8 On the Avenue
In all my life, I had never shopped on Michigan Avenue. I had no idea who was in business there or what they sold (except for a general feeling that they sold expensive merchandise and made plenty of money). It was only after I had opened the doors of Stuart Brent: Books and Records, that I discovered what a strategic location I had chosen... strategically in competition with two of the best-known book dealers in the city!
Only a block down the street was the Main Street Book Store, already a fixture on the Avenue for a decade. A few blocks farther south stood Kroch’s, Chicago’s largest bookseller and one of the greatest in America, while north of me the Michigan Avenue branch of Lyon and Healy, the great music store, still flourished. And I thought what the Avenue needed was Stuart Brent with his books and records! Maybe it was, but the outlook did not seem propitious.
Now, ten years later, Main Street and I are still selling books and not, I think, suffering from each other’s proximity. Main Street’s orientation has always been toward art, and they run a distinguished gallery in connection with their business. Lyon and Healy eventually closed its branch operation, and Kroch’s left the Avenue when they merged with Brentano, an equally large organization with which I have no family connection, on the Italian side or any other. These consolidations, I am sure, were simply manifestations of big business. If I were to fret about the competition, it would be that of the dime store next door, which sells books and records, too.
In addition to the street-level floor, my new shop had a fine basement room which I fitted out hopefully as a meeting place. I immediately began staging lectures and parties and put in a grand piano so we could have concerts, too. Anything to bring in people. Business grew, but as I soon found I would have to sell things besides books in order to meet the overhead, I compromised on long-standing principles and brought in greeting cards. Within six months, I was also selling “how to do it books”—how to eat, how to sleep, how to love, how to fix the leaky pipe in your basement, how to pet your cat, how to care for your dog, how to see the stars....
By the time I had been on the Avenue a year, it was hard for me to see how my shop differed from any other where you might find some good books and records if you looked under the pop numbers and bestsellers. Apparently some people still found a difference, however. In his book The Literary Situation, Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished critic, wrote:
On Michigan Avenue, I passed another shop and recognized the name on the window. Although the salesroom wasn’t large, it was filled with new books lining the walls or piled on tables. There were also two big racks of long-playing records, and a hidden phonograph was playing Mozart as I entered (feeling again that I was a long way from Clark and Division). The books on the shelves included almost everything published during the last two or three years that I had any curiosity about reading. In two fields the collection was especially good: psychiatry and books by Chicago authors.
I introduced myself to the proprietor, Stuart Brent, and found that he was passionately interested in books, in the solution of other people’s personal problems, and in his native city. Many of his customers are young people just out of college. Sometimes they tell him about their problems and he says to them, “Read this book. You might find the answer there.” He is mildly famous in the trade for his ability to sell hundreds of copies of a book that arouses his enthusiasm: for example, he had probably found more readers for Harry Stack Sullivan’s An Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry than any other dealer in the country, even the largest. Collections of stories are usually slow-moving items in bookstores, although they have proved to be more popular as paperbacks. One evening Brent amazed the publisher of Nelson Algren’s stories, The Neon Wilderness, by selling a thousand copies of the hardcover book at an autograph party.
We talked about the days when the Near North Side was full of young authors—many of whom became famous New Yorkers—and about the possibility of another Chicago renaissance, as in the years after 1915. Brent would like to do something to encourage such a movement. He complained that most of the other booksellers didn’t regard themselves as integrated parts of the community and that they didn’t take enough interest in the personal needs of their customers.... Brent’s complaint against the booksellers may well have been justified, from his point of view, but a visitor wouldn’t expect to find that any large professional group was marked by his combination of interest in persons, interest in the cultural welfare of the community, and abounding energy.
As a group, the booksellers I have met in many parts of the country are widely read, obliging, likable persons who regard bookselling as a profession and work hard at it, for lower incomes than they might receive from other activities. They would all like to sell more books, in quantities like those of the paperbacks in drugstores and on the news stands, but they are dealing in more expensive articles, for which the public seems to be limited.
The Literary Situation was published by Viking Press in 1954. I had met Mr. Cowley on a January evening the year before. When he came in, tall and distinguished looking, I had given him a chance to browse before asking if I could be of assistance. He smiled when I offered my help, then asked if I had a copy of Exile’s Return. I did. He fingered the volume and asked if I made a living selling books. “Of course,” I said, slightly miffed.
“But who in Chicago buys books like the ones you have on these shelves?” he asked.
“Lots and lots of people,” I assured him. I still didn’t know he was baiting me. We began to talk about Chicago, as I now saw it and as it had been. In a moment, he was off on Bug House Square (Chicago’s miniature Hyde Park), the lamented Dill Pickle Club, the young Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Charlie MacArthur, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Archibald MacLeish, Sinclair Lewis. I had to ask his name, and when he said, Malcolm Cowley, I took Exile’s Return away from him and asked him to autograph it to me. He took the book back and wrote: “To Stuart Brent—a real bookstore.” I felt better about being on the Avenue.
The next evening, Mr. and Mrs. Cowley came to one of our concerts in the downstairs room and heard Badura-Skoda and Irene Jonas play a duo recital.
America lacks the cafés and coffee houses that serve as literary meeting places in all European countries. I had high hopes for our basement room with its piano and hi-fi set and tables and comfortable chairs as a place for such interchange. In addition to our concerts, lectures, and art exhibits, there were Saturday afternoon gatherings of men and women from a wide range of professions and disciplines who dropped in to talk and entertain each other. We served them coffee and strudel.
Possibly the most memorable of our concerts was that played by William Primrose. He had promised long ago to do one if I ever had a shop with the facilities for it. We had them now, and quite suddenly Primrose called to announce that he would be stopping over in Chicago on his way to play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and would be delighted to present us with a recital.
There were only a few days to prepare for the event. As soon as the word was out, we were deluged with phone calls. Our “concert hall” would seat only fifty people, so I decided to clear the floor on the street level, rent two hundred chairs for the overflow audience, and pipe the music up to them from the downstairs room. I hired a crew of experts to arrange the microphones and set up the speakers.
The show did not start with any particular aplomb, and it got worse, for me at least, as the evening progressed. Primrose came early to practice. It hadn’t occurred to me that he needed to. He wanted not only to practice, but moreover a place in which he could do so undisturbed. Since the “concert hall” was swarming with electricians, not to mention the porter setting up chairs while I ran up and down the stairs alternating between a prima donna and a major domo, it looked as though another place would have to be found for Primrose to practice. I therefore took the great violist into a basement storage room that served as a catchall shared by my shop and the drugstore next door. But Primrose settled down happily in the dirty, poorly lit room amid stacks of old bills, Christmas decorations, old shelves and fixtures, empty bottles and cartons of Kleenex and went to work.
In less than ten minutes, a little grey man who filled prescriptions came bounding down the stairs screaming, “Where is Brent? Where is Brent?” He caught me in the hall and continued yelling, “If this infernal racket doesn’t stop, honest to God, I’ll call the police!” It was no use telling him the man making the racket was one of the world’s greatest musicians. He had never heard of Primrose and couldn’t have cared less. The noise coming up the vents, he claimed, was not only causing a riot in the drugstore, but he was so unnerved by the sounds that he had already ruined two prescriptions. While he was howling about his losses, I began howling with laughter. But there seemed nothing to do but get Primrose out of that room.
I moved my star into our receiving room, a messy cubbyhole ten feet wide. He didn’t seem to mind, although now, since he couldn’t walk up and down, he was confined to sitting in a chair for his practice.
Meantime, a crowd far beyond our capacity had swarmed into both levels of the shop. Those who came early got seats. Others sat on the stairs leading down to the hall. The rest stood, and some even spilled out the door onto Michigan Avenue. I couldn’t get from one end of the place to the other without stepping on people. I found myself begging someone’s pardon all evening long.
Then the complaints began. Those seated in the hall were gasping for air. Our cooling system simply wasn’t up to handling that many people. I rushed to the boiler room where the gadgets for controlling the air-conditioning were located and tried to improve the situation. Of course, I made it worse.
Finally I introduced Primrose to the audience and beat a hasty retreat. Almost at once an “important” guest tackled me with his complaints. I beat my way upstairs (those sitting on the stairs discovered they were not able to hear a thing) and after tripping over dozens of feet and crushing against uncounted bodies was confronted by a thin, long woman wearing a turban hat, who seized me and, amid this utter confusion, began telling me I was the most wonderful man alive. Her eyes were burning and every time she took a breath, she rolled her tongue across her lips. I was fascinated, but desperate. “What do you want?” I begged, willing to do virtually anything to extricate myself. “I want you to be my agent,” she said, pressing me to the wall. “I’m an author and I’ll have nothing to do with anyone but you.”
I ducked beneath her outstretched arms, trampled some people, caught my foot in the lead wire to one of the microphones, and fell heavily into the lap of one of the most attractive women I have ever seen. She fell off her chair onto the floor and I rolled on top of her. A folding chair ahead of me collapsed, and before anything could be done, a dozen lovers of music and literature lay sprawled on top of one another, while those not engaged in this chain reaction pronounced menacing “shooshes.” By the time I had righted myself, several friends had come up from the concert hall to complain about the noise upstairs.
Finally the concert ended. I was later told that William Primrose gave a brilliant performance—something to be remembered and cherished for a lifetime. I would not know. All I know is that the “most attractive woman in the world” in whose lap I landed sent me a bill for eighty dollars to replace the dress which I apparently had torn beyond reconstruction. I paid the bill.
There were other fine parties, among them one that grew out of the arrival of a play called “Mrs. McThing,” a funny, whimsical, adroit production which could be the product only of a great goodness of the heart. Helen Hayes and Jules Munshin were the stars.
I loved every minute of the play, and in addition to being entranced by Miss Hayes’ remarkable performance, thought Jules Munshin to be extraordinarily comical in his role. One of his telling lines was, “Let’s have a meeting,” no matter what the situation that provoked it. The problem might be entirely trivial, but before a decision could be made, a meeting first took place. As things do happen, the morning after the play opened in Chicago, Mr. Munshin walked into the shop along with another member of the cast. It was impossible to greet him with any other words, but, “Let’s have a meeting!” We became friends instantly, and when the play neared the end of its run, we decided there should be a farewell party for the cast. Jules asked Miss Hayes if she would come, and I was properly thrilled when she agreed.
So on closing night they all came to the bookstore, along with about thirty people Jennie and I had asked to join us. The program did not have to be planned. There was singing, reciting, story-telling. Then, quite by surprise, Miss Hayes’ colorful husband joined us. The fun really began, not only in heightened conversation, but when the MacArthurs’ daughter sat at the piano with Chet Roble and played and sang. Roble is another Chicago “original”—an artist of the blues and a superb personality and musician who has been playing over the years at Chicago hotels and night spots and always attracts a large and appreciative following. He was part of the cast of Terkel’s famous “Studs’ Place” show. He represents an almost lost art not only in his old-time jazz musicianship, but also in terms of cabaret entertainment—the performer who genuinely loves his work and his audience and who will remember ten years later the face of someone he met in a noisy night club crowd.
It was an all-night party. I talked with Miss Hayes about Ben Hecht, who had collaborated with Charles MacArthur on “The Front Page,” which opened quite a new page for the American theatre. She agreed that Ben could talk more sense, more dramatically than any author we knew. I had had an autographing party for Ben’s book, Child of a Century, an autobiographical study of his life and development as a writer. We sold almost 800 copies of the book that night. Ben came with his wife and daughter and sat behind the desk with a cigar in his mouth, his eyes dreamy, his mind tending toward some distant land, but he was most affable, while repeating over and over: “I’ve never done such a thing in my whole life. And I’ve been writing for forty years!”
Later Hecht had taken me to the old haunts of the Chicago literary scene. We sat in a tavern he had frequented while working on the now defunct Chicago Journal. He showed me where Hemingway took boxing lessons. We went to the building where Ben had lived on the fourth floor and Hemingway on the floor beneath. It was a time not long past, yet far away and long ago.
We viewed the former locale of the Dill Pickle Club, the famous literary tavern. Ben talked to me with personal insight about Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Bodenheim, Covici Friede, and others, among them, some of whose fame lay in tragic ends—death by drink, suicide, or merciless twists of fate.
Not long ago, I phoned Ben at his home in Nyack, New York. Red Quinlan, the television executive, had an idea for a series of literary shows to be called, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” He had talked to me about being narrator, and I in turn had suggested Ben Hecht for the first interview.
“Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent. Do you remember me?”
There was a flat, “Yes,” as though he didn’t, really.
“I’m calling to tell you,” I said, “that we have a great idea for a TV show and I want to interview you for it. It’s called....”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I don’t want a living thing to do with TV. Don’t tell me what you have to say. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “you haven’t given me a chance.”
“I don’t want to give you a chance,” he said. “I have no use for TV or anybody who writes for TV. It’s worse than snaring little girls away from home.”
“You still don’t understand,” I said.
“Look mister,” he said, “I understand. I just don’t want to hear your proposition. I want nothing to do with you or television. Is that clear?”
“Wait a minute, Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent from Chicago, don’t you remember?”
“Oh, Stu. Where are you calling from?”
“From Chicago.”
“Oh my God. Why did you let me run off like that? I thought you were some two for a nickel joker from a television agency. I’m sorry. How are you, baby?”
“Fine,” I said, “but I do want to talk with you about a TV series that I hope I’m going to do.”
“Sorry, baby, the answer is no. Not for any money in the world.”
“Well, how are you financially?”
“Ach, you know. Same damn thing. But I don’t care. I’m busy, killing myself with writing. I’ve got a hot book coming out soon. Be sure and get a copy. It’s really hot.”
“I wish you’d hear what I have to say. It’s really a fine idea.”
“Sorry, no. How’s the bookstore?”
So we talked of books and the time I nearly blew a gasket when Ben autographed his book, Charlie, at another Chicago store. He had sent me a carbon copy of his manuscript on that talented and lovable bum, Charles MacArthur, and I had told him I hoped we could raise a stir with a real party when the book came out. He agreed, having been considerably impressed with the first party we held for him. Ben was in Italy writing a movie scenario when the publication date of Charlie was announced. Upon receiving a cablegram requesting a Chicago autographing party date, he wired, Yes, thinking it was to be at my bookstore. It wasn’t... and for weeks after the event was held, nobody dared get near me.
“I’m still sorry about that mixup,” Ben said. “Well, o.k., baby, take care of yourself. When you get to New York, give me a ring and I’ll meet you for a drink at the Algonquin.”
I remembered my original purpose and tried again. “For the last time, you won’t listen to me about this TV thing?”
“Absolutely, irrevocably, no. Goodbye, Stu.”
I was left pondering about the strange and rather terrifying creature that is Ben Hecht, a wise, witty man of the world with the disarming gentleness of a tamed jungle beast. I thought again of our sentimental revisiting of Hechtian haunts... the small tavern across from Bug House Square where Ben paced off the original setting: “In this corner was a stage, here were the tables, and there were the two chairs that belonged to Charlie and me. Here, in this corner, we wrote The Front Page.”
Suddenly he put down his beer and said, “Let’s take a taxi over to the campus. I want to show you where Carl Wanderer lived.”
We hadn’t traveled far before Ben changed the course and directed the cab driver to let us off near the Civic Opera building. We walked down a few stairs into another tavern and Ben stood, cigar in mouth, looking. There were a few men at the bar and the bartender, leaning on outspread arms and returning Ben’s look inquiringly.
“Have you seen John Randolph or Michael Brown or Rudy York?” Ben said.
No one there had ever heard of them.
Ben muttered under his breath. “I guess they’re all dead,” he said. “I used to work with them on the Journal American.”
We sat down and ordered a beer. “I think this must be the place,” he said, “but I might have it mixed up. We had good times together. We had a real ball with this character, Wanderer. Do you know the story?
“Well, Wanderer was an ex-army officer who discovered that his wife was pregnant. He didn’t want the child because he feared it would interfere with resuming his army career. He wanted to re-enlist. So he arranged for a fake holdup on Ingleside Avenue. That’s where I want to take you now.
“Anyway, he got a bum off Clark Street and gave the guy a few dollars to make this holdup, assuring him it was just a trick to be played on his wife for fun. Wanderer took his wife to the movies that night, to a theatre, if my memory is correct, called the Midway. And on their way home, they have to walk almost half a block along the side of a school yard. The streets are poorly lit, and this bum sticks a gun to Wanderer and yells, ‘This is a stick-up!’
“The bum never had a real gun. But Wanderer did. He pretended to struggle with the guy and then shot him... turned the gun on his wife, too, and killed her instantly. Then he wiped off the gun and shoved it into the bum’s dead hand. It looked as though the robber had been resisted and somehow shot in the fight. Wanderer became a hero overnight, and the newspapers played him up for all it was worth.”
Ben and Carl Sandburg, who was then a reporter on the Journal, were eventually responsible for breaking the case. They went to interview the hero and came away with mutual misgivings which they confided to the police. It was a triumph worthy of The Front Page, but I think it was the irony of the world’s readiness for hero worship that made pricking the Wanderer balloon such a satisfying episode in the life of Ben Hecht.
In spite of all our efforts, the lectures and concerts in our downstairs room did not continue to draw indefinitely. Sometimes we couldn’t get fifty people to come out of an evening to hear good music for free (and one of the finest chamber groups in the city was providing us with a series just for the chance to play.) Saturday afternoons were idle—people seemed to have become too busy to spend time in simple conversation.
Book sales dropped, too. Price cutting hurt the psychiatric mail order business, although we held out for several years. Finally we discontinued the catalogue, in spite of its definitive value as a listing of significant books in this field.
Again, something new had to be done and done quickly. I decided to go after business and industrial accounts and to persuade them to give books instead of whiskey for Christmas presents. My successes included selling a bank 250 copies of the Columbia Encyclopedia, with the name of each recipient stamped in gold on the cover. I’m not sure this did much for the human spirit, but it helped pay the rent.
One afternoon Ben Kartman came in with a friend who had some ideas about Brent and television. They arranged an audition, I was accepted, and for almost a year I had a fifteen minute afternoon show, sandwiched between a program on nursing and one on cooking. Financially it was a disaster. I was paid scale, which at that time was $120 per week, and after I paid my union dues and my agent’s fees, most of the cost of the extra help I had to hire to cover the shop during my absences came right out of my own pocket. But I did learn this: be very careful what you sign, re-read the small print, and be sure to see your lawyer—lessons that would be helpful when television again beckoned in ways to be fully described in another chapter.
Every morning as I turned the key in the lock and entered the shop, my heart sank. Each day brought trouble, process servers, trips to the lawyer. This was what came from entering a retail business without a financial “cushion”—and especially a business that demanded a large stock: for every book I sold, I had to buy three... three books it might take months to sell. Sometimes I could visualize the credit managers sitting down for a meeting—their agenda: Let’s Get Brent. There was nothing to do but fight it out, worry it out, dream it out.
I have said disparaging things about the publishing industry and shall say more. But it was publishers and their representatives who, in large measure, saw me through. There was Robert Fitzhenry from Harper, now some kind of an executive, then one of the top salesmen in the business. He reminded one of Hemingway’s description of Algren: watch out for him or he will kill you with a punch. At one time you’d have thought from the titles on the shelves that I was a branch store for Harper. There was Joe Reiner from Crown Publishers, one of the first to sell me books out of New York. He too has graduated into the executive category. He taught me many things about the book business, and it was he who arranged for me to buy old book fixtures from the late Dorothy Gottlieb, the vivid, marvelous proprietress of the Ambassador Bookstore.
Bennett Cerf, master showman of the industry, gave me a measure of prestige when I needed it by making me an editor, along with Jessie Stein, of the Psychiatric Division of Random House. I was able to help their list with a number of important works by Chicago analysts.
Over the years people like Ken McCormick, Michael Bessie, Pat Knopf, Jr., Ed Hodge, Richard Grossman, Gene Healy, Peter Fields, Bob Gurney, Max Meyerson, Bella Mell, Bill Fallon, and Hardwick Moseley became more than business acquaintances and left their imprint on my life as well as upon my adventures in the book world. But more about that world later.
As business improved and as the light gradually became visible through the turbid waters in which I seemed immersed, my energies became increasingly focused upon the simple matter of keeping going, the business of each day’s problems, each month’s decisions, each year’s gains. Work and living have a way of closing in around one’s being so completely that when fate strikes through this envelopment, it comes as a stunning surprise. Fate does not care for what has been the object of one’s personal concern, and it seldom sends a letter or telegram to announce its arrival.
It had been just another day. Jennie had complained of a headache and some difficulty in focusing. In the afternoon we saw a doctor and in the evening an eye specialist. Evidently it was not glaucoma. Nonetheless we administered some eye drops and some pills. I fell asleep in the living room in my chair that night and was awakened early in the morning by three small children, vaguely perturbed, dragging their blankets behind them. Jennie was dead.
Death is not saying goodbye. One can no more say goodbye to death than to a statue or a wall. There is nothing to say goodbye to. It is too natural and final to be dealt with in any of the artificial, temporizing ways with which we pretend to conduct relations with reality.
My first impulse was to run—sell the store for whatever I could get, pack up my things, and leave. Take off perhaps for the little fishing village of Bark Point on the Northern tip of Wisconsin where we had a summer place and there retire in solitude and raise the children as best I could.
It was Bob Kohrman who got me to quit trying to react to death and to just go ahead and mourn. Death has no face, is no audience, has nothing to do with reaction. It is the life of the individual that demands everything, cries out to be lived, and if mourning is a part of this, go ahead. So I stayed where I was and worked and mourned, until one day the pain of loss stopped altogether.
Michael Seller had come over to the apartment one night and talked to me. “For one thing,” he begged, “don’t let irritations and problems pile up. Resolve them from day to day. And another thing... no matter what the cost, come home every night for supper. Never let a day or night go by without seeing your children and talking with them.”
I followed Mike’s advice to the letter. Every night I was home for dinner at six o’clock, even though I might have to leave later and return to the store. My routine was established. I ate, slept, and worked, and after store hours I gave myself to the problems that beset all parents of small children: changing diapers and being concerned over unexpected rashes and fevers in the night. I remembered Tolstoy’s answer to the question: When is a man free? A man is free when he recognizes his burden, like the ox that recognizes its yoke.
I learned that I was not alone. It was not only old friends like Claire Sampson bringing over a turkey for our dinner, or Lollie Wexler, early one wintry morning unbuttoning the hood about her blonde hair and, flushed with the cold and her own tremendous effort, saying ever so softly, “Can I help?” It was also people I scarcely knew, such as the strange man whose name I invariably forgot, but who dressed so elegantly, a stickpin in his tie, his moustache beautifully trimmed, a small flower in his lapel, and who called everybody, “Kid.” He came in now on a wet November night and bought some detective stories. To my astonishment, when I handed him the books, he began to weep. The tears were irresistible, so I looked at him and wept also. “You’re a sweet kid,” he said, strangling, and turned and left the shop.
There was Marvin Glass, a genius at toy design, devoted like Mann’s Herr Settembrini to the total encompassment of human knowledge. I almost had to hire a girl to take care of his special orders alone, dispatching telegrams, night letters, even cablegrams for books he wanted yesterday. He spoke in confidential whispers, but his expression was always so precise that you invariably found yourself watching carefully over every word you uttered in response.
There was Bert Liss, who wore the most beautiful coats I had ever seen and a fantastic series of elegant hats: a Tyrolean hat, a checkered cap, a Cossack fur hat, a dashing black homburg. Whenever he went crazy over a book, at least twenty of his friends would order a copy. But more than that, he was a gentleman, firm in his belief in the goodness of man.
Sidney Morris, the architect who helped design the interior of the shop (and never sent a bill) was there, not only to buy, but more important, whenever I needed someone to confide in. There was Oscar Getz—Oscar, in vaguely Prince Albert dress, forgetting a life of business and civic responsibility the moment he entered the world of letters. Upon encounter with ideas, his eyes lit up and his body began to quiver. There was no doubt about his ability to entrance his listeners. Once, while driving him home after an evening spent at a small café listening to gypsy music, I became so absorbed in what he was saying that I was presented with tickets for two traffic violations, one for failing to stop at a red light and another for going in the wrong direction down a one-way street.
Another scholarly business man, Philip Pinsof, came in with his brothers, Oscar and Eddie, and together they made it clear that I was being cared for. In later years I was to enjoy Sabbath dinners at the Pinsofs’—where Phil’s wife was a most gracious hostess who would seat her husband on a red pillow, as if to say, “For five days you have received the slings and arrows of the marketplace, but on Friday night you are as a king in your own home.”
George Lurie came not only to buy books but to regale me with stories, such as the episode in which he attended the board of governors meeting of a major university and was invited to sign a book in which each guest had inscribed not only his name but his alma mater. George wrote his name in the book and cryptically added H & M. The gentleman sitting next to him asked, “Harvard and what? Massachusetts Institute of Technology?” “No,” said George, “Halsted and Maxwell”—the address of Chicago’s famous and still extant open air market.
Everett Kovler, president of the Jim Beam whiskey company, made it clear to me that I could call him and say, “Everett, I need a sale.” There were times when I did, and he always replied, “Fine, send it.” Another official of the same firm, George Gabor, was also my benefactor. Through a strange twist of fate, he was able to cancel a debt that plagued me, muttering under his breath as he bought a book, “About that... it’s all been washed out.”
While the kindness of my customers served to cheer my heart no little, my peace of mind was greatly augmented by the personal friendship and professional concern of Dr. Arthur Shafton, the kind of pediatrician who would come to the house at a moment’s notice to treat bleeding or feverish children and soothe their hysterical father, the kind of physician who views medicine as an art. Sometimes when he dropped into the shop, he would take me in hand too, suggesting, “Perhaps you ought to go home now, you look tired.”
For a brief time, I also thought I had found a gem of an office girl. She was certainly unique and physically striking: a high breasted young creature at least six feet tall who responded to instructions by taking a deep breath, blinking her grey-blue eyes, and intoning, “Will do!” Then she would wheel on her spike heels, pick up her knees with an elevation that threatened to strike her chin, and walk away, a marvel of strange symmetry. She was the most obedient employee I ever had and the tidiest. My desk was always clean as a whistle. But when the time came for the month’s billings, I could find no accounts. I rushed to Miss “Will do” in consternation. She fluttered her lashes and said, “I threw them away.” That was how she kept my desk so clean!
As Christmas approached, the consideration and generosity of my friends and customers became positively orgiastic. Ruth Weiss called and said, “I’m telling everyone I know to send books and records for Christmas,” and apparently they did so. I have never seen so many art books sold at one time as on the day Dr. Freund and his wife, Geraldine, came in. Dr. Freund kept saying, “Lovely, I must have it,” to everything I showed him, until I became thoroughly embarrassed, and still he persisted in buying more. Sidney Morris sent books to all his architect friends, and the purchases of Morry Rosenfeld were so prodigious that May Goodman, my floor manager, was left speechless. The gentle Ira Rubel spent hours making copious selections, saying quizzically of each purchase, “Do you really think this is the most suitable?” A. N. Pritzker, Jack’s brother, made one of his rare appearances, and bought records—a little classical, a little operatic, a little ballet, a little jazz, a little popular, until he had a stack three feet high which he insisted upon paying for on the spot, although we were really too busy to figure up the amount.
It went like this day after day, until my embarrassment at so much kindness, and my inability to know what to say or do about it, became almost too much. Late at night, I would lie awake thinking about all these people rallying about me. And then my embarrassment turned to humble acceptance of so much caring, so much human warmth.