Book Review: ‘When Women Ran Fifth Avenue,’ by Julie Satow

WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamour and Energy on the Daybreak of American Style, by Julie Satow

In 1980, Donald J. Trump made the entrance web page of The New York Instances after assaulting a pair of scantily clad women at a Fifth Avenue department store.

That the ladies have been manufactured from stone and have been hooked up to the constructing of Bonwit Teller, within the strategy of being razed and changed by Trump Tower, was of little consolation to the trustees on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, which had been promised these Artwork Deco bas-relief beauties — lengthy hovering over pedestrians, now shattered.

The sculptures’ significance was allegorical in addition to architectural: Malls, although erected principally by males, have all the time been female domains. “The Girls’ Paradise” is the English title of Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, set at a retailer modeled after Le Bon Marché, still standing in Paris regardless of the ravages of e-commerce. Patricia Highsmith framed her 1952 lesbian romance “The Worth of Salt” on the fictional Frankenberg’s, based on Bloomingdale’s.

Now Julie Satow has written a bunch biography of the department-store doyennes who ran the present — and these locations of their heyday really were a form of theater — for the male founders and house owners whose names adorned the facades.

It was intelligent to convene these three queens from completely different durations, together with shorter sketches of figures farther from Fifth Avenue, just like the Black entrepreneur Maggie Walker, who in 1905 opened the St. Luke Emporium for her neighborhood in segregated Richmond, Va.; and Beatrice Fox Auerbach of G. Fox in Hartford, Conn., the inspiration for the savvy scion Rachel Menken of Menken’s on “Mad Males.”

Every may not have sustained a biography of her personal, although Odlum did write a dissembling memoir, “A Lady’s Place,” lengthy out of print, from which Satow attracts. Thought-about in combination, they’re a pressure. You possibly can think about them milling across the nice fragrance counter within the sky. After “Suffs,” perhaps “Spritzes”?

Stutz, who died in 2005, continues to be remembered by a sure cadre of Manhattan aristocracy, and her portrayal is fleshed out by interviews performed by the creator, who has contributed to The Instances (together with the Types part, the place I used to work) and beforehand wrote a e book about the Plaza hotel.

Not that “fleshed out” is a phrase readily utilized to Stutz, who as of late would have nearly definitely been canceled for fat-shaming; below her oversight, Bendel’s solely stocked as much as the equal of a up to date measurement 6. However she additionally revolutionized retail with a winding “avenue of outlets” that opened inside the shop in 1959 (“Avenue of Flops,” sneered the then-president of Bergdorf Goodman after he toured it). At a weekly open call generally known as the Friday Morning Lineup, younger artisans vied for a coveted spot in her stock as if making an attempt to get right into a nightclub.

Shaver had arrived in New York lengthy earlier than, from Arkansas by means of Chicago, on a lark along with her sister, who would design well-liked and peculiar Little Shaver dolls featured in Lord & Taylor’s Christmas home windows.

Employed by the shop’s president, a 3rd cousin of her mom’s, Dorothy labored her means up via the ranks (finally getting his job) and altered its practices: opening the Bird Cage, a well-known restaurant serving tea sandwiches; introducing the sort of private buying refined to a excessive artwork by Betty Halbreich at Bergdorf; selling American designers in a French-obsessed period; and, usually, establishing “that malls may rival galleries, and even museums, as cultural arbiters,” Satow writes. Abashed to be granddaughter to a Accomplice who joined the Ku Klux Klan, Shaver additionally used her energy to advertise racial equality, up to a degree.

The Debbie Downer of the trio is Odlum, devastated after her husband, a Wall Avenue tycoon who’d purchased Bonwit, left her for a manicurist at Saks (and later aviator). A salon colleague asserted in his personal memoir that the scandal was the idea for the Clare Boothe Luce play “The Ladies.”

Odlum supervised improvements together with shifting hats (“innocent whimsies,” a.okay.a. impulse purchases) from an higher ground to prominence, a membership for males to ogle lingerie fashions whereas their wives shopped, and a best-selling novel by the pinnacle of promoting that romanticized the lifetime of an assistant purchaser.

“A giant retailer provides so many glitter and enjoyable to the prosy enterprise of on a regular basis residing,” learn one line. This was definitely true when Salvador Dalí was commissioned to do shows, and crashed a tub full of soiled water via Bonwit’s window in a match of inventive pique.

Odlum married three extra instances however remained bitter, blaming her workload for hassle rearing her youngsters. “When my grandmother died,’’ a grandson tells Satow, “I bear in mind my father saying one thing alongside the strains of, ‘Nicely, the outdated witch is lastly lifeless.’”

There’s the truth is one thing Oz-like in regards to the Technicolor world of the division retailer, with its pneumatic tubes that swooshed money and gross sales slips as much as the ceiling; the show director who took one model, Cynthia, all over the place, together with El Morocco; the limitless number of items ranging even, at one retailer in Oklahoma Metropolis, to infants for adoption.

If the suburban mall did this establishment harm, the 24-7 grand bazaar of the web made it a ghost city. Satow’s e book has one eager for that pleasant hush when the gates rolled down, the doormen went dwelling and buying gave method to sleepytime.

WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE: Glamour and Energy on the Daybreak of American Style | By Julie Satow | Doubleday | 320 pp. | $32.50