Greenfield was tailor to presidents, stars
The first U.S. president to don a suit crafted by Martin Greenfield was Dwight D. Eisenhower. By chance, the two men had met before Eisenhower entered the White House, far away from the Brooklyn garment factory that Mr. Greenfield built into one of the most venerable clothiers in the United States, an outfitter of movie stars and business titans, politicians and power brokers of all kinds.
In April 1945, as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, then-Gen. Eisenhower visited Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp in Germany liberated days earlier by American forces. The horrors he witnessed, Eisenhower would later say, “beggar description.” He gazed upon the skeletal corpses strewn about the camp and met the starving prisoners, many of them seemingly suspended between life and death, who had survived the Nazi slaughter.
One of those prisoners was Mr. Greenfield, a 16-year-old Czech Jew who was the only member of his immediate family alive at the end of the Holocaust. Shaking Eisenhower’s hand that day in the camp, Mr. Greenfield had the impression, he later recollected, that the general was “10 feet tall.” Neither of them could have imagined that within a few years, Mr. Greenfield, newly arrived in America, would be outfitting him in a wardrobe custom made to fit what was in fact his more modest 5-foot, 10-inch frame.
Mr. Greenfield, who died March 20 at 95 at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., largely kept to himself his Holocaust survival story as he rose from floor boy at GGG Clothes to owner of Martin Greenfield Clothiers, as he renamed the company after purchasing it in 1977.
Mr. Greenfield dressed generations of entertainment stars, among them Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Paul Newman, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Leonardo DiCaprio, and athletes including Patrick Ewing, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.
New York City mayors Ed Koch and Mike Bloomberg wore his suits. Gen. Colin L. Powell, as former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and future secretary of state, began patronizing Martin Greenfield Clothiers as he transitioned from military to civilian life. He thanked Mr. Greenfield for “changing my uniform.” Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, traveled to New York to avail himself of Mr. Greenfield’s services.
Whether before, during or after their presidencies, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were among Mr. Greenfield’s clients. Clinton, whom he personally measured, needed a particular assist, the tailor said, when he left the Arkansas governor’s mansion for the White House.
Perusing Clinton’s closet in the White House residence, “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Mr. Greenfield wrote in a 2014 memoir, “Measure of a Man: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents’ Tailor,” co-authored with Wynton Hall. “A couple of short leather jackets,” he continued, “more jogging suits than any man needs to own, a ratty old overcoat so ugly I was tempted to throw it away on the spot, and a couple of average, off-the-rack suits.”
Mr. Greenfield recalled asking a White House aide, “These are really the president’s clothes?”
Clinton, if he heard Mr. Greenfield’s remark, apparently took no offense. He had been told that when Eisenhower was in office, Mr. Greenfield used to leave notes about foreign policy, particularly where Israel was concerned, in the pockets of the president’s freshly made suits.
“Do me a favor, don’t write notes in my pocket,” Mr. Greenfield recalled Clinton telling him. “I’m going to give you a fax number and you fax me anything you want.”
For years, despite his intimacy with his clients, few if any of them had any inkling of Mr. Greenfield’s past — the murder of his family or the time he spent at Auschwitz before he was subjected to a forced march and then sent on to Buchenwald. Clients might have overlooked the number tattooed on his arm if Mr. Greenfield rolled up his shirt sleeves.
“For 40 years, I didn’t talk about my past to anybody … ever,” he told Vanity Fair in 2014. “A lot of my clients were shocked when they came to a celebration when I was 80 years old to see that I was a refugee,” he continued, “a survivor.”