Neck-Lace

As most husbands do at least once, Malcolm Whitman, textile man, onetime U.S. singles tennis champion and Davis Cup player, came home one night wearing a silly grin and an expensive tie. His wife thought the tie was awful. She said she could make a better tie herself,† Dared by her husband, she did—and he was proud to wear it. Friends wanted to buy ties like it; Manhattan’s Abercrombie & Fitch asked Mrs. Lucilla Mara Whitman to design ties for their customers.

Mrs. Whitman, genteel, well-to-do daughter of an Italian countess, did not accept the offer. But after her husband died, she remembered it. Last week, in its small (25 ft. by 35 ft.) but plushy quarters on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, Countess Mara, Inc. celebrated its eighth and most opulent anniversary. Since its first birthday, sales (of silk ties only, at $6.50 to $15 each) have increased over 1,400%; they netted $40,155 last year.

The shop is the same in which she started by having silk printed to her own design, hiring girls to turn it into ties. She believed that men liked 1) bright ties as the only sartorial way of expressing themselves and 2) ties that told a story.

So Mrs. Whitman designed her bright colors in elaborate motifs, gave each motif a name. Examples: a yellow ticker tape tangled with prancing red devils, called “Ticker Tape”; a naked urchin facing a dark-green background of cactus, called “Cactus Also Needs Water.” (There are also a few less discreet themes which have to be kept under the vest in polite company.) For snob appeal, Mrs. Whitman printed only 30 dozen of each design, with her crested monogram on each tie.

She never publicly advertised her ties. But with some 100 retail outlets such as Chicago’s Marshall Field & Co. and Dallas’ Neiman-Marcus (which gave her its 1944 award for fabric design) clamoring for all she could send, the business expanded so rapidly that she finally had to hire two artists to help her turn out some 800-odd designs this year. That’s still not enough, because her customers often insist on buying ties by the dozen. Among her strangely mixed clientele: William Randolph Hearst Sr., Frank Sinatra, Noel Coward, David Dubinsky and Harry Truman, who once failed at selling ties himself.

†The same reason that made James Fenimore Cooper an author. After reading an English novel aloud to his wife, he declared: “I could write a better story myself.” When his wife dared him to try, he turned out the first of some 30 novels.