Talking with LI's Julie Satow about 'When Women Ran Fifth Avenue'

A look at 20th century business history doesn't necessarily sound like fun summer beach reading, does it? Yet in her follow-up to "The Plaza," a chronicle of the great New York hotel, Julie Satow has again written a readable, entertaining and enlightening book that will have you intermittently raising your eyebrows, laughing, sighing and sharing fun facts with your companions.

In When Women Ran Fifth Avenue (Doubleday, $32.50), Satow, who divides her time between New York City and Jamesport, unearths the stories of three women who reigned over New York's elite retail sector from the 1930s through the '80s: Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, and Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel.

If you've never heard these names, you're not alone. Much of Satow's research is the first that's been done on these figures. The combination of three unknown subjects, connected thematically but not in life, along with myriad side stories that are too good to leave out — these challenges led her to devise a unique and highly digestible structure and style for the book. It's a triple biography of the women, but it's also a history of shopping and women in the workplace from the 1930s to the '80s. Magazine-style sidebars spotlight everything from the development of mannequins to the first Black department store to the history of designer knockoffs.

Satow recently talked with Newsday about her project by Zoom.

How did you get interested in this topic?

After "The Plaza," I was in the market for a new book idea, and I wanted to focus on characters rather than buildings this time. While researching department stores, I stumbled first on Dorothy and Geraldine, then I found Hortense. They were just so interesting, and I felt so much affinity for them as a working mom struggling with work-life balance. Since this was during the pandemic, the glamour and nostalgia of their world was even more alluring.

For people who love to shop, the environments these women created for shopping will sound like a fairyland, or an amusement park.

In midcentury department stores, you could spend the afternoon not just shopping, but having tea or lunch, looking at displays, hearing music, smelling perfumes, trying things on and getting personal advice, people-watching. … It was like a whole universe unto itself, almost completely inhabited by women.

Some of their innovations sounded so prescient, like the ugliest duckling contest! It seemed like a modern reality show.

That was Hortense, who was so good at marketing. Here she joined with Mademoiselle magazine, and they put out a call. "If you're really, really ugly, tell us about it and we will make you over into a beautiful swan." They picked a young girl from Salt Lake City, who wrote about how she had a huge nose, her body was awkward, she was ungainly and miserable, and they brought her to New York. They gave her a nose job. They gave her a whole new wardrobe. And then they did an entire reveal with a documentary and a big party and "before and after" ads in the papers.

The point was to demonstrate the power of transformation that could happen at these places. You could go in as one type of woman, and walk out somebody completely different. It was a powerful example of the power of transforming your physical attributes — what that can do for you as a person.

Hortense was such a genius but also such a sad story.

I struggled with Hortense. At first, I was not very generous with my treatment of her, because I felt affronted by the way she rejected her own achievements and accomplishments at the end of her life. But she was the earliest of the figures, and her personal story reflects that.

As a young divorcee in Salt Lake City, she went to a dinner party and met this young lawyer Floyd Odlum. They shared a lot of the same ambition and drive and intelligence, they wanted out of their small worlds, and they fell for each other right away. Then Floyd got a job at a New York law firm, worked his way up, and in the 1920s they moved from Brooklyn to a mansion in Forest Hills.

Then he dumped her for her manicurist, right?

There are a number of origin stories of how Floyd met Jackie Cochran. The one I lean into is that Hortense was in the beauty parlor, talking about how her husband was going to take a cruise to Miami by himself to relax. Cochran, who was doing her nails, supposedly called the company, booked herself a ticket, and began an affair. Hortense put up with the situation for years before she divorced him.

When Jackie comes into the story, she's like this classic gold digger in a black and white movie.

Certainly Hortense felt that way. But Floyd definitely liked strong women, and Jackie had nothing if not ambition. She was a genius at mechanical things and got Floyd to pay for her to take flying lessons at Roosevelt Field. She not only got her pilot's license, she became close friends with Chuck Yeager and Amelia Earhart. More than Hortense, she was very famous within her own lifetime.

Jackie's flying lessons are among several appearances of Long Island in the book — there's also the expansion of the stores into the suburbs. Tell us about that.

Yes, Dorothy Shaver helped create the notion of the branch store, beginning in 1945, when she opened a Lord & Taylor location in Manhasset and later, in Garden City. Department stores saw branch locations as a means of growing their business, and especially in the postwar years, as suburbia was beginning to develop, really embraced the trend.

And Long Island still loves to shop! Amazon and Zappos are never going to match up to the magical world you paint in this book.