Summer at Tiffany

Two young college students come to NYC with little money and no jobs. Next thing they know, they’re working at Tiffany’s! Ms. Hart’s account of her summer working at the famed store along side her friend is funny and touching. It’s filled with accounts of visiting stores and eateries—like the automat—that no longer exist. Even though their salary is meager, they somehow find the way to explore the city and even find romance along the way. They also encounter celebrities of all types and witness history in Times Square. The stories are well told and entertaining. It’s a fun read especially anyone interested in fashion and retail history.

A trip to Tiffany always cheers me up, but unfortunately, I won't be visiting Chicago or New York again any time soon. So, what's the next best thing to visiting Tiffany & Co. along Michigan Avenue in Chicago or the one along Fifth Avenue in New York? READING about WORKING at Tiffany! This wonderful memoir by 83-year-old Marjorie Hart takes place during the summer of 1945 when she and her best friend, Marty, worked as pages at Tiffany & Co., making them the first female employees ever to work the sales floor. As pages, they were responsible for delivering packages to the repair and shipping department whenever one of the salesmen discretely "rapped" on the counter. There is a really funny story about how Ms. Hart mispronounced one of the salesman's names - which would ultimately cause her trouble later in the story -- because she had misunderstood the person who had told her the salesman's name due to the person's thick Brooklyn accent. What I find almost more interesting than Ms. Hart's memories of working at Tiffany - there's another really funny story about all the stress she endured while riding in the elevator with a bunch of loose pearls bouncing around as she tried helplessly to catch them -- are the ways she tried to save money! For instance, she cashed in empty soda bottles, at a nickel each, to help pay for her $40 round-trip train ticket from Iowa to New York and budgeted her weekly $20 paycheck right down to the last penny (e.g., ride the subway daily for two nickels, eat a sandwich at the Automat for 15 cents, use penny postcards to write back home -- no 3-cent stamps!) While the book is a fun light read, there's also some serious moments. Even though Ms. Hart is working at Tiffany -- TIFFANY! -- and having fun adventures in Manhattan with a shipman named Jim during her off hours, World War II is going on, and she's always very mindful of that. There's also a very touching chapter in the book about an army plane that crashed into the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945 that almost left me in tears because it reminded me so much of September 11, 2001. I'd give this book 10 stars if I could!

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 o

Thanks go to Marjorie Hart for giving us the opportunity to share her magical summer in New York as World War II is ending. As a former Iowan growing up in a neighboring town during the same time, I relished her descriptions of the wonders and glamor of New York. Summer at Tiffany is a lively, delightful book. Enjoy!

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!

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.