London was awash with nightclubs, much to the anguish of the home secretary, who did his best to close them down, but the clubs—particularly those patronized by the Prince of Wales—reigned supreme. The list was endless. On Thursday nights, the prince himself could usually be found at the Embassy, essentially a dining club with a tiny cheek-to-cheek dance floor, where he smooched with Freda Dudley Ward to music played by Bert Ambrose and his orchestra. A more bohemian, theatrical crowd hung out at Wardour Street’s Fifty Fifty, the Hambone, or the rakish Uncle’s in Albemarle Street. Arnold Bennett, a keen nightclub aficionado, was a fan of the Gargoyle and Kate Meyrick’s Silver Slipper, with its glass dance floor and twinkling mirror globes, while those who really wanted kicks headed to another of Mrs. Meyrick’s clubs, the infamous 43 in Gerrard Street. The 43 also had a distinguished clientele: even the Prince of Wales went from time to time, but it was really the haunt of European royalty—all those lost souls who had also lost their crowns—along with racing drivers, pilots, and sportsmen like Steve Donoghue the jockey and “Gorgeous George” Carpentier, the achingly handsome boxer. The 43 was frequented by people who lived on the edge—the serious gambler Major Jack Coats, the international financier Ivar Kreuger (who had been involved with Selfridge’s construction all those years ago), the theatrical and property entrepreneur Jimmy White, and London’s richest asset stripper, Clarence Hatry. Michael Arlen, Avery Hopwood, Jessie Mathews, and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars—and a young Evelyn Waugh would sit quietly at a side table observing the sights, later immortalized in his novels.
Everyone in town went to the 43. When Rudolph Valentino paid a visit, wearing, in the very latest fashion, a short, fitted tuxedo jacket, he was mistaken for a waiter. He took it well apparently, picking up a bottle with a flourish to pour drinks for several delighted guests. The house champagne sold at two pounds a bottle and the dance hostesses cost considerably more. Ma Meyrick presided over the door, taking ten shillings a time from patrons eager to hear Sophie Tucker belt out a song or Paul Whiteman’s star musicians jam late into the night.
All this fun came at a cost, however, especially to Mrs. Meyrick. Since she had launched her first club after the war, she had been arrested several times, fined thousands of pounds and served two six-month sentences in Holloway. She was the bane of the home secretary’s life and the target of the leading light in London’s Police Vice Squad, Station Sergeant George Goddard. Fortunately for Ma, Sergeant Goddard proved to be a man of extravagant tastes, which he found hard to meet on his police pay of six pounds a week. His weekly wage was supplemented with a brown envelope containing fifty pounds in crisp one-pound notes courtesy of Ma, with the same amount paid by her friend Mr. Ribuffi, the owner of Uncle’s. Every Friday afternoon, Sergeant Goddard would head to Selfridge’s, where he carefully placed the envelope in his personal safety deposit box. It couldn’t last of course. Shopped by an envious colleague, Goddard was eventually caught in 1929. He tried to explain away a large house in Streatham, an extremely comfortable car and twelve thousand pounds in cash in his Selfridge’s deposit box by saying he had made the money “selling confectionery on the side at the British Empire Exhibition,” but he was laughed out of court. Goddard, Mr. Ribuffi and Ma Meyrick were all sent to jail—Ma herself getting fifteen months’ hard labor.
Selfridge himself was more of a Kit Cat Club man. The expensive premises had opened on the Haymarket early in 1925, complete with the requisite big band but also with a lineup of gorgeous girls in a showy cabaret. The Kit Cat too was raided and then closed down. In an attempt to circumvent the law, it subsequently reopened as a “cabaret restaurant.” To celebrate the event, the club’s chairman, Sir Charles Rothen JP, engaged a dazzling dancing duo called the Dolly Sisters to perform on the opening night—and among the guests was Harry Gordon Selfridge. It wasn’t the first time he had seen the girls in action. They had been on the London stage in a C. B. Cochran show called The League of Notions in 1921, when Harry had carefully noted in his ledger that he had spent 17/6d on a ticket. After seeing them again four years later at the Kit Cat, he began an affair with Jenny—some say with both sisters—which, by the time it fizzled out in 1933, had cost him quite literally millions of pounds.
Jenny and her sister Rosie were identical twins. Hungarian by birth—their real names were Jansei and Rosika Deutsch—they were born in 1892. They moved with their family to America where the girls trained as dancers, going “on the road” as entertainers when they were just fourteen. The Dollies got their first big break when Flo Ziegfeld signed them up in 1911. By the time they hit London they were twenty-nine—rather old to be playing ingénues, but they did it well.
The twins specialized in synchronized “tandem” dancing, their movements “mirroring” each other so they blended into one—as indeed did the girls. The only way to identify one from the other was to listen to them—Jenny giggled more. She had been briefly married to the creator of the fox-trot, Harry Fox, and in postwar Paris she performed various outré dance numbers with a professional partner, Clifton Webb, while Rosie specialized in a particularly erotic form of flamenco. On the whole, though, the girls danced—as they did most other things—à deux. With their penchant for jewels, a passion for gambling, and a fondness for rich men, they were quickly nicknamed “the Million Dollar Dollies.”
Their act was especially popular with the gay crowd (both happy and homosexual) and with the sex tourists who frequented the club world of Paris, where nightlife was more lavish and louche than in London. In the French capital Elsa Maxwell, the supreme party organizer of the period, ran a club called the Acacia in partnership with the fashion designer Captain Edward Molyneux. There Jenny would dance, making her entrance each night in a cloak of fresh gardenias. The sisters apparently regarded London as stuffy, preferring to perform in Paris and throughout France. In reality, their déclassé behavior meant they weren’t accepted socially in a city that still regarded public performers with a shiver of unease. To call them uninhibited would be an understatement. As a cub reporter on the Sunday Times, Charles Graves recalled interviewing them after a performance of The League of Notions: “I knocked on the door and they said in chorus, ‘Wait a minute.’ I did so. ‘Now you can come in,’ they called. I entered. Both were stark naked.”
During their first foray on to the London stage, the Dollies had been squired around town by Sir Thomas Lipton. In reality, the genial Sir Thomas, although keen on promoting a reputation as a ladies’ man, was uninterested in women and happily returned home each night to his live-in companion, his loyal secretary John Westwood. During their Kit Cat season, when the Dollies found escorts who were more interested in their charms, it was share and share alike. Lord Beaverbrook’s daughter, Janet Aitken Kidd, recalled in her memoirs that “my father and his friend Harry Selfridge were batting Jenny and Rosie back and forth between them like a couple of ping-pong balls.” The Dollies were a succèss fou. They were painted by the artist Kees van Dongen; Edouard Baudoin hired them to promote the opening of his divinely chic Casino Sea Bathing Club created out of a tattered wooden shack in Juan-les-Pins; and Cecil Beaton drew them for Vogue while playing chemin-de-fer at Le Touquet. The Dollies, in short, were the first celebrities to be famous merely for being famous.
While fame meant a lot to Selfridge, fashion hardly touched him. He wasn’t part of the “designer world” nor was he on Condé Nast’s lunch list. He spent a fortune on entertaining, but had become frugal when it came to his own clothes. Arnold Bennett, killing time between appointments one day in the store’s basement, met Selfridge “wearing a rather old morning suit and silk hat. He at once seized hold of me and showed me over a lot of the new part—cold-storage for furs—finest in the world. Then up in his private lift to the offices and his room, where I had to scratch my name with a diamond on the window.”
The signature window, the Chief’s pride and joy, was by now a Who’s Who of fame and included Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Suzanne Lengle
n, and Michael Arlen. During his working day, Selfridge was still orderly and in control, working longer hours than men half his age. But he was playing hard too, delighting in showing off his conquests. He would walk the store with Suzanne, or Jenny, or Fanny Ward—just as he had done with Gaby—helping them to choose various things and telling the staff to “send the bill upstairs.” One wonders what the salesgirls, earning a few pounds a week, thought about their aging, albeit much-revered boss blithely signing off shopping worth hundreds—sometimes thousands—of pounds for his famous lady friends. Were they impressed by contact with celebrity? Absolutely. Did they talk about it when they got home? Definitely. Did it sadden them to see a doting old man fussing over rather greedy women? Almost certainly.
The life of the store continued apace. During the week of Selfridge’s sixteenth birthday celebrations in 1925, it is estimated that over a million people came through the doors. To mark the occasion, Selfridge sponsored an innovative fifteen-minute radio broadcast by the actress Yvonne Georges from the Eiffel Tower on the couture collections in Paris. This early attempt at commercial radio was the brainchild of an ex-Flying Corps radio wizard, Captain Leonard Plugge. Sadly for Selfridge, when the research survey notes were completed, only three people admitted to having heard the broadcast. Captain Plugge, cheerful in adversity, went on to launch the radio station Radio Normandy, as well as making a fortune perfecting the first motorcar radio.
Meanwhile, some shoppers in the store stumbled across history in the making as they watched the young Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrate his “televisor.” Baird had struggled long and hard to get recognition for his work. Calling in at the Daily Express in the hope of explaining the principles of television to the science editor, he was met with the response: “For God’s sake go down to Reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless. Watch him—he may have a knife!” At Selfridge’s, where they were more enlightened, Baird was paid twenty-five pounds to demonstrate his apparatus, for one week, three times daily. Since he was penniless, the money was a godsend.
It was a time of change not just outside the business but inside it too. Staff were leaving. Well-trained and experienced, they were able to command high salaries elsewhere. Percy Best went to the traditional drapers Schoolbred’s, while the three Americans went home, the display chief Edward Goldsman rejoining Marshall Field, although he returned at vast expense once a year to mastermind Selfridge’s Christmas windows. Crossing the Atlantic in the other direction, young Ralph Isidor Straus of the then family-owned Macy’s in New York, who was studying for an MBA at Harvard, joined the store as a hardworking summer intern. Eric Dunstan left to work for Syrie Maugham, who had by now moved to Grosvenor Street. It wasn’t a happy experience. Dunstan soon moved out, saying: “I cared little for her décor and less for her.” His replacement in the Selfridge inner sanctum was Captain Leslie Winterbottom, late of the Hussars, who stayed with “the Chief” until 1939.
In 1925 the Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill presided over a return to the gold standard. The aristocracy were being hit hard by death duties—on the Duke of Rutland’s death, the duchess had to put their Arlington Street mansion up for sale—while the newly rich were awash with money. For those with an eye for acquisitions, mergers, and debt reconstruction, there were fortunes to be made. Selfridge himself would soon become part of that trend, making him rich beyond even his dreams. But what would he do with the money?
Meanwhile, Mr. Asquith had finally accepted a peerage, becoming the Earl of Oxford. From the stage of a hugely successful revue called The Punch Bowl, Norah Blaney sang to an applauding audience:
Mr. Asquith now is an Earl
Oxford is his seat:
But Mr. Selfridge still remains
The Earl of Oxford Street.
13.
Tout Va
“The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt
until they are too strong to be broken.”
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
IN THE MID-1920S, A LEADING BUSINESS MAGAZINE, EXPRESSIONS, wrote: “To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever dared to refer to Mr H. Gordon Selfridge as a shopkeeper. He must be given credit for teaching London and the rest of the country that serving the public is business of the highest order.” As the growth in consumerism continued, the Drapers’ Chamber of Commerce inaugurated a summer school in Cambridge, offering courses in “new methods of merchandising, display, and window dressing.” Their star speaker was Selfridge himself, whose talk centered on his favorite themes of in-store entertainment, customer service, and value for money. “The first,” he said “will get them in, while the second and third will keep them there.” He concluded by giving the students the same mantra he always gave his own staff: “There are six useful things for notable success in business—judgment, energy, ambition, imagination, determination, and nerve. But the greatest of these is judgment.”
In the context of business decisions and planning, his own judgment appeared to be as sound as ever, his critical faculties seemingly unimpaired by the frivolity of his after-hours escapades. At sixty-nine, he still arrived at work early. He still walked the store. He still controlled board meetings with a brisk “Any business? No? Well then, let’s move on, shall we?” leaving his directors more often than not merely nodding their agreement. The much more lively monthly meetings with buyers and senior sales staff continued as they had always done, with “the Chief” singling out individuals whose departments had exceeded their targets and making them blush with pleasure at his praise.
The potential of television had excited him. “This is not a toy,” he said, “it is going to be a link between all peoples of the world.” He was also convinced of the long-term future of the motorcar, commissioning the civil engineer Sir Harley Dalrymple-Hay to prepare a feasibility study on the logistics of building an underground car park in Portman Square and enlarging the store’s fleet of motorized delivery vans. Cars were beginning to clutter the streets. By the mid-1920s as many as 51,000 motor vehicles and 3,300 horse-drawn carriages were passing around Hyde Park Corner each day and one-way traffic systems were introduced to help traffic flow. Nothing was too much trouble for Selfridge. When an American friend complained about the quality of the coffee in the Palm Court Restaurant, Selfridge had the brand changed. Walking in St. Marylebone, he observed the local fire brigade practicing on a piece of wasteland. He wrote to offer them practice facilities in the store, and in return got the smog-soiled façade cleaned for free. Of course, there were those who knew things were getting out of hand, not least A. J. Hensey, head of the Bought Ledger Department, whose job it was to draw up checks to cover the Chief’s costs. The ever-discreet Mr. Hensey who, in his own words, witnessed Selfridge “going gaga” over various women, wasn’t merely in charge of payments: he drew up checks for generous payoffs when the affairs ended.
Selfridge excelled in blurring the lines between professional and personal entertainment, ensuring his guest lists included influential businessmen and, unusual for the era, businesswomen such as his friend Elizabeth Arden, whose range was by now the top selling line in the store. Since moving into Lansdowne House, he had already hosted some glamorous soirées, but during 1925 he upped the pace, dispensing largesse on a spectacular scale. The media were always invited to cover such events, though they were allocated special tables rather than seated with the VIPs. Selfridge also shrewdly included the American media correspondents based in London, thereby guaranteeing coverage not just in New York and Chicago but coast to coast, courtesy of Time magazine which found his lifestyle irresistible. The store display department took charge of flowers and décor, the food halls delivered provisions, and restaurant staff were on hand to supplement his own domestic staff. The Stars and Stripes flew at an American-themed Rodeo Night where, after a supper of char-grilled hamburgers, fries, and ketchup, washed down with a dozen different beers, had been served in the Sculpture Court,
enthusiastic guests were taught square dancing and watched Red Indians doing lasso demonstrations.
At another party, to honor the newly arrived Japanese Ambassador, the display team created a Japanese water-garden, which ran down the center of the vast dining table. Checking the area in the afternoon, Selfridge noticed there were no goldfish. A series of frantic forays by taxi to the store’s pet department soon ensured that fifty fish were happily swimming among the water lilies. Satisfied with the result, Selfridge went upstairs to change into his customary white tie. Then disaster struck. The paint on the sides of the artificial pond had poisoned the water and the fish started to die. Selfridge immediately sent to the store for a dozen bicycle pumps and ordered his staff to pump oxygen into the water to revive the survivors. It was a good idea, but it didn’t work. Happily, the ambassador remained blissfully unaware of the drama and spent a delightful evening in the company of, among other dignitaries, the home secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, enjoying arias performed by an Italian soprano and watching Hawaiian “hula-hula” dancers shimmy to a native band.
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge Page 22