Carriage Trade (39 page)

And so, while the members of the fashion press milled around downstairs, asking, “Where is he? Where is this Mr. Tarkington?” Si sat alone upstairs, nervously chain-smoking mentholated cigarettes. Finally the telephone rang. He stubbed out his last cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, stood up, straightened his necktie, put on his jacket, shot his shirt cuffs, ran a comb through his hair, brushed away any dandruff that might have settled on his shoulders, and headed for the elevator.

As he made his entrance, emerging from the elevator on the street floor, someone—could it have been the savvy Alice Markham?—cried, “Here he is!” And Silas Tarkington's entrance was greeted with a burst of enthusiastic applause, while he beamed at his guests.

Now flashbulbs started to pop, and instinctively Si reached up and covered his face with his hands. “Please,” he begged, “don't photograph me. Photograph the store … the store … the store.…”

Much later that night, Alice Boynton Markham raised herself on one elbow in her dark bedroom, and said, “I think I had too much to drink at the party tonight. I shouldn't have let you seduce me.”

“I've wanted to do this for a long time,” he whispered. “I've wanted to do this for a long, long time.”

From
The New York Times
, October 10, 1958:

NEW TARKINGTON'S STORE APPEARS TO BE A HIT

Tarkington's, a new name on the fashion horizon, made its first bow to New York last night when fashion editors and writers were treated to a special preview of the new store's resplendent delights. The store will officially open its doors to shoppers next Friday.

For months, Fifth Avenue merchants and other retailers have been gossiping and speculating about what was going on behind the McKim, Mead & White facade of the former Truxton Van Degan mansion at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, and eagerly awaiting a chance for a glimpse inside. The result seems to have been worth the wait. The mansion, which was slated for the wrecker's ball two years ago, was saved in the nick of time by the young merchant Silas Tarkington and has been transformed into handsome retailing space that is in many ways unique.

Architectural Details Preserved

By dividing his selling space into a series of intimate boutiques, Mr. Tarkington was able to preserve much of the mansion's original floor plan. Other architectural details that have been preserved are marble floors and fireplaces, Tiffany stained-glass windows, Baccarat chandeliers, and wall panelings of exotic woods.

The merchandise, all of it decidedly on the pricey side, lends itself perfectly to this arrangement. On the street floor, near the Fifth Avenue entrance, is the Leah Roth boutique, a well-known name in designer millinery. For the press opening, Leah Roth offered a display of hats designed for the late Mrs. John Jacob Astor. The hats, borrowed from the Astor estate for the occasion, are all in black, since Mrs. Astor wore only black after her husband went down on the S.S.
Titanic
in 1912. Also on the street floor is the glittering boutique of Delafield & Du Bois, a new name in jewelry.

On an upper floor, in a room graced by an antique grand piano, is the salon of Antonio Delfino, a young designer never before shown in New York, whose airy, witty creations suggest that he is slated to become a name of considerable importance in the fashion world. Thus has Mr. Tarkington, a shy man who dislikes being photographed, cleverly combined the old and the new. Displays and windows, designed by Cyril Marx, manage to be both elegant and amusing at the same time.

In the gala party atmosphere of last night's press preview, it was impossible to tell whether the level of the store's service will match its magnificent array of fashion merchandise and its stunning decor, but if the enthusiastic response of last night's invited guests is any indication, Tarkington's seems well on its way to joining the pantheon of New York's fine specialty stores.

“What's a pantheon?” he asked her. The newspaper was spread out on the bed between them.

“It's a roster of the gods,” she said. “You're about to become one of the gods, my darling.”

He swung his feet over the side of the bed. “I've got to get to the store,” he said.

“So do I,” she said.

The clean-up squad was already at work when they arrived, by separate taxis. Someone had dropped a lighted cigarette on an Oriental rug, leaving an ugly burn, and a weaver had to be found who could repair it quickly. Cocktail glasses had left rings on many of the display counters, and even on the lid of the Bösendorfer. Bottles of Windex and furniture polish were being brandished everywhere. Merchandise had been pulled out for inspection, and display shelves and counters had to be put back in their original perfect order. Vacuum cleaners droned throughout the store. Si and Alice pitched in with the work, careful not to let their eyes travel toward each other. No one must suspect that they had become lovers the night before.

“Party favors,” Alice said at one point during the day. “It would be great if we could have favors for next week's party—something for the women and something for the men.”

“What could we give them?”

Alice snapped her fingers. “Antonio,” she said. “He's designed a fragrance. Did you know that?”

“I did not know that.”

“He gave me a little sample of it, and I thought it was quite nice. Oil of vetiver, clove, a bit of lemon—it's a spicy, woodsy scent. We could give perfume to the ladies, cologne to the gentlemen.”

“We've invited five hundred people. Could he have that much by next Thursday?”

“I think so. Right now, his collection's finished. He's the least busy person in the store.”

“But bottles! We'd need to bottle it and package it, all by next Thursday. That's impossible.”

“I happen to have a friend—” Moe Minskoff offered.

“No, this is Alice's idea,” Si said, a little sharply. “Alice will handle it.”

“We'd need different bottles for the men's and women's fragrances, of course,” she said. “Let me see what I can find in the way of bottles, and if necessary I'll do the packaging myself. If the scent turns out to be popular, we can sell it in the store and pay Antonio a royalty.”

“Do you really think you can pull all this off by Thursday?”

“Of course,” she said. “This is New York, remember? The great thing about New York is that there's always a little hole-in-the-wall store somewhere that sells whatever you're looking for.”

By Monday, she had found her one-ounce spray bottles. “I'd hoped for something a little more stylish,” she said. “These are from an Elizabeth Arden line that's been discontinued, but they'll have to do. If the scent's a success, Antonio will design his own bottles.” Antonio had concocted his perfume in the kitchen of his apartment, and by Monday afternoon he had put together three full gallons of his essence. Perfume became men's cologne, he explained, simply by diluting the essence base with alcohol. On Tuesday, Alice and Antonio spent the day filling five hundred bottles with medicine droppers. It was a tedious job, and by the end of the day both of them had headaches from the heavy scent.

On Wednesday, the labels arrived from the printer, pink labels for the perfume and blue for the cologne. The labels read:

Parfum de Antonio

BY

DELFINO OF TARKINGTON'S

The rest of that day was spent affixing the labels to the bottles, and Alice spent most of Wednesday night wrapping the party favors—blue tissue paper with pink ribbon bows for the men, pink paper with blue ribbons for the women. By Thursday morning, the job was done.

They had decided to employ the same tactic: Si Tarkington would not make his entrance until the party was well under way. Tonight, when Si stepped off the elevator, there was also applause. But since tonight's guests were from the worlds of society and the arts, where each celebrity guest was interested in his or her personal appearance more than in anyone else's, the applause was more polite and muted. Si immediately recognized some reasonably well-known faces.

There, in black, was Maria Callas. There was Audrey Hepburn, chatting with Joan Fontaine. There were Arlene Francis and her husband, Martin Gabel. There were Maureen O'Hara, David Niven, Moira Shearer, Nina Foch, Rhonda Fleming, Joan Bennett and Clare and Harry Luce, Charlton and Lydia Heston, Kirk and Anne Douglas. Alice had also managed to snare some European titles—“New Yorkers love titles,” she said—and, taking Si by the arm, she introduced him to the Princess de Crouy, the Countess D'Arcangues, and the Princess Colonna. Through it all swirled Antonio—youthful, handsome, and dashing in his dinner jacket—taking compliments on his fragrance and on his designs, in his true element at last. A poor boy from Brooklyn, born to Italian immigrant parents, he had confessed to Alice, as they worked in his kitchen with the little bottles, that he had got his idea for mixing a fragrance while helping his father make wine in the family's basement in Crown Heights.

“There's someone you must meet,” Alice whispered to Si. “Monique Van Degan is here. Her husband's grandfather built this house. She's upstairs in Sportswear with the Begum Aga Khan.”

From
The New York Times
, October 17, 1958:

SECOND GALA TOASTS THE ARRIVAL OF TARKINGTON'S

The worlds of international celebrity and high society collided with the tinkle of champagne glasses last night in the second of two glittering galas to toast the arrival of Tarkington's, the elegant new emporium on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street. The store opens officially to the public this morning at 10 A.M., but last night's entertainment was by invitation only. Invitations were carefully scrutinized at the door, and potential crashers were challenged.

Among the invited guests was Adam Gimbel, president of Saks Fifth Avenue and a vice president of the Fifth Avenue Association. Asked whether Tarkington's might not provide stiff competition for his own luxury-goods store, Mr. Gimbel merely smiled and said, “Whatever is good for Fifth Avenue is good for us.”

Another guest was Mrs. Truxton Van Degan III, whose husband's grandfather, the late railroad magnate, commissioned the stately seven-story graystone McKim, Mead & White mansion now occupied by Tarkington's. “It was a wonderful house,” Mrs. Van Degan said, looking around the new store, “but it had become such a white elephant for the family. No one can afford to live on this grand a scale anymore. It's wonderful that Mr. Tarkington had the taste and imagination to redo the place. Who would have thought it possible? We thought we were lucky to get $150,000 from a demolition company to tear it down, and
they
thought they were lucky to find a buyer for $25,000 more. The really lucky one is Mr. Tarkington. He's such a charming man.”

Mrs. Van Degan looked wistfully up at the ceiling of the street floor lobby, where six matching Baccarat chandeliers are suspended. “I wish I'd had the sense to take just one of those for myself before the sale,” she said. “I'd frankly forgotten about them. The last time I was here, they were in bags.”

Silas Tarkington noticed the discrepancy in the purchasing price, but he did not mention it to Alice. After all, Mrs. Van Degan might have been mistaken, though she seemed very definite about her figures.

On Friday morning, long before the doors opened at ten o'clock, crowds began to collect on the sidewalk outside the store and lines started to form outside the entrance. Presently, the police arrived, and yellow barricades were set up to control the crowds and get the curious to form a single manageable waiting line. Two mounted policemen trotted back and forth, up and down the block.

Looking out at this scene from his fifth-floor office window, Si could tell that the vast majority of these people were not Tarkington's shoppers. At least from the looks of this crowd, he hoped that they were not. These people would not be coming into the store to buy anything. They just wanted to look around. Still, the word-of-mouth that this kind of excitement would create could only help.

A mounted policeman was bellowing through his bullhorn, “No more than forty persons admitted at a time.… Fire regulations.… No more than forty at a time.…”

Looking down, it amused him, in a grim way, to think that eight years ago he had made his way to Hillsdale in a grimy, unventilated police van, manacled to seven other men, four of them black and all of them older than he. One of them had shit in his pants during the three-hour journey. On that occasion, the assignment for the police had been to protect the public from his unruly ways. Today, the police were lined up outside his store to protect him from the unruly public. “It could only happen in America,” as his father used to say.

“Moe, we need to talk,” he said.

“Sure,” said Moe. “What about?”

“Several things,” he said.

“Shoot, pal.”

“To begin with, that shipment from Chanel. Where did you get it?”

“I told you. I got friends. I got connections.”

“Andrew Goodman was at the party the other night. He commented that our Chanel collection looked a lot like some garments Bergdorf had ordered, but the order got lost. I had to do some fast talking about coincidences and that sort of thing.”

“Yeah, that's it. Just a coincidence.”

“I'm not sure I convinced him.”

“Well, when your own order comes in, you can offer to make a swap. Simple.”

“We've already sold several of those garments. How do we account for that?”

“Aw, we'll think of somethin'.”

Si looked at him steadily. “I hope so,” he said. “Now there's another matter I'm unhappy about, Moe. I think you saw Mrs. Van Degan quoted in last Friday's
Times
. She said we paid the demolition company a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for this building. She sounded very definite about it. But you told me the price was two hundred and twenty-five. You handled that transaction. Who's right?”