Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (10 page)

John Wanamaker, the famously enlightened Philadelphia retailer – regarded as the originator of ethical advertising – who then owned America’s largest emporium, came to visit, and even he was impressed. In the first three days of business, more than 150,000 people came through the doors and were given special celebration souvenirs costing over £10,000. Marshall Field’s old mentor Potter Palmer wasn’t there to share his triumph. Palmer had died that year, leaving an estate worth over $8 million to his wife Bertha, even setting aside a sum for her next husband ‘because he’ll need it’. In the event, Bertha remained a wealthy widow. Field was dumbstruck when he heard that
Palmer’s fortune had passed directly to his wife, bypassing their son. ‘What on earth does she need with all that money?’ he asked. ‘One million dollars is quite enough for any woman.’

Field was increasingly isolated. His estranged wife was dead. His brother Henry was dead. Many of his friends were dead. He never entertained in his vast, empty house. His children and grandchildren lived in England. He eschewed the poker circle at his club – gambling, in his opinion, was a weakness. His only activity was work – and playing the occasional round of golf. Peter Funk, a colleague who had the courage to speak his mind, said to him: ‘Marshall, you have no home, no family, no happiness, nothing but money.’

Harry Selfridge had played a huge part in masterminding the development of the retail division and in helping to create Marshall Field’s fortune, but despite his lavish lifestyle, he was still merely a salaried man. When the business was incorporated as a private limited company in 1901, Field allocated 6,000 shares to Harry, but John Shedd got more, which irked him.

In the winter of 1903, with the retail division’s annual turnover now at $17 million, profits a shade under $1.5 million and the next phase of development being planned, Selfridge lobbied Marshall Field for more. It wasn’t just about money. He craved recognition. Gambling on the fact that Field would give him what he wanted (including the renaming of the business as ‘Marshall Field & Selfridge’) he made his bid – and lost.

Field turned him down, and with that, Harry Selfridge made plans to leave.

‘Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.’
George Eliot

I
n the early 1930s, Harry Gordon Selfridge had his portrait painted by Sir William Orpen RA. The artist captured his subject looking contemplative and dignified, pen in hand, studying what might perhaps have been a financial statement. Among the large collection of treasured family memorabilia packed away into trunks and boxes at the home of Simon Wheaton Smith, Harry Selfridge’s great-grandson, is that same portrait turned into a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing could be more apt in trying to fathom Harry Selfridge. The man was puzzling indeed.

In 1903, he was living in considerable comfort with his wife and family in their imposing house at 117 Lake Shore Drive, and at their even larger weekend home on Lake Geneva. He was a respected member of the business community, running what was virtually his own fiefdom at Marshall Field where he was doing a job he loved and receiving ever-increasing profits by dint of his shareholding. Selfridge had great faith, indeed an almost messianic belief, in what
he
thought was the right way forward commercially. But he forgot one salient fact. It wasn’t his business.

Nancy Koehn of Harvard Business School, one of the world’s leading authorities on entrepreneurial history, has made an extensive study of Marshall Field & Co. ‘Selfridge,’ she says, ‘deserves a lot
of credit for bringing Field along, and helping him understand new developments in retailing.’ On the topic of Harry’s complex personality, Professor Koehn says: ‘He was pushy, exuberant, with panache and vision.’ However, she adds that what killed the partnership was Harry’s overweening ambition. ‘Field would have looked at his extravagances with a pursing of the lips – everything from the size of his office to the scale of his lifestyle – all this from a man with no visible investments, who lived solely off the business.’

Chief among Harry’s ambitions had always been that Marshall Field should expand beyond Chicago. Disillusioned by Field’s refusal to open in New York, Selfridge set his sights even higher. Having made several buying trips to England, and being increasingly enamoured with the business opportunities he saw there, he lobbied Field to open a branch in London. Marshall Field himself knew England well. Indeed, his daughter Ethel (recently divorced and now married to naval officer David Beatty) lived there, as did his son Marshall II. Visiting them was one thing, opening an overseas business quite another.

Harry also wanted to adjust the system whereby the store buyers had first and foremost to source from the wholesale division, to whom they paid a 6 per cent levy on all goods. In the early days, there had been advantages in sourcing bulk goods – especially household linen, hosiery and other basics – from the division. It was quick, easy and, even with the levy, cost-effective. But fashion and accessories were a different matter. Selfridge had long felt that the wholesale offerings were simply too conservative, too ‘safe’, and not in keeping with the needs of Chicago’s increasingly sophisticated shoppers. He wanted the store’s retail buyers to have a free hand in where – and from whom – they ordered their stock. The idea was anathema to Marshall Field and, unsurprisingly, won little support from John Shedd, the altogether calmer, more conservative favourite of Field, who ran the wholesale department.

Finally, there was the question of a change in name for the store. Field was growing old and his son played no part in the business, while Selfridge had poured every ounce of energy he had into the store. His
achievements had been spectacular – in his own mind he
was
part of the store – and he wanted his name over the door.

There were few colleagues Harry Selfridge could talk to. He wasn’t a man who shared his intimate fears and feelings easily. The hierarchical structure at Marshall Field was dominated by the original, elderly partners who were Field men to the core, and he was at odds with his one potential ally, John Shedd. There was, however, one person who was always ready to listen and offer shrewd advice. His best and most loyal friend was his mother. To outsiders, Madam Selfridge seemed to be merely gentle, dignified and kindly. To those who knew her better, however, she was something else entirely. The costume designer and artist Grace Lovat Fraser, who later became close to the Selfridge family in London, wrote: ‘Madam Selfridge was white-haired and tiny. Always dressed in black with lots of exquisite lace, she seemed the embodiment of a classic sweet old lady. But her appearance was misleading, for though she looked frail she was strong and hardy, had a keen brain and was an excellent business woman. For all her deceptive fragility, she could be unobtrusively formidable and was a very important influence in her son’s career.’

Harry’s mother’s support was crucial. No doubt buoyed by her belief that he should strike out on his own, when Harry heard that the nearby store being built for Schlesinger & Mayer was discreetly on the market, he made a spontaneous decision to raise the funds and buy it himself. The formal records of the transaction have vanished. Some say he raised enough money from bankers to buy the freehold for $5 million. That seems unlikely given that Marshall Field himself was the freeholder. Field rarely, if ever, sold investment property, and he certainly wouldn’t have sold it to Harry Selfridge. Others infer that Selfridge simply took over the lease, which at the time was owned by David Mayer and the retail magnate Henry Siegel, who had bought out Leopold Schlesinger a year or so earlier.

What is certain is that Harry’s new store was, and remains today, a beautiful building. Designed by the pioneering commercial architect Louis Sullivan – who numbered Frank Lloyd Wright among his staff
– in collaboration with the engineer Dankmar Adler, the twelve-storey, terracotta-clad corner site, with its elaborate ironwork ornamentation on the lower façade, had taken five years to complete. By the time it was finished, Adler had died, Sullivan’s practice was in decline and Mayer was broke.

In the spring of 1904, as building work neared completion, Henry Siegel must have been only too pleased to consign the lease. For Selfridge, it was a huge step. He was risking everything on a single throw, but for a man with a gambler’s soul, who lived and worked in the then capital city of gambling, it was worth it. Selfridge was now faced with the task of stocking and staffing his own store, as well as finding tenants for the upper floors. He also had to explain his decision to Marshall Field. The atmosphere in Field’s office that day must have been icy. Having admitted that he was leaving, and that he had bought Schlesinger & Mayer, Selfridge offered to stay and train his replacement. Field’s chilly reply to the man who had worked for him for twenty-five years was: ‘No, Mr Selfridge, you can leave tomorrow if it suits you.’ With that, Harry cleared his desk.

When the paperwork involved in his settlement from Marshall Field was completed, Harry Selfridge had liquid assets of well over a million dollars as well as ownership of two substantial houses. His plans made news, but neither he nor Field gave much away about what had happened. Interviewed by the media, Selfridge merely talked about ‘his great desire to become head of a business of my own’, saying he was ‘absolutely confident of success’ and that it was ‘time to take the step as he had just turned 40’ – shaving eight years off his age. Marshall Field remained tight-lipped when journalists questioned him about the loss of his star executive. Indeed, he rarely talked about it even to his own colleagues, other than saying to John Shedd, ‘We’ll have to get another office boy.’ Selfridge was more gracious. Field had been a huge part of his life, the dominant albeit distant father-figure he had craved to please. He never forgot him. When he opened Selfridge’s in London, a portrait of Marshall Field took pride of place in his office.

With a fanfare of brass-band music and flags flying, Harry G. Selfridge & Co., Chicago, opened its doors on 13 June 1904. It was an auspicious time to be opening a new business. Affluent consumers had taken to the road in their new automobiles and were driving them out to newly opened country clubs where they eagerly took up the fashionable game of golf: both hobbies necessitated extensive, not to mention expensive, specialist wardrobes. Automobiles had hit the city like a whirlwind. In 1900 there had only been 100 permits issued for motor vehicles, but by the time Harry Selfridge opened his store, there were nearly 1,500 registered drivers in Chicago. The City Council, perturbed by the trend for ‘scorching’, as driving fast was called, set a speed limit of ten miles per hour and required drivers to have ‘full use of arms and legs and be free of a drug habit’. In a city where rich and poor alike enjoyed their drink, no mention was made of alcohol.

Selfridge had long specialized in store windows that presented a themed story. Now his beautifully dressed opening displays paid homage to the latest fashion in ladies’ and gentlemen’s ‘motoring clothes’. Female mannequins were dressed like the subjects of Sir William Nicholson’s exquisite painting
La Belle Chauffeuse
, in duster coats, huge gauntlet gloves and big hats tied under the chin with a chiffon stole, while the male mannequins were shown in ‘go faster’ goggles and belted tweed driving jackets. Picnic hampers and leather-strapped luggage completed the picture.

Selfridge must have gone through a great deal of anguish in the run-up to the opening. It would have been hard for him travelling to work each morning, walking into his own elegant building, but wishing it was the bigger one down the road. Twenty-five years at Field’s were not easily forgotten. Bonds had been forged which could not easily be broken. He later explained his emotions during those troubled times to a journalist from the
Saturday Evening Post
: ‘I was extremely miserable competing with my own people – the people with whom I had spent so many happy and gloriously exciting years. I tried to beat down the feeling, but my unhappiness increased.’
Selfridge tried everything he could to energize his new staff but they simply couldn’t meet his impossibly high standards. ‘There’s no one here who knows
how
to do it,’ he told his wife sadly, perhaps only now realizing how skilful the vast back-room team had been at Marshall Field.

After being forced to leave so abruptly – no presentation, no gifts, no party, no recognition
at all
for what he had done over twenty-five years – Selfridge became a man dispossessed. Always the eternal optimist, now he became depressed. Suddenly, life at Harrose Hall, his country house on Lake Geneva, where he could tend his greenhouses full of rare orchids took on a new allure. Just three months after starting his new business, he made a spontaneous decision to sell up and retire. He called his ex-colleague John Shedd for help and advice. Shedd came up with the reputable retailers Carson, Pirie & Scott, who were anxious to relocate, and arranged a meeting between Sam Pirie and Harry Selfridge. The canny Mr Pirie struck a hard bargain, offering Selfridge – who had wanted a $250,000 premium over and above the original cost of his lease – $150,000 plus his supplier liabilities. Desperate to get out, Harry accepted.

Not unsurprisingly, Harry found retirement dull. He pottered around the grounds at Harrose Hall, tending his roses and orchids, and spending time with his young family. But it wasn’t enough. He bought himself a steam yacht which apparently rarely left its moorings, and attempted to take up golf, a game which he played abysmally badly. His friends urged him to take up public office, which in Chicago would have been a challenge in itself. The idea didn’t appeal. ‘No politics for me,’ he said, ‘it’s too much like being put in the pillory.’ He would probably have agreed with a reporter from the London
Daily Mail
who, after visiting the city, had written: ‘Chicago presents more splendid attractions and more hideous repulsions than any city I know. Other places hide their dark side out of sight – Chicago treasures it to the heart of the business quarter and gives it a veneer.’ He couldn’t have put it better himself. Chicago’s tycoons were ruthless. Harry Selfridge was never really part of their world.
Despite being a manager
par excellence
, to most of them he would always remain ‘Field’s ex-office boy’.