Emily Post Page 7

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1885, Bruce Price finished a four-story addition to property Washington Lee had bequeathed to Josephine. Now he was eager to return to some business that would immediately make, not cost, money. But first he had to attend to lingering matters out on Long Beach.

  The board of directors planted days of carefully calculated publicity in the Times, a final desperate payoff aimed at saving the limping, ill-fated investment. Six inches of well-positioned gossip listed the illustrious guests who appeared on a very hot summer weekend, along with the largest crowd since the beleaguered resort had opened five years earlier. Among the list of celebrity “late arrivals” was the architect himself, Bruce Price. The usual list of Van Burens and Baldwins and Turnures (whose family Bruce’s niece would marry into) contained no mention of wives or children, suggesting that the men were dutifully showing up in spite of the heat to represent their stake in the company.

  Nothing went right, the ragged celebration instead typifying five years of foredoomed efforts. The local stores ran out of bathing suits and clean towels by midafternoon on the record-breaking weekend. Hundreds of women and children couldn’t get seats on the train. To make things worse for the would-be tourists who were able to board, the hot, muggy ride took twice as long as normal. Even the initially cheerful Times reporter seemed to have been wilted by the truth: the facilities were just not prepared for such numbers, he concluded. The owners weren’t used to success.

  The Long Beach Hotel housed over fifteen hundred “heated mortals” that Sunday night alone. The incredulous restaurant owners and hoteliers exulted. They had “reason to rejoice,” having seen no such crowds the five years prior. But even such spurts of success couldn’t rescue the failing enterprise. By the time the hotel’s mortgage was foreclosed in 1885, the property loans amounted to $1.5 million, approximately $15 million now.

  Today, city histories chronicle this project as a major investment of its time. Glossy accounts plug the history of the hotel as if it were a success story, barely mentioning its disastrous first five years. The Tile Club is largely forgotten, and the Long Island Rail Road once again trundles along to the beach. But Bruce Price came out ahead. Guarding against loss, he had been building the nearby Coney Island Inn back in the summer of 1880, even as he finished the mammoth Long Beach Hotel. Everything was completed in sixty days, speed central to his aesthetic as much as it ruled the railroads and the age they traversed. His reputation traveled almost as quickly.

  So when Pierre Lorillard, the nephew of Bruce’s distant cousin Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, asked Bruce to help investigate some prime hilly country land—or very rough, rocky terrain, depending upon who was talking—he was more than ready. Lorillard was a man worth heeding: his family had practically cornered the tobacco industry, moving on to finance the famous Rancocas Stable in New Jersey. Through his contacts, Bruce had recently designed a parlor car for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Now, in the fall of 1885, they would begin a new project that would change his daughter’s future.

  CHAPTER 9

  EMILY POST WOULD RECOUNT THE FOUNDING MOMENT OF TUXEDO Park hundreds of times during her life: on a gray mid-September day in 1885, Bruce Price and Pierre Lorillard jumped off a train bound for Buffalo, refusing to let the lack of an official stop thwart them. Hopping onto a farmer’s wagon, they explored Lorillard’s ancestral Orange County acreage in a pouring rainstorm. By the day’s end, Bruce Price was convinced that he could make Lorillard’s dream a reality. With engineer E. W. Bowditch, the architect would build a self-contained community, with roads, sewer, water, nineteen mansions (or “cottages,” in the reverse snobbery of the wealthy’s nomenclature), a police station, a clubhouse, and a village, sited around three lakes at the base of New York’s rocky Ramapo Mountains. If they could quickly import eighteen hundred workmen from Italy, Lorillard would see his latest whimsy in place in nine months flat.

  Built on a six-thousand-acre game park shaped by the Ramapo hills, at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, Tuxedo Park would quickly become a playground for Lorillard’s wealthy friends and cohorts—the community inspired by the millionaire’s mistress. Early that year, Cora Brown Potter, a southern belle who thought she’d married money, had discovered that her husband didn’t have much of a fortune left—and he wasn’t very smart to boot. Through the social circles the Lorillards and the Potters shared, the exotic redheaded beauty became, in short order, Lorillard’s lover, even as she pursued her impressive talent for the stage. Several months before Bruce and Lorillard’s rainy walk about his land, Cora had given her restless philanderer an idea of what to do with the vast, useless (so he complained) tract of land he owned around Tuxedo Lake: Why not create a truly exclusive social club, one that played to its strength as an enclave against urban life? she suggested. Close to the city, yet only an hour from the heart of the Catskills, Tuxedo Park, with its lakes, crags, and hills, would be a perfect retreat where the affluent could pretend to relax.

  Lorillard thought this a brilliant idea and immediately asked her to follow through. Cora arranged a meeting for 150 male friends and associates, where Lorillard discussed his—or Cora’s—vision. As a reward, Tuxedo Park’s founder gave her a desirable plot of land to build on. Her husband, deciding he should at least appear as if he weren’t being cuckolded, insisted that the property be put in his name. A few years later, after Cora left him to become a professional actress, her husband and baby would inherit the Tuxedo Park house.

  Not one of the carefully detailed histories of Tuxedo Park includes the part Cora Potter played in its genesis. Instead, the official version claims that Lorillard and his son Pierre Lorillard V precipitously decided that it was wasteful to let their country acreage lie fallow, especially since Pierre père believed the land could be converted to first-rate hunting grounds. To gauge the interest in turning their forests into a private resort, the Lorillards decided to hold a dinner in the city for like-minded friends who would appreciate the proposition: a location convenient to the city but cozily estranged from its inhospitable rhythms.

  Reprinted in town documents, in city memoirs, and in myriad stories about Emily Post’s life—repeated by Emily herself until she probably believed it—this account omits a central figure, the true force behind Tuxedo Park’s existence. Cora Potter was blotted from the community’s history.

  THOUGH RARELY, ON A VERY CLEAR DAY from a certain lookout point in the Ramapo Mountains, the Empire State Building, built in the twilight years of Tuxedo Park’s golden age, magically emerges from the squadrons of trees. The skyscraper’s prominence among the stark pines captures the way Tuxedo Park integrated, even before the advent of the tall buildings, city and country. By car or train today about forty-five minutes from Manhattan, the community was meant as a rebuke to the Newport mansions that increasingly catered to the nouveaux riches. No urban realities would intrude on Pierre Lorillard’s park, which instead showcased the designs of the environment itself. The local land, 90 percent woods and mountains, inspired Lorillard to cultivate a return to nature, even as he accommodated society’s best, offering cottages for purchase or seasonal rental. In the 1950s, Emily Post would explain to a Yale doctoral student writing his dissertation on Bruce Price that, in truth, her father had had to work hard to convince Lorillard to stain the shingle cottages nature’s humble hues: gray and dull brown and rust red.

  Italian and Slovak immigrants built Tuxedo Park, most of them brought over by Lorillard or hired on the New York City docks to make his dream become a reality fast. He named the roads of the workers’ temporary cabins (in the slang of the period called “shanties”) Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Wall Street; the workers’ mess hall was “Delmonico’s.” Given her later insistent regard for others’ feelings, especially for those in one’s employ, Emily was probably sensitive to Lorillard’s careless disrespect for his employees, even as she considered him family and tried to overlook what her mother called his peccadilloes. Children of the southern aristocracy, like Bruce Price, were ta
ught not to take advantage of those in an inferior position; they spoke kindly to their slaves and, later, gently to their servants. As Emily herself would insist years afterward: a lady’s “manner to a duke who happens to be staying in the house is not a bit more courteous than her manner to the kitchen-maid.”

  However he treated them, Lorillard got what he wanted out of his employees. His demands motivated the workers to do the impossible during what was the particularly harsh winter of 1885–86. Even in the relentless snowstorms, the men proved indomitable. By the time it opened, in addition to the thirteen cottages and massive clubhouse, the park would boast the first telephone, water, and sewage-treatment systems outside a major city.

  The gargantuan project was a prize for any architect to have won, whatever his age. But Bruce Price hadn’t just stumbled on it, no matter what a few jealous competitors would mutter. During the critical months leading up to the project’s final planning, which included delicate contract negotiations with Lorillard, Bruce had already spent a great deal of calculated time socializing with Lorillard, best known as an aging playboy whose horses kept winning, as well as, according to a friend of Emily’s, “the biggest bore anyone had ever met.” The architect had also increased the time he spent socializing with Lorillard’s two sons, both well-known philanderers frequently mentioned in the notorious weekly Town Topics. Gossip claimed that Bruce won the Tuxedo Park commission instead of Peabody and Stern (who had been led to expect it) solely because he made sure to play with the boys who made the decision. Instead, though he certainly appreciated the need to mix with those he wanted to work for, Bruce was able to balance his friendships with such men, their misbehavior too obvious for his taste, with his own decorous personal behavior.

  IF THE SECOND HALF of 1885 (practically every day spent in the Ramapo hills) sped by in a blur for Bruce Price, the season proved, mercifully, fast moving for his daughter as well, even though she saw far too little of her father to be happy. While Bruce worked madly, pitching in with his own hands during an icy winter to get Tuxedo Park ready for its June opening, Josephine and Emily traveled back and forth to family soirees in the South. Even a good five years before her official New York debut, thirteen-year-old Emily attended countless family-sponsored teas in Baltimore—still the preferred way among Old Wealth to come out in the South, where anything grander was considered trying too hard, and prolonged dancing with young men during a debutante’s first year out would be an embarrassing mistake.

  Being able to pour properly—pristine white linen threatening to draw attention to any slipups made by the tense novice—was a rite of passage in Baltimore. Often Emily’s favorite cousin, Sarah Price, would preside as junior hostess. The beautiful Sadie would end up marrying one of the Pell heirs to the sprawling lands ten miles from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, bought from the Siwanoy Indians in the mid-1600s. Emily, close in age to Sadie, showed off for her southern family, mastering the technique of the tea so that she could move deftly from one home to another, taking in four or more invitations during a single bloated afternoon in the Baltimore of her late childhood.

  At Sadie’s home, the older cousins chattered nonstop about what balls they planned to attend this season. The girls buzzed with the news about one innovation that actually seemed to consider them first, ranking their needs ahead of the adults’ for a change. This year’s sponsors were experimenting with a new scheme: they were going to start the dances earlier, the hour unfashionable but easier on the participants. When the idea expanded to the North, a scandalized few complained that a ball was supposed to be held late, but the New York Times squelched them, its reporters documenting the Baltimore experience with obvious relief. The proposed schedule would make the event far easier on both the press and the debutantes. The Baltimore matrons proudly saluted their local newfangled commitment to having their young men and women “safely tucked in their little beds” by one A.M. But when plaintive New York reporters, exhausted by their typically late hours, pleaded with local society to follow the southern trend, Manhattan’s finest answered with a definitive no; it was not fashionable.

  This seemingly trivial issue rehearsed the fault lines still dividing Emily Price’s generation. The cotillions in New York invoked a mythical aristocratic past as the template for the present gilded reality. In Baltimore, twenty years after the Civil War defeat, people esteemed those among them who had been “well born before all had been lost.” Here there was nothing to prove with overdone balls and obscenely late hours. Southern women, after all, still exchanged anecdotes about whose grandmother had summoned up the grace to feed the Northern occupiers.

  Most of the women had nastily swept up their skirts when a Yankee soldier even nodded to them in their streets, or so the oft-repeated story went. But once in a while, a lady of real quality would come along—inevitably the speaker’s ancestor—good and gracious in the face of devastating defeat, and able to stare, without flinching, into those Yankee blue eyes. Such a lady would give the enemy water and a place to sleep. Combining righteousness with grace under pressure: this was the model held up for the well-raised southern girl, even into the 1880s.

  In part, the deliberate, carefully plotted gentility of the southern aristocracy—including the less outré, more refined party hours—was itself meant to rebuke the North: for its crass worship of money, and for failing to notice how naturally good people were supposed to act, even in defeat. Robert E. Lee had always behaved with genteel nobility: he was a gentleman, though bearing arms. It was his nemesis, General Sherman, who had burned his way through Georgia, in a story retold as if it had happened yesterday. The once luscious South, now desiccated, teased out ways to recall its lost culture, relying on its enchanting young women to perpetuate its traditions: “those good old days when women were safely on pedestals and lineage mattered most of all.”

  Back home, Emily found herself increasingly bored by spending her evenings with the servants as she made up homework accumulated during her frequent absences. She wasn’t interested in mastering the latest French vocabulary or, worst of all, spending more time with her mother and her friends on the nights they stayed in to play cards. For weeks the girl couldn’t help hearing all about the recent venue change for one of the year’s important balls. The Metropolitan Opera House, not the redoubtable Delmonico’s, had hosted the event. Outsiders might have missed the significance, but upper-class New Yorkers were agog. New money, flagrantly, had endowed the Met, creating the institution for those whose cash smelled too recent to gain access to society’s top echelons.

  CHAPTER 10

  EMILY PRICE, WHOSE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY WOULD BE CELEBRATED at the estate’s first autumn ball, worshipped Tuxedo Park. Bruce built four “cottages” for his little family of three, so that the Prices could stay in one and rent out the others. A domestic setting amid a coterie of friends connected by wealth and family, a carefully manicured wilderness her playground: for a precocious only child, Tuxedo Park was heaven, created by her estimable father himself.

  In spite of the deliberately understated drama of this country community, Tuxedo Park was not lacking in luxury. Its provenance, was, however, more tastefully disguised than that of the older, sometimes garish retreats. While Bruce was building, Lorillard had stayed busy breeding foxes for fall hunting and stocking the lakes with bass and pickerel for summer fishing. The point of Tuxedo Park, as far as its founder was concerned, was to experience nature at its finest. Because whatever else you could say about Newport and Bar Harbor and even Lenox, nobody at either resort was ever off duty. Only at Tuxedo Park was acting natural a virtue. Even the gestation of the entire project was organic: from September 18, 1885, when Bruce Price and Pierre Lorillard had braved the mud and rain of the embryonic park, to its official opening on June 16 the following year, nine months had passed. History books record the speed with which Bruce built Tuxedo Park, a near miracle in engineering and construction. His pace is still legendary among architects.

  The turnout for
the unofficial preview stunned even its organizers. On Memorial Day, May 30, 1886, three special trains, loaded with seven hundred guests, arrived from New York City. Green-and-gold buses and wagons, branding the scene with the club’s colors, lined up at the station to transport the visitors to the park. For latecomers, there were the Tuxedo taxicabs—single-horse covered carts, locally called “jiggers”—to pick up the slack.

  Striking an exotic, Vanderbilt-like tone out of tune with his determined paean to nature, Lorillard had commissioned specially constructed flatboats to ferry the guests across the park’s lake. The two barges were crewed by men in white yachting uniforms. Throughout the day, costumed local woodsmen hired by Lorillard to meander the park roads would suddenly appear whenever a carriage drove past. Tasked with looking natural, the novice actors looked sheepish instead, their black-feathered green Tyrolean hats bobbing along the pathways, their feet occasionally mired in mud.

  The land parcels sold quickly: within a matter of months, Lorillard’s friends from New York’s and New England’s finest families snapped them up. At the beginning, most owners, including the Prices themselves, used the homes for a few weeks only. Within a few years, the Astors, Pells, Baldwins, Bowdoins, Bryces, Goelets, Kips, Leroys, Mills, Rices, and Schermerhorns—the roll call expanded until it included almost every grand name of the late nineteenth century—were spending much of the late summer and early fall in Tuxedo, preferring it to Lenox, Massachusetts, the seat of the Berkshires, and, eventually, even to Bar Harbor and Newport. Gradually, in part due to its proximity to Manhattan, Tuxedo Park became a year-round address for many of the Price family friends.