O What a Lovely War!!!
Nothing is too lavish if it helps Neiman's and Sakowitz sell a few odds and ends here and there.
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Now back to Larry Marcus who, like big brother Stanley, is a very cultured man, and who has put together an important personal art collection. One friend of both Larry and Bob compared the two men this way "Larry is older and is more sophisticated: he has a well trained eye and buys what he loves—which is invariably superb. Bobby is still acquiring taste and, incidentally, his wife is one of his best teachers. She has great inborn taste."
Larry admits that Neiman's inauspicious start back in 1955 in a renovated "awkward, expensive" downtown building was a mistake. Houstonians just weren't impressed. The Post Oak-Galleria store, opened in 1969, however, is another story. The $10 million, architecturally exciting "most costly retail specialty facility ever built" (to quote Larry Marcus) with translucent onyx exterior panels and a classy, airy, three story interior with marble and brick floors, Indian rugs, and smashing displays opened across the street from its smaller-sized competing Sakowitz Post Oak store (the Southern Colonial style building was promptly remodelled and enlarged). Says one observer about the two stores: "as far as presentation is concerned—the buildings, the displays, the decor—there's no question that Neiman's is top dog. You might as well compare Tiffany's and Woolworth's." Ouch!
Comparisons may hurt, but everyone does compare—the stores, the prices (Neiman's is generally considered to be "high") and the personalities. Comparing Bob and Larry's offices may (or may not) tell as much about them and perhaps about their stores as any interview or public relations handout could. Bob's 12 feet by 12 feet cubicle in the basement of the downtown store is anything but impressive. Waiting in the Sakowitz executive reception area is depressing: early funeral home decor with double-tiered arrangements of plastic spring flowers, hospital tan walls, linoleum floor and a fenced-in switchboard girl whose back-drop is a sleezy bilge green drapery drawn skimpily across a doorway. This is Class?
Bobby's own office is an incredible clutter of papers piled 15 inches high on his desk and on the table behind him. The sofa is covered with packages, books, paper bags, two African looking artifacts and assorted items, all of which looks like it had been there forever. Dingy rug. An office version of the average teen-ager's bedroom. But Bob is there, looking out of place in these sloppy surroundings. Impeccably dressed. Natty, Yes, maybe he does have Class after all, and he's so darned handsome. Vaguely resembles (but much better looking than) Eddie Fisher.
Bob smiles. A friendly smile. "What's the difference between Sakowitz and Neiman's? Well," he answers slowly, and oh yes, warmly, "We try to be a little warmer. We have the best quality with a friendlier approach. Our customers are our personal friends. Neiman's has more the snobbish appeal. That's a perfectly valid approach, but it's just not ours," says the man who sold a jeroboam of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1929 to a Houston housewife for $9600 at last fall's third annual wine auction, an auction which he personally dreamed up.
Bob says Sakowitz wants to expand, but "we want to stay in the Southwest because we know the customer here. We'll go as far west as Phoenix, as north as Denver or Kansas City and as east as Atlanta." He makes much of the fact that Neiman's is "going national," now that it has been bought by Broadway Hale and already has stores in Atlanta, Bal Harbour (Florida) and one planned for Washington D. C., in addition to the Texas stores.
Larry Marcus and a chorus of Neiman PR people proclaim that the advent of Broadway Hale brought no changes except in accounting procedures. "They helped teach us things about management of resources, about cautious budgeting," says Larry. "In fact, my two brothers have probably had more influence on Broadway Hale than the reverse. They know about fine stores and Broadway Hale now owns three: the other two being Holt Renfrew in Canada and Bergdorf Goodman in NYC."
Not everyone agrees. A recently departed Neiman's executive who wishes to be unnamed commented "When a chain oriented to volume and large profits buys a small store not so oriented, there are bound to be changes. They still carry the couture things, but at the lower end the merchandise just isn't the same quality."
A Dallas doctor's wife thinks Neiman's is "getting cheap" since the Broadway Hale merger. "When the A. A.O.O. [American Academy of Otolaryngologists and Opthalmologists] held their convention here last fall," she says, "we asked Neiman's to put on a fashion show for the wives. They've always done that in the past and God knows those wives spend plenty in the store. But this year, we had to pay them to put on a show. Sanger Harris, on the other hand, gave us a champagne reception and fashion show gratis."
Larry Marcus' office is on the garden level of the Post Oak store. Garden level—that's chic for basement, although it is open on one side to a landscaped area so one can enter from the outside parking garage, walk through a spacious reception area to the elevators up to any of the three main floors. The executive offices are a far cry from those at Sakowitz. Space everywhere. Big leafy (real) plants in handsome brass and ceramic tubs. Chicly dressed model-types walk through. There's a colorful contemporary wall hanging on one wall that looks like it belongs in a museum. Larry Marcus' secretary is behind an opaque glass petition. The wait here is fun.
His office is large, about 20 feet by 20 feet, cluttered too, but even those piles of papers have handsome paper weights one would like to get a history on. The clutter turns out to be mostly maps and aerial photographs of land which Larry is developing outside Houston and Dallas. Art is everywhere. The place is sort of a confused museum. Lithographs, oils, several dozen small sculptures in wood, bronze, clay and glass.
Larry is attractive in an Anthony Quinn-handsome-ugly way. Clothes are OK but nothing super. He claps his hand and at once four wheels within a wire kinetic sculpture by Harry Kramer start going round. It's hard to concentrate on the interview what with snatching glances at his etchings and trying (but not too hard) not to eavesdrop on a phone call which interrupts. ("Sorry, Bill," says Larry, "I just wouldn't be interested in plastic copies. I'd rather have the authentic real thing for $100,000 than copies for $200. That's the sort of thing Foley's or Joske's might carry, but not us.") Now, that is class!
A man of many interests which include community affairs, Larry, like his brothers, follows their father's advice "to be successful, a man must be a leader not only in his business but in the city, state and nation in which he lives." So Larry is on museum boards. He even gets involved in un-chic concerns such as the financing of water districts. Not that Bob Sakowitz, his wife, his mother and his father, aren't Serving too. They are all on a long list of fund drives and boards, all doing their share, and more than their share, of Good Works.
But Larry does have that great house, that impressive art collection, and then, of course, he has polo. An invitation to have a drink at his house in Houston is, well, much like a chance for cocktails at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Statues everywhere, even poolside. An orchid greenhouse. Dramatic Howard Barnstone-designed house. In comparison, the young Sakowitz's Colonial house, while attractive, is, like their store, simply not that dramatic.
But to that matter of polo, the dernier cri in snob appeal. Poor old Bob gets left behind at the post (he only has a ranch). Larry has his own 900 acre polo farm outside Houston where his trainer tends some 30 polo ponies. An expensive hobby, polo. Larry plays the game about once a week, usually with Will Farish III, whose grandfather was one of the rounders of Humble Oil Co. In the old days, the local players used Neiman-Marcus hat boxes as goal posts.
You know in your heart that a man who plays polo is not going to cheat you when he sells you diamonds, don't you? Larry said once, "The entire jewelry business is a business of faith" and one suspects that he might well have omitted the word jewelry.
Just how impressed with Neiman's and Sakowitz some Houstonians really are may be reflected in the fifth grade at River Oaks Elementary School, about four miles down the road from both stores, where a small girl whose mother bought her clothes at Target has been nicknamed "Target" by some class-conscious classmates. Such little girls, splendid in their Pappagallo shoes and I-bought-it-at-Neiman's clothes are ruled already by shopping snobbism. Someone has told them—their mothers? their older sisters? who?—that it is terribly declasse to buy clothes at Target. For them, Neiman's is The Ultimate. Sakowitz is OK. Sears and Penney's: practical in a pinch but no panache. But Target? Yuck!
So when you read in the newspapers that someone has bought two $32,000 Caproni Jet sailplanes from Neiman's Christmas catalogue and someone else has bought a bottle of wine from Sakowitz for a price nearly equal to a working man's yearly income, then think of the schoolyard those people are playing in. If you can play in it too, that's fine. Just be careful that you know all the rules. There may be some schoolgirls around waiting to pounce.
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