Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

  Selfridge’s friend Edward Price Bell, at the time the London correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, described Harry’s attempt to acquire a newspaper in letters to his editor in America. “All his peculiar vanity and ambition are enlisted in trying to get it,” wrote Bell, explaining that the funds would come from “what one might call international-amity or world-friendship money from those who want to bring about a closer union of Great Britain and the United States. He [Selfridge] seems to be able to get as much money as he wants for any purpose.”

  Harry’s dream wasn’t quite as wide of the mark as might be imagined. He had influential friends, among them Sir Harry Brittain, the MP for Acton, founder of the Empire Press Union and president of the British International Association of Journalists. He also knew Brittain’s colleague, Evelyn Wrench, founder of the OverSeas League and the English-Speaking Union, who would go on to edit The Spectator. Another connection linked both Brittain and Wrench. The former had, in 1902, founded the Pilgrims’ Society, a dining club whose “strictly invitation only” membership was exclusively formed from an elite group of wealthy British and American businessmen, bankers, and politicians. Their aim was then (and remains today) “to foster good-will, good-fellowship and everlasting peace between the US and Great Britain.” The superrich, power-broking Pilgrims would have had unimaginable resources readily available to back the right sort of people. The trouble was that while Harry had strengths, he also had one weakness. It wasn’t women that worried these men, rather the fact he was a profoundly addicted gambler. Such a vice made him vulnerable. The Times passed into the capable hands of one of the leading Americans in Britain, Colonel J. J. Astor (later Lord Astor of Hever), and Harry’s Hearstian visions of a newspaper empire remained a dream.

  Unlike William Randolph Hearst, who was devoted to only one mistress, Marion Davies, Harry scattered his largesse, evidence of which came up for auction in Paris when, following her death, Gaby Deslys’s jewels—including her sensational black pearls—were sold. She was only thirty-nine when she died from the aftereffects of traumatic surgery for a throat tumor, and her estate was wound up in a blaze of publicity. The contents of the house that Harry had acquired for her raised an astonishing fifty thousand pounds as dealers and collectors scrambled to bid for Gaby’s belongings. Harry’s generosity proved a good investment for his girlfriends. In 1922, Syrie Maugham put his gifts on the block, selling the expensive furniture bought for the Regent’s Park house to finance her new interior design business and decorative antiques shop in Baker Street.

  As a rich, eligible widower, Harry Selfridge could have wined and dined any number of equally eligible and elegant women. But for the man who was at heart a showman, seemingly only showgirls would do. In 1922, his affection was focused on another French danseuse, Alice Delysia, the highly paid star of Charles B. Cochran’s London review Mayfair and Montmartre. Unfortunately for Mr. Cochran, Alice caught a throat infection and had to withdraw from the show, a debacle that cost C. B. over twenty thousand pounds. What she cost Harry Selfridge, we will never know.

  C. B. Cochran and his stage director Frank Collins were part of the innermost Selfridge circle. The store promoted theatrical productions through its window displays, invited stage stars to make presentations at events in the Palm Court, and was happy to loan furs and jewels for photographic sessions. When Selfridge wanted new uniforms for his beautiful bevy of lift girls, Cochran’s office was asked about “new design talent” in town. Recalling a polite, albeit nervous young designer who had visited recently, Mr. Collins thought his work might suit Selfridge. The appointment arranged, the young man anxiously presented twenty carefully prepared sketches, looking hopefully in Harry’s direction. “Go away, my boy, and learn to draw,” Selfridge told Norman Hartnell. Sir Norman, who would become Britain’s most famous fashion designer, recalled the incident in his memoirs, adding: “Later I grew to admire and like him. He would send lovely ladies to be dressed by me, and his guineas well recompensed me for that early humiliation.”

  The lift girls got their new clothes—designer unknown—while the lifts themselves got new doors, designed by the sculptor Edgar Brandt, whose work Selfridge saw at the Paris Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1922. Adapted from Brandt’s piece in bronze, Cicognes d’Alsace, the magnificent doors were not actually cast in bronze but were made from raised and formed sheet steel and wrought iron, mounted on plywood and painted with a mixture of varnish and bronze powder. It was beauty on a budget, but only an expert could tell.

  Selfridge loved Paris. Commuting regularly on the boat train, he would visit his great friends Théophile Bader and Alphonse Khan, the owners of Galeries Lafayette. He lunched with his French banker, Benjamin Rosier of Banque Suisse et Française, saw his young grandson Blaise de Sibour, and spent his nights playing baccarat for high stakes at François André’s exclusive club Le Cercle Haussmann. It has often been said that Harry’s gambling only began in earnest when he took up with the Dolly Sisters in the mid-1920s. But he had always gambled—and he knew where to go.

  At first it was Monte Carlo, where the casinos operated by the Société des Bains de Mer ruled supreme, but Monaco was too far to go for a weekend. Having banned gambling in 1837, the French government, bowing to pressure, reinstated it in 1907, with the result that grand casinos were built in Nice, Deauville, Cannes, and Biarritz. For the most part under the aegis of the man known as “the Casino King” of France, Eugène Cornuché, they offered baccarat and chemin de fer—roulette then being the exclusive fiefdom of Monte Carlo. Cornuché, keen to boost his casino in Cannes, hired sixteen glorious girls from Paris, dressed and bejeweled them, and installed them at his tables with enough chips to convince other gamblers that they were genuinely playing the game. Nicknamed the Cornuchettes, his team players became both rich and famous—one married a French duke. In Paris, however, such things weren’t allowed. For years, the city banned women from gambling. Playing the tables in Paris was never about fun and flirting, it was about serious money.

  In England, where gaming was banned, there were illegal gaming clubs, just as there were speakeasies in America. But outside private weekend house parties, British gambling was controlled by men just as tough as those running liquor in America, and there was little pleasure playing in an uneasy atmosphere of sinister violence. Still, Harry indulged in London. For a compulsive gambler—especially one who liked to hold the bank at baccarat—there wasn’t much choice. His private ledger shows the extent of his losses. In 1921, he listed fifteen payments in less than five months, totaling an astonishing £5,000, each made to his private secretary Eric Dunstan. It must have been “money owing.” Dunstan’s job was to deliver it.

  Years later, when a journalist was writing a feature about Selfridge, he asked an employee who knew him well what he was really like. “Oh, a genius, totally brilliant all week at work—but at the weekend he was someone completely different,” came the reply. At work through the 1920s Harry hardly put a foot wrong. In October 1922 the store hosted the first of its celebrated “election-night” parties. Store events are commonplace now, but then it was unheard of to entertain after hours. The black-tie dancing party with supper before the results—a Conservative victory, which meant Andrew Bonar Law became prime minister—followed by bacon and eggs for breakfast was a wild success. Champagne flowed all night, the barber’s shop was kept open to refresh the men with hot towels, while Lady Curzon, the Duchess of Rutland, the Russian Grand Duke Michael, and the actresses Gladys Cooper, Alice Delysia, and Anna May Wong danced, it was noted in the press, “with vigour.”

  Selfridge adored statistics and busied himself with data collected by his Information Bureau. He knew, for example, that 15.3 million people had shopped in the store in 1922. He also knew that his newly uniformed waitresses—now wearing trousers—could take “nine steps more per minute to get to the kitchen than they could in a skirt.” Speed didn’t cut any ice with critics of women wearing trousers. One cleric raged against Selfridge f
rom his pulpit, quoting Deuteronomy: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man.” The vicar was wasting his breath: before long women wouldn’t be wearing very much at all.

  Having put up with three years of delay over his planned store extension, in March 1923, when political change heralded the lifting of commercial building restrictions, an intriguing group of men gathered on the roof of the old Thomas Lloyd building adjacent to the store. Led by Selfridge in his customary morning coat and silk top hat, the team wielding pickaxes for the photographers included Sir Woodman Burbidge (Harrods), Mr. John Lawrie (Whiteley’s), Colonel Cleaver (Robinson & Cleaver), and Mr. Barnard (Thomas Wallis’s). That such a group gathered to celebrate the expansion of a supposed rival indicates how popular Selfridge had become. The business of retail had changed radically since Selfridge’s arrival in London. Indisputably, he was the accelerator of that change.

  On April 26, the Duke of York and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon were married at Westminster Abbey in front of three thousand guests, the women glittering with jewels, the men with decorations. That night, the Marchioness Curzon hosted a charity ball (“by kind permission of Mr. Gordon Selfridge at Lansdowne House”) for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute for Nurses. The guest list resembled the pages of Debrett’s, with an occasional leaf taken from the Almanach de Gotha—it was a wonderful opportunity to entertain a host of visiting royals in town for the wedding who might otherwise have had nowhere to go. For the price of three guineas a head they could dance to Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, drink champagne all night courtesy of Perrier-Jouét and admire each other’s court decorations. Patrons of the event included the duchesses of Sutherland, Somerset, Norfolk, Grafton, Beaufort, Northumberland, Abercorn, Westminster, and Portland, as well as the marchionesses Salisbury, Anglesey, Londonderry, Linlithgow, Carisbrooke, and Blandford. Then there were the countesses (from Bathurst and Beatty to Lonsdale and Shaftesbury), the ladies (Ribblesdale, Islington, Desborough, and Guinness, among others), and finally the mere knights’ wives: Lady Lavery, Lady Tree, Lady Cunard. The Prince of Wales was expected, though sadly he failed to arrive, but the royal princes Henry and George were there, along with King Alfonso of Spain.

  As the royal procession was moving through to dinner, a very drunk, near-naked Isadora Duncan bounced through the crowd and threw her arms around Selfridge, slurring: “Harry darling, how are you?” Selfridge stayed calm, hissing an aside to the omnipresent Eric Dunstan that he should “get rid of her” before moving through to dinner. Isadora, however, slipped away, disappearing up a back staircase to the ballroom where the band was playing rather romantic waltzes during the supper interval. When Dunstan eventually found her, she was wafting around in the middle of the floor, dress and arms flying, and with them a valuable terracotta knocked off its pedestal. Dunstan dutifully picked her up, carried her to a car and drove to the Cavendish Hotel where, as he later said, “I believe the resourceful Mrs. Rosa Lewis locked her in a room.”

  Back at Lansdowne House, the band played on.

  12.

  Making Waves

  “I discovered that men will pay anything to be amused.

  Pleasure and amusements are the only things in the

  world where the buyer rarely counts the cost.”

  —KATE MEYRICK, NIGHTCLUB OWNER

  WHETHER IT WAS A TEENAGER SPENDING 7/6D OF HIS SAVINGS on a crystal radio kit, or any one of the legions of enthusiasts reading Amateur Wireless while they fiddled with knobs in the hope of hearing the Savoy Havana Band live from the hotel ballroom, Britain had become besotted with radio. It had been hesitantly launched in 1920, when the Daily Mail sponsored a recital by Dame Nellie Melba broadcast live from Marconi’s Chelmsford works. While commercial radio was poised to take America by storm, most of Britain’s frustrated radio fans had to spend the next two years with little service to speak of, thanks to the postmaster general’s misconception that Marconi’s station 2MT, run out of a hut in Writtle, “would interfere with air to ground controls in matters of aviation.” The cheery voice of ex–Royal Flying Corps Captain P. P. Eckersley, the country’s first radio presenter, was thus strictly rationed to just fifteen minutes a week.

  Marconi was soon granted a second license, setting up a call sign, 2LO, at the company head office in the Strand, where the transmitter was housed in an attic room and the aerials were strung between towers on the roof. Then, in the summer of 1922, a hybrid between commerce and government, called the British Broadcasting Company Ltd., was formed. Marconi’s 2LO was transferred to the BBC in November and sales of “licenses to listen” soared from 10,000 to 500,000. By 1924, 2LO’s newly updated transmitter was installed on the roof of Selfridge’s, where Mr. Wragg, the buyer for the new radio department, was kept busy trying to keep pace with customer demand for wireless sets. By 1927, over two and a half million homes would own one. Selfridge’s was a launchpad not merely for unstoppable consumer trends but also for employees involved with them. Just three years later, Mr. Wragg left to help set up a business called Rent-A-Radio, which ultimately evolved into Radio Rentals, with a shop on virtually every high street in Britain.

  Newspaper publishers, many of whom felt threatened by this new way of disseminating news, refused at first to publish program listings. Seizing an opportunity to highlight the store’s “public service program,” Selfridge rode to the rescue, using the “Callisthenes” column to inform readers when they could hear their favorite music or listen to the news. It struck a chord. Within the week, national newspapers followed suit and thus their “radio pages” were born. Although enamored with the potential of radio, Harry refused to accept a manufacturer’s offer of three thousand pounds in cash to display their latest model. He abhorred the concept of concessions, telling Mr. Wragg, “If we did this sort of thing, we should eventually discover that someone else was running our business. Next, they would demand the right to dress our windows to suit themselves, then where would we be?”

  The store meanwhile positively hummed to music. The phonograph department wired up a player to serenade the workmen busy on the Oxford Street extension, who were cheered along while they worked to the big hit of the moment, “Fascinating Rhythm” by Jelly Roll Morton. When Selfridge himself visited the Palm Court for tea, the band struck up with “I’m Just Wild about Harry,” which was always guaranteed to raise a smile.

  He needed cheering up. Somerset Maugham’s play Our Betters had opened at the Globe Theatre to rave reviews. For the next twelve months Selfridge was parodied six nights a week and during matinées. He claimed he never saw it—just as William Randolph Hearst said he never saw Citizen Kane—but it’s hard to believe he didn’t slip in one evening. Every mannerism of “Arthur Fenwick,” the character based on Selfridge, was chillingly accurate. Eric Dunstan, a close acquaintance of Maugham’s confidant Gerald Haxton, was told that Maugham and Syrie had invited Selfridge out to lunch years earlier “so Willie could get the detail right.” Selfridge never talked about Syrie, who was herself now bitterly unhappy in her sham of a marriage. Indeed he never talked about any of his mistresses. Those members of staff closest to him—Dunstan, Miss Mepham, and Mr. Williams, by now the store sales manager—were never privy to his innermost thoughts. Williams would later say: “He wasn’t a man who either invited or gave confidences. He had a monumental detachment from all matters of personal concern.”

  The government meanwhile was in disarray. Bonar Law, his health failing, resigned in May 1923 and in December there was another general election and another party in the store. The twelve hundred guests, who included the Asquiths, the Churchills, Jack Buchanan, Gladys Cooper, Lady Headfort, the beautiful Lady Lavery, the Ranee of Sarawak, and the Hollywood hero Charlie Chaplin, danced to music from the famous bandleader Ambrose and his Embassy Club Band. Fifty telephone operators manned special lines bringing information in from around the country. As news of one close count was supposedly coming through, the famous music-hall comedian and emergent film actor Leslie Henson took the
microphone. “No change,” he said to cheers from the audience, as he pulled out his empty trouser pockets and shook them. The real results were posted up on a cricket scoreboard by six pretty girls. Those watching outside on the street crowded around the “electric newspaper,” which lit up the results in blazing lights. In fact they caused such a bottleneck in the street that the police insisted the store close it down.

  To the consternation of many wining and dining at Selfridge’s, the collapsing Conservative vote resulted in a hung Parliament, and Britain’s first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, moved into Downing Street. The Selfridge family were also on the move. Their lease on Highcliffe had expired and the castle was discreetly put up for sale by the Stuart Wortleys. Country weekends were now spent in the open environs of Wimbledon Park, where Rosalie, Serge, and their daughter Tatiana had moved into the once grand but now rather shabby Wimbledon Park House. The heavily mortgaged mansion—originally built for the 4th Earl Spencer, who owned the Manor of Wimbledon—belonged to Serge’s mother, Marie Wiasemsky. Desperately short of money, she had recently been taken to court by an irate servant owed three months’ wages of just twelve pounds. Rosalie and Serge, clearly hoping Selfridge would fund them, struck out on their own, taking over financial responsibility for the vast property. Serge, already popular in Wimbledon where the family hosted an annual fête and a historical fancy dress gala, had become something of a local hero when locals read press reports about him diving to rescue a mother and child from the sea near Boulogne.