Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  Her son’s memoir emphasizes Emily’s heroic agreement to a highly public fight—she was protecting the right of law-abiding men and women to make private choices that should remain just that—but in truth Emily Post had no say in the matter. At least her husband gave her the chance to play the brave, supportive, honorable wife. And perhaps Edwin knew he was doing them both a favor by furthering the demise of their marriage. Maybe, at some level, Emily even recognized his idiosyncratic sense of justice as well.

  By July 22, a week after a collection of breathless articles began appearing daily in the Times, the newspaper had begun listing prominent citizens who had “subscribed” to Colonel Mann’s various schemes in the past. Almost every major society figure had been bribed, from J. P. Morgan to the Vanderbilts, from Chauncey Depew to O.H.P Belmont. It seemed as if all society men cheated. Occasionally a woman’s name jumped out at the reader, its inclusion implying that the wives were paying for their husbands’ protection, much as Emily might have chosen to do, if only for her children’s sake—if Edwin had allowed her such an option. Instead, following a few weeks of sympathetic newspaper publicity, Edwin took the witness stand and recounted the entire saga with relish.

  Emily had accompanied him, and now she appeared in the overheated courtroom as a boldly dressed fashion plate, practically daring anyone to pity her. Her husband, after all, was the star, and his supporting actress knew how to play her role as well. As usual, Emily had designed her clothes and then sent sketches to her favorite local seamstress. A New York Times reporter described in detail her exquisite outfit: “The skirt cleared the floor about three inches, and was laid in groups of three-inch side plaits, two in each group, and each group of two plaits its own width from the adjacent group.” Fulsome attention was lavished on the color of the stripes at the wrist bands, the precise shape of the sleeves, the stitching, the buttons, and the type of feathers in her hat—red quills. The Times reporter also recounted an appearance earlier in the trial: “She wore the other day a smart linen costume, a short skirt and Eton, topped by a scarlet hat.” Like any savvy politician, Emily understood that red conveyed power and confidence. From now on, it would be her favorite color and would figure prominently in her self-presentation, from her shoes to her fingernail polish.

  But during the summer of 1905, an occasional glimpse of the wounded wife’s fragility peeked through, in spite of her flamboyant subterfuge. Most telling was a reporter’s odd misjudgment of Emily as “small.” Substantial midnight anguish must have diminished the usual grandeur of the five-foot-nine clear-eyed beauty from Baltimore. An uncharacteristic loss of appetite surely affected her weight: for once, the Gibson girl shape that her husband demanded was no longer a struggle to maintain.

  DURING THIS PERIOD, advance publicity began appearing for fall publication of Emily’s Purple and Fine Linen, set in New York and Newport. The novel must have titillated the Tuxedo Park crowd, quick to identify its point-for-point correspondence with the life they knew Emily lived, and in which, in some cases, they participated. To those envious of what seemed her easy success, Purple and Fine Linen was a delicious payback, with its virtual almanac of the author’s marital depression. Nonetheless, the novel’s blissful ending, which Emily had surely hoped would predict her own life story, now appeared a humiliating chimera, the desperate hope of a disappointed wife.

  But Emily’s new position as a writer whom critics took seriously proved a soothing unguent to her personal shame. The New York Times cited, in “Authors’ Summer Locations and Plans,” her forthcoming novel among its top selections. The very title of the article, with authors as its subject, signaled a shift in the way she was being perceived now: no personal references to parties, no catalogs of food or clothes were included. Instead, Purple and Fine Linen was described as literature.

  Purple and Fine Linen was published in October 1905, to generally positive if condescending critical response, similar to that given Flight of a Moth. Reviewers explained that the novel dealt “with the world-old questions of love and marriage, riches and happiness, and all the other things that go to make life bearable or unbearable.” Camilla James, the protagonist with no education outside of finishing schools, is a wildly successful debutante at Tuxedo Park—her cache of beaux’ favors reminiscent of Emily’s own—when she first lays eyes on Anthony “Tony” Stuart. She loves him at first sight, but he is obviously in thrall to the most theatrical, vivid, outspoken woman in the room, who is dramatically recounting the gossip about the sordid demise of a Pierre Lorillard figure. Soon, however, Tony is convinced by his father to pursue the lovely young girl instead, and he marries Camilla.

  Disappointingly, though Tony appreciates that his bride is “madly and demonstratively fond” of him, he himself seeks neither companionship nor sympathy from a wife, even though she is a “dear kid.” Camilla soon laments the hours her husband spends working or playing at the club: “If you love me . . . you ought to want to stay at home. Do you realize that you are never with me unless we go out?” Tony impatiently responds that between tending to their business interests and his father’s as well—echoing the real-life havoc of H.A.V. Post’s investments—he has no time for himself: “I work very hard all day and when I don’t have to go out with you, I do want a change myself. I want to go to the club, not only for pleasure, but because there are also important business affairs which I can arrange there.”

  “All right,” Camilla blurts out, “but you may be sorry some day if I become like all the other women, and don’t care whether you go out or stay in.” She worries privately that he values her only for her ability to shine at dinner parties. “I wonder if Tony thinks me an idiot?” she ponders. “Why does he take it for granted that I can’t understand [his business interactions]?” Left on her own so often, Camilla begins to read serious literature and to associate with literary types at social events. “She liked the satisfaction of feeling the growth of her mind. And yet the more she read, the more unsettled she became. She was less and less like the people she knew; it was getting harder and harder to be interested in the same continuous chatter. . . . But after all, these were her friends and this was her life; and both were the best of their kind.”

  As for loving her husband? “She supposed . . . she was in love with him. It never occurred to her that she was not. She did not believe that there was such a thing as the love she read about in books. She saw none of it in real life. The married people that she knew all seemed to lead their own independent lives irrespective of each other.” She concludes that “the trouble was that they did not seem to like the same things.” Tony soon takes a voyage abroad, which Camilla declines, though she would certainly have gone if she “were not such a bad sailor.”

  Inevitably, the heroine finds thoughts of “another man crowding out those of her husband” and finally contemplates divorce. Running off with a would-be lover, she turns back just in time. Temptation resisted, Camilla tries to rechart her future as she “thought of her father and mother. . . . Her conscience knew exactly what road they would point. . . . But when her husband came into her bedroom, her first instinct was resentment.” Realizing that a husband has “the right” to enter her boudoir, she finds herself even more resentful: “What and for what reason had he the right? . . . [H]e suddenly seemed a stranger and yet a fellow prisoner handcuffed to her. And she felt in the same moment that the shackles were stronger than she was able to break. She wanted to scream aloud.”

  Just as she decides to tell her husband she is leaving him, he assumes full responsibility for her unhappiness: “A woman never gets into your frame of mind except through great unhappiness. As for the blame, I take it upon myself. When a man neglects his wife, there are always plenty of other men willing to keep her from being lonely.” The fairy-tale ending to Purple and Fine Linen grants the author what she sought in real life. Her husband has realized, at the last minute, what he has in his spouse. He is willing to fight for her. “Don’t think for one minute,” he tells Camilla
after her confession of ardor for another, “that I intend to let you go without an effort on my part to keep you. . . . I love you! I love you! And I won’t let you go!”

  THE ENDING TO her own real-life fairy tale still in question, Emily was not in a celebratory mood that autumn, in spite of the professional success she had clearly achieved. In dramatic contrast to her past, she did little entertaining and made even fewer social appearances, seeming instead to marshal her resources to succor her sons and to think through how to handle her marriage. On November 15, 1905, when Emily attended a ball held on the famously fast three-year-old British ship the Drake, docked in Manhattan’s harbor, Edwin did not accompany her. In 1917 the ship would be blown up by German U-boats, but for now, it was an ideal venue for a dance, if you had any interest in the water or in speed itself. Emily had neither, and Edwin had both.

  HMS Drake’s setting was an irony that her husband could not have missed when he read the social pages and learned that his wife, who hated the sea, had taken sole possession of the party invitation. Emily, lurching and staggering through the evening, had her own way of paying her husband back.

  More to her tastes, Emily was one of the 170 illustrious guests invited to Mark Twain’s seventieth-birthday party. Staged at Delmonico’s, the event began with a cocktail reception, followed by dinner in the Red Room, music issuing from the forty-piece orchestra on loan from the Metropolitan Opera. Five hours of speeches came after the meal, their length making it fortunate that the chef had opted for hearty food: “fillet of kingfish, saddle of lamb, Baltimore terrapin, quail, and redhead duck washed down with sauterne, champagne, and brandy.”

  The press, clearly surprised at the guest list, observed that “a particular feature of the dinner was the strength of the feminine contingent. There were fully as many women there as men, and they were not present as mere appendages of their husbands, but as individuals representing the art of imaginative writing no less than the men.” Furthermore, these female achievers were relatively young: “The whole gathering did not seem to include half a dozen women with streaks of gray in their hair.”

  The published list of the guests carefully noted the few “wives of” by citing them as “Mrs.” Until now, even Emily’s novels had positioned “Mrs.” in front of “Emily Price Post.” In contrast, women writers at this event were granted a listing by name, marital status ignored. Except for six or seven illustrious socialites, all the invitees were “genuine creators of imaginative writings,” vetted by the host of the evening, George Harvey, the editor of the North American Review. The sponsor, Harper’s Weekly, published an end-of-the-year special edition for the event. The spill of photographs shows writers Willa Cather and Dorothy Canfield and, at Emily’s table, May Sinclair.

  Seeing herself endorsed as a professional restored some of the strength the summer had robbed from Emily. “Never before in the annals of this country had such a representative gathering of literary men and women been seen under one roof,” the Times crowed. In light of her confounded expectations regarding the life she would lead, Twain’s advice to his spellbound crowd must have resonated for Emily Price Post: “I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: that we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.”

  Perhaps the event—or the single women in attendance—provided sustenance to Emily, convincing her she could save her marriage if she tried hard enough. Or perhaps it scared her. Whatever the reason, something motivated her and Edwin to reunite at Tuxedo Park for the December holidays. On the day after Christmas, they watched their sons cavort with friends on the frozen trout pond, flying down the iceboat run. Basically sail-powered sleds, iceboats encouraged the kind of camaraderie Emily enjoyed most, even though they required more physical exertion than she preferred these days. She recalled wistfully that she had somehow found the energy to maneuver both beaux and iceboats during that long-ago winter of 1891.

  Now, as 1905 drew to an end, its finale stuffed with sumptuous holiday dinners, laughter, and libations, she was hopeful. Out on the lake, there was bravura skating, but Emily preferred watching the young lovers glide by arm in arm, her own arm linked, resolutely, through Edwin’s. The couple attended the house parties at the cottages of the Pells and the Lorillard sons, as well as giving their own, just as in years past. Given her unwavering disapproval of divorce, Emily was undoubtedly bartering for her husband’s affection. But their marriage was merely on hold. Whatever crusade Emily mounted to resurrect their severely bruised union—hoping to re-create the scene of conjugal reconciliation she had written for her last novel—failed to convince her real-life spouse.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE POSTS’ DIVORCE, ANNOUNCED EARLY IN 1906 THOUGH NOT granted till the end of the year, was postponed upon Phoenix Ingraham’s recommendation. Phoenix, though admitted to the bar only four years earlier, was well connected in legal and state circles through his illustrious father and grandfather. Now he was trying to protect his friends’ privacy until the legal hurricane over the exposure of New York City’s confidential divorce records had passed.

  The federal government’s investigation had been well intended. What should constitute a nationally uniform divorce law? As it stood, citizens could be legally divorced in one state, travel to another to be married to other people, and then honeymoon in a third state that not only failed to recognize their new marriage but considered them legally bound to their former spouses. Partly in response to what seemed a national epidemic of divorce, the government had concluded that a special summer census would, for the first time, assess official court records of failed marriages—including files previously sealed by law, destined to remain interred in the vaults, their truths about who did what to whom carefully concealed. Citizens who had testified under oath were horrified and outraged when unannounced staff from the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor descended upon the New York City County Courthouse, seizing state-filed divorce documents.

  Officials from Washington and the New York Supreme Court threatened one another in a tense standoff. Then, after watching federal workers delve into all documents pertaining to a divorce or separation less than twenty years old, the state defiantly intervened. Albany wouldn’t permit this travesty of justice, New York lawmakers told their superiors. New Yorkers had taken the government at its word when they’d testified under oath. A state’s rights action was filed, and furious federal officials were forced to substitute a census that allowed New Yorkers to keep their secrets.

  And there seemed to be a burgeoning number of them. These days, the upper-class seemed mad for divorce. It was as if the privileged generation following Josephine and Bruce had suddenly found their parents’ model of marriage intolerable. But Emily Post would never waver throughout her life: divorce, when there were children involved, was to be avoided at all costs. Adults could contain their differences within a household for the sake of those they’d brought into the world. After all, she’d watched her mother and father and their good friends, such as the Lorillards, do exactly that, at least while their children were young.

  UNLIKE MANY OF her era, Emily was ashamed that her marriage had failed. Luckily, that spring, further attention to her professional success soothed the sting of her looming divorce. The Washington Post explored the new claims of “women of wealth” who scorned idleness, preferring “to work, to do things, to accomplish.” Near the end of the column, after discussing the “brush, pen and chisel” work of women ranging from Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney to Catherine Duer—and the obligatory Edith Wharton—the article’s author enlisted a new figure, noting, “The signature ‘Emily Post’ is appearing with increasing frequency. This is the pen name of Mrs. Edwin Post, famed in society as Emily Price, daughter of the late Bruce Price, the architect. So far she has confined herself to fiction.”

  Such professional attention, along with the solace of time, encouraged Emily to focus on the present. Nonetheless, even though she no longer noticed conversations pausing when she walked by, reminders of the previous sum
mer’s scandal lingered everywhere. The annual Tuxedo horse show in June 1906 received a suspiciously large and sympathetic notice by Colonel Mann, just months before he managed to get himself acquitted of the convoluted charges finally filed against him by various society men. The illustrious and circumspect banker George F. Baker took over as the horse show’s president, further motivating Mann to pander to the crowd he despised: Tuxedo Park had become “a colony more select if less wealthy than Newport . . . undoubtedly the most exclusive retreat on the American continent,” he wrote in Town Topics. “Climbers have scaled the Newport cliffs only to find the hills of Tuxedo far more treacherous.” Unlike Emily, Edwin was not ashamed of the public collapse of their marriage. In spite of his oft-expressed disdain for Tuxedo Park, he spent the rainy weekend of the horse show in residence. By now a first-rate tennis player, he wasn’t about to miss the chance to compete in the June tournament. His estranged wife wasn’t present.

  Emily was working nonstop these days, finding in her writing a refuge from reality and from the rawness of her largely unexplored emotions. Sometimes, however, she was forced back to earth against her will. On October 25, 1906, on Nassau Street in lower Manhattan, mere blocks from her father’s skyscraper, thirty-four-year-old Emily Price Post appeared at the Office of the Referee. Day after day, for two weeks, Emily was subjected to the details of her husband’s forays with the actress Grace Fields, a witness in Emily Post v. Edwin M. Post.