David Boroff’s vignette of a dress manufacturer indicates that the New York garment district is not quite that pure concentration of grandiose ambition which it is popularly supposed to be.
_____________
Alex Marcus is a short, thick-shouldered man in his late forties with an air of jauntiness suggested by his springy step and his sharp garment-center suits. When he walks around the “market,” he stops and speaks to many people with a relaxed, undemanding friendliness. In the industry he is regarded as something of a “Danish and coffee philosopher,” and many men prominent in the dress business have confided in him. In an industry dominated by high-pressure types committed to the idea that if you don’t get bigger you go downhill, Alex stands out as cannily conservative. A partner in one of the biggest firms manufacturing half-size dresses, he daydreams about a simpler life: “I’ll go into a menial business . . . no push . . . peaceful-like. I’ll get a salesman, a basic sort of kid who won’t mind doing the shipping, and a pattern-maker—and I’m all set. What do I need all this tumul for?”
With his glasses, mustache, and alert look, people have often mistaken him for a physician. And in fact that was originally his ambition. Like so many sons of Jewish workers, Alex was earmarked for medicine at an early age, but there was no ready answer as to how to finance his education. The third of eight children, Alex can hardly remember a time when he wasn’t working. As a boy of twelve during the 20’s, he worked for a pharmacist with a thriving sideline as bootlegger. Alex and his next younger brother used to deliver the bootleg whiskey. When most kids their age were just learning to play punchball, Alex and his brother had more than $800 in the bank. This money ultimately went towards the purchase of a two-family house for the large family.
There was play, too, but, in retrospect, it was of a peculiarly entrepreneurial character. The kids on his block in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn rarely engaged in sports. Instead they carved a small empire of doubtful worth out of the sprawling lots which stretched out for two city blocks. Here the rites of their gang took form, and here in true buccaneering fashion there were unceasing fist-fights to determine the leader. Alex, a small but wiry youngster, won out and immediately designated his younger brother Izzy—now Irving—his lieutenant. The kids were endlessly involved in junk-collecting, in selling ice cream, and in other money-making ventures.
For two years, while attending high school, he worked as a garage attendant, pumping gas—in those days attendants literally pumped gas from hand carts—and fixing flats. He would do his homework in between customers. He came away from the job with more money in the bank and a double hernia. After graduation from high school, he went on a hitch-hiking trip to Canada with a friend. A photograph from that year, 1925, shows two slight young men in breeches and long socks with knapsacks on their backs. Alex’s mouth is flattened into a thin line—a pose he often affected on the assumption that it made him look manly. He has often meant to do more traveling. In the last few years he has driven to Canada with his family and has been in Miami, but he has never really “seen the country”; he talks about taking a trip for a few months after he liquidates his business—if he ever does.
_____________
After two years in the shipping department of a large linen house, Alex began to work as assistant to his older brother Lou, a piece-goods buyer in a dress house. He has been in the industry since that time. In the meantime he was attending City College in the evening and during the summer, an arrangement which lasted for five and a half years.
“In those days,” he reminisced recently, “you worked plenty hard. One fellow did what two or three do today. At six o’clock the boss would send down for a sandwich, and you’d never get out night after night till eight or nine. The same with the cutters, but today it’s different with the unions and everything. . . .”
As a piece-goods buyer, first assisting his brother, then as a full-fledged buyer in another firm, he never had big ambitions. “I wasn’t like some guys in the line, always thinking about going into business. I just wanted to make a livin’. Anyway, I was going to City College at night, and in back of my mind was the idea that I would eventually study medicine or maybe dentistry.” Life was pleasant enough during those early working years. A spirited, forthright young man, Alex was attractive to girls. With even-handed impartiality, he carried on aggressive flirtations with the friends of both his younger and older sisters.
Somewhat of a theoretician about most matters, Alex had decided in advance what he wanted in the girl he married. She was to have perfect vision—Alex wore glasses from childhood on—and she was to be an all-around athlete. (He was particularly fond of ice-skating and swimming, and he liked to take long walks.) At twenty he began to go with a girl still in high school, a pretty honor student who was planning to go to business school after graduation. However, she played hob with his carefully worked out criteria: she was near-sighted, and she had a profound disinclination for all sports. Moreover, Alex’s mother, an imperiously charming woman, tended to be hypercritical about the girl friends of all of her sons. (Her criticism usually focused on some part of the anatomy, which was either too lavish or too skimpy.) He was married at the age of twenty-five.
Just before his wedding, he had an anxiety attack which was to recur a few times in his life. He had just changed jobs, and his new job was on a much larger scale than the previous one. Distressed by his new responsibilities and confronted by the terra incognita of marriage, he was unable to sleep or eat. He gave up the job for one of more modest dimensions and eased into the realities of marriage, and the crisis was over.
The pattern of his married life took shape. He visited his family a good deal, often by bicycle on Sunday morning. Alex was fond of visiting his local library and taking out biographies and books dealing with medicine. The young couple had a baby girl on whom they lavished all the “advantages.” Because his in-laws were in poor health, Alex lived in their building, a clean if shabby four-family house with bird-cage rooms in Borough Park. On the block he was a huge favorite of the children, with whom he was open-handed and playful.
The war came and Alex, like many other piece-goods buyers with good contacts, went into business. It was a partnership with a smooth, cynical salesman, equipped with a strong, if cold, intelligence. Like most businesses during the war years, it went well, far better than Alex had dreamed. His older brother, Lou, who had inducted him into the industry, also went into business and did well. It was a source of deep regret to Alex that their father died shortly after they went into business, and did not live to see the businesses flourish. The father was a scrappy little baker with considerable pride of craft who, nevertheless, was anxious for his children to go into business or one of the professions.
_____________
Alex’s way of life did not change materially. He continued to live in the same small apartment, and his family spent the summer in the Rockaways. There were, of course, little extras: his daughter took singing lessons; she learned to sing “pop” songs at the age of eight with all the appropriate Broadway gestures. He entertained a little more lavishly. When cars became available after the war, he paid the usual extravagant sum for a new one. (But it was a Plymouth; he was uninterested in anything larger or more pretentious.)
The business continued good after the war, but in 1948 Alex began to feel a mounting uneasiness. He was at a loss to explain it himself. All he knew was that he felt much as he did at the time he was married and had started on a new and threatening job. He couldn’t sleep or eat and found himself unable to endure his partner’s megaloid talk about expanding or his cold-blooded appraisals of people. He felt vaguely that his partner, who lived high, was too “Broadway” for him. He began to yearn for what was to him a period of Arcadian simplicity—when he was on a job. Finally, he asked his partner to buy him out. Alex’s defection was the talk of Seventh Avenue. People thought that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. After being bought out, Alex picked up a well-paying job as piece-goods man in a large house making half-size dresses.
A few months later the dress business went into one of its recurrent tailspins, and people in the industry began to talk of Alex as a prophet. He himself was puzzled by his own uncanny timing, but did nothing to discourage his glossy reputation as a business seer.
He remained with the house making half-size garments for three years, during which time he learned this new offshoot of the dress line. In the meantime he made overtures to a brash, imaginative young salesman about going into business. (The salesman proved to be a younger counterpart of his former partner—if anything, more determined and thicker-skinned. Apparently, Alex feels safe teamed to such partners, though he dislikes them personally.) This business went even better than Alex’s first venture. His partner, particularly gifted in styling and full of bold production ideas, worked out a low-priced line offering far more than any other manufacturer in the same price bracket. Moreover, he pushed through ambitious promotional schemes involving national advertising whose cost was shared by retail chains. Some of Sid Levine’s commitments could hardly be fulfilled, and it remained for Alex to work them out: to provide special trimming or a certain fabric and yet keep the cost down to a point at which there was still a profit.
Then the business was set up as a “volume” house. Again Alex had scored; now his reputation as an astute forecaster was confirmed. He had called all the shots: he had “waltzed” from a business just before the dress market caved in; he had learned a new line and was now doing fabulously well in that line to the acute discomfort of his competitors.
_____________
What his competitors did not know is that Alex was as unhappy about his business as they were. True, it was making money—a good deal of money. (At one point the line was so hot buyers were sitting on camp chairs in the lobby waiting their turn to see the dresses and place orders.) But it was a big business, and a “big business means big problems.” There were headaches with personnel. As Alex put it, “they were all in each other’s way” in a loft intended for a small house. Renting another loft only complicated matters, for Alex was constantly rushing from one loft to the other. In desperation, the partners hired an efficiency expert about whose value Alex was skeptical. He later acknowledged that the man in his six months in the plant had rung up some achievements.
There were ads in national magazines, and there was even a radio program for a while. Alex remarks, with some self-deprecation, that he helped launch the career of one of the country’s most celebrated “pop” singers.
Most disturbing to Alex were his partner’s plans. Determined to be the biggest in the business, Levine pushed bigger and bigger promotional schemes. The inevitable occurred: no matter how many corners they cut, they couldn’t deliver as per specifications. In addition, they had such a magic reputation that orders flooded in beyond their capacity to fill. They were late on deliveries, and often when they were not, customers were dissatisfied with what they got. Returns became a persistent problem. Alex’s feelings became increasingly negative about the “madhouse.” After further internal conflict, he resolved to get out of the business and go into a much smaller business with his pattern-maker—“one you can control.” As matters stood, a liquidation would have been disastrous because there would have been a huge loss in accounts receivable. The alternative was for Alex to be bought out by Levine, but here Levine proved to be very cagey. Knowing he had Alex over a barrel, he offered a very small sum. Alex countered by pressing for liquidation. Finally terms were agreed upon for Alex to be bought out. Papers were drawn up. Alex, still not accustomed to the financial level on which he was operating, was staggered by the lawyers’ fees which added up to $4,000. At this point, there was a new rush of orders, and Levine entreated Alex to stay in business. The arrangements were scuttled and Alex “started to bounce again.”
However, he feels confident now. He is “sitting on a pile of loot” and feels that he cannot get hurt. He takes a melancholy pleasure in contemplating the many people he knows who have “busted” in the industry. There is his former boss, who lost his money and is now a salesman. “I don’t have ideas of grandeur,” he recently told Alex. “I make a living; that’s enough. And believe me, I’m better off.” There is the contractor who went into the manufacturing business, went quickly through his money, and died of a heart attack. “In this business,” Alex sums it up, “a guy who’s nothing becomes a big enterprise, while a guy who’s tremendous becomes a nothing. You can drop a bundle in no time at all.”
Alex believes that he can beat the common fatality, and psychology, of boom and bust. The image he has of himself is that of a philosophic individual who can resist the pressures that come with success.
_____________
In truth, Alex’s picture of himself is not too wide of the mark. His way of life has not changed radically. He drives a Dodge instead of a Plymouth and stoutly refuses to get a Cadillac. (“What, I couldn’t line up four Fleetwoods outside the door if I wanted them? But what do I need it for?”) His social life is confined to his brothers and sisters, to whom he is devoted, his in-laws, and a few friends with whom he plays cards. Without feeling any deep commitment to the idea, he wanted his wife to have a mink coat (“just so that she won’t feel different from the other women”), but she has refused, saying, “Where do we go that I need a mink? To the pictures?” He drinks in moderation but has avoided the fashionable drinking and gambling he encounters in the top echelon of the industry.
A graduate of a rigorous Talmud Torah, Alex never had to think through his attitude towards religious education because his one child is a daughter and “a girl doesn’t have to go; there’s no Bar Mitzvah.” For years he attended High Holy Day services in the small cellar synagogue, with spittoons at regular intervals, maintained by his old Talmud Torah. Two years ago, upon moving to a “nicer part” of Borough Park, he joined a Conservative temple with all its appurtenances of Men’s Club, fund-raising Journal Drive, etc. He balked at participating in temple activities but contributed so generously—from his business—to the bazaar that he was elected to the board of trustees, despite his protestations. He has since been drawn into some activities, but he cannot abide the perennial niggling disputes and the maneuvering for power.
Alex’s wife, Miriam, comes from a traditional home and keeps kosher. A moderate in most matters and a person of remorseless common sense, she is distressed by the incursion into her part of Brooklyn of religious zealots—the men in caftans and beards; the little boys, pallid and fearful with their bobbing peyes. “It’s not right,” she says. “Religion is fine, but this is too much already. After all, we’re Americans. It’s not right for them to bring their old-fashioned ways into the neighborhood.”
In the market, Alex feels closest to the Yiddish-speaking men, the old-timers whom he identifies with his father, now dead. They, in turn, are fond of him and consider him a type becoming increasingly rare in the industry. Alex himself has observed a marked change in the personnel of the industry. There is now a whole new generation, many of whom are college graduates. “But they have to adapt themselves too,” he says. “They have to get tough inside or they don’t last.”
The role he enjoys most is a paternal, benevolent one. Distrustful of organized charity because of the ritualized ostentation he sees in it, Alex takes pleasure in helping people out and talks with some expansiveness about it. He has gotten many men in the industry jobs which worked out well. He can easily be approached for loans. He is especially considerate of his employees when they are getting married, becoming fathers, etc. In addition, he has achieved a small reputation as a match-maker. The older men in the industry have approached him for help in marrying off their daughters. They invariably ask if he knows someone like himself—“a down-to-earth fellow.” Alex takes particular pride in one couple he brought together. The fellow, a shipping clerk who “couldn’t get out of his own way,” now runs his own successful business as the result of his father-in-law’s assistance. Alex is always pleased when he can help his employees by “slipping them a few bucks.” However, he insists that they be “basic people.” He is unable to feel sympathetic towards his shipping clerk because the latter preens himself on his college education and his wife is devoted to such things as modern dance lessons.
_____________
“In this business,” Alex says with the air of one who is amazed at his own audacity, “it’s constant intrigue and manipulation.” In his current venture, his business was thrown out of a national magazine because of failure to live up to specifications called for in the ads. Dependent upon national advertising, Alex’s firm immediately organized a subsidiary business which would be able to place ads, the old business serving as the source of dresses for the new. But there was a “leak,” and the national magazine again dropped their account. “Don’t worry,” Alex says, “we’ll figure something else out. But you want to know something? I’m tired of all this melodrama. I’m fed up with the dreykopf. I would like to get out of the business. But it’s hard: when you’re making money, you just don’t get out, even though you know you’re riding for a fall.”
He calls the turmoil and tumult of money-making a “rat race,” which he regards with sad amusement and resignation. He likes to tell of a piece-goods buyer friend who decided to throw over a $15,000-a-year job because it was getting him “punchy.” He determined to move to the West Coast and open a “nice, quiet liquor store.” He moved there with his family, and while the store was being built, he received a long-distance call from his former boss entreating him to return with a $5,000 raise. The piece-goods man could not withstand these blandishments and returned to New York; now “he’s bouncing again.”
One of Alex’s biggest customers is the multi-millionaire owner of a big mail-order business in Connecticut. This man, a self-made immigrant, has a large, gusty personality and is alternately berating Alex or “romancing” him. He often calls and complains about Alex’s failure to deliver on time. On other occasions he urges Alex to visit him at his estate, offering to fly him from New York in his private plane. “I want to see your beautiful wife and your beautiful daughter,” he says cajolingly. Alex has never accepted the invitation. “Who needs him?” he says.
When this mail-order tycoon proudly told Alex that he had lectured at a famous business college (he neglected to mention that he had also contributed to it heavily), Alex felt obliged to keep matters in balance. He informed his friend that he had majored in Latin. Now the mail-order man is fond of saying, “I like to speak with you, Mr. Marcus. You are a man of culture—with a specialization in Latin.”
Alex is generally pleased with his life. His wife is surprisingly young-looking and attractive, without the sleek, synthetic quality he finds repellent in middle-class women of his acquaintance. His daughter, Marilyn, now a nineteen-year-old, is a junior at Brooklyn College. Possessed of her father’s sense of humor and her mother’s sturdy common sense, Marilyn “has always been a pleasure around the house.” When it was time for her to go to college, there was no question about her not going out of town. “We want her with us”—and Marilyn agreed. For a time, Mrs. Marcus was considering transferring her to a “paying college” in the New York area because “there would be a better element there.” However, Marilyn was happy at Brooklyn College and had joined a House Plan. Now she is engaged to be married.
Despite his situation, Alex has not developed any philosophy of success. “The thing I like best,” he says, “is that I can tell anyone I want to go to hell. I’m a plain guy. I can always open a gas station to make a livin’. What’s the matter? You don’t think I’d be fit for it?”
_____________
