Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

  Harry Selfridge returned to Jackson late in 1876 with five hundred dollars he had “saved from his earnings,” although given his predilection for poker, it was more likely to have been the winnings from a few lucky hands at cards. He then drifted from one dreary job to another, culminating in eighteen months at a local grocery store. By the time he was twenty-two, he was desperate to move on. But how—and to where? Salvation came through his ex-employer, Leonard Field, who was persuaded to write a letter of introduction to Marshall Field in Chicago. Marshall was the senior partner in Field, Leiter & Co., one of the biggest and most successful stores in the city. Young Harry would ultimately help make it one of the most famous in America.

  Selfridge used to say that his interview with Mr. Field lasted a matter of minutes and that the man was “so cold it made him shiver.” Terms were discussed, with Harry claiming he agreed to a weekly wage of ten dollars as a stock boy in the wholesale department basement—but the pay at the very bottom of the ladder he determined to climb was certainly less than that.

  Variously described as “dignified and quiet,” and so taciturn he was nicknamed “silent Marsh,” Field had little time for anything other than work. How a man so devoid of personality could have been so successful in the business of sales, where the ability to communicate and motivate is crucial, is a mystery. Field cared little for what he called “frivolous methods,” running his business the way he lived his life. Dry, humorless and puritanical, albeit always courteous, he was the antithesis of Harry Selfridge. They complemented one another, but although Selfridge worked for Field for over twenty-five years, they were never friends.

  To call Marshall Field merely “successful” is an understatement. By 1900, his recorded annual income was $40 million a year (nearly $800 million today), and when he died in 1906, he left an estate worth $118 million (over $2 billion today). A large part of his fortune came from real estate and his early investment in railroad stocks. He was also an original and significant investor in the Pullman Company, backing George Pullman’s imaginative concept of luxurious comfort while traveling by train. Given that the journey from Chicago to New York alone took twenty hours, it is small wonder that Pullman’s deluxe dining car, called “the Delmonico” after New York’s swell restaurant, was so successful. Only the rich could travel in his cars, while the really rich bought and customized their own private Pullman carriages—the private jets of their day—fitting marble bathtubs, overstuffed velvet sofas, piped organ music and, the height of one-upmanship, taking along an English butler to ensure the service was smooth.

  The nucleus of Field’s wealth, however, came from shopping. The towering department store on State Street was a mecca for Chicago residents, but as with all the early nineteenth-century “great store” successes, it was the wholesale department that laid the foundations of the Field fortune, supplying people in small townships all over the Midwest with whatever they needed, from dress fabric to carpets, petticoats to parasols.

  Marshall Field was a farmer’s son who grew up in Conway, Massachusetts, where the whole family had to help on the land. As neither he nor his elder brother Joseph had any feel for farming, both took what was virtually the only route out of rural life—working as salesmen in a dry-goods store. Marshall’s first job was in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but in 1856 he headed west to join his brother Joseph in Chicago—though it’s doubtful whether the neat and tidy, churchgoing young man of twenty-one realized what was going to hit him when he got there. Reminders that Chicago was a frontier town were everywhere in the sprawling mass of timber buildings that stretched along the shore of Lake Michigan. Mud was the main topic of conversation—it was so deep that it oozed over the boardwalks, clogged wagon wheels and ruined ladies’ clothes. Not that there were too many ladies in Chicago. Local men searching for a bride would “go East” and, having found a suitable partner, return to Chicago, placing a notice in the local newspapers with the address of the new marital home. Enterprising local dressmakers would often be among their first callers. Having examined the bride’s trousseau, the dressmaker would then go from door to door presenting her compliments—along with her newly discovered knowledge of the “latest fashions from the East.”

  For those prepared to take risks, business opportunities were spectacular. William Butler Ogden—who became Chicago’s first mayor—bought a tract of land in 1844 for eight thousand dollars, selling it six years later for three million dollars. Mr. Ogden was nothing if not enterprising. When financing for the Illinois and Michigan Canal dried up he ensured bonds were issued to raise the necessary cash. Always a step ahead, in the same year the canal was opened, he built Chicago’s first railroad.

  In 1856, Marshall Field had no money with which to buy land or open a store. Instead he took a job at the wholesaler Farwell, Cooley & Wadsworth, one of the many firms busy shipping dry goods out via Chicago’s burgeoning railroads to where the tracks ended in emergent new townships—where women were desperate for everything from cottons and calico to sewing thread and buttons. Field went “on the road,” meeting local merchants, sizing up the business potential, and diligently doing his duty by Mr. Cooley, whose efficient bookkeeper, Levi Z. Leiter, was also busy in the back office, entering their profits in the ledgers. When Potter Palmer, arguably Chicago’s most successful merchant, gave up wholesaling to concentrate entirely on his retail division, the polite Mr. Field picked up most of his clients—at the same time keenly observing the progress of Mr. Palmer’s impressive new store on Lake Street.

  Chicago’s ladies were determined shoppers. In the prewar financial slump they bought at discount, so much so that Harper’s caustically advised husbands to “observe your wife shopping if you would know her. She may be sweet in the parlor, but she is like a ghoul at the counter.” In fact there was very little else for women to do in Chicago other than shop. There were no beauty parlors, no restaurants—or certainly none where women could eat—and only one theater. Servants took care of the housework and the kitchen. The only thing that ladies could do outside their home—other than attend activities organized by their local church—was to shop for clothes and household materials. Feminists have long raged about the consumer culture, but the early women’s champion Elizabeth Cady Stanton was quite clear on the subject. While she deplored the excesses of wealthy women “who only lived for fashion,” she also implored women to seek independence through masterminding the family budget: “go out and buy” she would shout from the platform at conventions and meetings, urging women to seize the initiative in equipping their household and clothing themselves—whether or not they were paying the bills.

  Marshall Field was a man with a searing ambition to make money. All his life he judged opportunity strictly by prospective returns—and when the elderly Mr. Wadsworth retired, the chance of buying into a partnership was irresistible. When the Civil War began, Mr. Farwell, the sole remaining original founder, welcomed Marshall Field as a full partner. Three years later, in another management shuffle, the business was taken over completely by Field and Levi Leiter, who became partners. Somehow—despite working an average sixteen-hour day—Marshall Field found the time to meet and marry Nannie Scott, and their son, also named Marshall, was born in 1868. By this time, the Field fortunes were firmly established.

  Retail historians today praise Marshall Field as one of the trade’s “founding fathers,” but arguably his quantum leap to success came from buying other people’s businesses rather than founding his own—and the business that really propelled him forward was that belonging to Potter Palmer. Ten years after he had opened his store, Palmer was making $10 million a year. He was wealthy, but not healthy. In 1865, worn out and worried by gloomy advice from his doctors, Palmer sold the majority equity in his business to Field and Leiter for $750,000 and moved to Paris, leaving the two men with a platform rivals could only dream about.

  Palmer was soon back in Chicago enthusing over Baron Haussmann’s spectacular rebuilding program in Paris where wide, elegant
boulevards had replaced narrow streets and the installation of a modern sewage system and transport had finally made Paris “shopper friendly.”

  He knew that if Chicago was to have a world-class shopping district, then its stores needed a better environment. Getting out his checkbook, he bought up buildings on State Street, parallel to the lakeshore, until his holdings were a mile long. Lobbying the city council to widen the lane into a boulevard, at a stroke he single-handedly reoriented the center of Chicago from Lake Street—which ran by a foul-smelling river—to State Street, which he virtually owned. He demolished the run of “shack” shops and saloons along it to build commercial properties, and subsequently leased his prime six-story corner site to Field & Leiter for fifty thousand dollars a year.

  Potter Palmer married in 1870. As a wedding gift to his young bride, Bertha Honoré, he built a hotel and named it the Palmer House. Eight stories high, with 225 rooms fitted out with Italian marble and French chandeliers, it was Chicago’s most sumptuous building. The hotel never took a paying guest. In 1871, fire swept through the city. An area of three and a half square miles was ravaged, three hundred people died and ninety thousand were made homeless—nearly a third of the city’s population. Among the buildings destroyed were Palmer’s hotel and Field & Leiter’s new store. Luckily, Marshall Field and Levi Leiter were well insured. Having recouped most of their losses, they moved to a temporary site, from which they did a roaring trade in Chicago’s post-fire renaissance.

  It took well over a year to clear the debris left by the great fire. Businesses had to “make do and mend,” and many men set up offices in their own homes as Chicago picked itself up and started a massive rebuilding program. Field and Leiter bought a property on Market Street where they established their wholesaling headquarters while considering their future. At the same time, Potter Palmer was planning his new “dream” hotel. To raise the money, he sold a parcel of land on State Street for $350,000 to the calculating men who ran the Singer Manufacturing Company and who were busy using the phenomenal profits from selling their patented sewing machine to diversify into property.

  As a result of Isaac Singer’s machine and Ellen Demorest’s invention of the first paper patterns, many American housewives were becoming competent dressmakers. Observing this trend with unease, the legion of professional dressmakers upped the stakes by affecting fancy French names and even learning a word or two of the language, which never failed to impress their customers. For the newly affluent woman, however, all this home-centered activity was dull. Fashion, etiquette, and beauty manuals and magazines were now pouring from the printing presses, establishing new trends at almost breakneck speed. Women wanted to go out and buy for themselves, a fact that had not escaped the property division of the Singer Manufacturing Company, which spent over $750,000 on an elegant white marble-fronted building on the corner of State Street and Washington. In fact it was so elegant, the great Alexander Stewart himself was rumored to want it for a Chicago outpost of his New York store. He didn’t get it; instead it was leased to Field & Leiter, who moved in during the autumn of 1873 just as the New York stock market crashed and a deep recession struck America. It was not an auspicious start.

  2.

  Giving the Ladies What They Want

  “Judge not a man by his clothes, but by his wife’s clothes.”

  —SIR THOMAS DEWAR

  FASHION DESIGNERS AND MARKETERS LIVE IN HOPE THAT A trend will develop credibility and become a bestseller. Then of course they crave a new one, because in reality, fashion succeeds as a business precisely because its obsolescence is inevitable. For true devotees, the cycle lasts a mere six months and the launch of a new look necessitates all sorts of changes. But even today, it is rare for one’s entire wardrobe to become dated overnight. Not so when the cumbersome crinoline and matronly bonnet were consigned to history.

  By the early 1870s no truly style-conscious woman in society would have been seen dead in hoops—she had to change her wardrobe from top to toe as a totally new look swept into fashion. To the delight of the drapery retailers, its replacement, a revival of the eighteenth-century polonaise—best described as a masterful combination of cinch and pouf—also required substantial amounts of material. Women poured themselves into a tight-fitting, short-waisted bodice with even tighter sleeves, worn above drawn-back, bunched skirts puffed at the rear into an elaborate bustle. The whole outfit, often overwhelmed with a profusion of ruches, ribbons, and fringes, flew in the face of the emergent dress reform movement, which despaired at the complexity of women’s wardrobes.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, the supreme master dictating trends was Charles Frederick Worth. Born in Lincolnshire, Worth spent some time on the shop floor at Swan & Edgar in Piccadilly and several years working for leading silk merchants in both London and Paris. He opened his own salon on the rue de la Paix in 1858 and found fame by dressing Princess Pauline von Metternich and the Empress Eugénie. Monsieur Worth was sufficiently egotistical to think of himself as all-powerful—fashion titans usually do—but he wasn’t the first celebrated royal designer. That honor goes to Rose Bertin, dressmaker and milliner to the illfated Marie Antoinette. Rose Bertin’s celebrated skills were surpassed only by the astonishing bills she presented to the queen. But even though she sent model dolls wearing miniature versions of her gowns to princesses at other royal courts in Europe, her reputation was restricted to just a few hundred people. Thanks to the growing influence of magazines in America, Worth was the first designer to become internationally famous.

  He was the designer of choice for the wives of the superrich—his were the original “red carpet” gowns, created for women who made an entrance and whose husbands’ bank balances could stand the cost. His favorite clients were American, since they tended to order several gowns at once and never queried the design or the price. Worth used to say “My transatlantic friends are always welcome—they have the figures, the francs and the faith.” The thrifty French grandees, on the other hand—such as the Comtesse de Greffulhe, one of Proust’s models for the Duchesse de Guermantes in À la recherche du temps perdu—ordered individually and, worse, would have their dressmaker make “alterations” so that the gown could be worn for longer.

  Worth revolutionized the business of fashion by presenting his collection on live models in Paris to a slavishly devoted audience, which included most of the “Wall Street wives.” Traveling to Europe—particularly to Paris—was an annual event for the American rich, enabling them to stock up on art and antiques and visit Worth’s salon. Unfortunately for Worth, the Franco-Prussian War put paid to their travels. Worse still, his most famous client, the Empress Eugénie, went into exile in England, his sumptuous salon was requisitioned as a hospital, and the bitter siege of Paris left people more worried about food than fashion. News filtered out that Parisians were eating their horses, cats, and dogs, and Le Figaro reported that the chefs at the Paris Jockey Club showed culinary initiative in making “quite a good salami from rats.”

  In the uneasy aftermath of the war, Worth reopened. Ably assisted by his son, Jean-Philippe, before long his business reached such dizzy heights that he had over twelve hundred staff on his payroll. His masterstroke was to follow the money by taking his collection to New York and Rhode Island. There, as “the king of fashion,” his appearances resembled a state visit as society scrambled to have him as guest of honor at their cocktail receptions and dinners. Orders were then placed to be made up in Paris and shipped back to America.

  There wasn’t a name from the Gilded Age that Worth didn’t dress, and a wardrobe by Worth became the sine qua non for rich American girls who were keen to acquire a titled British husband. Worth’s lifestyle mirrored that of his clients, and his beautifully dressed wife and two elegant sons became part of the Worth publicity machine that whirred so effectively that J. P. Morgan himself considered Worth a friend and is said to have cried when he died.

  Having virtually invented the crinoline, Worth was equal
ly pleased to get rid of it, as once more he changed the way women dressed. Drapers owed Monsieur Worth a debt beyond price. As each fashion plate of his latest gown was published, women would rush to buy material and commission a similar model. At Field & Leiter alone in the mid-1870s, there were three hundred girls sewing in the top-floor workrooms, all busy making gowns for the wives of Chicago’s rich, while copies of Worth’s newly styled and lavishly trimmed jaunty hats flew out of the millinery department.

  Despite the back bustles, which involved purchasing a collapsible framed contraption called a “dress improver,” women were finally discovering the delights of lighter lingerie, as ultra-heavy boned and back-laced corsets were replaced by less cumbersome underpinnings. Corsets were still boned, but the most popular, unaccountably named “The Widow Machree,” was a curve-inducing, front-fastening model with kid-covered hooks and eyes. For the main part, women’s dresses were still buttoned up—at least during the day—but the décolleté evening gowns that were now emerging required new uplifting underwear. For those embarrassed about their meager embonpoint, help was at hand from the Elastic Bosom Company which, having patented their padding, proudly announced that “in case of shipwreck it would be impossible for the wearer to drown.” In an astute move at a time when virtually all sales staff were male, Marshall Field employed women to work in the store’s burgeoning lingerie department, which meant that ladies could be accurately measured and fitted without embarrassment: particularly important as overtight corsets could cause anything from fainting fits to uterine and spinal disorders.

  Field’s brother Joseph had by this time been dispatched to England where he set up a company outpost in Manchester, the idea being that he would source new products, imports having cachet among the store’s wealthier clientele. Joseph was a dull, miserly man, given to wearing his overcoat in the unheated office and entirely lacking in the glamour associated with fashion, so it isn’t surprising that his purchases had a mixed reception. He did, however, send back all sorts of specialist textiles including Nottingham lace and Paisley shawls. Field & Leiter sold lace tablecloths that cost a thousand dollars, a time when the average weekly wage was ten dollars, but they had plenty of customers who could afford them and who were not at all perturbed by the prohibitive import duties that added so much to the price.