Summer at Tiffany (Hardcover)

by Marjorie Hart (Author)
Key Phrases: watch counter, studio couch, old black magic, New York, Fifth Avenue, Story City (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
At the age of 82, Hart, a professional cellist, recalls 1945, when she and her best friend, Marty, students at the University of Iowa, spent the summer in Manhattan, in this pleasant but slight memoir. Failing to obtain work at Lord & Taylor, the pair, self-described as long-limbed, blue-eyed blondes, were hired at Tiffany's—the first female floor sales pages, delivering packages to the repair and shipping department, for $20 a week. Hart details their stringent budget ("1. Two nickels for subway. 2. Sandwich at the Automat: 15 cents") and describes, somewhat breathlessly, what a thrill it was to see such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland shop at the fabled store. Her romance with a midshipman, the combat death of her cousin, the news of the dropping of the first atomic bomb and a vivid account of the celebration in Times Square after Japan's surrender convey a sense of the WWII era, but without adding much illumination. She does, however, evoke New York City as seen through the eyes of two innocent smalltown girls. 16 pages of b&w photos and illus. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Although the country is still at war, Manhattan during the summer of 1945 is an intoxicating place, especially for two fresh-faced young coeds who step off a train from Iowa armed with little more than their youthful exuberance and the name of a very influential contact. The combination is enough to land Marjorie and her best friend, Marty, jobs as pages at the prestigious Tiffany & Co., making them the first female employees ever to work the sales floor. From this groundbreaking vantage point, the girls see and do it all, from assisting notorious gangsters and international playboys at the jewelry counters, to rubbing elbows with celebrities at the city's legendary nightclubs, to glimpsing General Eisenhower during his triumphant victory parade, to kissing soldiers in Times Square on V-J Day. Remarkably, this winsome memoir was written 60 years after that giddy summer spent pinching pennies and dreaming of diamonds, yet Hart's infectious vivacity resonates with a madcap immediacy, delectably capturing the city's heady vibrancy and a young girl's guileless enchantment. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1 edition (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061189529
• ISBN-13: 978-0061189524
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #151,166 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read, it only makes me want to know more, April 19, 2007

By	Kate Maeda "kalohe" (Apex, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a wonderful piece of history combined with a great story about young women having an adventure in New York City. I love the things that get left out of her letters home. It could be fiction as easily as biography. She's a really nice writer. You get a sense of life in a tight-knit Iowa town. I would really like to see more from Ms Hart about life in that area, that era. It's all so different from what kids are living today and at that same time some of the problems are the same. And so rich in history. I'm really not expressing myself well. I will recommend it for my 18 year old daughter who will be off to college in the fall, and to my sister who is a writer and critical of anything sloppily written (she won't have complaints about this one) and to my dad, who lived all of this from a different prospective, having grown up in Washington DC and having spent the war years in Hawaii and the Pacific.

Even if I didn't write the review well, Ms Hart wrote the book beautifully. I started it last night, and didn't get anything else done until I finished it.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Summer at Tiffany, April 23, 2007

By	Sandra Mitchell "Sandra Mitchell" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The story of Summer at Tiffany is just as cute as the gorgeous book cover portrays! This is a quick, easy read that highlights a summer Marjorie Hart spent in NCY during college with her friend Marty during the late 1940's. The pages take you back to a charming and magical era, when shopping at a department store was an elegant experience. The fun times that Marjorie has are all captured in an easy to read and well written manner. This was a feel good book and one I will look forward to re-reading again. Highly recommended!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming to Manhattan with little money and one secondhand reference takes great bravery and pluck..., May 30, 2007

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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