Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (21 page)

The Selfridge family, holding American passports, were free to travel wherever and whenever they wanted. Harry’s wife, mother and children went to Chicago. Harry himself went regularly to Paris and even, on one occasion, to Germany, a trip that caused endless speculation in the media. The visit was made to assess the situation at his
German offices, but also in the interests of design. In March 1915, an exhibition of German goods was staged at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, under the banner of ‘A Proposal for the Foundation of the Design & Industries Association’. The exhibition focused on the aesthetics of goods, hitherto available from Germany, whose manufacturers had long championed industrial design. Earlier attempts by the Government to encourage British manufacturers to replicate blockaded goods had failed. Examples presented at Board of Trade exhibitions were frankly shoddy. This project was different. It sought to promote excellence in design and to encourage British manufacturers to be more creative. Among the original patrons and instigators of the scheme were St John Hornby of W. H. Smith; Fred Burridge, Principal of the Central School of Art; Frank Warner, the silk manufacturer; H. G. Wells; Frank Pick of the London Underground; and H. Gordon Selfridge, all of them committed to ‘a more intelligent demand amongst the public for what is best and soundest in design’. Even
The Times
approved. ‘Entirely practical,’ they reported, ‘not vaguely artistic.’

In 1915, Gaby Deslys moved to London to prepare for her new show, a revue called
Rosy Rapture
. The besotted Selfridge bought her the lease of a house in Kensington Gore, filling it with expensive ephemera from the store. Hampers packed with delicacies were delivered daily by a Selfridge’s motor van, along with vast baskets of flowers. At Easter that year, he instructed the store florist to make up an Easter Egg made from fresh violets – with the added twist that a live chick be put inside. Used to his eccentric requests, on this occasion the florist flatly refused, fearing the chick would die. Selfridge, who loathed confrontation, apparently backed down. Alongside flowers and furniture, Gaby got jewellery – including a sensational necklace of black pearls. When
Tatler
ran a feature on the star ‘at home’, they swooned over her ‘chinchilla fur bed rugs and rooms that were scented with Rigaud’.

London suited Gaby like no other city, and Londoners adored her. As
Rosy Rapture
went into rehearsal, it became the talk of the town. It wasn’t just Gaby who attracted attention. The revue had been
written for her by J. M. Barrie. The distinguished author of
Peter Pan
and
The Admirable Crichton
was fêted wherever he went, but he was shy and lonely. A year earlier he had become entranced by the petite, fluffy, feminine Deslys. To him, she was like a living doll – a blonde, beautiful child-woman. Fascinated by the music hall, Barrie offered to write something special just for her. London’s chattering classes were agog.

That Barrie wanted to experiment with the music hall was not surprising. In the aristocratic venues of the West End such as the Alhambra, the Empire, the Palace Theatre and the Hippodrome; in the huge bourgeois music halls of the less fashionable boroughs such as the Hackney Empire; even in a rickety venue down a murky alleyway in the East End, the public in their thousands gathered to sing, clap and laugh at the curious mix of comedy sketches, dancers and chorus girls who supported the legendary leading ladies – whether Lottie Collins belting out ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’ or Marie Lloyd’s brilliant
double entendre
that ‘she’d never had her ticket punched before’. The music halls were not licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and could therefore get away with risqué performances not possible in the regular theatre. At the time Barrie was writing
Rosy Rapture
, they were also acting as recruitment centres for the Army. Young lads hearing Marie Lloyd singing ‘I didn’t like you much before you joined the army, John, but I do like you, cockie, now you’ve got yer khaki on!’ enlisted the next morning.

Barrie’s hopes for his show were dashed. It wasn’t cheerful enough for an audience that craved humour. Despite a couple of songs from Jerome Kern and some innovative use of cinematography by Barrie, the show was a flop. Barrie didn’t attend the opening night, having just heard of his close friend Guy du Maurier’s death in action and the loss of his adopted son, George Llewelyn Davies. But Arnold Bennett was there. He wrote to Hugh Walpole: ‘Went to the 1st night of Barrie’s eccentricity. It was a frost & most of it extremely poor. Selfridge, the official
amant
of Gaby Deslys, was in a box with his family.’

Selfridge’s family may or may not have known about the affair, but
his staff most certainly did. Gaby toured the store like the diva she was, helping herself to anything she wanted, the bills, as always, being charged to ‘the Chief’s private account’. On one memorable day she lost her tiny pet dog and sat sobbing hysterically in Harry’s office until he sent her home and set about masterminding what his secretary called ‘Operation Dog’. Missing notices were posted up, the police were informed and a substantial reward was offered. The pampered pooch was eventually found.

Barrie meanwhile, rattled by the poor reviews, had cabled his friend and mentor Charles Frohman in New York, asking him for help in putting
Rosy Rapture
to rights. Frohman obligingly booked a passage on the
Lusitania
. The ship sailed from New York on 1 May, loaded with munitions for the war effort. Just off the coast of Ireland, it was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 1,200 lives – including that of Charles Frohman.
Rosy Rapture
closed at the end of the month.

Somerset Maugham meanwhile had high hopes that his new play, completed while he was living in Rome in 1915, would be a success. He had crafted his story about an amoral, lascivious and depraved group of rich Americans and decadent British aristocrats very carefully, dipping his pen in acid to excellent effect. In
Our Betters
, Pearl Grayston, a rich American woman married to a British peer, has manipulated herself into becoming London’s leading hostess. Her lover Arthur Fenwick – who conveniently provides the money for the lavish entertaining – is a snobbish, elderly American war profiteer. Pearl’s girlfriends are drawn from a motley bunch of rich Americans who have acquired themselves British titles and gigolo boyfriends. Maugham’s character Pearl was based on a combination of the society hostess Emerald Cunard and Victoria Sackville, while Arthur Fenwick was very obviously Harry Gordon Selfridge – right down to his soft voice and distinctive mannerisms.

The Lord Chamberlain was so concerned at the anti-American thrust of the play that he sent it over to the Foreign Office for Sir Edward Grey to read. The response was to ban it, the material being
considered so offensive it would be detrimental to the efforts being made to persuade America to join the war. If Selfridge was unaware of the plot then, he certainly heard of it in 1917, when
Our Betters
opened to rave reviews in New York. When the play finally opened in London in 1923, it was a sell-out. Selfridge’s humiliation lasted for months. Maugham had exacted his revenge.

The business of shopping continued apace, as did the business of publicity. A writer from a distinguished arts and literary magazine,
The Academy,
was given the store’s ‘VIP tour’ by the Chief himself, who proudly pasted the resulting editorial into one of the huge press-cuttings books that he always maintained personally, right down to writing the captions and dating the pages. The
Academy
’s report was full of admiration: ‘Outside all is war sensationalism, stress and danger. Inside the store all is beauty and order … [there is] a pervading sense of well-being and efficiency. It made an impression that lingers … of piles of dainty fabrics, of colour … of capable young women who have replaced our soldiers at the door and in the lift.’

In fact, the lifts at the store had always been operated by uniformed girls who were as good-looking as those in the best chorus line. The ‘Selfridge’s Red Cross Corps’ were also particularly well kitted out, their uniforms being specially tailored to fit. Women were now driving the motorized delivery vans – many of which had been transformed into ambulances – and, in an effort to save petrol, holding the reins of the store’s horse-drawn carts. Women were on guard as commissionaires, in green woollen great-coats, braided caps and huge gauntlet gloves. Wherever there was a job in the store that had been done by a man who had enlisted, a woman took it over – some even stoking the boilers. The shortage of men was affecting most households. Servants – especially footmen – were in short supply, much to the annoyance of Winston Churchill’s mother, who so disliked parlour-maids that she transformed her two into ‘foot-maids’. The girls wore black skirts with smart swallow-tail coats and evening waistcoats, white shirt-fronts, winged collars and black ties.

Selfridge’s was always putting on a show of one sort or another. Phil
Mead, Hampshire’s star county cricketer, was hired to lead ‘Cricket Fortnight’, while less cheeringly, a few days after the Germans had used chlorine gas at Ypres, the store’s pharmacist demonstrated its stinking toxicity by mixing spirits of salts with chlorate of potassium in front of a fascinated crowd on the roof terrace. Anxious mothers flocked to the pharmacy to buy supplies of bleached cotton gauze, elastic and extra-absorbent cotton wool to send out to their sons, along with packets of morphine that were readily sold and always used. The Duchess of Rutland – seemingly a constant presence in the store – opened an Art Exhibition in aid of the War Seal Foundation, one of the endless charities that kept upper-class women busy. The Duchess had hoped to open a hospital in France – her daughter Diana had solicited a donation of £2,000 from ‘dear Mr Selfridge’ – but the plan fell through. Diana instead became a nurse, while the Duchess confined herself to two rooms of their Arlington Street house, turning the rest into a hospital.

By 1916, Asquith’s Government was in disarray. Having resigned over the disaster at Gallipoli, Churchill had gone to the Western Front. The war was escalating. Zeppelin raids had begun and the U-boat campaign was edging Britain towards the brink of starvation. The country yearned for dynamic leadership. They got it in December when David Lloyd George became Prime Minister, in part thanks to the machinations of Sir Max Aitken whose reward was a peerage. Ennobled as Lord Beaverbrook – and by now the owner of the
Daily Express
– he would soon become Minister of Information, but even his own newspaper couldn’t print the truth about what was really happening. There was still no job for Selfridge, despite his friend Sir Albert Stanley being appointed as head of the Board of Trade. Late that year, Selfridge moved his family to the country, taking a lease on Highcliffe Castle in Christchurch on the Hampshire coast. Officially, their move was due to the threat of the Zeppelin raids. Unofficially, it was due to Harry’s heightening affair with Gaby Deslys.

‘Business carried on as usual during alterations on the map of Europe.’
Winston Churchill

T
he store published record year-end figures for 1917, with profits of £258,000 (over £10 million today) mainly achieved, said Selfridge on announcing the results, ‘by an increase in household goods and cheaper clothing while luxury goods and expensive women’s wear has fallen off’. A year earlier, Condé Nast, the owner of American
Vogue
, had taken the view that even if women weren’t buying luxuries, they would still enjoy looking at them. He launched a British edition at the price of 1 shilling a copy, perhaps not understanding that the women with the most disposable income were working in munitions and reading
Tit-Bits.
With the upper classes showing their customary thrift and the middle classes strapped for cash, launching the glossy magazine hadn’t been easy.
Vogue
’s fashion editors responded with features explaining ‘how it is possible to have a smart wardrobe even with the handicap of a limited income’. Shortages meant higher prices everywhere – the cost of food had risen by 65 per cent and clothing by 55 per cent. The Government Food Controller had imposed fixed prices on basics such as bread and jam which Selfridge delighted in undercutting, using his ‘Callisthenes’ column to hammer the point home. There were, however, no discernible cuts in his own household budget – he was living in customary style at 30 Portman Square and spending prodigiously on renovating Highcliffe Castle.

The Highcliffe estate had originally been acquired by King George III’s young Prime Minister, the Earl of Bute, who, having the advantage of a very rich wife and a taste for beautiful buildings, commissioned Robert Adam to design several for him. These included Luton Hoo, Lansdowne House and Kenwood in London, and a seaside mansion, then called High Cliff, where in 1773 he laid out exotic botanical gardens. High Cliff was left to Lord Bute’s youngest and favourite son, General Sir Charles Stuart, but sadly for Sir Charles, without the money to maintain it. He demolished the property, sold the contents and also parted with most of the land.

His son in turn, also called Charles and a distinguished diplomat, vigorously set about restoring his inheritance, gradually reacquiring the land his father had sold. While
en poste
in St Petersburg he ordered timber; in Spain he commissioned bricks; as British Minister in Lisbon during the Peninsular War he sent instructions about the purchase of the remnants of the original mansion, by now a notorious smuggler’s den. When he was dispatched to Paris to choose a house for Lord Wellington’s anticipated sojourn as Ambassador, his unerring eye settled on Princess Pauline Borghese’s
hôtel
in the rue du Faubourg St Honoré – still the British Embassy today. On his own subsequent appointment as Ambassador, he delighted in attending the auctions taking place in the capital after the fall of Napoleon’s regime. Among other treasures, he bought furniture and carpets from the estate of the gallant Marshal Ney, stonework from the Norman Benedictine abbey of St Peter at Jumièges, and a complete window of sixteenth-century stained glass from the church of St Vigor in Rouen. His pièce de résistance was a gloriously carved oriel window from the Grande Maison des Andelys, where Henri IV had sat with his dying father. Twelve huge barges were needed to ship his acquisitions back to England, and it took him another five years to build the impossibly romantic Highcliffe Castle, completed in 1830. Now ennobled as Lord Stuart de Rothesay, he divided his life between Highcliffe and his London town house in Carlton House Terrace, where he installed the bed on which allegedly the Empress Josephine had died.