The Right Places

New York, N. Y. 10019: What Are They Doing to Bergdorf Goodman?

Are there no more absolute strongholds of the super-rich? Well, there are places that have tried to be. But they too are changing fast, and turning into something else.

At Bergdorf Goodman, for example, it used to be that nothing was done that was not done with elegant flourishes. When Andrew Goodman, the president and owner of the store that confers New York’s most prestigious fashion label, once brought in a urine sample to be sent over to his doctor, his secretary in the Christmas confusion had it gift-wrapped and sent to the doctor’s house. It was under the tree on Christmas morning. And they tell the tale of how once in the Bridal Salon the bride-to-be was hesitant about buying a white wedding gown because, as she put it, she was still in mourning for her first husband. A hasty conference was called among Bergdorf’s brass, and the bride wore gray. At the same time, during the recent craze for women wearing cartridge belts slung around their hips, Bergdorf’s would not stock the belts because Andrew Goodman found the fashion personally distasteful.

It was, therefore, something of a shock to the business, social, and shopping communities of New York when Andrew Goodman announced in 1971 that one of the last family-run stores in America would pass out of his family and, pending FTC approval, become a part of the Broadway-Hale department store chain—the conglomerate that also recently gobbled up another of the last family-run stores in America, Neiman-Marcus. What will become of the Bergdorf touch?

Bergdorf’s has also always been a store that is nothing if not cozy. It has been, as they say in the motel business, a “Ma and Pa operation,” and quite literally Andrew Goodman’s father, Edwin Goodman, who founded the store (with a Herman Bergdorf who long ago departed) and his wife were known by all the store’s employees as “Dad” and “Mom.” There are still old-time Bergdorf’s people who refer to the present president as “young Andrew,” and to his son, who is thirty-one, as “little Eddie.” The Goodman fiefdom on Fifth Avenue has been run with such an air of benevolent paternalism that not only the staff but many of the longtime customers treat the place as they would a second home. After all, what other New York specialty store has on its top floor a vast apartment for the Goodman family where, when the lights go out, the storekeeper can sleep right on top of his merchandise. The third elevator in the main bank serves the apartment (which also has its own entrance on Fifty-eighth Street), and through the years customers and salespeople have grown used to the Goodmans, and their children and grandchildren with their nurses, going up and down that elevator. The rule—up until the time the elevators finally went automatic—was that if any member of the Goodman family got into the car, he or she was taken to his chosen floor, reversing directions if need be, regardless of where the other passengers were headed, and the passengers were expected to be understanding. Most were, but one woman wrote crossly, “Why don’t you Goodmans wait until 5:30 when the store is closed—then you can ride up and down that elevator all night as far as I’m concerned!”

“The Apartment,” indeed, has over the years developed its own mystique. It has become a sort of sacred place, since only a few of the elect have been invited into it. To be asked to the Apartment has awesome significance, though whether for good or evil one never knows until one gets there. It is as though, from the Apartment, a Big Brother of Bergdorf’s watches over all. And perhaps he does. In the dining room of the Apartment hangs a portrait of the founder, Edwin the Elder, and not long ago Andrew Goodman, gulping down his breakfast coffee and realizing that he was going to be late for his office on the floor below, looked nervously up at the portrait and said, “Don’t worry, Papa, I’ll stay an extra fifteen minutes tonight.”

The Goodman family has always indulged itself at Bergdorf’s. Several years ago, for reasons which to the outside world seemed odd and whimsical, an antiques department was opened on the third floor where ten-thousand-dollar French clocks were sold hard by ten-thousand-dollar Russian sables. It was because Andrew Goodman’s sister, Ann Goodman Farber, was married to a man who liked fine old furniture. Nena Goodman, Andrew’s wife, collects paintings and is herself a painter of some talent, and so she has been given her own art gallery in the store—a boutique called Nena’s Choice. One of their daughters, Minky (her name is Mary Ann but she had a governess who used to call her “a little minx”) makes pottery, and it has occurred to her to ask for a corner of the store. But Bergdorf Goodman has also been indulgent to its staff, particularly those who have long demonstrated their loyalty to the Goodmans, and the store has many pensioners as well as people who have been kept on the payroll long after their usefulness has ended. Andrew Goodman takes pride in the fact that with a thousand-odd employees he knows nearly every one by name, and in most cases knows their children’s names and ages, and their sizes. The faithful are granted special privileges. Mrs. William Fine, wife of the president of Bonwit Teller but who, as Susan Payson, used to work for Bergdorf’s, once got a last-minute invitation to a formal party. First she murmured that she had nothing to wear, but then added that she thought she could work it out. She “borrowed” an eighteen-hundred-dollar designer dress from her stock, went to the party, and the first person she encountered there was Andrew Goodman. He merely winked, said he admired her taste in dresses, and all was forgiven. When Liberty Bandine, now the store’s personnel director, first went to work for Bergdorf’s she earned seventy-five dollars a week, and her boss became curious about the decidedly expensive way she dressed. Miss Bandine coolly explained that she earned a comfortable second income by playing the horses, and that she had a bookie named Whitey who drove a Bond Bread truck. Thereafter Whitey was permitted to park his truck at the store’s Fifth Avenue entrance while Miss Bandine placed her bets.

Adding to this coziness and feeling of one big happy (and rich) family was the fact that Bergdorf’s, now in its second generation of Goodman family control, had a third Goodman generation in the persons of a fine-looking son, young Eddie, and two fine sons-in-law, Harry Malloy and Gary Taylor.

That is, it did until recently. One by one, each of these men has left the store—first Harry, then Eddie, then Gary. The story along Seventh Avenue is that Gary Taylor, who had become Bergdorf’s general manager, was sitting one day in a meeting where the subject under discussion was whether hemlines would stay up or go down. Suddenly Taylor rose and said, “Gentlemen, I have just come to the conclusion that this business is not my cup of tea,” walked out of the store, and has never come back. This of course is not what really happened, though even Taylor admits that it makes a good story. But the fact is that Taylor, now twenty pounds trimmer—“no more of those rich lunches”—now packs his lunch in a brown paper bag and drives off every day to New Haven, where he is enrolled at the Yale School of Forestry, in the process of making the switch from high fashion to tall timber. Harry Malloy has became an insurance broker. And son Eddie Goodman goes to work every day down a dark flight of steps, past a row of rusted garbage cans, into the basement of an old church to an office marked “Broom Closet.” The youngest of the three Goodman daughters, meanwhile, Pammy, whom the family calls “our hippie,” is married to a man who does no work at all and is living in the New Mexican desert, building her own little adobe hacienda. Now Andrew has been left to mind his store alone. How did it all happen—and happen so fast?

From the beginning, a very special sort of store like Bergdorf’s required a very special sort of man to run it. In 1878, Goodman’s Store at 54 Main Street in Lockport, New York (“Next to Niagara Co. Nat’l Bank”) was running small ads for such items as “25 doz. ladies’ wrappers at 37^½ cts.” By 1919, Adele Simpson, the designer, recalls, her husband’s grandmother ran a millinery shop on Fifth Avenue, opposite where Saks now stands, called Ufland’s. The second floor of this building was rented to a small outfit of dressmakers and furriers called Bergdorf Goodman. When the troops were returning home from World War I, the Simpson children were told that it was all right to watch the parade from the Goodmans’ upstairs window, since Bergdorf Goodman were merely tenants. Mrs. Simpson’s husband, Wesley, remembers that among the onlookers was little Andrew Goodman. The man responsible for the long journey from Lockport that ended opposite the Pulitzer Fountain of Abundance on the Plaza, on the site of the old Cornelius Vanderbilt château, was Andrew’s father.

There were some who called the senior Edwin Goodman austere. Others said that underneath the austere façade there breathed a warm and humorous man. Whatever the case, he was a man with determination and an ability to take the risks who, though he was one, did not look like a canny trader but like an Old World diplomat. And he had both an idea and the luck to have had the idea at just the right place and time. To begin with, Edwin Goodman was frankly only interested in the carriage trade, and his furs and custom-made suits and coats and dresses were made and priced for that market. He was an early fan of Beautiful People, and liked to surround himself with actresses, models, debutantes, and other society or purely ornamental types. He had a great weakness for titles, but his principal requirement in a woman was that she be rich. And, in fitting out rich ladies in coats and suits and furs and dresses, he felt he had learned something about the rich woman’s psyche. Up until 1920, nearly every important dress a rich woman wore was made to order—slowly, with extensive sessions for measurements and fitting. But in the Twenties the pace of a woman’s life was speeding up, and this gave Goodman his Idea: why not sell expensive and elegant dresses that could be bought right off the rack? The notion of ready-to-wear clothes at custom prices was unheard of, and indeed the prophets of doom in the trade were cheerfully on hand to tell Edwin Goodman that it would never work. But when word got around New York that dresses from Bergdorf Goodman which used to take weeks to have made could be bought and worn the same day, sales skyrocketed. By 1927 he was doing three million dollars’ worth of business from the rented rooms over Ufland’s, and a year later sales had jumped to five million dollars. In 1928, Edwin Goodman announced his plans to move to the Vanderbilt site at Fifty-eighth and Fifth, and once more there were enthusiastic Cassandras to point out that no merchant had ever been successful north of Fifty-seventh Street. The year of the move, sales hit six million dollars and the Goodman family installed itself in the gorgeousness of the top-floor apartment where, it was noticed, Mr. and Mrs. Goodman were listed as “janitor” and “janitress,” since building codes prohibited anyone other than a janitor to live in a building where manufacturing took place.

The move to the south end of the Plaza, with its view of the park and upper Fifth Avenue that is unique in the city, was not made rashly or without certain precautionary measures. As shoppers at Bergdorf’s have noticed, the store is not laid out like other stores, with a main shopping area on each floor. Instead, each floor is cut up into a series of small rooms. These rooms were Edwin Goodman’s insurance. If the store did not work as a whole, he could wall off the passageways between these rooms and rent the rooms to other tenants. Fortunately, though there were one or two uneasy years at the beginning of the Depression, the Goodman carriage trade proved indefatigable, and Bergdorf’s has never had to take in roomers.

In his new store, Edwin Goodman was able to indulge his own taste for European nobility as well as the snobbishness of his customers. He hired, for example, a grand duchess as a saleslady, and he found a good perfume man who happened, not entirely coincidentally, to be a Georgian nobleman named Prince Matchabelli. His publicity lady was the Countess de Forceville, and the publicity that the store received was appropriately high-toned. Edwin Goodman’s son has carried on in his father’s tradition, bringing to the store such luminaries as the great Jo Hughes and Dr. Erno Laszlo. Though not titled, exactly, these are something very close to the Blood Royal when one realizes that the likes of the Duchess of Windsor and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney will practically not get dressed in the morning without consulting Miss Hughes. And without Dr. Laszlo’s skin treatments and products, according to Leonard Hankin, Bergdorf’s vice president, “Anita Colby would do a Shangri-La act right before our eyes.” In the Mallett antique shop, meanwhile, it seemed right that the man in charge be a dashing London bachelor named Sir Humphrey Wakefield.

Personal service for the best “clients”—never “customers”—was another of Edwin Goodman’s fetishes, and when the likes of the late Mrs. Thelma Chrysler Foy (a storekeeper’s delight, so much did she love to shop, often buying twenty dozen pairs of gloves and eighty hats of an afternoon) stepped through his doors, the master himself descended from his fifth-floor office to help wait on her. Today, Andrew Goodman will often ask a prime client up to his big corner office for a drink, or to the apartment for lunch, where salesgirls troop up with armfuls of merchandise. This has led to a few embarrassing moments, as happened not long ago when rumor flew through the store that “one of the Bronfmans” was in Bergdorf’s and buying heavily. The Bronfmans, of course, control a vast distillery fortune, and the shopping Bronfman was politely asked upstairs. There, all sorts of treasures were brought forth, including an eighteen-thousand-dollar antique spinet that, perhaps understandably, had gone unsold for some time. The Bronfman bought and bought—including the spinet—but while store executives were rubbing their hands, Nena Goodman became suspicious. She excused herself and made a few telephone calls. The “Bronfman” was an impostor, and was thrown out of the store empty-handed.

Nena Goodman’s role in running to earth the ersatz Bronfman is typical of an operation that has always considered itself more of a family than a business. In times of crisis, all the Goodmans have pitched in to do their share. In his growing-up years and through Choate and Yale, young Eddie Goodman was not “groomed” for retailing, exactly, but it was always more or less understood, in conversations with his father and grandfather, that Eddie would follow their footsteps into Bergdorf’s. When Andrew Goodman’s daughters reached the age when they wanted summer jobs, they went to work at Bergdorf’s. More recently, in Jo Hughes’s fashion shows, which always close with a wedding scene, Andrew Goodman’s eleven grandchildren provide Miss Hughes with a prime source for flower girls and pages. Just as the brooding influence of the Apartment overhead has shaped the attitude of every Bergdorf salesgirl, so has the Store loomed over the lives of three generations of Goodmans. And so it has been a shock to everyone connected with Bergdorf Goodman to realize that in a very few years there will be no more Goodmans there.

What is less well known is that Edwin Goodman, Sr.’s dynastic dream for his son and grandson very nearly collapsed a generation ago, not long after his white marble temple was completed on Fifty-eighth Street and the Plaza. And though the family has always conveyed an impression of cozy unity, there have, for many years, been rumblings from within. Andrew Goodman, for example, did not join his father’s enterprise without certain misgivings, and most people today who cite Andrew Goodman as one of New York’s great merchants are unaware that he didn’t really want to be one. He was of a generation in which dutiful Jewish sons did what their patriarchal Jewish fathers told them to, and perhaps, in the end, he would have had to go with the store even though there was a time when he wanted desperately not to. In his youth, Andrew Goodman showed certain signs of enjoying the good life of a rich young man around town, and when his father decided that Andrew was being frivolous about his studies he was plucked out of the University of Michigan and sent off to Paris to be apprenticed to the fashion house of Jean Patou. In Paris, there was more frivolity and more parental displeasure.

There was consternation in the Goodman family, however, in 1935 when Andrew announced that he wanted to marry a beautiful Cuban girl named Nena Manach. Not only was Nena a “foreigner,” but she had been married before and had a daughter by her previous husband (Vivien Goodman Malloy is only a half-sister to Andrew Goodman’s other children). She was also a Roman Catholic. Nena’s first meeting with the senior Goodmans was hardly auspicious. At dinner, served in the stiff and formal Old World style that Mr. Goodman preferred, Mr. Goodman asked Nena where she had bought her dress. She mentioned some shop on Madison Avenue, and there was a thundering silence. When she and Andrew continued to make plans for their marriage despite Mr. Goodman’s objections, Mr. Goodman summoned Nena to his office. He handed her a legal document and told her to sign it. It was a premarital contract in which Nena was asked to promise that in the event of a divorce, she would not ask more than one hundred dollars a month alimony from Andrew. In tears, Nena signed the agreement, and she and Andrew were married in September of that year.

True, Mr. Goodman’s attitude toward Nena gradually softened. On their first wedding anniversary, he gave her a fur piece. It wasn’t much fur—only four skins—but in the box containing it were scraps of paper which Nena realized was the torn-up marriage contract. And so Andrew Goodman took up his duties at the store only as a sort of compromise. Having caused his father so much displeasure, he could not cause him more.

Andrew Goodman today is a cheerful, handsome man who dresses with quiet conservatism—he refuses to join the swing to wider neckties and prison-stripe shirts—who talks easily on almost any subject and who actually has a stream-of-consciousness speaking style, leaping gracefully from subject to subject—from the impressive business done by Julie Trissell, Bergdorf’s coat and suit lady (six million dollars a year in her department alone) to his irritation with New York’s Landmarks Commission for attempting to get Bergdorf’s building declared a landmark (“It’s barely forty years old, for God’s sake!”) to his cautious optimism that the FTC will rule favorably on the Broadway-Hale takeover—despite grumbling from Ralph Nader’s Raiders that by acquiring Bergdorf’s Broadway-Hale will have some sort of monopoly on American high fashion (“Ridiculous!”). To help him with his flow of conversation, Andrew Goodman has an executive-type telephone setup in his office that lets him talk, and that talks back to him, as he moves about his office, and a wide variety of calls can thus be managed at the same time. “Of course it was a disappointment to have the boys leave,” he said recently, between pushing buttons and juggling calls, “I wanted them to stay, and in each case there were long conversations with Harry, Eddie, and Gary. But I respect their wish to do their own thing. And with this merger I think I’ve accomplished several things—found a good marriage partner whose stock is excellent. They’ve promised to give us complete autonomy—as they’ve done with Neiman-Marcus, which has worked out very happily for all concerned. Under the terms of the deal, the family keeps the property and the apartment—Broadway-Hale will lease the store. In view of the family situation, I think I’ve set it up pretty well.”

It is certainly true that all the Goodmans have been set up so that they are very well off. During the week in the apartment Andrew and Nena Goodman entertain frequently at small luncheons and dinners that are part business, part social. Because business takes Andrew Goodman into the fashion worlds of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, their friends tend to reflect those worlds too, and so at a Goodman dinner party it would be no surprise to find Jimmy Galanos, just in from the Coast, or “the whole Dior gang,” as Nena Goodman calls them, in town from Paris. The Goodmans’ best friends are Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Draddy (of David Crystal, the dress manufacturer) who are their pop-in-on neighbors in the country. Nena Goodman prefers eight to ten at a seated dinner (often black tie), but the apartment is perfectly capable of handling two to three hundred people for a cocktail buffet, such as the one tossed for the Duke of Windsor, and another given for Count and Countess Hubert D’Ornanon, the French perfumer and entrepreneur. The country house in Rye is a large and rambling frame affair with airy, antique-filled rooms that seem to open onto each other endlessly and stretch the length of a football field. Here there is a pool and tennis court, and weekend afternoons are spent with friends dropping over for a game or a swim—the Draddys, or the George Berlingers, or financier Leon Mandel, in from Palm Beach with his also-Cuban-born wife, Carola.

There are those who say that Andrew Goodman doesn’t really run the store, and hasn’t for a number of years—that the real power behind the Bergdorf throne is non-family Leonard Hankin, Bergdorf’s vice president. One who voices this view is designer-manufacturer Malcolm Starr, who says, “Leonard makes all the decisions—he just brings them to Andrew for an okay.” There is a certain amount of truth in this, although Goodman and Hankin actually operate as a curiously effective team in which Andrew Goodman is the charming and kindly father-figure in the store, and Leonard Hankin is the man called in whenever unpleasant tasks must be performed. As a result, everybody who works at Bergdorf’s loves “Mr. Andrew” unabashedly, while “Mr. Leonard” is regarded with less enthusiasm by many people. The formidable Jo Hughes, because she is perhaps the foremost woman in high fashion in America, can speak from an impregnable position of power in the store, and can say whatever she thinks, and usually does. She once asked Mr. Hankin, “Leonard, how can you work in a place where you are so thoroughly hated?” His answer, with a shrug, was, “Somebody has to do the dirty work—the needling, the hiring and firing.”

Hankin himself is a rosy-faced man with bright eyes and a fine mane of white hair who, in contrast to Andrew Goodman, comes to work in windowpane-checked suits and patent leather Gucci shoes. As an ambitious young man, a number of years ago, working in Bergdorf’s fur department, he wrote a long memorandum to Mr. Edwin Goodman which contained Hankin’s suggestions for “goosing up” the store and its profits—including a department for less expensive dresses for younger and less rich women. Weeks passed, and there was no reply to the memo. Then it came: a summons to the Apartment. Mr. Goodman’s terse comment, when Hankin arrived, was: “I like many of your ideas, but I don’t want to see them carried out in my lifetime. After I’m gone, you and Andrew can do what you like.” And that is more or less what has happened, including the addition of the very successful Miss Bergdorf department where under-one-hundred-dollar dresses can be bought.

A rumor that persists at Bergdorf is that Leonard Hankin once had the temerity to say to Andrew Goodman, “Andrew, why don’t you stick to your charities and committees, and I’ll run the store.” Whether or not Hankin actually said this or not, it is true that in recent years Andrew Goodman has devoted more and more time to speechmaking and fund-raising for such causes as the United Jewish Appeal, the National Jewish Hospital, and the American Jewish Committee. Though his children are all baptized Catholics, he has remained a “conscious Jew,” but not a practicing one. He also toils for a number of other causes and sits on boards such as the Fifth Avenue Association, the New York City Better Business Bureau and the Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Many of his activities are non-Bergdorforiented, though no matter where he is—even on a yacht in the Aegean—he telephones daily for the sales figures.

An inability to get along with Leonard Hankin has been cited as the chief reason why, one by one, Harry Malloy, Eddie Goodman, and Gary Taylor left the fold of family and store. All three men smile and say that this is not so, but it probably was a factor in each case. A while ago, another rumor circulated that the Goodman family, in order to keep the boys in the store, was considering firing Hankin, and it is true that Hankin became extremely exercised at one point when a Florida newspaper referred to him as “formerly of Bergdorf Goodman,” and wanted a retraction printed. The three young men, meanwhile, have mentioned the difficulties inherent in being “a son in the business”—any business. Relations between themselves and their associates, they claimed, always seemed strained and unnatural. It is always hard for lower-echelon personnel to speak honestly to the boss’s son; there is always the chance that he’ll carry it up to his father’s office. And so, one by one, they went.

Harry Malloy went first, after ten years in the store, and went into partnership in the insurance business. He thrives and is happy in it. Next went Eddie Goodman, after four and a half years with the store. “I majored in English Lit at Yale,” he says, “and I toyed with the idea of teaching. But teaching is too pastoral for me. I like to see the input and output of what I do. I went with the store with misgivings—just as my father did, with ambivalent feelings about it, thinking that it was what I was supposed to do, remembering my grandfather. He was a great presence, a personage—there was a great scurrying about when he was coming to call, and you had to be scrubbed raw, before being ushered into the presence. And it’s not that I don’t like retailing, and fashion is the most interesting part of retailing, much more interesting than selling cars. But the point is, to be good at retailing, you have to adore it. You have a six-day-a-week job. You have to make it your life. I helped organize the Bigi department, and that was fun. But 1967, you may remember, was a bad year for the cities—I wanted to do something, to get involved. After leaving the store, I worked in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a member of a nine-man team that was trying to develop a college in Bed-Stuy, and also to bring new businesses into the area.”

Eddie Goodman has since joined Pacifica Radio’s station WBAI–FM, a free-wheeling listener-supported station that operates from a converted East Side church, as the station’s general manager. Here he appears to be in sharp contrast with his surroundings—a tall, slim man whose suits and ties are even more conservative than his father’s, and whose hair is unfashionably short, he works in a studio where intense and flowing-haired young men work in beads and cut-off jeans, taping programs of Ukrainian folk music or discussing the travels and teachings of Baba Ram Dass. A bowl of catfood for the studio cat, a fat yellow tiger, sits in the center of the cluttered room. “I’m sure they think me the squarest of the squares,” Eddie Goodman says. “I’ve recognized that sartorial and tonsorial politics is a real thing, but I don’t believe in it—nor do I believe in changing my life style to suit my new career.” Eddie Goodman, his wife, and two little girls have a large Park Avenue apartment, a maid, and a nurse for the children, and take a house for the summer on the North Shore. He does, however, go to work by subway, getting off at Fifty-ninth Street, and says, “I guess there’s some retailing still in my blood, because I always cut through Bloomingdale’s to see how they’re doing.” He also says, “I often think nowadays that if the feminine liberation movement had started twenty years earlier, there might still be Goodmans at Bergdorf’s. The pressure was always on me, the son, to go into the business. Nobody ever considered my three sisters. Who knows? They might have been great.”

Minky and Gary Taylor, meanwhile, live in a big Victorian house with fourteen-foot ceilings on Long Island Sound, from which Gary Taylor commutes to the Yale School of Forestry. “I don’t really consider myself a dropout from the rat race,” he says, “and I’m not really going to become Smoky the Bear.” Taylor, who is in his mid-thirties, admits that he has been a man slow to “find” himself. Originally from Denver, he was a Dartmouth dropout who wanted to be a writer, and for a while he lived in the Village writing poetry and trying to sell it. He worked for a while for various magazines, but never for the one he wanted to, the New Yorker, which turned him down. “I went to Bergdorf’s because I was told that Leonard had spread himself too thin, and needed someone.” When he left, he had the title of the store’s general manager. “It wasn’t that Leonard Hankin and I didn’t get along, but it was a little strange. Before I went to the store, we used to know the Hankins socially and go to their house a lot. The minute I joined Bergdorf’s, the invitations stopped. With Leonard, you’re either a friend or a business associate—never both.”

Along with other young Americans, Gary Taylor had become increasingly concerned about ecology—“Do you know that there is more tin above the ground in this country than there is under the ground in the entire world? We’ve got to begin to think of garbage as a new kind of natural resource.” And so, it grew “in the back of my mind, as a child of my time, I had to get out and do something. And believe me, there’s more to what I’m taking at Yale than just trees. I don’t know what direction I’ll be taking yet, but I’m at Yale to find out.” After a few days of classes at Yale, Taylor wailed to his wife, whom he met while she was an undergraduate at Smith, “My concentration span has left me!” Said she, “You never had any.”

The Taylors were packing for a trip to Portugal, and their four little boys, their nurse, and a big Dalmatian dog named Gypsy were all, in certain ways, underfoot. “I’m all with Gary for what he’s doing,” Minky Taylor said. “And I’m afraid I think Bergdorf’s is a frivolous business—and the store has changed.” When Eddie Goodman was getting married, for example, his future wife’s mother brought a dress to the store to find matching shoes. A claustrophobic woman, she decided to leave the store by way of a staircase rather than the elevator and, going out, a fire door slammed. Immediately, alarms went off and the poor woman was tackled by guards in the street who threatened to carry her off to precinct headquarters. Though she kept screaming, “My daughter is going to marry Eddie Goodman!” it was a while before she was released. And not long ago Minky Taylor herself, making a Charge-Take purchase at the store, was required to show elaborate identification. “You hate to have to say, ‘Look, my father owns this place,’” she says. “But in the old days that simply would not have happened.”

There are also those who insist that the Bergdorf woman shopper has changed in recent years, now that the spending likes of Mrs. Foy are no more than a memory. Not only are younger women coming into the store who are looking for less expensive clothes, with the two-thousand-dollar dresses having a much harder time finding a market, but the rich women customers seem to be spending less money, or at least spending money in different ways. Two very profitable recent items, for example, had nothing to do with high fashion. They were a transparent plastic “dome” umbrella that goes over the wearer’s entire head and shoulders, and something called an Isotoner—a leotard of a special fabric which, when worn, is said to firm and tone the wearer’s body. Almost novelty-store items, you might say. And there is a new kind of customer, meanwhile, for the expensive items, and she might be called the non-customer. She is a great source of annoyance to Messrs. Goodman and Hankin because, after lunch and a few cocktails, she sweeps with a friend into Bergdorf’s, buys like a mad thing for an hour or so, and then the next day—her friend having been suitably impressed—she returns everything for credit. There are also those who say that the store has let down its side badly, and there were startled looks on the street floor the other day when a modishly dressed young girl, all beads, chains, hair, and fringe, emerged from an elevator with her male escort who, above the belt of his tie-dyed jeans, wore nothing at all besides a headband. “In the old days, he would not have been permitted inside the store,” a salesgirl whispered.

“We used to run a store for the rich woman and the kept woman,” Leonard Hankin said recently. “We can’t any more.” Still, there are enough of the old breed around to allow the store to retain some of its air of gentility and comfort, including one longtime customer who wrote to Andrew Goodman to suggest that her name be taken off the store’s mailing list. She was in her eighties now, and infirm, she explained, and hardly ever went out any more, “and it makes me feel a little guilty knowing you are spending that postage on me.”

“Oh, I so hope the FTC approves!” Minky Taylor said, when the decision was still pending, as though she longed to have the great weight of the famous store thrown forever from her slender Goodman shoulders; as though she yearned for one of the last “family” stores for the super-rich to pass out of the family and into the hands of a super-super-rich conglomerate; as though she knew that the idea of such former “right” places as Bergdorf’s was dying, and that it must be allowed to die as gracefully as possible. Within weeks, her prayers were answered. The FTC approved, and the conglomeration was complete.

What changes will take place when Bergdorf’s—so small and special and private—becomes a part of Broadway-Hale? Well, certainly there will be branches of Bergdorf Goodman opening across the landscape, from Scarsdale to Atlanta. Branchification was something the Goodmans always scorned (though, as an inducement to Eddie, a branch store—to give him his head, and his own place—was for a while considered in Chicago). But the greatest loss, most people feel, will be the personal touch of the Goodman family. Not long ago a candy manufacturer approached Andrew Goodman with the idea of setting up a street-floor chocolate boutique at Bergdorf’s. Andrew took a box of chocolates home, tried a few pieces, and didn’t like it. So there was no boutique. In the Broadway-Hale conglomerate, who will taste the candy? Who will ever care?