Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  Tuxedo Park would be Bruce Price’s greatest legacy. The park’s design depended upon each site and its house working as one, an aesthetic, according to later architects, that encouraged Frank Lloyd Wright’s “interpenetration of interior and exterior space.” Experts in American architecture believe Tuxedo Park set the stage for what a student of Yale’s Vincent Scully would call “the most interesting domestic architecture of the first half of the twentieth century.” Scully himself, a prominent historian of American architecture, claimed that Wright’s prairie homes were strongly influenced by Bruce’s cottages, proving of “profound importance for the later development of creative American domestic building.”

  The New York Times critic Christopher Gray also admires the complex. “The distinction of Tuxedo Park,” he says, “lies not in the individual architecture but in the planning and conception of the whole: to create a private enclave with appropriate architecture, with nothing showy or fancy. Bruce Price when he was designing there in the eighties was competing against the big showy Fifth Avenue–type palaces, Astors on Fifth Avenue, and also in the Jersey shore and other resorts, and even in, to some extent, the Berkshires. Though those tend to be toned down, many of them are really quite aggressive. But the early Tuxedo Park houses are all very simple and unassuming and appropriate and nothing extra to them.”

  AS TUXEDO PARK’S demands lessened, Bruce Price’s workload in the city accelerated. Adding draftsmen to his practice and expanding his office space, Bruce had entered a new level of achievement. He joined critic Russell Sturgis, with whom he would write several books, to reconstitute the neglected Architectural League (originally formed in 1881). Primarily through the efforts of the two men, the league became an influential arbiter of architectural taste in New York and nationwide. Bruce helped inaugurate a program of exhibitions, lectures, dinners, and annual juried shows of the nation’s best buildings, a tradition that continues today. Motivated by Frank Smith’s success with the Tile Club, Bruce supported artistic collaboration across the disciplines. He welcomed prospective members’ divergent interests, their various roles as muralists, sculptors, painters, and landscape architects.

  Bruce had been honoring nonstop commitments all year. Following the Tuxedo Park inaugural ball, the unveiling of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s (now Liberty) Island finally took place on October 28, 1886. Bruce Price belonged to the volunteer staff arranging the event. Taking the steamer Florence from Manhattan, he and several others arrived at the site at seven A.M. in order to ready everything on the dais for the afternoon ceremony. Around two P.M., boats started depositing guests on the island, including Josephine and Emily. One of the wives of the male welcoming committee actually climbed the 354 steps to reach the torch, surprising reporters most by her gender.

  Everything from yachts to rowboats filled the bay, their vivid banners festooning the little island. French and American flags obscured the dais. Finally the Tennessee boomed, the gunship causing the water to shimmer from its vibrations. A smiling President Cleveland took the speaker’s stand, where he stood for a solid half an hour, acknowledging the nonstop cheers. The French speeches that followed sounded a common theme: France, not England, had spawned America. America and France would continue to fight injustice together.

  Recreational asides such as the Statue of Liberty pleased Bruce’s wife and daughter, especially because Uncle Frank was involved, but it was the commissions inundating the architect’s desk that changed their lives. Tuxedo Park had proven the Price family’s ticket to success. Bruce had not yet put the finishing touches on the park when he accepted a project from Mrs. Alfred Lebbeus Loomis, whose physicist grandson, Alfred Lee Loomis, would, much later, use the park to convene cerebral firepower to construct the atomic bomb. But for now, Bruce was busy building a simple—in his manner of speaking—house for Mrs. Loomis in Ringwood, New Jersey.

  DURING THE EARLY MONTHS of 1887, Emily, spurred on by stories of her cousins’ scholastic success, meant to study harder than usual at Miss Graham’s. Instead, she interspersed periods of concentrated lessons with the ramped-up socializing Bruce’s commissions ensured, especially his recent magnificent creation in the Ramapo hills. While she waited, the fourteen-year-old was observing the life she would inherit. This summer would prove a whirl of dinner parties at Tuxedo Park that her father actually attended as well; this—all of this—was, after all, his creation. But it was the upcoming October gala at the park that guests always ended up talking about excitedly. In one short year, the fall dance at Tuxedo had become the hottest ticket in town.

  A leading member of what would become Café Society in the 1920s, Elsie de Wolfe (a friend of Cora’s from the instant they met in England), recalled the tensions throughout the social world of New York City during the weeks leading up to the park’s autumn dance of 1887: “Women pulled every string they could master in order to be included. Failing, they wept bitterly. Men almost broke their necks in an attempt to get an entering wedge into what was tantamount to a closed circle.”

  It would prove providential to Emily’s future that Cora Potter finagled one of the coveted invitations for Elsie to attend that year’s dance, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the trouble it led to. Later, park residents insisted, the financially impoverished and, worse, short-term professional actress (sharing Cora’s passion for the limelight) would never have been allowed in. Cora herself would recall that “the exclusive invitation and membership lists included the highly select only, and they had to pass the cold and exacting eye of Pierre Lorillard, who was a dictator in his own right.”

  Throughout that winter season and early into 1888, Cora Potter encouraged Elsie to ply her well-known thespian talents on Tuxedo’s elaborate stage. Without scruples, Cora was training her handpicked replacement for Pierre Lorillard’s lover. She assured Lorillard that Elsie would serve him well in every regard. Certainly the great age difference between Elsie and Pierre Lorillard wasn’t a major impediment to friendship or to accepting help from a wealthy patron: Frances Folsom, a twenty-one-year-old, had wed President Grover Cleveland two years earlier, and he was nearly three decades her senior. If she could be first lady without Colonel Mann detailing their courtship in Town Topics, why couldn’t the married Pierre Lorillard, without exciting spurious comment, befriend with his largesse an innocent young woman?

  Inevitably, when the friendship did indeed become fodder for Town Topics, Lorillard was apoplectic. The newspaper published details the millionaire thought he had cleverly obscured. Maybe he had: more than one historian believes Elsie fed the gossip to Town Topics herself.

  Stories spread through the park, irritating Josephine and infuriating her husband. The truth was not at issue: this publicity was an invasion of Lorillard’s privacy. Whether the Prices believed the official story Lorillard promoted—that he was merely underwriting what he saw as a promising acting career—was not their point; that anyone dared suggest otherwise should offend them all. Secretly, Josephine must have reveled in the juicy innuendos about Elsie de Wolfe that circulated that November and ran in Town Topics through the end of January. She couldn’t have felt entirely easy about her husband’s association with the notorious philanderer Pierre Lorillard, but after considering the futility of complaining and the prospect of appearing a shrew, she chose to ignore it.

  The fifteen-year-old Emily Price would suffer grievously, in her eyes, from the repercussions of the de Wolfe–Lorillard relationship. The Tuxedo Stage, part of the Grand Ballroom that Bruce had built for the compound, served as a venue for amateurs and, occasionally though unofficially, as a first stop that talents headed for Manhattan used to warm up. For several years, Emily had found ways to increase her appearances, whether participating in local benefits or in plays written and staged by Tuxedo Park residents. Predictably, the child nurtured by her father’s always dramatic company proved a natural. Before long, there was little she enjoyed as much as basking in the limelight, mugging for laughs while exaggerating her v
owels, and, most of all, being the center of attention. Later she would recall this period when she “loved to act.” Secretly, she sometimes even considered becoming an actress. She craved the power she felt when an audience responded.

  But the spotlight would soon be denied to the adolescent. The hoopla involving Lorillard’s two actress- mistresses, who had both appeared on her father’s Tuxedo Stage, caused the pompous millionaire to declare the proscenium off- limits to Emily Price. The girl was so talented that corrupt women like Cora Potter and her friends might seduce her into following their lead onto the professional stage. Look and learn, Pierre Lorillard instructed; this drama being played out at Tuxedo Park should be a cautionary tale for the Price family. Bruce felt the concern overstated, but Josephine had already become uncomfortable with the attention Emily was getting, as well as the slight hauteur it had encouraged. She welcomed the chance to command Emily to pursue a different hobby. Over the years, Emily would spin the story one way and then the other, allocating blame for her failure to become a famous actress first to Lorillard, then to her mother. If only her father had spoken up, she would imply: then she could have constructed a career for herself on the stage.

  CHAPTER 11

  AT THE END OF THE CENTURY, IT WAS HARD TO ACCESS WINTER sports easily from the city—with the exception of the particularly urban pastime of ice-skating in Central Park. Achieving near-immediate eminence as the place for those of Emily’s age to spend the snowbound weekends, Tuxedo Park quickly gained status among the children of the rich. Iceboats—basically boards set on runners—had become wildly popular, and cross-country skiing seemed to have been created for the local terrain. Every year Pierre Lorillard came up with a new idea: the toboggan run was quickly illuminated for nighttime events. Even winter hunting had a small cache of older devotees.

  Sledding the clubhouse’s indoor stairs was a special treat for the younger set. The girls in their voluptuous party dresses, Miss Price among them, slid down the staircase on tin trays, caught in a pillow at the bottom by their beaux. The game came to an abrupt end, however, when one of the Lotharios got sloppy with his remarks, questioning a friend stationed nearby a bit too loudly if he too had seen that last lass’s “lovely laces” when her dress flew up. All participants were commanded to stop the activity immediately, the miscreant sent packing, and the game declared over forever at Tuxedo Park.

  If anything saved the minor intrigues at Tuxedo Park from becoming Colonel Mann’s topic of 1888, it was nature. On March 11 the Great White Hurricane, deflecting attention from society’s dramas entirely, paralyzed the East Coast. The most famous snowstorm in America halted life on the Atlantic seaboard for one week, reminding the increasingly confident easterners that nature held the trump card. The Great Blizzard of ’88 caused temperatures in New York City to fall as much as sixty degrees in one day. Winds whipped twenty-one inches of snow into twenty-foot drifts, costing four hundred lives. The Times published a daily death count.

  When Emily was asked later about the blizzard’s effect on New York, her reference was Tuxedo Park, where the storm killed off the quail Pierre Lorillard had so proudly supplied. That’s about as far as the Price family’s direct connection with the disaster extended. Not many in Emily Price’s circle were interested in how the less fortunate lived. Even the concerned few considered it unseemly to introduce such an inflammatory topic into their social conversations.

  Her own family was not entirely impervious to the lower class’s needs: they wouldn’t think of allowing their servants to live in penury, and they believed in being sensitive and respectful to their hired help, ensuring that they had proper and attractive, if modest, living quarters. Though Josephine meant well by others, it was Bruce who conscientiously translated good intentions toward the less fortunate into measurable results. Emily’s own amateur house designs invariably included large and cheerful servants’ quarters, including the unusual addition of a separate dining room. She worried about ensuring enough space for the servants of a household, explaining how important their well-being was to everyone else’s. Predictably, she would rarely experience the “servant problem” that plagued so many upperclass households through the decades she was alive. Her staff tended to be loyal and long-employed.

  During her childhood, the national census still listed the servants as part of the family they lived with, the practice suggesting the days when slaves or indentured laborers were considered part of a family’s property. Emily’s family believed that respect was due to those who performed well, whatever their job. In fact, if people were willing to work hard enough, they could do anything.

  This was the era of social Darwinism. Well suited to the American belief in individualism, and tailor-made to the business interests of the age, Herbert Spencer’s deeply flawed system surely influenced, if only indirectly, the assumptions shaping Emily as she grew up. As an adult, she would assume that people wishing to become successful members of society could do so as long as they possessed resolve. Those disabled by poverty or prejudice or physical misfortune failed to enter the scope of the young Emily’s thought. After all, America was a nation built on the idea of freedom for all, the individual’s rights central to its creed. Such convictions were fundamental to the Price family’s ethics, and as long as Bruce and Josephine treated others well, they were not interested in further philosophical discussion. Their standards for doing unto others, however, were higher than was typical for their class, grounded in a generosity that refused to consider class or personal expedience the equal of unmotivated kindness.

  By 1888, Bruce’s life had acquired a distinctly New York City rhythm, and in spite of his continued habit of emptying his pockets for the poor every day, its tempo didn’t encourage much worrying about the unfortunate. The networking, as it would later be called, the socializing, the getting close to people in the know, the solidifying of personal bonds: the Price family did everything right to further their patriarch’s career. Bruce opened a new office at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street, within easy walking distance of the mammoth construction under way at Madison Square Garden, Stanford White’s current project.

  Not only professional kinships succored the Price menagerie during this period. That year, the family’s nurturing of their distant relatives came to fruition. According to the New York Times, Emily Price had been made an heiress by Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, she of the East Side Lodging House for orphaned boys, where she’d delivered ice-cream cones along with a bed to sleep in. How much of a fortune the elderly philanthropist left Emily Price is unclear. Wolfe’s estate itself was worth between $8 and $10 million, but upon her death the previous year she had left a sizable amount to a great many people. Her bequest to Emily, however, was publicly deemed a large fortune.

  ANOTHER VICTIM OF the March blizzard had been the Canadian Pacific Railway. Needing to recoup the season’s losses, its officials distributed free passes to artists in exchange for promotional pictures of scenery visible from their trains. Through Lorillard’s strong connections in Canada, Bruce got in on the offer early, parlaying the acquaintances he made through the project into serious architecture commissions. He ended up designing several buildings for the CPR, initiating the château style with his design for the Banff Springs Hotel.

  It was the right time to go north. Self-consciously, the Canadian millionaires provided American architects an overflow of commissions as the new nation strove to separate its aesthetic from those of the United States and, more important, Great Britain. Now, at the end of the nineteenth century, architects Bruce Price and McKim, Mead and White heavily embossed the Canadian cities with their signatures. Bruce spent much of 1888 working on Windsor Station in Montreal, which would open the following year. Even as he was in the middle of the Tuxedo Park project, he had managed to start on what would be the main Canadian Pacific station, its profile still dominating the Montreal skyline today. The railroad terminal, with its massive stonework and rounded arches, was characteristic of the Romanesq
ue revival popular during this period. At Tuxedo Park, the talk was often about Bruce Price—Bruce’s brilliance, Bruce’s popularity.

  More than anything, Emily wanted to accompany her father on his ventures north; she was sure Miss Graham wouldn’t object to additional onsite education. Instead, she felt herself oppressed by what now seemed like Josephine’s almost constant presence at her side. Josie was spending all her energies plotting her only child’s upcoming debut, and she thought her daughter well advised to take more interest in it herself. Should she return to Baltimore for the official first presentation or hold it in Tuxedo, perhaps at the autumn ball? Emily found herself wishing for longer school days and extra assignments to take her out of her mother’s clutch.

  These years that rendered Emily Post an adult were named by Mark Twain the Gilded Age. Historians argue for other labels, often revelatory in their contradictions: “The Age of Innocence, The Age of Excess, The Age of Reform, The Age of Energy, The Age of Enterprise, The Mauve Decade, The Brown Decades, The Populist Moment, The Confident Years, The American Renaissance.” As historian Jean Strouse concludes, the “final third of the nineteenth century has generated more divergent interpretations than any other period in American history.” Broadly defined as running from the end of the Civil War to Queen Victoria’s death, the period by whatever name paraded a wild mélange of newly minted American millionaires and their extraordinarily fortunate wives. The attention accorded by both the conventional and the popular press to such figures, especially the women, reflected the historical anomaly of such great wealth possessed by (relative to the past) so many. Newly liberated from the exhausting routines of the olden days, moneyed wives had to redefine themselves.