on a Murphy bed with “an uncoiled spring that made her sleep in a fetal position,” and yet she wakes up every morning ready to conquer the day. “April was,” Jaffe writes, “an extremely relaxed and healthy girl.” Of course, nobody stays relaxed or healthy in Manhattan for long. April has one of the hardest runs of any woman in the book. She quickly becomes a pawing post for her lecherous boss, she falls for a debonair Ivy League type only to find out he’s a dastardly jerk who slut-shames her to his friends, and she gets out of the city by the skin of her teeth.
Rounding out the twentysomething office cadre are Gregg Adams, the wannabe actress who is the femme fatale of the group, and Barbara Lemont, a young single mother who is working to support a toddler when most of her co-workers are working to secure a husband. All of these women scurry around on eggshells trying not to anger an older editor at Fabian named Amanda Farrow. When they are not dodging Miss Farrow (who was played with withering acidity by Joan Crawford in the 1959 film adaptation), the women must play whack-a-mole with handsy men both in and out of the office. Mr. Shalimar, who runs Derby Books, is a Scotch-swilling creep who makes a pass at April in her first week and gropes Barbara at the company Christmas party.
The “bad men” aspect of “The Best of Everything” is perhaps the most subversive quality of the novel and also its most timeless. Jaffe was talking about men who abuse their power and influence in the workplace long before most writers would even touch the subject. In the scene that takes place at the Christmas party, as Barbara ducks away from Mr. Shalimar’s slobbery kisses, he calls her a “little bitch” in front of the entire office. “What did you think I wanted to do, rape you?” he bellows. He then threatens to fire her, but Caroline assures Barbara that he doesn’t have the power to do so and her job is safe. But this scene! Was anyone else writing with such clarity about workplace harassment in the nineteen-fifties—or even since? Every time I read that scene, it takes my breath away, not only because Jaffe is bold enough to write a man saying the quiet part out loud in front of everyone but also because she shows the maddening fallout of the incident. Barbara doesn’t lose her job, but Mr. Shalimar doesn’t lose anything, either. There is no H.R. department to speak of, and Mr. Bossart, the one higher-up whom Barbara can complain to, immediately advises her to bury the memory. “I know you’ll take it for what it is worth,” he tells her, “and let the office gossip die down as quickly as possible by not adding to what is said after tonight.”
Barbara takes it on the chin, outwardly, but inside she is fuming:
What is remarkable about this passage is not that it feels topically relevant sixty-five years later—the mention of women’s whisper networks, the excusing of a man’s forceful actions as an innocent mistake, the acknowledgment that it is Barbara who has to carry this incident with her always as everyone else forgets—but that it feels tonally relevant. Jaffe shows that, even in 1958, workingwomen were already weary and wise, funny and fatalistic about the brutal realities of office culture. The women in “The Best of Everything” may be young, but they were not born yesterday. They are savvy and self-protective, and they work to protect one another. The girls do gossip, despite Barbara’s swearing innocently that they don’t. They watch one another’s backs when it comes to both drooling dotards and viperous, ruthless women like Miss Farrow, who steps on the kitten heels of others to get ahead. Jaffe’s candor about the casual sexism that leaks from the water cooler turned the book into a sensation.
In 1958, shortly after “The Best of Everything” became an instant hit, Jaffe went on a Canadian news program to promote the book. For the interview, Jaffe sat at an L-shaped table, sandwiched between the host and a male novelist who also had a best-seller.
The two men approach Jaffe with a spiky barrage of fear, fascination, and flirtatiousness. The first question out of the host’s mouth is “Miss Jaffe, is it square to be good these days?”—implying that she is, on some level, a bad girl, or at least a devoted chronicler of bad-girl exploits. Jaffe’s answer is subtly barbed. “Oh, I think that some people think so,” she quips. “I think especially in a big city like New York, you are supposed to, if you are good, keep it to yourself, in contrast to a small town, where if you are bad you keep it to yourself.” Still, the prodding continues. The host asks her if society needs to “protect the working girl.” At one point, he turns to the other novelist as if Jaffe isn’t present and asks, “She’s awfully hard on men in that book, don’t you think?” Throughout the interview, Jaffe often quietly clears her throat and tries not to laugh. He asks the male novelist if he would be afraid to date someone like Jaffe. (The novelist, to his credit, says he would be up for the challenge.) At the tail end of the interview, the host nudges Jaffe about whether she plans to get married. “This is a personal question,” he says. “But you must be used to this kind of thing.” “Oh, gracious, I don’t know,” Jaffe says with a sigh. “I didn’t know when I was going to write a best-seller, so how can I tell you when I am going to get married?”
Jaffe never married. Instead, she wrote nearly twenty books. She decorated her beautiful Manhattan apartment in various shades of beige and cream. She made her life as a writer. And, most notably, she supported other women who wanted to write. In 1987, she launched the Rona Jaffe Prizes at Radcliffe College, which annually gave awards to two undergraduates who wanted to pursue writing as a career. Then, in 1995, Jaffe launched the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, which bestowed grants each year on six female authors at the beginning of their careers. (The Writers’ Awards program ended in 2021, but the foundation lives on and continues to offer fellowships to women who write.) “Of the women who won this year, none of them made more than twelve thousand dollars a year,” Jaffe told one interviewer, in 1995. “One poet was a single mother who worked as a bartender in a strip joint. If she had money for day care, she wouldn’t have to work there anymore. Just putting food on the table is a luxury for these writers.”
Workingwomen are rarely handed the best of everything, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot desire it, or grasp at it, or throw themselves at it with abandon. What I love most about Jaffe’s book is that it is about being brand new in a city, before the grind beats you down, when you still have the swooning belief that it will all make sense somehow. She wanted to capture something essential about those early wandering days of not knowing how it will all turn out, of being equally hungry for advancement, sex, and an expensive steak that you did not have to pay for. She wanted to capture what it feels like to walk through New York City, first as a rube, and then as a woman of experience, in possession of the kind of intimate knowledge that can come only from years of standing up to it all. “Where could she ever begin to attack a fortress like New York?” Jaffe writes, of one of her heroines. “She didn’t even want to. She only wanted to stay there until she herself was part of it.” ♦
This is drawn from a new edition of “The Best of Everything.”
