Kane & Abel (1979) (68 page)

Richard had been making good use of his time at Harvard. By the beginning of his senior year he not only appeared set for a summa cum laude, but he was also playing the cello in the university orchestra and was second pitcher for the baseball team. As Kate liked to ask rhetorically, how many students spend Saturday afternoon playing baseball against Yale, and Sunday evening playing the cello in the Lowell concert hall?

Richard’s final year passed all too quickly, and when he left Harvard armed with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics, a cello and a baseball bat, all he required before reporting to the Business School on the other side of the Charles River was a good holiday. He flew off to Barbados with a girl named Mary Bigelow, of whose existence his parents were blissfully unaware. Miss Bigelow had studied music, among other things, at Vassar, and when they returned two months later, Richard took her home to meet his parents. William approved of Miss Bigelow; after all, she was Alan Lloyd’s great-niece.

Richard began his graduate course at Harvard Business School on October 1, 1954, after taking up residence in the Red House. The first thing he did was to throw out all his father’s cane furniture and to remove the paisley wallpaper that Matthew Lester had once thought so fashionable. His grandfather’s winged leather chair survived. He installed a television in the living room, an oak table in the dining room, a dishwasher in the kitchen and, more than occasionally, Miss Bigelow in the bedroom.

A
BEL CUT SHORT
a trip to Europe in November 1952 immediately upon hearing the news of David Maxton’s fatal heart attack. He attended the funeral in Chicago with George and Florentyna, and later told Mrs Maxton that she could be a guest at any Baron in the world whenever she pleased for the rest of her life. She could not understand why Mr Rosnovski had made such a generous gesture.

When Abel returned to New York the next day, he was delighted to find on the desk of his 42nd-floor office a report from Henry Osborne indicating that the Eisenhower Administration didn’t appear to be interested in pursuing an inquiry into Interstate Airways, possibly because the shares had retained their value for over a year. Eisenhower’s Vice President, Richard M. Nixon, seemed more involved in chasing the spectral communists whom Joe McCarthy had missed.

Abel spent the next two years flying back and forth across the Atlantic as he continued to build his overseas empire. He only wished the Europeans could erect new hotels at a pace the New World took for granted.

Florentyna opened the Paris Baron in July 1953 and the London Baron in December 1954. Barons were also at various stages of development in Brussels, Rome, Amsterdam, Geneva, Edinburgh, Cannes and Stockholm, all part of a ten-year expansion programme.

Abel had so many deadlines to cope with that he had little time to think about William Kane. He had not made any further attempt to buy stock in Lester’s Bank or its subsidiary companies, although he had held on to six per cent of the bank’s shares, in the hope he would still be given the chance to deal Kane another blow from which he would not recover quite so easily. Next time, Abel promised himself, he’d make sure he didn’t unwittingly break the law. He would have been the first to admit, if only to George, that Curtis Fenton would never have allowed him to make such a foolish mistake.

Abel had already suggested to Florentyna that she should join the board when she left Radcliffe at the end of the academic year. He had decided that she should take over responsibility for all the shops in his hotels and consolidate their buying, as they were fast becoming an empire in themselves.

Florentyna was excited by the prospect, but insisted that she must get some outside training before joining her father. She did not think that her natural gifts for design, colour coordination and organization were any substitute for experience. Abel suggested that she train in Switzerland under Monsieur Maurice at the famed Ecole Hotelie`re in Lausanne. Florentyna balked at the idea, explaining that she wanted to work for two years in a New York store before deciding whether or not to take charge of the Baron Group’s shops. She was determined to be worth employing, ‘And not just as my father’s daughter,’ she informed him. Abel thoroughly approved.

‘A New York store? That’s easily arranged,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Walter Hoving a call, and you can start at Tiffany’s.’

‘That’s exactly what I don’t want to do,’ said Florentyna, showing that she’d inherited her father’s streak of stubbornness. ‘What’s the equivalent of a junior waiter at the Plaza Hotel?’

‘A salesgirl at a department store,’ said Abel, laughing.

‘Then that’s the job I’ll be applying for.’

Abel stopped laughing. ‘Are you serious? With a degree from Radcliffe and all the travelling you’ve done, you want to be an anonymous salesgirl?’

‘Starting out as an anonymous waiter at the Plaza didn’t stop you from building up one of the most successful hotel groups in the world,’ replied Florentyna.

Abel knew when he was beaten. He had only to look into the steel grey eyes of his beautiful daughter to realize she had made up her mind, and that no amount of persuasion, gentle or otherwise, was going to change it.

After Florentyna had graduated from Radcliffe she spent a month in Europe with her father, while he checked progress on the latest Baron hotels. She officially opened the Brussels Baron, where she made a conquest of the handsome young managing director, whom Abel accused of smelling of garlic. She had to give him up three days later when it reached the kissing stage, but she never admitted to her father that garlic had been the reason.

When she and Abel returned to New York, she immediately applied for the vacant position (the words used in the classified advertisement) of junior sales assistant’ at Bloomingdale’s. On the application form she gave her name as Jessie Kovats, well aware that no one would leave her in peace if they thought she was the daughter of the Chicago Baron.

Despite protests from her father, she left her suite in the New York Baron and started looking for somewhere to live. Once again Abel gave in, and presented her with a small but elegant apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street near the East River as a twenty-first birthday present.

Florentyna had long before resolved not to let her friends know that she was going to work at Bloomingdale’s. She feared they would all want to visit her at the store and her cover would be blown in days, making it impossible for her to be treated like any other trainee. When her friends did enquire, she told them she was helping to run the shops in her father’s hotels. None of them gave her reply a second thought.

After completing the store’s training course, Jessie Kovats - it took her some time to get used to the name - started in cosmetics. The shop assistants in Bloomingdale’s worked in pairs, and Florentyna immediately turned this to her advantage by choosing to work with the laziest girl in the department. This arrangement suited both girls, as Florentyna’s choice, a blonde named Maisie, had only two interests in life: the clock when its hands pointed to 6 p.m., and men. The former happened once a day, the latter all through the day.

The two girls soon became comrades without exactly being friends. Florentyna learned a lot from Maisie about how to avoid work without being spotted by the floor manager, as well as how to get picked up by a man.

The cosmetic counter’s profits were well up after the girls’ first six months together, even though Maisie had spent most of her time trying out the products rather than selling them. She could take two hours just repainting her fingernails. Florentyna, in contrast, had found that she had a natural gift for selling - and thoroughly enjoyed it. After only a few weeks the floor supervisor considered her as proficient as many employees who had been with the company for years.

When Florentyna was moved to Better Dresses, Maisie went along by mutual consent, and passed much of her time trying on the clothes while Florentyna sold them. Maisie was able to attract men - even those in tow with their wives or sweethearts - simply by looking at them. Once they were ensnared, Florentyna would move in and sell them something. Few escaped with untapped wallets.

The profits for the next six months in Better Dresses were up by 22 per cent, and the floor supervisor concluded that the two girls obviously worked well together. Florentyna said nothing to contradict this impression. While other assistants were always complaining about how little work their partners did, Florentyna continually praised Maisie as the ideal colleague, who had taught her so much about how a big store operated. She didn’t mention the useful advice that Maisie also imparted on how to cope with over-amorous male customers.

The greatest compliment an assistant can receive at Blooming-dale’s is to be asked to serve on one of the front counters facing Lexington Avenue, and so to be among the first faces seen by the public as they enter the building. It was rare for a girl to be invited to work there until she had been with the store for at least five years. Maisie had been with Bloomingdale’s since she was seventeen, a full five years, by the time Florentyna had completed her first. But because their sales record together was so impressive, the manager decided to try them both out in the stationery department on the ground floor. Maisie was unable to derive much personal advantage from the stationery department, for although she didn’t care much for reading she cared even less for writing. Florentyna wasn’t sure after having spent a year with her that she could read or write. Nevertheless, the new post pleased Maisie greatly because she basked in the added attention it brought her. Florentyna suspected that some of the men who walked in off the street to buy stationery did so for no other reason than to chat up Maisie.

Abel admitted to George that he had once slipped into Bloomingdale’s and covertly watched Florentyna at work, and had to confess that she was damned good. Florentyna was unquestionably a chip off a formidable old block, and he had no doubt that she would have few problems taking on the responsibilities he had planned for her.