Harry Malloy went first, after ten years in the store, and went into partnership in the insurance business. He thrives and is happy in it. Next went Eddie Goodman, after four and a half years with the store. “I majored in English Lit at Yale,” he says, “and I toyed with the idea of teaching. But teaching is too pastoral for me. I like to see the input and output of what I do. I went with the store with misgivings—just as my father did, with ambivalent feelings about it, thinking that it was what I was supposed to do, remembering my grandfather. He was a great presence, a personage—there was a great scurrying about when he was coming to call, and you had to be scrubbed raw, before being ushered into the presence. And it’s not that I don’t like retailing, and fashion is the most interesting part of retailing, much more interesting than selling cars. But the point is, to be good at retailing, you have to adore it. You have a six-day-a-week job. You have to make it your life. I helped organize the Bigi department, and that was fun. But 1967, you may remember, was a bad year for the cities—I wanted to do something, to get involved. After leaving the store, I worked in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a member of a nine-man team that was trying to develop a college in Bed-Stuy, and also to bring new businesses into the area.”
Eddie Goodman has since joined Pacifica Radio’s station WBAI–FM, a free-wheeling listener-supported station that operates from a converted East Side church, as the station’s general manager. Here he appears to be in sharp contrast with his surroundings—a tall, slim man whose suits and ties are even more conservative than his father’s, and whose hair is unfashionably short, he works in a studio where intense and flowing-haired young men work in beads and cut-off jeans, taping programs of Ukrainian folk music or discussing the travels and teachings of Baba Ram Dass. A bowl of catfood for the studio cat, a fat yellow tiger, sits in the center of the cluttered room. “I’m sure they think me the squarest of the squares,” Eddie Goodman says. “I’ve recognized that sartorial and tonsorial politics is a real thing, but I don’t believe in it—nor do I believe in changing my life style to suit my new career.” Eddie Goodman, his wife, and two little girls have a large Park Avenue apartment, a maid, and a nurse for the children, and take a house for the summer on the North Shore. He does, however, go to work by subway, getting off at Fifty-ninth Street, and says, “I guess there’s some retailing still in my blood, because I always cut through Bloomingdale’s to see how they’re doing.” He also says, “I often think nowadays that if the feminine liberation movement had started twenty years earlier, there might still be Goodmans at Bergdorf’s. The pressure was always on me, the son, to go into the business. Nobody ever considered my three sisters. Who knows? They might have been great.”
Minky and Gary Taylor, meanwhile, live in a big Victorian house with fourteen-foot ceilings on Long Island Sound, from which Gary Taylor commutes to the Yale School of Forestry. “I don’t really consider myself a dropout from the rat race,” he says, “and I’m not really going to become Smoky the Bear.” Taylor, who is in his mid-thirties, admits that he has been a man slow to “find” himself. Originally from Denver, he was a Dartmouth dropout who wanted to be a writer, and for a while he lived in the Village writing poetry and trying to sell it. He worked for a while for various magazines, but never for the one he wanted to, the New Yorker, which turned him down. “I went to Bergdorf’s because I was told that Leonard had spread himself too thin, and needed someone.” When he left, he had the title of the store’s general manager. “It wasn’t that Leonard Hankin and I didn’t get along, but it was a little strange. Before I went to the store, we used to know the Hankins socially and go to their house a lot. The minute I joined Bergdorf’s, the invitations stopped. With Leonard, you’re either a friend or a business associate—never both.”
Along with other young Americans, Gary Taylor had become increasingly concerned about ecology—“Do you know that there is more tin above the ground in this country than there is under the ground in the entire world? We’ve got to begin to think of garbage as a new kind of natural resource.” And so, it grew “in the back of my mind, as a child of my time, I had to get out and do something. And believe me, there’s more to what I’m taking at Yale than just trees. I don’t know what direction I’ll be taking yet, but I’m at Yale to find out.” After a few days of classes at Yale, Taylor wailed to his wife, whom he met while she was an undergraduate at Smith, “My concentration span has left me!” Said she, “You never had any.”
The Taylors were packing for a trip to Portugal, and their four little boys, their nurse, and a big Dalmatian dog named Gypsy were all, in certain ways, underfoot. “I’m all with Gary for what he’s doing,” Minky Taylor said. “And I’m afraid I think Bergdorf’s is a frivolous business—and the store has changed.” When Eddie Goodman was getting married, for example, his future wife’s mother brought a dress to the store to find matching shoes. A claustrophobic woman, she decided to leave the store by way of a staircase rather than the elevator and, going out, a fire door slammed. Immediately, alarms went off and the poor woman was tackled by guards in the street who threatened to carry her off to precinct headquarters. Though she kept screaming, “My daughter is going to marry Eddie Goodman!” it was a while before she was released. And not long ago Minky Taylor herself, making a Charge-Take purchase at the store, was required to show elaborate identification. “You hate to have to say, ‘Look, my father owns this place,’” she says. “But in the old days that simply would not have happened.”
There are also those who insist that the Bergdorf woman shopper has changed in recent years, now that the spending likes of Mrs. Foy are no more than a memory. Not only are younger women coming into the store who are looking for less expensive clothes, with the two-thousand-dollar dresses having a much harder time finding a market, but the rich women customers seem to be spending less money, or at least spending money in different ways. Two very profitable recent items, for example, had nothing to do with high fashion. They were a transparent plastic “dome” umbrella that goes over the wearer’s entire head and shoulders, and something called an Isotoner—a leotard of a special fabric which, when worn, is said to firm and tone the wearer’s body. Almost novelty-store items, you might say. And there is a new kind of customer, meanwhile, for the expensive items, and she might be called the non-customer. She is a great source of annoyance to Messrs. Goodman and Hankin because, after lunch and a few cocktails, she sweeps with a friend into Bergdorf’s, buys like a mad thing for an hour or so, and then the next day—her friend having been suitably impressed—she returns everything for credit. There are also those who say that the store has let down its side badly, and there were startled looks on the street floor the other day when a modishly dressed young girl, all beads, chains, hair, and fringe, emerged from an elevator with her male escort who, above the belt of his tie-dyed jeans, wore nothing at all besides a headband. “In the old days, he would not have been permitted inside the store,” a salesgirl whispered.
“We used to run a store for the rich woman and the kept woman,” Leonard Hankin said recently. “We can’t any more.” Still, there are enough of the old breed around to allow the store to retain some of its air of gentility and comfort, including one longtime customer who wrote to Andrew Goodman to suggest that her name be taken off the store’s mailing list. She was in her eighties now, and infirm, she explained, and hardly ever went out any more, “and it makes me feel a little guilty knowing you are spending that postage on me.”
“Oh, I so hope the FTC approves!” Minky Taylor said, when the decision was still pending, as though she longed to have the great weight of the famous store thrown forever from her slender Goodman shoulders; as though she yearned for one of the last “family” stores for the super-rich to pass out of the family and into the hands of a super-super-rich conglomerate; as though she knew that the idea of such former “right” places as Bergdorf’s was dying, and that it must be allowed to die as gracefully as possible. Within weeks, her prayers were answered. The FTC approved, and
the conglomeration was complete.
What changes will take place when Bergdorf’s—so small and special and private—becomes a part of Broadway-Hale? Well, certainly there will be branches of Bergdorf Goodman opening across the landscape, from Scarsdale to Atlanta. Branchification was something the Goodmans always scorned (though, as an inducement to Eddie, a branch store—to give him his head, and his own place—was for a while considered in Chicago). But the greatest loss, most people feel, will be the personal touch of the Goodman family. Not long ago a candy manufacturer approached Andrew Goodman with the idea of setting up a street-floor chocolate boutique at Bergdorf’s. Andrew took a box of chocolates home, tried a few pieces, and didn’t like it. So there was no boutique. In the Broadway-Hale conglomerate, who will taste the candy? Who will ever care?
Photo by Marc Riboud, Magnum
$5,000 a lecture—Yevtushenko
13
The Circuit: Tell Us All
In a recent burst of enthusiasm for his profession—lecture management—Dan Tyler Moore, director general of the International Platform Association, announced that on a certain evening in the spring of 1968 no fewer than forty thousand speakers were holding forth in as many auditoriums in the city of New York alone. If true, and figuring that lecture audiences generally consist of anywhere from two hundred and fifty to fifteen hundred people, this would have meant that every resident of the five boroughs, man, woman and child, had simultaneously sat down to be talked at, along with several million other people who could only have come from out of town.
Mr. Moore’s claim is all the more astonishing measured against the fact that, in the lecture business, New York is not considered to be a “good talk town.” Sophisticated New Yorkers, it seems, tend to prefer less cerebral pastimes—such as cocktail parties, lovemaking and theater-in-the-nude—to going to lectures. It is in the allegedly culturally barren hinterlands, smaller cities such as Buffalo, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Fort Wayne, Dallas, Shreveport, Spokane, Iowa City and Bakersfield, that lecture audiences are trotting out in the hundreds of thousands to be edified, or just to listen to the sound of another human voice. But the Moore statement does draw attention to something undeniable: the lecture business is big business and getting bigger. This year more than a hundred million dollars will be spent on what might be called just a lot of hot air. In other words, when the new American moneyed middle class is not traveling, skiing, shopping, or dining out, it is avidly pursuing self-improvement. Sitting in front of a speaker’s lectern is clearly one of the new places to be when you’ve nowhere else to go.
Furthermore, the 1940s image of the lady lecturer created by the late Helen Hokinson—corsaged speaker addressing a sea of flowered hats (following a chicken-in-timbales luncheon), on the subject of Flower Arranging or Secrets of Slipcovering—is now hopelessly out of date. So is the picture of the effete critic who has come to the woman’s club to talk on the Joys of Poetry. Today congressmen, senators, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Supreme Court justices have taken to the lecture platform, along with ballplayers, sopranos, columnists, doctors, lawyers, composers, gurus, women’s liberationists and ballet dancers. Lecturing has become an important second source of income for actors between plays, authors between books, singers between concerts, even photographers between assignments. Bosley Crowther, former film critic for the New York Times, claims he put his children through college by lecturing. Senator Barry Goldwater in 1968 made sixty thousand dollars in lecture fees alone and is the envy of all his Senate colleagues. Everyone whose name shines with the slightest glint of fame scrambles to climb aboard the gold lecture wagon to join those who are currently making money at it—such diverse figures as Harry Golden, Rise Stevens, Art Buchwald, Dick Gregory, Bob Feller, Kitty Carlisle, George Plimpton, Philippe Halsman and Madame Claire Chennault.
Matching—indeed outweighing—the eagerness of those willing to lecture and be paid for it are the organizations with budgets they are eager to spend on lectures. These, too, are a far cry from the club luncheons Miss Hokinson sketched. Women’s groups no longer have a corner on lecturers’ services. It is as though in the last decade, in a spirit of uplift, men’s organizations all over the country decided to put aside their traditional evening of drinking and card-playing in favor of listening to the reminiscences of Baroness Maria von Trapp, whose life story was turned into The Sound of Music. Or to hear the powdered accents of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, whose joint lecture, titled “An Evening of Elegance,” is, according to Their Graces’ agent, “really just a plug to get tourists to come and visit their castle.”
The greatest demand for lecturers comes from colleges. “They’re the bread and butter of our business,” says Alan S. Walker, president of the Program Corporation of America. “Look at it this way: every single college and university in the country books between ten and fifteen speakers every year. That adds up to a tremendous market.” Whatever the reason for this activity, one lecture bureau, the American Program Bureau of Boston, takes in about three million dollars every year from college campuses, three-quarters of the agency’s revenue. With more than four thousand colleges and universities, there is an audience of over seven million people—and they have money to pay.
There is another reason why the college audience is particularly enticing to lecturers and the agencies. This big, rich audience turns over every four years. This means that a lecturer can be booked again—and again—at any given college. This is not the case in, say, the annual Republican Club Fund Dinner in Tulsa. After one engagement a speaker becomes “dead” for that organization for as long as a dozen years, and he may even be dead for all of Tulsa. This is because this year’s program chairman has got to come up with something better than last year’s speaker; if not, it would be like arriving in last year’s hat. “With colleges,” says one lecture agent taking a hardboiled view, “you can send them a speaker and maybe he’s lousy. So what? Two, three years later nobody will remember whether he was or wasn’t.”
Which brings up the inevitable question: How valuable, or how entertaining, are the lectures being peddled—and delivered—to this seemingly insatiably lecture-hungry public? The answer, needless to say, is that it depends. There are, to begin with, two basic kinds of lecturers. There is the person who, having achieved a certain amount of fame or recognition in his field, decides, as it were, to cash in on it with “a little lecturing on the side.” These are people who regard lecturing as something else to do, an added source of income, an excuse to get away from their wives (or husbands) for a few weeks each year. These might be called the casual lecturers who are really only as good as their names happen to be. At the moment, for example, Arthur Ashe is considered one of the “hot” lecture properties and his signature is being sought by a number of agencies, though of course no one knows—or cares—whether Mr. Ashe is as skillful on the platform as he is at the net.
Lecturers of this type, however, tend to have relatively short careers. According to an agent, “The first year we have them we can book them anywhere—they can be just as busy as they want. The second year there’s a slip. By the third year, unless they’re awfully good, they’re dead.” And yet it is this group that composes the majority of the lecturers in the business. According to W. Colston Leigh, who runs a New York agency often called “the Tiffany’s of the lecture bureaus,” “Ninety per cent of the people in this business are no damned good. It’s like any other profession. Only the dedicated and talented minority really succeed.”
The dedicated and talented minority are, of course, the second group. These are men and women who take their lecturing seriously, who work at it with full strength, who believe in what they’re doing—and saying—and work on their platform performances with as much intensity as a painter works on a canvas. They learn how to establish rapport with an audience, how to build a mood and control it, how to get a laugh or a tear. They learn how to judge an audience’s reaction and how to attune themselves to the subtleties of the composition of
a group, and to tell instinctively when an anecdote that might be appreciated by one kind of audience will not by another. These lecturers leave their audiences enriched or entertained or both, and needless to say, these lecturers are the more durable sort, in demand year after year.
Into this category fall such people as Louis Untermeyer, who, in his mid-eighties, recently retired from a long career of lecturing, and Emily Kimbrough, who loves lecturing so much that she lectures, then writes a book about lecturing, then lectures about writing a book about lecturing. Edward Weeks, editor emeritus of the Atlantic, is another of this long-lasting breed, as was the late critic John Mason Brown. Eleanor Roosevelt, for years a Colston Leigh client, was still another who—though never really a very good speaker—managed, by some magic of her personality or spirit, to hold audiences enthralled with her fluty voice.
Since the lecture industry has, for the last decade, been enjoying a seller’s market, with more organizations clamoring for speakers than there are speakers to speak—and since the speakers themselves are subject to such a high turnover rate—the lecture-bureau business has become highly competitive. Everybody, as Jimmy Durante used to say, wants to get into the act and is furiously beating his own drum. In the scramble to out-celebrity each other, lecture bureaus have been known to adopt practices which, while not actually illegal, might be considered a bit unsporting, and in their efforts to lure Famous Names to their lists their most important tool has been the greatness of the size of the human ego. For example, a familiar tactic has been for a lecture agent to call up a Supreme Court justice or similar luminary and say, “If I can get you a lecture engagement paying a top figure of five thousand dollars, may I represent you?” In most cases the celebrity, flattered at the thought that such a high price is placed on his words, says yes right away, and then, in a few days, forgets all about it. No five-thousand-dollar engagement may ever come, but in the meantime the celebrity’s name has been printed on hundreds of thousands of brochures scattered to organizations across the country, lending prestige to the lecture bureau—and to the other speakers, less well known, whom the bureau represents.
The Right Places Page 19
