Emily Post Read online

  Emily Post

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part Three

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Part Four

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Also by Laura Claridge

  Copyright

  To Devon and Ian:

  Indelicate as always, I wallow in your love.

  To Dennis:

  until we die, we will remember every

  single thing, recall every word, love every

  loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to

  others to love, love that can grow brighter

  and deeper till the very end, gaining

  strength

  and getting more precious all the way.

  —A. R. AMMONS, “IN VIEW OF THE FACT”

  These States are the amplest poem,

  Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations.

  —WALT WHITMAN, “CHANTS DEMOCRATIC AND

  NATIVE AMERICAN, NO. 1,” LEAVES OF GRASS, 1860

  Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every country.

  —SINCLAIR LEWIS, 1935

  Damn it, I happen to love this country.

  —J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, EARLY 1950S

  INTRODUCTION

  EMILY POST ENTERED THE WORLD ONLY SEVEN YEARS AFTER AMERICA’S Civil War ended. Though most of her family sided with the Union, a few renegade relatives fought with the South, the staunch loyalists who survived spinning heroic stories of General Lee and his horse Traveller throughout their lives. At the time of Emily’s birth in Baltimore, women were being jailed for promoting birth control for married couples; when she died in New York City, women and men, married or not, were campaigning for legalized abortion. A few years before her funeral, befuddled but fascinated, even now, by the latest technology that celebrated the ingenuity of the age, she would watch, on television, the launch of Sputnik.

  She witnessed Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as well as the emergence of Martin Luther King. Her youth was shaped by the high Victorian era, cosseted by the Gilded Age, and then tossed about in the restless years culminating in World War I. Through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II and its domestic aftermath (all revolutions of a sort), Emily Post’s Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home—magisterial, impatient, collegial, and neighborly—would outlast the ages it reflected and corrected.

  When it debuted in 1922, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest and a country at its wildest. The preternaturally confident author had her feet firmly planted in the Jazz Age, taking its thoughtful measure in her meticulous way. What Emily initially called her “little blue book” debuted in a Manhattan society intrigued by the Algonquin’s Round Table, where Harold Ross, editor of a new, quickly influential weekly, the New Yorker, held court with a whiskey in hand. Even as sales skyrocketed for Emily Post’s guide to the good but proper life, the same decade would also nurture Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway, Claudette Colbert and Clara Bow, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong. Etiquette assumed its position within the heady cultural milieu of the 1920s, shaped by the era of its birth even while modifying it.

  At its broadest, etiquette—the measure of how we treat one another—reaches across class, race, gender, and culture. For many women, particularly (and through their transmission to their sons and husbands), Etiquette long fashioned our country’s idea and ideal of what it was to pursue a gracious—possibly even a moral—life. Attention to behavior, after all, preoccupied the founders of our nation. Sixteen-year-old George Washington had written his pamphlet Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation: A Book of Etiquette believing that everything he already knew about getting on in life was worth sharing with others.

  Though never a head of state, Emily Post didn’t lack for recognition. In 1976 and again in 1990, Life magazine would laud her as one of the most important Americans of the twentieth century. Etiquette, by the 1930s having sold over a million copies, would continue to be touted in the most unlikely moments and places. The list of extravagant citations the book has received in the past few years alone includes admirers as disparate as P. J. O’Rourke, reminiscing about learning how to fit into society through Emily’s book; Joan Didion, using Etiquette to confront her grief over her spouse’s death; and Tim Page, a Washington Post music critic, discovering that Etiquette could help him cope with Asperger’s syndrome.

  In 1934, more than a decade after Etiquette’s publication, Ruth Benedict, on the first page of her groundbreaking work Patterns of Culture, would state that “anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society.” Lacking the intellectual tools to articulate her own cultural philosophy, Emily Post nonetheless worked instinctively from a similar model. While Benedict was exploring customs far from her native shores, Emily was a domestic anthropologist, plumbing the homegrown soil for its indigenous fertility. She assumed early on that change was endemic to humanity, and that the human task was to adapt to it, preserving the best of what came before and integrating what superseded the past.

  Emily Post’s life and work would have been inconceivable without the story of Ellis Island, and the millions of immigrants who sought to become what they considered real Americans during Emily’s lifetime. Between her engagement party in 1891 and the twelfth reprinting of Etiquette in 1924, Ellis Island was terra firma for more than 22 million immigrants. As a little girl, she was granted a singular privilege: while a family friend constructed its base, the Statue of Liberty functioned as her personal dollhouse, allowing the child to play inside its hollow core for weeks. When the statue was completely finished, her beloved father shared the dais with a select group,
helping to dedicate Miss Liberty to the American people, especially to those future citizens streaming through the immigration corrals. Such mythical moments braid competing truths about Emily Post and the country she increasingly grew to understand and to appreciate on its own messy terms. Hers was a staggeringly ambitious hodgepodge of a nation that offered liberty and justice to all—but a justice whose blindness, for all its noble intentions, required continual redress.

  How could the promise that etiquette bestows be maintained throughout the twentieth century? How, in the face of massive human and natural evils, could Americans believe that considerate social intercourse remained a significant issue? That politesse mattered? If misleadingly superficial at first glance, however, the lady’s solution holds up after all. Emily Post was not alone in maintaining that the art of treating people well is the other side to the act of waging war.

  CHAPTER 1

  IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS—IN MANY RESPECTS AN OLD TALE, WITH nothing original to recommend it. A society man was caught cheating on his wife, and now, his blackmailers agreed, he would have to pay.

  Emily Price Post, the adulterer’s wife, was furious. Shocking even herself, for the briefest of moments the usually even-tempered young matron yearned for revenge. Against her spouse, his lover, the blackmailers, and society: anyone who had contributed to this pain. Still in love with her husband, the thirty-two-year-old woman had long ago given up hope that he felt the same about her. She had made peace with her private anguish. What she had not anticipated was public humiliation.

  During the hottest days that summer of 1905, the aftermath of Edwin Post’s betrayal played out daily on the front pages of New York City’s newspapers. Such flamboyant publicity bolstered Edwin’s damaged self-image even as it shriveled his wife’s. Now Emily wore, to those few who knew her well, an aura of sadness only emphasized by her husband’s exuberance.

  Edwin’s friends had warned him to be discreet, but he had ignored them, sure, as usual, that he knew best. By late April 1905 the cocky thirty-five-year-old stockbroker had become careless about how he conducted his affairs with chorus girls and fledgling actresses. So in the middle of June, when one of them whined, mistaking his attentions for relationship collateral, he made a fatal misstep. He reacted callously, warning her to vacate the Connecticut cottage he kept for such intrigues: she bored him.

  Within days of toasting his new freedom from the starlet he had suddenly found cloying, Edwin received a call from a representative of Colonel William D’Alton Mann, publisher of the articulate gossip sheet Town Topics. Mann, already embarked on this summer’s vacation abroad, had left his business in the hands of Charles H. Ahle, his second-in-command. The officious Ahle suggested that he and Edwin Post meet—soon. On June 25 Ahle visited Post, who was unceremoniously instructed to ante up the cash or be exposed to scandal: Town Topics was about to go public with some juicy news of certain interest to Edwin. Luckily, Colonel Mann had left instructions to suppress this gossip if Post subscribed to a vanity book to be printed sometime in the distant future. Five hundred dollars would neatly cover the costs for Post’s copy. He should be grateful, Ahle added unctuously; some other men—more important than Post—had been taxed a far greater amount for the same “project.”

  Thus it was that Edwin Post joined the Gilded Age prey, a group of select men (and several women) stalked by the redoubtable publisher. Colonel Mann abhorred what he considered the duplicity of society. He took immense satisfaction in supplementing his own income at the expense of a careless millionaire’s misalliance. The jovial Civil War hero, a suave, condescending, robust Santa Claus, mixed in his complicated person two sometimes contrary impulses. He was a true believer—no sloppy grammar or careless vernacular would be published under his masthead. But he was also a cynical extortionist, impatient with public figures so inane that they discarded their private lives for a night of pleasure.

  This hypocritical reformer had become an object of dread among the city’s most prominent citizens: J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, William K. Vanderbilt, and William C. Whitney. His method was simple: hire aggrieved servants, disgruntled friends, or a furious spouse to spy on suspects. Then bully those miscreants into paying for a “subscription” to a mostly phantom, wildly expensive illustrated book about leaders of society. Various prices were assessed for each victim, with an eye to what the sinner could afford. What could be easier than such a scam, in the shadow of the Victorian mores that still darkened the resplendent Gilded Age? Money and fevered morality, a glorious mix for a con artist with ethics like Mann’s.

  Pleading a shortage of money, Edwin bought some time to consider his options. Two days later, Ahle came looking for him again. The wayward husband bargained with Mann’s representative. “Give me a little more time and I’ll get you the money,” he pleaded, adding, “please don’t publish the article on Friday”—the usual pattern for expensive gossip sponsored by Town Topics.

  Here the truth becomes a matter of conjecture. The official line, constructed by Emily years later, maintained that the victim was unable to produce the $500 “fee” for the vanity book (worth about $5,000 in today’s currency)—his extensive costs of paying for a mistress aside. Before divulging the news to his wife, Edwin had first sought advice from the couple’s mutual ally, prominent society lawyer Phoenix Ingraham (whom Edwin knew to be smitten with Emily). Predictably, their friend had insisted that she be brought into the discussion, whereupon Emily immediately agreed to help bring down this corrupt operation that had netted so many of their friends. There was no question: the Posts should not pay off the bribe. The prospect of a public spectacle, with her husband its sacrificial lamb and she herself the object of prurient gossip, supposedly failed to discourage the always decorous Emily Price Post.

  Throughout the years, Emily would contend that the couple’s private discussions had centered upon Edwin’s lack of money as well as their mutual determination to end the insidious blackmail of their friends. But such a grand explanation allowed Emily to displace her husband’s painful, real weakness: his inability or, even worse, his unwillingness to protect his wife from scandal.

  THE WEEK FOLLOWING July 11, 1905, both the New York Times and the New York Tribune sustained a running commentary on the sting. “Stockbroker’s Way of Dealing with Bribe Offer” trumpeted the Tribune’s front page. Edwin Post, the article continued, was a partner in a brokerage firm and lived—in the summers—with his wife and children in Tuxedo Park. A terse sentence followed: “[Post’s] action in the case was taken on the advice of Mrs. Post.” The Baltimore Sun, Emily’s hometown paper, ran a short frontpage article on the affair, failing to mention that the betrayed wife was the daughter of their famous homegrown architect, whom, till then, the city had proudly claimed as its own any chance it got. However briefly, Edwin Post was finally at the center of Emily’s life.

  She never forgave him.

  CHAPTER 2

  HE KNEW HE’D STRUCK GOLD WHEN SHE TRIED SO HARD TO impress him, stifling her girlish giggles and self-consciously checking her slight slouch. A fetching enough sixteen-year-old from the Pennsylvania countryside, she had been turned out by Baltimore’s best finishing school, polished with the high patina of shiny anthracite coal. Josephine Lee won Bruce Price’s loyalty, if never quite his heart, within minutes of their meeting at a debutante ball in the winter season of 1869.

  Young Bruce, an aspiring architect, was undeniably looking to marry money, and Josephine’s father, Washington Lee, possessed a postwar fortune in want of spending. The Lees were no anomaly: one of Lee’s railroad compeers demonstrated his recent profits, in 1865, by throwing what was the most lavish party in memory. The menus were lettered in gold, the dining room “smothered in rarest flowers.” Each of the host’s guests was presented with a silk cushion embroidered with his name. The wines cost $25 a bottle, the prestigious singers were paid $1,000 for two songs, and the final bill for the extravaganza totaled $20,000 (almost $3 million today), to bravos all around.
/>   Emily Bruce Price, Washington Lee’s granddaughter, would be a daddy’s girl throughout her long life. She unabashedly bragged about her devotion: to Emily, Bruce Price was a giant among men. At six feet, two inches, the architect whose charms were legendary came of age at the end of the Civil War, but he would have stood out in any era. Handsome, naturally convivial, confident, generous: it is easy to understand his daughter’s lifelong infatuation. Her adoration, in the end, merely echoed that of Bruce Price’s many friends and relatives, who, after being with him for five minutes, seemed convinced they’d made contact with something significant. His niece, a countess by marriage, still recalled, almost fifty years after his death, Bruce Price’s “outstanding personal beauty and personal charm” and his “unpretentious confidence in himself.” “Everyone” revered him, she said. Emily worshipped him.

  Born in Cumberland, Maryland, at the end of 1845, Bruce Price had arrived a week and a half too early to be the Christmas baby his parents had anticipated. What would become his trademark of nearly obsessive punctuality stamped his earliest days. The boy, one of an eventual seven brothers and sisters, spent most of his childhood in Baltimore. Hugging the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s third-largest city enjoyed a seventy-mile buffer from the Atlantic, a distinction only one other major American port, Philadelphia, could claim. The location was ripe for a transportation liaison, which the railroad barons of the nineteenth century would pursue with relish, even when slaves were needed to turn dreams into reality.

  William Price, Bruce’s father—“eccentric,” sniped some who didn’t understand him—was an important lawyer in Baltimore during the turbulent 1860s. A restless man, Price graduated from college eager to leave the outskirts of Washington County in favor of the more prosperous legal garrets of Cumberland. There he met and quickly wed Marion Bruce, a Scottish lass who could minister to his practical side. Their obligatory Episcopal ceremony reflected no particular religious convictions on the part of either bride or groom.