The Right Places (25 page)

Hankin himself is a rosy-faced man with bright eyes and a fine mane of white hair who, in contrast to Andrew Goodman, comes to work in windowpane-checked suits and patent leather Gucci shoes. As an ambitious young man, a number of years ago, working in Bergdorf's fur department, he wrote a long memorandum to Mr. Edwin
Goodman which contained Hankin's suggestions for “goosing up” the store and its profits—including a department for less expensive dresses for younger and less rich women. Weeks passed, and there was no reply to the memo. Then it came: a summons to the Apartment. Mr. Goodman's terse comment, when Hankin arrived, was: “I like many of your ideas, but I don't want to see them carried out in my lifetime. After I'm gone, you and Andrew can do what you like.” And that is more or less what has happened, including the addition of the very successful Miss Bergdorf department where under-one-hundred-dollar dresses can be bought.

A rumor that persists at Bergdorf is that Leonard Hankin once had the temerity to say to Andrew Goodman, “Andrew, why don't you stick to your charities and committees, and I'll run the store.” Whether or not Hankin actually said this or not, it is true that in recent years Andrew Goodman has devoted more and more time to speechmaking and fund-raising for such causes as the United Jewish Appeal, the National Jewish Hospital, and the American Jewish Committee. Though his children are all baptized Catholics, he has remained a “conscious Jew,” but not a practicing one. He also toils for a number of other causes and sits on boards such as the Fifth Avenue Association, the New York City Better Business Bureau and the Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Many of his activities are non-Bergdorforiented, though no matter where he is—even on a yacht in the Aegean—he telephones daily for the sales figures.

An inability to get along with Leonard Hankin has been cited as the chief reason why, one by one, Harry Malloy, Eddie Goodman, and Gary Taylor left the fold of family and store. All three men smile and say that this is not so, but it probably was a factor in each case. A while ago, another rumor circulated that the Goodman family, in order to keep the boys in the store, was considering firing Hankin, and it is true that Hankin became extremely exercised at one point when a Florida newspaper referred to him as “formerly of Bergdorf Goodman,” and wanted a retraction printed. The three young men, meanwhile, have mentioned the difficulties inherent in being “a son in the business”—any business. Relations between themselves and their associates, they claimed, always seemed strained and unnatural. It is always hard for lower-echelon personnel to speak honestly to the
boss's son; there is always the chance that he'll carry it up to his father's office. And so, one by one, they went.

Harry Malloy went first, after ten years in the store, and went into partnership in the insurance business. He thrives and is happy in it. Next went Eddie Goodman, after four and a half years with the store. “I majored in English Lit at Yale,” he says, “and I toyed with the idea of teaching. But teaching is too pastoral for me. I like to see the input and output of what I do. I went with the store with misgivings—just as my father did, with ambivalent feelings about it, thinking that it was what I was supposed to do, remembering my grandfather. He was a great presence, a personage—there was a great scurrying about when he was coming to call, and you had to be scrubbed raw, before being ushered into the presence. And it's not that I don't like retailing, and fashion is the most interesting
part
of retailing, much more interesting than selling cars. But the point is, to be good at retailing, you have to adore it. You have a six-day-a-week job. You have to make it your life. I helped organize the Bigi department, and that was fun. But 1967, you may remember, was a bad year for the cities—I wanted to do something, to get involved. After leaving the store, I worked in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a member of a nine-man team that was trying to develop a college in Bed-Stuy, and also to bring new businesses into the area.”

Eddie Goodman has since joined Pacifica Radio's station WBAI–FM, a free-wheeling listener-supported station that operates from a converted East Side church, as the station's general manager. Here he appears to be in sharp contrast with his surroundings—a tall, slim man whose suits and ties are even more conservative than his father's, and whose hair is unfashionably short, he works in a studio where intense and flowing-haired young men work in beads and cut-off jeans, taping programs of Ukrainian folk music or discussing the travels and teachings of Baba Ram Dass. A bowl of catfood for the studio cat, a fat yellow tiger, sits in the center of the cluttered room. “I'm sure they think me the squarest of the squares,” Eddie Goodman says. “I've recognized that sartorial and tonsorial politics is a real thing, but I don't believe in it—nor do I believe in changing my life style to suit my new career.” Eddie Goodman, his wife, and two little girls have a large Park Avenue apartment, a maid, and a nurse for the
children, and take a house for the summer on the North Shore. He does, however, go to work by subway, getting off at Fifty-ninth Street, and says, “I guess there's some retailing still in my blood, because I always cut through Bloomingdale's to see how they're doing.” He also says, “I often think nowadays that if the feminine liberation movement had started twenty years earlier, there might still be Goodmans at Bergdorf's. The pressure was always on me, the son, to go into the business. Nobody ever considered my three sisters. Who knows? They might have been great.”

Minky and Gary Taylor, meanwhile, live in a big Victorian house with fourteen-foot ceilings on Long Island Sound, from which Gary Taylor commutes to the Yale School of Forestry. “I don't really consider myself a dropout from the rat race,” he says, “and I'm not really going to become Smoky the Bear.” Taylor, who is in his mid-thirties, admits that he has been a man slow to “find” himself. Originally from Denver, he was a Dartmouth dropout who wanted to be a writer, and for a while he lived in the Village writing poetry and trying to sell it. He worked for a while for various magazines, but never for the one he wanted to, the
New Yorker
, which turned him down. “I went to Bergdorf's because I was told that Leonard had spread himself too thin, and needed someone.” When he left, he had the title of the store's general manager. “It wasn't that Leonard Hankin and I didn't get along, but it was a little strange. Before I went to the store, we used to know the Hankins socially and go to their house a lot. The minute I joined Bergdorf's, the invitations stopped. With Leonard, you're either a friend or a business associate—never both.”

Along with other young Americans, Gary Taylor had become increasingly concerned about ecology—“Do you know that there is more tin above the ground in this country than there is
under
the ground in the entire world? We've got to begin to think of garbage as a new kind of natural resource.” And so, it grew “in the back of my mind, as a child of my time, I had to get out and do something. And believe me, there's more to what I'm taking at Yale than just trees. I don't know what direction I'll be taking yet, but I'm at Yale to find out.” After a few days of classes at Yale, Taylor wailed to his wife, whom he met while she was an undergraduate at Smith, “My concentration span has left me!” Said she, “You never had any.”

The Taylors were packing for a trip to Portugal, and their four little boys, their nurse, and a big Dalmatian dog named Gypsy were all, in certain ways, underfoot. “I'm all with Gary for what he's doing,” Minky Taylor said. “And I'm afraid I think Bergdorf's is a frivolous business—and the store
has
changed.” When Eddie Goodman was getting married, for example, his future wife's mother brought a dress to the store to find matching shoes. A claustrophobic woman, she decided to leave the store by way of a staircase rather than the elevator and, going out, a fire door slammed. Immediately, alarms went off and the poor woman was tackled by guards in the street who threatened to carry her off to precinct headquarters. Though she kept screaming, “My daughter is going to marry Eddie Goodman!” it was a while before she was released. And not long ago Minky Taylor herself, making a Charge-Take purchase at the store, was required to show elaborate identification. “You hate to have to say, ‘Look, my father owns this place,'” she says. “But in the old days that simply would not have happened.”

There are also those who insist that the Bergdorf woman shopper has changed in recent years, now that the spending likes of Mrs. Foy are no more than a memory. Not only are younger women coming into the store who are looking for less expensive clothes, with the two-thousand-dollar dresses having a much harder time finding a market, but the rich women customers seem to be spending less money, or at least spending money in different ways. Two very profitable recent items, for example, had nothing to do with high fashion. They were a transparent plastic “dome” umbrella that goes over the wearer's entire head and shoulders, and something called an Isotoner—a leotard of a special fabric which, when worn, is said to firm and tone the wearer's body. Almost novelty-store items, you might say. And there is a new kind of customer, meanwhile, for the expensive items, and she might be called the non-customer. She is a great source of annoyance to Messrs. Goodman and Hankin because, after lunch and a few cocktails, she sweeps with a friend into Bergdorf's, buys like a mad thing for an hour or so, and then the next day—her friend having been suitably impressed—she returns everything for credit. There are also those who say that the store has let down its side badly, and there were startled looks on the street floor the other
day when a modishly dressed young girl, all beads, chains, hair, and fringe, emerged from an elevator with her male escort who, above the belt of his tie-dyed jeans, wore nothing at all besides a headband. “In the old days, he would not have been permitted inside the store,” a salesgirl whispered.

“We used to run a store for the rich woman and the kept woman,” Leonard Hankin said recently. “We can't any more.” Still, there are enough of the old breed around to allow the store to retain some of its air of gentility and comfort, including one longtime customer who wrote to Andrew Goodman to suggest that her name be taken off the store's mailing list. She was in her eighties now, and infirm, she explained, and hardly ever went out any more, “and it makes me feel a little guilty knowing you are spending that postage on me.”

“Oh, I so hope the FTC approves!” Minky Taylor said, when the decision was still pending, as though she longed to have the great weight of the famous store thrown forever from her slender Goodman shoulders; as though she yearned for one of the last “family” stores for the super-rich to pass out of the family and into the hands of a super-super-rich conglomerate; as though she knew that the idea of such former “right” places as Bergdorf's was dying, and that it must be allowed to die as gracefully as possible. Within weeks, her prayers were answered. The FTC approved, and the conglomeration was complete.

What changes will take place when Bergdorf's—so small and special and private—becomes a part of Broadway-Hale? Well, certainly there will be branches of Bergdorf Goodman opening across the landscape, from Scarsdale to Atlanta. Branchification was something the Goodmans always scorned (though, as an inducement to Eddie, a branch store—to give him his head, and his own place—was for a while considered in Chicago). But the greatest loss, most people feel, will be the personal touch of the Goodman family. Not long ago a candy manufacturer approached Andrew Goodman with the idea of setting up a street-floor chocolate boutique at Bergdorf's. Andrew took a box of chocolates home, tried a few pieces, and didn't like it. So there was no boutique. In the Broadway-Hale conglomerate, who will taste the candy? Who will ever care?

Photo by Marc Riboud, Magnum

$5,000 a lecture—Yevtushenko

13

The Circuit: Tell Us All

In a recent burst of enthusiasm for his profession—lecture management—Dan Tyler Moore, director general of the International Platform Association, announced that on a certain evening in the spring of 1968 no fewer than forty thousand speakers were holding forth in as many auditoriums
in the city of New York alone
. If true, and figuring that lecture audiences generally consist of anywhere from two hundred and fifty to fifteen hundred people, this would have meant that every resident of the five boroughs, man, woman and child, had simultaneously sat down to be talked at, along with several million other people who could only have come from out of town.

Mr. Moore's claim is all the more astonishing measured against the fact that, in the lecture business, New York is not considered to be a “good talk town.” Sophisticated New Yorkers, it seems, tend to prefer less cerebral pastimes—such as cocktail parties, lovemaking and theater-in-the-nude—to going to lectures. It is in the allegedly culturally barren hinterlands, smaller cities such as Buffalo, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Fort Wayne, Dallas, Shreveport, Spokane, Iowa City and Bakersfield, that lecture audiences are trotting out in the hundreds of thousands to be edified, or just to listen to the sound of another human voice. But the Moore statement does draw attention to something undeniable: the lecture business is big business and getting bigger. This year more than a hundred million dollars will be spent on
what might be called just a lot of hot air. In other words, when the new American moneyed middle class is not traveling, skiing, shopping, or dining out, it is avidly pursuing self-improvement. Sitting in front of a speaker's lectern is clearly one of the new places to be when you've nowhere else to go.