The Secret (21 page)

“There really is a brisk trade in this sort of thing,” said Vicky. She picked up the pair of handcuffs and examined them intently, distastefully, wrinkling her nose. “But it is true that getting into it would change the character of the business.”

Vicky did not keep silent in our meetings. She was a businesswoman in her own right, long accustomed to saying what she thought and to being heard. My father knew her character well and listened when she spoke. Sal, who was used to ignoring the judgments and opinions of women, had learned not to discount what she said.

I remember what she was wearing that day: a pale orange cashmere jacket over off-white linen slacks. Everything under those items was Cheeks merchandise. I had watched her dress that morning and could testify to that.

“It don’t hafta change the character of the business,” Sal argued. “Ya put this kind of stuff in a separate room. Some customers will be lookin’ for that kinda merchandise, and they’ll find it. They’ll ask for it. Lotsa customers won’t.”

“Well, I’d like to suggest something,” said Roger Middleton.

We had learned that Roger was a great deal more than a suit. He looked like a suit. He talked like a suit. But he was a shrewd businessman, with lots of useful ideas. And he was not unacquainted with our line of business.

“Shoot,” my father said. “Let’s hear your suggestion.” He was bored with the discussion. He intended to make a decision very shortly, and he had patience for just so much talk.

“This is an expanding business,” said Roger. “It has huge potential. But, Mr. Cooper, you run it like a country store, if you don’t mind my telling you so.”

“Even if I do mind, you just told me so.”

“Here we have an example. Would offering—” he paused and pointed at the handcuffs lying on the table. “—
those
bring in more customers, or drive away some who would be offended? We shouldn’t guess. We should find out.”

“How we gonna find out?”

“Two ways. First, we offer that kind of merchandise in a few selected stores and see how it moves. Also, we should do a demographic study of our customer base. Who buys in Cheeks stores? Men mostly? Or women? Young or old? We interview a selected base of customers and see how they’d feel about finding handcuffs in a store.”

To my surprise, my father agreed to Roger’s suggestions. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll try it in ten stores, say. Then, how we gonna do these interviews?”

“We hire a consulting firm to do the demographic study,” said Roger. “That’s their business: interviewing customers. They can do it unobtrusively, and they will know how to evaluate the answers.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised you got in mind a firm to do this study,” said my father.

“I do. Andersen, Brisk and Associates. There are other firms, but I have seen their work, and they are pros.”

“What will they charge us?” my father asked.

“That will entirely depend on how thorough we tell them to be. I am sure it will be less than two-hundred thousand dollars.”

“You think it will be worth it?” he asked Vicky.

“I’d do it, Jerry.”

“You wanta call them for us?”

We would be surprised by the outcome of both these ventures.

37

Andersen, Brisk & Associates did the demographics study. They conducted discreet interviews with one thousand of our customers. Their interviewers were innocent-looking little girls for the most part, but they had been intensely trained. Every question they asked had been approved by my father, by Vicky, and by me. The phrasing was not accidental. Their tone of voice derived from their training. Gazelle, Inc. paid $175,000 for the survey.

Many of the interviews were taped—after advising the interviewee that it
would
be taped “for quality control.” I listened to a good many, and they were very discreet.

“Let me assure you that, though I am audio-taping, you are not being photographed. I don’t want to know your name or where you are from. At the end of the interview I will offer you a twenty-dollar gift certificate. I will not try to sell you anything.”

The interviewer then established the age and sex of the interviewee and whether or not this was the person’s first visit to a Cheeks store.

“When you visit a Cheeks store, do you usually come alone or with a friend?”

“With a friend. After all,
she’s
the one who’s gonna wear the stuff.”

“Not in this store but in a few other Cheeks stores a new line of merchandise has been offered lately. It includes steel handcuffs and leather straps to restrain a person in various ways. Would the presence of such merchandise in a store make you less likely to go there?”

“How is it the French say?
Chacun à son goût?
Each to his own taste. What somebody else buys is none of my business.”

“Then would you consider buying, say, a pair of handcuffs?”

“Ask the woman who’s going to wear them.”

“Would you wear them?”

“Might be interesting.”

The results, ready in four months, were immensely interesting:

54 percent of our customers were men.

46 percent were women.

7 percent of our customers, men and women, were twenty-five years of age or younger, 24 percent were in the range twenty-six through thirty-five, 34 percent were in the range thirty-six through forty-five, 21 percent were in the range forty-six through fifty-five, 9 percent were in the range fifty-six through sixty-five, and 5 percent were over sixty-five.

In the stores where handcuffs and the like were offered, 11 percent of the customers bought them, and of the 89 percent who did not, only 8 percent said they wished we did not offer that kind of merchandise.

Of the customers who did not buy handcuffs, etc., 46 percent said they might buy them sometime. Those customers were about equally divided between men and women. They also tended toward the higher age groups.

Sal had insisted on a question: If they were offered, would you consider buying whips? Of men, 4 percent said they would consider it. Of women, 11 percent said they would consider it.

12 percent of our customers said they preferred not being seen at our stores.

38 percent sometimes, or even usually, came with a friend.

Of those who came to the store with a friend, it was the friend who was going to wear the merchandise and that friend took part in selecting what was purchased.

39 percent wished we would offer underclothes for men.

Well … a lot of it was surprising, particularly that 39 percent thought we should offer sexy things for men.

*   *   *

Larkin Albert was enthralled. To design erotic scanties for men! I had met him several times and now sat down over dinner with him and Vicky at Four Seasons. Albert was dressed as usual, as a woman. Vicky was there at my father’s insistence. Albert, he insisted, was not above coming on to me.

Actually my father was kidding us, just to get Vicky to meet the man. Albert was not about to come on to any man. He might have tried to come on to Vicky, if she’d been alone.

I suspected at the time that Four Seasons knew who he was and what he was, and I wondered if he would have been made welcome there if he had not asked for my father’s table. He was, anyway, among the most glamorous women in the room, and was maybe the very best dressed. I remember his “basic little black dress.” I remember that I could not have guessed he was a man. She wouldn’t admit it, but neither could Vicky—though later she insisted she had known all along that he was a man.

“My! You say thirty-nine percent? Well! What a challenge!”

“Challenge?” Vicky asked.

Albert grinned. “About seven percent of women—an unscientific guess, not based on a study like yours—think their boobs are too big. Maybe another ten percent think theirs are just right. Which leaves eighty-three percent who think theirs are too small. Men—I’d guess ninety-five percent of men wish their cocks were bigger, no matter what size they are.” He shrugged. “The challenge of designing men’s scanties is to make them think their undies make them look bigger. And that is
one hell
of a challenge.”

He would solve the problem.

*   *   *

My father had chosen two stores in Manhattan—Midtown and the Upper East Side—and one in Stamford, Connecticut, one in Boston, one in Jersey City, one in Philadelphia, and one in Washington for our experiment in selling S-M merchandise.

He stocked them pretty much the way Sal suggested, with steel handcuffs and leg irons, leather versions of the same, and leather collars. He expanded each store’s stock of nipple clips. The printed instructions that went with them suggested they could also be attached to the labia or the foreskin of an uncircumcised male.

One item he allowed surprised me. It was a gag, consisting of a soft rubber ball pierced with a narrow strap that could be buckled behind the neck, making it impossible to spit out the ball. Of course, the subject’s hands would have to be cuffed behind the back.

We wondered if we would not run into trouble with local authorities, once we began selling this kind of stuff. It didn’t happen.

Sal visited the stores and asked for volunteers to model these things. In every store, at least one young woman did volunteer.

Some of these girls were pretty good actors. I went to the Midtown store and watched a girl model. She stripped to Cheeks scanties, black of course, and then the woman manager cuffed her hands behind her back and locked on a pair of leg irons. Finally she shoved the bright red ball into the girl’s mouth and tightened and buckled the strap. The girl took it for a few minutes, stumbling around the room and showing off. Then she began to struggle and shake her head and moan. When tears began to run down her cheeks, the manager unfastened the gag, and the girl hung her head and wept. Another clerk came in and led the “victim” out of the showroom. Five minutes later, out of sight of the customer of course, the girl was laughing and drinking a Coke.

The customer, embarrassed at having put an innocent kid through such discomfort, bought a set of cuffs, shackles, and gag. I wondered how he thought some other young woman was going to react at being restrained the same way.

Oddly, this line of merchandise generated curiosity in Vicky and Melissa. One evening when we were having dinner in my father’s apartment, Melissa went in the bedroom and came out carrying handcuffs and leg irons, which my father locked on her. She blushed and grinned and muttered something to the effect, “Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.”

Vicky volunteered that she would try it, just for a minute. My father took the things off Melissa and handed them to me. I fastened them on Vicky. She walked around the living room, lurching and awkward. The one minute was enough. She demanded I take them off, and I did.

In our own apartment, later, she told me she wanted to try them again. I picked up a set at one of the stores. That night after dinner she stripped to a pair of panties and a bra, and I locked the chains on her. She tugged at the cuffs, apparently pretending she really was a prisoner. She did not stumble in the shackles, quickly gauging the length of the chain and the length of the steps she could take. She walked around the apartment. When she sat down beside me I felt the crotch of her panties and found she had soaked them. I pulled them down, and we made love without removing the cuffs or shackles.

She liked them—within limits. Sometimes she wore the handcuffs and leg irons for a whole evening.

This kind of stuff sold. It was never a major profit center, but Cheeks sold handcuffs, leg irons, and gags. The nature of the business was changing.

*   *   *

Larkin Albert called us to his studio to see what he had designed. My father, Sal, and I went to his little show.

Larkin—I had begun to call him by his first name—had hired four models to show us the line he knew would sell. Charlie Han had worked the items up for him. It was all of ribbed combed cotton, a sort of knit with some stretch in it.

Okay. The four models came out wearing Larkin’s designs. Each of them was a young man with a shaved and lightly oiled body. One of them was muscle-bound.

The underwear was striking. The big-line companies like Jockey had been selling slingshots for years. No one would be shocked by bikini styles in men’s briefs. Larkin had designed thongs. Straps circled the hips to attach front to rear. One of the designs had no rear. A string ran from the back end of the pouch, up along the anus, and reached the string coming around from the corners of the pouch. Most of the styles, though, had a definite pouch in front and a stretched cover for the butt.

My father shrugged and spoke quietly to me. “Colored jockstraps.”

“Maybe,” I whispered. “But … I think there’s something more to it.”

There was.

Standing before us at this point was a handsome young man with an out-of-season tan and a hairless torso. His male parts filled the pouch of his thong. In fact, they stretched it.

“Ken,” said Larkin. “Pull it down and let the: gentlemen see how you are hung.”

Ken smiled nervously, but he pulled the thong down to his knees.

His penis was nothing unusual. He didn’t have a hard-on. He had a normal, circumcised penis.

Larkin gestured to him to pull the thong up again. With the cotton stretched over him again, he looked huge.

Larkin had solved his problem. And the solution was simple. The pouch was sewn to capture the scrotum as well as the penis. In other men’s briefs, and in jockstraps, the scrotum and testicles were allowed to hang between the legs. In Larkin’s designs, the scrotum was lifted like breasts in a bra. The pouch was filled, overfilled. And this shoved the penis forward and made it look twice its real size.

The other three models were told to shove their thongs down and let us see what they had. One was bigger than average. The others were average. But with their underpants in place, they looked like they were hung like horses.

Cheeks had another line of merchandise. It would prove highly profitable.

38

JERRY

As my son Len became more and more involved in my business, I told him more and more of the history until he knew most of it. I did not tell him much about the Boiardo feud in Philadelphia. I told him that the man who paid for his first pair of Gucci loafers was a don. That was, of course, Don Enrico. I told him the old man was dead, but not exactly
how
he got dead.