Coming to Manhattan with little money and one secondhand reference takes great bravery and pluck, particularly in war-torn America in 1945. Images from movies and the grand sweeping melodies of standard tunes of the era provide Marjorie Hart and her best friend Marty with a jumping-off point as tourists. But as they make do with what little they've brought with them, they end up becoming bonafide New Yorkers for a summer that ends triumphantly with love all around and a VJ Day celebration in Times Square.
The details of the time, the mores and concerns of a young lady in this pre-women's-lib period, are wrought quite skillfully and imaginatively by Hart, a first-time memoirist. A cellist by trade, she never lets go of either her Iowa good sense or her little girl's love of all things romantic and exciting. So she becomes a first-rate tour guide through a New York that remains only between Trump-sized towers and well-known chain stores. The drama --- for example, of saving enough CHANGE to take public transportation each day (a nickel!) or trying to figure out what kind of drink to order in an elegant cafe you've read about in movie magazines your whole life --- is small but never really quaint. There is enough in Hart's experiences for even the most jaded techno-kid of this age to find some commonalities between that world and today's.
But it is the girls' experiences in Tiffany & Co. that make the book what it is. After Marty brazenly drags Marjorie into the store and, using a reference that may or may not come through, more or less demands jobs for them --- making them the first female pages in the history of Tiffany --- their lives take a dramatic and fantastic upswing. Living amongst the rich and famous, if only from 9 to 5, gives the girls a lot to talk about and introduces them both to the sweet side of serious money and the not-so-nice side (gangsters buying jewels with ill-begotten booty gives them the creeps yet proves exciting at the same time).
The other denizens of the floors --- including the secret third floor of Pearls and Diamonds(!), lifers who act like butlers out of an Evelyn Waugh book, and an elevator man direct from a Damon Runyan play --- are wonderfully represented. They provide a safe and secure environment for the girls to learn the ropes of this high-price business, as well as pointers on life that they take to heart. In these passages, Hart's direct prose sparkles like the glow of the famous Tiffany diamond.
The war creates an interesting context for all this movie-magazine madness. The girls meet enlisted men at Barnard dances and must endure the painful news from home when someone they know goes MIA or comes home in a body bag from the war. When a warplane accidentally hits the Empire State Building, Hart writes about the experience of the city in its aftermath so intensely that it almost could be mistaken for a description of 9/11. New York and World War II, atomic bombs and young love all meld together to offset the high-society hijinks of Tiffany, giving SUMMER AT TIFFANY a weight that grounds it in reality while still allowing us the enjoyment of living vicariously through those for whom it is not as daily a concern.
Hart never came back to New York after that summer. Although offered an opportunity to stay on the East Coast and study cello at Yale, she returned to Iowa and became a music educator as well as a musician out west. But her experiences in Manhattan that long-ago summer made some serious indentations on her life card, and she displays great heart in reliving and recounting for us a very special part of her own history and the history of the United States.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
