Career Crossroads

Following the sale of Hudson's to the
Minneapolis-based Dayton stores,
Marx was named senior vice presi-
dent-administration for the combined
Dayton Hudson Department Stores,
working in Detroit and regularly
commuting to Minneapolis.
It was when he faced the possibili-
ty of an imminent relocation to
Minneapolis that Marx started look-
ing at his skill set.
"My wife Sally is from Detroit,
and when they said you're to move to
Minneapolis, I told her that if we did
that, we'd only be forced to move
again some time in the future,"
recalled Marx.
So Marx took stock of his expertise
and background in finance and invest-
ments, and put the word out that he
was looking. Unfortunately, some of
the job offers that filtered back were for
out-of-town positions. But Marx's yeo-
man performance in coordinating
media coverage of the closing of
Hudson's landmark downtown store
had not gone unnoticed by an appre-
ciative media. This despite Marx being
the man in the background, deferring
to corporate protocol and speaking for
CEO P. Gerald Mills.
Marx began taking on a series of
assignments from ad agencies and
attorneys, all of them referrals from
those who'd followed his work —
"people like attorneys Sheldon Toll
and David Page of Honigman, Miller,
and ad guys like Fred Yaffe and Skip
Roberts at W.B. Doner," said Marx.
"I started working on projects," he
said. Some involved strategic plan-
ning, other times it would be finding
a store manager, or working with
sales reps of WDIV-TV to orient
them towards retail clients."
By May of 1985, Marx also began
teaching marketing and strategic
planning at the University of Detroit.
"I had a master's degree, and I was
always a bit academic," said Marx.
Then fate played a hand. Detroit
saw a major realignment of the retail
scene as Kohl's, Target and Mervyns
came to town. Almost overnight, a
whole new cast of players populated
the retail scene.
After originally working out of his
house, Marx found an office in
downtown Birmingham where he
shingle: Marx
hunc, out his first shincrle.
Management Services. He began with
six employees. By 1987, Marx was
working for clients like Great Scott!
supermarkets and WDIV.
Through the matchmaking services

Family Roots

Fred Marx was born in Denver, Colo., and grew up in Bexley, Ohio. His
father, Simpson Marx, died when Fred was 2, and his mother, Florence,
remarried Maurice Zox, a surgeon.
The Marx family originally set down roots in Alabama after emigrating
from Bavaria. One family member fought for the Confederacy in the Civil
War. Marx's grandfather, Julius Lee Marx, was the first Jew to earn a master's
degree from the University of Alabama, and Adolph Ochs, before he became
publisher of the New York Times, was best man at his wedding.
Dramatist Lillian Hellman was Marx's father's first cousin. The family leg-
end is that she wrote her hit play, The Little Foxes, about the Marx family.
Marx is a longtime member of Temple Beth El. His wife, the former Sally
Sloman, whom he met in Cincinnati, is descended from fur trader Mark
Sloman, one of the original founders of the temple. Marx and his wife of 31
years have four children: Julie, 22, graduated last spring from the University
of Michigan, and is an assignment editor at E Entertainment in Los Angeles.
Andrew, 20, is a sophomore at U-M, and Carolyn, 16, is a sophomore at
Bloomfield Hills Lahser High School. Scott, 14, is in the eighth grade at
Bloomfield Hills Middle School.

of Kathy Jackson at Crain's, Marx
hooked up with Michael Layne, who
brought his agency experience to a
company whose very name suggested
they were commercial property man-
agers. Layne, nine years younger and
of a different creative temperament, is
a perfect counterfoil for Marx.

Fortuitous Call

Marx's biggest break came in April
1987 with a phone call from Eugene
Applebaum of Arbor Drugs. The
company had gone public, and had
an advertising agency, but needed PR
help. Applebaum had seen newspaper
articles about Marx and collected
them, and now invited Marx over to
talk informally.
"I remember that day very well. I
had to get to the airport to fly to
Chicago on some work for Inacomp.
The session for them was about how
to set a store up visually," said Marx.
Applebaum told Marx that Arbor
should be doing PR in-house, and
asked him to pre-select candidates.
Marx agreed, and the interviewing
and recruiting process went on for
several months. Eventually,
Applebaum told Marx that the people
he was bringing in for consideration
were fine, but they had little financial
and retail knowledge.
By this time, Marx was working
on the annual report for Arbor.
Because Applebaum liked Marx's
advice, he gave him the Arbor
account. Marx says it was never his
intent to pitch Applebaum. But soon,
Marx became the Arbor spokesman,
even handling Arbor's employee corn-

munications.
"From 1987 to this day, if Mr. A.
(Applebaum) calls, I don't care if I
I'm leaving for the West Coast, he's
my priority," says Marx. "He made
this agency. We made it with his con-
fidence. He could have had a New
York agency.
Arbor was a billion-dollar compa-
ny. But he had loyalty. He always
expected high performance and high
standards," said Marx. The two
remain close today, even though
Applebaum has sold Arbor to CVS.
"I am indebted to [Eugene
Applebaum] not only for his busi-
ness, but also for whatever I learned,"
said Marx.

Shifting Players

Once he entered the major leagues
with Arbor, Marx started attracting
larger clients. But he also benefited
from a series of changes in the local
agencies that had long dominated the
playing field.
"Tony Franco sold his business.
Bev Beltaire, because of her health,
sold also. And Jack Casey sold his
agency. By the end of the 1980s, all
three of these great companies had
changed dramatically," said Marx.
That's when Marx Layne jumped
in to fill the void by identifying the
consumer and non-automotive niche.
"The big national PR firms like
Hill and Knowlton had never been
important in Detroit. But what really
opened doors for us was when
Andrea Fischer Newman at
Northwest Airlines gave us a project
that led to our current relationship as