Harry’s mother’s support was crucial. No doubt buoyed by her belief that he should strike out on his own, when Harry heard that the nearby store being built for Schlesinger & Mayer was discreetly on the market, he made a spontaneous decision to raise the funds and buy it himself. The formal records of the transaction have vanished. Some say he raised enough money from bankers to buy the freehold for five million dollars. That seems unlikely given that Marshall Field himself was the freeholder. Field rarely, if ever, sold investment property, and he certainly wouldn’t have sold it to Harry Selfridge. Others infer that Selfridge simply took over the lease, which at the time was owned by David Mayer and the retail magnate Henry Siegel, who had bought out Leopold Schlesinger a year or so earlier.
What is certain is that Harry’s new store was, and remains today, a beautiful building. Designed by the pioneering commercial architect Louis Sullivan—who numbered Frank Lloyd Wright among his staff—in collaboration with the engineer Dankmar Adler, the twelve-story, terracotta-clad corner site, with its elaborate ironwork ornamentation on the lower façade, had taken five years to complete. By the time it was finished, Adler had died, Sullivan’s practice was in decline and Mayer was broke.
In the spring of 1904, as building work neared completion, Henry Siegel must have been only too pleased to consign the lease. For Selfridge, it was a huge step. He was risking everything on a single throw, but for a man with a gambler’s soul, who lived and worked in the then capital city of gambling, it was worth it. Selfridge was now faced with the task of stocking and staffing his own store, as well as finding tenants for the upper floors. He also had to explain his decision to Marshall Field. The atmosphere in Field’s office that day must have been icy. Having admitted that he was leaving, and that he had bought Schlesinger & Mayer, Selfridge offered to stay and train his replacement. Field’s chilly reply to the man who had worked for him for twenty-five years was: “No, Mr. Selfridge, you can leave tomorrow if it suits you.” With that, Harry cleared his desk.
When the paperwork involved in his settlement from Marshall Field was completed, Harry Selfridge had liquid assets of well over a million dollars as well as ownership of two substantial houses. His plans made news, but neither he nor Field gave much away about what had happened. Interviewed by the media, Selfridge merely talked about his “great desire to become head of a business of my own,” saying he was “absolutely confident of success” and that it was “time to take the step as he had just turned forty”—shaving eight years off his age. Marshall Field remained tight-lipped when journalists questioned him about the loss of his star executive. Indeed, he rarely talked about it even to his own colleagues, other than saying to John Shedd, “We’ll have to get another office boy.” Selfridge was more gracious. Field had been a huge part of his life, the dominant albeit distant father-figure he had craved to please. He never forgot him. When he opened Selfridge’s in London, a portrait of Marshall Field took pride of place in his office.
With a fanfare of brass-band music and flags flying, Harry G. Selfridge & Co., Chicago, opened its doors on June 13, 1904. It was an auspicious time to be opening a new business. Affluent consumers had taken to the road in their new automobiles and were driving them out to newly opened country clubs where they eagerly took up the fashionable game of golf: both hobbies necessitated extensive, not to mention expensive, specialist wardrobes. Automobiles had hit the city like a whirlwind. In 1900 there had been only a hundred permits issued for motor vehicles, but by the time Harry Selfridge opened his store, there were nearly fifteen hundred registered drivers in Chicago. The City Council, perturbed by the trend for “scorching,” as driving fast was called, set a speed limit of ten miles per hour and required drivers to have “full use of arms and legs and be free of a drug habit.” In a city where rich and poor alike enjoyed their drink, no mention was made of alcohol.
Selfridge had long specialized in store windows that presented a themed story. Now his beautifully dressed opening displays paid homage to the latest fashion in ladies’ and gentlemen’s “motoring clothes.” Female mannequins were dressed like the subjects of Sir William Nicholson’s exquisite painting La Belle Chauffeuse, in duster coats, huge gauntlet gloves, and big hats tied under the chin with a chiffon stole, while the male mannequins were shown in “go faster” goggles and belted tweed driving jackets. Picnic hampers and leather-strapped luggage completed the picture.
Selfridge must have gone through a great deal of anguish in the run-up to the opening. It would have been hard for him traveling to work each morning, walking into his own elegant building, but wishing it was the bigger one down the road. Twenty-five years at Field’s were not easily forgotten. Bonds had been forged that could not be easily broken. He later explained his emotions during those troubled times to a journalist from the Saturday Evening Post: “I was extremely miserable competing with my own people—the people with whom I had spent so many happy and gloriously exciting years. I tried to beat down the feeling, but my unhappiness increased.” Selfridge tried everything he could to energize his new staff but they simply couldn’t meet his impossibly high standards. “There’s no one here who knows how to do it,” he told his wife sadly, perhaps only now realizing how skillful the vast backroom team had been at Marshall Field.
After being forced to leave so abruptly—no presentation, no gifts, no party, no recognition at all for what he had done over twenty-five years—Selfridge became a man dispossessed. Always the eternal optimist, now he became depressed. Suddenly, life at Harrose Hall, his country house on Lake Geneva, where he could tend his greenhouses full of rare orchids, took on a new allure. Just three months after starting his new business, he made a spontaneous decision to sell up and retire. He called his ex-colleague John Shedd for help and advice. Shedd came up with the reputable retailers Carson, Pirie & Scott, who were anxious to relocate, and arranged a meeting between Sam Pirie and Harry Selfridge. The canny Mr. Pirie struck a hard bargain, offering Selfridge—who had wanted a $250,000 premium over and above the original cost of his lease—$150,000 plus his supplier liabilities. Desperate to get out, Harry accepted.
Not unsurprisingly, Harry found retirement dull. He pottered around the grounds at Harrose Hall, tending his roses and orchids, and spending time with his young family. But it wasn’t enough. He bought himself a steam yacht that apparently rarely left its moorings, and attempted to take up golf, a game that he played abysmally badly. His friends urged him to take up public office, which in Chicago would have been a challenge in itself. The idea didn’t appeal. “No politics for me,” he said, “it’s too much like being put in the pillory.” He would probably have agreed with a reporter from the London Daily Mail who, after visiting the city, had written: “Chicago presents more splendid attractions and more hideous repulsions than any city I know. Other places hide their dark side out of sight—Chicago treasures it to the heart of the business quarter and gives it a veneer.” He couldn’t have put it better himself. Chicago’s tycoons were ruthless. Harry Selfridge was never really part of their world. Despite being a manager par excellence, to most of them he would always remain “Field’s ex-office boy.”
Selfridge had a cavalier attitude toward money. He lived extravagantly, spent prodigiously on those he loved, and had a belief that all would always be well—regardless of what he owed. In later years, when his personal overdraft had reached monumental proportions, one of his bankers in London remarked, “Mr. Selfridge seems to enjoy the sensation of debt.” In Chicago, with his family and perhaps his age in mind, he took out a high-level life insurance policy. He also tried his hand at investments. Invited to put money into the White Rock Soda Company—carbonated drinks being all the rage—he turned the offer down as being too closely associated with diluting whiskey. However, he did decide to invest in a gold mine. In the winter of 1904, he became president of the Sullivan Creek Mining and Milling Company, providing the finance to drill for gold at the Calico mine in Tuolumne County, California.
It a
ll started off rather well. The Chicago firm of Allis-Chalmers—then the world’s largest manufacturer of mining equipment—was on board advising Selfridge as to what equipment would be needed, and the mining expert William Chalmers seemed impressed with the initial geological data from what was a rich gold area. Drilling tests and surveys went on throughout the spring of 1905, with Selfridge paying all the costs.
That summer the Selfridge family left to spend a season on the French Riviera. There, letters arrived from America requesting more money for equipment and wages. Then came the news that Selfridge had longed to hear. They had found gold at 190 feet—enough to send for assay, and enough to convince Selfridge that he was about to become very rich. Late in August, he settled his family at the Ritz in Paris, while he went to London on business. He had a meeting to attend.
At the age of seventy-one, Marshall Field suddenly had a spring in his step and a smile on his face. He’d put a smile on the face of Europe’s most important jewelers too as he shopped for a sumptuous collection of diamonds and pearls—presents for his new bride, Delia Caton. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Caton were friends of Marshall Field who, it was always said, had long held a tendre for his neighbor’s attractive, elegant wife. When Arthur died in 1904, Field seized the moment and proposed to Delia. They sailed to England in July 1905 and were married on September 5 at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Selfridge’s trip to London was timed precisely so he could visit Field—and not just to congratulate him on his new marriage.
Two earlier biographies of Selfridge have claimed that he went to see his old boss with an audacious offer to take over the Chicago store. Nancy Koehn flatly rejects the idea: “Selfridge could never have raised that amount of money, and even if he could, Field would never have sold.” However, the talk at the time was that Harry Selfridge had the support of the mighty J. P. Morgan himself in his planned acquisition, and that Field was sufficiently intrigued to agree to “look at” his proposals. Whether Selfridge was looking at London in his own right, as he later claimed, or whether he was proposing an outpost of Marshall Field there, we’ll never know. But one way or the other, any hopes of doing business with Mr. Field were about to be destroyed.
The newlywed Fields returned to Chicago early in October that year, taking with them Marshall’s son, his wife Albertine, and their young family. Also en route back to America were the Selfridge family. By the time they got home on October 10, news had arrived that the gold mine was barren. What little gold there was would be too expensive to excavate. By the time the company was wound up, Selfridge had lost $60,000 or, in today’s money, just under $1.2 million.
In November, tragedy of a far greater kind struck the Field household when Field’s troubled son died in the hospital from a gunshot wound to the stomach. Not unnaturally, the family claimed one of his guns had been discharged accidentally. Others said he had committed suicide, while the talk of the town was that he had been shot by one of the girls at the city’s most notorious brothel, the Everleigh Club. Owned by two genteel Kentucky sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, the brothel was the ultimate in luxury. The sisters had been just twenty-one and twenty-three when they opened their “house,” dedicated to servicing the desires of Chicago’s wealthy men. Ada did the hiring. “I talk with each applicant myself,” she said proudly in the promotional brochure she circulated. “Girls must have worked somewhere before coming here—we do not take amateurs.” Indeed they didn’t. The Everleigh Club girls were not merely beauties in ball gowns. They were expertly trained in the art of flattery, good conversation, and even better sex, and several of them married extremely well. The club had Silver and Copper Rooms for the mining kings, and the Gold Room was refurbished each year with real gold leaf. An ensemble of violin, cello, piano, and, occasionally, a harp provided soothing music. The kitchen was run by superb chefs, and the cellar stocked with the finest champagne—Minna didn’t serve red wine, reasoning it made the customers sleepy. On Christmas Eve, the sisters would give a special party exclusively for the “gentlemen of the press.”
The Everleigh Club of course also offered gambling, and the stakes were high. Minna, who was convinced men preferred gambling to girls, placed a thirty-minute limit on roulette and dice. The club was never raided—the sisters paid the police well for their protection—and its opulent tranquility was rarely shattered, except on one memorable occasion, when the rabidly anti-smoking campaigner Lucy Page Gaston stormed in yelling, “Minna, you can stop your girls from going straight to the devil—you must stop them smoking cigarettes.”
Although father and son had never been close, Field was grief-stricken. He carried on working—supervising the next phase of the momentous rebuilding program at the store—and playing his weekly round of golf. On New Year’s Day 1906, though it was bitterly cold, he and three friends played eighteen holes, traipsing knee-deep through the snow in search of their special red golf balls. By the next day he had developed a sore throat but insisted on traveling to New York with his wife and valet. By the end of the week he had contracted severe pneumonia from which he never recovered, dying in his suite at the Holland House Hotel.
Field had planned his will very carefully. Determined there would be no squandering of his hard-earned fortune, he had set up complex trusts. On the death of the immediate beneficiaries, the capital would revert to the Field estate, and his grandchildren would not receive the bulk of their money until they were fifty. His daughter Ethel meanwhile became seriously rich, enabling her to spring to her naval husband’s defense when he was threatened with disciplinary action following the straining of his ship’s engines. “What, court martial my David? I’ll buy them a new ship!” she exclaimed. In the event, the Navy relented, but Ethel’s six-million-dollar inheritance did buy her husband a Scottish grouse moor, a hunting lodge in Leicestershire, a steam yacht, and a mansion in London. Four years later, at the age of thirty-nine, David Beatty became the youngest admiral in the Royal Navy since Horatio Nelson.
Harry Selfridge mourned Marshall Field deeply. Whatever low points their strained relationship had reached, Field had been Selfridge’s mentor. His death marked the end of the great era at Marshall Field. Potter Palmer was dead. Levi Leiter was dead (leaving Mary Curzon a very rich woman). As specified in Field’s will, John Shedd became president of the store, continuing with the expansion plans laid down by the founder. For Harry Selfridge, at the age of fifty, the time had come to consider his future.
6.
Building the Dream
“L’Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers.”
—NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE
IN 1906, NO ONE MEETING HARRY SELFRIDGE FOR THE FIRST time would have dreamt he was fifty. He looked a decade younger, talked with endless enthusiasm and exhausted people half his age with his boundless energy. Not that he exercised to keep fit. “Thinking is enough physical exercise for me,” he used to say. When he was pondering some major—or even minor—decision, he would sit in his swivel chair, turn it toward the window, lock his hands behind his head, and stare into the distance. No one ever dared interrupt him. When he’d decided on the outcome, he’d swing round quickly and say, “Right, here’s what we’ll do, let’s get on with it.” And that was that. Once he’d made up his mind, he never changed it.
Craving a new challenge, and encouraged by his close friend Walter Cottingham, of the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company (an enterprising firm whose motto was “Cover the Earth”), Selfridge made up his mind to move to London and open his dream store. The awesome Selfridge energy swung into operation. Letters were written, cablegrams sent, telephone calls made to friends and acquaintances, meetings arranged. He was back at work and loving it. As far as his family was concerned, if he was happy, they were happy. They were probably relieved to see him so energized, and didn’t mind at all when he took off for London, staying first at the Savoy Hotel and thereafter renting an elegant furnished apartment in Whitehall Court, an imposing mansion block with a spectacular view over St. James’s Park.
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p; One of the essential requirements for gracious living in Edwardian London being live-in servants, a Scottish couple, Mr. and Mrs. Fraser, moved in during March that year, Mrs. Fraser as housekeeper and Mr. Fraser first as valet and later as butler. The Frasers were to be part of the fabric of Selfridge family life for the next two decades. Fraser fitted the stereotype of the British butler perfectly. Depending on his mood, his manner would swing between the unctuous and the supercilious: a family friend described him as “a cross between Disraeli and Micawber.” In 1921, when the Selfridge family had just moved into the palatial splendor of Lansdowne House, Fraser answered the bell and found a distinguished elderly gentleman on the doorstep proffering a flat box. The visitor was Monsieur Pierre Cambon, the former French Ambassador to the Court of St. James, who on his return visits to London always called first at his old friend Lord Lansdowne’s house, bringing with him a gift of a very ripe Brie. Confronted by a strange servant, Monsieur Cambon asked if Lord Lansdowne was at home. “I’ve never heard of him,” said Fraser, suspiciously sniffing at the parcel, “and he certainly doesn’t live here.” Monsieur Cambon—and presumably his cheese—beat a hasty and confused retreat.
From the moment he arrived in London, Selfridge was determined not to be thought of as a “flash Yankee,” a type viewed with grave suspicion by London’s business community, which was still reeling from the dubious antics of the transport tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, known to have been a contemporary of Selfridge in Chicago.
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge Page 8