The Hardest Thing I Ever Had to Sell

All my business life I’ve been engaged in selling something, from the time I sold Saturday Evening Post subscriptions to the time I entered Nei-man-Marcus and started selling furs and clothes and antiques. Never, however, until I wrote Minding the Store was I in the position of selling a piece of myself. I had been told that the modern technique for selling books was to go on the “coast to coast tour” and expose yourself, and incidentally the book, to the television audience. I prepared myself for the ordeal, but even so I couldn’t anticipate the stultifying effect of talking about myself for three solid weeks, six to ten times a day. I have never felt any hesitancy about proclaiming the virtues of a mink coat or a Ming vase or a beautiful gown, but talking about my book and myself became a nightmare. My diary of the first eight days as a book hawker commenced on Wednesday, October 2, the national publication date.



Wednesday, October 2: The publisher’s public relations chief picked me up at the Sherry Netherland at 6:15 a.m. and whisked me to the NBC studios where the Today Show is; produced. We were greeted by a production assistant who guided me immediately to the makeup room. There, the reflection from my bald head was subdued with pancake, and I was offered my first cup of television station coffee, which is dark and hot but otherwise bears no resemblance to the brew of the noble bean. The entrance to NBC and the corridors were deserted when we entered, but in the studio the crew was tinkering, adjusting, measuring in a sort of quiet haste. It reminded me of waiting for surgery at Baylor Hospital – the same atmosphere prevailed. “Miss Walters won’t like that color drop. Miss Walters always likes the chairs arranged like this. Miss Walters is wearing beige today” was the chatter line of the cameramen and technicians. Apparently, an appearance on this show is the television equivalent of a Papal audience.

At precisely 6:57 Miss Walters arrived with Gene Shalit, glanced at me, nodded, and proceeded to the set. The show went on the air at 7:00 a.m. At 7:16 I was escorted to a seat on Miss Walters’ right, ignored until 7:21 when Shalit called me to her attention with a comment something like, “We have an author with us today.” Her face unfroze into a controlled smile, and she said, quoting from the publisher’s blurb, as if it were her own, “Here’s the man who has made more women happy, the greatest pitchman of all, Stanley Marcus. Who’s minding the store today?” Barely waiting for a reply, she and Shalit started talking about the Christmas catalogue and some of the esoteric gifts we’ve featured, commenting on the myth of the rich Texans. I assured her that there were rich Texans but not nearly so many as she might imagine, and that the stereotypes of the mid-Thirties had all disappeared.



To steer the conversation back to the book, I interjected (as my public relations advisor had told me to do under such circumstances), “In my book, Minding the Store, I described some of these now extinct characters, and ….”



Miss Walters ignored this; lead completely and said, “I notice that big stores are closing down, like De-Pinna and Best & Co. People are saying that stores of your type are passé today. Are they giving way to boutiques?” To which I replied, “Well, Miss Walters, stores are like television stars – they come and they go.” End of interview. I’m confident I won’t be asked back in the event I write another book. I really don’t understand why she carries such TV clout, but I can’t argue with her success. She is attractive, but I got the feeling that she was taut – under severe self control. She gives me the impression of having been quick frozen; she starts to thaw under the TV lights and from audience adulation.

By 7:30 we left the studio and I returned to my hotel for breakfast and a short nap before taping an interview with my old friend, Arlene Francis, for her radio show.

Arlene offered me radio station coffee which was no better than the TV coffee of the early morning. Though the two studios were twenty blocks apart, the coffee tasted like it came out of the same pot. Arlene got started on the Christmas catalogue, but it was easier to get her back to the book. Arlene is easy to work with. She always has been a relaxed performer – not overly self impressed.

I finished in time to get up to “21” where the publisher gave a press luncheon to officially launch the book. I was impressed by the fact that most of those present had seen the Today Show. Since I rarely watch TV, I was surprised by the impact that Barbara Walters makes.

At four o’clock, Bergdorf Goodman put on an autographing party for me. Friends and Seventh Avenue manufacturers turned out and I inscribed a couple of hundred books in two hours. In the course of the autographing session, I met one distant relative, hitherto unknown to me, one man who had a complaint about a suit he had bought the previous summer at our Bal Harbour store, and one man who had an invention he wanted to sell me. I satisfied the complaining customer by telling him I couldn’t do anything about his problem until the following morning, and I asked the inventor to write me a letter. I was soon to learn that someone with an invention would show up at each subsequent autographing in a dozen different cities. As a retailer, I realized that an autographed book could not be brought back for credit, so I took a little extra time and inscribed each book with the name of the recipient.

From there I dashed to a cocktail party given in honor of the publication of the book by old friends, Kay and Warren Leslie. By nine o’clock I was getting numb (not from the cocktails but from the chatter and the heavy schedule) so my good wife had the sound judgment of getting me to call it a night and turn in.



Thursday, October 3: At 11:15 I was a guest on Leonard Harris’ Midday Show on WNEW-TV along with Joseph Levine, the motion picture producer, who was plugging his new picture. Harris was a genial host, but he, too, was more interested in the Christmas catalogue than the book. More bad television coffee.

We had time to gulp a sandwich before reporting in at WNBC radio to tape a segment for that program. Another producer at that station heard I was in the building, so he grabbed me for a taping for his radio show. Every interviewer today asked “Who’s minding the store?” WNBC coffee ran true to type.

At four o’clock I was picked up to drive out to Manhattanville College in Westchester to attend a book fair being sponsored by Barbara Bannon of Publisher’s Weekly who had written such a glowing advance review of the book. I felt obligated to make an appearance. I got back to New York by 8:30 – an hour late – to attend a dinner party given for me.

Friday, October 4: The day started out early with a telephone interview with Peter Roberts of Station WOR Radio. This was followed by a twenty-minute interview at my hotel with a financial editor of the Cleveland Press in anticipation of my forthcoming visit to Cleveland the following week.

At noon I went up to the Tobe-Co-burn School to speak to their students in fashion merchandising. They were a good audience and I autographed books for almost the entire class.

A luncheon interview had been arranged with the publisher and a writer for People magazine. I gave them about three minutes on the catalogue and then we talked about the book.

In the afternoon I set forth to visit the leading New York bookstores, accompanied by Lynn Caine, the public relations woman, and Joe Consolino, Little Brown’s metropolitan area representative. I autographed copies at Doubleday, Scribner, Brentano and Rizzoli, and shook hands with as many book salespeople as I could find. By this time I felt like a politician campaigning for votes. Fortunately there were no babies to kiss or Indian headdresses to put on for photographs. The day ended at 5:30.



Saturday, October 5: My wife and I left by Metroliner at 8:30 a.m. for Philadelphia to attend a luncheon being given by old friends. An amazingly large group turned out, much larger than could have been mustered on a Saturday in Dallas. Since I was not being interviewed, I could talk about the book, not the catalogue. The guests were very responsive and followed me over to Wanamaker’s where I autographed books. I better understood W.C. Fields’ statement, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Dinner party that night.



Sunday, October 6: Up early to catch a plane for Boston to attend the Boston Globe’s annual Book Festival at which I spoke in the late afternoon. The audience was responsive and asked many questions following my speech. Many of those in attendance knew of Neiman-Marcus through their experience with NM merchandise which we close out through Filene’s Basement.



Monday, October 7: At 9 a.m. I was scheduled for the Joyce Hamlin TV Show, where the other guest was Milton Berle, who was promoting his book. When I went into my pitch, I got a lot of laughter from the studio audience. I didn’t think I had said anything particularly funny, but then out of the corner of my eye, I could see Milton Berle wiggling his ears. He’s a worse act to follow than a trained monkey. Joyce wanted to know “Who’s minding the store?” Boston TV coffee as bad as New York, but no worse.

My old friend, Eddie Bernays, one of the deans of the public relations profession, had graciously arranged a luncheon at the Harvard Faculty Club for me to meet a group of Boston newsmen.

From 4 till 6,I spoke to the Marketing Club of the Harvard Business School and autographed books. I finished in time to dash for a plane to Cleveland where I arrived exhausted at 10 p.m.



Tuesday, October 8: The day started off with a two-hour television show at 8 o’clock on which I appeared along with James Michener and a couple of other writers who were hawking their books. The host, like most of the other TV hosts I encountered, obviously hadn’t read the book but depended on two or three excerpts which had been picked out by his assistant. Naturally the catalogue was the number one question thrown to me. By now I’m beginning to get a little numb from the repeti-tiousness of talking about myself and discussing the same topics. Not one interviewer yet has discussed the chapters on art, book collecting, or problems I’ve had with customers who have disagreed with my political positions.

This program was followed by interviews with the women’s editors of the two daily papers, both of whom did ask my views about fashion trends. We’d chosen to go to the women’s feature editors in preference to the book editors, for the former are much more accessible and their stories get printed the following day, whereas the book people usually work three or four weeks in advance of publication. Newspaper coffee in the Midwest is no better than television coffee in the East.

My plane to Minneapolis left at 2:55, so I had time for one radio callback program. Cleveland is evidently hurting from the recession, for all the questions asked had to do with the economy. The host tried to force me into saying that we were headed for a deep depression and that we would have rioting in the streets. I neatly side-stepped his attempts. The callbacks were interesting, for nine out of ten were most complimentary about the store. The callers were either customers or former employees. My interviewer testingly suggested I had set up the calls.



While I finished the program, the Little Brown salesman who was driving me to the airport got a sandwich for me to eat in the car en route to the plane.



That night in Minneapolis I was the guest at a dinner party given by Carl Erickson, President of Dayton’s, where I met a dozen or so people who brought their books along to be autographed. Most of them commented on my appearance on the Today Show. The pulling power of Barbara Walters all across the country is not to be underrated.



Wednesday, October 9: This was a jam-packed day with a TV appearance at 8 a.m., a breakfast interview back at the hotel with a newspaper reporter, a radio interview at 11 and then a dash across town to appear on a midday TV show, where I was asked “Who’s minding the store?”

I was booked to autograph immediately following at B. Dalton and an hour later at Dayton’s. A luncheon was scheduled for me at 1:30 and between the main course and dessert, I stepped out to do a newspaper interview with a feature writer from the St. Paul Dispatch. One more radio interview finished my Minneapolis day. I told my P.R. rep that I was so tired of talking about Minding the Store, Neiman-Marcus and myself that I wondered if I couldn’t talk about Jim Michener’s book instead. She denied me that privilege.

I sped to the airport to fly to Chicago in time to keep a dinner date with Maggie Daly of the Chicago Tribune, an old friend and one of the leading newspaper columnists of the city. She has always been most generous to me, so talked out as I was, I gave her enough material for several notes in her column on successive days. Fortunately I had enough for both her and her friendly rival columnist, Peg Zwecker of the Sun-Times, with whom I had breakfast the following morning.

So ended eight days on the road! Actually I had started out a week previous to publication by touring the cities in which we have stores, and I had a week more to go on the West Coast. Fortunately by the time I reached Los Angeles, I had my second wind, and I was told by candid listeners that I didn’t sound or appear tired from fielding the same questions. I spent half my time knocking down the same old stereotypes about Texas and the other half forcing the interviewers to relate to the book. It was not until a month later when I did two TV shows with Bob Cromie in Chicago that I found an interviewer who had actually read the book and who was thus able to discuss it in depth. These shows came off handsomely.

With 35,000 book titles being published annually (and approximately two-thirds of them in the autumn) there’s a mad push to get any book into the limelight. The television tour is essential for immediate exposure, for the book reviews may not come out until a month or two later, by which time your book is “old stock” at the bookstores. If I had any doubts about the selling potentiality of the broadcast medium, they were dispelled by my cross-country trip during which time I appeared on some ninety radio and television programs and was interviewed about fifty times for newspapers and periodicals. Traveling “the circuit” may be a nightmare, but it sells books!

I was impressed by the youth of the staffs at the radio and TV stations and their warm friendliness and competence, by the generosity of friends who insisted on giving me parties at all stops, and of course by the ghastly quality of the gallons of coffee I consumed along the way. Perhaps the way to improve television would be to give the performers decent coffee!