Column: I was amazed by Neiman Marcus 60 years ago; now I’m amazed how long it lasted
I could’ve warned Stanley Marcus about digging his Texas spurs into Yankee soil.
Neiman Marcus is now bankrupt and shedding some of its far-flung stores, but six decades ago, I sensed his magic touch might not travel well.
Back then, after I married in to a Dallas oil family, my mother-in-law took me to the original Neiman Marcus store.
“Burn his clothes, and dress him in something posh!” she exclaimed. It was her favorite adjective.
Even as I was expecting to be escorted out by security, several sales ladies rushed over with French designer jeans and fringed cowboy shirts no cowboy could afford. They warmly greeted my mother-in-law by her first name. She’d been a fashion model, and her father-in-law made a fabled oil strike.
I sensed that Stanley Marcus didn’t run just another department store. He presided over a playground for the nouveau riche, for those who will always be nouveau riche for all their millions, and for nouveau riche wannabes.
His admonition to the clerks tending the fine jewelry counter was not to steer shabbily dressed customers to the costume jewelry department, my mother-in-law explained. “He’d say: ‘They might not have had time to change since the oil well gushed.‘ ”
A clerk nodded, apparently in agreement.
On another visit, my mother-in-law was shown a piece of jewelry. “It’s nice,” she said. “Do you have something more expensive?”
Waiters in the Zodiac dining room were trained similarly to the clerks. Upon taking food orders, they’d gently guide a customer to an appropriate wine: “And don’t you think that your boeuf bourguignon would be nicely paired with a goblet of Chateauneuf du Pape?”
Stanley Marcus wasn’t alone in realizing that a big number on a price tag can lift a product’s appeal above its intrinsic value. But as the son of a co-founder of Neiman Marcus, he had an ear attuned to the way his customers talked.
In the Texas vocabulary, only two sizes matter: small and very big. A modest price tag attracts people of modest means. But he wanted those boastful of Texas’ humongous size, who bragged about its enormous ranches and myriad herds of cattle, and who could put big money where their mouths were.
So the Neiman Marcus window displays and mannequins screamed big, bigger and BIGGEST. Its Christmas Book featured a way-over-the-top gift. One year, it might be matching his-and-her airplanes or windmills. Another, it was a $700,000 doghouse, with architectural details mimicking the Taj Mahal.
In 2019, it was front-row seats at the big-name designer shows during New York’s Fashion Week. For $250,000, you’d have compared notes with a Neiman Marcus executive over cocktails in the restaurant of its glitzy Hudson Yards store. If you missed it in 2019, though, you won’t get a second chance. That is one of the stores being closed.
My father-in-law never went for Stanley Marcus’ most outlandish Christmas gifts. He had an airplane and a helicopter. But he bought a bauble a few rungs down the ladder of dreadful excess: a humongous plexiglass coffee table, its bowels filled with a maze of neon tubes. Hooked up to a hi-fi set, it put on a light show, emitting great splashes of colors that mutated and gyrated to the beat of a song.
Mr. Stanley — as employees and favorite customers addressed him — opened Dallas’ eyes to the luxurious goodies of a wider world some were scarcely aware of. At my first family dinner, Aunt Olive stared pensively at me before saying: “Ronnie, being from Chicago, you probably didn’t learn your Texas history in school. Right?”
Stanley Marcus kept an eagle eye on the great emporiums of Europe, scooping up the latest in chic apparel and other bijous. He brought famed European designers, like Coco Chanel, to his store.
In his memoirs, Stanley Marcus quoted a Texas rancher who, upon visiting the store, announced: “In all my time, I have never seen so many things a body can get along without as I have here!”
Such is the mark of a truly great salesman: making a customer feel he must have what he knows he doesn’t need.
Yet even when Stanley Marcus’ store and I crossed paths, the winds out of the Texas panhandle were shifting. Cadillacs the size of battleships were giving way to SUVs. Younger members of the Dallas Country Club were agitating for replacing the practice greens with tennis courts.
And now, Neiman Marcus is downsizing, a word I never heard in my Dallas years. “Bankrupt,” yes. Decades before learning that Nieman Marcus was bankrupt, I heard that word used in innumerable yarns of wildcatters — freelance drillers — who lost a fortune when a well didn’t come in, but returned to the oil fields as a roughneck and emerged once again rich.
That the Neiman Marcus chain did as well as it did for as long as it did is a merchandising achievement. America’s cultural underlay, an inheritance from the Puritans, traditionally frowns on ostentatious displays of wealth.
So I send best wishes to Chicago’s Neiman Marcus and the others that survive. Yet my heart says none will ever be more than a faint shadow of the Dallas store where Stanley Marcus’ salespeople, on a moment’s notice, transformed me into a rhinestone cowboy.
rgrossman@chicagotribune.com
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