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Stanley Marcus |
STANLEY MARCUS
1905-2002
If there is a Dallas style, it came from Stanley Marcus. It’s not just that he taught Dallas women how to dress; he also showed the city how to shine. He took a frontier town and made of it a center of sophistication, elegance, flamboyance, and flair.
A backwater more Southern than Western, barely rid of the Ku Klux Klan ”that’s what Stanley Marcus returned to from Harvard in 1926. He settled into his father’s store at the corner of Main and Ervay and quickly came to see that the standards already embedded there, at Neiman Marcus, could be applied to the whole of life ”and should be.
He married Billie Cantrell, a beautiful and spirited buyer for the Sport Shop. Together they set out to build a house by Frank Lloyd Wright, who produced a plan they loved but could not afford. Even so, the experience was pivotal. Stanley Marcus learned always to aim for the best, and the house he created, while not by the master, was informed by the same sense of line, landscape, and proportion that animated the highest moments of the Prairie School.
During World War II, when the nation needed all the cotton and wool it could get to clothe our forces at the front, it was Stanley Marcus who went to Washington, D.C., and devised a silhouette that emphasized a slender shape instead of flowing fabric. Then he persuaded American women to wear that silhouette all the way to VJ Day. The style we see in the fabulous films of the 1940s came directly from Stanley Marcus.
After the war, he came home to Dallas, once again, and found people turning inward, fearful of things alien to their own instincts. Even Picasso seemed threatening. His work was banned from the art museum because he was a Communist, although he was making the most of capitalist collectors to grow wealthy himself. No real danger there. Stanley Marcus knew that as well as anybody and fought to restore the museum to its senses.
But he did more than that. He held up to the city not a mirror but a window, through which he introduced, patiently and with infinite imagination, the world. His Neiman Marcus Fortnights brought to downtown the finest clothes, furnishings, foods, and arts from nations everywhere. In an era of infrequent fliers, he showed Dallas the importance of simple pleasures, shared with people oceans away.
The stand he took was far beyond fashion. It was a deep declaration of the good life, rooted in all that had gone before, yet reaching ever for the new. When Billie Marcus died, Stanley and Linda, his second wife, embraced the aesthetic of Santa Fe, especially folk art. They nurtured a taste for Bobby Short’s music in New York, and in the last year of his life Stanley and Linda hurried to Broadway to see The Producers, then the latest hit.
What Stanley Marcus understood is this: style mocks death. Style keeps death at bay. And, as George Herbert said, living well really is the best revenge.
