Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (4 page)

Harry soon left the bank and moved to Gilbert, Ransom & Knapp, a local furniture factory, where he became a book-keeper. Unfortunately, the business was already waning and went into liquidation a few months later. Being unemployed wasn’t an option, so he took work at a dollar a day in an insurance business in Big Rapids, a small town several hundred miles away.

Whatever influences inspired Harry Selfridge in his quest to create a seductive shopping experience, he certainly didn’t find them in Big Rapids. He was never a fan of country pursuits, and fishing and furtrapping were pretty much all Big Rapids offered by way of recreation in those days. Neither did he drink much. What Harry enjoyed was playing cards – especially poker – and Big Rapids was almost certainly where he honed his game. At one point, boredom is rumoured to have prompted him to study law – via a correspondence course – but he subsequently admitted that it was a ‘complete disaster’. In one thing, however, he remained constant. In the office he was always impeccably dressed. Years later, when Selfridge had become famous and the American press serialized his life story, an old acquaintance from Big Rapids recalled that Harry has always looked ‘as if he had just come out of a bandbox’.

Harry Selfridge returned to Jackson late in 1876 with $500 he had ‘saved from his earnings’, although given his predilection for poker it
was more likely to have been the winnings from a few lucky hands at cards. He then drifted from one dreary job to another, culminating in eighteen months at a local grocery store. By the time he was 22, he was desperate to move on. But how – and to where? Salvation came through his ex-employer, Leonard Field, who was persuaded to write a letter of introduction to Marshall Field in Chicago. Marshall was the senior partner in Field, Leiter & Co., one of the biggest and most successful stores in the city. Young Harry would ultimately help make it one of the most famous in America.

Selfridge used to say that his interview with Mr Field lasted a matter of minutes and that the man was ‘so cold it made him shiver’. Terms were discussed, with Harry claiming he agreed a weekly wage of $10 as a stock boy in the wholesale department basement – but the pay at the very bottom of the ladder he determined to climb was certainly less than that.

Variously described as ‘dignified and quiet’, and so taciturn he was nicknamed ‘silent Marsh’, Field had little time for anything other than work. How a man so devoid of personality could have been so successful in the business of sales, where the ability to communicate and motivate is crucial, is a mystery. Field cared little for what he called ‘frivolous methods’, running his business the way he lived his life. Dry, humourless and puritanical, albeit always courteous, he was the antithesis of Harry Selfridge. They complemented one another, but although Selfridge worked for Field for over twenty-five years, they were never friends.

To call Marshall Field merely ‘successful’ is an understatement. By 1900, his recorded annual income was $40 million a year (nearly $800 million today) and when he died in 1906, he left an estate worth $118 million (over $2 billion today). A large part of his fortune came from real estate and his early investment in railroad stocks. He was also an original and significant investor in the Pullman Company, backing George Pullman’s imaginative concept of luxurious comfort while travelling by train. Given that the journey from Chicago to New York alone took twenty hours, it is small wonder that Pullman’s deluxe
dining-car, called ‘The Delmonico’ after New York’s swell restaurant, was so successful. Only the rich could travel in his cars, while the really rich bought and customized their own private Pullman carriages – the private jets of their day – fitting marble bathtubs, over-stuffed velvet sofas, piped organ music and, the height of one-upmanship, taking along an English butler to ensure the service was smooth.

The nucleus of Field’s wealth, however, came from shopping. The towering department store on State Street was a Mecca for Chicago residents, but as with all the early nineteenth-century ‘great store’ successes, it was the wholesale department that laid the foundations of the Field fortune, supplying people in small townships all over the Midwest with whatever they needed, from dress fabric to carpets, petticoats to parasols.

Marshall Field was a farmer’s son who grew up in Conway, Massachusetts, where the whole family had to help on the land. As neither he nor his elder brother Joseph had any feel for farming, both took what was virtually the only route out of rural life – working as salesmen in a dry-goods store. Marshall’s first job was in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but in 1856 he headed west to join his brother Joseph in Chicago – though it’s doubtful whether the neat and tidy, churchgoing young man of 21 realized what was going to hit him when he got there. Reminders that Chicago was a frontier town were everywhere in the sprawling mass of timber buildings that stretched along the shore of Lake Michigan. Mud was the main topic of conversation – it was so deep that it oozed over the boardwalks, clogged wagon wheels and ruined ladies’ clothes. Not that there were too many ladies in Chicago. Local men searching for a bride would ‘go East’ and, having found a suitable partner, return to Chicago, placing a notice in the local newspapers with the address of the new marital home. Enterprising local dressmakers would often be among their first callers. Having examined the bride’s trousseau, the dressmaker would then go from door to door presenting her compliments – along with her newly discovered knowledge of the ‘latest fashions from the East’.

For those prepared to take risks, business opportunities were
spectacular. William Butler Ogden – who became Chicago’s first Mayor – bought a tract of land in 1844 for $8,000, selling it six years later for $3 million. Mr Ogden was nothing if not enterprising. When financing for the Illinois and Michigan Canal dried up he ensured bonds were issued to raise the necessary cash. Always a step ahead, in the same year the canal was opened, he built Chicago’s first railroad.

In 1856, Marshall Field had no money with which to buy land or open a store. Instead he took a job at the wholesaler’s Farwell, Cooley & Wadsworth, one of the many firms busy shipping dry goods out via Chicago’s burgeoning railroads to where the tracks ended in emergent new townships – where women were desperate for everything from cottons and calico to sewing threads and buttons. Field went ‘on the road’, meeting local merchants, sizing up the business potential and diligently doing his duty by Mr Cooley, whose efficient book-keeper, Levi Z. Leiter, was also busy in the back office, entering their profits in the ledgers. When Potter Palmer, arguably Chicago’s most successful merchant, gave up wholesaling to concentrate entirely on his retail division, the polite Mr Field picked up most of his clients – at the same time keenly observing the progress of Mr Palmer’s impressive new store on Lake Street.

Chicago’s ladies were determined shoppers. In the pre-war financial slump they bought at discount, so much so that
Harper’s
caustically advised husbands to ‘observe your wife shopping if you would know her. She may be sweet in the parlor, but she is like a ghoul at the counter.’ In fact there was very little else for women to do in Chicago other than shop. There were no beauty parlours, no restaurants – or certainly none where women could eat – and only one theatre. Servants took care of the housework and the kitchen. The only thing that ladies could do outside their home – other than attend activities organized by their local church – was to shop for clothes and household materials. Feminists have long raged about the consumer culture, but the early women’s champion Elizabeth Cady Stanton was quite clear on the subject. While she deplored the excesses of wealthy
women ‘who only lived for fashion’, she also implored women to seek independence through masterminding the family budget: ‘go out and buy’ she would shout from the platform at conventions and meetings, urging women to seize the initiative in equipping their household and clothing themselves – whether or not they were paying the bills.

Marshall Field was a man with a searing ambition to make money. All his life he judged opportunity strictly by prospective returns – and when the elderly Mr Wadsworth retired, the chance of buying into a partnership was irresistible. When the Civil War began, Mr Farwell, the sole remaining original founder, welcomed Marshall Field as a full partner. Three years later, in another management shuffle, the business was taken over completely by Field and Levi Leiter, who became partners. Somehow – despite working an average sixteen-hour day – Marshall Field found the time to meet and marry Nannie Scott, and their son, also named Marshall, was born in 1868. By this time, the Field fortunes were firmly established.

Retail historians today praise Marshall Field as one of the trade’s ‘founding fathers’, but arguably his quantum leap to success came from buying other people’s businesses rather than founding his own – and the business that really propelled him forward was that belonging to Potter Palmer. Ten years after he had opened his store, Palmer was making $10 million a year. He was wealthy, but not healthy. In 1865, worn out and worried by gloomy advice from his doctors, Palmer sold the majority equity in his business to Field and Leiter for $750,000 and moved to Paris, leaving the two men with a platform rivals could only dream about.

Palmer was soon back in Chicago enthusing over Baron Haussmann’s spectacular rebuilding programme in Paris where wide, elegant boulevards had replaced narrow streets, and the installation of a modern sewage system and transport had finally made Paris ‘shopper friendly’.

He knew that if Chicago was to have a world-class shopping district, then its stores needed a better environment. Getting out his cheque book he bought up buildings on State Street, parallel to
the lake shore, until his holdings were a mile long. Lobbying the city council to widen the lane into a boulevard, at a stroke he single-handedly reoriented the centre of Chicago from Lake Street – which ran by a foul-smelling river – to State Street, which he virtually owned. He demolished the run of ‘shack’ shops and saloons along it to build commercial properties, and subsequently leased his prime six-storey corner site to Field & Leiter for $50,000 a year.

Potter Palmer married in 1870. As a wedding gift to his young bride Bertha Honoré, he built a hotel and named it the Palmer House. Eight storeys high, with 225 rooms fitted out with Italian marble and French chandeliers, it was Chicago’s most sumptuous building. The hotel never took a paying guest. In 1871, fire swept through the city. An area of three and a half square miles was ravaged, 300 people died and 90,000 were made homeless – nearly a third of the city’s population. Among the buildings destroyed were Palmer’s hotel and Field & Leiter’s new store. Luckily, Marshall Field and Levi Leiter were well-insured. Having recouped most of their losses, they moved to a temporary site, from which they did a roaring trade in Chicago’s post-fire renaissance.

It took well over a year to clear the debris left by the great fire. Businesses had to ‘make do and mend’, and many men set up offices in their own homes as Chicago picked itself up and started a massive rebuilding programme. Field and Leiter bought a property on Market Street where they established their wholesaling headquarters while considering their future. At the same time, Potter Palmer was planning his new ‘dream’ hotel. To raise the money, he sold a parcel of land on State Street for $350,000 to the calculating men who ran the Singer Sewing Company and who were busy using the phenomenal profits from selling their patented sewing machine to diversify into property.

As a result of Isaac Singer’s machine and Ellen Demorest’s invention of the first paper patterns, many American housewives were becoming competent dressmakers. Observing this trend with unease, the legion of professional dressmakers upped the stakes by affecting
fancy French names and even learning a word or two of the language, which never failed to impress their customers. For the newly affluent woman, however, all this home-centred activity was dull. Fashion, etiquette and beauty manuals and magazines were now pouring from the printing presses, establishing new trends at almost breakneck speed. Women wanted to go out and buy for themselves, a fact that had not escaped the property division of the Singer Company who spent over $750,000 on an elegant white marble-fronted building on the corner of State Street and Washington. In fact it was so elegant, the great Alexander Stewart himself was rumoured to want it for a Chicago outpost of his New York store. He didn’t get it: instead it was leased to Field & Leiter who moved in during the autumn of 1873 just as the New York stock market crashed and a deep recession struck America. It was not an auspicious start.

‘Judge not a man by his clothes, but by his wife’s clothes.’
Sir Thomas Dewar

F
ashion designers and marketers live in hope that a trend will develop credibility and become a bestseller. Then of course they crave a new one, because in reality, fashion succeeds as a business precisely because its obsolescence is inevitable. For true devotees, the cycle lasts a mere six months and the launch of a new look necessitates all sorts of changes. But even today, it is rare for one’s entire wardrobe to become dated overnight. Not so when the cumbersome crinoline and matronly bonnet were consigned to history.

By the early 1870s no truly style-conscious woman in society would have been seen dead in hoops – she had to change her wardrobe from top to toe as a totally new look swept into fashion. To the delight of the drapery retailers, its replacement, a revival of the eighteenth-century
polonaise
– best described as a masterful combination of cinch and pouf – also required substantial amounts of material. Women poured themselves into a tight-fitting, short-waisted bodice with even tighter sleeves, worn above drawn-back, bunched skirts puffed at the rear into an elaborate bustle. The whole outfit, often overwhelmed with a profusion of ruches, ribbons and fringes, flew in the face of the emergent dress reform movement, which despaired at the complexity of women’s wardrobes.