Emily Post Read online

  She glowed. Nervous, but in a good way—challenged to live up to her own and to her parents’ high expectations—Emily entered Delmonico’s through the usual portal on Twenty-sixth Street, where she was redirected to the Fifth Avenue side of the building. Here she would enter a salon, where East Indian and Portuguese silken embroideries draped the walls and electric lights illuminated the marble. Moorish-style flowers by the society florist Klunder set the stage for the Hungarian band playing at full blast in the outer rooms. The fashionable Lander’s Orchestra performed in the ballroom until supper was announced.

  After dinner, Emily took center stage. In her excitement, the easily fatigued young woman summoned new reservoirs of energy, and she danced the cotillion almost continuously for three hours. No record exists of the exact sequence of steps employed during the early morning hours, but a typical agenda would have contained a set with a grand march, waltz, schottische, lancers, and polka. At least three sets—the limit was eight—were danced, the order of each dependent upon what was called. The dancers had to concentrate hard, especially when the dance master announced sudden variations within a routine. The few who executed the wrong steps looked especially foolish, causing others to trip. Man or woman, if you had failed to do your homework, you’d be completely humiliated and the object of communal pity and disdain.

  By the time her official debut at Delmonico’s was over, Emily was exhausted. As she would explain later, she’d nonetheless never faltered. Gracefully, triumphantly, she gathered so many lavish bouquets pressed on her by admiring young bucks that even her best friends expressed envy. (The smarter men, by sending extravagant flowers to Emily’s home that afternoon, had obligated the debutante to invite them to tea.) The other girls were awed that she won so many of the prizes for best dancer, everything from a decorated hand mirror to a small mirrored jewelry box. After each routine, she needed help carrying her haul to the table.

  Emily would find an excuse to recount the story of her debut throughout her adult life, noting that “the girl who is beautiful and dances well is . . . the ideal ballroom belle.” More importantly, “a young girl’s success” was ruthlessly measured by her “ballroom popularity.” Reality was best whatever the handicap: for “those not so blessed—some of the greatest belles ever known have been as stupid as sheep”—a cheerful disposition and lack of self-consciousness would compensate for much.

  But in 1889, the young, triumphant Emily Price had no deficits. Nor any rivals. With her ramrod posture and delicate yet strong face, she commanded the stage, appearing almost otherworldly. Even her heavily lidded eyes added to her appeal, provocative when she was merely trying to strike a serious pose. The eligible swains vigorously pursued the young woman, permitting her (admittedly big) feet to rest only when she was too tired to dance any longer. Burdened by all her prizes and the flowers she had cleverly woven together into a kind of elaborate combination shield and muff, Emily required four men just to carry out the bouquets lavished upon her. Her carriage looked like a florist’s shop.

  CHAPTER 13

  THROUGHOUT HER LIFE EMILY REPEATED THE FABLE ABOUT HOW she and Edwin Post fell in love the night of her debut. She noticed him noticing her while she waltzed by with Phoenix Ingraham—though in fact Phoenix was four years younger and probably not present. Edwin and she danced a polka, equally smitten with each other’s savoir faire and good looks, a Gibson girl twirled and thrilled by a Gatsby ahead of his time. The slender, boyishly handsome Edwin himself remembered it a bit less romantically: he realized very quickly that Miss Price would fit well into his life’s plan, in spite of his being several inches shorter than the young lady in question.

  Edwin Post loved theatrical women, and Emily’s increasingly sure wit, her confidence fueled by the broad approval her dance skills were earning her, made her all the more attractive to the young man. She had developed a talent for mimicry that guaranteed she was popular at dinner parties, and she relished the sway she held over her postprandial audiences with the monologues she supposedly made up on the spot (though it is likelier that the perfectionist practiced ahead of time). Before long, Emily knew she was performing only for Edwin.

  The young man must have been magnetic, because the belle of the ball quickly accepted him as her escort to all the major dances that season. In short order, everyone understood that she and Edwin were serious about each other. Still, Emily believed in having fun before settling down to the sort of family responsibilities her mother modeled. However brief, this was a heady period in her life. She meant to exploit being a debutante, if for no other reason than to recoup the effort it had taken to become one. And yet, the year following Emily’s debut saw little press coverage of the wellregarded debutante. Newspapers recorded few appearances at social events or urban soirees. Emily loved ice-skating, making obvious her absence in the day’s ubiquitous photographs of young society men and women skating in Central Park. Framed by the distant Dakota, the solitary tall building still far from the center of things in 1890, the shots were printed in the New York Times with almost weekly regularity that winter.

  The early months of 1890 passed with no notices of Emily attending parties, social events, or family activities with her mother. Even the spring tea that her beloved cousin Sadie Price gave at her magnolia-laden Linden Avenue house in Baltimore didn’t list Emily as a guest. Emily’s appearances in Bar Harbor, where Bruce was building new “cottages” that summer, were noted in the society pages. Emily seems to have gone through some little-discussed malaise during this period. Perhaps she paused long enough after her debut to ask if there might be more to life than dancing. Her odd sense of discontent, her feeling that she should do more than suckle society, might have been the cause of Emily Price deciding to work for her father.

  She spent much of that year, just as she had done as a little girl, accompanying Bruce to his job sites, from New Jersey to Canada. Having mastered the principles he preached, she would eagerly reiterate them in fairly technical language in her 1930 book The Personality of a House. Perhaps the training at her father’s hands was simply parental compensation for thwarting her earlier dreams of a stage career, but the timing was in many ways perfect. This was the age of the architect, of men pushing the skyscraper higher, shaping a radically new urban aesthetic from scratch.

  Why Emily pursued her aspirations or training no further is unclear, but at the least, Josephine must have insisted that no real lady would choose to work for a living. Or maybe Emily lacked the talent: Personality of a House, though an impressive compendium, doesn’t show the sophisticated aesthetic necessary to great architecture. She frequently refers to her memory of building her dollhouse with her father and making miniature cardboard replicas of Georgian furniture, which she would arrange and rearrange on paper diagrams of each room.

  At least she was not forced to be part of the social mania surrounding her friends’ newest passion, the yacht culture, an elite society Emily distinctly disliked. She had ample opportunity to participate, but she declined repeatedly. Just like Mrs. Astor, who refused to accompany her husband on his luxurious Nourmahal for even one inaugural trip (but who didn’t demur at crossing the Atlantic in midwinter), Emily, when given the choice, maintained that she was not a sailor. Many of her friends at Tuxedo, including Juliet Morgan, delighted in spending time on the water, as their parents made yachting the center of their own recreation. In May 1890, J. Pierpont Morgan ordered a new boat to replace the Corsair he had bought in 1882, when there had been twenty-nine boats in the New York Yacht Club fleet. Now, in 1890, there were seventy-one. Yachting was “the Gilded Age’s premier form of sport,” and Emily was about to become enmeshed in its wash whether she liked the water or not.

  Price family photographs from the winter of 1890–91 show a rustic post-Christmas vacation in the Berkshires; following a typical protocol of the times, the Prices had invited the debutante’s favorite beau to accompany them. The holiday snapshots show “Papa” playing with Jack, the Price family dog.
But the photograph that gives pause shows Josephine dreamily—even adoringly—gazing at the handsome young family visitor, Edwin Post. He was on break from his Columbia studies.

  By the beginning of the New Year, whatever had kept her press coverage minimal during 1890 was no longer an issue. Emily attended the Ihpetonga (“High Place of Trees”) Ball at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on January 21, 1891, having planned her outfit with her usual precision: her best friends, including Juliet Morgan, would be there. Ten days later, as if another coming out were being announced, the phrase “A Woman of Distinction” headed a syndicated society notice. Probably paid for by her parents, the piece about the “handsome and statuesque” Miss Bruce Price is most noticeable for the way Emily is identified, in addition to her name, as the distinguished architect (emphasis mine). Perhaps the phrase is just a bizarre misprint, the writer having confused Emily with her father, though her parents aren’t even mentioned.

  The newspaper announcement marking Emily’s January 1891 reemergence onto the social scene pronounces her the belle of Tuxedo, Newport, and Manhattan. Detailing her soft eyes, “lustrous brown hair,” and tall and “stately” physique, the description commends her cleverness and accomplishments as well as her beauty. “Quite a star on the amateur stage . . . perhaps the best banjoist in fashionable society,” the newspaper recounted.

  In the 1890s, banjo playing was a chic sign of the fast-moving times, and to be among its premier players was impressive. No longer only the stuff of minstrel shows, the instrument was now the new trend in Ivy League colleges. Their banjo orchestras were inspired by the fashion of the last thirty years, during which increasing numbers of society women had begun playing the classic banjo in the European picking style. Henry Dobson, a famous banjoist in New York, had created frets to help players improve their accuracy, an innovation that appealed to the ladies even as it distressed the old-timers.

  In one of the quirks of American history, many historians have concluded that the banjo, developed in Africa and introduced to America by slaves, proved restricting for blacks and liberating for women. Socialites meant to legitimize the instrument’s stature, hoping to elevate it, aided by the new silk or gut strings, to the status of a violin—an unlikely goal, for a number of reasons. Nonetheless, banjo bands proliferated. New York aficionados bought Buckbee banjos locally, though the most ambitious musicians imported banjos from one of ten specialty shops in Boston.

  Emily plied her banjo like a flirtatious peacock fanning its tail. Used to getting what she wanted one way or another, she had been appearing lately as a musical performer, often enough to unnerve Josephine, Pierre Lorillard’s warning ringing in her ears. On the last day of January, the syndicated newspaper column announced, in effect, that Emily Price was seriously on the market again, her informal apprenticeship with her father over. Her assets were coolly cited, among them her recent bequest: “She was a legatee under the will of Miss Catharine Wolfe and she will have a very large fortune besides.” If the willowy socialite had her heart set on a perchance reluctant beau, this article was the perfect hook.

  Something clicked. By April 12, 1891, Emily Price was officially engaged to Edwin Main Post. But six months later, in October, Emily found herself temporarily on hold, her parents submitting a formal announcement to the New York Times that the wedding had been postponed due to the prospective bride’s “illness.” Edwin, a favorite of the ladies, seemed little affected. A month later he penned an off-color poem, a “softly murmured song of the Babylon maiden,” in the log of his family’s hunting boat, the Macy:

  He rumpled me so!

  ’Twas only a miracle,

  Mamma doesn’t know

  He rumpled me so.

  Shall I tell her? Hell no

  He was really “not in it”

  He rumbled me so!

  ’Twas only a minute.

  He rumbled me so!

  Edwin and Emily wouldn’t marry until midyear 1892. The reason for the wedding’s postponement—surely a remarkable event for the circumspect Prices to announce publicly—remains unclear. But it is unlikely that “illness,” the polite euphemism of the day, was the cause. Edwin’s father, H.A.V.—Henry Albertson Van Zo Post—was rapidly losing control of his financial ventures. Post’s record of financial distress had begun the year Emily was born, when H.A.V.’s brother Edwin A. Post had sued him to recover funds that he and Mrs. Post no longer possessed: H.A.V. had just declared bankruptcy. More recently, Tuxedo Park home owners were divided over whose side they took when the same ornery family member, Edwin Post, on the A list of the social circuit in spite of his infamous truculence, very publicly argued that a survey map proved that certain cemetery grounds in Long Island’s chic Southampton resort belonged to him alone—meaning that he had every right to raise his hogs and chickens on what most residents considered sacred land. Marrying their daughter into a family commanding such headlines as “The Desecration of a Graveyard in Southampton” was neither Josephine nor Bruce’s idea of making a good match.

  Most important, from their first meeting, Bruce had not felt completely comfortable with the young Edwin Post. The future bridegroom’s volatile line of work—he was buying up office property seized during bankruptcies and then profiting from their resale—didn’t sit right with Bruce; nor did it suggest the kind of financial stability he wanted for Emily. A photograph taken around this time shows the tremendously successful architect seated at his desk amid a tumble of plans. Handsome, successful, commanding, at the top of his game, admired and worshipped by his daughter, he must have been a difficult act for Edwin Post to follow.

  EMILY SPENT MOST of the following winter in Manhattan. But by early February 1892, her family had apparently capitulated to someone’s entreaties. She accompanied the Posts to a fancy party in Washington, a cotillion given by family friends Mr. and Mrs. John McLean (he owned the Washington Post). The ball honored a visiting young descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Emily surely gloried in this southern departure from the numbingly familiar routine of the New York ballroom. Even the jaded social editor at the Times perked up a bit at the party’s variation in theme: the favors, at least, were “unique,” lending a slightly exotic air to the nation’s usually staid capital. Proud attendants squired a wooden horse ringed with flowers around the room. Ladies were instructed to take one of the rosette garlands and adorn themselves wherever they chose. Gentlemen received violet rosettes and ribbons, including Bonaparte emblems in gilded orange, bees on tinsel cord, and purple streamers embossed with the requisite eagle.

  Guests gathered from up and down the eastern seaboard. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston were especially well represented. The event was a top-tier social affair, and the Post family’s inclusion relieved Josephine and Bruce’s concern over the stability of Edwin’s family. The month after the Bonaparte fête, Emily and her mother were off to Tuxedo, where Josephine worked feverishly on the arrangements for the June wedding. The meticulous journals Emily kept of the dresses she ordered from Paris houses, many of which she herself designed from scratch, are the first known instance of her near compulsion to record the minutiae of her everyday life. She began keeping a detailed expense account of her clothes, though there was certainly no financial reason to do so; her parents were paying. She recorded the ribbons and trims she bought at Stern’s or Altman’s, noting when and where she wore an outfit and, interestingly, whether its effect was what she had hoped for. “Not a success. Can’t tell why,” said one entry. She was jubilant when she scored an exceptionally economical success: after one such triumphant evening, she noted, “And all it cost was $11.79.”

  Edwin and Emily spent little time getting to know each other. Several years into their marriage, Emily would clumsily fictionalize their relationship: “Do you realize . . . that I was only seventeen when I tucked up my hair, let down my dresses, and, imagining myself the Princess in a fairy tale, was married?” she has her heroine say. Even later, she would criticize
the old ways, the complete strangers that young couples were to each other at the beginning of their marriage: “A young man was said to be ‘devoted’ to this young girl or that, but as a matter of fact each was acting a role, he of an admirer and she of a siren.” At the turn of the twentieth century, “each was actually an utter stranger to the other,” she recalled.

  Dating, as we know it, was not acceptable among the upper-classes in the early 1890s. In contrast, the working class had already integrated the term into its slang, and even the Ladies’ Home Journal occasionally employed it during the new decade. The mixed messages of the gay nineties ensured that women of all social strata became adults informed by wildly contradictory values. One ideal was the upper-class Gibson girl, whose model, Irene Langhorne Gibson, was a friend of Emily’s from down South. Oddly, though the Gibson girl’s creator was Irene’s husband, her profile embodied the new ideal of greater independence for unmarried females.

  As the wedding neared, Edwin and Emily spent even less time together. In mid-April, during Easter weekend, he went out for a shoot on the Macy, along with several friends and male family members. At three-thirty P.M. on Friday afternoon, the hunters caught a train out of Babylon, Long Island’s resort town on the Great South Bay where the Post family had long spent their summers, the bay itself a forty-five-mile arm of the Atlantic Ocean between the southern shore of Long Island and the barrier islands offshore. They arrived a mere ten minutes later at the boat, anchored just off the dock, located about halfway out on Long Island’s South Shore. The men ritualistically removed what they called their store clothes and donned their shooting apparel before pulling up anchor and hoisting the sail. The Macy’s captain cooked a celebratory dinner in honor of the holiday: leg of lamb, potatoes, green beans, and cranberry dressing, the meal topped off with a rich vanilla pudding. As everyone settled back with a fine cigar or two, set on playing cards before they retired early, Edwin took the wheel so that the cabin crew could eat.