Famous Nathan (31 page)

These were generous concessions, ones that had not been granted to Murray when he had set out on his own almost a decade before. Nathan was more flexible this time around. But he didn't have to be happy about it.

“[Nathan and Ida] didn't say much [about the new business],” Sol remembered. “It was too personal for them, the fact that I left his business, their business, so they weren't going to praise me for it. They wouldn't say something positive, because it was hurting them, the fact that I did that. They would have preferred I stayed and suffered.”

Sol put a lot of consideration and money into designing a comfortable, clean, and attractive environment, down to the particular penny white tile he chose for the walls. It might have been possible to take the boy out of Nathan's Famous, but you couldn't take Nathan's Famous out of the boy. Snacktime imported many of the techniques, the policies, and the general double-time atmosphere from the Coney Island store. The only things missing were the screams of the roller-coaster riders and the beach sand.

“It was an interesting situation,” Sol said. “Because many times, I had agreed with my father, against Murray, in terms of what Murray wanted to do or what he did. I had a very similar viewpoint with my father.”

When Snacktime opened on September 17, 1963, Sol employed an old publicity trick that Nathan had used several times. He gave away free hot dogs all day, an estimated forty thousand total. The lines outside the new store stretched around the block, all the way to Macy's on Herald Square.

Sol also poached more than a few workers from his father. He hired Al Shalik as general manager of Snacktime. Shalik had been Sol's own longtime right-hand man at Coney Island, a hardworking manager whom he had also brought along when he transferred to Oceanside.

“I had worked for Nathan until 1963,” Shalik said. “But when I was on Thirty-Fourth Street with Sol, we ran that place the way we were taught to run Nathan's at Coney Island.”

Even those Coney Island workers who didn't follow Sol to Midtown approved of Snacktime when they stopped by. Hy Brown: “To build an operation with two doors, customers coming in one way and going out the other way, that was really good. Very good thought went into it. He had each station separate, the potatoes and the franks and the drinks. It worked very nice, very smooth.”

Snacktime's grand opening brought father and sons together for a celebration, along with many of the other Handwerker relations. Murray and Dorothy were there, brimming with happiness. There didn't seem to be a trace of jealousy in the older brother's response to the new place. In effect, Sol's founding of Snacktime made it official. Murray's way was now cleared to become the unchallenged boss of Nathan's Famous. He was jubilant, wishing Sol well, but with an undeniable undertone of “good riddance.”

As for Sol, he still nursed grudges from when he had worked with Murray on Coney Island. Especially galling was the high-handed way he felt the older son treated people, including Sol but other veteran employees, as well. “I would never forgive him,” Sol said of Murray. “Never. He was very selfish and egotistical, and he had no feelings for the people.”

Nathan and Ida had a more bittersweet reaction to the antagonism between their sons. They both realized that Snacktime's grand opening actually represented a sad ending, a signal that Nathan's dream of a family dynasty at the Coney Island store had finally died.

“The two brothers really could have made a go of the business, if they were willing to,” said Jay Cohen. “If they could ever work out a way how to do this thing together. If they could, if they could, if they could. They couldn't.”

It must have been very difficult for Murray to be the oldest son of Nathan Handwerker. It seems almost inevitable that he would overcompensate for his father's lack of praise by trying too hard to distinguish himself. Nathan was competitive with his sons, so it was not surprising that Murray was competitive with Sol.

The feuding between Sol and Murray repeated the history of bad blood between the Handwerker brothers of the generation before. Such psychologists as R. D. Laing believe human behaviors are handed down from generation to generation like heirlooms. Perhaps it was fated that Sol and Murray would not get along. But the end result was the permanent split that happened when the younger brother went out on his own and left the older brother in command of the business.

Nathan appeared surprised and a tad disgruntled when he recognized so many workers behind the Snacktime counters as former employees of Nathan's Famous. Sol's new place was, in fact, a Nathan's Famous in all but name. It also fit the common formula developed first by Nathan and later, independently, by Ray Kroc: limited menu, speedy service, dependable quality.

The humongous Snacktime sign towered over Thirty-Fourth Street, visible from the escalators of the new Madison Square Garden to fans heading up to the arena's Knicks or Rangers games. A companion neon sign was a true work of vernacular art, portraying a cartoon mascot man holding a hot dog and downing a soda, with the liquid visibly pouring into his belly as he drank.

The new enterprise was a rousing success. Snacktime grossed $1 million in its first twelve months of operation. Sol was able to pay back Nathan's $250,000 start-up loan a year after opening. More than that, Snacktime served to validate Sol's vision for small-store expansion. On a personal level, it freed the family's youngest child from the domination of his father and older brother.

Sol never worked for Nathan or under Murray again.

*   *   *

With his hand now firmly on the rudder of Nathan's Famous, Murray continued with his own expansion plans. In 1965, he opened an outlet at 2290 Central Avenue in Yonkers. In keeping with his bigger-is-better philosophy, and not having fully learned his lesson at Oceanside, the new place was a ten-thousand-square-foot colossus. As with Roadside Rest, Murray took over a struggling restaurant, Adventurer's Inn, an amusement-park-themed eatery that had just relocated from its former quarters in the Cross County Shopping Center.

Nathan's Famous Yonkers retained some of the features of Adventurer's Inn. “The Yonkers place had a tremendous game room,” remembers Hy Brown. “It was on a big, tremendous parking lot, across the street from a Castro.” A bakery in the basement churned out buns for the store's frankfurters and rye bread for the deli sandwiches. Nathan refused to submit to a franchise arrangement when opening new stores. He insisted that Murray buy the Adventurer's Inn site outright, and gave him money to do so.

The new store—technically, the first Nathan's Famous not located on Long Island—had a bumpy start. The game room was operated under a separate contract, as was the bakery. The managers of the restaurant came in via the new scientific training programs instituted by Murray and Dr. Eimicke. The results were mixed. In fact, it seemed that the overabundance of new management trainees had motivated the purchase of the Yonkers store, rather than the other way around. All those new employees needed a place to work.

“Murray forced the expansion,” said Hy Brown. “When he bought Yonkers, I don't think he was ready to cope with the problems. [Dr. Eimicke] had brought people in and trained them, people who had their way of doing things, not Nathan's way.”

The management difficulties were eventually smoothed out, in part by bringing experienced employees from Coney Island. After a rocky start, sales at the Yonkers location started to rise.

The success came at a crucial time. Murray was pushing a plan for the company to go public. To lure new investors for the initial Nathan's Famous stock offering, he could now point to three successful stores: Yonkers, Oceanside, and the Coney Island mother ship.

The stock sale, when it occurred in 1968, was hugely successful. Originally issued at $8 and opening at $14, a single share of Nathan's Famous soon hit $46. The stock then split two for one and headed even higher, reaching $42. The market cap for Nathan's Famous essentially meant that investors had valued the company at $145 million, the equivalent of $855 million in today's money.

Here was the payoff for all the decades of hard work and long hours. Everyone involved became wealthy, at least on paper. Nathan, Sol, Murray, and Leah each would end up with million-dollar stock holdings. When the stock peaked, Nathan was worth $40 million.

Veteran employees were given the chance to purchase shares at the initial public offering price. Joe Handwerker was granted shares and bought in heavily, winding up owning a full one percent of the outstanding stock. “He was a rich man,” said his cousin Sidney, who also bought into the company. Murray laid down a rule that insiders from the business had to hold the stock for at least two years before unloading. That was okay. As the price continued to climb, no one considered getting out. The ride was too good, as exciting as a trip aboard the Cyclone.

Dr. Eimicke was one of those who benefited from the sale of shares in the company. He had pushed vigorously for the initial public offering and was granted generous stock options when it came. “Vic was one of the big, big promoters of the idea of going public,” his wife, Maxine, recalled. “He had a lot of their stock.”

The year of the IPO, Murray was elevated to president of Nathan's Famous, Inc. The rise in the company's share price made him look like a financial genius. Nathan remained as chairman of the board of directors but became increasingly less and less involved with the business.

There were a few doubters. “The day Nathan told me he was retiring, I sold my stock, I swear to God,” said Jay Cohen. “Because the world knew it. The world knew that as long as Nathan was alive, as long as he was out there chomping on that cigar, the place was going to be well taken care of.”

Murray wasn't finished yet. Flush with cash from the public offering, Murray secured a beachhead in Manhattan, taking over another fading restaurant, this one located at Broadway and Forty-Third Street in Times Square.

“They raised millions of dollars going public,” recalled Marsha Abramson. “The money furnished lavish executive offices as well as the store on Forty-Third Street.”

Again, Murray went massive. The former Toffenetti's had been called “the cathedral of restaurants” when it opened in 1940, a three-story, glass-fronted modern building with an escalator and an open, all-stainless-steel kitchen. Adding to the glamour of the place were lavish washrooms, air-conditioned telephone booths, ornate chandeliers, and walls covered in expansive surrealist murals. Calling itself “the Busiest Restaurant on the World's Busiest Corner,” Toffenetti's featured seating for a thousand and a menu, as its motto proclaimed, “Famous for Ham and Sweets.”

The sons of founder Dario Toffenetti sold out in 1968, and Murray leased the space from its new owners. With three floors to play with, he really went to town, creating a Nathan's Famous outlet on ground level, and a steakhouse and bar with formal dining on the lower floor.

“It was common knowledge among senior personnel that Murray always wanted to open a fancy restaurant,” said Charles Schneck. “He was very excited about getting the old Toffenetti's and turning that into a Nathan's. He just wouldn't listen to those who tried to talk him out of it.”

Murray also leased new company headquarters one block away, in the brand-new One Astor Plaza office building on Forty-Fourth Street. The interiors there were particularly extravagant, with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, expensive wood paneling, and Persian carpets.

Part of the effort was for show, a shrewd move on Murray's part to portray the business as thriving. He could now invite potential investors to the Nathan's Famous offices, impressing them with the gorgeous surroundings and crossroads-of-the-world location. The executives hired by Dr. Eimicke felt right at home. Their salaries were in keeping with their environment.

On the main floor of the old Toffenetti's, Murray created what his PR guru Morty Matz called “a hot dog mecca.” The new store debuted with all the hype that Matz and his partner, Max Rosey, could muster.

“Nathan was there, and of course he was the special interest of the press,” Matz recalled. “He would tell his stories about how, as a young man, he used to buy a cake of soap for a nickel and stand in line in a public shower to bathe. Or how when he opened the original Nathan's in Coney Island, he would work for twenty-four hours on weekends—he would not sleep.”

Despite these best efforts, the new outlet quickly proved to be a disaster. The Times Square Nathan's Famous did not do enough business to support the location's sky-high rent. The formal dining room and bar on the lower floor failed to attract a clientele.

“They found out the hard way that people don't come to a hot dog place to go downstairs to a steakhouse,” noted Hy Brown. “The Forty-Third Street store was a complete abortion and money drain. Everybody associated with its construction was on the take. It was built wrong, it was overstaffed, everybody was stealing, security was five times what was needed. Oy vey, it was bad.”

It was Oceanside all over again. Murray was forced to summon seasoned managers from the Coney Island store to right the listing ship. The bloated workforce of four hundred had to be trimmed in half. Once again, Murray needed help to pull himself back from the brink.

“To me, it was sad, how Murray ran the business and what he thought he had to do to make it successful,” Sol said of his brother. “I was happiest when I left. I didn't have to deal with him anymore.”

“Murray's ideas were always grandiose,” said Hy Brown. “Oceanside and Times Square both ate money.”

The blows just kept on coming. The National Labor Relations Board investigated the company and found its old-style personnel policies unfair and illegal. A third strike hit the company, effectively ending the “family business” ethos that had been put in place in Nathan's time.