The Right Places (23 page)

Getting and keeping the right kind of clientele is, one gathers, something like performing a tightrope act. “I don't want this to become a singles joint, like Maxwell's Plum or those places up on Second,” Lavezzo says. Single girls in New York have long been aware that P. J. Clarke's is not a promising hunting ground for men. Two pretty young magazine editors who had stopped by Clarke's for beers during the evening rush hour were told, somewhat abruptly, by the bartender, “Look, if you two girls just came in to get out of the rain, don't take up room at the bar.” And when, several years ago, Clarke's began to get a reputation as a rendezvous for the gay crowd, Dan Lavezzo put up a sign saying that men unescorted by ladies can only be served at the far end of the bar. This sign hangs face to the wall on most “normal” evenings, but can be flipped around so as to state its business should the occasion demand. Lavezzo says, “We don't want people to have
too
good a time here. We don't want people singing or banging on the table, or getting too noisy or getting into fights. I have my two bouncers, Eddie and Mark, to take care of that sort of thing. The trouble is, you can't rough people up the way you used to—if you do, they'll sue. What we want is to keep this a nice, friendly place where people can eat and drink in a relaxed, homey atmosphere.”

For the most part, Lavezzo gets his wish, though there are occasional bad moments. There is one man, the bane of Third Avenue
saloonkeepers, who goes from bar to bar trying to engage the customers in arguments. He will argue, it seems, about almost anything. When he appears, and becomes too belligerent, he is gently but firmly ejected from Clarke's. Also—and members of the Women's Liberation Front should take note—Clarke's bartenders insist that they have much more trouble with disorderly women than they do with men. “A drunk woman is impossible,” Lavezzo says, “and you really have to be careful throwing
them
out.” For some reason, there is a curious witching hour in bars like Clarke's. It occurs around 10
P.M.
, and is the moment when trouble starts. No one knows quite why, but bartenders heave a sigh of relief when ten-thirty comes, knowing that if a saloon can make it peacefully through that moment it will probably make it through the night.

And Lavezzo must be doing something right, because Clarke's is nearly always thronged with people from the time it opens at ten in the morning until three or four the next, when it closes, seven days a week. If there are any complaints they are of crowds at the bar and long lines waiting for tables in the dining room. Business has never been better, and Dan Lavezzo admits, “Now that we're stuck out here like a sore thumb, people notice us who never did before. It's the best advertising we could have.” He has been gradually phasing out his upstairs antiques business, and would like to open another dining room on the second floor. The new dining room would be, according to Lavezzo, “a little more elegant, maybe, but still P. J. Clarke's, still the nineteenth-century feeling. I'd have no trouble filling it.” His plan, however, has presently run afoul of his new landlords, the Tishmans. To accomplish it, Lavezzo feels that he would have to expand his kitchen facilities in the basement, including some space that belongs to the Tishman tower. Because of an existing contract with another restaurant owner in the building, the Tishmans say they cannot legally rent Lavezzo the space. At the moment, matters are at a standstill.

Paddy Clarke was a great lover of animals, and in his day, there was always a dog, or sometimes two, around P. J. Clarke's. (Even today, dogs have a better chance of getting into Clarke's than ocelots.) One of Paddy's dogs was a habitual wanderer, and became well known around the East Side—so well known that cab drivers, spotting him on his rounds, would pick him up and drive him home to Clarke's,
always certain that they would be paid their fare. Another dog, patently female, was named Bobo Rockefeller, after a favorite Clarke's customer. All these dogs were known and loved by Clarke's regulars, but the old-timers agree that there was never a dog quite like the one Paddy Clarke named Jessie. Jessie, according to Paddy, was a “Mexican fox terrier,” but whatever she was she was an extraordinary person. If you gave Jessie a nickel she would trot across the street to Bernard's drugstore and buy a chocolate bar. She would return to Clarke's with the chocolate bar and nudge you to unwrap it for her. If you gave her a quarter, she would go in the other direction to a meat market, and there she would purchase a bag of dog scraps. Paddy Clarke used to insist that at the end of the day she collected his bar receipts and helped him check them against the chits. She was the official screener of Clarke's customers. If Jessie growled when you came through the door, you could not be served.

When Jessie died, Paddy Clarke had Jessie stuffed and placed in a position of honor, on a shelf just above the entrance to the ladies' room. Only slightly the worse for time and dust and smoke and a few moths, she is still there, as immortal as Clarke's itself, a mascot and a symbol. She still wears a savvy expression, keeping a beady eye on things. Isn't it pleasant to think, in this age of instant self-destruct mechanisms, that thanks to Danny Lavezzo's ninety-nine-year lease, Jessie will still be there in the year 2066, by which time there will surely be saloons on the moon. So will P. J. Clarke's still be there, indestructibly dowdy, triumphantly tacky. If Patrick Joseph Clarke had made a will, the way everybody had wanted him to, who knows what might have happened to his bar and grill? As it is, it would seem that only an act of God could remove P. J. Clarke's from the corner of Fifty-fifth and Third. And God, in most cases, was on Paddy Clarke's side.

Photo by Erich Hartmann, Magnum

Andrew Goodman inspects a model at Bergdorf's

12

New York, N. Y. 10019: What Are They Doing to Bergdorf Goodman?

Are there no more absolute strongholds of the super-rich? Well, there are places that have tried to be. But they too are changing fast, and turning into something else.

At Bergdorf Goodman, for example, it used to be that nothing was done that was not done with elegant flourishes. When Andrew Goodman, the president and owner of the store that confers New York's most prestigious fashion label, once brought in a urine sample to be sent over to his doctor, his secretary in the Christmas confusion had it gift-wrapped and sent to the doctor's house. It was under the tree on Christmas morning. And they tell the tale of how once in the Bridal Salon the bride-to-be was hesitant about buying a white wedding gown because, as she put it, she was still in mourning for her first husband. A hasty conference was called among Bergdorf's brass, and the bride wore gray. At the same time, during the recent craze for women wearing cartridge belts slung around their hips, Bergdorf's would not stock the belts because Andrew Goodman found the fashion personally distasteful.

It was, therefore, something of a shock to the business, social, and shopping communities of New York when Andrew Goodman announced in 1971 that one of the last family-run stores in America would pass out of his family and, pending FTC approval, become a part of the Broadway-Hale department store chain—the conglomerate that also recently gobbled up
another
of the last family-run stores in
America, Neiman-Marcus. What will become of the Bergdorf touch?

Bergdorf's has also always been a store that is nothing if not cozy. It has been, as they say in the motel business, a “Ma and Pa operation,” and quite literally Andrew Goodman's father, Edwin Goodman, who founded the store (with a Herman Bergdorf who long ago departed) and his wife were known by all the store's employees as “Dad” and “Mom.” There are still old-time Bergdorf's people who refer to the present president as “young Andrew,” and to his son, who is thirty-one, as “little Eddie.” The Goodman fiefdom on Fifth Avenue has been run with such an air of benevolent paternalism that not only the staff but many of the longtime customers treat the place as they would a second home. After all, what other New York specialty store has on its top floor a vast apartment for the Goodman family where, when the lights go out, the storekeeper can sleep right on top of his merchandise. The third elevator in the main bank serves the apartment (which also has its own entrance on Fifty-eighth Street), and through the years customers and salespeople have grown used to the Goodmans, and their children and grandchildren with their nurses, going up and down that elevator. The rule—up until the time the elevators finally went automatic—was that if any member of the Goodman family got into the car, he or she was taken to his chosen floor, reversing directions if need be, regardless of where the other passengers were headed, and the passengers were expected to be understanding. Most were, but one woman wrote crossly, “Why don't you Goodmans wait until 5:30 when the store is closed—then you can ride up and down that elevator all night as far as I'm concerned!”

“The Apartment,” indeed, has over the years developed its own mystique. It has become a sort of sacred place, since only a few of the elect have been invited into it. To be asked to the Apartment has awesome significance, though whether for good or evil one never knows until one
gets
there. It is as though, from the Apartment, a Big Brother of Bergdorf's watches over all. And perhaps he does. In the dining room of the Apartment hangs a portrait of the founder, Edwin the Elder, and not long ago Andrew Goodman, gulping down his breakfast coffee and realizing that he was going to be late for his office on the floor below, looked nervously up at the portrait and said, “Don't worry, Papa, I'll stay an extra fifteen minutes tonight.”

The Goodman family has always indulged itself at Bergdorf's. Several years ago, for reasons which to the outside world seemed odd and whimsical, an antiques department was opened on the third floor where ten-thousand-dollar French clocks were sold hard by ten-thousand-dollar Russian sables. It was because Andrew Goodman's sister, Ann Goodman Farber, was married to a man who liked fine old furniture. Nena Goodman, Andrew's wife, collects paintings and is herself a painter of some talent, and so she has been given her own art gallery in the store—a boutique called Nena's Choice. One of their daughters, Minky (her name is Mary Ann but she had a governess who used to call her “a little minx”) makes pottery, and it has occurred to her to ask for a corner of the store. But Bergdorf Goodman has also been indulgent to its staff, particularly those who have long demonstrated their loyalty to the Goodmans, and the store has many pensioners as well as people who have been kept on the payroll long after their usefulness has ended. Andrew Goodman takes pride in the fact that with a thousand-odd employees he knows nearly every one by name, and in most cases knows their children's names and ages, and their sizes. The faithful are granted special privileges. Mrs. William Fine, wife of the president of Bonwit Teller but who, as Susan Payson, used to work for Bergdorf's, once got a last-minute invitation to a formal party. First she murmured that she had nothing to wear, but then added that she thought she could work it out. She “borrowed” an eighteen-hundred-dollar designer dress from her stock, went to the party, and the first person she encountered there was Andrew Goodman. He merely winked, said he admired her taste in dresses, and all was forgiven. When Liberty Bandine, now the store's personnel director, first went to work for Bergdorf's she earned seventy-five dollars a week, and her boss became curious about the decidedly expensive way she dressed. Miss Bandine coolly explained that she earned a comfortable second income by playing the horses, and that she had a bookie named Whitey who drove a Bond Bread truck. Thereafter Whitey was permitted to park his truck at the store's Fifth Avenue entrance while Miss Bandine placed her bets.

Adding to this coziness and feeling of one big happy (and rich) family was the fact that Bergdorf's, now in its second generation of Goodman family control, had a third Goodman generation in the
persons of a fine-looking son, young Eddie, and two fine sons-in-law, Harry Malloy and Gary Taylor.

That is, it did until recently. One by one, each of these men has left the store—first Harry, then Eddie, then Gary. The story along Seventh Avenue is that Gary Taylor, who had become Bergdorf's general manager, was sitting one day in a meeting where the subject under discussion was whether hemlines would stay up or go down. Suddenly Taylor rose and said, “Gentlemen, I have just come to the conclusion that this business is not my cup of tea,” walked out of the store, and has never come back. This of course is not what really happened, though even Taylor admits that it makes a good story. But the fact is that Taylor, now twenty pounds trimmer—“no more of those rich lunches”—now packs his lunch in a brown paper bag and drives off every day to New Haven, where he is enrolled at the Yale School of Forestry, in the process of making the switch from high fashion to tall timber. Harry Malloy has became an insurance broker. And son Eddie Goodman goes to work every day down a dark flight of steps, past a row of rusted garbage cans, into the basement of an old church to an office marked “Broom Closet.” The youngest of the three Goodman daughters, meanwhile, Pammy, whom the family calls “our hippie,” is married to a man who does no work at all and is living in the New Mexican desert, building her own little adobe hacienda. Now Andrew has been left to mind his store alone. How did it all happen—and happen so fast?