Despite the temptations of running a store that eventually employed over two thousand young women—some of them exceedingly attractive—there was never the slightest suggestion that Harry Selfridge ever flirted with his female staff, never mind having an affair with any of them. The idea would have horrified him. To him, the staff were an army to be marshaled onward to victory. He reveled in their adulation, but intimacy of any sort was out of the question.
Nonetheless, in the autumn of 1908, Harry found time for the occasional pleasurable, lingering lunch or supper with several women, among them the beautiful ex–Gaiety Girl Rosie Boot—the Marchioness of Headfort—who became a lifelong friend, and Lady Sackville, the chatelaine of one of England’s great Elizabethan houses, Knole. Victoria Sackville, who had captivated Harry when the Selfridges were living in Samuel Waring’s house, Foots Cray, in Kent, had a penchant for rich men, especially rich American men. She was also politically adept, articulate, and devastatingly attractive, having inherited her Spanish dancer mother’s dark, sultry eyes and sensual mouth. Her daughter, the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, would later say: “If ever the phrase ‘to turn one’s heart to water’ meant anything, it was when my mother looked at you and smiled.” Lady Sackville also owned a charming gift shop called Spealls, in South Audley Street, where she sold expensive lamp shades and pretty bric-a-brac at inflated prices to enthusiastic American visitors.
On his regular theater outings, however, Harry was generally accompanied by his wife, Rose, who along with their children and Madam Selfridge (as Lois was always called) were now living in a palatial eighteenth-century house at 17 Arlington Street, leased from the Countess of Yarborough. Selfridge may not have wanted to be thought of as flash, but he was more than happy to be thought of as rich. Surrounded by the impressive Yarborough sculpture collection—including masterpieces by Bernini—and their even more impressive library, London’s most talked-about American family blithely settled into British life in the grand manner.
Arlington Street was an aristocratic enclave, colonized by the scions of Britain’s finest families, where their Robert Adam and William Kent houses were known by name—Rutland, Wimborne, Zetland, Yarborough—rather than by number. In general they viewed change with suspicion—Ivor Guest, Lord Wimborne, had grumbled furiously at the disruption caused by the building of the Ritz, which overlooked his gardens—but taxes were taking their toll and Lady Yarborough for one needed the rent. Not all the Selfridges’ neighbors were as tolerant as the charmingly unorthodox Duchess of Rutland and her daughters, Marjorie, Letty, and Diana Manners, who lived next door in an equally beautiful house, today the site of the Caprice. The duchess, quickly realizing that Mr. Selfridge intended to staff his private office with well-connected young men of impeccable background, suggested her great friend Viscountess de Vesci’s nephew Yvo as being “just right for the job.” He was hired within the week.
Of course, no one really knew how much—or how little—money Selfridge actually had. It was said that his wife’s family were rich and it was known that he had worked with Ethel Beatty’s father, Marshall Field, and had been in business with Lord Curzon’s father-in-law, the late Levi Leiter. (Leiter’s other daughters, Daisy and Nannie, had become, respectively, the Countess of Suffolk and the Hon. Mrs. Colin Campbell.) Selfridge, master of illusion, would simply smile and say they had all been “marvelous people.”
That autumn the press eagerly reported on progress, fed by daily bulletins. The Daily Graphic quoted Selfridge as saying, “We have broken all previous building records and without any overtime of consequence … we built 80 square feet on the corner to the top of the great columns, including the steelwork of the story above, in two weeks and five days.” It was an awesome sight and a frightening climb for those invited by Selfridge to tour the site. Among them was the publisher Evelyn Wrench, who noted in his diary: “I climbed the girders with him and felt dizzy doing so.” Wrench, a distinguished traveler who would go on to found the Overseas League and the English-Speaking Union, was tremendously impressed with Selfridge. “He certainly is one of the most forceful Americans I know. I feel sure that, granted good health, he will revolutionize the drapery and large store business in this country.”
Not all the press reports were positive. The drapery trade press were particularly skeptical about the size of the project and the sales turnover needed to sustain it, while other reports were frankly scathing about Selfridge’s concept. Most criticisms had a distinctly anti-American bias. The British Weekly wrote: “A crusade has been started to force on London superfluous luxuries such as those overstocked across the Atlantic.” But in the main, the press warmed to Harry Selfridge because he, unlike virtually any other British businessman, courted them assiduously.
Selfridge had arrived in London at a point when the popular press was becoming ever more powerful. Lord Northcliffe, in particular, had astutely recognized what the growing reading public wanted out of their daily newspaper. His Daily Mail was appealingly priced at just a ha’penny and packed with a unique mix of scandal, social gossip, competitions, and opinionated features by some remarkably fine writers. Northcliffe was not the first proprietor to discover this potent combination. George Newnes had started his phenomenally successful pictorial weekly magazine Tit-Bits, featuring short news “bites” peppered with pictures, in 1881, and it soon had a circulation of over half a million.
Just as Northcliffe felt that a newspaper intended for mass readership had to be exciting, so Harry Selfridge felt the same about his shopping venue. From his earliest days in business, Selfridge had understood, as few other men really did, the value of constant publicity and how to make the best use of it. While doing so, he forged relationships with reporters, gossip writers, editors, and proprietors alike. One of his closest friends—a fellow Wisconsin-born American who had settled in London—was Ralph Blumenfeld, an ex–Daily Mail man and now editor of the Daily Express. Rarely a week went by when the two men didn’t lunch or dine together, and rarely a day passed without them exchanging a letter or telephone call. Selfridge respected the press and perhaps even feared them. He once told his advertising manager: “Never fight with them, never fall out with them if you can possibly avoid it, they will always have the last word.” He was right to be cautious, and his caution paid off. Years later, when he was deeply in debt, his life in shocking decline, the media largely left him alone.
Selfridge astutely hired an ex-journalist named James Conaly as his press officer and set up a special “press club room” for reporters to use when they were in the West End. Invited journalists had their own keys, and the room was equipped with typewriters, telephones, stationery, a fully stocked bar, and the guarantee of some sort of human-interest story for them to phone through to the news desk on a daily basis. Editors were given hampers at Christmas, flowers at Easter. There was even a diary kept that listed birthdays so a special gift could be sent, and wives were always guaranteed the best table in the store’s Palm Court Restaurant. But it wasn’t merely efficient media handling that endeared much of Fleet Street to Harry Selfridge—his unwavering belief in advertising meant they also made money.
During the opening week of his store, Selfridge hit London with an advertising campaign the like of which it had never seen. Thirty-eight richly illustrated advertisements drawn by some of the most well-known graphic artists and cartoonists, including Sir Bernard Partridge of Punch, appeared on 104 pages in 18 national newspapers. The campaign caused a sensation, with even The Times declaring it marked an epoch in the history of British retail advertising—perhaps regretting having vetoed Harry’s attempt to book its entire front page for the launch. The cost of such a campaign was enormous. The store spent an astonishing £36,000 in just seven days—in today’s terms nearly £2.35 million! That excluded production costs—and Bernard Partridge didn’t come cheap. To the chagrin of London’s advertising agencies, all the work was handled internally. The in-house creative department produced the artwork and Harry Se
lfridge personally selected the space, insisting that he receive the 10 percent discount usually given to agencies.
In those days most stores merely booked a modest series of quarter-pages. Harry Selfridge created a whole new source of income for newspapers—and they loved him for it. It wasn’t just the sheer volume of his spending that made waves. Uniquely, his advertisements weren’t about products: they were a mission statement about his philosophy of shopping. Not everyone liked them. One advertising trade paper called them “high-falutin’ nonsense,” while another dismissed them as “piffle.” Other reactions ranged from admiration to derision at Harry’s sentimental, idealistic text:
We have every pleasure in announcing that the formal opening of our premises—London’s newest shopping centre—begins today and continues throughout the week. We wish it to be clearly understood that our invitation is to the whole British public and to visitors from overseas—that no cards of admission are required—that all are welcome—and that the pleasures of shopping as those of sightseeing begin from the opening hour.
In promoting the “pleasures of shopping,” in calling the store a “shopping center” and, more significant, in talking about “sightseeing,” Harry Selfridge was putting into place things we take for granted today. Art exhibitions in-store? Selfridge did it in 1909. Cookery demonstrations in the kitchen equipment department? Selfridge did it in 1912. But nearly a hundred years ago, these were visionary ideas. It was almost as if H. G. Selfridge was being advised by his new friend H. G. Wells. He made mistakes of course. Given the rising tension between Britain and Germany, his advertisement headed “Greetings to the Fatherland” was perhaps unwise. All in all, though, his advertisements, with their lack of pressure to buy and their reassuring messages about fine quality, convenience and comfort, superb service, fair prices, and above all fun, broke new ground.
Against all the advice from his army of technicians scrambling to finish the store interiors in time, Selfridge fixed the opening day for Monday, March 15, 1909. No one believed the store would be ready. Indeed a journalist escorted around the premises reported that “disorder reigned supreme.” The eighteen hundred staff worked throughout the weekend until midnight on Sunday, frantically unpacking and arranging stock in over a hundred different departments. In the store’s magnificent windows, hidden until the opening by ruched silk theater curtains, Edward Goldsman had created exquisite fashion displays inspired by Watteau and Fragonard. The staff gasped with admiration—and then gasped in horror when the newly installed sprinkler system erupted, flooding most of them.
Water was the biggest problem. Outside there was too much—on the opening day it poured with rain—and inside there soon wasn’t any at all. As thousands of people streamed through the store, doing everything from using the impressive bathrooms to drinking water with their lunch, the four-hundred-foot-deep artesian well pumps gave way under the strain. In desperation, the manager of the hairdressing department fled upstairs to the restaurant, commandeering all the soda siphons to rinse out shampoos.
Staff positioned by the Oxford and Duke Street doors counted in ninety thousand people on the opening day. In a nice theatrical touch by Selfridge, who always got on very well with the local constabulary, over thirty policemen were on hand outside to handle the crowds. For the most part those who came were just looking. Actual sales totaled a meager three thousand pounds, well under target. Selfridge himself didn’t mind. Or if he did, he didn’t show it. As far as he was concerned, the opening day was a bit like the opening night of a play. It was the reviews he was waiting for. Did people like the store? Would they return? Would it be a long-running success?
There wasn’t much not to like. The place was a marvel. There were six acres of floor space with no internal doors. Instead there were wide, open-plan vistas—perhaps not quite as open as Selfridge had wanted but, given onerous fire restrictions, still a revelation for London retailing. Nine Otis lifts, each six feet square, whisked passengers from the toy, sports, and motoring departments on the lower ground floor to the restaurant on the top floor. The store was brilliantly lit and flooded with the scent of fresh flowers. Floors were carpeted in the house “signature green,” which was also used for everything from the commissionaires’ uniforms to the smart delivery vans. There was a library, fully stocked with all the latest magazines and newspapers; a silence room (for respite between exhausting bouts of shopping); a branch post office (for mailing letters and cards written on complimentary store stationery); an information bureau; and, in a forerunner of today’s concierge services, staff on hand to book everything from train tickets or seats at a West End show to a hotel suite or a steamship stateroom on a passage to New York. There was a first-aid ward with a uniformed nurse in attendance (her clothes supplied by the in-store nurses’ uniform department); a bureau de change; parcel and coat drop-off points; sumptuous ladies’ and gentlemen’s cloakrooms; a barber shop; a ladies’ hairdressing salon that also offered a manicure service; and even a chiropodist. The huge restaurant served lunch to people entertained by an orchestra, while men—though not women—could escape to their own smoking room. Harry Selfridge had thought of everything.
His competitors were dumbfounded at the amount of space given over to services. Surely the point of a shop was for people to buy things? The Selfridge philosophy, however, was first to get them in, then to keep them there. Thereafter they would buy. As he said in one of his advertisements, the store sold “all merchandise that Men, Women and Children wear” and “almost everything that enters into the affairs of daily life.” At that point, he meant more or less everything other than food and wines. Those would come later. Neither did he sell furniture, or at least not beds, wardrobes or dining tables and chairs. Some thought this was the result of his “deal” with Waring who, after all, was also a furniture retailer. In reality, as Selfridge later said, it was because margins were better on decorative home furnishings such as lamp shades, glass, china, silver, cutlery, lacquer screens, and rugs. Waring meanwhile had sent over the impressive desk destined for the chairman’s impressive fourth-floor corner site office. He also sent a bill, which Selfridge avoided paying for the next three years.
Lord Northcliffe himself visited that week, shopping incognito, and was so pleased with the service he received that he wrote to Selfridge praising the skill of the salesman, saying that the chap in question—a young man by the name of Puttick—“was destined to go far.” Selfridge quickly dictated a reply, signing it for the first time with what thereafter became his business name: H. Gordon Selfridge.
Looking at earlier letters, it is evident his signature changed too. It was almost as if he’d been practicing a brand-new sweeping flourish of letters. Now he had a new name, new handwriting, a new store, and a new life. But old habits remained.
Somehow, in all the frantic months of preparation, Selfridge had found time to become initiated into that select band of brothers, the Freemasons. He joined Columbia Lodge 2397, whose membership was exclusively made up from the American community in London. Among the distinguished list of Columbia Founders was Henry S. Wellcome, the American pharmaceutical millionaire, who cordially received “Brother Gordon Selfridge” to the Lodge. Brotherly love, however, would soon be irrevocably strained when Wellcome’s wife, Syrie, and Harry Gordon Selfridge started their tempestuous affair.
7.
Takeoff
“A store which is used every day should be
as fine a thing and, in its own way, as ennobling
a thing as a church or a museum.”
—H. GORDON SELFRIDGE
OVER A MILLION PEOPLE WERE COUNTED INTO SELFRIDGE’S during the opening week. From that moment on, both the store and the man became famous. “Selfridge,” wrote one columnist, “is as much one of the sights of London as Big Ben. With his morning jacket, white vest slip, pearl tie-pin and orchid buttonhole, he is a mobile landmark of the metropolis.” There was always a small crowd waiting outside to see him arrive at work each morn
ing at 8:30 A.M. An observer recalled that “he was received in respectable silence by the bystanders, who always waved at him.” Selfridge would doff his hat and proceed inside. He took his private lift to the fourth floor and walked briskly down the corridor lined with framed press editorials and advertising tear sheets to his northeast corner office suite. There his personal staff—Thomas Aubrey, his private secretary, and two typists—would already be going through the first post.
Harry’s morning unfolded in a series of rituals, each performed with precise timing. Though he usually shaved at home, in the store the American-equipped barber shop sent up an assistant to give him a scalp rub and trim and hot towel wrap, and to lightly wax his mustache and eyebrows, while a manicurist buffed and filed his fingernails.
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge Page 10