“Art?” said Abe. “Essie, you’re talking nonsense.”
Charles Wilmont held up his hand. “Hold on, let her finish,” he said.
“I thought that if a farmer and his wife could have a really beautiful picture to hang on their walls—not just cheap calendar art, but a really beautiful, famous work of art by an Old Master—a reproduction, of course—”
“Like Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’?”
“Yes,” she said eagerly. “Suppose, on the last page of each catalogue, you offered a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’—it would come as such a surprise after all the medicines that it would certainly be noticed. Offer it, in a pretty frame, for a few dollars—a copy of a painting that they’d have to travel to some great museum in Europe to see—would that give the farmer and his wife a sense of importance, a sense of belonging to something bigger than a little farm?”
“Rubbish, Essie!” said Abe.
“Now wait … now wait,” Charles said. He hooked his thumbs in his vest, frowned, and lowered his chin to his chest. “Do you know,” he said, “that I like it? I like it because it has class. That’s something your company is going to need a lot of, gentlemen—class. Lord knows it doesn’t have much now. Jake, I suggest that you make your wife vice-president in charge of class.”
April 27, 1913
Dear Uncle Sol:
This letter is to inform you that I have decided to leave your employ and embark upon a new business venture of my own as a general partner in the firm of Eaton & Cromwell & Company here in Chicago.
This decision was a painful one for me to make, because it means that I will be leaving the family business. But I am sure you know that I have never really felt “cut out for” the men’s retailing business. Though I do not expect you to greet this decision with pleasure, it is irrevocable, and I humbly ask that you give my new venture your blessing, however reluctantly.…
I plan to depart from Rosenthal’s six weeks from this date, in order to give you time to locate a suitable replacement. Once you have found him, I will gladly spend whatever time is necessary to break him in, and if I can aid you in this search please let me know.…
Esther and the children join me in love to all the family.
Sincerely,
Jacob
“Well, that does it,” said Uncle Sol, crumpling Jake’s letter into the little ball on the dinner table. “We’ve squandered enough on his foolishness, and this is the end of it. We call in his loan, and he goes out of the will.”
“Out of the will,” repeated Uncle Mort.
“And yours, too, Lily?” said Uncle Sol.
Lily Auerbach said nothing.
“Lily?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” Lily said, and got up and left the table.
And now it was a month later, and Jake Auerbach and Charles Wilmont were in the small waiting room outside George Eaton’s office. The final partnership-agreement documents were stacked on a small table in front of them, ready for signatures. The two had been a few minutes early for the meeting, and now Abe Litsky was a few minutes late, and Jake had begun pacing the floor, his hands folded behind his back. “Tell me something, Charles,” he said. “Do you really think I can make something of this?”
Charles smiled. “Last-minute doubts?”
“Not exactly. But tell me something—what was that business school you went to?”
“Wharton.”
“And before that?”
“Harvard.”
“In any of those courses that you took, didn’t they tell you that it was important to know where an investor’s money came from?”
Charles made a steeple of his fingers. “When that can be ascertained, yes, it’s a good idea.”
“Well, you know where my share came from.”
“Yes.”
“From Essie. But where did she get the money? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“At this point, I’d suggest not looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
“She’s lying to me. I know she is. She says she won it in a sweepstakes. That’s got to be a lie.”
“It might help your peace of mind, Jake, if you took her word for it. After all, what difference does it make? The money’s here.”
“But the point is, she’s lying. God knows I’ve wanted to get out of the haberdashery business, and God knows the money’s useful. But where did she get it? And why is she lying to me?”
“She may have her reasons. If she is lying.”
“But you don’t know my wife the way I do. She comes from—nothing. She’s a simple, immigrant Russian girl I plucked out of the Lower East Side. From absolute nothing. Pretty, yes. And clever. But where would a girl like Essie find fifty thousand dollars? She talks about a miracle. That’s rubbish, Charles. Fifty thousand dollars doesn’t land in the lap of a woman like Essie through a miracle. She’s ambitious, yes—”
“Ambitious for you, I think.”
Jake turned angrily on his heel. “Yes, and I’m getting a little sick and tired of her being ambitious for me. Trying to run me, trying to run my life. Interfering. Making suggestions like art reproductions. I’m sick of it. If anyone’s going to run this business, it’s going to be me. Not her. That’s got to be made clear to her. Can that be made clear to her?”
“I’m sure it is,” Charles said quietly. “Already.”
“But now she feels she has to lie to me. Why? What does she want now?”
“Perhaps just your happiness and success. Why not leave it at that?”
“Do you think—whoring? Do you think she got the money whoring with some rich man?”
“No, I do not think that.”
“Neither do I. She’s a simple immigrant girl. She doesn’t know any rich men, and where would she meet one? She was only in New York for a week. How would someone like Essie meet a rich man?”
“Jake, I think you should trust your wife.”
“She’s clever with her pen. She does sketches. Do you think—art forgery? I was reading about a man who forged Old Masters, and palmed them off as the real thing. But he did it for years. How could she forge fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Old Masters in a week?”
“I agree,” Charles said dryly. “She couldn’t have.”
“But it’s got to have been something like that. Something illegal.”
Charles Wilmont was smiling again. “You know,” he said carefully, “I haven’t known you very long, and I’ve known your wife only a little longer. But I’ve just made an interesting discovery about Jake Auerbach. It’s not how your wife got the money that’s upsetting you. It’s that she got it at all. You’re upset because the money came from a woman.”
“I’m upset because she’s never lied to me before. And now she is!”
“I also think that if you and I are going to work together, Jake, we should not be having this sort of conversation.”
But at that moment Abe Litsky burst into the waiting room, all enthusiasm, rubbing his hands. “Just think,” he whispered, “in half an hour we’re going to own half of this company!”
From the Eaton & Cromwell 1913 Fall Catalogue:
PROBABLY THE WORLD’S GREATEST
ART MASTERPIECE
LEONARDO DA VINCI’S “THE LAST SUPPER”
Perfectly Reproduced
in color on heavy-duty board
to hang in your home
36 by 60 inches just $4.95
(includes genuine walnut frame)
During the first few months with the new business, Jake Auerbach was almost never home. He worked late into the night, and through weekends, and often slept at the office. Charles Wilmont kept the same long hours, and that was why, one September afternoon, Essie was surprised to answer her doorbell on Grand Boulevard and find Charles standing there. It was a Saturday, and Essie had been drying the children’s lunch dishes, and still carried the blue dishtowel in her hand. “Would you believe it?” he cried. “More than forty thousand orders for
‘The Last Supper,’ and they’re still coming in! Don’t tell Jake I told you, but I wanted you to be the first to know—” Seizing the dishtowel, he swung it around her waist, and, holding both ends, began propelling her in a kind of impromptu gypsy dance on the front doorstep, in full view of the busy street. “Miracle worker!”
“Charles,” she laughed, struggling in his grip, “the neighbors—”
“To hell with the neighbors. You’re going to be rich!”
Sometimes, even all these years later, Essie Auerbach can still experience the dizzy feeling of being twirled about in that wild dance.
Fourteen
Early in the year 1915, most of the talk in the newspapers was of the growing intensity of the Great War in Europe. German U-boats had begun their blockade of Great Britain, and the British navy had attacked the Dardanelles to prevent the Germans, who had seized control of Turkey, from blocking supplies to Russia by way of the Bosporus and the Black Sea. In April of that year, in the second battle of Ypres, the Germans introduced poisonous chlorine gas to modern warfare, and left the French colonial troops choking and fleeing in disarray. In May, the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland, and sank in less than twenty minutes, with great loss of life—1,198 souls, including many prominent Americans, among them Mr. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. America, committed to a policy of nonintervention, watched all these grim events on the other side of the Atlantic with increasing nervousness, assured by President Wilson that “There is such a thing as being too proud to fight.” It was in the summer of 1915 that the two little girls—Joan, who was six years old, and Babette, who was five—set up a lemonade stand constructed of two orange crates on the sidewalk outside the house on Grand Boulevard. Essie made them their lemonade, suggested a price of two cents a glass and, at the end of the afternoon, the girls dutifully turned over their receipts—forty-two cents—to their mother.
It was in 1915, too, as Essie remembers it, that she began to notice the change that was taking place in her husband. She knew that his business was taking up much of his time, and she didn’t resent that. Even at home, he spent much of his time on the telephone, often talking late into the night long after she and the children had gone to bed. She knew that the business was expanding rapidly, and that this expansion demanded his full attention. She also knew that certain differences had arisen between Jake and George Eaton, and that these differences weighed heavily on his mind. It had been Charles Wilmont’s suggestion, for example, that an independent chemist be given the assignment of checking on the efficacy of some of Eaton & Cromwell’s remedies, and now there was even talk of Eaton & Cromwell building a laboratory of its own. As Charles had expected, many of Mr. Eaton’s cures had been tested and found quite worthless.
“The trouble is,” said Jake, “that Eaton not only invented these things, but he named them. He feels about them as though they were his own children. When we try to explain to him that his French Arsenic Complexion Wafers won’t do a thing to cure acne, that his Vegetable Cure for Female Weakness is nothing but watered-down tomato juice, that his Great Hay Fever Remedy could actually cause kidney disease, and that his Ten-Day Miracle Cure for gout has killed rats in the lab, he can’t bear the idea of having to drop these things from the line. He argues, argues all the time. He says things like, ‘Well, if this Ten-Day Miracle Cure won’t work, let the lab come up with a Ten-Day Miracle Cure that will.’ We have to keep repeating to him, ‘George, there is no ten-day miracle cure, dammit!’ He argues back, ‘But you’ve got to admit it’s one hell of a good name!’ It’s an uphill battle with him, every day, trying to turn this into a company our customers will trust.”
All these exigencies of the new business were, Essie knew, very trying to Jake. And all this was understandable. But it was a subtle difference in tone that she had begun to notice—the tone of voice in which he spoke to her, the tone in which he dealt with his family—a certain abruptness, peremptoriness.
“Your little daughters have retailing talents, too, it seems,” she said to him. “Look—forty-two cents which Joan and Babette made from their lemonade stand this afternoon.”
“I don’t want them doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Running a lemonade stand.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not dignified,” he said. “And it’s also dangerous. I’m getting to be well known in this town. Haven’t you heard of kidnappers?”
“Kidnappers? In this nice neighborhood?”
“And that’s another thing,” he said, changing the subject. “It’s high time we started looking for a house in a better part of town.”
And another time, he had come home from the office and presented her with a small box. She opened it, and in it were a pair of diamond earrings. “Oh, Jake,” she said. “How beautiful!”
She had been about to throw her arms around him and kiss him when he said, “And incidentally, run down to Field’s tomorrow and get yourself some decent outfits.”
Trying not to show her hurt, she said, “I don’t need any new outfits, Jake.”
“The woman to ask for there is Miss Marguerite. In the French Room. Just tell her who you are.”
It had been in 1915, too, that he had bought his first automobile, a long black Pierce-Arrow, and, because he could not afford the time to learn to drive, he had engaged a young chauffeur named McKay to drive him. And it was true, now, that his name was often in the newspapers. In fact, she found herself increasingly relying on the newspapers to inform her of Eaton & Cromwell’s fiscal progress. On October 17, 1915, for example, the following story appeared in the Chicago Tribune:
EATON & CROMWELL NOW NATION’S
LARGEST PARCEL POST CUSTOMER
Within two years of the inauguration of Parcel Post service, the Chicago-based mail-order house of Eaton & Cromwell, Inc. has become its single biggest user, U.S. Post Office Department sources revealed today. Eaton & Cromwell floods the Chicago Post Office with an average of 20,000 pieces a day, and these figures are expected to climb as the annual Christmas shopping season approaches.
Ordinary retailers, meanwhile, complain that the Post Office is, in effect, subsidizing the growing mail-order houses, since their catalogues have been given the category of second-class “educational matter,” the same as books and periodicals, and can therefore be mailed out to customers at considerably lower costs. George Smiley, for example, a local retailer, says, “What they’re sending out is nothing but advertising. And yet they’re given the same break as the publishers of fine literary magazines such as Harper’s. You tell me if that’s fair.”
Mr. Jacob Auerbach, however, who with advertising head George Eaton pilots Eaton & Cromwell, counters this by saying, “Our postal bill runs as high as $6,000 a day, and this money is going directly into the coffers of the United States Government. If anyone thinks we’re getting a bargain from the Post Office, all he needs to do is multiply this figure by roughly three hundred mailing days, and see what our outlay is.”
Eaton & Cromwell, founded in 1903 by Mr. Eaton and Cyrus Cromwell, started out solely as a purveyor of patent medicines. Since Mr. Auerbach joined the firm two years ago, the company has been steadily expanding into other kinds of merchandise, including men’s and women’s apparel, housewares, furniture, small appliances, and gift items. Next year, the company plans to introduce its own line of automobile accessories.…
“Why isn’t Abe’s name ever mentioned in these stories?” Essie asked him.
“Abe prefers the silent partner role,” he said. “Something to do with the trouble he got himself into in New York, I imagine. He and I don’t talk too much about that.”
At the next board meeting, Charles Wilmont brought up a matter of business. “Rothman Brothers is for sale,” he said. Rothman Brothers was one of their chief suppliers of apparel. “And I propose we buy it.”
“You mean get into manufacturing?” Jake asked.
“Exactly. If we became our own manufacturers in this area, the savings would be tremendous, and if we can modernize Rothman’s operations the way we have our shipping, the savings would be even more. This seems to me the next logical step, and I think we should make this sort of thing one of our long-range goals. As manufacturers become available, we should snap them up. If we could become our own jobbers and wholesalers, nobody in the country could undersell us.”
“I like that as an ad slogan,” said George Eaton. “‘Nobody Undersells Us!’”
“As a matter of fact, so do I,” Charles said.
“I can see it on the cover of our next catalogue,” Jake said. “‘Nobody Undersells Us.’”
Thus it was that a new slogan was born, and that the cloak-and-suit-making firm of Rothman Brothers was absorbed by Eaton & Cromwell, the first of many such acquisitions.
Some of the newspaper stories of the era were not entirely complimentary:
EATON & CROMWELL WORKERS AMONG
LOWEST PAID IN CITY; MUST TURN TO VICE
TO MAKE ENDS MEET, COMMISSION SAYS
In a report issued today, the Chicago Vice Commission, as part of its continuing effort to rid the Windy City of its reputation as a hotbed of vice and crime, revealed that more than $15 million a year is derived from vice in Chicago, and that at least 5,000 women practice prostitution full or part time. How, the report asked, is it possible for a single woman who does not live at home to eke out a living on what the Commission found to be the average woman’s salary of $6 a week?
“It is impossible to figure it out on a mathematical basis,” the report stated. “If the wage were eight dollars per week, and the girl paid two and a half dollars for her room, one dollar for laundry, and sixty cents for carfare, she would have less than fifty cents left at the end of the week. This is provided she ate ten-cent breakfasts, fifteen-cent lunches, and twenty-five cent dinners.” Her only solution, the report implied, was to turn to prostitution in her after-work hours.
The Auerbach Will Page 21
