Before stardom came, Burt Lancaster sold lingerie and suits at Marshall Field’s in Chicago

I ran into Burt Lancaster last week.

I was walking through Macy’s in the Loop, which used to be the home of Marshall Field & Company and where long ago Lancaster worked.

Of course it was not Lancaster in the flesh. He died in 1994 of a heart attack when he was 80 years old.

I ran into my father too because I first heard of Lancaster’s connection to this store from my father Herman who had written, with his newspaper pal Lloyd Wendt, the history of the store in 1952, “Give the Lady What She Wants.” He knew everything there was to know about the store.

“Burt Lancaster used to work here,” I could hear my father say.

The words came from the summer of 1968 and he and I had seen the week before Lancaster in “The Swimmer,” that strange movie, a captivating and unsettling one too, based on a John Cheever New Yorker magazine short story, at the bygone Esquire Theater.

We were in Field’s to pick up a present for a friend of my mother’s when my father said, “Burt Lancaster used to work here,” to which I must have said, “No way,” and then he told me the story.

This memory rushing back made me think about how odd it is that Lancaster doesn’t have the same afterlife stature as such contemporaries as Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant and a few others.

Perhaps it was because he kept his private life, as best as possible, relatively private. He was never tabloid fodder,

Or was it possible that the lack of star status in death was because his 80-some film roles were not sufficiently powerful to be remembered?

I always highly regarded Lancaster but decided to answer that by re-watching some of his movies.

The first was, of course, “The Swimmer.” Then came “The Killers,” his first movie role, opposite Ava Gardner in her first big role too. I watched him in “Elmer Gantry,” which won him an Academy Award as best actor; “Seven Days in May” (also with Gardner); in later in life roles in “Atlantic City” and “Field of Dreams”; in “The Rainmaker,” opposite Katharine Hepburn. I watched him on a beach with Deborah Kerr in “From Here to Eternity” and flying for the circus with Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida in “Trapeze.”

There are more to come but I can say with confidence that Lancaster was a great actor and I am hardly alone in that opinion. The late Roger Ebert wrote of him in the wake of his death, noting that he had “an angry, intellectual, introspective side, that led him to give some of the best performances of his generation.” He also wrote that “few major stars of the last half century compiled such a distinguished and varied filmography.”

My colleague Michael Phillips told me this a couple of days ago: “There was no one else like him. In “The Killers” it’s impossible to imagine either he or Gardner would not becoming huge sex symbols, and huge stars. Lancaster had that quality that his second movie’s title promised, ‘Brute Force.’ He looked at home in the boxing ring, on the trapeze or in ‘The Swimmer.’”

I knew little about Lancaster beyond his films so I started digging, especially eager for facts about his time in Chicago. Of course, his life has been energetically chronicled. So, it was easy to learn that he was born in New York City on Nov. 2, 1913; grew up poor in East Harlem; developed skill in gymnastics in high school; performed with another gymnast and on his own in theaters and for circuses; was injured and, on the suggestion of a friend, took off for Chicago, arriving in early 1942 with $20 and one suit.

I know all this, and more, because I’ve just finished reading 2000′s “Burt Lancaster: An American Life,” an excellent biography by Kate Buford.

In it, she also delivers what I was looking for: “Heading to Chicago right after Pearl Harbor, he snagged a $25-a-week job in Marshall Field as a floor walker in the women’s lingerie department. The store found the handsome Lancaster could cut down on returned merchandise. ‘I learned how to con those dames along,’ he said. Lancaster thought he’d do better with the 5% commission earned by salesmen in men’s furnishings, but he wasn’t as popular in that department. The customers didn’t notice him. What to do? Acrobatic handstands on the counter and cartwheels in the aisle, as it turned out. No longer ignored, he was soon earning the comfortable sum of $80 a week. If you want to sell something, Lancaster later advised, ‘sell yourself first.’”

He moved on to some other jobs here — meatpacker, boiler room fireman — before heading back to New York, living with his father and working as a singing waiter in Jersey City until he was drafted.

He spent 26 months overseas during World War II, assigned to the Fifth Army, performing acrobatics for troops in Australia, North Africa and Italy. He came back to New York, was “discovered” by a talent scout in an elevator, appeared in a play, went to Hollywood and …

After making “The Killers” he was back in Chicago.

He was interviewed in an Oct. 6, 1946 Tribune story with the headline “Former Acrobat Knocks on Door of Film Fame.” Writer Philip K. Scheuer noted the actor’s “deathless features and Apollo-like torso.”

I asked Phillips why Lancaster is not more highly regarded today.

He told me, “Perhaps it’s because he had such an intriguing taste in material, and he developed and, often uncredited, produced many of his own projects, which wasn’t common at the time. He gravitated toward challenging stories general audiences didn’t have to put up with in a John Wayne movie.

“What I love about Lancaster, besides that voice, is how he became both movie star and actor, on his own terms. He had as full and varied a screen career as any male Hollywood star ever enjoyed. ‘Sweet Smell of Success,’ where he plays an insidious Walter Winchell-style gossip columnist, that was a dare to his fans, practically career suicide. But c’mon. The way Hunsecker, Lancaster’s character, says ‘I love this dirty town!’ will live forever.”

Others think that immortality was due to Lancaster.

Kirk Douglas, another actor of similar vintage, died in 2020. He was 103 and had co-starred with Lancaster in six movies. When his pal died, he said this, “It’s the passing of a giant. But Burt will never die.”

And that’s OK by me.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com