Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (35 page)

I
n early October 1935, Harry headed for America. His support for Harvard had not gone unnoticed by Dr Silas Evans, the enterprising President of Ripon College, Wisconsin, who had awarded Harry an honorary doctorate. Accompanied by his daughter Violette, Harry was royally fêted in the town of his birth, and at a civic luncheon held in his honour, Mayor Harold Bumby announced the renaming of a special town recreation space as ‘Selfridge Park’. Ripon’s newspapers made much of the visit and described Harry’s successful career in great detail. Being less certain about the status of the pneumatic young blonde accompanying him, they merely described her as ‘a family friend’.

A few days later, when Selfridge arrived in Los Angeles,
Time
magazine revealed his companion to be the ‘French-Swedish actress Marcelle Rogez, who Harry Gordon Selfridge was intending to bring to the notice of Hollywood’. Miss Rogez, Harry’s latest – and last – serious love interest, had great ambitions for a Hollywood career. Observing them lunching together at 20th Century Fox, the film gossip-columnist Louella Parsons wrote: ‘The elderly, yet venerable-looking Mr Selfridge had such beautiful manners. He stood when Marcelle got up, pulling back her chair, bowing slightly to her at the end of the meal, walking out behind her – showing old world courtesy rarely seen in this town anymore these days.’

It was reported that Harry was hoping to raise finance on his trip. If that was so, he was destined for disappointment. To American bankers in the midst of the Great Depression, Selfridge represented a bygone era of ‘success through excess’ in retailing investment. With promotional budgets stripped to the bone, spending money to make money had become unfashionable.

Back in London, and accompanied by the pulchritudinous Miss Rogez, he hosted another election-night party. The eclectic guest list was, as always, a masterful combination of politics, Fleet Street, society and show business. Friends like Lord Beaverbrook, Winston Churchill and Lord Ashfield were joined by Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Noël Coward, Ivor Novello, the actress Madeleine Carroll (fresh from her role in the film of John Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
), and the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. The President of the Royal Aero Club, Sir Philip Sassoon, escorted the rabidly right-wing and very rich Lady Houston, whose enthusiasm for aviation was eclipsed only by her enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini. The fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli put in an appearance, as did the interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and, surprisingly, Syrie Maugham. The party went on into the small hours. To Lady Londonderry’s dismay, her almost inseparable companion Ramsay MacDonald lost his seat, and Stanley Baldwin returned to power as Prime Minister. It was the last election-night party that the store would host.

Missing from his life was Harry’s old friend Lord Riddell, Chairman of the
News of the World
, who had died a year earlier. Selfridge had been full of admiration for his boisterous newspaper. In 1933, he had helped broker a deal between the store model Gloria and the
News of the World
, who serialized her racy ‘top model memoirs’ for an ‘undisclosed sum’. It wasn’t the first project they had worked on. On one occasion, Selfridge’s had sponsored a fashion design competition run by the
World
, offering a cash prize and promising to showcase the winner’s outfit in the store. A panel of designers and stage celebrities met in the Palm Court for the judging session and a lunch, at which the actress Sybil Thorndike had agreed to present the prize.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t learned her lines. Standing up to make her speech, she gushingly enthused: ‘This is the most wonderful event. But then, I have always thought that the
Sunday People
is the most wonderful newspaper ever published.’ As the unstoppable Miss Thorndike continued to eulogize the
News of the World
’s bitter rival, Lord Riddell sat frozen faced, quietly decimating his bread roll.

Newspaper editors were allocating an increasing amount of space to reporting on fashion, which in itself was receiving an enormous boost from the cinema as women sought to emulate the glamour they saw on the silver screen. Ready-to-wear clothing was now widely available, and copies of work from designers such as Balenciaga swept into the shops, Madge Garland of
Vogue
observing, ‘Coats admired in the February Paris collections can be found this autumn at Jaeger.’ Those who couldn’t afford to buy what they wanted bought the bestselling paper patterns of all the new silhouettes from Paris. Fortunately for retailers, there was still a clear divide between day and night: women dressed for dinner, wore the ubiquitous ‘little black dress’ for cocktails, pinned diamanté dress clips to their necklines and wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without wearing a hat and gloves. The bias cut, the pyjama suit and cruise-wear were all the rage, while the daring adopted Elsa Schiaparelli’s surreal style. Admittedly, not every shopper in Selfridge’s took to her cheeky chapeaux with a lobster perched on top, but her influence, in everything from hand-knit swimsuits to ornate embroidery and even fantasy buttons, was undeniable. Intent on outstripping her bitter rival Coco Chanel, ‘Scap’ was planning her own perfume. Called ‘Shocking’ and seductively packaged in a bottle based on Mae West’s curves, it was launched in 1936 and showcased at Selfridge’s.

The 1930s also marked a new era in that profitable department store staple, underwear. Dunlop’s chemists had managed to transform latex rubber into a reliable elastic thread, which was in turn transformed into the girdle. With entire new ranges of underpinnings on the market – including Warner’s first ‘cup-sized’ brassiere – manufacturers hastened to claim that corsetry fitting had become a ‘scientific’
art and trained saleswomen to fit and measure accurately. So seriously did women take to this system that the process of acquiring new underwear could now take an hour or more. Gossard launched their ‘Gossard Complete’, a boneless foundation garment that could be worn under a backless evening gown, which, since it fastened with side hooks and bars, was promoted with the appealing copy-line ‘No maid required.’ Only the rich or those lucky enough to have a devoted family retainer still had a personal lady’s maid. Meanwhile, thanks to labour-saving devices such as electric cookers, lighter-weight vacuum cleaners and improved washing-machines, domestic tasks could be handled without an army of servants. This was probably just as well, because not only could most people no longer afford to hire them, but young girls no longer wanted to be parlour maids: instead they took jobs as cinema usherettes or waitresses or worked behind the ever-expanding cosmetics counters in department stores.

Selfridge and his store were hardly ever out of the press. In the autumn of 1935 he was profiled in depth by
Reader’s Digest
and his ‘official’ biography, sympathetically written by William Blackwood, was serialized in Chicago’s
Saturday Morning Post
and thereafter in England in
The Passing Show
, a once successful but now somewhat ailing society features magazine. Neither the magazine’s title nor its diminishing status was lost on the new member of the Board, Mr Holmes, who watched all this self-aggrandizement with unease, later saying: ‘Selfridge wanted to go on being king of his own castle, even though it was beginning to tumble.’

There was, in the beginning at least, very little Andrew Holmes could do, other than watch – and wait. He made his own tours of the store, fretted over the payroll of the group’s 15,000 employees, queried expenses and sat in on board meetings at which Selfridge would blithely state, ‘Minutes agreed unless objected to – business closed,’ before ushering everyone out of his office. If Selfridge felt uneasy about Mr Holmes, he didn’t show it. Confident that he carried a majority vote, he simply ignored him. By and large Harry’s life – within the store at least – continued as before. Staff were summoned
to his presence by a twinkling trio of bright blue lights, part of a clever internal security system set up throughout the store. He toured each morning, and again in the afternoon. Miss Rogez continued to shop until she dropped. Most importantly, plans went ahead for the relocation of the food hall from the site on the far side of Oxford Street to custom-designed space in Orchard Street. Just before Christmas 1935, Selfridge went to inspect progress on the new site. Gazing up at workmen painting the ceiling, he took a step forward and toppled twelve feet from the edge of the floor on to scaffolding below. At first, witnesses thought he was dead, but he escaped with little more than concussion and a bruised hip, though he was confined to bed for a week. That Christmas, as the health of the King rapidly deteriorated and he too took to his bed, for the second year running Wallis Simpson arrived at Selfridge’s to do the seasonal gift shopping for the Prince of Wales.

King George never recovered, dying at Sandringham on 20 January 1936. His son David, now King Edward VIII, continued to go dancing with Wallis, herself by now a glittering example of Cartier’s skill, wearing priceless stones remounted in ultra-modern settings. Their venue of choice was still the Embassy Club, where not much had changed either except the music. Syncopated jazz had been eclipsed by the ‘swing time’ sound as perfected by Benny Goodman’s orchestra and by the show songs of Rogers & Hart, Noël Coward and Cole Porter. The new King-Emperor could still be seen at the Ritz and the Savoy, and he still went to stay with his close-knit circle of friends, but increasingly he spent most of his time at his beloved Fort Belvedere, deluding himself that he could marry Wallis Simpson and keep his throne. The British press continued to be discreet, despite the Court Circular revealing that in June ‘Mrs Simpson’ was present at a dinner party held at St James’s Palace – Mr Simpson being tactfully elsewhere.

That summer, Wallis and the King went on a Mediterranean cruise aboard the luxury steam yacht
Nahlin,
but there was no cruising for the Selfridge family. Harry had had to sell the
Conqueror
. He had also moved house, departing reluctantly from Carlton House Terrace
and moving into an apartment in Brook House on Park Lane, where, ironically, Syrie Maugham was busy decorating another sumptuous flat belonging to Mr and Mrs Israel Sieff of Marks & Spencer. Brook House had been built on the site of the mansion owned by Harry’s old friend Ernest Cassel, which had subsequently been sold to developers by his granddaughter, Edwina Mountbatten. The Mountbattens themselves had moved into their much-photographed thirty-room penthouse, accessed by a high-speed lift, in June. Making plans to install Marcelle Rogez in an apartment nearby, Harry oversaw the decoration himself, becoming the bane of the builders and exhausting his private secretary Leslie Winterbottom, who struggled to cope with the Chief’s demands. Top of his wish-list was a black bath, which proved hard to find. Making daily visits to the flat to check on progress, Selfridge badgered the foreman in charge of the search. ‘Now, look here, Sir,’ he replied, ‘it isn’t that easy. But if you want to put a black lady in here, we’ll soon find a white bath for her.’ The joke was lost on Harry, who returned to the store demanding that Winterbottom change the builders.

Earlier that year, Selfridge’s had put on an ornate display to celebrate its twenty-seventh birthday, lighting up the exteriors with an enormous 2-ton rotating globe. Gifts such as silver keys or oak seedlings had always been given out to celebrate special anniversaries (Selfridge himself called them tokens of esteem), but this time customers were merely handed morsels of an enormous birthday cake. In June, shoppers surged into the newly opened food hall. By the time the doors closed, a central display of tinned salmon had been so depleted by shoplifters that only a dozen or so cans remained. The staff dithered about telling the Chief, who loathed the very mention of theft. When in the end they did, Miss Mepham recalled that ‘the news rather crushed him. He simply couldn’t believe the worst of his fellow man.’ Whether due to the endless promotions, the new food hall or the increase in summer holiday shopping as travellers headed to sunnier shores, business that year picked up considerably, resulting in a year-end net profit of £485,000.

Neither Selfridge nor his son was accustomed to restraint. Gordon Jr bought himself a new plane, which
Time
magazine reported as having cost $45,000. He flew his expensive toy to Spain – at that time in the midst of a bitter civil war – taking the de Sibours along for the ride. Lacking his father’s finesse in handling the press, his interview with
Time
on his return rather backfired, his escapade being described as ‘Sportsman Selfridge having swank fun’. It was also noted that he had stayed safely the other side of the border when Jacques de Sibour courageously returned to rescue thirty stranded American tourists the following day. Whether the trip was wise or foolish, Mr Holmes clearly didn’t like it, any more than he liked Gordon Jr flying around the country on business trips. Mr Holmes believed in taking the train.

With the date of Edward VIII’s Coronation set for May 1937, and curiously ignoring the gossip about the King and Wallis, Harry started to make plans to deck the façade with the most sumptuous decorations London had ever seen. Exactly as with King George V’s Coronation and subsequent Jubilee, he spent hours at the College of Heralds, poring over every detail.

Harry was now 80. He had always believed his mental agility would push back the years, and to an extent it did; but physically he was in decline. At a film premiere at the Regal Cinema in Marble Arch he fainted. When press photographers caught the moment, his embarrassment was made public in the
Daily Sketch.
Just a few weeks later he fell heavily while trying to vault a roped stanchion in the store’s restaurant. His own trusted senior staff were also becoming old. Some, like the endlessly discreet Mr Hensey in Accounts and the urbane jewellery buyer Mr Dix, who had recently presided over the opening of England’s first store counter selling Mikimoto cultured pearls, retired. Others, like Freddie Day who had spent his career buying trunks and luggage, died. The Chief’s trusted confidant, A. H. Williams, left to open his own advertising agency which failed to perform as he had hoped: Williams later ruefully admitted that ‘It was Selfridge who made us what we are.’ The architect Sir John
Burnet died. Ralph Blumenfeld suffered a bad stroke and spent less and less time in Fleet Street. Lord Ashfield too was ill with a severe eye complaint. Selfridge wrote to Blumenfeld: