The Grandes Dames
Page 18
The Emerys also built one of the city’s first luxury apartment houses, again a very daring and foresighted move. At the time, apartments, or “flats,” as they were called, were considered fit habitations only for the poor; the affluent lived in private houses. But the Emerys’ first apartment house was found to be so convenient and comfortable that the young William Howard Tafts became tenants for a while. Spurred by this success, the boys built more, giving their apartment houses romantic, European-sounding names—the Lorraine, the Lombardy, the Brittany, the Saxony, the Normandy, the Warwick, Somerset, Cumberland, Essex, Clermont, Navarre, Verona, Madrid, Suffolk, Granada, Seville, Garonne, Aragon, and Castile—to name only a few. They built the Carew Tower, a forty-five-story office skyscraper, which is still Cincinnati’s tallest building. Like the Hotel Emery, the Carew Tower featured an enclosed shopping arcade, and it also included another hotel, the Netherland Plaza.
Two competing hotels were the Grand and the Gibson, which, young Thomas J. Emery believed, were profiteering by charging $3.50 a day for a room with meals. A good hotel, he claimed, could offer the same accommodations and service for $2 a day. The result was his Palace Hotel, opened in 1882. “As long as the sun shines,” Thomas Emery promised, “the Palace will be a two-dollar hotel.” To be sure, there was only one public bathroom and toilet to a floor, but that was standard for hotels of the time.
The Emerys began expanding their real estate operations beyond Cincinnati, and soon they were developing and building projects in such widely scattered places as San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Toledo, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico. The brothers had more than two thousand tenants in Cincinnati alone, not counting, of course, the stream of transient guests in their hotels. By 1930 it was estimated that the only family in America which controlled more real estate than the Emerys of Cincinnati was the Astors of New York.
The Emery Candle Company, in the meantime, had weathered the age of kerosene, of gaslight and, eventually, electricity, and was turning out stearic acid, oleine, and glycerine products sold all over the world. Two other Emery companies had spun off from this—the American Oil Treating and Hardening Company, specializing in the hardening of oils, and the Twitchell Process Company, which supplied a reagent for splitting fats.
In 1866, Thomas J. Emery married twenty-two-year-old Mary Hopkins of Brooklyn. (His younger brother would remain a bachelor until fairly late in life, when a wife became necessary for dynastic reasons.) Mary’s background and upbringing were genteel. Her father, a New York clergyman named Francis Swaine Muhlenberg, was the son of General Peter Muhlenberg, a soldier-clergyman who had been a companion-at-arms of General George Washington in the Revolution, and a member of the family after whom Muhlenberg College is named. But Mr. Muhlenberg had died when Mary was quite young, and, when her mother remarried a well-to-do dry-goods merchant named Richard H. Hopkins, Mary began using her stepfather’s surname.
But her nickname was “Guppy.” No one knew where that came from, but she clearly liked it because she often signed her letters that way. And in appearance she did rather call to mind a little fish. She was small and plump, and not really pretty, though she had big, deep-set eyes and was proud of her flawless white skin and her tiny, delicate hands. She was also bookish. She spent the equivalent of her high-school years, from 1857 to 1862, studying at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights. Packer was, in those days, a school for well-born young ladies—tuition was $12 a quarter, plus 50 cents each for “books in ink,” which made it, for its time, an expensive place. It was also unusual in that it was then the only school in New York City where a woman could receive the equivalent of a higher education—indeed, it was the only school of its sort for miles around. Vassar did not come into existence in Poughkeepsie, New York, until 1861, and Barnard was established some years after that. While others of her generation were learning to work petit point and pour tea, Mary was studying science, mathematics, Latin, German, French, and art history. Before meeting Thomas Emery, she had planned to become a schoolteacher.
When Emery brought his bride home to sober, solid Cincinnati—Serene Cincinnati, it has been called—she fitted right in. The population base of Cincinnati was largely English and German, two nationalities not known for extravagance and show. On Mary Emery’s father’s side, her ancestors were German Lutherans; on her mother’s, they were English Episcopalians. Cincinnati has never been accused of being trend-setting or avant-garde, and neither was the new Mrs. Emery. Though she was married to one of the city’s richest men, Mary Emery’s bearing was modest. Her simple coiffure was tucked carefully under a net made of her own fine hair. Instead of hats, she favored bonnets. Her dresses were high-collared, long-sleeved, long-skirted, and nearly always of black or dark purple, though she occasionally appeared in a white mohair outfit. When she ventured out, she was always black-gloved and carried a black parasol.
Edgecliffe, the house the Thomas J. Emerys built for themselves in Cincinnati, was large, but not overpowering in the sense of a Whitemarsh Hall. It contained only sixteen principal rooms, plus a kitchen, service area, and basement. Mary Emery had chosen the site—high on a bluff overlooking a wide bend in the Ohio and the Kentucky hills beyond—because of its literary overtones. Both Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Dickens had visited Cincinnati, and had declared this particular hilltop view the most beautiful in the city. Edgecliffe was built of gray stone in the style of a castle on the Rhine, and a round third-floor tower faced the river and overlooked a series of balconies and terraces. From the rooftop widow’s walk a panoramic view extended for miles in all directions.
Edgecliffe was decorated and furnished with Victorian exuberance, and yet with a certain amount of Victorian restraint. The wide wrought-iron doors of the entrance led into a marble-floored central atrium with a fountain at its center, lit by a coffered skylight ceiling three stories high. In this hall stood two marble lamps of learning imported from Italy, and a statue representing the youthful Michelangelo. Up from the atrium led a wide marble staircase, culminating in a balcony which connected the rooms on the second floor. Just off the entrance hall was the music room, its walls covered in pale green silk brocade, its windows hung with green velour drapes, the room itself furnished with Louis XV and XVI pieces. Opposite was the dining room, with an elaborate, tapestry-hung fireplace, carved-plaster walls and ceiling, and four Moorish-style hanging sanctuary lamps. The furniture in this room was all hand-carved by local artisans in the Jacobean Renaissance style. Also on the main floor were a library with an Italian marble fireplace, with walls covered in red brocade, lighted by brass chandeliers and twin nine-foot-high French Renaissance torcheres; a morning room, containing a Louis XVI desk, a copy of the one used at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; and a river-facing solarium with French doors leading into the terraces and gardens. Outbuildings included a carriage house and two hothouses, for Mary Emery was very fond of flowers.
Though the Emery house was certainly a grand one, it was by no means the grandest—or largest—house in Cincinnati. (That distinction probably belonged to the Wurlitzers, who manufactured organs.) Nor was it really designed for huge entertainments. There was no ballroom, and the dining room could accommodate sixteen at most. Mary Emery did not like to give large teas or receptions and, in fact, had little interest in becoming a great hostess. Her entertaining was limited to her long and formal Sunday dinners, served in the middle of the day, and the guests were usually close friends and family.
Because Mary missed the East and the fresh sea breezes off Brooklyn Heights, the Emerys built a second home in Newport, called Mariemont (pronounced, in the English fashion, Mary-mont.) But here again, Mariemont was austere compared with the castles which Vanderbilts, Astors, and Belmonts were building in Newport at the time. Mariemont, built in the Victorian shingle style, was far from the fashionable reaches of Bellevue Avenue, and it was not even on the waterfront—nor did the Emerys, who could certainly have afforded
to do so, care to mingle or compete with the other families of the summer colony. The gardens, not the house, made Mariemont a showplace, and fourteen Portuguese gardeners were required full-time to maintain them. And so a pattern was established. For the six cold months of the year, the Emerys lived at Edgecliffe in Cincinnati, where Mary was quietly beginning to assemble her art collection. For the six warm months, the family stayed in Newport under the supervision of Sophie, Mrs. Emery’s personal maid. Travel was usually by private railroad car, but even here there was a prudent Cincinnati difference. Though the Emerys could have afforded to buy their own private car, as other rich Americans were doing, the Emerys leased theirs for the trip. It made sense, considering the size of the staff that traveled with them. A private railroad car rented for the same price as a carful of Pullman accommodations, plus a surcharge of 15 percent—and was cheaper than the cost of ownership and maintenance.
Mary Emery was to demonstrate that, to be a grande dame, it was not always necessary to be haughty, despotic, arrogant, eccentric, demanding, vain, or outrageous. As the wife of a very rich man, she was none of these things. On the contrary, she was soft-spoken, gentle, domestic and retiring, and more than a little shy—plain little Guppy. In addition to art, she loved music. She seemed to have a dread of becoming a public figure, and she set aside every Wednesday as her private day. On Wednesdays she would receive no callers, and, instead, would work in her gardens, or meditate, or read, or listen to Bach and Beethoven on her wind-up Victrola with its painted morning-glory amplifying horn.
Like so many grandes dames of the era, Mary Emery was not immune to personal tragedy. The Emerys had two children, both boys, Sheldon and Albert. Albert, the younger, was an athlete and an outdoorsman. Sheldon was scholarly, like his mother something of a bookworm, and a brilliant student. Like many introverted youths, he was also sickly, but Mary Emery loved both her sons unqualifiedly. Albert Emery was killed in 1886 at the age of eighteen in a sledding accident at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Sheldon died in 1890, at twenty-three, from pneumonia, while a student at Harvard.
Sheldon’s funeral in Cincinnati was attended by a Harvard classmate and friend named Charles J. Livingood, and Mary Emery was immediately struck by what she saw as Livingood’s uncanny resemblance to his dead classmate. Subsequently she asked him if he would consider coming to work for her, and from then on, and for the rest of her life, Charles Livingood would be Mary Emery’s right-hand man, managing her business affairs and civic projects.
In 1906, Thomas J. Emery died while on a business trip in Egypt, and Livingood—now married and a father himself—became a sort of surrogate husband as well as son. Livingood’s daughter Elizabeth recalled in 1981 that, as a little girl, she had owned a coral necklace with a gold clasp fashioned in the shape of two angels’ heads. Mrs. Emery had admired the necklace and asked to see it. Fingering the clasp, she said to Elizabeth Livingood, “The names of these two angels are Albert and Sheldon.”
Elizabeth Livingood recalled that she was not particularly pleased to hear that’ her two gold angels had boys’ names. Later, of course, she realized that the death of Mrs. Emery’s two sons, followed by the death of her husband, had a lot to do with the sort of woman Mary Emery would become.
Because it was at this point, with all the menfolk in her family dead and easily the richest woman in Cincinnati, that sixty-two-year-old Mary Emery quietly—almost secretively—embarked upon her extraordinary career in philanthropy.
“I think now,” said Elizabeth Livingood, “that she may have been one of the saddest, loneliest women I’ve ever known. Though she was by nature extremely shy, she felt that somehow she had to reach out and touch the world.”
16
A LITANY OF GOOD WORKS
Mary Emery’s first important philanthropy came not long after her husband’s death, when she donated $250,000 to build a YMCA in Newport, specifically for the Army and Navy enlisted personnel who were stationed there. She had noted, she wrote in a letter outlining her plan, that Newport offered the military men little in the way of entertainment or recreation except “bar rooms and picture shows.” Her YMCA, she hoped, would provide “a better rallying place than you now have for your leisure hours … preferring it as a resort.” As would become typical of her giving, however, she was secretive about it. She was not present at the cornerstone laying, and the identity of the donor was not made public until half an hour before the event. The plaque placed on the building did not even include her name, but merely read:
A MOTHER’S MEMORIAL TO HER SONS
SHELDON AND ALBERT EMERY
To her alma mater, Packer Institute, Mary shipped off $50,000 Brooklyn Union Gas Company bonds to establish a teachers’ pension fund, directing that the fund be named in memory of a favorite mathematics teacher, Miss Adeline L. Jones. In her home town, another $250,000 was presented to the University of Cincinnati Medical School to endow a professorial chair named in honor of her pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin K. Rachford. Another large gift went to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and a grand total of $20,000,000 was set aside to establish the Thomas J. Emery Memorial Fund in memory of her husband. Because her husband “had a kindly and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the Negro race,” she built a 250-bed “Negro orphan asylum” in Cincinnati, as well as a black YMCA. Clearly, as the widow of a builder, she had acquired a taste for building things.
In Cincinnati, meanwhile, the gossips said that Mary Emery and Mrs. Charles P. Taft were not, as they appeared to be, best friends at all, but were actually bitter philanthropic rivals. It was noted that whenever Mrs. Emery stepped forward to support a project, Mrs. Taft withdrew her support from that particular endeavor. Annie Sinton Taft was also very rich. Her father, David Sinton—though the fact was politely overlooked by the time of the second generation—had been a Civil War profiteer. Sensing, with the South talking of Secession, that a war was in the offing, and having a good hunch that war would mean a demand for pig iron, Sinton had cornered the prewar iron market. From the fortune he made selling iron for cannon balls to both the Union and the Confederacy, Sinton had built, among other things, Cincinnati’s Sinton Hotel, which rivaled the Emerys’ Netherland Plaza in both size and luxury. Annie was David Sinton’s only child.
Actually, what Mary Emery and Annie Taft did in Cincinnati—it was often the subject of their daily “breakfast letters”—was to divide things up. When Annie Taft’s interest in the Cincinnati Symphony began to wane, and she became more interested in the Cincinnati Opera, Mary Emery took over the Symphony and built the 2,200-seat Emery Auditorium, where, for years, the Symphony performed. Considered acoustically perfect, the auditorium contained—and still contains—a giant Wurlitzer theatre organ, one of two or three of its kind in the world. The Emery Auditorium, which was completed in 1914, was designed along the lines of the great opera houses of Europe, with a “Diamond Horseshoe” first balcony. For reasons of fashion as much as anything else, the arms of the horseshoe sweep down to the edges of the proscenium in grand curves, embracing the audience as it were, so that the gowns and jewels of the gentry in the boxes are on full display for the lesser folk downstairs in the stalls.
To assure that Culture, or at least a bird’s-eye view of it, would also be available to the least affluent, the architects also included a steep and lofty second balcony, which offered narrower and harder seats in more closely packed rows. The theory in theatre architecture at the time seemed to hold that, though the rich and poor might be permitted to attend cultural events under the same roof, it should not be necessary for them to rub shoulders with one another, and, to that end, admission to this steerage section of the great hall was possible only through a single rather narrow stairway and a separate entrance from the street. (Because this arrangement failed to satisfy later fire-law requirements, the second balcony is no longer used.)
Hard by the auditorium, to fill up the block, perhaps, Mary Emery built the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute, a school devoted to
the teaching of trades, which later became part of the University of Cincinnati system. Its capacity was 4,000 students, and an industrial museum adjoined it. Though the Emery name appears on the auditorium’s marquee, Mary’s name is nowhere affixed to either of the two other buildings.
Putting the lie to tales of a philanthropic rivalry, Mary Emery and Annie Taft did sometimes cooperate on the same civic projects. Both women were animal lovers, and at one point each pledged $125,000 for the Cincinnati Zoo, provided other citizens would do the same. Others did. But the Sinton-Taft fortune was never a match for Mary Emery’s. Her annual $40,000 contribution to the Cincinnati Community Chest, plus another $25,000 from the Emery Memorial Fund, made her for twenty years the city’s largest individual donor.
Reciting a list of Mary Emery’s benefactions in Cincinnati and elsewhere very quickly becomes a litany of good works, but among the more important were the building of the Parish House for Christ Church in Cincinnati; a farm for the Fresh Air Society; the Ohio-Miami Medical College for Cincinnati’s General Hospital; The Vacation House, a farm and home for children on the Ohio River; the Central Building of the Cincinnati YMCA (in addition to the “colored” YMCA); the Reception & Medical Building at Trudeau Sanitarium in Saranac, New York; memorial buildings at Tuskegee Institute, Berea College, Lincoln University of Kentucky, Miss Berry’s Schools in Rome, Georgia, Sewanee University, and Hobart College of San Juan, Puerto Rico; the Administration Building of the Children’s Home in Cincinnati; the Salvation Army Rescue Home for Colored in Cincinnati; the waterworks for the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky; “cathedral houses”—children’s shelters, in memory of Sheldon Emery—in such far-flung places as Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Circleville, Ohio.