The Bed in the Closet

GOODS & SERVICES

Nothing is funnier to practical Americans than a gadget that seems almost too practical to bear. Like the first model T, the Murphy In-A-Dor bed. which folded up into a closet, was laughed into fame, and so into the annals of genuine Americana. Millions who never owned a Murphy bed had seen Charlie Chaplin wrestling vainly with the contraption in One A.M., roared with glee when it finally flipped him into the closet. William L. Murphy, who invented the bed in the early 1900s, stoutly insisted that no such outrage ever happened in real life. But sales soared, and the Murphy bed became a part of the language.

Like the man who first honeymooned at Niagara Falls, Murphy was a daring young American who was only trying to make good. He was a farm boy newly arrived in San Francisco when the idea dawned on him; he had previously been a stagecoach driver, undertaker, deputy sheriff. Bedding manufacturers snapped at his scheme, and by 1910 were producing 250,000 Murphy beds a year. But the bed became far more than just a commercial success when the budding movie colony saw in it a hilarious prop for slapstick comedy. By the mid-1920s, Murphy and his disappearing bed had beaten off imitators right and left in bitter patent battles; he finally emerged with a fortune and his own distributing company in New York.

In the 1930s, pull-out sofa beds cut into Murphy's markets. World War II housing regulations hurt them more by classifying the beds as furniture instead of structural built-ins, cutting them out of mortgage packages. Progress and Government rules folded Murphy bed sales. To recoup, Murphy concentrated on selling "efficiency" kitchens for small apartments. Last year his Murphy Door Bed Co. sold only 10,000 letdown beds, making most of its $1,000,000 sales from kitchen units. Last week, as the company planned a comeback in house-trailer Murphy beds, Inventor Murphy died at 81 in Belle Vista Beach, Fla.

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