Measure of a Man

by Martin Greenfield

  In 2014, I paid a visit to the Boardwalk Empire set. They were shooting an episode from the show’s final season at the historic Players Club building here in New York. My dear friend Steve Buscemi, who plays the lead character Enoch “Nucky” Thompson on the show, was in the middle of shooting a scene. Watching all the characters shuffle around the period set in our suits thrust me back in time. No matter how many television or movie wardrobes we do, I never tire of seeing my custom creations come to life and dance across the screen. The set and clothes were period perfect.

  Ever since Steve appeared in his breakout role in Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic Reservoir Dogs as the character Mr. Pink, I’d enjoyed watching his career blossom. We always shared a special bond. He’s a Brooklyn boy, too. Steve’s wife, Jo, often brings their son to the factory, and we have a big time. A man who understands the sacredness of family is one I respect.

  Steve’s also got a beautiful heart. Before his acting career, he served as a New York firefighter with FDNY Engine 55. When the terrorists attacked America on September 11, 2001, Steve quietly put his acting gigs on hold and drove down to his old fire station to help his brother firefighters pull bodies out of the rubble. When reporters called to ask if the rumors were true, he declined to comment. That’s the kind of guy Steve is.

  On set, Steve finished his scene and pulled me aside. Unlike some method actors who remain in character in and out of scenes, when Steve’s done, he’s done; I was talking to Steve, not Nucky.

  “How do I look, Martin?” he asked.

  I smoothed his lapels and gave him the once-over.

  “Beautiful,” I said. “Couldn’t fit or look better.”

  “You know the only time I ever heard anyone call me ‘handsome’ was when I wore your suits,” he joked, referencing his trademark quirky look. “Seriously, 90 percent of this role is the clothes. Any time I’m practicing and feeling unsure about a line or scene, I look in the mirror and realize you’ve already made Nucky. I just have to mouth the words. The suits do the rest.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE TAILORS’ TAILOR

  Hollywood forced me to think and dream bigger.

  Hanging out with celebrities boosted my confidence. Stars were just people—nice people, even. Moreover, the menswear conference confirmed that I was on my way to being a master tailor. The industry professionals I met were competent but not superior. My competitive nature let me know I could play with the best—and even beat them. My ego-boosting trip proved timely. As it turned out, Mr. Goldman had bigger plans for my future than I could have ever dreamed.

  “We’re headed to London, Martino,” he said. “Pack your suitcase and bring Arlene.”

  Mr. Goldman traveled in style and comfort. He never carried money on him save for a single silver dollar. Standing in the hotel lobby, I asked him why he didn’t carry cash.

  “I don’t need to. You don’t either,” he said. “I just sign for it. If you have any expenses, don’t pay for anything. Just tell them you’re with Mr. Goldman.”

  “I don’t have to pay them?”

  “No. You’re with me. That’s all you need.” Mr. Goldman noticed my confusion. “Let me show you,” he said. “Go to that desk clerk and tell him to give you one thousand pounds.”

  “What? I’m not telling him that. You tell him.”

  “No, I want you to. Just say Mr. Goldman is your boss.”

  The experiment made me feel like a stickup artist. When I asked the clerk for the money, not surprisingly, he refused. I then did as Mr. Goldman instructed and told them he was my boss.

  “Do you have a check or something?” the clerk asked.

  “No, my boss is Mr. Goldman.”

  “I’m sorry. We don’t do business like this in England,” he said in an annoyed tone.

  Mr. Goldman stepped in. “I’m Mr. Goldman. What’s the problem?”

  “Sir, I cannot just advance your colleague here one thousand pounds.”

  “Why not? You know Mr. Collette, the famous businessman, don’t you?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “He’s my cousin. Call him.”

  The clerk shot us a skeptical but slightly worried look. While speaking to Mr. Collette on the phone, his expression changed to extreme embarrassment and mortified regret.

  “Mr. Goldman, sir, I am so terribly sorry for my mistake. . . . I . . . I . . . I apologize for the misunderstanding, sir.”

  “Give Martino here the money he requested,” said Mr. Goldman.

  “Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir. Right away.”

  Mr. Collette gave us his Rolls-Royce and a driver for the entire week.

  Mr. Goldman understood the importance of appearances. He was a master at projecting power and panache. We were suit men. Our business was all about flair and perceived authority. Dress important and you become important. A man who signed for things made an unspoken statement of credit and wealth. Showing up in a Rolls-Royce signaled to prospects they, too, could join the ranks of the elite—or at least look the part—by wearing Mr. Goldman’s clothes. Our Rolls took us from haberdashery to haberdashery. Mr. Goldman pitched. I measured. He closed. I learned.

  No lesson was too small for Mr. Goldman to impart. When he found out I didn’t drink alcohol, Mr. Goldman took it upon himself to set me straight. “If you’re going to be in this business, Martino, you have to learn to drink Scotch,” he said. He took me to a bar and taught me how to knock back and hold my liquor. I hated the stuff but loved that he took the time to teach me.

  Still, even with all Mr. Goldman’s one-on-one mentoring, I doubted whether I had it in me to ever become a “front man” in our trade. Mr. Goldman made it look effortless. But he didn’t have a foreign accent. Moreover, he had a fancy education and formal sales and rhetorical training. I didn’t. I decided it was best to run my measuring tape, not my mouth.

  Despite my insecurity about my language and education, though, I knew my value as GGG’s virtuoso tailor. By the late 1960s, I had grown frustrated and felt underappreciated. While the company’s wealth rose, mine remained flat. Mr. Goldman had told me that if we grew GGG’s sales to a hundred thousand units annually, my pockets would be full of cash. After traveling with him to Boston to see Malcolm Kenneth, an outerwear manufacturer, we inked a deal to make their lightweight gabardine coats that pushed us to 110,000 units. I waited two weeks. Nothing. My paycheck stayed the same.

  I confronted him. “We are at 110,000 units now. My pockets are empty,” I said in a frustrated tone. “I thought you said my pockets would be fat with money if we hit a hundred thousand units. Did you forget that?” The pained look in his eyes let me know my words worried and embarrassed him. The next Monday, he pulled me into his office.

  “Martino, you were right,” he said. “You’re the closest thing I have to a son. I need you to know that. You are vital to GGG’s success. From now on, every year, you will receive a substantial annual bonus. There’s something else. You’re an executive now. That means you represent GGG. So, I’m buying you a new Cadillac with GGG plates. Every three years we’ll trade it in and get you a new one in whatever color you want. End of story.”

  In 1972 Mr. Goldman had a heart attack. I raced to the hospital in a panic. I couldn’t lose him.

  The nurses made me sit in the waiting room. A few seats over sat a man with a face strikingly similar to Mr. Goldman’s, three fat cigars sticking out of his shirt pocket. “Excuse me,” I said. “Are you here with the Goldman family?”

  “Yes, but my father won’t see me,” he said. I tried not to let on that I never knew Mr. Goldman had a son. “He disowned me,” the man said, tearing up. “But I would like to see him. I really would. But he won’t see me.” Although I didn’t know the story or what had happened between them, my heart hurt for this man I had just met.

  I waited until he left before asking the nurse if I could go back and see Mr. Goldman. She escorted me into his room. He was lucid and looked good for having just suffered a heart attack
. After a few minutes of small talk, I broached the subject. “Mr. Goldman, you lied to me. You said I was the closest thing you had to a son. But in the waiting room I just met a man who said he is your son. Why did you lie?”

  “I didn’t lie. He’s dead to me.”

  I later learned the estrangement had been caused by a fight involving stocks and money. I didn’t know the details. I didn’t need to. The whole thing tore at my heart. The ease with which American families discarded relationships appalled me. It was one of the few facets of American life that disappointed me. People here had no damn clue how blessed they were to live in freedom with their families. That any family could willfully and casually sever bonds between parent and child sickened me. It was an arrogant, ungrateful affront to God and orphans.

  Sadly, over the next few years, the Goldman family’s internal tensions intensified. I sensed that serious trouble lay ahead. A high-powered clothing man who had signed deals with Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent to produce their labels approached me with an offer to join him in a new company. He offered me a one-third stake in the company if I would set up and run a new factory he would build to my specification. The opportunity excited me, but the thought of abandoning Mr. Goldman left me feeling queasy and disloyal. I dreaded telling him.

  “Mr. Goldman, I lost my father when I was a boy in the camps. You are like my father. It’s hard for me to tell you the story, but now is my opportunity to go into business. To go out on my own. I need your advice. If you were my age and in my place, what would you do? You’ve never steered me wrong. I trust you completely.”

  “I am not the best man to ask. I’m an old man—and you’re my business! If you don’t want to be here, I want to close up the factory. There’s no use keeping GGG open if you go.” His words stabbed me like a dagger. “Martino, listen to me. If I give you 5 percent of my corporation, you will own it all one day.”

  “Sir, that’s very gracious of you, but I couldn’t accept something like that. Besides, your brothers are younger. I’m close to you, not them.”

  “Fine. Then let me invest in you. How much do you need in order to stay?”

  “I don’t know . . . maybe twenty-five thousand dollars?”

  “We’ll write it up and get it signed immediately.”

  Several months later, Mr. Goldman told me he needed to speak with me privately. He said to meet him at a nearby park. When I arrived, he had already arrived and was sitting on a bench. “I want this to remain between us,” said Mr. Goldman. “I want you to take over the whole business and run GGG.”

  “What about Sam?”

  “You’re my guy. You will do a much better job than Sam. You get along with the workers better. You know my business better than anyone.” The idea excited me. He was right. I could do a better job. I wanted to innovate and make changes. “You will earn sixty thousand dollars a year, plus your car and all the rest.”

  “Who would tell Sam I’m the new boss?”

  “You would.”

  “I cannot do that, Mr. Goldman. You hired him. He’s my boss. I can’t do that.”

  “Well, if you can’t do that then I can’t pay you that kind of a salary.”

  “What if you let Sam go and I take less money.”

  “That doesn’t work, Martino. I will keep him on but start shifting things to you.”

  In 1977, exactly thirty years after I arrived in America and found work as a floor boy, I bought the GGG factory at 239 Varet Street in Brooklyn for $100,000. The facility and equipment were mine; the GGG brand was not. I would build a new brand from scratch, step by step, picking the people and systems I wanted. I called it Martin Greenfield Clothiers.

  We started with six people. I wanted a business where I touched every suit and served as an architect of the human form. Originally, I envisioned a smaller operation that would turn out a hundred suits a week. My boutique-scale vision died hard and fast. The phone started ringing off the hook. A men’s store in Philadelphia named Diamonds wanted us to hand tailor their suits. Then Neiman Marcus called. They wanted me to do trunk shows and handle their made-to-measure clients. The suits would have Neiman Marcus on the joker tag but would be hand tailored by us.

  My newfound creativity and managerial freedom allowed me to set up smarter systems and do things right. I refused to compromise. We would use only the highest-quality materials and methods. My suits would feature my hand-shaped full-canvas fronts, Italian and English woolens and cashmeres, handmade horn buttons affixed with a smart button stance, endless hand pressing to mold the jacket’s form, hand-stitched and functional buttonholes, and collars with a gorge done right to ensure a snug fit around the shirt collar. And above all, only over my dead body would any suit made by Martin Greenfield ever feature fused or glued interlining.

  A suit jacket has three layers of fabric: inside, outside, and an interior canvas layer. In a handmade suit, the interior layer floats freely between the inside and the outside. That’s what gives a jacket verve. Cheap suits fuse or—heaven forbid—glue the middle layer to the front layer. The result is a disgusting mess of a suit. When I’m walking down the sidewalk and see a fused or glued jacket, I cross the street so I don’t have to look at it. It’s a rumpled, misshapen sartorial atrocity. That doesn’t happen with properly constructed free-floating canvas. Not the way I do them. My suits drape the body.

  In addition to setting soaring manufacturing standards, I also insisted that Martin Greenfield Clothiers’ private clients receive a personalized customer experience. It made good business sense, but it made even better tailoring sense. One of the many advantages of a custom suit over a ready-made suit is that I am able to correct for a customer’s physical imperfections or irregularities. Uneven arms? I correct for them by modifying the sleeves. Longer-than-normal torso? I change the drop and button stance. Drooping shoulder? I reconstruct the shoulders and make them symmetrical.

  I also insisted that we understand each customer’s way of life and professional work. For example, when we dressed a Walter Cronkite, Conan O’Brien, or Stone Phillips, we wouldn’t use the same fabrics that we’d use for a professional athlete like LeBron James, Patrick Ewing, or Shaquille O’Neal. Television cameras hate certain patterns and sheens, whereas athletic, muscular bodies hate tight seams. I was determined to make sure that the corporate culture of Martin Greenfield Clothiers put a premium on personalized customer communication.

  Despite my confidence in my tailoring and systems, I was still insecure about my ability to sell directly to customers. It was a skill I had never had to learn—and wasn’t sure I could. Then, in 1978, I got a call from the legendary Stanley Marcus, owner of Neiman Marcus. He wanted me to meet him at his Dallas store for a tuxedo trunk show. “Do up a dozen tuxedos. Give me your very best cuts and looks. I’m flying you down here for a VIP trunk show,” he said.

  I hadn’t liked Mr. Marcus the first time I met him. Worse, I thought he was a Communist. That first encounter was at a men’s fashion convention in Manhattan during my GGG days. “Take every penny out of the man’s pocket when he shops with you,” he had told me. The words made me wince. It reminded me of something the Russian Communists I fled from might say. But then I listened to the rest of Mr. Marcus’s spiel:

  When you dress a man, you have to make sure you dress him 100 percent. You have to sell him everything he needs to dress properly. A scarf, a hat, gloves, pocket square—everything. Why? Because if you forget to sell him a pocket square, he’s going to run to another store and buy one. That salesperson is going to say, “Do you have a jacket to put it in?” When the customer says, yes, I bought it from Neiman Marcus, the salesman will say, “I can sell you a suit just as good for less.” And then you just lost a customer for life—and all because you failed to sell him a stupid pocket square.

  A natural-born seller, Mr. Marcus knew what he was talking about. He hadn’t built one of fashion’s most successful stores by accident. As he liked to say, “I have the simplest taste; I’m always satisfi
ed with the best.”

  And now Mr. Marcus was calling me to do a Friday night trunk show for him. I made up my twelve sharpest tuxedos and flew to Dallas. Mr. Marcus arranged for a white stretch limousine to bring me to his downtown store, where I was greeted by a big sign out front—“Welcome, Martin Greenfield!”—and chilled champagne at the door. The event was to be a black-tie affair. After greeting me, Mr. Marcus told me to hurry up and change and then come find him before the show started.

  That’s when he dropped the bomb on me. “I want to switch it up a little tonight,” he said. “I will make a few remarks and introduce you, but I want you to get on the stage and sell them.” My stomach churned.

  “Mr. Marcus, I don’t talk. I’m a tailor. You’re the salesman. I just know how to make the clothes, not sell them.”

  “No, I want you to go up there, take a tux jacket, and walk them through all the craftsmanship and tailoring you put into making a suit jacket.”

  “Mr. Marcus, sir, I don’t want to embarrass you. I don’t think this is a good idea. I just. . . .”

  “Nonsense. You’ll do great. Just talk about the quality and details you pour into everything you make. That’s all you have to do. Your work speaks for itself. Just show them what you do.”

  I was so nervous I thought I was going to vomit on the tuxedos. I got in front of the wealthy crowd and went through each section of the jacket, stitch by stitch. I talked about the lining, the seam work, the fabrics—everything. While I was droning on about the workmanship in each coat, Mr. Marcus stood up and interrupted me mid-sentence. “Hey, Martin, I thought you said you couldn’t talk? Now stop talking. You already have three guys sitting next to me who are ready to get measured and buy tuxedos. Hurry it up, will you?”

  The crowd burst out laughing. I did too.

  The three men who wanted tuxedos turned out to be Mr. Marcus’s brother, cousin, and son. They may have genuinely wanted the suits, but Mr. Marcus no doubt encouraged them to take the lead so others would follow.