Mortimer Levitt, 98; Built Empire in Menswear

Mortimer Levitt, who built a men’s fashion empire of made-to-measure shirts, starting with one Custom Shop Shirtmakers store in New York City and growing to include more than 60 others around the country, died Tuesday. He was 98.

Levitt, who also wrote five books about men’s style and related subjects and was an avid supporter of arts programs, died at his summer home in Greens Farms, Conn., of complications from a stroke, his daughter, Elizabeth Levitt Hirsch, said Thursday. He was a longtime resident of New York City.

The self-made mogul was born in Brooklyn and dropped out of high school to help support his mother and brothers. At age 20, he started his own business of custom-order shirts for men priced at $2.15 each. From then on, he kept the price far lower than the typical cost of a custom-made shirt.

He opened his first store on Broadway near 36th Street in Manhattan in 1937. Before he sold his business 60 years later, he had shops in upscale malls and shopping districts in many cities, including Beverly Hills, Century City and San Francisco. His stores also carried other menswear, such as ties and suits.

After amassing his fortune as a businessman, Levitt used some of it to support the arts. Two years ago, he gave Pasadena $250,000 to restore the band shell in the city’s Memorial Park. The shell, built in the 1930s, is now named the Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts. He also promised $100,000 a year for five years in a matching-funds program to help launch a free summer concert series at the pavilion.

The Pasadena project is one of several like it that Levitt sponsored in recent years. Others are in Harrisburg, Pa., and Westport, Conn., near his summer home.

He was a founder of the Manhattan Theater Club in New York City, and for more than 25 years served as chairman of the board of Young Concert Artists, which fosters the careers of promising young classical musicians. Pianist Emanuel Ax and violinist Pinchas Zuckerman were once part of the program.

Levitt’s passion for classical music began on a ski trip when he heard the overture to Richard Wagner’s opera “Tristan and Isolde” on the radio. He returned to New York City and bought a record player and dozens of albums, his wife, Mimi, said Thursday. For some years, he held musicales at their Manhattan townhouse and, at age 47, started taking piano lessons.

“He was quite a character, a real original,” Mimi Levitt said of her late husband. “He never cared what other people did. He did things his way.”

A flamboyant dresser who knew the rules of good taste, Levitt wrote several how-to books about men’s fashion. “The Executive Look: How to Get It, How to Keep It” (1981) and “Class: What It Is and How to Acquire It” (1984) attracted attention in part because of Levitt’s writing style.

“Fashion is an industry rip-off. Forget it! Stay with the classics,” he pronounced in the first book. He complained that the long-necked President Johnson wore his shirt collars too low and scolded a prominent business executive he knew who boasted about buying “rejected” shirts on sale, even though he bought them in Levitt’s store. He warned all men to check their shirt size often. A weight gain of six pounds adds a quarter of an inch to a man’s neck measurement, he pointed out.

In “Class,” Levitt urged men to take their shirts to the laundry or learn to iron them themselves. He also encouraged them to do their own shopping.

“Men are traumatized by their wives and mothers,” he said in a 1986 interview with Crains, a business journal. “If they’d only listen to me. I know so much.”

Levitt married Anne Marie “Mimi” Gratzinger in 1948 after his first marriage ended in divorce. Besides his wife and the couple’s daughter, who resides in Beverly Hills, Levitt is survived by the couple’s son, Peter, of New York City.

Information about a memorial service being planned for September is available by e-mailing mortimermemorial@aol .com. Contributions in Levitt’s name may be made to the Friends of the Levitt Pavilion, 85 E. Holly St., Pasadena, CA 91103.