Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing!” the woman cries indignantly. Other shoppers, heading out into the late-afternoon rush hour, pause to observe the scene.

  “They’ve caught a shoplifter!” one woman says loudly to her companion.

  “I must ask that you open your shopping bag,” the guard says. “Otherwise, I must—”

  “Well, certainly!” the woman says. “But honestly, I’ve never been subjected to such a—”

  “Ah,” the guard says, lifting a man’s alligator belt from the shopping bag. “Here is the problem. You see! The magnetic tag has not been removed from this article. You have your sales slip for this, of course.”

  “Certainly! It’s in there somewhere, I suppose!”

  The guard extracts a pink slip of paper from the bag and examines it. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but this is from the women’s shoe department, for the pair of shoes that I assume are in that box. I see no sales slip for a man’s belt.”

  “This is ridiculous!” the woman cries. “I’ve been a Saks charge customer for years! Never have I been subjected to this sort of thing before!”

  “Perhaps if we can go back to the small leather goods department, we can straighten this out,” he says, taking her arm.

  “What?” she says, pulling away from him. “I’m in a terrible rush! This is most inconvenient. Don’t you know who I am? I am Naomi Myerson!”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I must—”

  Suddenly she snatches the alligator belt from his hand and flings it in his face. “Take your damn belt!” she cries. “And if that belt turns up on my next Saks bill, I’ll sue! Do you hear me? I’ll sue!” She hurls herself through the second set of swinging doors and out into the rush-hour street.

  It is evening now, and Mimi and her husband are sitting in their living room, sipping a martini before dinner.

  “How was your day?” she asks him.

  “Oh, routine,” he says. “Today was our monthly partners’ lunch. No big issues to discuss.”

  “Ah, your partners’ lunch,” she says. She sips her drink. “Where did you do it this time?”

  “At the Downtown Club. And you?”

  He has obviously forgotten that today she was lunching with Michael. “Oh, I was fairly busy. I just had a sandwich at my desk.”

  She gazes into her cocktail glass. And so here we sit, she thinks, two famously successful people in a two-career household, so smiled upon by fortune. And this is the point to which twenty-nine years of marriage have brought us. We sit here, domestic as that silver cocktail shaker—that cocktail shaker that was a wedding gift, that has all the names of Brad’s ushers at the wedding engraved on it—and tell lies to one another.

  Palm Beach, Michael had said, come with me to Palm Beach. Palm Beach, that latest triumph of the Jewish Renaissance. She has always hated Palm Beach, and all those other places that were always her grandfather’s places, never her own. If he had suggested Srinagar or Ootacamund or Katmandu, or some other more exotic place—the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, he had once suggested in a moment of fantasy, where they would start a sheep ranch—would she have flown there with him?

  “You never loved the shegetz you married, did you?”

  Right now, she does not have the answer to either of these questions.

  10

  Granny Flo Myerson (interview taped 8/27/87):

  Leo was a crook. I think I already told you that, but what I didn’t tell you was that his son, Nathan, also was a crook. In fact, Nate Myerson was worse than a crook, he was a rat. Nate had it in for my son Henry, but I’m getting ahead of my story. My Adolph may have had a lot of enemies, but he wasn’t a crook. Leo and Nate were both crooks. They’re all dead now, so I can say this.

  Leo was five years younger than Adolph, and my goodness, I don’t think those two ever got along. Even when they were in the painting business in the Bronx, they were always scrapping. Adolph would want to do things one way, and Leo would want to do it another. It was always like that. I think I told you that Leo was much the better-looking of the two brothers. Oh, my, Leo was a looker, for all his crookedness. Leo looked a little bit like What’s-his-name, the movie star, Douglas Fairbanks, and Adolph was short and fat. Leo had all the girls—even after he was married he had girls—and Adolph could never get a girl, until I came along and proposed to him. Those two used to sit right behind my family at temple, and my eye was always on Leo, even though I knew it was Adolph’s eye that was always on me. I think I told you that I’d have rather married Leo than Adolph, but how could I do that? Leo already had a wife, named Blanche. These people are all dead now. Blanche was all right, though I didn’t have too much to do with her. At least Blanche was nicer than Leo turned out to be.

  You see, even though Leo was five years younger, he’d married earlier—around nineteen hundred, it seems to me. I married Adolph in nineteen fifteen, and Adolph was already forty-five! By then, Leo and Blanche already had a family. There was the son, Nate, that I told you about, and two little girls, Minna and Esther. Nate, I told you, is dead, and under mysterious circumstances that I’ll get to later. I don’t know what’s become of Minna and Esther, because the family’s been out of touch with those cousins since before the war. They may be dead too, for all I know, but if they’re alive they’d be pretty old ladies now—nearly as old as me!

  But the point of it is that Adolph never got along with his brother. Part of it was because of Leo’s way with the ladies, but that was only part of it. Adolph used to say that Leo was stupid, and Leo used to say that Adolph was cheating him out of his share of the money, but it wasn’t true. One thing I can say about my husband is that he never cheated. He did other things, but he didn’t cheat his brother. If anything, he was too fair with him—fairer than Leo deserved. Anyway, after my husband invented nail polish, things got quite worse. Of course I can’t say that my husband invented nail polish, can I? It’d been around for some years. It was the quick-drying nail polish that was new. That was the thing. That, and the catchy names, like Three Alarm.

  Anyway, Leo thought he should get all the credit for it. He’d say, “Where would you be if I hadn’t put the whatchamacallit in it, the chemical that makes it quick-drying? Where would you be without me, Mr. Big Shot?” And Adolph would say, “And where would you be if I’d let you throw the whole batch out, like you wanted to do? Where would you be if I hadn’t seen the possibilities?” They’d argue like that all day long, and it would make my husband crazy. He’d come home at night and read to me from his diary about how Leo was making him crazy. I remember a lot of days where the diary began with “How many times did Leo make me crazy today?”

  Anyway, in those days there was a lot of dirty work in our business—a lot of dirty work at the crossroads. In the nineteen twenties, particularly. There were payoffs. Under-the-counter payoffs. You’d pay a store owner, or one of his clerks, to display your products in the front of the store, or on top of the counter, or along the center aisle, and to push your competitors’ product into the back, where it wouldn’t be seen. Of course the competition did the same thing, and so the payoffs got bigger and bigger if you wanted your brands to get a good display in a store. Some people say it still goes on today. I wouldn’t know. You’ll have to ask Mimi about that, but I’ll bet she won’t tell you. I don’t know if it’s exactly against the law, but it’s dirty business.

  I’ll tell you how some store owners worked. The Miray salesman would come into a store, complain about his display, make the payoff, and bingo! Up would go a big, fancy display of Miray right inside the front door. Half an hour later, a salesman from Revlon or one of the others would come into the same store, complain about his display, make the payoff, and bingo again! Down would come the Miray display, and up would go Revlon’s in the same spot! This could happen a dozen times a day! People complain about the cost of cosmetics. They say a night cream that retails fifty dollars has only a few cents’ worth of ingredients in it. They say the rest of
the cost is for packaging and advertising, but that’s not true! It’s not packaging and advertising that push up the cost, it’s the payoffs! My husband explained it all to me, how it worked. It was all in his diary, how much he paid off, and who to, to get his products displayed at all.

  That was one reason why, in the late nineteen twenties I think it was, my husband decided to pull Miray out of the dime stores and drugstores, where the payoffs were worst, and sell only in the big department stores, which were supposed to be respectable. Well, let me tell you something: The big stores may have been a little more respectable, but there were still payoffs, and I’m talking Wanamaker’s and Saks and Best’s and Lord & Taylor, I’m not talking dreck. In those days, anyway. The only difference between the fancy stores and the dime stores was that the big stores were too busy to change their displays every half hour! Except for Altman’s. I’ve always trusted Altman’s. My family were friends with the Altman family, and they were always respectable people. But Saks! Saks used to be owned by the Gimbel family, who were from out West somewhere, and my husband used to say, “Beware of the Gimbels!” He’d say, “I helped make Frank Woolworth rich, now I’m making the Gimbels rich!” Think of that: if it hadn’t been for men like my husband, who would she be, this Barbara Hutton?

  Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the payoffs. It was worst in the nineteen twenties, and even in the nineteen thirties, right up to just before the war. Today, I don’t know about. Ask Mimi. In the nineteen twenties and ’thirties there were even worse things than that. This is a very competitive business, as I guess you know. The competition in this business is fierce, it’s cutthroat. There were real strong-arm tactics used to keep a competitor’s product off the shelves. They’d use the Teamsters to misdirect a competitor’s shipment, or to get it “lost” or hijacked. There’d be kidnap threats, even murder threats. It was no holds barred! This was during Prohibition that all this started, but it went on even afterward. In the nineteen twenties was when cosmetics began to be big business. That was when even Wall Street began to take a serious look at companies like ours. Before that, we were thought of as kind of like the movie business, strictly small-time stuff. But now that even Wall Street was looking us over, it meant the competition was even stiffer. It became like a war between the cosmetics companies.

  Then, in ’twenty-nine I think it was, there was a kind of scandal, at least it could have been if it hadn’t been covered up. A Revlon—I think it was Revlon, yes, I’m sure it was Revlon—a Revlon shipping van was found in New Jersey with its tires slashed and a bullet hole through the windshield. The driver was gone, they never did find him. But there were bloodstains inside the cab, and in the back, all the shipping crates and cartons had been ripped open and their contents smashed to smithereens. A witness said she’d seen what sounded like one of our Miray cars in the vicinity the night it happened.

  Well! As you can imagine, Adolph was fit to be tied when he heard about this! He called Leo on the carpet and wanted to know what he knew about this. Leo just laughed in Adolph’s face. Leo admitted he knew that something like that was going to happen. Leo admitted that, behind Adolph’s back, he’d been hiring gangsters—The Mob!—to frighten the competition. That made Adolph just about hit the roof, but Leo said, “It’s just a part of the price of doing business.” Can you imagine that? Anyway, the witness changed her story, said she could have been mistaken (someone must have threatened her or bought her off), and that scandal went away on us. But you can imagine how knowing that Leo was doing things like that made Adolph even crazier. That was when Adolph began filling the pages of his diaries with lots of entries under the heading “Plan to Get Rid of Leo.” It took him almost ten years to do it, but he did it.

  I mean, the under-the-counter payoffs were one thing—everybody did that—but using The Mob, that was too much for Adolph.

  Then, I think I mentioned that Leo had this son, this Nate. In nineteen thirty-one, this Nate was about thirty, and Leo began pushing Adolph to give Nate some big job in the company. Well, by then, Adolph didn’t want Leo in the company, and he certainly didn’t want Nate! Nate was a bum! Meanwhile, Adolph had always planned that our son Henry would take over the company someday—that was Adolph’s dream. Our son Henry was born in nineteen sixteen, and so in nineteen thirty-one, Henry was just fifteen, just a little boy, but that was another reason why Adolph didn’t want to let Nate into the company, to be there standing in our Henry’s way when the time came.

  Henry was just fifteen years old when Nate—his own cousin, a grown man—approached him.

  Henry was … so young. Young, even, for fifteen. How can I describe my Henry to you? He was innocent, a beautiful child—not like Edwee, not at all. Henry believed in the goodness of things, even then. Sometimes, I think that Henry was too good a person to live out a full life. Of course, that Alice he married was no help to him, no help at all. Any brains, any goodness that are in Mimi came from her father’s side, not from that Alice. Even Mimi’s looks come from Henry.

  Henry was—how to describe him? Henry was my angel on earth. He was my Henny-Penny—that’s what I called him. Do you know that story about Henny-Penny? “Run, run, the sky is falling!” I didn’t know it, but the sky was beginning to fall on Henry even then. Later, if Alice knew it, she was too stupid to know what to do about it! Henry could have had … such a future! Do you know that story in the Bible about old King David when he hears that his son Absalom has been killed? He goes to the tower over the gate and cries, “O Absalom, my son, my son Absalom. Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.” That’s how I felt when I heard that my Henny-Penny was dead … like going to a tower … and crying out to God.… Oh, you don’t know it, but it’s a terrible thing for a mother to outlive her firstborn son … terrible.… Excuse me, I’m sorry.… Do you mind turning off that machine until I … [unintelligible] …

  All right. Yes, I’m fine, now. Let’s go on. Where was I? Oh, how Nate corrupted Henry, and turned him against his father. Nate approached Henry—Nate, a grown man, his first cousin, and Henry, a child of fifteen—and said to him, “Do you know how your father and my father run that company of theirs? That swell little company that you’re supposed to inherit? They hire gangsters to run it, that’s how! Gangsters who kill people who get in their way! What do you think of that? They actually kill people!” It seems that Leo had actually boasted to Nate about his gangster connections, and how he used them! Can you imagine that?

  Henry—so young, so innocent, so trusting—ran to his father and said, “Is it true, Daddy? Is it true what Cousin Nate says—that you pay to have people killed?” Of course Adolph denied it. How could you not deny a question like that, coming from your own young son? But I know that Henry knew from his father’s reaction that his father was lying to him. Children know these things. You can’t lie to a child. And I don’t think Henry ever trusted his father again. I don’t think he ever believed in his father’s business again. I don’t think Henry ever even trusted me again, because I was there when his father tried to deny all these things, and of course I had to deny them too, even though I knew the truth. I had to stand behind my husband.

  I honestly think Adolph could have killed Leo then, killed Leo and Nate, killed them both, if he could have figured out a way. Sometimes I think he should have—for killing his son’s love for him, for robbing him of his innocence, for poisoning a son’s mind against his father, and even me who loved him more than the world itself! Because that was what it was like—a poison in the mind of an impressionable young boy. Because Henry never forgot it. Years later, Henry came back at his father and accused him—but I don’t need to tell you that all this made my husband more determined than ever to get his brother out of the company—forever.

  There’s a picture of my Henry over there on that little table in the corner. It was taken when he was about thirty. Go take a look at it. See that sad, mistrustful look in his eyes? It was there from that day in nineteen thirty-one onward. But see
how handsome he was? Can you see Mimi’s face in his? I can, or could. I used to pick up that photograph often, and study that face, and that look, and curse Leo and Nate for doing what they did to him. Of course, I can’t see that photograph anymore, but I can still see the face, and the look, in my mind’s eye. Now, turn off your machine again because this next I am going to tell you is for off the record.…

  “Payoffs?” Mimi smiles. “We’re a bit more sophisticated nowadays than we were in my grandfather’s day. Today, it’s called public relations. I have a whole department devoted to it. A retailer or salesperson would be insulted today if you went up to him and handed him an envelope full of money, the way my grandfather used to do. But we’re still very nice to our friends the retailers, as we say. We take them out to lunch and dinner, we have parties for them. We remember them at Christmastime with a little note and a little gift. I make it a point to make regular personal visits to the stores where our products are sold. I visit with the buyers, chat with the salesgirls, tell them what a terrific job they’re doing, how great they look, offer them little hints on how to make their jobs easier for them. There are certain special salespeople to whom we pay special attention. See that Rolodex file on my desk? It’s full of the names of special salespeople who’ve done well for us over the years. It’s got their names, their home addresses, their spouses’ names, their children’s names and ages, their birthdays, their glove sizes, everything we can find out about them. On Christmas, these special people get very special gifts from us and a personal note from me. There’s Miss Libby from Neiman’s in Fort Worth, for instance. Every year for the past fifteen years, Miss Libby personally sells over fifty thousand dollars’ worth of our products. Naturally, we’re extra nice to the little jewels like Miss Libby. On her fifteenth anniversary with the store, I sent Miss Libby a Cartier pearl choker—pearls, because I’d heard her say that the only jewels she ever wore were pearls. I like to think we’re especially good at remembering to add these personal touches.