Broadway on Fifth Ave.

A girl waits and waits, and if she's

lucky along comes Mr. Right. . . and

Mr. Bergdorf . . . and Mr. Goodman.

--Helen Gallagher

in No, No, Nanette

Manhattan's fashionable Bergdorf-Goodman, outfitter to many of New York's best-dressed women for 71 years, finally found a Mr. Right last week. As the Federal Trade Commission gave its long-awaited approval, the store was sold for $12.6 million in stock to Edward Carter's Broadway-Hale group of Los Angeles. The deal swallowed one of the nation's few remaining well-known independent merchants, though the prestigious Bergdorf store will keep a separate identity and its own label. The FTC evidently decided that any attempt to block the sale, on the grounds that it reduced competition, might cause a further decline along New York's still chic but troubled Fifth Avenue.

Bergdorf lately has faced more than its share of setbacks. None of the four children of Chairman Andrew Goodman, 65, showed any interest in minding the family store. Edwin, 32, his only son, is the manager of an adventurous, listener-supported FM radio station in New York, and recently spent two nights in jail for failing to honor a subpoena for tapes that had been recorded during a jail uprising. Further, Bergdorf-Goodman steadfastly refused to open branches beyond its single Fifth Avenue store, losing customers to the suburban shopping-center outlets of Saks, Lord & Taylor and other competitors.

The store's business still permitted Goodman and his Spanish-born wife Nena to lavishly entertain special customers, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Barbra Streisand, in their 14-room penthouse atop the store. But recently profits have sagged; in 1970 Bergdorf earned well under 4% on sales of $32 million. Convinced that only a bigger company could borrow enough capital to expand the business beyond New York's midtown area, Goodman began searching for somebody to buy him out. Unless a buyer could be found, he said sadly, the store would probably close, and its valuable Fifth Avenue real estate (which was not part of last week's transaction) be sold for high-rise development.

Eastward Ho. The ultimate deal rang up yet another remarkable achievement for Ed Carter, Broadway-Hale's soft-spoken chairman, whose personal tastes for quality run to driving a black Jaguar and collecting 17th century Flemish paintings. Since he signed on with Los Angeles' three-store Broadway chain in 1946, Harvard-trained Carter has built it into a group of 60 stores with annual sales of $755 million. Bucking the discount trend in the '60s, he concentrated on quality merchandise; three years ago, he persuaded the FTC to approve Broadway-Hale's purchase of Dallas-based Neiman-Marcus, which is now expanding into Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Florida. Now that Carter has reached Fifth Avenue, he plans to open at least three more Bergdorf-Goodman stores in the New York area during the next decade.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.