By the time I was twelve, the family was in a state of frenzy over how they could knock this artistic nature out of me. Finally, it was decided that a trade school, where my hands could be the learners, was the only solution for a safe future. I enrolled at Mechanic Arts High School, where I learned carpentry. My spindle-legged tables were a howling success and caused a great deal of hell-raising with the people who wanted plain, sturdy-legged tables. I just couldn’t resist putting the wood on a lathe and making all the fanciest turns I knew how. The classes were anything but fashionable. They consisted of sheet-metal work and a blacksmith’s shop where we had the best fun. What I couldn’t do with the blowtorch and anvil! Everything I made had curlicues and twists . . . I suppose you might call it Irish baroque. Along with all those shop classes came algebra, which I could never figure out, and history, which I was terrific at, from a costume point of view. I couldn’t recite a word of Shakespeare, but I could sure draw a costume for every character in the plays.
What made these school years livable was an after-school job at Jordan Marsh Company, the city’s largest department store. At two thirty I was out of the school prison, trotting down fashionable Boylston Street with more enthusiasm than I’d shown all day, observing all the windows of the most fashionable shops in Boston. A special delight was sizing up the august Beacon Hill dowagers who would be going to tea at the Ritz Hotel. I often dallied outside its doors just to get a glimpse of some fascinating women. Jordan Marsh was across the Boston Common, in the commercial section of town, surrounded by Filene’s and the other big stores that just swallowed me up. At Jordan’s I was a stock boy in the ready-to-wear departments, and had the time of my life pushing the big carts through the store. My favorite departments were better dresses, furs, and handbags. The store had an elegant quality that disappeared after my days there in the early 1940s. A grand stairway curved up through the central rotunda; mahogany showcases gave a proper Bostonian attitude to the high-ceilinged main floor.
I wasn’t there but a few weeks before I knew the best merchandise from the plain, everyday stuff. I was always finagling a deal, until I got to push the racks with the best dresses down to their department, where I carefully scrutinized every one I took off.
I would unload the stock truck of the handbag department like I was unveiling the emperor’s jewels, making sure I set the bag on the counter so customers felt they had just discovered something they had never seen before. If the salesgirls didn’t make a few sales during the performance, I was crushed. The store’s glove department didn’t interest me, but its buyer wore the most exciting hats. They were tall Lilly Daché turbans, the likes of which few Bostonian women had ever seen. They had a sense of drama. This buyer also wore the first silver foxes without legs, tails, and heads I had seen. It was a knockout when everyone else in Boston was cherishing all those legs, tails, and heads. As a matter of fact, for years they continued to wear it like that in Boston, and didn’t think of cutting them off.
My first six months’ salary went to buying a pair of these silver foxes for my mother. She hardly ever wore them, feeling they were too daring and showy.
At this time I started covering myself in outrageous bright shirts and ties. I bought the first fake-fur-lined trench coat with the biggest fur collar I could find, and nearly drove the family crazy with shame, wearing it on the first cool day of September. I just couldn’t wait to get it on my back and parade into school—although I almost fainted from the heat in the rush-hour crowd in the trolley car. Clothes were everything to me, and I think I spent seven days a week deciding what I’d wear the next week.
Life at Jordan’s was fabulous, and had they given diplomas, I would have graduated with honors. That said, I almost got canned at one point. It was during the parade at the end of the Second World War, and I felt the store should do something in the way of a big display. Of course, they had already hung the world’s largest American flag over the Washington Street facade of the building, which made Filene’s flag look like a postage stamp. But I thought I should add some of my own flair, so I went through all the men’s rooms in the store, taking the rolls of toilet tissue and stashing them up on the roof of the store, at the corner of Washington and Summer Streets, the busiest intersection in Boston, where the biggest crowd was sure to assemble. After collecting dozens and dozens of rolls, I began to unroll them over the heads of the marching soldiers. It was an instant success, as the white rolls whipped down in huge white streaks! The crowd below went wild with delight as the unrolled ends bounced off the heads of the cops. Within fifteen minutes the intersection was a blizzard of toilet paper, which became a spectacular tangled mess in all of Filene’s flagpoles—it took them months to unwind it. In my enthusiasm in creating a living display, I had completely blocked the window view of the store’s president, Mr. Mitton, which was right under where I was standing. I had hardly unrolled the last of the paper, when the hands of store detectives, executives, and Boston cops hauled me before the exasperated president.
After three years in the women’s fashion department, I was sentenced—because of the toilet paper episode—to the home furnishings department. The only excitement there came from the fabrics and colors, especially in the towel and linen department, which generated gigantic sales from customers replacing the war years’ drain on their linen closets. My stock cart would be piled eight feet high with towels of brilliant color: flamingos, blues, greens, roses. Up to this time, toweling had always been pure white, and I must say I took real delight in mixing all the colors onto the counters—almost like painting. The department was a wonderful education in the rare laces and damasks used for table covers, and I was given great insight into the weaving of materials. The assistant buyer was a wonderful gal by the name of Nancy Peckham, who wore the best-looking hats, and introduced me to the New Yorker, which we would hide away in the stockroom and read like the Bible most of Friday afternoon. The buyer was a very quiet sort of man who could freeze you out quicker than any windstorm. But he was very nice to me, and gave me my first tuxedo to wear to the many school proms and debutante cotillions that were taking place.
These dances were social highlights, and I attended every one I could get an invitation to. They presented the delicious opportunity of bringing fresh flowers to all my favorite girls of the moment, and I definitely chose my girlfriends because of their chic. If they didn’t wear just what I thought was the right gown, that ended the romance. I had two favorites in my first year of high school, Barbara, who looked like the traditional debutante and dressed with respectable taste, and Gloria, who was the Brenda Starr of my life. Gloria and I got going on glamorous Hollywood living. Her great ambition was a mink coat, and we made the most uninhibited entrances into the local ballrooms. The neighbors were talking for weeks. We were considered fast kids. Also, she drove her own convertible, and dyed her hair to match it. She was fabulous and all the guys wanted to date her, but after the first night they were scared to death, because all Gloria would talk about were her dreams of mink coats, vacations in Florida, new cars, and twenty-room houses with five maids. As you can imagine, in a middle-class neighborhood this went over with anything but a bang. But Gloria and I were a pair; I remember a dance at the very conservative Vendome where Gloria, who was sixteen years old, caused a sensation. All the girls wore birthday-party-pastel gowns, but Gloria made her own from thirty yards of navy-blue net, and jeweled stars sparkled across her strapless top and the front of the skirt. It was really a ravishing affair, and we’d have been tops at the party if it hadn’t been for Gloria’s sister, who was by far the most entrancing girl in town. Her slithery crepe dress, draped up on one side like you saw on the movie queens, practically got us all expelled from school. I guess it was what you’d call early vamp.
During my last year at the trade school a swanky Fifth Avenue New York store bought and started remodeling the old Museum of Natural History. This was to be a new fashion store. I passed it each afternoon on my way to work. The site
for the store was superb—the lovely old redbrick museum was set in a block-wide park of trees and shrubs. All this right in the center of the most exclusive shopping area. The store was to be Bonwit Teller’s first branch. The excitement over its opening in Boston was terrific. For a whole year, every cup of tea downed in Boston was followed by gossip about the extravagance of the New York store spending a million dollars to renovate and decorate this old museum. White sheets covered the building’s windows, and all the work was directed from New York under great secrecy. As the September opening neared, everyone wondered what kind of store it would be. No display windows were installed in the mansion-like building. The word was out that it would remain like a private estate. William Pahlmann, New York’s answer to Elsie de Wolfe, was the interior decorator. Huge crates arrived daily from the antiques shops of Europe and Third Avenue. The suspense was killing, as I would pass each day on my way from school to Jordan Marsh. When the first newspaper announcement appeared a month before the opening, all of Boston was shocked, as the extravagant New Yorkers bought an entirely blank newspaper page with a tiny Steinberg drawing of five superb Beacon Hill dowagers standing on a platform in an upper corner, all dripping in fur, frantically waving their lorgnettes at the empty page. For a month, this teaser advertising continued, with never a mention of Bonwit Teller. In the ad, a long pole from under the platform on which the ladies stood ran down the side of the page to the lower corner, where gears and wheels lowered the ladies further each day. On opening day, all the Boston newspapers showed two totally blank pages, with the Steinberg platform finally lowered to the bottom of the page, and the five ladies madly running across it toward a two-inch-high drawing of the new palatial Bonwit store. The ad campaign caught everyone’s imagination, and really put the lorgnettes of Boston on its doings. I had passed the store each day during its construction, and I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. I had to get right in the middle of all the excitement. Two days before Bonwit’s opened, I quit my job at Jordan’s against the better judgment of the vice president, Cameron Thompson, who told me that Bonwit’s could never last, and they’d be dumping all the help within a year. But no one could stop me. All this glamour had really shaken me up. I had to be in the middle of the soup.
Bonwit’s hired me the same afternoon I left Jordan’s, as a stock boy for the designer clothes. I was to keep track of the Diors and Adrians. My head was in a swivel of excitement as I crawled around the gorgeous clothes. And when it came to the romantic ball gowns, I thought I’d die of happiness! The store opened on a bright Indian summer day. The gardens around the store were freshly planted in a rioting color of chrysanthemums and shrubs; the grass lawns were like velvet gowns. From the grand stairway, a red carpet flowed out to the street. Two striped metal tents with sides of glass flanked the huge stairway. These were set on pillars of marble. They were to be the display cases, and the only indication that this was a fashion store. The white sheets had been dropped from the windows, and the dazzle of beautiful crystal chandeliers blazed through every window. The first floor overwhelmed each visitor with sumptuous French decorations, made more extravagant by the daring use of pale pastel walls and carpets, and damask upholstery. (At that time, pastels were not used in decorating; instead dark greens and grays were dominant for interiors.) Off this large entrance room were four separate salons, each decorated in a different French period, with not a hint of what was for sale, until a saleslady wearing the daring New Look of Dior—tight bodice, full skirt to the mid-calf—presented the handbags, shoes, lingerie, and gloves that occupied the four rooms. Most of the opening-day guests were still wearing war-length to-the-knee skirts. The whole effect of Bonwit’s was as if Paris had been transplanted into twentieth-century Boston. The stuffed birds, bees, butterflies, and serpents that had once filled the rooms had disappeared, leaving only their plumage, rare skins, and delicate wings, which were turned into the most exquisite handbags of alligator, scarves of ostrich feathers, shoes of snakeskin, and silk stockings with the delicacy of butterfly wings. And the silkworm had turned its dark nest into a glittering salon where the most seductive lingerie in the world could be seen.
Great excitement centered on the forty-five-foot-ceilinged grand salon on the second floor. Here, a mammoth whale had once been suspended from the ceiling and delighted millions of Boston children. It was my favorite room in the museum; as I now stood in the middle of the huge salon, my eyes almost fell out of my head. A magic wand had turned the room into the most glorious ballroom imaginable, fit to please an empress. Three gigantic crystal chandeliers dangled and danced from the gilded ceiling, where the immense black whale had slept. The floor, which had held cases of sharks, flying fish, and other great beauties, now held the rarest French chairs, tables, and sofas covered in satins and velvets. The dark, dingy oak walls had been transformed into mirrored and gilded underwater grottoes. Ruby-red drapes fringed in gold dripped from the thirty-foot-high French windows that opened onto a royal balcony.
The four rooms that led off the halls of the grand salon once housed lions, tigers, leopards, and dozens of precious jungle animals. They were now the fitting rooms and stockrooms for the top designer clothes of the world. Here the New Look of Dior brushed shoulders with thirty-thousand-dollar Russian sable coats. Three maids strutted through, spraying the rarest perfume from rock crystal flagons, which sat upon silver platters with pearl satin pillows. I often thought the jungle beasts that slept for so long in these rooms were still lurking in the shadows. Every now and then the frightening screams of hysterical women being fitted in the finest creations made me feel the jungle of wild beasts and that of the tame human were quite the same.
The next floor was a mezzanine between the second and third. These rooms had been a delight to Beantown kids as they squeezed their parents’ hands and peeped at the ferocious gorillas and a hundred different monkeys that had played in the glass cases; now there was a splendid French Victorian millinery salon displaying the most frivolous hats in the world, which would have made the apes and monkeys shriek with laughter as proper Bostonian women admired their heads in Paris’s latest whimsy.
The third floor was decorated in the manner of a country house, where sport clothes and young college girls replaced the seashells and other natural studies.
It was a sumptuous opening: famous New York designers lapped up the free champagne while rubbing shoulders with the Four Hundred of Boston. All the Yankee bluebloods were there, along with the cream of Beacon Hill and Commonwealth Avenue. Bonwit’s had staffed the store with Social Register help, and it was all going to be just too swell for words, till the New Yorkers soon discovered that the proper Bostonians didn’t spend lots of money on clothes. As a matter of fact, they hardly ever bought new clothes. I remember the first week; everything about the opening had been so ritzy and snobby that women were afraid to come into the store. One pedigreed dowager from Louisburg Square came in with a twenty-year-old gown that she thought Bonwit’s would remake. I almost died laughing. Here the stockrooms were sagging under the weight of the newest clothes, and the favored blueblood customers were bringing in old dresses to be done over! About this time the big-shot New Yorkers started to sober up and wonder about business. They wanted this store to be so exclusive, invitations for the opening were not sent to the wealthy ladies of the Jewish community. As you can imagine, this slight was the underground talk in Boston for years, and many in the Jewish community totally ignored the Boston store. Bonwit’s had had a hell of a long pull putting the store in the black since that opening day. The store eventually ended up in completely different hands, where no such ridiculously stupid clique could insult a group of the community. Of course feelings were outraged at the time because the atrocities committed by Hitler had scarcely stopped when an antiquated minority of social snobs dared to pull so brazen a segregating stunt in a store that supposedly opened its doors to the public.
The upshot to the story was that, within a year, the whole bunch of society wom
en who opened with the store in executive positions were all thrown out on their derrieres, and the long, hard task of rebuilding an integrated image was carried on by a Texan, Mrs. Rosalind DeHart.
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AS THE STORE CHANGED OWNERSHIP, it came to scarcely resemble the original glamorous decor. Eventually, you could hardly see the floor or the walls for the clutter of counters and merchandise hung everywhere. The fine French furnishings were replaced by hidden racks of lingerie and dresses, which were probably much, much better for business.
But the first year was wonderfully exciting to me. Each morning I arrived early and helped unload the trucks from New York. I saw every piece of merchandise that came into the store, and learned a great deal about design and how to use materials, and at any time I could tell you what was in every department. There was a wonderful freedom, and I was allowed to work through every stockroom and alteration room. It was a big, happy family; everyone was pleasant to get along with, the salesgirls often letting me help them sell the clothes. I was only eighteen at the time. One salesgirl, Dolly, had a fabulous customer who bought dozens of things on each visit. The lady also had two beautiful daughters, whom Dolly let me show clothes to when she was busy with the mother. One time I sold the eighteen-year-old girl my favorite coat of the season. It was a Ben Reig design of cuddly brown chinchilla cloth, tight bodice and full skirt, with the back vent slit to the waist, and then closed with a row of twelve half-dollar-size black buttons. It was $395. I had almost sold the other sister an $1,800 Dior ball gown, when their mother called a halt to the episode. It’s such a wonderful feeling to sell someone something you love and that you know they will enjoy. Selling fine clothes is an art equal to designing them. Unfortunately, it’s an art unappreciated today. Today’s generation thinks of it as a lowly occupation. What a mistake! Just think of the great art dealers selling the canvases of famous painters. The art of selling fine clothes has been lost in big, overcrowded department stores where the intimate personal interest is not important. That’s why fine clothes from the most important designers are now being sold in small, privately owned shops around America. No elegant lady spending hundreds of dollars for a dress wants to push her way through a mobbed department store.
Fashion Climbing Page 2