Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

In one of his many interviews with the Daily Express, Selfridge had said: “It isn’t the making of money that’s the chief motive with me. It’s the great game that’s the thing. There is nothing so enthralling as the conduct of a great business—it’s the most fascinating game in the world—and it brings no sorrow with it.”

  Unfortunately, the making of money was the chief motive of one of the company’s major shareholders—the Prudential Assurance Company. To them, retailing wasn’t a game, it was a business. Disturbed not merely by falling profits but by the profligate extravagance of Mr. Selfridge, the “men from the Pru” decided they had to put a man on the board. They found him in Mr. H. A. Holmes, who for many years had labored diligently at the Midland Bank before becoming the finance director of the India Tyre and Rubber Company. Little did Selfridge know just how much sorrow he would bring.

  15.

  Over and Out

  “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost than

  never to have loved at all.”

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  IN EARLY OCTOBER 1935, HARRY HEADED FOR AMERICA. HIS support for Harvard had not gone unnoticed by Dr. Silas Evans, the enterprising president of Ripon College, Wisconsin, who had awarded Harry an honorary doctorate. Accompanied by his daughter Violette, Harry was royally fêted in the town of his birth, and at a civic luncheon held in his honor, Mayor Harold Bumby announced the renaming of a special town recreation space as “Selfridge Park.” Ripon’s newspapers made much of the visit and described Harry’s successful career in great detail. Being less certain about the status of the pneumatic young blonde accompanying him, they merely described her as “a family friend.”

  A few days later, when Selfridge arrived in Los Angeles, Time magazine revealed his companion to be the “French-Swedish actress Marcelle Rogez, who Harry Gordon Selfridge was intending to bring to the notice of Hollywood.” Miss Rogez, Harry’s latest—and last—serious love interest, had great ambitions for a Hollywood career. Observing them lunching together at 20th Century Fox, the film gossip-columnist Louella Parsons wrote: “The elderly, yet venerable-looking Mr. Selfridge had such beautiful manners. He stood when Marcelle got up, pulling back her chair, bowing slightly to her at the end of the meal, walking out behind her—showing old-world courtesy rarely seen in this town anymore these days.”

  It was reported that Harry was hoping to raise finance on his trip. If that was so, he was destined for disappointment. To American bankers in the midst of the Great Depression, Selfridge represented a bygone era of “success through excess” in retailing investment. With promotional budgets stripped to the bone, spending money to make money had become unfashionable.

  Back in London, and accompanied by the pulchritudinous Miss Rogez, he hosted another election-night party. The eclectic guest list was, as always, a masterful combination of politics, Fleet Street, society, and show business. Friends like Lord Beaverbrook, Winston Churchill, and Lord Ashfield were joined by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Noël Coward, Ivor Novello, the actress Madeleine Carroll (fresh from her role in the film of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps), and the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. The president of the Royal Aero Club, Sir Philip Sassoon, escorted the rabidly right-wing and very rich Lady Houston, whose enthusiasm for aviation was eclipsed only by her enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini. The fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli put in an appearance, as did the interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and, surprisingly, Syrie Maugham. The party went on into the small hours. To Lady Londonderry’s dismay, her almost inseparable companion Ramsay MacDonald lost his seat, and Stanley Baldwin returned to power as prime minister. It was the last election-night party that the store would host.

  Missing from his life was Harry’s old friend Lord Riddell, chairman of the News of the World, who had died a year earlier. Selfridge had been full of admiration for his boisterous newspaper. In 1933, he had helped broker a deal between the store model Gloria and the News of the World, who serialized her racy “top model memoirs” for an “undisclosed sum.” It wasn’t the first project they had worked on. On one occasion, Selfridge’s had sponsored a fashion design competition run by the World, offering a cash prize and promising to showcase the winner’s outfit in the store. A panel of designers and stage celebrities met in the Palm Court for the judging session and a lunch, at which the actress Sybil Thorndike had agreed to present the prize. Unfortunately, she hadn’t learned her lines. Standing up to make her speech, she gushingly enthused: “This is the most wonderful event. But then, I have always thought that the Sunday People is the most wonderful newspaper ever published.” As the unstoppable Miss Thorndike continued to eulogize the News of the World’s bitter rival, Lord Riddell sat frozen-faced, quietly decimating his bread roll.

  Newspaper editors were allocating an increasing amount of space to reporting on fashion, which in itself was receiving an enormous boost from the cinema as women sought to emulate the glamour they saw on the silver screen. Ready-to-wear clothing was now widely available, and copies of work from designers such as Balenciaga swept into the shops, Madge Garland of Vogue observing, “Coats admired in the February Paris collections can be found this autumn at Jaeger.” Those who couldn’t afford to buy what they wanted bought the bestselling paper patterns of all the new silhouettes from Paris. Fortunately for retailers, there was still a clear divide between day and night: women dressed for dinner, wore the ubiquitous “little black dress” for cocktails, pinned diamanté dress clips to their necklines and wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without wearing a hat and gloves. The bias cut, the pajama suit, and cruise-wear were all the rage, while the daring adopted Elsa Schiaparelli’s surreal style. Admittedly, not every shopper in Selfridge’s took to her cheeky chapeaux with a lobster perched on top, but her influence, in everything from hand-knit swimsuits to ornate embroidery and even fantasy buttons, was undeniable. Intent on outstripping her bitter rival Coco Chanel, “Scap” was planning her own perfume. Called “Shocking” and seductively packaged in a bottle based on Mae West’s curves, it was launched in 1936 and showcased at Selfridge’s.

  The 1930s also marked a new era in that profitable department store staple, underwear. Dunlop’s chemists had managed to transform latex rubber into a reliable elastic thread, which was in turn transformed into the girdle. With entire new ranges of underpinnings on the market—including Warner’s first “cup-sized” brassiere—manufacturers hastened to claim that corsetry fitting had become a “scientific” art and trained saleswomen to fit and measure accurately. So seriously did women take to this system that the process of acquiring new underwear could now take an hour or more. Gossard launched their “Gossard Complete,” a boneless foundation garment that could be worn under a backless evening gown, which, since it fastened with side hooks and bars, was promoted with the appealing copy line “No maid required.” Only the rich or those lucky enough to have a devoted family retainer still had a personal lady’s maid. Meanwhile, thanks to labor-saving devices such as electric cookers, lighter-weight vacuum cleaners, and improved washing machines, domestic tasks could be handled without an army of servants. This was probably just as well, because not only could most people no longer afford to hire them, but young girls no longer wanted to be parlor maids: instead they took jobs as cinema usherettes or waitresses or worked behind the ever-expanding cosmetics counters in department stores.

  Selfridge and his store were hardly ever out of the press. In the autumn of 1935 he was profiled in depth by Reader’s Digest and his “official” biography, sympathetically written by William Blackwood, was serialized in Chicago’s Saturday Morning Post and thereafter in England in The Passing Show, a once successful but now somewhat ailing society features magazine. Neither the magazine’s title nor its diminishing status was lost on the new member of the board, Mr. Holmes, who watched all this self-aggrandizement with unease, later saying: “Selfridge wanted to go on being king of his own castle, even though it was beginning to tumble.”

  There was, in the beginning at least,
very little Andrew Holmes could do, other than watch—and wait. He made his own tours of the store, fretted over the payroll of the group’s fifteen thousand employees, queried expenses and sat in on board meetings at which Selfridge would blithely state, “Minutes agreed unless objected to—business closed,” before ushering everyone out of his office. If Selfridge felt uneasy about Mr. Holmes, he didn’t show it. Confident that he carried a majority vote, he simply ignored him. By and large Harry’s life—within the store at least—continued as before. Staff were summoned to his presence by a twinkling trio of bright blue lights, part of a clever internal security system set up throughout the store. He toured each morning, and again in the afternoon. Miss Rogez continued to shop until she dropped. Most important, plans went ahead for the relocation of the food hall from the site on the far side of Oxford Street to custom-designed space in Orchard Street. Just before Christmas 1935, Selfridge went to inspect progress on the new site. Gazing up at workmen painting the ceiling, he took a step forward and toppled twelve feet from the edge of the floor onto scaffolding below. At first, witnesses thought he was dead, but he escaped with little more than a concussion and a bruised hip, though he was confined to bed for a week. That Christmas, as the health of the king rapidly deteriorated and he too took to his bed, for the second year running Wallis Simpson arrived at Selfridge’s to do the seasonal gift shopping for the Prince of Wales.

  King George never recovered, dying at Sandringham on January 20, 1936. His son David, now King Edward VIII, continued to go dancing with Wallis, herself by now a glittering example of Cartier’s skill, wearing priceless stones remounted in ultramodern settings. Their venue of choice was still the Embassy Club, where not much had changed either except the music. Syncopated jazz had been eclipsed by the “swing time” sound as perfected by Benny Goodman’s orchestra and by the show songs of Rodgers & Hart, Noël Coward, and Cole Porter. The new king-emperor could still be seen at the Ritz and the Savoy, and he still went to stay with his close-knit circle of friends, but increasingly he spent most of his time at his beloved Fort Belvedere, deluding himself that he could marry Wallis Simpson and keep his throne. The British press continued to be discreet, despite the Court Circular revealing that in June “Mrs. Simpson” was present at a dinner party held at St. James’s Palace—Mr. Simpson being tactfully elsewhere.

  That summer, Wallis and the king went on a Mediterranean cruise aboard the luxury steam yacht Nahlin, but there was no cruising for the Selfridge family. Harry had had to sell the Conqueror. He had also moved house, departing reluctantly from Carlton House Terrace and moving into an apartment in Brook House on Park Lane, where, ironically, Syrie Maugham was busy decorating another sumptuous flat belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Israel Sieff of Marks & Spencer. Brook House had been built on the site of the mansion owned by Harry’s old friend Ernest Cassel, which had subsequently been sold to developers by his granddaughter, Edwina Mountbatten. The Mountbattens themselves had moved into their much-photographed thirty-room penthouse, accessed by a high-speed lift, in June. Making plans to install Marcelle Rogez in an apartment nearby, Harry oversaw the decoration himself, becoming the bane of the builders and exhausting his private secretary Leslie Winterbottom, who struggled to cope with the Chief’s demands. Top of his wish list was a black bath, which proved hard to find. Making daily visits to the flat to check on progress, Selfridge badgered the foreman in charge of the search. “Now, look here, sir,” he replied, “it isn’t that easy. But if you want to put a black lady in here, we’ll soon find a white bath for her.” The joke was lost on Harry, who returned to the store demanding that Winterbottom change the builders.

  Earlier that year, Selfridge’s had put on an ornate display to celebrate its twenty-seventh birthday, lighting up the exteriors with an enormous two-ton rotating globe. Gifts such as silver keys or oak seedlings had always been given out to celebrate special anniversaries (Selfridge himself called them tokens of esteem), but this time customers were merely handed morsels of an enormous birthday cake. In June, shoppers surged into the newly opened food hall. By the time the doors closed, a central display of tinned salmon had been so depleted by shoplifters that only a dozen or so cans remained. The staff dithered about telling the Chief, who loathed the very mention of theft. When in the end they did, Miss Mepham recalled that “the news rather crushed him. He simply couldn’t believe the worst of his fellow man.” Whether due to the endless promotions, the new food hall or the increase in summer holiday shopping as travelers headed to sunnier shores, business that year picked up considerably, resulting in a year-end net profit of £485,000.

  Neither Selfridge nor his son was accustomed to restraint. Gordon Jr. bought himself a new plane, which Time magazine reported as having cost forty-five thousand dollars. He flew his expensive toy to Spain—at that time in the midst of a bitter civil war—taking the de Sibours along for the ride. Lacking his father’s finesse in handling the press, his interview with Time on his return rather backfired, his escapade being described as “Sportsman Selfridge having swank fun.” It was also noted that he had stayed safely on the other side of the border when Jacques de Sibour courageously returned to rescue thirty stranded American tourists the following day. Whether the trip was wise or foolish, Mr. Holmes clearly didn’t like it, any more than he liked Gordon Jr. flying around the country on business trips. Mr. Holmes believed in taking the train.

  With the date of Edward VIII’s coronation set for May 1937, and curiously ignoring the gossip about the king and Wallis, Harry started to make plans to deck the façade with the most sumptuous decorations London had ever seen. Exactly as with King George V’s coronation and subsequent jubilee, he spent hours at the College of Heralds, poring over every detail.

  Harry was now eighty. He had always believed his mental agility would push back the years, and to an extent it did; but physically he was in decline. At a film premiere at the Regal Cinema in Marble Arch, he fainted. When press photographers caught the moment, his embarrassment was made public in the Daily Sketch. Just a few weeks later he fell heavily while trying to vault a roped stanchion in the store’s restaurant. His own trusted senior staff were also becoming old. Some, like the endlessly discreet Mr. Hensey in Accounts and the urbane jewelry buyer Mr. Dix, who had recently presided over the opening of England’s first store counter selling Mikimoto cultured pearls, retired. Others, like Freddie Day, who had spent his career buying trunks and luggage, died. The Chief’s trusted confidant, A. H. Williams, left to open his own advertising agency, which failed to perform as he had hoped: Williams later ruefully admitted that “It was Selfridge who made us what we are.” The architect Sir John Burnet died. Ralph Blumenfeld suffered a bad stroke and spent less and less time in Fleet Street. Lord Ashfield too was ill with a severe eye complaint. Selfridge wrote to Blumenfeld:

  I wish dear fellow you were well enough to come to America with me this autumn. Albert [Lord Ashfield], as you know, seems much improved after treatment in France. So, of the Three Musketeers, when Albert gets in good shape, two of us will pull you around and we will again be ready for the fray. Your friend, Harry.

  Selfridge always attended funerals, wrote kindly letters to widows and sent flowers and fruit to the sick. He even visited an incurably ill retiree every week to play a game of cards. The store and its staff meant everything to him. Walking the vast acreage with Williams a few months earlier, the Chief said poignantly: “This is our life, without it we are nothing.”

  Children pouring onto the store roof for the arrival of Father Christmas that year were enchanted when he flew into town in his own airplane, triumphantly making a low loop-the-loop above them. Just a few minutes later, as if by magic, he appeared in a vast motor sleigh, riding up Oxford Street waving a star-spangled banner, and bringing the traffic to a standstill. By the time he emerged with his sack from a faux chimney built on the roof, the mesmerized youngsters were beside themselves with excitement. The performance, honed to perfection over the years, ran like a well-oiled m
achine. It was all very charming—not to mention profitable—and was repeated, albeit less elaborately, in all the Selfridge group stores. Usually, the Chief himself attended many of these performances, but this year he was confined to bed after an accident in which a fire engine crushed his Rolls-Royce. He therefore missed a visit to Jones Brothers in Holloway. It was probably just as well. That year, Father Christmas ran amok, swinging his fists instead of his sack, and started to beat the children over the head.

  The panic in the toy department at Jones Brothers was nothing to that in the display department at Selfridge’s where ornate banners, hand-embroidered in gold thread with the insignia of the new king, had been arriving from specialist workshops charged with the task of producing perfection. The trouble was no one knew what to do with them.

  On December 3 Wallis Simpson had awoken to find her photograph emblazoned across the front pages of every newspaper in England. People were aghast. Was this the woman their king wanted to marry? The press had worked hard to create an image of a blue-eyed Prince Charming. Now, led by the implacable Times editor Geoffrey Dawson, they set about destroying him. They also set about destroying Wallis Simpson. On December 10, after weeks of speculation and frenzied press reports, the king abdicated. Angry protestors stoned Wallis’s house in Cumberland Terrace while she frantically packed her suitcases and trunks. That evening, under the cover of darkness, the trunks were transported to Selfridge’s where Ernest Winn supervised their stacking in a corner of the dispatch department. Recalling that curious moment of history in the making, he later said: “We were told to keep things quiet and not tell anyone what we had in Despatch … some special people were coming to collect it in a few hours. As we were roping it all up, some of the messenger boys were unhappy. It wasn’t so hard to understand … we didn’t want to lose our king. When we’d finished with Mrs. Simpson’s luggage we just stared at each other sadly.”