Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (11 page)

Selfridge had a cavalier attitude towards money. He lived extravagantly, spent prodigiously on those he loved and had a belief that all would always be well – regardless of what he owed. In later years, when his personal overdraft had reached monumental proportions, one of his bankers in London remarked, ‘Mr Selfridge seems to enjoy the sensation of debt.’ In Chicago, with his family and perhaps his age in mind, he took out a high-level life insurance policy. He also tried his hand at investments. Invited to put money into the White Rock Soda Company – carbonated drinks being all the rage – he turned the offer down as being too closely associated with diluting whiskey. However, he did decide to invest in a gold mine. In the winter of 1904, he became President of the Sullivan Creek Mining and Milling Company, providing the finance to drill for gold at the Calico mine in Tuolumne County, California.

It all started off rather well. The Chicago firm of Allis-Chalmers – then the world’s largest manufacturer of mining equipment – was on board advising Selfridge as to what equipment would be needed, and the mining expert William Chalmers seemed impressed with the initial geological data from what was a rich gold area. Drilling tests and surveys went on throughout the spring of 1905, with Selfridge paying all the costs.

That summer the Selfridge family left to spend a season on the French Riviera. There, letters arrived from America requesting more money for equipment and wages. Then came the news that Selfridge had longed to hear. They had found gold at 190 feet – enough to send for assay, and enough to convince Selfridge that he was about to become very rich. Late in August, he settled his family at the Ritz in Paris, while he went to London on business. He had a meeting to attend.

At the age of 71, Marshall Field suddenly had a spring in his step and a smile on his face. He’d put a smile on the face of Europe’s most important jeweller’s too as he shopped for a sumptuous collection
of diamonds and pearls – presents for his new bride, Delia Caton. Mr and Mrs Arthur Caton were friends of Marshall Field who, it was always said, had long held a
tendre
for his neighbour’s attractive, elegant wife. When Arthur died in 1904, Field seized the moment and proposed to Delia. They sailed to England in July 1905 and were married on 5 September at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Selfridge’s trip to London was timed precisely so he could visit Field – and not just to congratulate him on his new marriage.

Two earlier biographies of Selfridge have claimed that he went to see his old boss with an audacious offer to take over the Chicago store. Nancy Koehn flatly rejects the idea: ‘Selfridge could never have raised that amount of money, and even if he could, Field would never have sold.’ However, the talk at the time was that Harry Selfridge had the support of the mighty J. P. Morgan himself in his planned acquisition, and that Field was sufficiently intrigued to agree to ‘look at’ his proposals. Whether Selfridge was looking at London in his own right, as he later claimed, or whether he was proposing an outpost of Marshall Field there, we’ll never know. But one way or the other, any hopes of doing business with Mr Field were about to be destroyed.

The newly-wed Fields returned to Chicago early in October that year, taking with them Marshall’s son, his wife Albertine and their young family. Also en route back to America were the Selfridge family. By the time they got home on 10 October, news had arrived that the gold mine was barren. What little gold there was would be too expensive to excavate. By the time the company was wound up, Selfridge had lost $60,000 or, in today’s money, just under $1,200,000.

In November, tragedy of a far greater kind struck the Field household when Field’s troubled son died in hospital from a gunshot wound to the stomach. Not unnaturally, the family claimed one of his guns had been discharged accidentally. Others said he had committed suicide, while the talk of the town was that he had been shot by one of the girls at the city’s most notorious brothel, the Everleigh Club. Owned by two genteel Kentucky sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh,
the brothel was the ultimate in luxury. The sisters had been just 21 and 23 when they opened their ‘house’, dedicated to servicing the desires of Chicago’s wealthy men. Ada did the hiring. ‘I talk with each applicant myself,’ she said proudly in the promotional brochure she circulated. ‘Girls must have worked somewhere before coming here – we do not take amateurs.’ Indeed they didn’t. The Everleigh Club girls were not merely beauties in ball gowns. They were expertly trained in the art of flattery, good conversation and even better sex, and several of them married extremely well. The Club had Silver and Copper Rooms for the mining kings, and the Gold Room was refurbished each year with real gold leaf. An ensemble of violin, cello, piano and, occasionally, a harp provided soothing music. The kitchen was run by superb chefs, and the cellar stocked with the finest champagne – Minna didn’t serve red wine, reasoning it made the customers sleepy. On Christmas Eve, the sisters would give a special party exclusively for the ‘gentlemen of the press’.

The Everleigh Club of course also offered gambling, and the stakes were high. Minna, who was convinced men preferred gambling to girls, placed a thirty-minute limit on roulette and dice. The club was never raided – the sisters paid the police well for their protection – and its opulent tranquillity was rarely shattered, except on one memorable occasion, when the rabidly anti-smoking campaigner Lucy Page Gaston stormed in yelling, ‘Minna, you can stop your girls from going straight to the devil – you must stop them smoking cigarettes.’

Although father and son had never been close, Field was grief-stricken. He carried on working – supervising the next phase of the momentous rebuilding programme at the store – and playing his weekly round of golf. On New Year’s Day 1906, though it was bitterly cold, he and three friends played eighteen holes, traipsing knee-deep through the snow in search of their special red golf balls. By the next day he had developed a sore throat but insisted on travelling to New York with his wife and valet. By the end of the week he had contracted severe pneumonia from which he never recovered, dying in his suite at the Holland House Hotel.

Field had planned his will very carefully. Determined there would be no squandering of his hard-earned fortune, he had set up complex trusts. On the death of the immediate beneficiaries, the capital would revert to the Field estate, and his grandchildren would not receive the bulk of their money until they were 50. His daughter Ethel meanwhile became seriously rich, enabling her to spring to her naval husband’s defence when he was threatened with disciplinary action following the straining of his ship’s engines. ‘What, court martial my David? I’ll buy them a new ship!’ she exclaimed. In the event, the Navy relented, but Ethel’s $6 million inheritance did buy her husband a Scottish grouse moor, a hunting lodge in Leicestershire, a steam yacht and a mansion in London. Four years later, at the age of 39, David Beatty became the youngest admiral in the Royal Navy since Horatio Nelson.

Harry Selfridge mourned Marshall Field deeply. Whatever low points their strained relationship had reached, Field had been Selfridge’s mentor. His death marked the end of the great era at Marshall Field. Potter Palmer was dead. Levi Leiter was dead (leaving Mary Curzon a very rich woman). As specified in Field’s will, John Shedd became President of the store, continuing with the expansion plans laid down by the founder. For Harry Selfridge, at the age of 50, the time had come to consider his future.

‘L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.’
Napoleon Bonaparte

I
n 1906, no one meeting Harry Selfridge for the first time would have dreamt he was 50. He looked a decade younger, talked with endless enthusiasm and exhausted people half his age with his boundless energy. Not that he exercised to keep fit. ‘Thinking is enough physical exercise for me,’ he used to say. When he was pondering some major – or even minor – decision, he would sit in his swivel chair, turn it towards the window, lock his hands behind his head, and stare into the distance. No one ever dared interrupt him. When he’d decided on the outcome, he’d swing round quickly and say, ‘Right, here’s what we’ll do, let’s get on with it.’ And that was that. Once he’d made up his mind, he never changed it.

Craving a new challenge, and encouraged by his close friend Walter Cottingham, of the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company (an enterprising firm whose motto was ‘Cover the Earth’), Selfridge made up his mind to move to London and open his dream store. The awesome Selfridge energy swung into operation. Letters were written, cablegrams sent, telephone calls made to friends and acquaintances, meetings arranged. He was back at work and loving it. As far as his family were concerned, if he was happy, they were happy. They were probably relieved to see him so energized, and didn’t mind at all when
he took off for London, staying first at the Savoy Hotel and thereafter renting an elegant furnished apartment in Whitehall Court, an imposing mansion block with a spectacular view over St James’s Park.

One of the essential requirements for gracious living in Edwardian London being live-in servants, a Scottish couple, Mr and Mrs Fraser, moved in during March that year, Mrs Fraser as housekeeper and Mr Fraser first as valet and later butler. The Frasers were to be part of the fabric of Selfridge family life for the next two decades. Fraser fitted the stereotype of the British butler perfectly. Depending on his mood, his manner would swing between the unctuous and the supercilious: a family friend described him as ‘a cross between Disraeli and Micawber’. In 1921, when the Selfridge family had just moved into the palatial splendour of Lansdowne House, Fraser answered the bell and found a distinguished elderly gentleman on the doorstep proffering a flat box. The visitor was Monsieur Pierre Cambon, the ex-French Ambassador to the Court of St James, who on his return visits to London always called first at his old friend Lord Lansdowne’s house, bringing with him a gift of a very ripe Brie. Confronted by a strange servant, Monsieur Cambon asked if Lord Lansdowne was at home. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Fraser, suspiciously sniffing at the parcel, ‘and he certainly doesn’t live here.’ Monsieur Cambon – and presumably his cheese – beat a hasty and confused retreat.

From the moment he arrived in London, Selfridge was determined not to be thought of as a ‘flash Yankee’, a type viewed with grave suspicion by London’s business community, who were still reeling from the dubious antics of the transport tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, known to have been a contemporary of Selfridge in Chicago.

Backed by American money, Yerkes had arrived in London in 1900, aiming to feather his nest by developing the city’s underground railway system. Having manipulated his way into gaining control of the Metropolitan District Railway, Yerkes audaciously mounted a ‘rescue’ bid for the half-completed Bakerloo line. The Bakerloo had been left stranded when its original founder had committed suicide
by swallowing cyanide following his conviction for fraud. Yerkes (the inspiration for Theodore Dreiser’s trilogy on corrupt financiers) subsequently added the Charing Cross, the Euston & Hampstead and the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railways to his portfolio, as well as financing the building of the Lots Road power station to supply the burgeoning electric lines. Discovered to have been falsifying the accounts – his speciality being to pay massive management charges into his private bank account – Yerkes fled to New York, where he died in 1905. He left behind him a network of deep tunnels yet to be completed and, in many circles, a deep-rooted mistrust of American methods of business. It was all close enough for Selfridge to be alarmed at being thought of as anything less than punctilious in his business dealings.

Anxious for the business of retailing to be taken seriously, and partially as his own armour against a potentially hostile environment, Selfridge adopted a formal style, dressing as though he was a merchant banker rather than merely a merchant. He didn’t retreat into frock coats, but the pearl-grey, braided morning coats he had favoured in Chicago were now toned down to darker shades of charcoal and black, worn with either striped or plain trousers. He remained faithful to his signature high-cut stiff collars and added a classic white ‘slip’ to frame his waistcoat, and in the evening he was immaculately kitted out in white tie and tails. There was always a sense of formality about his clothes – no one could ever remember seeing him dressed in anything even remotely casual.

Knowing what he wanted to do was all very well. Knowing where to do it was the next challenge. His criteria were space and easy access. Bond Street as a location was fleetingly considered and then rejected as too narrow to suit his craving for scale. Regent Street was dismissed due to restrictions on size imposed by the Crown Estates. He seriously considered the Strand, finding a site that appealed, but negotiations over a lease apparently collapsed. Being a man obsessed with beautiful buildings, the allies he found to search for the ideal site were all acquaintances involved in building and architecture. Among
them was the young architect Delissa Joseph, who not only designed stations for the Underground Electric Railway Company but who also had a friend called Samuel Waring – who was interested in meeting Harry Selfridge.

By 1906, Samuel Waring was not only Chairman of the leading furniture manufacturer and retail business, Waring & Gillow, but also a director of a specialist building firm called Waring & White, a business run in association with the noted American construction engineer, James G. White. For Harry Selfridge, who needed an investment partner, Waring offered an irresistible combination of technical expertise and much-needed cash. Waring & White, under the skilful direction of the architects Charles Mewes and Arthur Davis, had just completed construction of the Ritz Hotel, London’s first steel-framed building. Selfridge, like Waring, was a guest at the hotel’s splendid opening-night dinner, where no doubt they discussed their plans to shake up London’s retail establishment. The two men, both spontaneous, super-charged, insomniac workaholics, quickly – in hindsight perhaps too quickly – agreed terms. In June that year they formed a company called Selfridge and Waring Ltd with capital of £1 million in 100,000 preference shares at £5 each, and 500,000 ordinary shares at £1 each. Selfridge had 150,006 shares and Waring 150,001.