Summer at Tiffany is Marjorie Hart's delightful, fast, fun, nostalgic memoir of the summer of 1945, when she and her best friend, Marty Garrett, traveled to New York City for the summer and became the first women to ever work at Tiffany's. (Yes, as in, little blue box baubles.) Not only did she and Marty make history becoming the first women ever hired at the iconic flagship, but they also had a front row seat the V-E Day and V-J Day celebrations that punctuated the beginning and end of the summer. In between, they flirted with sailors, rubbed elbows with the rich and famous, worried over news from the Pacific, and experienced the joys and perils of life in the big city, a day at the ocean, and so much more.
The idea to spend the summer in New York came from some of Marjorie and Marty's Kappa sisters at the University of Iowa. Convinced it would be easy to find jobs as shop girls in the best department stores, Marjorie and Marty take the train east, only to be turned away from a succession of top stores. Through a combination of grit, pluck, luck, and a fortuitous reference through a previously-unknown family connection, they land jobs as pages where everyone from Judy Garland to the Windsors to the top mafiosos shop.
Remarkable as the stories about Tiffany are, it's the overriding sense of an era, the zeitgesit, that sets this memoir apart. The little details - about fashion, news reports, food, curfews, college songs, and attending church - are in many ways the heart of the book. I tore through this in a couple of nights, and it left me wanting more. It also left me a bit awed by Hart herself, who the internet tells me is 95 and still going strong. She's even on Twitter, which is more than I can say.
Five stars, for the book, and the author.
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