In 1955, New York City is full of post-war euphoria and glamour, and the Barbizon Hotel -- the place where Grace Kelly lived when she first came to the big city -- is where young women from good families stay while they launch their careers and wait for Mr Right to come calling with a dozen roses and a date night at El Morocco.

Laura, a patrician beauty from Connecticut, arrives with a magazine internship and dreams of becoming a writer; Dolly, a sweet, small-town girl is working the secretarial pool and looking to be swept off her feet; and Vivian, a red-headed British bombshell with a palpable disdain for rules, yearns to make it as a singer while working nights as a cigarette girl.

As the young women become friends, each of their lives gets swept into the exhilarating, heart-breaking maelstrom of New York City.