A bit of hurried, stealthy corporate paper-shuffling several months after the crash could have played a key role. Probably as a way to protect company stock from the Drage lawsuit, some of Kitty’s voting shares and some of the voting shares in Freddy’s estate were quietly reissued by the firm as non-voting shares. That measure, obviously designed to shield the family business, may have balanced the playing field between Kitty and Byron. But, still, if she decided to sell, she could demand much more than the book value of her shares in the harsh economy of that time. She could ask for so much money that maybe her Uncle Byron would realize it made no sense to cut her—and the Kansas City Harveys—out of their own business.
DRAGE V. HARVEY was a gruesome lawsuit. The winner had to prove it was her relative who had lived the longest in that carnage, and had more time to suffer the most horrible death made possible by modern technology.
Lucy Drage’s lawyer, Frank Sebree, worked for months building a case. His team took new affidavits from anyone who had been at or near the crash site in Pennsylvania. They did their own analysis of all the forensic evidence. And they blew up photos of the cabin of a Staggerwing, as well as the devastating shots taken at the crash site. They planned to make a judge and jury feel as if they were actually inside the plane as it went down. And they believed they could prove that there was at least a minute, and maybe even two minutes, when Freddy was already dead but poor Betty was still alive and conscious, clutching her dog in her arms.
On the day of the crash, some eyewitnesses claimed they saw or heard the plane hit the side of a mountain and lose a wing before nosediving. The local coroner had even highlighted this in his initial findings. While the government report later disagreed with that assessment, Drage’s attorney felt the local farmers and miners who had tried to save the couple would be more sympathetic than the government’s expert witness: In the small world of aviation, the safety investigator on the case turned out to be Eugene Vidal, whom President Roosevelt had appointed director of the Bureau of Air Commerce. Since Vidal and Freddy had known each other for years, there was some speculation the government was helping TWA withhold certain facts about the crash. “It was important that airline officials keep their mouths shut,” one family member recalls, “because [Freddy’s] insurance might be in some jeopardy.”
The trial started in April 1937 on the one-year anniversary of the crash. But just as the proceedings were getting under way, the judge was informed by the lawyers that their clients had settled.
Kitty had blinked.
She agreed to pay Lucy Drage about $100,000 ($1.5 million) just to put an end to the grotesque spectacle. Part of the money went into annuities that would give Lucy an annual income of $3,000 ($43,300); the rest she took in cash. Kitty also agreed to pay all the bills Betty had run up buying clothing over the past couple of years. Besides the London shopping spree, there was her tab of $7,347.56 ($110,000) at the posh Marion Dwyer dress shop in Chicago. Her five-page bill included charges for an ermine and velvet wrap, a silver muskrat coat, a Lanvin coat with nutria fur trimming, fourteen gowns with tailored slips for each, assorted designer suits, coats, skirts, blouses, handbags, and evening bags, and twenty-three pairs of gloves.
Kitty let it be known that she had always planned to give the Drages part of the estate, and that suing her had not been necessary at all. Yet Lucy and her lawyers considered the settlement a great victory over difficult odds. In Kansas City, it was rare for anyone to beat the Harveys at anything.
With the case settled, Freddy’s estate could finally be probated. It was valued at $750,000 ($11.2 million), on which Kitty had to pay inheritance tax of $105,217 ($1.6 million). She kept the family home in Kansas City, where she expected to be spending more time, and the houses in California. And when all the estate paperwork was finally finished, she turned her attention to becoming more involved at Fred Harvey.
At the same time, her uncle turned his attention to forcing her out.
Byron and Kitty did their best to keep their conflicts out of the newspaper and away from other family members, but their arguments apparently went on for over a year. Daggett Harvey, the only child of Byron’s who was not in the business at that time—he was a thirty-two-year-old corporate attorney—would always remember a screaming phone conversation he once overheard between the two of them. In Daggett’s later years, after his father was gone and he had joined the family business himself, he would sometimes bring up the incident to his son with a troubled tone in his voice. He said he remembered telling his father, Byron Sr., that he sympathized with Kitty. If his father insisted on forcing her to sell, Daggett wanted to make sure “it was done the proper way.”
Apparently, Byron was willing to pay almost anything to make Kitty back down. Family members who discussed this with her, or later had access to the records of her estate, estimate she got at least $1 million in cash for her stock, and more likely as much as $3 million ($45.8 million). And this was during the second wave of the Great Depression. While the secret deal was being negotiated, the slowly rebounding American economy actually took another nosedive in 1937 and went into another recession.
Kitty was crushed to give up her chance to run the family business, although she would never explain why she did it. “She didn’t like to speak about painful things,” recalled her closest nephew. When asked about difficult family matters, she often told him, “If it were true, I wouldn’t want to talk about it.” She was a little more direct years later when another of her nephews brought up the subject during lunch at the Ritz in Paris. “Not that it’s any of your business,” she said, “but I didn’t have any choice.” Perhaps Byron or his attorneys promised a gloves-off battle, which she knew would hurt the business and the family at a time when they could least afford it. Or maybe she came to believe that Byron had an iron-clad option to buy her shares, and the only fight left was over the price.
But while she never fully explained her decision, it haunted her. Kitty Harvey was not one to let her emotions rule her. She had little tolerance for weepy women. But whenever the subject of how it ended with her Uncle Byron came up, and how she had been forced to sell the company because she was the wrong sex, she always confessed that she was “in tears.”
Not long after Kitty sold her shares, the company’s oldest and longest-tenured staff member reached his fiftieth anniversary at Fred Harvey. Tim Cooper had been Ford’s original assistant back in 1888 and the company’s first black office employee. He had worked his way up over the years to become the chief shipping clerk at the Kansas City headquarters—which was soon to be dismantled and moved to Chicago. Byron, who had known Cooper since they were both teenagers, started planning a big banquet in his honor, which the entire family and many work friends would attend. But Cooper reportedly told Byron he “simply refused” to be part of such an event. Instead, he chose to celebrate with the remaining members of the Kansas City Harveys. He and his wife, Helen, had a private dinner just with Kitty and Minnie, in the very formal, very English dining room at Ford’s old house.
AS THE FAMILY SIMMERED, a husky thirty-eight-year-old former cigar salesman set out to make himself as famous across the country as Fred Harvey. His name was Howard Johnson.
Back in 1924, Johnson had quit his father’s New England cigar business and opened a small store in the Wollaston section of Quincy, Massachusetts, where he sold ice cream made from his mother’s recipes at the soda fountain. Within two years, he was wholesaling ice cream to stands all over Cape Cod, and had added spicy frankfurters and addictive tender fried clams to his takeout menu. In 1929, he opened his first restaurant in Quincy, which became unexpectedly popular because of a scandal in the American theater. Eugene O’Neill’s experimental play Strange Interlude had been banned in Boston because of its frankness about sex, abortion, and mental illness, and the production was mounted instead in Quincy. In addition to its challenging subject matter, the play ran four hours—such a long day’s journey into night that it was performed with a dinner
break. Howard Johnson’s was the closest restaurant to the theater. A family-food star was born.
Despite the Depression, the business did well enough that in 1935, Johnson was ready to expand. He didn’t have enough money, however, so he sold a franchise to a sea captain in nearby Orleans, Reginald Sprague, who agreed to peddle the company’s signature ice cream, as well as the franks and clams. Sprague’s Howard Johnson restaurant had a sitdown dining room attached to a soda fountain where patrons could swivel on stools or order takeout—like a Harvey eating house but more middlebrow, with seashore food and a more East Coast version of Americana.
The new restaurant was so popular that Johnson agreed to sell dozens of franchises. He handpicked the franchisees, working with them closely to choose locations and build to his specifications. He also held their hands through every step of the way, setting up centralized ice-cream-making facilities and contracting for frankfurters and clams so he could completely control the quality of the food served in his name. In 1936, Howard Johnson opened thirty-nine new roadside family restaurants in New England. That was more eating houses than the dwindling Fred Harvey chain still had in the entire Southwest.
Within two years, Johnson had eighty franchises, and his ads proclaimed, “The Howard Johnson vogue is sweeping the country!” By 1940, there were more than one hundred Howard Johnsons, extending from New England down through New York (where he built a restaurant near the world’s fair site) and New Jersey, as well as pockets of new franchises around Washington, D.C., and in Florida. The new king of family dining also landed the contract to control all the restaurant stops along what would become America’s first major toll-road system, the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was one more way for Howard Johnson to establish himself as the next Fred Harvey for the nation’s most modern form of transportation.
He did so with almost no resistance from Fred Harvey itself. After spending so much time and money getting control of the family business, Byron didn’t really have the ambition or the capital to expand into this obvious new market. And after Freddy’s death, Byron withdrew the company from all its airline contracts as well—just as Howard Hughes was taking over TWA and the commercial aviation business was having its second wind. Byron decided that Fred Harvey would stick with what it knew—union stations, what was left of the trackside hotels and eating houses, La Fonda in Santa Fe, and of course the Grand Canyon, which, amazingly, now made more money than everything else in the company put together.
CHAPTER 42
PRIVATE PRINGLE TO THE RESCUE
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HARVEY FAMILY TUMULT, A LETTER FROM Hollywood arrived at Byron’s office. It was from Bing Crosby’s production company with Paramount, Major Pictures, which had just finished Pennies from Heaven with Crosby and Louis Armstrong and Go West, Young Man with Mae West and Randolph Scott. They were going to make a movie set at a Fred Harvey eating house in New Mexico in 1900, about a woman who comes west to be a Harvey Girl.
The letter came from William Rankin, who had written the screenplay—which he said treated the Harvey restaurants “with the greatest respect, attempting to show that they were greatly responsible for the development of the Southwest.” He wanted to know whether Fred Harvey could help them make their film authentic. Rankin even offered to submit the final shooting script to Byron for his approval. The project, originally called Susannah Was a Lady and then Parade to Empire, was expected to star Janet Gaynor and Fred MacMurray.
Byron Jr. quickly checked out the production company with a friend in Hollywood, a young costume designer at Paramount, Edith Head. Once she assured him that any film they produced would be “perfectly legitimate and worthwhile,” he told his father that Fred Harvey should assist the producers in any way they could. Byron put John Huckel’s old assistant Harold Belt on the case. Belt would devote much of the next ten years to the project, for the Harvey Girls movie, like Fred Harvey itself, spent the better part of that decade in turnaround.
TO THE TRAVELING PUBLIC, Fred Harvey was still a western powerhouse: While many smaller locations had closed, its major hotels, restaurants, and union station operations still appeared to be going strong. Increasingly, the company was known for its Santa Fe dining car service, especially on the Super Chief—its first all-diesel service between Chicago and California, the fastest and classiest train ride ever. The glistening, modern, all-steel Super Chief was the transportation of choice for business and Hollywood types still anxious about flying. In fact, they became so reliant on the train, after its 1936 debut, that it was not uncommon to hear people use “chief” as a verb, as in “I just chiefed in from the coast.”
While the Super Chief had the same excellent Fred Harvey dining car service as its predecessors, it had an extra touch inspired by the sensibilities of the Kansas City Harveys in the “good old days.” Mary Colter designed a revolutionary china pattern, called Mimbreño, just for its dining cars. She based her design on the whimsical pottery made by Indians in New Mexico’s Mimbres valley during the thirteenth century, so all the pieces were decorated with blood-red paintings of stylized, floating animals: amusing fish chasing each other’s tails, genuflecting parrots, leaping quail, wrestling birds, and all manner of funny bunnies. The dishes were almost too enchanting to sully with food. They were used in an exclusive dining car space called the Turquoise Room.
The only downside to the Super Chief was that its terminus in Los Angeles was the antiquated Santa Fe La Grande station on East First Street. But that changed in 1939 when the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and Southern Pacific finally completed construction of the new $11 million ($171 million) Los Angeles Union Station. Considered the last great railroad station in America, it was also the last for which Fred Harvey was hired to run all the restaurants and retail stores. While Mary Colter did not design the entire majestic station complex, she did create a remarkable space for the Fred Harvey eateries. It had a spectacular arched ceiling that brought to mind the inside of Jonah’s whale, spacey Deco fixtures, and a dazzling floor, which appeared to be random zigzags and geometrics until you stepped back and realized it was actually a block-long Navajo blanket made of linoleum tiles.
Colter also designed a marvelous Deco cocktail lounge. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper immediately dubbed it the “newest rendezvous in town … so pleasant there it’s a joy to miss your train. No one wants to catch one.”
Unfortunately, Hedda was right—a lot of people didn’t want to catch the train anymore. The Super Chief itself was successful. So was a new economy train called the Scout, which even had a car for women and children traveling alone, with a Santa Fe “Courier-Nurse” to help out. (It quickly became known, in the words of one corporate historian, as “a rolling nightmare of diapers, midnight feedings and a constant parade of women moving back and forth to the diner seeking warm bottles of milk.”) But in general, passenger traffic was falling, along with the prices that passengers were willing to pay. The Santa Fe tried getting into buses, which also stopped at the remaining Harvey eating houses. Fred Harvey even opened its first bus-only restaurant and lounge in the new Santa Fe Trailways bus terminal in Hollywood, on Cahuenga Boulevard. But in general, the railroad’s business was flat—just when new investment was needed for more speedy diesel trains to keep up with the times.
BY MOVING FRED HARVEY’S main office to Chicago, in the same building as the headquarters of the Santa Fe, Byron had brought the family business closer to the railroad than ever before. So much so that Fred Harvey actually lost its long battle with the Interstate Commerce Commission over whether dining car employees really worked for the Harveys or for the railroad when it came to qualifying for union membership. In a decision the company fought hard, railroad workers were allowed to unionize the Fred Harvey dining cars, which eventually led to unions in other parts of the operation.
At a time when Fred Harvey was under intense economic pressure, it was the last thing the company needed. Every page of the annual report was pockmarked with red ink. Their retail business was so
disastrous that Byron urged Herman Schweizer to start liquidating the Indian art.
Schweizer resisted, and somehow managed to keep most of the best pieces hidden in his vault and on his inventories so his priceless collection would not be sold off at bargain prices. But it was hard for him to believe how much American tastes had deteriorated. Where he once had bought pieces that museums fought over, the “Harvey ethnographer” was now handling only the cheap stuff he originally had commissioned for the least discriminating tourists. Instead of stocking handsome shops, he was selling turquoise and silver trinkets through a mail-order catalog.
The Harvey chain was on life support—there were only twenty-nine restaurants left, and half of them were consistently losing money. Byron even had to close the historic first eating house, in Topeka. And when he did, journalist William Allen White was already writing the obituary for Fred Harvey, and for a way of life in America:
The newspaper announced yesterday that the … oldest surviving Harvey house on the Santa Fe system, the one at Topeka, had closed … For 50 years and more, Harvey Houses … were beacons of culinary light and learning, chiefly because they broiled steak instead of frying it and also used French dressing on head lettuce. Before that, sugar and vinegar were regarded as proper dressing for lettuce in these latitudes. Also, the Harvey houses introduced au gratin potatoes and rare roast beef. Small things these, but devastating to the cook who fried her steak and her potatoes and regarded floating island as the acme of all desserts.
Appetite for America Page 43