Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

23. STANLEY MARCUS, CIVILlZED TEXAN

+23+ STANLEY MARCUS, CIVI LlZED TEXAN T HE HALL O F ST ATE in Dallas is a monumental and lavishly decorated art deeD building at Fair Park, constructed to house the State of Texas's history exhibit at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition. It is now the home of the Dallas Historical Society. Against the wall of its semi-circular entrance hall are life-size bronze statues by Pompeo Coppini of six Texas heroes: Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, William B. Travis, James W. Fannin, and Thomas Jefferson Rusk. Several years ago, a newly appointed director of the Dallas Historical Society solicited the names of six twentieth-century Texas heroes to supplement these nineteenth-century figures. I sent in my suggestions, a list of twentieth-century statesmen (and stateswomen) who I thought were worthy successors to these bronze giants. But on reflection, I realized that I had omitted my favorite twentieth-century Texan, a man who never held public office-Stanley Marcus. Marcus, who died in 2002 at the age of ninety-six, is best known to Texans as the president of the Dallas department store that his family founded in 1914- Neiman-Marcus. But in addition to being a merchant and taste-setter, he was the most civilized Texan of his day, a bibliophile, art collector, oenophile, and gourmet at a time when most of the world thought of Texans as loud, obnoxious, super-rich clods. Stanley Marcus was as much at home on the C hamps-Elysees as he was on Main Street in Dallas, and he did his best to educate his customers to move in the wider world with the same ease that he did. My first introduction to Paris and London came from the French and British Fortnights that Marcus produced at Neiman's in 1957 and 1958. The fortnights were not limited to the store. For the French Fortnight, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts did a special exhibit of Toulouse-Lautrec paintings from the Musee d'Albi, and the artist Bernard Buffet gave a lecture. There was a French tapestry exhibit at the Dallas Municipal Auditorium. Best of all, the Zodiac Room served French pastries for two weeks. For the British Fortnight the next year, the Old Vic came to Dallas for a week and a London bobby directed traffic in front of the store. For a culture-hungry teenager living in Fort Worth, it was paradise just thirty miles away. VVhat distinguished Marcus from other Texas merchant princes of the 1950s and '60s was that he had a genuine desire to make Texas a less provincial place. Speaking about the history of retailing, he once told the New York Times that "it was the department store that helped people get away from provincialism." He not only supported Dallas's art museum, library, and symphony, but he chaired the Dallas World Affairs Council at a time when many Dallasites, encouraged by the right-wing editorials of the Dallas Morning News, thought that the United Nations was part of a Communist plot. Most of Neiman-Marcus's customers were fairly conservative Republicans, and when Marcus came out for John Kennedy in 1960, some ofthem closed their charge accounts. But, as he says in his book, Minding the Store (University of North Texas Press, 1997), they continued to shop at the store; they just paid cash. I was present at the October 1963 speech by Adlai Stevenson in the Dallas Municipal Auditorium at which Stanley Marcus introduced Stevenson to an audience that was stacked with John Birchers and worse, who were intent on preventing him from speaking. VVhen the boos and hisses and catcalls started, Marcus shouldered a bewildered Stevenson away from the podium and, in a steely voice, asked for order. A well-dressed and beautifullycoifed blonde in the audience stood up and started to reply and Marcus pointed the gavel at her and said, "You sit down and shut up." That probably cost him a customer or two, but it brought order for a few minutes, even though the meeting later deteriorated into a shoving match during which both Marcus and Stevenson were spit upon and hit with a picket sign. Marcus later asked Lyndon B. Johnson to try to dissuade John Kennedy from coming to Dallas.After the assassination, he took out a full-page ad in both Dallas papers urging Dallasites to "be tolerant of different...