Emily Post Read online

  Lee knew his daughter was in good hands: Bruce was a worker too. Under the aegis of his own Baltimore firm, Baldwin and Price, the young architect quickly constructed four solid city houses at 12–16 East Chase Street, reserving his favorite, No. 14, for Josephine and himself. Upon Emily’s birth—and surely as part of a deal Bruce cut with the doting grandparents—he moved the family back to Wilkes-Barre, where they would live for the next five years. City court records reveal that the young couple retained and even enlarged their Baltimore house, building sewer and drainage pipes as part of the expansion. Emily was always careful to refer to her father’s professional grounding in Baltimore. After all, Bruce Price, architect, a descendant of the city’s own Francis Scott Key, would belong to its history books as well.

  SHE WOULD NEVER deny being larger than life. On October 27, 1872, one incontestable hard fact presented itself as metaphor and nature both, when Bruce Price and Josephine Lee, two giants in their different ways, produced a very large baby. Emily Bruce Price weighed in at over nine pounds, hardly the delicate creature more typical of her era.

  Like clockwork, regimentation being important to young Josephine Lee Price, a son would follow the next year. According to burial records, William Lee Price was born on April 18, 1873, and died on December 6, 1875, within days of Bruce’s birthday. This “fact” is impossible to reconcile with Emily’s birth six months earlier. But the early death of little William in 1875, just before Christmas, mentioned only once in the lifelong flow of interviews conducted with Emily Post, became a kind of family secret, the creed of an age that expected personal problems to go unacknowledged.

  Perhaps it was her desire to blot him from the family chronology that caused Emily to mesh her birthday confusedly with William’s. Certainly it is odd, especially for as fastidious a record keeper as Emily Post, that the birth dates on the child’s Wilkes-Barre gravestone and on Emily’s own granite marker in Tuxedo Park overlap. Such lifelong “confusion” strikes a false note in a woman who recorded the yardage of every dress she sewed and the color of every bulb she planted.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE YEAR EMILY POST WAS BORN, NEW YORK CITY, 190 MILES NORTH of Baltimore and a few miles less to Washington Lee’s coal fiefdom, braced itself for a more complicated birth. Its gestation finally complete, Grand Central Station tethered the old to the new surer than genealogy ever could. Transportation reigned, and coal was king. The decade was switching gears, gentility displaced by a refusal to linger.

  Emily entered a world barely stepping one foot ahead of financial disaster. The very tempo of her country’s change, the relentlessness of its progress, contributed to a near breakdown in its infrastructure. Not everyone, it is true, registered dismay during this first real test of postwar American monetary markets. Josephine, for instance, scarcely recovered from Emily’s birth, succumbed to the speculation spreading throughout the markets. She was good with money, and she made a tidy sum from her stock investments. Her enterprise did not lack for irony: more than any other single event, the extreme overbuilding of the nation’s railroad system—on which Washington Lee had staked his fortune—had laid the groundwork for the fiscal meltdown that year.

  The fear in its wake shaped a depression that would hold the newly reunited nation in a nervous clutch for another six years. Along the way, institutions thought invulnerable were exposed as anything but. In 1873, on an insufferably muggy September afternoon, the country’s leading financier, the indomitable Jay Cooke, signaled to a nation that radical change was indeed at hand. Cooke had played a significant role in the Civil War by helping the Union raise over $3 billion in bond sales, portending the ways modern governments would fund their wars in the subsequent century. More recently, he had sent General George Custer to clear out the Sioux Indians blocking progress on the Northern Pacific Railroad he had underwritten.

  Now, to the shock of just about everyone, Jay Cooke & Co., the nation’s premier investment bank, failed, finally and completely outmaneuvered by its only rival, J. Pierpont Morgan and his cohorts. Possibly Cooke took some perverse solace in the signs of his greatness: his fall on September 18 set off a national drama. The New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days; credit evaporated and companies folded.

  With the failure of the banks, thousands of workers were suddenly without income. Such dramatic shifts in fortunes engineered momentous social change. To people of Emily’s class, a new sophistication about the instability of the money markets fueled their concerns. (What would the market do? J. P. Morgan was often asked. “It will fluctuate,” he inevitably answered.) All of which suited Washington Lee just fine. Developing strategies for playing the market with all that coal money proved a robust enterprise. Lee and his family would ride out the depression in style, in spite of an unexpected loss here and there.

  Emily’s grandfather had enjoyed the frenetic growth of the railroads unfettered by government regulation. Now he had his ear to the ground again, this time listening to rumbles of pending bank failures. In spite of her own preoccupation with her babies in the early 1870s, Josephine found herself engrossed in the household excitement anytime her father started talking about the current market realities. Father and daughter enjoyed dreaming together out loud. But while humble, unassuming coal was stoking Washington Lee’s lifeline, his imagination kept returning to those gold mines in Africa.

  Josephine didn’t talk finance exclusively; she was equally interested, unlike her father, in the lives of people who inhabited the fabulous world of men like Jay Gould. She enjoyed regularly gossiping with her rich but down-to-earth relatives about the extravagant lives detailed in the local papers and tabloids. Still redefining itself as a country, the restored Union was being forced to confront class structure even as its national ethos preferred denying such undemocratic barriers. The newspapers described society’s movement, in ever greater detail, as the gap between the haves and have-nots grew even larger. Of all the names bandied about, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor’s was the bluest. She, more than anyone, inspired the postwar frenzy of lavish displays of wealth to prove one’s worth. And yet, in one of the paradoxes endemic to the Gilded Age, between the Reconstruction of the 1860s and the early twentieth century, society depended upon ancestry, not the incidental (and implicitly vulgar) acquisition of a fortune, to rank its citizenry.

  Shortly before the depression of 1873, Ward McAllister, a formidable social climber from Savannah, even founded an exclusive New York City institution called the Patriarchs. McAllister showed Mrs. Astor, whose toady he became, how to create a truly exclusive social circle: he devised a group of twenty-five men (enlarged to fifty the following decade) whom he alone deemed the choicest of the social crop, a set meant to represent bloodlines rather than mere fortunes. Fifteen years later, he would create his mythical list of the Four Hundred, said to enumerate all those worthy of gracing Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. McAllister finally produced a catalog of the Four Hundred (really only 273 names) during his last gasp in the 1890s, the list existing only in his imagination until then. Such pompous self-aggrandizement was frequently mocked in the press: Charles Dana Gibson cleverly caricatured society’s self-appointed leader on a hobbyhorse—referencing a common game played at the society dances—or as a goose girl (a figure in another such amusement) herding a flock of the elite Four Hundred.

  Throughout Emily’s youth, Mrs. William B. Astor—the Mrs. Astor, Caroline Schermerhorn—with Ward McAllister at her side, would help maintain Society’s purity, whether in New York or Newport. Because of the circle her family inhabited, Emily had many opportunities to observe such members of Society. Without realizing the significance of her disdain at the time, the young girl disliked such posturing, her contempt later underwriting her personal code of ethics. She was, of course, influenced by her parents: though accepted into the ballrooms, they remained sufficient outsiders to levy judgment upon the society they had joined, and by training and heritage, they were too sensible to swallow it whole. Real quality, they taught the
ir daughter, had nothing to do with money or birth.

  SPENDING THE FIRST few years of her childhood in the bosom of an adoring extended family, benevolent lords of their local fiefdoms, Emily Price escaped the depression entirely. One memorable Christmas in Wilkes-Barre, her grandfather even presented her with a fine miniature china tea set. Outraged at not receiving a more exciting gift, the four-year-old demanded her young uncle Charlie’s elaborate toy train instead, only to be gently rebuked for overreaching: when she was older she could play with the train. Soothingly told to go pretend to have tea in the garden, little Emily marched outside, railing against her lack of power. There, she systematically smashed each expensive cup and saucer against the rocks, scattering shards of china throughout the pool. The girl didn’t want to play tea party; she wanted to work an engine like Uncle Charlie.

  Such petulance surfaced whenever Emily felt herself treated dismissively, as if she wasn’t mature enough to have what others, older and wiser, possessed. One summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, for instance, where the young girl and her mother vacationed while Bruce worked at enlarging several local estates for the Gilded Age set, Emily again displayed the entitlement of a bright only child. The five-year-old was given a charge account by her parents so that she could learn to manage money. Instead, she immediately ran up a bill for $5 at the local candy shop, feeding her sweet tooth. To her surprise, her father refused to pay the bill: it was hers, he explained, not his. To show her the size of her debt, Bruce filled up a box with five hundred beans, which stood in for pennies. She had to use her weekly allowance until the beans were gone.

  Throughout her life, Emily would remember this kind of firm, instructional discipline with almost as much pleasure as the lessons in design she received from her loving but often preoccupied father. Either way, Bruce Price was worth listening to. Whether truly attracted to his field or as an attempt to gain his attention, Emily began to show an early interest in what Bruce worked on in his home office. The delighted father set the little girl up on his oversized drafting table, allowing her to “work” alongside him while he revised his blueprints, supplying her with a T square, paper, and proper pencils. Soon the child was tagging along when he visited (startled) clients.

  Such concentrated moments compensated, in part, for the lack of attention her father typically gave her. Emily saw very little of the architect, his frequent absences as he worked overtime at his business encouraging her to idolize him. Josephine’s father had delivered on his promise of an office in Wilkes-Barre for a wedding present. Profiting from his father-in-law’s gentle but direct suggestions to town councilmen, Bruce was able to design local churches and homes that were unusually choice architectural commissions for his age. He labored especially hard for the first five years of Emily’s life, capitalizing on the commissions both his father-in-law and his own former colleagues in Baltimore steered his way.

  Bruce’s buildings were more or less subsidized into realities on the power of Washington Lee’s name, both in Wilkes-Barre and Baltimore, one successful project begetting the next. During the professionally crucial years following Emily’s birth, important firms in New York made note of Bruce Price, whose achievements were already on prominent display. Very few architects see the majority of their designs actually executed. Bruce Price’s prolific blueprints, in contrast, would average a 90 percent rate of execution throughout his career.

  Connections would only become more important as his business grew. Around the time of Emily’s birth, the architect cemented a friendship with a longtime Baltimore resident that would prove seminal to his future. Bruce met Frank Hopkinson Smith when the two worked together on a project. An informally trained architect, artist, writer, and socialite, “Hop” Smith, probably after Bruce the most influential man in Emily’s life, was a talented engineer and artist, as well as a riveting storyteller. His compelling, friendly masculinity supported a geniality Bruce Price admired. Born in Virginia a decade earlier than his friend, Hop had grown up in Maryland and considered it his home. He took pride in being the great-grandson of Francis Hopkinson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

  Hop Smith informally sponsored his friend in the assorted circles he himself inhabited, social and professional. Years earlier, he had relocated to Manhattan, traveling back to Baltimore frequently. After hearing from Hop one more time about the opportunities he was missing in New York City, Bruce seriously began to consider moving. The business trips he had been taking to New York had already made him restless for more. He marveled at the changes sweeping their way across town with an awesome invincibility. Urban life was sprawling in all directions, even appropriating Fifth Avenue itself, New York’s definitive promenade. The city, groaning under the unprecedented heft of new construction, seemed to flex its muscles more powerfully than ever. The recent opening of Central Park encouraged the building of new uptown residences. Such fashionable relocations were finally convincing out-of-town visitors like Josephine that settling below Wall Street was no longer the only viable—or even the best—sign of gentility.

  Enhancing her own prestige was not Josephine’s driving force: like her father, she usually gravitated to change and excitement for their own sakes. Her privilege blinded her to the ways her upper-class status offset the handicap of having been born a girl. Josie saw little to recommend equality with men. She shrugged off women who acted, she scoffed, as if they were ashamed of being female. Her sexual politics typified those of the readers of Baltimore’s popular anti-suffrage magazine of the age, True Woman. Why would anyone willingly take on male responsibilities?

  And yet for all her commitment to the traditionally feminine, Emily’s mother was a strong woman. Now, invigorated by what she glimpsed when she accompanied Bruce to “the city,” as the Baltimorean referred to Manhattan, she finally suggested that her extended family might move there. Her parents’ rapid acquiescence—five-year-old Emily’s energetic grandparents were ready for a change—spurred the young couple on. Eager for another adventure, Washington and Emily Lee financed the Prices’ change of residence along with their own, enthusiastically endorsing their son-in-law’s choice of a neighborhood. The Lees were already sold on the city, their granddaughter later recalling reasons for their immediate allegiance: “New York was built, is building, will ever be building in huge blocks of steel and stone, and the ambitions of every city and country in the world will keep pouring into it . . . and shoving it up higher and higher into towering cubes.” The Lees and the Prices were quickly enveloped into its urban fold.

  CHAPTER 5

  EMILY POST WOULD ALWAYS BEAR THE IMPRINT OF A KNOWING southern girl, her antebellum roots as entrenched as her northeastern attitudes. Her convivial, artful restraint, her disdain for vulgar displays of wealth or beauty or personal information, stemmed partially and potently from her ties to a mixed heritage. If nothing else, an overspill of Baltimore relatives would keep her going back home for a good fifty years of debutante balls and weddings and christenings.

  Her childhood house in Manhattan was one of several four-story red-brick houses lining Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. By the time the Prices arrived in New York, society might have been moving uptown, but the less secure denizens still leaned toward real estate they knew was correct. And Emily’s New York home was connected to her birthplace, after all: Bruce selected the building because its windowsills reminded him of Baltimore houses he had loved. Even today, New York Times architecture critic Christopher Gray lauds the 12 West Tenth Street town house’s “fabulous door escutcheon . . . [which] looks like a spider web woven by a Gibson Girl, a terrific sinuous work. . . . Clearly custom hammered.”

  The two apartments, one above the other, ensured that the Prices and Lees saw much of each other. Yet it is easy to forget the Lees’ proximity to their grandchild, Mrs. Emily Lee’s namesake. In fact, without studying a few scarce family photographs, it would be possible to read everything Emily Post wrote, including the thousands of interviews she w
ould grant through the years, without coming upon a single reference to Josephine’s spunky if inelegant parents. It was Bruce and his family, not Josephine and hers, that Emily would venerate throughout her life.

  Everything her father did was larger than life in his daughter’s eyes. Soon after arriving in Manhattan in the late 1870s, for instance, Bruce had dared to renovate their Tenth Street building, though the Lees thought it fine as it was. Even as the local residents tensed over historical errors he might commit, the confident architect dismayed them further when he explained that he would rent out his in-laws’ apartment when they weren’t in residence.

  The more subtle issue of Bruce’s boldness dealt with class and custom, as well as the architect’s imperviousness to outdated modes of conduct: Could a gentleman turn his house into a home for himself while leasing part of it for profit—and remain a gentleman? Emily’s proud father answered yes: a person of quality was no less pure for earning a living.

  WITHOUT SHORTCHANGING his formidable talent, and without taking anything away from what were apparently Bruce Price’s almost unworldly magnetism and his preternatural good looks, we can admit the significant role luck played in his life. He came to New York hungry and wise, knowing that such an appetite was exactly what got things done. Manhattan could not afford to relax in the knowledge that it had the urban edge: significant rivals challenged the city’s supremacy, especially in the form of the great midwestern capital eight hundred miles to the west. The year before Emily was born, after the roaring, uncontrollable fire gutted Chicago, the city had been forced to rebuild. Destruction spawned the forward-looking Chicago aesthetic. When Bruce moved to New York, the competition between Chicago and New York had evolved into a heated contest, one that shaped the work of any major architect of the period.