Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

  Anthony di Bosdari was a regular at the Café de Paris, the Embassy, the 43, and the Silver Slipper. By now there were literally dozens of such clubs, all doing a roaring trade. The faster the home secretary tried to shut them down, the quicker they reopened. Selfridge’s commissioned the BBC “disc jockey,” Christopher Stone, to supervise the selection of top dance hits of the day recorded under the store’s own “Key” record label and pressed by Decca, while within the store, music played as though it would never stop. The young elite adored the ditty written in their honor:

  We mean to spread the Primrose Path

  In spite of Mr. Joynson Hicks

  We’re People of the Aftermath,

  We’re girls of 1926

  In greedy haste, on pleasure bent

  We have no time to think or feel,

  What need is there for sentiment,

  Now we’ve invented Sex-Appeal?

  We’re young and hungry, wild and free,

  Our skirts are well above the knee,

  Come drink your gin, or sniff your snow,

  Since Youth is brief and Love has wings,

  And time will tarnish, ’ere we know

  The brightness of the Bright Young Things.

  Before the General Strike, Selfridge’s had mobilized a hand-picked team to protect the rooftop radio masts and made plans to transport staff to work in their delivery vans. Even so, Selfridge himself saw no reason to cancel a planned trip for fifty of his buyers to visit top American stores and examine merchandising techniques, generously including W. R. Adams, the store’s wines and beverages buyer, in the junket. Quite what Mr. Adams hoped to learn in Prohibition America is hard to fathom, but he was graciously received by, among other senior store owners, Bernard Gimbel of Gimbel Brothers, who hosted a jocular “dry” lunch for the touring group.

  By the summer, the Selfridge family were in Deauville, where their father was à trois with the Dollies. The two girls were seen in violet wigs and matching violet chiffon and net frocks, and photographed taking a much-publicized dip in swimsuits trimmed with waterproof ostrich feathers. The besotted Selfridge bought each twin a pair of four-carat fine blue diamonds, instructing Cartier to set them on the back of a pair of matched tortoises. The ballet dancer Anton Dolin, dining with the Dollies at Deauville, recalled that after a particularly heavy session at the tables, at which both sisters had “lost a lot,” a beribboned box of pearls for Rosie and a diamond bracelet for Jenny arrived from Selfridge with a note saying: “I hope these will make up for your losses, darling girls.” Dolin was speechless. “Your losses indeed!” he exclaimed to Elsa Maxwell. “It was all Selfridge money!”

  By now, the Dollies’ stage career had peaked. The previous autumn they had suffered a run-in with the celebrated Parisian “Queen of the Night” Mistinguett, arguing over their scene in her big revue at the Moulin Rouge. Realizing during rehearsals that they were being parodied in a particular sketch, they pulled out of the show and promptly filed a lawsuit for five hundred thousand francs, claiming damages for loss of work and saying that the script wasn’t “worthy of their status” and was demeaning to their reputation. The court case dragged on for a year, with the Dollies ultimately winning a settlement, but it left a bad taste in the theater world. Just as Selfridge had always said “never cross a newspaper,” so the Dollies should have realized that it was unwise to cross Mistinguett. She got her own back two years later when she discovered a pair of divinely handsome Norwegian drag artists called the Rocky Twins and trained them to perform as the “Dolly Sisters” to utter perfection. No one, it’s said, could tell the difference.

  Throughout the spring and summer, Jimmy White had been breezing in and out of the fourth-floor inner sanctum at Selfridge’s as he, Harry, and his son plotted their deal. “Hello Pop,” White would bawl out on arriving for another cigar-filled, whiskey-drinking session. Harry’s staff had never, ever heard anyone be that familiar with the Chief and worried at the influence the rash, brash White appeared to have over their boss.

  By September 1926, the Gordon Selfridge Trust, in the name of Selfridge and his son, was established. Formed to acquire the ordinary share capital of £750,000 in Selfridge & Co. Ltd., the Trust was capitalized at £2 million, with one million 6 percent preference shares of £1 each and one million ordinary shares of £1 each. Father and son retained 900,000 of the ordinary shares. The issue was launched in a blaze of publicity, with the store hosting a fashion show for city investors who watched appreciatively as gorgeous models burst out of giant hatboxes on a flower-decked stage. Selfridge himself chaired the press conference, saying: “A modern business should aim at building an edifice that will last forever.” When one reporter had the temerity to ask him how old he was, Selfridge sidestepped the question: “I retired once at 40. I don’t intend to do it again. I’ve been told by my very conservative business adviser this Trust is the right thing to do.” To believe Jimmy White was a conservative adviser was extraordinarily naïve, but when Selfridge was on a roll, nothing could stop him.

  Later that year, the Selfridge dynasty’s domain grew still larger when Selfridge Provincial Stores Ltd. was launched with capital of £3.3 million. Once again the deal had been put together by Jimmy White and once again, it was oversubscribed. The new company swiftly went on a spending spree, buying the charming and long-established, albeit now run-down, store Bon Marché in Brixton, together with Brixton’s second store, Quin & Axten, Holdrons of Peckham, Barrats of Clapham, and Pratts of Streatham. The financial press were bemused at the high prices paid to acquire these suburban stores and equally concerned at the guarantee of a 7 percent dividend on the ordinary shares for ten years. Father and son ignored it all, delighting in the fact they were now rich. At the age of twenty-six, H. Gordon Jr. became managing director of the Provincial Stores Group, while his father celebrated by installing Otis escalators in the Oxford Street store. He also gave Jenny Dolly a thousand shares in his newly formed business and bought a horse called Misconduct, the first of several steeplechasers he would acquire from White’s Foxhill stables, which raced under the store’s distinctive dark green colors. Not to be outdone, Gordon Jr. ordered a custom-made teak-decked speedboat he called The Miss Conduct and took to piloting his own Gipsy Moth plane when visiting his regional empire.

  Early in 1927, the Dollies’ much-publicized Paris show A vol d’oiseau closed after a run of only eight weeks. In future, their fame would derive from their appearances at the gaming tables where Selfridge was spending more and more time with the dazzling duo, and spending more and more money on them. Jenny’s jewels became legendary. Thelma, Lady Furness, a future mistress of the Prince of Wales and no stranger to good jewelry herself, observed Jenny playing the tables at Cannes: “I have never seen so many jewels on any one person in my life. Her bracelets reached almost to her elbows. The necklace she wore must have cost a king’s ransom, and the ring on her right hand was the size of an ice cube.” Cecil Beaton also saw Jenny at work, this time at Le Touquet:

  The greatest thrill in this sensational playground is the vision of Jenny Dolly playing baccarat at the high table. Here is a sight which will go down in history, for in years to come old doddering bores will weary their grandchildren saying I am old enough to remember Jenny Dolly looking rather like a guttersnipe as well as a regal queen, my dears, literally harnessed with colossal jewels of incalculable worth, sitting sphinx-like as she won or lost the most vast of fortunes. Her coolness. Her grimaces, the movements of her arms and her diamond-smothered hands. Her hundreds of cigarettes, cups of tea, coughing and shoulder-shrugging are all part of her “tableside” manner which has been brought to a pitch of technical perfection. Every other woman pales before her and is silenced in awe of envy!

  After the Dollies had effectively retired from show business, Rosie was briefly married to Sir Mortimer Davis’s son Morty Jr. (who regrettably turned out to be less rich than she had thought), while Jenny divided her time between Jacques Wittouck, the Belgian financie
r with a bulging wallet, and Harry Selfridge. Between them, they indulged her every whim. She acquired a tumbledown house in Paris that was expensively rebuilt and decorated, and a château at Fontainebleau, where the long hall was lined with softly lit glass jewel cases exhibiting her trophies. Most weekends, Selfridge would take the boat train to France, carrying a two-quart thermos jug filled with Jenny’s favorite chocolate ice cream. He also bought a luxuriously fitted steam yacht called the Conqueror, which was moored in Southampton Water, permanently crewed and ready for sailing instructions. The trappings of success rested easily on his shoulders. He basked in the adulation of his staff and was lionized by the press as chairman of England’s largest retailing business.

  When Jimmy White came calling again in 1927, Selfridge welcomed him with open arms. It was a fatal mistake. White’s big plan was that Selfridge should buy Whiteley’s of Bayswater, which had been ailing for some time. Selfridge knew the property well. It was the store he had most admired on his first trip to London decades earlier. Indeed, he was close to John Lawrie, who had been chairman since old Mr. Whiteley had been murdered by his supposed illegitimate son in 1907. Whiteley’s two legitimate sons, however, found the prospect of a wealthy retirement alluring. Having invested in a brand-new building, they had spent the last fifteen years presiding over a declining store in a declining area. Bayswater had become dismally run-down, its once elegant properties subdivided into crowded boardinghouses, or lived in by the elderly shabby-genteel. The best-known addresses were those used as drug dens. This was no place to run a smart store.

  John Lawrie was close to Jimmy White. Both men knew that Selfridge, for all his apparent self-confidence and his heartfelt passion for retailing, was no hard-nosed businessman. Telling Selfridge that if he bought Whiteley’s he would own “a whole mile of windows” and would, as “the youngest store-owner in London,” have acquired the city’s oldest store, White moved in for the kill. Whiteley’s was not the oldest store in London (Swan & Edgar had opened in 1812), and Selfridge was no longer young, having just passed his seventieth birthday. But the prospect was irresistible and the deal—reported to have cost ten million pounds—was done. An official announcement of the takeover was made on April Fool’s Day. At the shareholders’ meeting a little old lady stood up and asked querulously if Whiteley’s annual dividends would remain at 25 percent. Selfridge assured her that they would and that he would guarantee them for fifteen years. “She reminded me,” he said rather mournfully some years later, when the real cost of his rash promise had made itself felt, “of my dear mother.”

  By June, Jimmy White was dead. His cut from the Whiteley’s deal, however big, hadn’t been enough to save his crumbling empire. Having made a desperate gamble on oil shares bought on margin, he lost the last of his money. He ended his life by swallowing prussic acid and left behind a curious suicide note: “The world is nothing but a human cauldron of greed. My soul is sickened by the homage paid to wealth.” Selfridge, who took his death hard, was one of the few mourners at White’s funeral. Another suicide reported in the press just a few weeks later may also have caught his attention. William Jones, whose family business, Jones Brothers of Holloway, was sold to Selfridge in the first deal brokered by Jimmy White, had shot himself, his death attributed to depression.

  Leaving his management team with the task of turning around Whiteley’s, Selfridge took off for several weeks on a triumphant public relations tour of America. Meanwhile, the company laid on free shuttle buses between Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s, with singing conductors to cheer up the passengers. But they remained worryingly empty. At Selfridge’s, Mr. Miller, the store’s resident architect, was busy with plans to fill in the center of the main façade, paving the way for the formation of a further eleven acres of floor space. Footfall was up—people had clamored to see Sir Alan Seagrave’s record-breaking Mystery Sunbeam car—but profits were down.

  In the autumn of that year, Selfridge was back in America, this time to give a speech at Harvard Business School in celebration of his gift to the Baker Library of his priceless Medici manuscripts. The loss of the beautiful documents didn’t seem to worry Selfridge. Much as he had loved them, he enjoyed recognition more as an elite donor to Harvard’s library.

  That autumn, Isadora Duncan died at the age of fifty. She had spent her last pathetically drunken years in Paris and Nice, always hoping she would at last break into films by writing scripts. Certainly, her death was as dramatic as anything on-screen—she was strangled by her own chiffon scarf in a car driven at high speed by the young, handsome, Italian mechanic Benoît Falchetto. She had danced beautifully, and Selfridge loved beauty. At a talk he gave to students at Liverpool University’s School of Architecture, he said: “I will tell you the five most beautiful things in creation. First a beautiful woman. Then a beautiful child. A beautiful flower, a beautiful sunset and … a beautiful building.”

  His own beautiful building in Oxford Street was completed in 1928, when the huge cantilevered canopy of bronze and glass, supported by two free-standing Ionic columns set in a vast canopy of Portland stone, was unveiled to an admiring public. An enormous three-ton bell, cast by Gillett & Johnston, was installed high above the parapet, while Sir William Reid’s impressive bronze frieze of sculptured panels bordering the rear wall of the loggia won him a silver medal from the Royal Society of British Sculptors. Architectural Design & Construction called it “the most imperial building in London.” For Selfridge, it represented a lifetime’s achievement.

  Adding to his racing stable, Harry bought the much-fancied Ruddyman (Misconduct, having fallen badly in the Grand National, had had to be destroyed), placing him with Captain Powell’s stables at Aldbourne in Wiltshire. Powell also trained Rex Cohen’s horses. Cohen, the owner of Lewis’s of Liverpool, would meet up with Selfridge at the races and exchange friendly nods and tips. There was always a camaraderie among the drapers, although Selfridge was virtually alone in attending John Lewis’s funeral in June. The reclusive, miserly old retailer was ninety-three when he died and left strict instructions that he was to be buried in his wife’s unmarked grave, that his staff should not mourn him, and that the store should stay open as usual.

  John Lewis’s death marked the passing of the last of the original London store owners. The men now in charge were younger, more ambitious, more in tune with the rise of consumer society. Most of them took business seriously, and many of them had learned their craft working for Harry Gordon Selfridge. The trouble was, Harry himself was now spending his time playing.

  14.

  Flights of Fancy

  “There is nothing so enthralling as the conduct

  of a great business. It is the most fascinating game

  in the world—and it brings no sorrow with it.”

  —HARRY GORDON SELFRIDGE

  HARRY SELFRIDGE’S FAVORITE TIME OF DAY WAS THE QUIET hour or so spent with Mr. Miller, the store’s resident architect, poring over plans and elevations. Since the early 1920s, bit by bit he had begun to acquire parcels of land fronting on to both Orchard Street and Duke Street. The latter area was used as warehousing and workshop space and was connected to the main store by a tunnel running under Somerset Street. By 1928, with enough property in place to create an enormous rear extension, Mr. Miller was preparing detailed applications for planning permission. Wherever possible, Selfridge bought plots stretching back to Wigmore Street, always believing that one day he would realize his dream of an entire “double island” site. By 1930, as his jigsaw puzzle of prime property pieces increased—finally taking in St. Thomas’s Church and the old Somerset Hotel for one hundred thousand pounds—the Marylebone Works Committee recommended that the Council accept Selfridge’s application for an initial three million pounds scheme to extend fully on the Duke Street side. As ever with Harry’s hopes and dreams, however, there were strange anomalies. Sometimes he let valuable options lapse. Quite often, he invested thousands in buying a plot, despite knowing that it was useless unless he c
ould get space to the left or right and that such an acquisition might be problematic—one grumpy hairdresser held out for over twenty years. At other times, he seemed content simply to gaze at the drawings.

  It might have been expected that, having become rich, Harry would finally build the castle on Hengistbury Head. Philip Tilden, who by now had completed hundreds of drawings, waited for the call. It never came. Distracted by the Dollies, his yacht, his horses—and his dreams of a triumphant palace in Oxford Street—he let the plans gather dust, leaving seabirds to circle undisturbed over the peaceful cliff top. Each week, flowers were placed on Rose’s and Lois’s graves in the equally peaceful churchyard at St. Mark’s, and each quarter, the costs of the sexton who tended the plots were paid from the Selfridge family account.

  In bustling Oxford Street, where the magnificent front entrance was now installed, Selfridge turned his attention to developing the rooftop space, already used as an exhibition ground and containing the ice rink. Now it was announced that Selfridge’s was creating “the biggest roof garden in the world,” its construction to be masterminded by the urban garden expert Richard Suddell. When it opened over Whitsun in 1929, the beautiful displays stretched the entire length of the roof on Oxford Street, and the heady scent of roses, lavender, thyme, and hyacinths filled the air. For the next decade, thirty thousand bulbs would be planted each autumn, ensuring a spring flowering of snowdrops, crocuses, tulips, and daffodils. The roof housed ornamental ponds, a water garden, a winter garden, a paved vine walk, a cherry tree walk, and clematis-covered gazebos. The technical achievement in constructing such beauty was impressive: the earth, rock, stone, turf, fountains, and plants required together weighed over eighteen hundred tons. Plants and bulbs came from the company nursery, installed at the Preston Road staff sports ground, where greenhouses and flower beds were lovingly cultivated by eight gardeners. The rooftop oasis was crowded all day, with restaurant service available for morning coffee, lunch, and afternoon tea.