WHEN WOMEN RUN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamor and power at the dawn of American fashion, by Julie Satow
In 1980, Donald J. Trump appeared on the cover of the New York Times after assaulting a pair of scantily clad women in a Fifth Avenue department store.
That the women were made of stone and attached to the Bonwit Teller building, in the process of being demolished and replaced by Trump Tower, was of little comfort to the administrators of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had been promised these works Art Deco. Bas-relief beauties that long loomed over pedestrians and are now destroyed.
The meaning of the sculptures was both allegorical and architectural: department stores, although mostly built by men, have always been female domains. “Ladies’ Paradise” is the English title of Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, set in a store inspired by Le Bon Marché, which still stands in Paris despite the ravages of e-commerce. Patricia Highsmith set her 1952 lesbian romance “The Price of Salt” in the fictional Frankenberg’s, based on Bloomingdale’s.
Now Julie Satow has written a group biography of the department store doyennes who ran the show (and these places in their heyday were really a form of theater) to the male founders and owners whose names adorned the facades.
It was smart to summon these three queens from different periods, along with shorter sketches of figures further removed from Fifth Avenue, such as the black businesswoman Maggie Walker, who in 1905 opened the St. Luke Emporium for her community in segregated Richmond, Virginia ; and Beatrice Fox Auerbach of G. Fox in Hartford, Connecticut, the inspiration for Menken’s brainy scion Rachel Menken in “Mad Men.”
Each may not have had her own biography, although Odlum did write a mock memoir, “A Woman’s Place.” Long out of print, which Satow is based on. Taken together, they are a force. You can imagine them circling the big perfume counter in the sky. After “Suffs”, maybe “Spritzes”?
Stutz, who died in 2005, is still remembered by a certain group of Manhattan aristocracy, and her portrait is enriched by interviews conducted by the author, who has contributed to The Times (including the Styles section, where she used to work) and previously wrote a book about the Plaza Hotel.
Not that “developed” is a phrase that easily applies to Stutz, who these days would almost certainly have been canceled for fat-shaming; Under his supervision, Bendel’s only supplied the equivalent of a contemporary size 6. But he also revolutionized retailing with a winding “shopping street” that he opened inside the store in 1959 (“The Street of Failures,” the then-president of Bergdorf Goodman scoffed after his tour). In a weekly open call known as the Friday Morning Lineup, young artisans competed for a coveted spot in their inventory as if trying to get into a nightclub.
Shaver had come to New York much earlier, from Arkansas via Chicago, for fun with his sister, who would design the popular and strange Little Shaver dolls that appeared in Lord & Taylor’s Christmas windows.
Hired by the store’s president, her mother’s third cousin, Dorothy rose through the ranks (she eventually got her job) and changed her practices: she opened Bird Cage, a famous restaurant serving tea sandwiches; present the kind of personal shopping artfully refined by Betty Halbreich at Bergdorf; promoting American designers in an era obsessed with France; and, generally, establishing “that department stores could rival galleries, and even museums, as cultural arbiters,” Satow writes. Ashamed of being the granddaughter of a Confederate who joined the Ku Klux Klan, Shaver also used her power to promote racial equality, to a point.
The Debbie Downer of the trio is Odlum, devastated after her husband, a Wall Street tycoon who had bought Bonwit, left her for a manicurist at Saks (and later an aviator). A salon colleague stated in his own memoirs that the scandal was the basis for Clare Boothe Luce’s play “The Women.”
Odlum oversaw innovations that included moving hats (“harmless whims,” also known as impulse purchases) from an upper floor to prominent locations, a men’s club for ogling lingerie models while their wives shopped, and a best-selling novel by advertising boss who romanticized the life of a purchasing assistant.
“A great store adds much sparkle and fun to the prosaic business of everyday life,” read one line. This was certainly true when Salvador Dalí was commissioned to make exhibitions and crashed a bathtub full of dirty water against Bonwit’s window in a fit of artistic pique.
Odlum married three more times, but remained bitter, blaming her workload for her problems raising her children. “When my grandmother died,” a grandson tells Satow, “I remember my father saying something like, ‘Well, the old hag is finally dead.’”
In fact, there is something Oz-like in the Technicolor world of department stores, with their pneumatic tubes that shoot cash and sales receipts up to the ceiling; the exhibition director who took a mannequin, Cynthia, everywhere, including El Morocco; the unlimited variety of products that even range, in an Oklahoma City store, to babies for adoption.
If the suburban mall caused damage to this institution, the 24/7 Internet Grand Bazaar turned it into a ghost town. Satow’s book longs for that delightful silence when doors close, doormen go home, and shopping gives way to sleep.
WHEN WOMEN RUN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamor and power at the dawn of American fashion | By Julie Satow | double day | 320 pages | $32.50