Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  “Presentation, presentation, presentation,” he’d intone.

  Mr. Marcus was thought to be way out on the left. He was one of the very few employers who didn’t believe in keeping a glass ceiling over the heads of the women in the company. He traveled the world collecting modern art and creative ideas. He was always reaching out, always learning, always curious.

  I immediately understood his approach to merchandise because it reminded me so much of Suzy’s; it wasn’t about having more, bigger, better stuff, it was about creating an environment of good quality and graciousness. Maybe it was a capitalist brand of ahead-of-its-time feng shui. Mr. Marcus understood that people respond and grow toward beauty, and it gave him joy to help them make a physically and emotionally comfortable home where the world would be left outside. And that dynamic applies right down to the most intimate environment we live in: our clothes.

  The first Neiman Marcus Fortnight event was described in Time magazine as “Dallas in Wonderland.” For two weeks in the autumn of 1957, shoppers entered the store and were transported to France: Parisian décor, Gallic music—Coco Chanel herself came from Paris to visit. The first international flight ever to arrive in Dallas delivered her to Love Field, and there to meet her were Mr. Marcus and his vibrantly elegant wife, Billie. Dressed in full way-out-West regalia—ten-gallon hat, embroidered shirt, and pointy boots—he whisked Chanel off to a party at his and Billie’s home and then on to the event at the flagship store. Coco swept all the guests off their feet, customers couldn’t get enough French fashion and perfume, and Mr. Marcus knew he was onto something.

  He’d come up with the idea as a way to lure in customers during an aggravating slump in sales that occurred every year before the holiday shopping season kicked in. Every year, Fortnight featured a different part of the world. Brilliant ideas and unique experiences unfurled from the Marcuses’ love of travel, theater, and art. In the early 1960s, Mr. Marcus brought in Alvin Colt, a Tony Award-winning set and costume designer, and they worked together for the next twenty-three years. During a Spanish event, an elaborate china shop hosted a live bull. The British event made the main floor into a manor hall. Visitors included Sophia Loren, Joan Crawford, Princess Grace, and Prince Rainier. As the events grew more and more grandly enchanting, holiday sales figures were left in the dust by the cultural attraction and marketing miracle of Fortnight.

  “Go where people aren’t,” Mom had said. This was a vivid illustration.

  My first Fortnight in 1968 couldn’t have been more perfect.

  “It’s Italy!” I told Suzy. “You have to come. There’s going to be music, food, huge paintings, incredible designer clothes. It’s not even optional for you to miss this, Suz.”

  She stayed with me at my little apartment. We dressed to the nines and stepped through the front door at Neiman Marcus and back in time to our Italian adventures.

  Fortnight 1969 was “East Meets West.” Alvin Colt created a life-size elephant made of fuchsia orchids and parked it near the elevators. Weaving arm in arm through the elegantly done aisles, Suzy and I reminisced and compared notes on love and life. She kept busy with Junior League and her other activities. I was dating a wonderful man I’d met at a University of Illinois alumni event. He was handsome, smart, and Jewish, but he was almost twenty years older than me, so Mom and Daddy were less than thrilled about it.

  “He is a bit old for you,” said Suzy. “Nan, he’s pushing forty. Think about it.”

  “I like older men,” I said. “Every guy I meet who’s my age either smokes dope or is a dope or just wants to climb all over me. This is a wonderful man. Funny, smart, industrious. We could have a good family together.”

  “That sounds nice,” she said wistfully.

  I studied her expression for a moment. “What …”

  “Stan and I won’t have babies. Dr. Moffet tested us. It’s not going to happen.”

  “Oh, Suzy. What about … have you seen a specialist? You could go to Chicago.…”

  “And discuss our private life with some stranger?” Suzy pushed my arm, appalled. “Certainly not. We just have to face it. It wasn’t bashert. Not meant to be.”

  “I’m so sorry, Suz. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She nodded. “We’ve started working through the process to adopt a baby from the Jewish agency, and I actually love the idea. Instead of sitting here month after month, waiting for a baby to happen, now I know there’s a baby waiting for me, needing a home, and all I want to do is find him and get my arms around him and give him a wonderful life like Mommy and Daddy gave us. The thing is, now that I’m not obsessing about the pregnancy part, I’m thinking about the part where you actually raise up this child—this human being. It’s kind of intimidating, the idea of being responsible for leading another person from the cradle to adulthood. I want to get it right.”

  “You will, Suz.” I linked my arm through hers, and she squeezed my hand.

  At the time, artificial insemination was just emerging into common use; fertility drugs and in vitro were some researcher’s distant dream. (And thank God. Hormone treatments might have done Suzy in even sooner.) We’d always commiserated on “womanly complaints”—stabbing cramps and aching breasts that arrived monthly with our periods.

  “Nanny, I asked Dr. Moffet why my breasts get so lumpy and painful every month. I told him you had the same problem, and he said it’s fibrocystic breasts—which sounds a lot worse than it is. It’s a hormone thing. Very common. Nothing to worry about.”

  I told her I’d already gotten this explanation from my gynecologist in Dallas, with the added caveat that if a lump didn’t go away, it should be biopsied.

  “To see if it’s infected or … something.”

  “Well, right,” said Suzy. “But it always turns out to be nothing.”

  That year, Suzy did have a lump that wouldn’t go away. She ignored it as long as she could, but Mother and I dogged her about it until she relented, swallowed her fear, and got the needle aspiration, which determined the lump was just another cyst.

  “You see?” she chided. “I was a nervous wreck for nothing.”

  Not long after that, I had a needle biopsy on a lump that lingered. Later, Suzy had another, and I had another, then she had another, and so it went over the years. They were successively less frightening, and Suzy was happily lulled into a complacent sense of confidence. It was an inconvenience we both learned to live with. There were always unnerving moments waiting for the results, but we certainly weren’t paralyzed with anxiety over it; neither of us ever slowed down for a second. The paperwork always confirmed the result we fully expected, and we went on our way as if the procedure was less than the bite of a horsefly. We paid attention without allowing the issue to distract us from living our lives. Which was the right thing to do.

  Stanley Marcus liked me. Some whispered that Mr. Marcus sometimes “took interest” in women for a lot of reasons, but I think a lot of that came from men—and some women—who simply couldn’t believe any woman could ascend in the corporate setting purely by dint of industry and horse sense. In any case, there was never a hint of anything offsides in the way Mr. Marcus treated me. I can state with certainty that he liked me because I worked like a dog and almost never asked for days off.

  “Never stop selling,” he said. “I think you’ve got a future. I want you to learn.”

  And I did learn. My years at Neiman Marcus were thrilling and intensely educational. I didn’t realize until much later how much I absorbed just being there every day. Mr. Marcus gathered all the assistants on the floor for a company meeting on a regular basis, assessing us with a congenial but unblinking eye.

  “I’m going to challenge you,” he said one day before we dispersed. “If any of you can accurately tell me what a customer is going to spend, I’ll give you five hundred dollars.”

  We slapped our hands together, whipped out our notebooks and pens, and went off to bird-dog the front door. The game of selling, we’d been tau
ght, began the moment a customer crossed the threshold. Sizing people up by the obvious yardsticks—the cars they drove, the caliber of their shoes, the way they talked—we invariably thought we had them pegged, and invariably, we were wrong.

  “Don’t make assumptions,” Mr. Marcus told me. “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

  The logical conclusion: Every person should be treated with the deference and respect you would show your best customer. Princes and paupers, ladies who lunch and the waitress who served them—every person has the potential to make or break your day, because the way you treat people in general adds up to the kind of person you are.

  Norman Brinker was a man who definitely defied his book cover. He was a quintessential Texas entrepreneur, a millionaire in white jeans and riding boots, who transcended his hardscrabble childhood but never forgot where he came from. After a stint in the navy, he earned a place on the U.S. Olympic Equestrian Team and competed at the summer games in Helsinki in 1952. He started Brink’s Coffee Shop in Dallas in the early 1960s and ended up building an empire. While I was in college, Norman was opening Steak & Ale restaurants all over the Southwest. While I was working my way up from the basement at Neiman Marcus, he was taking his company public and effectively transforming the casual dining industry. (He’s often credited as the inventor of the salad bar.)

  I knew who he was, because I was active in various charities around town, and if there’s one thing good fundraisers know, it’s which pants have the most generous pockets. Norman Brinker was a familiar figure and a bighearted donor at the symphony and American Cancer Society events. His wife, the renowned tennis champion Maureen “Little Mo” Connolly, had died of cancer in 1969. Norman was famously dedicated to her and devastated by the loss. We’d see him in the store with his two beautiful daughters, Cindy and Brenda. Adorably inept at all things girlish, he was grateful for the attention of the salesgirls who swarmed like a school of minnows as soon as he walked in the door.

  Wealthy widowers do not go undetected in Dallas. Especially not this rare specimen, who combined the disarming grin of a newspaper boy with the body of an Olympic athlete. Women loved him, and he loved women—even the ones who unabashedly viewed him as a prime piece of real estate. As the house-hunters circled, he came and went, making amiable conversation with Mr. Marcus and whoever happened to be on the floor. None of us was surprised to see him shopping for a diamond ring.

  In 1970, Neiman Marcus Fortnight was a salute to Ruritania, Suzy became the mother of a darling little boy named Scott, and I made it to the second floor.

  I was selected from the pool of assistant trainees to work with an ambitious, wise buyer, Loretta Blum, who was fabulously smart and stylish. She was fairly small in stature, and I think she took one look at me—this corn-fed midwestern girl almost six feet tall—and knew I’d be able to negotiate the freight elevator with ten coats on one arm and six suits on the other. Plus the rods. I suppose she figured, “So what if she doesn’t look like a scrawny little fashion model? This girl’s a pile driver!” And I turned out to be exactly that.

  As soon as the buyers were given an opening to buy something, I was writing letters and making phone calls, hounding the manufacturer. It made them a little crazy, but we got our clothes faster. Loretta taught me a lot about fashion shows and how to work with the designers who visited the second floor. At any given moment, everyone in the room was selling, whether the customer knew it or not.

  In walked, let’s say, Mrs. Jones of Amarillo. I jumped and ran. My first task was to make sure she was set up with a salesperson in a room full of merchandise of appropriate size and function. If Mrs. Jones was there for a cut-and-trim suit, I dashed downstairs for a bolt of cashmere, and while the designer worked her magic, I was all over the store gathering costume jewelry, hats, gloves, shoes, shoes, and more shoes, filling up the room like a bazaar.

  About halfway through the measuring, cutting, gathering, and selling, there was always a light tap on the door, and Mr. Marcus would step in.

  “Oh, Mrs. Jones. So happy to see you today. I was wondering if you’d like to come and have dinner with me and Billie tonight at our house.” One day, he added, “Nancy’ll be there.”

  I was on. I couldn’t wait to tell Suzy.

  Stanley and Billie Marcus lived in a magnificent contemporary home with pre-Columbian sculptures and great art everywhere. The guest of honor was seated on his right. I was seated on his left. The first course arrived: a delicate crab dish. Genteel but animated conversation moved back and forth around the eclectic group of Dallas elite, store employees, and a few random artists, writers, and designers. You never knew who was going to be there.

  “Mrs. Jones,” said Mr. Marcus, “I’m so happy you could join us this evening. I was thinking of you during my recent visit to Japan.” He drew an intricately carved box from his pocket and set it directly next to her plate. “I saw this interesting piece from the Tang Dynasty. It reminded me that you have horses.”

  “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Jones. “That is lovely, isn’t it?”

  “Exquisite.” Mr. Marcus opened it to reveal a pair of intricately carved ornaments. “These netsuke—they’re made of Siberian mammoth ivory—come from the Edo period. I realized how perfectly they’d coordinate with a certain diamond and sapphire necklace in our fine jewelry department.” Out came the necklace from his other pocket. “And knowing how beautifully you wear sapphires, I wanted to show you the two together.”

  By the end of the evening, Mrs. Jones—or Mrs. Smith or Mr. Smith or the Smiths’ lovely daughter—would have spent literally thousands and thousands of dollars.

  Being able to observe this salesman extraordinaire—this master showman—up close was the greatest thing to happen in my marketing education, right up there with everything I’d learned watching my father persevere in building his business year after year. Stanley Marcus had an infallible eye for the devilish details, and the way he forged connections with people was nothing short of brilliant. When he was out traveling the world, he always had a stack of postcards with him, and as he rode along on trains and airplanes, he spent hours neatly scribing personal notes by the hundreds, one after another.

  Dear Mrs. Smith,

  I’ve just returned from India. I’m going to be sending you a box of wonderful merchandise I know you will love!

  Love, Stanley

  He didn’t waste time trying to talk people into things they didn’t need or want; he intuited what they secretly craved and offered it to them along with a story that transformed the item into an artifact and a purchase into a coup de grâce, the same way Alvin Colt transformed the main floor of a department store into the Fête des Fleurs.

  “Most people aren’t creative,” Mr. Marcus said. “But they’re waiting for creation. They don’t want to be changed, but they want to be entertained and educated. They want to learn in a way that excites their curiosity and convinces them to take action.”

  I was brought into the creative meetings for the fabulous Neiman Marcus catalog that year, and I had the opportunity to present one seasonal idea.

  “What about boats?” I said.

  “Go on,” Mr. Marcus said after a moment.

  “My parents started out with very little. A little sailboat and a willingness to work hard. Over the years, they got a little motorboat, and then a rickety sort of houseboat, and now—well, now my father is doing quite well. They have a very nice boat. It’s not a yacht, but it’s the kind of boat you could take around the world, if you chose to. And a few years ago, he bought my mother a lovely mink coat. These things aren’t about status or self-indulgence. They envisioned a quality of life and worked toward it. Fashion—whether it’s personal style or home décor—is an extension of those dreams we have for ourselves. The cut of our jib, if you will.”

  I felt the eyes of everyone around the table. I wasn’t being judged, I was being heard, and it was exhilarating.

  “Plus,” I added, “everyone looks better in white.”


  Mr. Marcus put me in charge of his little boutique at the Fairmont Hotel, where it was my responsibility to serve the particular needs of the most spectacular customers. Suzy was beyond thrilled when I was given the task of escorting Princess Grace to Fortnight and when I was given the difficult task of finding a Dallas restaurant willing to serve our guests, Ike and Tina Turner. (It was a different time; Tina and Dallas both worked hard in subsequent years to rise above bullies and become free and flourishing.)

  When a major Hollywood diva arrived with her entourage, I was summoned to her suite. This was the first time I heard the Hungarian language spoken, and I was fascinated by the sound, but the pressing matter at hand was the proper fitting of the diva.

  “Those silly girls,” she lamented. “They keep bringing things that don’t fit, telling me I’m not a size six. I think I know what size I am!”

  “Yes, ma’am. Of course,” I said. “I’ll be back with some items for you to choose from.”

  I sprinted back to the store and rallied help down in the basement, hastily snipping tags and labels from a number of size six garments and stitching them into their size twelve counterparts. The diva was delighted and spent buckets of money, which earned a few more stars in my crown as far as my boss was concerned.

  “You’re an evil genius,” Suzy giggled when I told her. “Is that even legal?”