The Right Places (24 page)

From the beginning, a very special sort of store like Bergdorf's required a very special sort of man to run it. In 1878, Goodman's Store at 54 Main Street in Lockport, New York (“Next to Niagara Co. Nat'l Bank”) was running small ads for such items as “25 doz. ladies' wrappers at 37
^½
cts.” By 1919, Adele Simpson, the designer, recalls, her husband's grandmother ran a millinery shop on Fifth Avenue, opposite where Saks now stands, called Ufland's. The second floor of this building was rented to a small outfit of dressmakers and furriers called Bergdorf Goodman. When the troops were returning home from World War I, the Simpson children were told that it was all right to watch the parade from the Goodmans' upstairs window, since Bergdorf Goodman were merely tenants. Mrs. Simpson's husband, Wesley, remembers that among the onlookers was little Andrew Goodman. The
man responsible for the long journey from Lockport that ended opposite the Pulitzer Fountain of Abundance on the Plaza, on the site of the old Cornelius Vanderbilt château, was Andrew's father.

There were some who called the senior Edwin Goodman austere. Others said that underneath the austere façade there breathed a warm and humorous man. Whatever the case, he was a man with determination and an ability to take the risks who, though he was one, did not look like a canny trader but like an Old World diplomat. And he had both an idea and the luck to have had the idea at just the right place and time. To begin with, Edwin Goodman was frankly only interested in the carriage trade, and his furs and custom-made suits and coats and dresses were made and priced for that market. He was an early fan of Beautiful People, and liked to surround himself with actresses, models, debutantes, and other society or purely ornamental types. He had a great weakness for titles, but his principal requirement in a woman was that she be rich. And, in fitting out rich ladies in coats and suits and furs and dresses, he felt he had learned something about the rich woman's psyche. Up until 1920, nearly every important dress a rich woman wore was made to order—slowly, with extensive sessions for measurements and fitting. But in the Twenties the pace of a woman's life was speeding up, and this gave Goodman his Idea: why not sell expensive and elegant dresses that could be bought right off the rack? The notion of ready-to-wear clothes at custom prices was unheard of, and indeed the prophets of doom in the trade were cheerfully on hand to tell Edwin Goodman that it would never work. But when word got around New York that dresses from Bergdorf Goodman which used to take weeks to have made could be bought and worn the same day, sales skyrocketed. By 1927 he was doing three million dollars' worth of business from the rented rooms over Ufland's, and a year later sales had jumped to five million dollars. In 1928, Edwin Goodman announced his plans to move to the Vanderbilt site at Fifty-eighth and Fifth, and once more there were enthusiastic Cassandras to point out that no merchant had ever been successful north of Fifty-seventh Street. The year of the move, sales hit six million dollars and the Goodman family installed itself in the gorgeousness of the top-floor apartment where, it was noticed, Mr. and Mrs. Goodman were listed as “janitor” and “janitress,” since building
codes prohibited anyone other than a janitor to live in a building where manufacturing took place.

The move to the south end of the Plaza, with its view of the park and upper Fifth Avenue that is unique in the city, was not made rashly or without certain precautionary measures. As shoppers at Bergdorf's have noticed, the store is not laid out like other stores, with a main shopping area on each floor. Instead, each floor is cut up into a series of small rooms. These rooms were Edwin Goodman's insurance. If the store did not work as a whole, he could wall off the passageways between these rooms and rent the rooms to other tenants. Fortunately, though there were one or two uneasy years at the beginning of the Depression, the Goodman carriage trade proved indefatigable, and Bergdorf's has never had to take in roomers.

In his new store, Edwin Goodman was able to indulge his own taste for European nobility as well as the snobbishness of his customers. He hired, for example, a grand duchess as a saleslady, and he found a good perfume man who happened, not entirely coincidentally, to be a Georgian nobleman named Prince Matchabelli. His publicity lady was the Countess de Forceville, and the publicity that the store received was appropriately high-toned. Edwin Goodman's son has carried on in his father's tradition, bringing to the store such luminaries as the great Jo Hughes and Dr. Erno Laszlo. Though not titled, exactly, these are something very close to the Blood Royal when one realizes that the likes of the Duchess of Windsor and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney will practically not get dressed in the morning without consulting Miss Hughes. And without Dr. Laszlo's skin treatments and products, according to Leonard Hankin, Bergdorf's vice president, “Anita Colby would do a Shangri-La act right before our eyes.” In the Mallett antique shop, meanwhile, it seemed right that the man in charge be a dashing London bachelor named Sir Humphrey Wakefield.

Personal service for the best “clients”—never “customers”—was another of Edwin Goodman's fetishes, and when the likes of the late Mrs. Thelma Chrysler Foy (a storekeeper's delight, so much did she love to shop, often buying twenty dozen pairs of gloves and eighty hats of an afternoon) stepped through his doors, the master himself descended from his fifth-floor office to help wait on her. Today,
Andrew Goodman will often ask a prime client up to his big corner office for a drink, or to the apartment for lunch, where salesgirls troop up with armfuls of merchandise. This has led to a few embarrassing moments, as happened not long ago when rumor flew through the store that “one of the Bronfmans” was in Bergdorf's and buying heavily. The Bronfmans, of course, control a vast distillery fortune, and the shopping Bronfman was politely asked upstairs. There, all sorts of treasures were brought forth, including an eighteen-thousand-dollar antique spinet that, perhaps understandably, had gone unsold for some time. The Bronfman bought and bought—including the spinet—but while store executives were rubbing their hands, Nena Goodman became suspicious. She excused herself and made a few telephone calls. The “Bronfman” was an impostor, and was thrown out of the store empty-handed.

Nena Goodman's role in running to earth the ersatz Bronfman is typical of an operation that has always considered itself more of a family than a business. In times of crisis, all the Goodmans have pitched in to do their share. In his growing-up years and through Choate and Yale, young Eddie Goodman was not “groomed” for retailing, exactly, but it was always more or less understood, in conversations with his father and grandfather, that Eddie would follow their footsteps into Bergdorf's. When Andrew Goodman's daughters reached the age when they wanted summer jobs, they went to work at Bergdorf's. More recently, in Jo Hughes's fashion shows, which always close with a wedding scene, Andrew Goodman's eleven grandchildren provide Miss Hughes with a prime source for flower girls and pages. Just as the brooding influence of the Apartment overhead has shaped the attitude of every Bergdorf salesgirl, so has the Store loomed over the lives of three generations of Goodmans. And so it has been a shock to everyone connected with Bergdorf Goodman to realize that in a very few years there will be no more Goodmans there.

What is less well known is that Edwin Goodman, Sr.'s dynastic dream for his son and grandson very nearly collapsed a generation ago, not long after his white marble temple was completed on Fifty-eighth Street and the Plaza. And though the family has always conveyed an impression of cozy unity, there have, for many years, been rumblings from within. Andrew Goodman, for example, did not join his father's
enterprise without certain misgivings, and most people today who cite Andrew Goodman as one of New York's great merchants are unaware that he didn't really want to be one. He was of a generation in which dutiful Jewish sons did what their patriarchal Jewish fathers told them to, and perhaps, in the end, he would have
had
to go with the store even though there was a time when he wanted desperately not to. In his youth, Andrew Goodman showed certain signs of enjoying the good life of a rich young man around town, and when his father decided that Andrew was being frivolous about his studies he was plucked out of the University of Michigan and sent off to Paris to be apprenticed to the fashion house of Jean Patou. In Paris, there was more frivolity and more parental displeasure.

There was consternation in the Goodman family, however, in 1935 when Andrew announced that he wanted to marry a beautiful Cuban girl named Nena Manach. Not only was Nena a “foreigner,” but she had been married before and had a daughter by her previous husband (Vivien Goodman Malloy is only a half-sister to Andrew Goodman's other children). She was also a Roman Catholic. Nena's first meeting with the senior Goodmans was hardly auspicious. At dinner, served in the stiff and formal Old World style that Mr. Goodman preferred, Mr. Goodman asked Nena where she had bought her dress. She mentioned some shop on Madison Avenue, and there was a thundering silence. When she and Andrew continued to make plans for their marriage despite Mr. Goodman's objections, Mr. Goodman summoned Nena to his office. He handed her a legal document and told her to sign it. It was a premarital contract in which Nena was asked to promise that in the event of a divorce, she would not ask more than one hundred dollars a month alimony from Andrew. In tears, Nena signed the agreement, and she and Andrew were married in September of that year.

True, Mr. Goodman's attitude toward Nena gradually softened. On their first wedding anniversary, he gave her a fur piece. It wasn't much fur—only four skins—but in the box containing it were scraps of paper which Nena realized was the torn-up marriage contract. And so Andrew Goodman took up his duties at the store only as a sort of compromise. Having caused his father so much displeasure, he could not cause him more.

Andrew Goodman today is a cheerful, handsome man who dresses with quiet conservatism—he refuses to join the swing to wider neckties and prison-stripe shirts—who talks easily on almost any subject and who actually has a stream-of-consciousness speaking style, leaping gracefully from subject to subject—from the impressive business done by Julie Trissell, Bergdorf's coat and suit lady (six million dollars a year in her department alone) to his irritation with New York's Landmarks Commission for attempting to get Bergdorf's building declared a landmark (“It's barely forty years old, for God's sake!”) to his cautious optimism that the FTC will rule favorably on the Broadway-Hale takeover—despite grumbling from Ralph Nader's Raiders that by acquiring Bergdorf's Broadway-Hale will have some sort of monopoly on American high fashion (“Ridiculous!”). To help him with his flow of conversation, Andrew Goodman has an executive-type telephone setup in his office that lets him talk, and that talks back to him, as he moves about his office, and a wide variety of calls can thus be managed at the same time. “Of course it was a disappointment to have the boys leave,” he said recently, between pushing buttons and juggling calls, “I wanted them to stay, and in each case there were long conversations with Harry, Eddie, and Gary. But I respect their wish to do their own thing. And with this merger I think I've accomplished several things—found a good marriage partner whose stock is excellent. They've promised to give us complete autonomy—as they've done with Neiman-Marcus, which has worked out very happily for all concerned. Under the terms of the deal, the family keeps the property and the apartment—Broadway-Hale will lease the store. In view of the family situation, I think I've set it up pretty well.”

It is certainly true that all the Goodmans have been set up so that they are very well off. During the week in the apartment Andrew and Nena Goodman entertain frequently at small luncheons and dinners that are part business, part social. Because business takes Andrew Goodman into the fashion worlds of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, their friends tend to reflect those worlds too, and so at a Goodman dinner party it would be no surprise to find Jimmy Galanos, just in from the Coast, or “the whole Dior gang,” as Nena Goodman calls them, in town from Paris. The Goodmans' best friends are Mr. and
Mrs. Vincent Draddy (of David Crystal, the dress manufacturer) who are their pop-in-on neighbors in the country. Nena Goodman prefers eight to ten at a seated dinner (often black tie), but the apartment is perfectly capable of handling two to three hundred people for a cocktail buffet, such as the one tossed for the Duke of Windsor, and another given for Count and Countess Hubert D'Ornanon, the French perfumer and entrepreneur. The country house in Rye is a large and rambling frame affair with airy, antique-filled rooms that seem to open onto each other endlessly and stretch the length of a football field. Here there is a pool and tennis court, and weekend afternoons are spent with friends dropping over for a game or a swim—the Draddys, or the George Berlingers, or financier Leon Mandel, in from Palm Beach with his also-Cuban-born wife, Carola.

There are those who say that Andrew Goodman doesn't really run the store, and hasn't for a number of years—that the real power behind the Bergdorf throne is non-family Leonard Hankin, Bergdorf's vice president. One who voices this view is designer-manufacturer Malcolm Starr, who says, “Leonard makes all the decisions—he just brings them to Andrew for an okay.” There is a certain amount of truth in this, although Goodman and Hankin actually operate as a curiously effective team in which Andrew Goodman is the charming and kindly father-figure in the store, and Leonard Hankin is the man called in whenever unpleasant tasks must be performed. As a result, everybody who works at Bergdorf's loves “Mr. Andrew” unabashedly, while “Mr. Leonard” is regarded with less enthusiasm by many people. The formidable Jo Hughes, because she is perhaps the foremost woman in high fashion in America, can speak from an impregnable position of power in the store, and can say whatever she thinks, and usually does. She once asked Mr. Hankin, “Leonard, how can you work in a place where you are so thoroughly hated?” His answer, with a shrug, was, “Somebody has to do the dirty work—the needling, the hiring and firing.”