King of the Hills
The end of the world according to Fred began at breakfast at this very dining room table, with its handsome silver candlesticks and the two tiny crystal birds grazing between them for nonexistent crumbs.
The once and future kings of Rodeo Drive--Fred Hayman, who founded the original Rodeo Drive Committee in 1972, and Ron Michaels, manager of the Louis Vuitton boutique and currently the committee’s president--were talking together at Hayman’s elegant home in the Beverly Hills flats when Michaels made a surprising suggestion to the man he considers his mentor. How would Hayman feel about vacating 273 Rodeo Drive and letting Vuitton take over the space?
It was not unlike asking Dad to give up the throne. Hayman, 73, has held court in the ivory edifice at the southwest corner of Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way since 1961, first as a silent partner in the Giorgio boutique, then as its owner along with his wife, Gale. He held on through an acrimonious 1983 divorce and the 1987 sale of the business to Avon, and bought back the property for $6 million. He opened Fred Hayman Beverly Hills in 1989, by which time his name and that location were shorthand for the epitome of style.
He has had other offers over the years, and not small ones. Michaels had heard a rumor that The Disney Store was in active negotiations when the deal suddenly went south, and designer Calvin Klein, who has talked for years about opening a Rodeo Drive boutique, has made efforts to woo Hayman out of the way.
But Louis Vuitton needed a site for what Michaels calls its “global store concept.” The company that started making luggage in 1854 hired designer Marc Jacobs last year to create a clothing line, and that, along with Vuitton’s expansion into shoes, colored leather handbags and exotic leathers, requires more space than the company’s current 5,000 square feet just a quarter-block away. When Vuitton fell out of negotiations on another location, Michaels’ boss asked him simply: What is the best location on Rodeo Drive?
Without hesitation, Michaels said it was the Hayman space. “I can’t imagine him ever wanting to close, though” he said, “or even move, or anything.”
“Maybe,” said Michael Burke, “that’s because no one’s ever asked.”
Or at least no one the size of Louis Vuitton, which, along with Christian Dior, Givenchy, Kenzo and Christian Lacroix, is part of the world’s largest luxury goods combine--Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. During the last 15 years, Vuitton has experienced exponential growth, from two stores in 1970 to 300 today. A behemoth with class; surely Hayman would be impressed.
So Michaels asked for a private audience after the monthly meeting of the Rodeo Drive Committee. As the moment approached, he found himself feeling terribly nervous. He did not want to insult Hayman, whom he reveres, by suggesting it was time for the older man to bow out. “I tenderly and gently broached the subject,” he recalls.
Hayman was silent for a moment. For the first time, he wondered if it was, in fact, time for a change. A big Vuitton store at the south end of Rodeo would, he thought, be “good for the street.” And that has been his guiding principle for more than 30 years; personal success has always been tied to the larger issue of what is good for the street.
He told Michaels he would think about it.
That was in November 1996. Three months later, Hayman informed the younger man that he would be willing to cede the space to Vuitton. It seemed the sensible thing to do. He had no blood heir to take over the business, since his three children have displayed no interest in it, and after 34 years, he was ready to abandon the daily demands of the job.
Some time in the next two months, Hayman will begin to dismantle the store that has been his second home, the store that inspired the Judith Krantz novel “Scruples.” He has to vacate the premises in June. Vuitton plans to begin construction in July, to expand the existing space into a 10,000-square-foot showcase store--with Hayman as landlord.
What to do with the memories? The pool table, installed in 1968 to give men something to do while their wives tried on designer clothes and spent money, will go out to Hayman’s Malibu beach house. A section of the oak bar, site of many a 10 a.m. pick-me-up in Hayman’s heyday, the place where Elizabeth Taylor could order a glass of white wine while she shopped, will be moved to Malibu as well.
Hayman jokes about the “memorabilia room” he will need to house all his souvenirs, but a slightly distracted look flits across his usually composed face in the instant before the laugh comes. For Hayman knows the truth: Stores close all the time. He is about to dismantle retail history.
His departure symbolizes the end of the era when brash, ambitious entrepreneurs muscled onto Rodeo and turned it into a street of dreams. There is no longer room for him in the wonderland he created; Vuitton’s move signals the dominance of the international retailer. Success in the 1970s was about designer exclusives and the personal touch; in the 1990s, it’s about the global luxury broker and a Rodeo Drive Web site.
“I miss the old days,” Hayman admits. “Fred Haymans exist today--but not on Rodeo Drive.”
Things will never be the same.
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Here is what Rodeo Drive was like in the 1970s and 1980s, when Fred Hayman was so powerful that designers such as Halston willingly granted him the exclusive right to sell their designs: People went shopping in double limousines (one for the family, one for its purchases); Gucci had a private second-floor salon for special customers who had a key to get in, and even the congenitally blase retailers were sometimes shocked at the level of consumption. One longtime colleague remembers the day Hayman had to close down Giorgio temporarily while he solved an inventory problem: An Arab and his harem had come into the store, Hayman reported, and bought every evening gown he had.
He was hardly complaining. That kind of extravagance was just what Hayman wanted, proof that his master plan was working. He wanted to elevate Rodeo Drive from just another shopping street to a world-class boulevard, on a par with London’s Bond Street, New York’s Fifth Avenue, Paris’ Avenue Montaigne. Dorothy Chilkov, an impossibly tailored woman with a European air and a shock of short white hair, managed the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce when Hayman first approached her in 1972 about a separate Rodeo Drive committee: She refers to him as “the catalyst” who inspired the grand excess of “the Golden Era.”
He set the bar high. To get the competitive businessmen on the new Rodeo Drive Committee into a more collaborative frame of mind, Hayman set up an intimate evening: cocktails at his store for his fellow retailers, followed by dinner at the Beverly Wilshire in a private dining room, with gold lace tablecloths and, says Chilkov, “so much silver, and so many wineglasses.”
Others rose to the challenge. When hotelier Hernando Courtright gave a ball to celebrate Rodeo, he greeted his 400 guests by riding into the ballroom on horseback. Aldo Gucci flew in from Italy for committee meetings, and one visit inspired another ball, with music by the Henry Mancini Orchestra and souvenir crystal globes by David Orgell. Whenever a new retailer moved onto the block, Hayman took him to lunch at the Bistro, explained the importance of promoting Rodeo Drive and usually left with a $10,000 check to support the committee’s activities.
All of this was engineered by a man who believes that life is in the details. Hayman, born in 1925 in the Swiss textile town of Gall, immigrated to New York with his mother and stepfather in 1941 with dreams of becoming a chef. He started as an apprentice cook at the Waldorf-Astoria, was promoted to banquet manager and, two years later, was dispatched by Conrad Hilton to the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
He came to Giorgio by degrees. At first it was merely an investment; he still worked at the Beverly Hilton and dreamed of acquiring the space that once had housed Romanoff’s Restaurant. But circumstance intervened: He bought out his partners at Giorgio, the Romanoff’s negotiations stalled and, as he puts it, “I just got more and more involved in the store.”
There were two wives and three children along the way, but in 1962, Hayman divorced his second wife and began a courtship with cocktail waitress Gale Gardner Miller. They married in 1966, and three years later, she joined him at Giorgio. They divorced in 1983.
It was a legendary success--first the exclusive store, then, in 1981, the signature Giorgio Beverly Hills fragrance, which still brings in about $100 million in sales annually. By the time Avon bought the company and corporate name in 1987, the empire was worth $167 million. Hayman’s profits enabled him to open his new store and launch another fragrance: 273.
In 1988, this company town honored him with a custom-tailored job: fashion coordinator for the Academy Awards ceremony, a position he has held ever since. Every year he hosts a fashion show, designed, he says, “to set the tone the producer wants for the ceremony.” Letters go out to each nominee and presenter, offering to help select an ensemble for the big night. “It was a bright idea,” he says carefully, “because the stars dressed poorly, many of them. In those days the stars dressed themselves or didn’t pay much attention. Today, of course, the Academy Awards are the greatest fashion show.”
In fact, he did so well he is almost out of a job. In the early days, Hayman dressed a lot of people--last year, probably under a dozen. “They’re besieged now by designers,” he says. “There were many more when we started, but the interest now in fashion is phenomenal. So I guess we have succeeded.”
He is the arbiter of high-end style, referred to by more than one person as “Mr. Rodeo Drive.” But to hear Hayman tell it, his ascendance was based on nothing more than the sort of gracious service he learned in the hotel business. Personal notes thanking customers, personal phone calls to let a celebrity know that the store had just received a Halston gown that would be perfect for her. Never a gift-with-purchase promotion, which, as far as he is concerned, sullies the name of retail. When Hayman or one of his employees gave a customer a gift, it was carefully selected for that individual, never an anonymous mass-market trinket.
And don’t forget valet parking. There actually was a time, in the dark and distant past, when wealthy shoppers had to park their own cars before they dropped thousands of dollars. Hayman understood that luxury demanded better and, in 1977, instituted Beverly Hills valet parking service.
“It was all show biz, style,” he says. “A new way of marketing entirely.”
*
While Fred Hayman was selling Dunhill blazers to Natalie Wood and Janet Leigh, Ron Michaels was hanging around his grandfather’s Beverly Hills luggage store, Bon Voyage Bazaar, an upscale place that carried Louis Vuitton among its brands. The store had been in business since 1934 and had as clients its fair share of celebrities. Michaels remembers being patted on the head when he was a little boy by Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, and the thrill of his 13-year-old life was the day Elvis Presley dropped in. His father stepped in to take over the business and, when Ron was grown, he waited on celebrities such as Fred Astaire and Barbara Stanwyck.
He and Hayman existed in a parallel universe, where, as Michaels puts it, “luxury meant getting what you wanted,” and the retailer’s job was to make sure that happened. When he joined Louis Vuitton 15 years ago, he brought with him the lessons he had learned from his father and grandfather. Customers who purchased a cigar humidor received it filled with cigars; a whiskey case came with whiskey in it.
When rock singer Rod Stewart and Rachel Hunter came in last year to purchase a leather duffel to hold their baby’s toys, Michaels dispatched an employee to Toys “R” Us to fill the bag. On Rodeo Drive, people who have no need of either a freebie or another reminder of their celebrity status are sure to get both.
Michaels was a retailer in the tradition of Fred Hayman, but Hayman had managed, by his own success, to change the rules of the game. Of the original Rodeo Drive entrepreneurs, only Herb Fink, who owns Theodore, is still in business on the strip. Carroll & Co. had to move two blocks over, to Canon, when its long-term lease expired. Jerry Magnin is out of business. One by one, the pioneers moved out of the way to make way for what Michaels calls “the monoliths”--international retailers who have colonized the 400 block of Rodeo and are marching south toward Wilshire Boulevard.
The street now reads like a who’s who of luxury marketers: Tommy Hilfiger, whose new store is larger than most country inns, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, Versace, Gucci, Chanel. It is a boom time--”100% rented,” Michaels crows--with a waiting list for space. Being Vuitton’s landlord is not a bad line of work, with rents ranging from $514 to $518 per square foot.
Managing Vuitton is as close as a millennium marketer is going to get to the good old days. Michaels has the best of both worlds, a hands-on opportunity at the largest Vuitton outlet in the continental United States, and the formidable support of an international company with an expanded line. He is almost giddy at the possibilities of mega-service: Hayman might have called his customers personally; Michaels thinks nothing of special-ordering an item from anywhere in Vuitton’s world.
*
One wintry afternoon, the only customers at the bar at Fred Hayman Beverly Hills are two foot-weary young women whose eager pastel suits and sensible pumps suggest that they are visiting the land of conspicuous consumption, not leasing a place for the season. No matter. The service is impeccable, as are the cappuccinos in their tall ivory cups, sporting snowy peaks of foam and a delicate sprinkling of dark chocolate. A Japanese tourist discusses the selection of sale handbags with her husband. Across the aisle, a young woman holds up an ivory satin bustier in front of her oversized sweater and daydreams.
They stand in stark counterpoint to the remnants of the glamour days--the oversized black-and-white George Hurrell photographs of Hollywood celebrities, from Gary Cooper to Jean Harlow, that line the stairway to the second floor, the beaded evening gown with fabric as thin as a butterfly’s wing, the autographed celebrity glossies that gaze down over the bar.
There is testimony to Hayman’s power. Some of the tailored pantsuits carry labels that acknowledge the codependency of designer and retailer: “Vestimenta for Fred Hayman,” implying that, while a shopper might find Vestimenta suits at another store, these suits are specially designated for Fred Hayman; the cachet flows both ways.
But there are sale racks, too--not yet the big final sale but a nod to what didn’t move over the holidays. There are bargain hunters and souvenir collectors who never make it past the counter of 273 sweatshirts, bathrobes, T-shirts and tote bags that greets people as they walk in the door. No famous faces today. No big spenders. The British tourist who spent “tens of thousands of dollars” a few days ago, according to Fred, has decamped for home and his credit card bills.
It is a bit more quiet than a passionate man might like, but Hayman is philosophical. The new kids on the block were “inevitable,” he says with the slightest smile. “Times change.” He has everything he ever hoped for, except a place in the future he helped to create.
He has not decided what to do next. He likes to spend quiet weekends at the beach house with his fourth wife, Betty, and as a rule rejects all invitations for Saturday nights. They go out to dinner, or they have friends over; it might look, to some, like a slowing-down.
Hardly. Hayman wants to put the world on notice: There will be a next project. This is not retirement. “I’m a food man, I’m a drink man, I’m a hotel man,” he says. “I really don’t know now, but there’ll be something new--I hope.”
“It’s been a great trip,” he says, and then, surprised to hear himself speaking in the past tense, he corrects himself. “It’s a fabulous trip now. It’s just so damned different.”
