Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (9 page)

An off-site ‘amusement area’ in the Midway Plaisance, segregated from the exhibition halls but an integral part of the concept, offered round-the-clock excitement. The most thrilling was a ride on the ‘Giant Wheel’ built by the brilliant young design engineer George
Ferris. The Fair’s organizing committee had long wanted something to ‘top’ the Eiffel Tower, which had dominated the 1889 Paris International Exposition. After months of indecisive bickering, they eventually settled on the Ferris concept with the proviso that George Ferris should fund not only the plans and specifications (which alone cost him $25,000) but also the construction costs. Ferris and his team worked round the clock through the severe Chicago winter. When they had finished, his triumphant wheel towered majestically to a height of 266 feet, giving the passengers who paid 50 cents to ride in one of its 36 carriages – each big enough to hold 40 people – a view of three different States from the windows. During the nineteen weeks the Ferris wheel operated, it carried nearly one and a half million people and was the greatest single attraction at the Fair. Tragically, the strain of raising the cash and the stress of building the wheel exhausted Ferris. He died destitute and alone in a Pittsburgh hospital just three years after his prototype wheel had astounded the world.

Other than the Ferris wheel, the biggest draws at the Midway Plaisance were Buffalo Bill Cody and his ‘Wild West Show’, and Fahreda Mahzar, an exotic dancer who called herself ‘Little Egypt’ and who performed her signature belly dance – the ‘hootchy-kootchy’ – wearing layers of transparent chiffon which, as one eager reporter noted, ‘showed every muscle in her body rippling at the same time’. ‘Little Egypt’ wasn’t the only one flexing her muscles. Assigned to tour Europe to procure military bands to play at the fair, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr, showing his potential for showmanship, had brought back the acclaimed German strongman Eugen Sandow, who subsequently became the father of modern-day body building. Flo put him under a management contract and masterminded his performance at the Fair. Sandow started his act lying in a black velvet-lined box, his body dusted in white powder, and then slowly rose from it like a muscled classical God, dressed in little more than a leopard-skin loincloth. Some women were so overcome at the sight that they fainted – even Bertha Palmer was persuaded to ‘touch’ Sandow’s rock-hard muscles, pronouncing them ‘very impressive’.

During the six months of the Fair, there wasn’t a visiting VIP who didn’t make their way downtown to Marshall Field, where Harry Selfridge personally conducted them around the store. Field himself was usually nowhere to be seen when these celebrity visits were made, finding them as distasteful as he did talking to the press. Field neither liked nor trusted journalists, whereas Harry instinctively understood the power of publicity, giving them all the help he could. Harry was now being described in the newspapers as the ‘genial personality in charge of the retail division of Marshall Field’, and his job there fitted him like a second skin.

As the Fair drew to a close, visitors could reflect on what they had seen. First and foremost, they had been exposed to the wonders of electricity, in itself an icon of technological advance. They had drunk the world’s first carbonated drinks, eaten the world’s first hamburgers, and admired the world’s largest cheese – which weighed in at thirteen tons. Visitors had sent picture postcards to friends using the world’s first commemorative stamps, enjoyed cookery demonstrations involving new products such as Quaker Oats and Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix, and fallen in love with the bicycle. Some had heard Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony’ which he composed for the Fair, while others had seen Anschutz’s ‘electrotachyscope’ project the world’s first moving images. Mayor Harrison, receiving the plaudits of his colleagues on Mayor’s Day, 28 October, must have felt justifiably proud, but the ebullient Mayor didn’t live long enough to enjoy the plaudits. He was assassinated that night by Eugene Prendergast, who in his defence subsequently pleaded insanity. Prendergast lost his case and was executed.

The World Fair had a profound impact on Harry Selfridge who, having witnessed at first hand how to entertain a crowd, later became devoted to showing all manner of technical innovations to a captivated audience in London. The Fair itself, quite apart from being the precursor of global theme parks from Coney Island to Disney World, also so enchanted the young writer L. Frank Baum that he turned its ‘White City’ into his ‘Emerald City’ of Oz.

The World Fair was symptomatic of changes taking place everywhere in the western world, particularly in women’s lives. The World’s Congress of Representative Women had met in Chicago during the Fair, where over 150,000 women flocked to listen to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone speak. Fresh ideas poured forth from a huge number of newly successful women’s magazines. Women in Chicago now travelled alone on the cable street cars and elevated trains. There were changes too in fashion. Women would have to wait another decade to abandon their corsets, but there was an important shift in the shape and weight of clothes as more and more women took to wearing two-pieces and blouses.

The ‘jacket-and-skirt’ combination had first been seen in America during the Civil War. Women in the intellectual and professional classes had continued to wear it, calling it their ‘emancipation suit’. Dress reformers also adopted front-buttoning soft underwear as pioneered in fine knit by Dr Jaeger and in cotton by Dr Kellogg. The leisured classes and newly rich, however, had relentlessly clung to the formality of the back bustle both by day and by night, until the ‘two-piece’ with its faintly military cut and gored skirt was given a huge boost when it was adopted by the Prince of Wales’s beautiful wife, Princess Alexandra, whose every move in fashion was eagerly watched in America. For once the trend hadn’t originated from Worth. It was the British tailoring genius Charles Poynter of Redfern who made the suits for the Princess – in tweed for shooting parties and in navy blue and white grosgrain for yachting. The waist was still cinched, but the bustle had disappeared, and the sleeves were puffed from shoulder to elbow and then narrowed from elbow to wrist.

The trend for what the stores referred to as ‘tailor-mades’, along with the ornate, high-necked blouses that went with them, triggered the mass production of much better-quality ready-to-wear. Marshall Field’s still had its own in-house workrooms for hand-made clothes, but bulk stock, for them as for other stores, was now sourced from the clothing factories and sweat shops of New York and Chicago.

America’s ‘new woman’, as the media styled her, energetically took to sport, particularly tennis, which in itself created a fashion trend. Players wore softer skirts, with a plainer ‘shirt-waist’ blouse and an unbuttoned cotton-drill jacket. Nothing typified this image more than the drawings of the graphic artist Charles Dana Gibson. The ‘Gibson Girl’ was officially launched in 1890 and for the next twenty-five years she came to represent the ideal female form in the United States. The tall, rangy and patrician young woman styled by Gibson, with her casually up-swept hair and
sportif
clothes, had a huge impact on fashion. Women wanted to look, dress and live their lives like her.

Women also took enthusiastically to dance as an acceptable form of exercise, in particular adopting the ‘stretch and body poses’ movement programme originally pioneered by the Frenchman François Delsarte, which became a huge craze in America. Not that ‘doing Delsarte’ meant breaking a sweat, it was more about grace and control. His system was the precursor of contemporary dance as pioneered by Loie Fuller and her disciple Isadora Duncan, who naturally chose Chicago – acclaimed as the most progressive city in America – to launch her professional career in 1895. When she auditioned at Chicago’s leading variety house, the Masonic Temple Roof Garden, Isadora so impressed its manager Charles Fair that he booked her on the spot. Knowing his audience, however, the cigar-chomping Mr Fair doubted that her dance programme would hold them. ‘You might do the Greek thing first,’ he suggested, ‘then change to something with petticoats and frills so you can do kicks.’ With only her ‘Grecian’ shift in her luggage – and no money for shopping – Fair sent Isadora to see his friend Selfridge.

Selfridge was enchanted with Isadora, overseeing her selection of red gingham, white organdie and lace ruffles for her outfit. Billed as ‘the California Faun’, Isadora was a sensation, and, having dressed her, Selfridge was in the audience to watch. Some people later said he undressed her too – she was after all a believer in free love, and Harry was an attractive man, with a tendre for dancers and a wife who was often to be found 90 miles away, supervising the construction of their
imposing mock-Tudor house on the shores of Lake Geneva. Whatever the case, Isadora Duncan and Harry Selfridge remained friends until she died.

Field himself continued to add to his property portfolio, one particular acquisition having a certain poignancy. In 1898, Levi Leiter’s only son Joe, who so far had excelled himself solely in playing high-stakes poker, decided to gamble on making his own fortune by attempting to corner the world’s wheat market, buying all he could on margin. When the Chicago meat baron P. D. Armour needed 9 million bushels in a hurry he contacted young Leiter, who refused to sell. Armour wasn’t going to be pushed around by ‘an uppity kid’. He sent a fleet of ice-breaking tugs over the frozen lake north to Duluth, buying wheat for himself and an extra 9 million bushels, which he poured into the market. Young Joe Leiter’s margins were called in and he ended up owing $10 million. With his son facing certain bankruptcy and possibly prison, Levi Leiter had to liquidate assets fast, among them a valuable parcel of land on the corner of State Street, housing the site of department store Schlesinger & Mayer, for which Field paid his ex-partner $2,135,000.

The Leiters’ financial disaster had a dramatic impact in London, where Leiter’s daughter Mary, now Lady Curzon, was putting together the sumptuous wardrobe required for her forthcoming position as Vicereine of India. It wasn’t only her clothes and jewels that were needed. George Curzon required an impressive wardrobe of uniforms, and the couple were also expected to pay the outgoing Viceroy for his wine cellar, horses, carriages and silver plate. Curzon, who had little money of his own, had always assumed his rich father-in-law would be able to provide everything necessary. All he got from Levi Leiter was £3,000 and a new tiara for Mary, leaving him in the embarrassing position of having to request an advance on his salary.

Back in Chicago, by 1900, 14 million tons of cargo were passing through the port. Over 500 miles of street-car tracks – called ‘street railroads’ – threaded their way through the city, and the elevated railroad was packed every day. Automobiles were also slowly beginning
to make an appearance, though to visitors it must have seemed as if everyone was riding a bicycle as the new craze for cycling swept the nation. Happily for women cyclists their skirts didn’t sweep the ground. When Lillian Russell took to cycling – on a custom-made Tiffany gold-plated machine, with mother-of-pearl handlebars and her initials worked in diamonds on the wheels – she wore a cream leg-of-mutton sleeved cycling suit with the skirt shortened by three inches, which set an unstoppable fashion trend.

Fashion also had a huge impact on Marshall Field. Since the World Fair, Field’s had imported over $3 million worth of goods annually from around the world. By 1900 the retail division alone turned over an astonishing $12.5 million. With the store severely short of space, that year Field acquired the rest of the buildings in the block, including the Central Music Hall where Harry and Rose had married, enabling him to demolish the building on the original site and replace it with an enormous twelve-storey structure, retaining only the comparatively new annex. Once more Daniel Burnham and his team swung into action, and once more Harry Selfridge was flying with excitement. At every stage of the development he booked advertisements to inform shoppers about progress, at the same time reassuring them that Field’s was ‘committed to fair prices and good value’. Selfridge was busier than ever at work, and Rose was busy at home with their two daughters – Rosalie’s sister Violette was born in 1897 – and their son, Gordon, who was born three years later. Their fourth child, another daughter called Beatrice, born in 1901, would complete their family.

Advertising had become a major tool in the promotion of retail. The industry with which Selfridge had experimented in the early days was now virtually unrecognizable. Nationally, the biggest spenders were the food companies and the tobacco industry, but businesses producing toiletries and soft drinks were not far behind. By 1899, eighty companies were making, or beginning to make, automobiles, and advertising agencies were keenly anticipating the day when cars would appear on the pages of influential magazines. In the meantime,
they had to make do with the bicycle, and for the first time ever women were shown outside the home in a non-domestic setting riding their bicycles.

Advertisements for Marshall Field were, like most retail pages, booked locally rather than nationally, with newspapers being the biggest beneficiary. Indeed, the growth of retail advertising paralleled the growth of the big city newspapers, which created arts, event and fashion features by way of reciprocal editorial. Following company policy, Marshall Field pages never appeared on Sunday, this being still a day devoted to family, friends and Church.

The first phase of the six-year building programme opened in 1902. Marshall Field’s was a monument to new technology with over 50 elevators, 15,000 fire-sprinklers, and a cold storage vault with room for 20,000 fur coats. There was a library, a first-aid room with a trained nurse, an information bureau, a concierge service to book theatre tickets and hotel rooms, a crèche where mothers could leave their children in the care of trained nannies, and seven restaurants. Harry Selfridge had supervised every inch of the project from the miles of carpets to the hundreds of mirrors. He hadn’t forgotten the staff either. Now numbering 7,000, they had a special canteen, recreation rooms, locker rooms, a gymnasium and their own library. He instigated a three-day training system whereby new salespeople were given an intensive course in manners and in how to make the customer feel at home.