Neiman-Marcus, Texas: The Story of the Proud Dallas Store

By Frank X. Tolbert

Herbert Marcus, Sr., a former buyer with Dallas’ Sanger Brothers department store, had left his previous job to found a new business with his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman and her husband, A.L. Neiman, then employees of Sanger Brothers competitor A. Harris and Co. In 1907 the trio had $25,000 from the successful sales-promotion firm they had built in Atlanta, Georgia, and two potential investments into which to invest the funds. Rather than take a chance on an unknown “sugary soda pop business,” the three entrepreneurs rejected the fledgling Coca-Cola company and chose instead to return to Dallas to found a retail business. The store, established on September 10, 1907, was lavishly furnished and stocked with clothing of a quality not commonly found in Texas. Within a few weeks, the store’s initial inventory, mostly acquired on a buying trip to New York made by Carrie, was completely sold out. Oil-rich Texans, welcoming the opportunity to flaunt their wealth in more sophisticated fashion than was previously possible, flocked to the new store. In spite of the Panic of 1907 set off only a few weeks after its opening, Neiman Marcus was instantly successful, and its first several years of operation were quite profitable.

Neiman-Marcus, Texas by Frank X. Tolbert “tells the story of Dallas’ fashion-wise emporium, from its start in 1907 to its acclaim today [1953], and is profiled here in all its elegance, community significance and individual enterprise.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789126761

Frank X. Tolbert

Joseph Francis Tolbert (1912-1984), better known as Frank X. Tolbert, was a Texas journalist, historian, and chili enthusiast. He was best known for his Dallas Morning News local history column Tolbert’s Texas, which ran from 1946 until his death in 1984. Tolbert was born on July 27, 1912 in Amarillo, Texas and was raised in Wichita Falls and Canyon. He attended various colleges and then worked as a sports writer for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Wichita Falls Times Record News, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He also wrote articles that were published in Leatherneck Magazine, Collier’s, Esquire, and the Saturday Evening Post. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, and married Kathleen Hoover in December 1943. In 1946 he joined the Dallas Morning News and became a regular columnist on Texas topics, including colorful Texas people from all walks of life. Tolbert was also a food connoisseur, wrote a history of chili con carne called A Bowl of Red (1972), and ran Tolbert’s chili restaurant in Dallas. In 1967 he founded, with Wick Fowler, the World Chili Championship held annually in Terlingua, Texas, which was later named for them. He appeared in several television commercials for Dennison’s canned chili during the late 1970s. Tolbert died of heart failure on January 10, 1984, aged 71.

Book preview

This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [e-mail]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1953 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

NEIMAN-MARCUS, TEXAS

The Story of the Proud Dallas Store

by

FRANK X. TOLBERT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

1—NEIMAN-MARCUS DEFINED 6

2—MR. STANLEY 15

3—SOME OF THE NEIMAN-MARCUS GIRLS 26

4—IN THE BEGINNING 34

5—THE STATESMAN OF MERCHANDISING 80

6—THE NEIMAN-MARCUS WOMAN 88

7—CARRIE 94

8—THE WORLD SERIES OF FASHION 97

9—THE CRITICS 103

10—SOME GOOD CUSTOMERS 106

11—WE HAVE NO CLERKS 115

12—PROTECTING OUR LABEL 120

13—THE BARRICADES 123

14—THE MAN FROM BROOKS BROTHERS 126

15—CHRISTMAS AT NEIMAN’S 129

16—THE FAMILY 135

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 141

DEDICATION

To Carrie Marcus Neiman

1—NEIMAN-MARCUS DEFINED

ONE night about ten years ago a beautiful blonde girl ghost appeared on a road near Dallas’ White Rock Lake.

Mr. and Mrs. Guy Malloy, directors of display for the world-famous specialty store, Neiman-Marcus, saw the girl. Only they didn’t recognize her, right off, for a ghost. She had walked up from the beach. And she stood there in the headlights of the slow-moving Malloy car.

Mrs. Malloy said, Stop, Guy. That girl seems in trouble. She must have fallen in the lake. Her dress is wet. Yet you can tell that it is a very fine dress. She certainly got it at the Store.

By the Store, Mrs. Malloy meant the Neiman-Marcus Company of Dallas.

The girl spoke in a friendly, cultured contralto to the couple after the car had stopped. She said she’d like to be taken to an address on Gaston Avenue in the nearby Lakewood section. It was an emergency, she said. She didn’t explain what had happened to her, and the Malloys were too polite to ask. She had long hair, which was beginning to dry in the night breeze. And Mrs. Malloy was now sure that the girl was wearing a Neiman-Marcus dress. She was very gracious as she slipped by Mrs. Malloy and got in the back seat of the two-door sedan.

When the car started, Mrs. Malloy turned to converse with the passenger in the Neiman-Marcus gown. The girl had vanished. There was a damp spot on the back seat.

The Malloys went to the address on Gaston Avenue. A middle-aged man answered the door. Yes, he had a daughter with long blonde hair who wore nothing but Neiman-Marcus clothes. She had been drowned about two years before when she fell off a pier at White Rock Lake.

The point of this story—for our purposes—is not that Mr. and Mrs. Guy Malloy, a hard-working, sober, no-nonsense couple, say very firmly that they saw a ghost. Other folks say they have seen the beautiful girl ghost of White Rock. The point of this story is that she was a very well-dressed ghost. And Mrs. Malloy at once identified her as wearing Neiman-Marcus clothes.

For to Dallas women—and to all style-conscious women from Paris to California and from Peru to Alaska—Neiman-Marcus is not just the name of a store which traffics in the choicest of clothes, jewels, and house furnishings. Rather, Neiman-Marcus is an adjective—and a superlative one. An unusually well-groomed woman, who rhymes tastefully with her clothes, is likely to be described as very Neiman-Marcus-ish!

Mrs. Mamie Eisenhower, wife of the first Texas-born president of the United States, is a very Neiman-Marcus-ish lady.

Before buying her clothes for the 1953 inaugural day ceremonies and celebrations, Mrs. Eisenhower went to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to make a good study of the collection of inaugural gowns of former first ladies.

Then Mrs. Eisenhower bought both her Renoir pink gown for the two inaugural balls and her town suit for the inaugural ceremony and parade from the Neiman-Marcus Company. Neiman’s commissioned Nettie Rosenstein to design the ball dress and Hattie Carnegie the suit.

Six days after the inaugural, Mrs. Eisenhower wrote to one of the beauteous experts in Neiman-Marcus’ New York office, Miss Kay Kerr:

I have so many things for which to thank you—your patience, your courtesies, your helpfulness, your excellent opinions and judgment....The past few weeks certainly have been trying ones, and I can imagine what difficulties were imposed upon you where fittings were concerned by my nasty cold, which has been with me since December. That you accomplished so much under such handicaps is a tribute to your patience and efficiency....

George Sessions Perry, a Rockdale, Texas, writer and long-time friend of the Marcus boys, strains his rhetorical milk so much when he mentions Neiman-Marcus that he has never been able to sell the magazines much about the store. Perry says, Many folks look at Neiman-Marcus and see only a breathtakingly beautiful store. This is like a rancher looking at wild flowers and seeing only cow feed. Neiman-Marcus is a state of mind. Almost a state of grace. It isn’t the biggest store on earth, but it is one of the finest and most exciting.

George says you have to burn butane on Olympus’ highest crag to really describe Neiman-Marcus.

Mrs. Edna Woolman Chase, boss editor of Vogue magazine, burned her butane over Neiman-Marcus like this in a Dallas interview: I dreamed all my life of the perfect store for women. Then I saw Neiman-Marcus. And my dream came true!

Physically, Neiman-Marcus is eighty-seven superb shops which gross $25,000,000 a year.

There are about 600,000 people in Dallas, counting the suburbs, and about 50,000 Dallas families have charge accounts at Neiman’s. The rest of Neiman’s 50,000 charge accounts belong to people all over the world, including an astounding number in seaports like Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, New York, and Boston.

These eighty-seven Neiman-Marcus shops are in six six-story buildings which have sprouted up together at Main and Ervay and Commerce streets in the booming heart of downtown Dallas. Some of these buildings are of terracotta traditional with old-fashioned-looking elevators to hoist the customers. And some of the buildings are very modern with escalators and a lot of tan brick and glass and aluminum.

The six buildings are pushed together like so many spelling blocks there in the westward shadow of the thirty-two-story Mercantile Bank Building. And after $7,500,000 of expansion work completed in 1953, the six buildings had 275,000 square feet of floor space.

Neiman’s, strictly a Dallas outfit, also has a new $1,600,000 branch store on Preston Road in the northern suburbs.

The color themes and décor of the Preston Road place, which has 63,000 square feet of space, were inspired by the art and culture of Southwestern Indians. Colors of earth, sun, and sky—as copied from Indian weaving, pottery, and sand painting—are subtly blended throughout this beautiful little store.

The light from the store’s patio reflects on colored glass murals of Kachina figures, which represent various supernatural beings in Indian folklore. Over a stairway hangs a bright-colored Alexander Calder mobile, Mariposa, which prompted an elderly Texas ranchwoman to inform Store Manager Ben Eisner, You’ll never catch any flies with that thing.

Also, Neiman’s has a warehouse—the handsomest in Dallas. From the outside you might take it for a modern art museum. Among the warehouse’s conveniences is a fur vault which has stabled as many as 20,000 mink coats.

This physical description does not explain why Dallas people lead visitors to the store in the same spirit Parisians lead a tourist into the Louvre.

Even Dallas children sense that Neiman’s is a place for reverence. One afternoon a mother and her six-year-old daughter were shopping together in the store and looking very spiffy. The youngster had wished to wear her blue jeans on the trip, but she had been told that blue jeans were not suitable for shopping at Neiman-Marcus. In the lingerie department the little girl spotted one of Neiman-Marcus’s decorative lingerie models parading around in a filmy negligee. The little girl said in a shocked voice, Mamma! Look what that lady wore to shop at Neiman-Marcus!

In the same reverent spirit, a young Texas writer came to the Neiman-Marcus gift-wrapping department with his first novel. He figured that if he sent in the book under a Neiman-Marcus gift wrapping the editors wouldn’t let it go unnoticed. The book was accepted within two weeks. I’ll always wonder how much that Neiman’s gift wrap had to do with it, says the writer.

The Store is a family enterprise, run by the four intelligent, aesthetic, and hard-driving Marcus boys.

Besides Stanley, the company president, the Marci are Edward S. Marcus, executive vice-president and cattleman on the side; Herbert Marcus, Jr., who runs the Man’s Shops; and Lawrence Eliot (Lawrie) Marcus, who is in charge of the famous second floor where the most expensive clothes are sold under the approving eye of a great sixteenth-century Chinese Goddess of Mercy.

Up until her death in 1953, the boys’ gentle, patrician aunt, Mrs. Carrie Marcus Neiman was both a sales person and the chairman of the board. (She was divorced in 1928 from A. L. Neiman, one of the store’s founders and its financial quarterback at the start. And that same year Neiman sold out his interests to the others and moved to New York City.)

To give you an idea how Neiman’s runs today, one morning several years ago the board of directors was considering building the branch store in Preston Hollow. The phone rang. One of Mrs. Carrie Neiman’s customers of forty-year standing was looking for her on the second floor.

Aunt Carrie didn’t have to make any excuses. The other directors understood. She ran for her customer. The meeting ended. The $1,600,000 expansion in the suburbs was forgotten for that day.

In a way, Neiman’s operates like a super-fastidious newspaper. All of the merchandise is carefully edited before the customer ever sets eyes on it.

Department heads have to sell the Store’s uninhibited and brilliant advertising director, Miss Jane Trahey, on why each department’s merchandise should be featured in Neiman’s daily newspaper advertisements.

At one of these weekly powwows, held in the office of Executive Vice-president Eddie Marcus, a merchandising executive named Mrs. Agnes Butterfield was presenting the case for advertising a very expensive little girl’s coat of the new orlon fabric. Mrs. Butterfield is a capable woman with a commanding voice and God for her co-buyer. She mentioned that the orlon coat ought to be featured in an ad because if it gets stained you can just rinse it in water and the stains will come out. That should give those copywriters plenty to write about.

Will it really wash? asked Miss Trahey.

Mrs. Butterfield, becoming a little annoyed, yelled back, Of course it washes!

Stanley Marcus, who was sitting in on the meeting, asked Mrs. Butterfield, Have you ever washed one?

Mrs. Butterfield answered: Of course not! I don’t want a coat in stock that’s been washed.

Eddie Marcus said, We don’t want a lot of coats in stock that won’t wash like the ticket on them says they will.

About then Jane Trahey and Stanley started staining the beautiful little coat with lots of salad dressing and chocolate syrup. And then Eddie Marcus grabbed the stained coat and went into his private restroom and started sloshing it around in water. Meanwhile, Mrs. Butterfield was groaning about a $60 markdown on the coat.

When the coat dried, though, it looked like new. And it was featured in a huge ad.

Neiman-Marcus advertising has an elegant quality about it which the other copy-writers in town can’t seem to quite imitate. These pretty ads have been decorating Dallas newspapers so long that most readers don’t have to look at the Neiman-Marcus nameplate to know they are looking at a Neiman’s ad.

This was proved once in a huge ad featuring an expensive dress. The printers forgot to put the Neiman-Marcus signature in the ad. Nowhere was there any mention of Neiman’s. Yet the dress was a complete sell-out and the store got 300 mail orders from newspaper readers.

Mary Martin—long before she became famous with "My