Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (30 page)

In the post-war era, the heady combination of sun, sea and gambling in France was all the rage. And even if you didn’t play, you could pay to watch those who did. All you needed were some evening clothes and the sum of £3, for which, on presentation of your passport, you could enter a casino. A further few pounds would buy dinner and a bottle of wine, and the opportunity to dance to the band which played until the small hours of the morning. For another payment of £4 10 shillings, those who cared to watch fortunes being won and lost were allowed to step beyond the ropes and stanchions and enter the
salles privées
where those for whom gambling was a way of life spent their evenings. There, the powerful players showed they could afford to lose as well as win.

Among those who could well afford to lose were the Aga Khan, Major Jack Coats, the Duke of Westminster, a clutch of Rothschilds, the Belgian financier Jacques Wittouck, Marshall Field III, the Kimberley diamond mining millionaire Solly Joel, King Alfonso of Spain, the Kings of Sweden and Denmark, Indian maharajas and their various wives, the automobile magnate André Citroën, the cognac producer James Hennessy, the Canadian tobacco tycoon Sir Mortimer Davis and various super-rich war profiteers. Millionaires from Chile, Argentina and America flocked to the tables, although after the revolution the impoverished Russian grand dukes weren’t able to play unless they had hooked a rich lover to foot the bills. When Coco Chanel finished her affair with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who had been earning a precarious living as a champagne salesman,
she passed him on to a wealthy girlfriend, saying: ‘You can have him. These Grand Dukes are too expensive to keep.’ In fact Dmitri had introduced Coco to Ernest Beaux, who created Chanel No. 5 for her, so the poor man had more than earned his keep.

Above and on the facing page: The Dolly Sisters at the tables in Le Touquet, 1928, by Cecil Beaton (Cecil Beaton/Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd)

Each season, the gambling group migrated
en masse
to their chosen habitat. In the summer it was always Deauville, Le Touquet or Biarritz, in the winter, Monte Carlo, Cannes or occasionally Nice. The casinos of France were run by Eugène Cornuché – who had made his fortune through Maxim’s restaurant in Paris – and his protégé and ultimate successor, François André. Between them, these men instigated the concept of the luxury resort hotel, with its sumptuous seaside casino, its elaborate floor show and its six-course foie gras and caviar dinner. They also shrewdly invited women into the casinos and bars, and for over three decades they watched people lose their money. For the
truth is that gamblers always lose. Monsieur Cornuché and Monsieur André, however, couldn’t lose. Although during their era Monte Carlo held the monopoly on roulette, the French casinos offered both baccarat and
chemin de fer
– and the baccarat bank was run not by the casinos themselves but by a syndicate of Greeks headed by the fearless Nicolas Zographos, who paid the casinos for the privilege of controlling the cards. When Zographos died in 1953 he left a fortune of £5 million, every penny of it made from baccarat. When Harry Gordon Selfridge died in 1947, he left just £10,000, having ploughed his way through a fortune estimated by some to be as much as £3 million.

Nicolas Zographos changed the face of twentieth-century gambling when he sat down at the baccarat table in Deauville in 1922 and quietly said: ‘
Tout va
.’ For those playing against him, the sky was, quite literally, the limit. He and his colleagues had put together a pool of 50 million old francs (£16 million today), which was more than enough to get them started. Although they had some alarming moments over the next few years as the richest of the rich played furiously against them, they kept their cool and ultimately their money. Someone once asked Zographos why he did it. His answer was ‘It’s like morphine.’

For the Dolly Sisters, gambling was indeed a drug, one on which they had become hooked as teenagers in America. There they had been squired by the legendary sugar-daddy ‘Diamond Jim’ Brady, who took them to the private members’ Canfield Casino at Saratoga in upstate New York and out to Coney Island. By the mid-1920s, having each discarded a husband, they were commuting effortlessly between Paris, New York and the French casino resorts where they regularly took bookings to appear in cabaret. When they had finished on stage, the twins, known variously as ‘the Pep Sisters’ or ‘the Gold Diggers’, continued the show at the tables.

The girls had expensive tastes. When they were flush, they bought jewels, but what they liked most was gifts, and they perfected the art of acquiring them. Apparently, one of their favourite tricks was to strip
off all their jewels, passing them to a friend, and sit looking disconsolate at the tables. When a wealthy duke, maharaja or banker asked why they were so downcast, they would say they had ‘lost everything, right down to their last bracelet’. Not for nothing did every important jeweller have a boutique in the casino resorts. Following their display of crocodile tears, the Dollies could expect deliveries from various admirers by morning. They didn’t invest sensibly like their actress friend Pearl White, who on her retirement bought property and opened a bar in Paris and a hotel and casino in Biarritz, where she wisely ignored the tables. Nor were the Dollies as indulgent with money as their gambling contemporary, the French actress Maude Loti, who used to light her cigarettes with 1,000-franc notes and relax each day by shooting off blank cartridges in her bathroom. However, the girls variously earned, won, spent and lost a fortune. As a result, they were always in need of a rich companion.

When Jenny and Rosie met Selfridge, he wasn’t actually that rich. He lived like a lord and spent prodigiously, but it was really all show. So when the opportunity came for him to make some serious money – apparently at no risk to himself or his beloved store – he grabbed it with both hands. In early 1926, the idea of forming the Gordon Selfridge Trust was put to him by James ‘Jimmy’ White, a man who had made a fortune from property (among other deals he had bought and rapidly sold Wembley Stadium after the British Empire Exhibition), boxing promotion and share speculation. White was a bluff and tough Lancashire man, an ex-bricklayer with a thick accent, profane language and a bad temper. Yet somehow the softly spoken, mild-mannered Harry Selfridge – whose strongest expletive was ‘My stars’ and whose pet phrase was ‘As sure as God made little green apples’ – became very taken with him. White and he had been nodding acquaintances for years, having first met at National Sporting Club boxing events at the Café Royal. Their paths continued to cross at various nightclubs such as the Kit Cat and the Silver Slipper, and at Daly’s Theatre, the much-loved musical comedy venue recently acquired by White as part of his burgeoning ‘leisure’ portfolio. Jimmy
White’s great hobby, apart from making money, was racehorses, which were kept at his flourishing Foxhill stables in Surrey.

White had a friend whose family owned two London stores – John Barnes of Finchley and Jones Brothers of Holloway. Strapped for cash and scrapping amongst themselves, the family wanted out. White’s Charterhouse Investment Trust brokered a deal whereby both stores were bought by Selfridge’s as part of the existing ‘Provincial Stores’ group. From this evolved White’s grand scheme to make his friend a rich man and earn himself a sizeable cut. The retail sector was in favour with the City. Many of London’s leading stores had posted good profits – Harrods, Barkers, D. H. Evans, Dickens & Jones and Liberty’s all claimed a record year. Only Whiteley’s seemed to be suffering. Pre-tax profits at Selfridge’s for 1925 stood at £500,000. Selfridge, with his unerring grasp of statistics, was able to tell the media that the store had been dealing with up to 200,000 transactions a day; that it had handled its largest amount of cash sales ever, and that stock had turned over a record number of times.

The department making the most money was perfumery and cosmetics. Pulling out a powder compact to strike a pose had by now become the epitome of sophisticated chic, just as shingled hair, cloche hats, ever-shortening skirts and shiny stockings were now the height of fashion. An astonishing 800 films a year were now coming out of Hollywood, and there was hardly a young woman in the country who didn’t follow the fashions set by film star heroines such as Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo. Elinor Glyn, herself now working in Hollywood, had famously coined the phrase ‘The It Girls’, which perfectly summed up the brittle mood of the moment. Manufacturers were quick to use the latest synthetic fabrics, now available in a whole range of colours thanks to better-quality industrial dyes, to produce affordable ready-to-wear clothes. Fashion, with all its essential accessories, was no longer merely a perquisite of the rich. It was finally on the move among the masses.

Investors were learning to like the business of fashion and beauty, representing as it did so much spending of disposable income. In
December 1925, an impressive prospectus outlining the formation of the Drapery and General Investment Trust had resulted in over £2 million being raised by its creator, the smooth-talking, high-living businessman Clarence Hatry. Regarded in the City as a ‘boy wonder’, Hatry had started his career as an insurance broker. He made a fortune in war profiteering and by the 1920s was living in a Mayfair mansion with a swimming-pool in the basement and spending weekends on board the
Westward
, then one of the largest yachts in the country. Clarence Hatry ran a complex clutch of companies under his umbrella vehicle, the Austin Friar Trust, with a peer of the realm – the Marquis of Winchester – on the board to add the requisite cachet.

Hatry’s Drapery Trust scheme was centred on family-owned department stores, which were mostly now run by the second or third generation and mainly operated in provincial towns. Though rich in property assets, they often lacked capital for modernization. Such stores represented ripe pickings for Hatry. He took dozens of them into his Trust, promising not just investment but also central buying services, product information and trend reports, management expertise and promotional packages. Within a matter of weeks, Hatry had taken out £1.8 million in charges in a bewildering series of sub-deals and costly service contracts, leaving dozens of stores in limbo and wondering whether it had all been worth it. It would take another four years before Clarence Hatry’s world crashed around him but his money-making scheme was the model for Jimmy White in his deal with Selfridge, which they launched in the autumn of 1926.

Selfridge saw in the New Year escorting Fred and Adele Astaire’s mother to the ball at the Royal Albert Hall. Busy with plans for his daughter Beatrice’s wedding, he eschewed his normal week skating in St Moritz for a quick dash to Cannes where, side by side with Jenny and Rosie Dolly, he watched the epic tennis tournament between Suzanne Lenglen and the American champion Helen Wills. Later that night, despite being ill, Jenny and Rosie took their customary seats at the Winter Casino baccarat table, flanked by a pair of nurses in mufti to pass medicine and brandy. Back in London a day later,
Selfridge walked his daughter up the aisle at the Catholic church in Spanish Place where she married Count Louis Blaise de Sibour.

In May, when the TUC voted to back the depressed and disgruntled miners, the first general strike in British history began. For the miners, already struggling to survive on a few pounds a week, being asked to work longer hours for reduced wages was the last straw. For the public, led by the tabloid press to believe there would be anarchy, the whole event seemed to pass in a haze of anticipation of violence that never materialized. King George V took exception to suggestions that the strikers were ‘revolutionaries’, saying, ‘Try living on their wages before you judge them.’ As it turned out, he was right. The strike somehow seemed rather civilized. Enthusiastic volunteers drove the trains. Society ladies like Lady Diana Cooper folded copies of
The Times,
while Lady Louis Mountbatten manned the telephones at the
Daily Express.
At one point, a group of miners were seen playing football with the police. Through it all, the group the
Daily Mail
had dubbed ‘The Bright Young People’ danced the night away, filling their days and nights with endless fun. When treasure hunts became all the rage, they stormed through Selfridge’s, leaping over counters and rushing up and down in the lifts. Selfridge didn’t mind. It was good publicity and anyway, the treasure hunters all came from ‘good’ families.