Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (8 page)

The couple left on their honeymoon accompanied by Lois Selfridge – a fact which didn’t seem to perturb the new Mrs Selfridge in the slightest. It was just as well the two women got along because they would live together in various homes for the rest of their lives. An impressive array of wedding presents reflected the couple’s status – not
to mention the size of the guest list – and included a valuable parcel of land on the shores of Lake Geneva, a wealthy enclave ninety miles north of Chicago, presented to them by Rosalie’s sister and brother-in-law, who owned a summer house next door. There Harry and Rose – as he always called his wife – would build a mock-Tudor country house with large greenhouses where Harry tended his favourite roses and prize orchids. Harry Selfridge now had two women to idolize, and they in turn both loved him unconditionally.

‘We live in an age where unnecessary things are our only necessities now.’
Oscar Wilde

O
n some days it seemed to Harry Selfridge that he was riding the crest of a wave, on others that he had crashed to the beach. At home, there was sadness for Rose and Harry when their first child – a daughter they named Violet – died a few months after her birth. Selfridge masked his grief by throwing himself even more energetically into his work, while Rose recuperated quietly. Having excelled herself with the development of Rosalie Villas, it might have been expected that she would continue working. But she didn’t. In an era when women craved their independence, Rose seems to have been content at home. She had married a tornado of energy and at times seemed to find it all rather exhausting.

City officials were buzzing with plans following Chicago’s coup in winning the bid to host what was officially known as ‘The World’s Columbian Exposition’, America’s celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus arriving on its shores. Chicago had flourished its cheque book to beat off stiff competition from New York, Washington and St Louis. In April 1890, President Harrison approved an Act of Congress to provide for ‘an international exhibit of arts, industries, manufactures, and the products of the soil, mine and sea, in the city of Chicago’, and invited the ‘nations of the world to take part’. In much the same way that London’s Great Exhibition
of 1851 had launched the emergent trend of consumerism, Chicago’s World Fair would establish it as an irrevocable part of daily life.

This was the event Chicago had been waiting for – not least the property speculators who rushed to buy land. Harlow Higginbotham (the senior partner in charge of finance at Marshall Field) was appointed as President of the Fair, and Daniel Burnham was designated as overall Director of Works. They knew when the Fair was going to be – 1892 – and they soon decided where, selecting a vast 630-acre site on the South Side, covering Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance. How it would all happen was less easily decided. A group of the country’s leading architects convened to plan the buildings. Headed by Burnham, the group included Richard Morris Hunt (of Astor, Vanderbilt and Field house fame), Charles McKim of the hallowed New York partnership McKim, Mead & White, Frederick Law Olstead (who had laid out New York’s Central Park), and Chicago’s own celebrated Louis Sullivan. They apparently started to argue at their very first meeting, with the eastern group advocating classicism and Chicago’s Louis Sullivan, modernism. Furthermore, it soon became clear that the plans laid down couldn’t possibly be completed in time, and the public opening of the Fair was postponed to 1893.

There being a lot to do, Chicago’s great and good set to work. First, Mayor Carter H. Harrison had to get re-elected. He had already served a straight four terms, so the city’s residents knew what they were getting – Harrison was a hard-drinking, keen gambling man. Sure enough, when he won, albeit by a narrow margin, he announced he had ‘laid down two hundred barrels of good Chicago whiskey that could kill at the distance of a mile’ for official hospitality. In New York, Mrs Astor’s arbiter of etiquette Ward McAllister was horrified, writing in
The World
‘that it is not quantity but quality that visiting New York society will care about’. Uneasy about the menus, not to mention the wines, McAllister advised the city to ‘import a number of fine French chefs as a gentleman who has been accustomed to terrapin and pâté de foie gras would not care to dine on mutton
and turnips’. His pronouncements on Chicago’s seeming inability to organize a banquet caused a furore, with the local press calling him a ‘head butler’ and a ‘New York flunky’. McAllister, not to be outdone, unleashed a further barrage of criticism: ‘It takes nearly a lifetime to educate a man how to live. These Chicagoans should not pretend to rival the East in matters of refinement – their growth has been too rapid for them to acquire both wealth and culture.’

McAllister, who had originated the concept of Mrs Astor’s famous ‘Four Hundred’ (in reality the number of people who could comfortably fit in her ballroom), was obsessed with decorum, dancing and décor. Convinced that the rich of Chicago couldn’t dance a quadrille, he was particularly caustic about the design of the millionaires’ mansions, where the ballroom was often relegated to the third floor and, worse, accessed by an elevator: ‘In New York, the opinion is that the approach to the ballroom should be as artistically effective as the room itself. We don’t go to dance by going up in an elevator.’

Chicago, proud of its meaty menus and its elevators, ignored most of his pontificating, but jibes about dancing touched a nerve. Help was on hand courtesy of Eugene A. Bournique’s Dance Academy where Mr Bournique, more used to teaching children their first ballet steps, was kept busy teaching the intricacies of ballroom etiquette to their parents. The city echoed to the sound of construction. New hotels were built, existing ones redecorated; new restaurants opened and, as the city’s gaming dens hastily planned an expansion of their floor space, demand for roulette wheels rocketed and a new factory had to be opened to cope with the orders.

Mrs Potter Palmer, as the city’s leading lady, was appointed chairman of the Board of Lady Managers in charge of their own Women’s Building. Even in the face of the growing influence of the women’s movement, such a project was a radical step for America, and Mrs Palmer determined it would be noteworthy. The Lady Managers hired a female architect, Sophia Hayden, to create their pavilion, planning a series of rooms to show everything from cookery demonstrations to the latest in home technology, interior design, arts,
crafts and even a model kindergarten. It was agreed that concerts in the auditorium would only feature the work of women composers and that exhibitions would display the achievements of women in the arts and sciences and in the professions. Last but not least, the pavilion would exhibit the very latest in fashion trends, together with exhibits of rare jewels and antiquities borrowed by Mrs Palmer from her wealthy, titled friends in Europe. Everything in fact that a woman could want or need – except cosmetics.

Not that entrepreneurs involved in the embryonic business of beauty didn’t want to exhibit. Madame Yale, famous for her lectures on ‘The Religion of Beauty, the Sin of Ugliness’, was keen to promote her products. But Mrs Palmer and her committee were utterly determined that she should not. Rouge and lipstick were, said Mrs Palmer, ‘not things we wish to dwell on or emphasize’. In banning Mrs Yale, Bertha Palmer was following the mores of the day, which determined that cosmetics were ‘not respectable’. Ladies like Mrs Palmer took care of their skin with soap, water and a face-mask made with old-fashioned oatmeal. They may have tried Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s exclusive ‘Recamier’ cream – Mrs Ayer herself being from a good Chicago family – but more often than not they were content with a greasy lanolin-based cream made up by the local pharmacist. Given Chicago’s brutal winter weather, they would almost certainly have used lip salve (one excellent local recipe included hog-fat, a useful by-product of Chicago’s stock yards), and eyebrows were plucked and waxed. Finally, a light dusting of fine powder would have been applied to avoid shine. Further than that, they would not go.

As a consequence, in smart stores like Marshall Field’s, the toiletries department was of minor significance. It sold hand mirrors, brushes and combs, hair accessories, eau de cologne and a wide range of beautifully packaged scented soaps. Neither did Field’s attempt to enter the business of hairdressing or offer beauty treatments such as manicures and massage, which were the fiefdom of small, individual beauty parlours. Field’s held out against the onslaught of cosmetics for a long time, though others soon succumbed. As early as 1897, the
Sears catalogue offered its own line of cosmetics, including rouge, eyebrow pencils and face powder, while Harry Selfridge himself would famously go on to open England’s first major cosmetics department in 1910.

With 25 million visitors expected to attend the Fair, Marshall Field astutely set a retail expansion plan in motion. Early in 1892 he began to buy buildings to the east of the store, commissioning Daniel Burnham to design a new nine-storey annexe, which had to be ready in eighteen months. Despite his awesome workload overseeing the erection of more than two hundred buildings for the Fair, Burnham managed to bring the new Field project in only two months over deadline, and by August 1893 it was open for business.

Harry Selfridge became minutely involved in planning the layout and fitting of this new space of more than 100,000 feet, which ultimately gave the store an overall total of nine acres. Under Burnham’s expert tutelage, he received a master class in building, lighting and shop-fitting. Technical innovations included the installation of thirteen high-pressure hydraulic elevators and twelve separate entrances with revolving glass doors. Interior fixtures included lavish hand-carved mahogany counters trimmed in bronze and, in a welcome first for shoppers, a majestic suite of ladies’ lavatories. There were now a hundred different departments at Marshall Field’s, all of them dressed to the nines to welcome the international visitors who were touring the Fair and who, inevitably, were also drawn into the store.

For Selfridge, 1893 was a momentous year. In addition to the World Fair and the expansion of Field’s, he and Rose had a baby daughter, Rosalie, born on 10 September – which explains why Rose was absent from most of the festivities connected with the Fair: when pregnant, ladies of the day never socialized in public.

Harry was among the welcoming committee that greeted the Duke of Veragua – a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus – and his Duchess when they arrived in Chicago in May for the opening celebrations. Despite his lofty titles, among them ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’, the Duke was a man of modest means who bred Arab horses at
a stud farm outside Madrid. Flattered at being met by an escort of the United States Cavalry, and delighted by the lavish hospitality and media attention accorded him and his Duchess, the Duke began to overstay his welcome. Two weeks grew to three and then a month. The organizing committee, panicking at the cost of hosting the ducal couple, suggested it was time to leave. The Veraguas finally agreed to go, but not before the Duke had intimated that the same military escort that had met them on arrival should also see them off at the station. The organizing committee, with no remit to provide a second escort, were saved by an enterprising member who kitted out a team of amateur actors as hussars, mounting them on black horses and equipping them with swords. It did the trick nicely.

Running the Fair involved considerable diplomacy as tempers flared and egos exploded. The mighty Steinway Piano Company had refused to exhibit, so the committee banned its pianos from being used by any of the dozens of orchestras playing throughout the Fair. This didn’t worry the young musician Scott Joplin, who was practising his new ‘rag-time’ tunes on a rickety upright in a local saloon, but it did alarm the great pianist Ignacy Paderewski who refused to play on anything but a Steinway. The impasse was broken when the Fair’s musical director had the foresight to smuggle in a Steinway, resulting in such a row that the poor man was forced to resign.

The next Spanish grandee to sample Chicago hospitality was HRH the Infanta Eulalia – daughter of Queen Isabella II and a haughty young woman who was fond of remarking that ‘in Spain there is Nobility – or nothing. We do not recognize the middle classes.’ With the World Fair being targeted at exactly that group, her visit was destined to be tricky. Eulalia and her husband Prince Antoine arrived at the station in George Pullman’s own private railway car – somewhat late having made an unscheduled stop in Pennsylvania, where Eulalia had sent out for a fresh supply of Spanish cigarettes. To the delight of Chicago’s booming tobacco industry – and the distress of Bertha Palmer who loathed smoking – the Infanta puffed prodigiously, even enjoying a cigar after dinner. Her much-publicized habit prompted
an enterprising local firm to box up Cuban cigars with her picture on the lid, unfortunately promoting her to ‘Eulalia, Queen of Spain’ in the process.

The Royal party was allocated a glorious suite at the Palmer House Hotel, stuffed full of antiques and tapestries to make them feel at home. Legend has it that the Infanta at first refused to meet Mrs Palmer on the grounds that she was merely ‘the wife of my innkeeper’. What is certain is that wherever the Infanta went, she was always late. Keeping Spanish-style hours, she didn’t arrive at the gala reception held at the Palmers’ home in her honour until 10.15 p.m. Once there, however, she was invited to take up position on a velvet throne set on rugs impregnated with rare perfumes where she held court until the small hours, while John Sousa’s band kept the party entertained.

Chicago’s South Side had blossomed into a glorious mass of pearly-white grandeur, shimmering by the lake like Camelot, with the gilded domes of its ‘Court of Honour’ (as the classically styled principal building was called) twinkling in the sunlight. The team of artists and architects who had created this model ‘White City’ as an awesome show of corporate power and consumerism allowed themselves to be described as ‘the greatest meeting of minds since the Renaissance’. In reality, apart from the central, anchor buildings in stone, the whole was mainly done by smoke and mirrors. Most of the buildings were temporary edifices made from a mixture of plaster, cement and jute fibre, all painted white. Critics called them ‘decorated sheds’ but even the sternest opponent couldn’t fail to be secretly impressed. Thousands of daily visitors travelled on the newly built South Side ‘L’, an elevated railroad that dropped them off at the Jackson Park Terminal where they could walk through Louis Sullivan’s monochrome, futuristic Transportation Building before touring the Fair on its own elevated electric railway.