Architectural Details Preserved
By dividing his selling space into a series of intimate boutiques, Mr. Tarkington was able to preserve much of the mansion’s original floor plan. Other architectural details that have been preserved are marble floors and fireplaces, Tiffany stained-glass windows, Baccarat chandeliers, and wall panelings of exotic woods.
The merchandise, all of it decidedly on the pricey side, lends itself perfectly to this arrangement. On the street floor, near the Fifth Avenue entrance, is the Leah Roth boutique, a well-known name in designer millinery. For the press opening, Leah Roth offered a display of hats designed for the late Mrs. John Jacob Astor. The hats, borrowed from the Astor estate for the occasion, are all in black, since Mrs. Astor wore only black after her husband went down on the S.S. Titanic in 1912. Also on the street floor is the glittering boutique of Delafield & Du Bois, a new name in jewelry.
On an upper floor, in a room graced by an antique grand piano, is the salon of Antonio Delfino, a young designer never before shown in New York, whose airy, witty creations suggest that he is slated to become a name of considerable importance in the fashion world. Thus has Mr. Tarkington, a shy man who dislikes being photographed, cleverly combined the old and the new. Displays and windows, designed by Cyril Marx, manage to be both elegant and amusing at the same time.
In the gala party atmosphere of last night’s press preview, it was impossible to tell whether the level of the store’s service will match its magnificent array of fashion merchandise and its stunning decor, but if the enthusiastic response of last night’s invited guests is any indication, Tarkington’s seems well on its way to joining the pantheon of New York’s fine specialty stores.
“What’s a pantheon?” he asked her. The newspaper was spread out on the bed between them.
“It’s a roster of the gods,” she said. “You’re about to become one of the gods, my darling.”
He swung his feet over the side of the bed. “I’ve got to get to the store,” he said.
“So do I,” she said.
The cleanup squad was already at work when they arrived, by separate taxis. Someone had dropped a lighted cigarette on an Oriental rug, leaving an ugly burn, and a weaver had to be found who could repair it quickly. Cocktail glasses had left rings on many of the display counters, and even on the lid of the Bösendorfer. Bottles of Windex and furniture polish were being brandished everywhere. Merchandise had been pulled out for inspection, and display shelves and counters had to be put back in their original perfect order. Vacuum cleaners droned throughout the store. Si and Alice pitched in with the work, careful not to let their eyes travel toward each other. No one must suspect that they had become lovers the night before.
“Party favors,” Alice said at one point during the day. “It would be great if we could have favors for next week’s party—something for the women and something for the men.”
“What could we give them?”
Alice snapped her fingers. “Antonio,” she said. “He’s designed a fragrance. Did you know that?”
“I did not know that.”
“He gave me a little sample of it, and I thought it was quite nice. Oil of vetiver, clove, a bit of lemon—it’s a spicy, woodsy scent. We could give perfume to the ladies, cologne to the gentlemen.”
“We’ve invited five hundred people. Could he have that much by next Thursday?”
“I think so. Right now, his collection’s finished. He’s the least busy person in the store.”
“But bottles! We’d need to bottle it and package it, all by next Thursday. That’s impossible.”
“I happen to have a friend—” Moe Minskoff offered.
“No, this is Alice’s idea,” Si said, a little sharply. “Alice will handle it.”
“We’d need different bottles for the men’s and women’s fragrances, of course,” she said. “Let me see what I can find in the way of bottles, and if necessary I’ll do the packaging myself. If the scent turns out to be popular, we can sell it in the store and pay Antonio a royalty.”
“Do you really think you can pull all this off by Thursday?”
“Of course,” she said. “This is New York, remember? The great thing about New York is that there’s always a little hole-in-the-wall store somewhere that sells whatever you’re looking for.”
By Monday, she had found her one-ounce spray bottles. “I’d hoped for something a little more stylish,” she said. “These are from an Elizabeth Arden line that’s been discontinued, but they’ll have to do. If the scent’s a success, Antonio will design his own bottles.” Antonio had concocted his perfume in the kitchen of his apartment, and by Monday afternoon he had put together three full gallons of his essence. Perfume became men’s cologne, he explained, simply by diluting the essence base with alcohol. On Tuesday, Alice and Antonio spent the day filling five hundred bottles with medicine droppers. It was a tedious job, and by the end of the day both of them had headaches from the heavy scent.
On Wednesday, the labels arrived from the printer, pink labels for the perfume and blue for the cologne. The labels read:
Parfum de Antonio
BY
DELFINO OF TARKINGTON’S
The rest of that day was spent affixing the labels to the bottles, and Alice spent most of Wednesday night wrapping the party favors—blue tissue paper with pink ribbon bows for the men, pink paper with blue ribbons for the women. By Thursday morning, the job was done.
They had decided to employ the same tactic: Si Tarkington would not make his entrance until the party was well under way. Tonight, when Si stepped off the elevator, there was also applause. But since tonight’s guests were from the worlds of society and the arts, where each celebrity guest was interested in his or her personal appearance more than in anyone else’s, the applause was more polite and muted. Si immediately recognized some reasonably well-known faces.
There, in black, was Maria Callas. There was Audrey Hepburn, chatting with Joan Fontaine. There were Arlene Francis and her husband, Martin Gabel. There were Maureen O’Hara, David Niven, Moira Shearer, Nina Foch, Rhonda Fleming, Joan Bennett and Clare and Harry Luce, Charlton and Lydia Heston, Kirk and Anne Douglas. Alice had also managed to snare some European titles—“New Yorkers love titles,” she said—and, taking Si by the arm, she introduced him to the Princess de Crouy, the Countess D’Arcangues, and the Princess Colonna. Through it all swirled Antonio—youthful, handsome, and dashing in his dinner jacket—taking compliments on his fragrance and on his designs, in his true element at last. A poor boy from Brooklyn, born to Italian immigrant parents, he had confessed to Alice, as they worked in his kitchen with the little bottles, that he had got his idea for mixing a fragrance while helping his father make wine in the family’s basement in Crown Heights.
“There’s someone you must meet,” Alice whispered to Si. “Monique Van Degan is here. Her husband’s grandfather built this house. She’s upstairs in Sportswear with the Begum Aga Khan.”
From The New York Times, October 17, 1958:
SECOND GALA TOASTS THE ARRIVAL OF TARKINGTON’S
The worlds of international celebrity and high society collided with the tinkle of champagne glasses last night in the second of two glittering galas to toast the arrival of Tarkington’s, the elegant new emporium on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street. The store opens officially to the public this morning at 10 A.M., but last night’s entertainment was by invitation only. Invitations were carefully scrutinized at the door, and potential crashers were challenged.
Among the invited guests was Adam Gimbel, president of Saks Fifth Avenue and a vice president of the Fifth Avenue Association. Asked whether Tarkington’s might not provide stiff competition for his own luxury-goods store, Mr. Gimbel merely smiled and said, “Whatever is good for Fifth Avenue is good for us.”
Another guest was Mrs. Truxton Van Degan III, whose husband’s grandfather, the late railroad magnate, commissioned the stately seven-story graystone McKim, Mead & White mansion now occupied
by Tarkington’s. “It was a wonderful house,” Mrs. Van Degan said, looking around the new store, “but it had become such a white elephant for the family. No one can afford to live on this grand a scale anymore. It’s wonderful that Mr. Tarkington had the taste and imagination to redo the place. Who would have thought it possible? We thought we were lucky to get $150,000 from a demolition company to tear it down, and they thought they were lucky to find a buyer for $25,000 more. The really lucky one is Mr. Tarkington. He’s such a charming man.”
Mrs. Van Degan looked wistfully up at the ceiling of the street floor lobby, where six matching Baccarat chandeliers are suspended. “I wish I’d had the sense to take just one of those for myself before the sale,” she said. “I’d frankly forgotten about them. The last time I was here, they were in bags.”
Silas Tarkington noticed the discrepancy in the purchasing price, but he did not mention it to Alice. After all, Mrs. Van Degan might have been mistaken, though she seemed very definite about her figures.
On Friday morning, long before the doors opened at ten o’clock, crowds began to collect on the sidewalk outside the store and lines started to form outside the entrance. Presently, the police arrived, and yellow barricades were set up to control the crowds and get the curious to form a single manageable waiting line. Two mounted policemen trotted back and forth, up and down the block.
Looking out at this scene from his fifth-floor office window, Si could tell that the vast majority of these people were not Tarkington’s shoppers. At least from the looks of this crowd, he hoped that they were not. These people would not be coming into the store to buy anything. They just wanted to look around. Still, the word-of-mouth that this kind of excitement would create could only help.
A mounted policeman was bellowing through his bullhorn, “No more than forty persons admitted at a time.… Fire regulations.… No more than forty at a time.…”
Looking down, it amused him, in a grim way, to think that eight years ago he had made his way to Hillsdale in a grimy, unventilated police van, manacled to seven other men, four of them black and all of them older than he. One of them had shit in his pants during the three-hour journey. On that occasion, the assignment for the police had been to protect the public from his unruly ways. Today, the police were lined up outside his store to protect him from the unruly public. “It could only happen in America,” as his father used to say.
“Moe, we need to talk,” he said.
“Sure,” said Moe. “What about?”
“Several things,” he said.
“Shoot, pal.”
“To begin with, that shipment from Chanel. Where did you get it?”
“I told you. I got friends. I got connections.”
“Andrew Goodman was at the party the other night. He commented that our Chanel collection looked a lot like some garments Bergdorf had ordered, but the order got lost. I had to do some fast talking about coincidences and that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Just a coincidence.”
“I’m not sure I convinced him.”
“Well, when your own order comes in, you can offer to make a swap. Simple.”
“We’ve already sold several of those garments. How do we account for that?”
“Aw, we’ll think of somethin’.”
Si looked at him steadily. “I hope so,” he said. “Now there’s another matter I’m unhappy about, Moe. I think you saw Mrs. Van Degan quoted in last Friday’s Times. She said we paid the demolition company a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for this building. She sounded very definite about it. But you told me the price was two hundred and twenty-five. You handled that transaction. Who’s right?”
“I’m right, of course! Would I lie to you?”
“I hope not,” Si said carefully. “But I wonder why Mrs. Van Degan came up with a smaller figure.”
“That broad’s nutty as a fruitcake,” Moe said. “I’ve done deals with her husband, and he’s told me she’s as nutty as a fruitcake. She spends six months a year at the Hartford Retreat, whenever she starts thinking she’s Marie Antoinette and the peasants are trying to murder her. That’s how nutty she is.”
Si waved his hand to dismiss the subject. “There’s a third matter I’ve been meaning to ask you about. You remember when we were all working so hard to get the renovations finished and the electricians were threatening to strike? That day, a bunch of goons appeared outside the building. Where did those guys come from?”
Moe chuckled. “Electricians went back to work, didn’t they? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“But where did the goons come from? I’ve never seen such a rough-looking bunch.”
“I told you, I got connections. People with influence.”
“Who are these people?”
“Just friends. Friends of mine. People who owe me.”
“And the elevator inspection certificates. They were all put up awfully quickly. But even though I was here the whole time, I never saw an elevator inspector come around.”
“There’s shortcuts. Shortcuts you can take down at City Hall. Everybody does it. If you went through all the red tape they got for you down there, it would take six months to get an elevator inspected.”
“You mean our elevators were never inspected?”
“Look, what are you bitchin’ about?” Moe said. “You got your work done when you wanted it done, didn’t you? You got everything done on time, with all the necessary permits, strictly legit. So what’s your problem?”
“I guess what it all boils down to,” Si said, steepling his fingers, “is that I’ve started wondering about some of the investors you’ve been bringing in. That initial two-hundred-thousand-dollar check, for instance. That was a large sum of money. Where did it come from?”
“I told you! Friends, connections, people who owe me. People who for one reason or another don’t want their names known. In that particular case, it was from a guy who wanted to invest some money he didn’t want his wife to know he had. So what’s the big deal?”
“I don’t want any dirty money in my operation, Moe.”
“Dirty money, clean money, what’s the diff? It’s all money, ain’t it? Money is money.”
Si paused for a moment. “Moe, I’m really grateful for everything you’ve done,” he said at last. “I couldn’t have gotten this place off the ground if it hadn’t been for you.”
“Now that’s more like it,” Moe said. “Now you’re talkin’ more like I’d expect to hear—a little gratitude for all I done.”
“I am grateful, Moe. But this morning I had a meeting with an officer from the Morgan Guaranty Trust. He came to offer me some financing. Funny, isn’t it? A year ago the big banks wouldn’t talk to me. But now that the store looks like it’s going to be successful, the banks send vice presidents around, begging me to let them loan me money. Anyway, I’d like to accept this particular offer. And I’d like to use some of that capital to buy you and your friends out.”
Moe’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, yeah?” he said.
“Quote me a price, Moe.”
“You ain’t gonna buy me out, pal.”
“Come on, Moe. Be reasonable. Quote me a price. Some of that money I’ve had for two years. Let me pay it back, with full interest.”
“I told you you ain’t gonna buy me out! You ain’t never gonna buy me out! This is my store too, ya know! This is the first respectable high-class business I’ve ever had an interest in, and who made it respectable? Me! And I ain’t gonna lose that interest in it—never!”
“Moe, I’m asking you as a friend. With the money I’d pay you, you could go out and buy something else—”
“I don’t want nothing else! I worked too damn hard to get what I got right now, and I ain’t gonna give it up!”
“Then I’m afraid I’ll have to—”
“Afraid you’ll have to do what? Now, wait a minute, buddy! You better hold the phone! Are you threatening me, pal? There ain’t a fucking thing you can do to me, and
you fucking well know it! How’d you like it if I told your fancy banker friends who this blowgut who calls himself Silas Tarkington really is? How’d you like it if I took a coupla reporters from The New York Times, that seems to think you’re the hottest thing since sliced bread, out to Woodlawn Cemetery and showed ’em where the real Silas Tarkington is planted, deader’n a mackerel? You got a bad case of a swollen head if you think you’re gonna get rid of me, Mr. Big Shot! I’ll yank that tombstone outa Woodlawn Cemetery and plant that fucker right beside your front door on Fifth Avenue, and you’ll be dead! Try any fast ones with me, pal, and they’ll be writing your obituary!”
He began jabbing his pudgy forefinger into Si’s chest.
“You’re stuck with me, pal,” he said. “Get that through that swollen head of yours. I made you what you are, and I ain’t lettin’ you go!”
“You could ruin us both, of course. But I suppose you know that.”
“Right! If we sink, we go down together. But we ain’t gonna sink, and you know why? ’Cause I been ruined before, and I ain’t gonna be ruined again, and you been ruined before and you ain’t gonna be ruined again, neither. You gonna let that little shiksa you’re screwin’ see you turned into a ruined man? Fuck, no! She’s only screwin’ you because she’s screwin’ Mr. Big Shot. Well, I made you into that big shot, so you’re my Mr. Big Shot now, and you’re gonna stick with me.”
“Just tell me one thing, Moe,” he said. “When is my mother going to start getting her dividends? She’s started pestering me.”
“We got other more important investors to pay off first, that’s when. It’s like these’re bondholders and preferred stockholders. Bondholders and preferred stockholders always get paid off first. Your old lady is only a common stockholder, who gets paid off after.”
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