Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  In spite of his part in orchestrating the divorce for his friends, Phoenix Ingraham appeared now as Emily’s advocate. Over the past year, the lawyer had gone through the necessary charade of hiring private detectives to “catch” Edwin going in and out of Grace’s apartment. However cooperative with and sympathetic toward Edwin Phoenix had been, his subsequent, almost immediate courtship of Emily suggests that he was promoting his own interests as well.

  Routine for its time, the hearing demanded that Emily swear under oath that she had not “forgiven” or “condoned” the relationship between Miss Fields and Mr. Post. Nor had she lived with Edwin since discovering his adultery. She had never visited the West Side Manhattan residence at 907 Seventh Avenue her husband shared with the actress. Edwin (with Emily’s family money) had hired two servants to assist his paramour, who was, to make matters worse, a lovely, intelligent-looking young woman. Exhibit B consisted of photographs passed around the courtroom, including a handsome picture of Edwin and Grace, eerily similar in looks, both square-jawed with knowing but kind eyes. Grace’s provocative face has nothing of the tawdry in it: she was classically beautiful. Her forthright gaze into the camera implies a certain feistiness, though her looks could have commanded the crowd’s attention in the most genteel of Gilded Age ballrooms. Edwin had lost some hair this past year, but he only appeared more distinguished because of it. The five-foot-six bantamweight carried a mere 140 pounds on his slim frame. He and Grace seemed a good fit.

  The hearing took two of the longest weeks in Emily’s life, ending on November 6. Then, when it was all over, she was free to work. She could have a career; she would have to, she would claim, as a single woman supporting herself and her children in a manner to which they were accustomed. By the 1906 Christmas holidays, the Posts’ divorce decree would be final. That December, almost twelve months following Emily and Edwin’s last joint appearance, Edwin Main Post entered the New York Stock Exchange as a member for his final workday; henceforth, he would find odd jobs around Babylon to keep him afloat financially. On January 23, 1907, the front page of the Times updated society: “Divorce for Mrs. E. M. Post” explained that the divorce was a month old, its verdict sealed. Mrs. Post still owned the Tuxedo house, and it was “understood” that her attorneys had not asked for alimony. (Four years later, a small newspaper announcement of Edwin’s remarriage rendered a different version: Edwin Post had been levied monthly alimony and child support of $200—the equivalent of $2,000 today—upon his divorce.)

  Perhaps during the divorce proceedings Emily had nudged the New York Times writer to emphasize that she didn’t ask for alimony. The newspaper’s wording was just ambiguous enough to leave room for conjecture. But Edwin had no money left anyway, and it is unlikely that he made regular payments, whether assessed or not.

  Every summer the well-tended children would take the train to their father’s family home in Babylon. The two boys would come to love spending summers with their witty half brothers and their British stepmother, Eleanor. This time, he had found himself a real actress, not one who had taken to the amateur stage as if the limelight were her natural home, misleading Edwin Post about the obedient daughter he was about to marry instead.

  For her part, Emily operated efficiently and quickly: she cut her ex-husband out of her life forever. He had become, in her household, a ghost. She would continue to set an extra place at the table for as long as she lived, though the identity of the absent guest remains unclear. According to family legend, she refused to see or speak to or hear about Edwin Post again. William Post, Emily’s beloved grandson “Billy,” remarks: “She never once mentioned Edwin in my hearing. Nor did she ever speak of remarrying. I have absolutely no idea whether my grandmother wanted to divorce Edwin or not. What I do know without a doubt is that she did not wish her personal problems to become public, ever.”

  ____

  NEITHER EMILY NOR EDWIN Post was a bad person in any conventional sense of the word. They had needs that a Gilded Age society marriage could not accommodate. Strong individuals, they fit better into the modern age on the horizon than into the Victorian era where they’d been young adults. Through no one’s fault, they had fallen into a marriage conceived in the cracks of a decrepit model, one bequeathed them by their parents. Edwin replayed, in the way he treated Emily, his father’s own family drama. And Emily, confused by her mother’s adoration for Bruce alongside Josie’s own diminished self-worth except as a helpmate, didn’t know how to connect her marriage to the larger world she was yearning to join, or how to find a place in which to express her own prodigious talent.

  Edwin liberated Emily Post. And perhaps she was so large of spirit, so honest with herself, that she realized her own complicity in the hollow formality her marriage had become. The divorce signaled, as much as personal freedom for both spouses, a new era of self-determination for unhappily married middle- and upper-class citizens. Like it or not, Emily Post was part of her age.

  CHAPTER 28

  EMILY LISTENED WITH WONDER TO HER FRIENDS’ DESCRIPTIONS of the brilliantly illuminated iron and wooden ball, a seven-hundred-pound colossus five feet wide. One hundred twenty-five-watt bulbs harbingered the future, as the unwieldy globe descended a flagpole at Times Square. It was the new way to mark the New Year, but Emily preferred to retreat to the past, where she could reclaim her sense of self. She sailed to Europe in January, the solace of travel abroad meant to clear her mind of the tragic farce she’d been part of at home. But innovations in communications meant that distance no longer protected the rich: she had barely debarked when she heard that a colleague of her father’s, the architect Stanford White, had been killed in a lovers’ triangle.

  As frightening as it all sounded from afar, at least it stayed distant to her while she was in France, where she reveled in Paris’s diverting squabbles instead. Increasingly important to Emily following her divorce, these annual respites would satisfy her need for reconnecting with the Old World, where she felt safe psychologically as well as physically. She soon developed a routine that varied little during the next ten years: after spending a week or two at Minnie Coster’s apartment in Paris, she’d visit her friend Leila Emery, whose baby daughter Audrey would marry Grand Duke Dmitri—long after he had betrayed his Romanov family and helped to assassinate Rasputin. Emily went from friend to friend (or distant relative), spending several summers motoring through the Black Forest or the Dolomites and finishing the season in Normandy, where Uncle Frank often painted en plein air.

  All these signs—the focused writing, the visits to friends she grew closer to—indicate that Emily managed to digest much of the lumpy psychic matter of her dissolved marriage within months. The divorce had, after all, been a long time in coming. Resilient by nature, she was becoming centered again, maybe more content than she’d ever been, except as the darling of Tuxedo Park. She returned to New York City in time to attend a benefit at the Waldorf-Astoria for Rome’s Keats-Shelley house, featuring Uncle Frank at the dais with Mark Twain and five other luminaries at his side. Mrs. Grover Cleveland was among the guests “prominent in society, literature, and art.”

  As gratifying as her writing was, what gave her at least as much pleasure was her talent for interior design and construction, which was suddenly valued in her father’s world. Family friend John Russell Pope had begun seeking her help in creating models of the houses he was building. Brilliant designs on the outside, he’d realized, didn’t ensure livable interiors. Might Bruce Price’s talented daughter, whose drawings he’d admired years before, pursue ways to solve his problems? The resultant models Emily began constructing from waxed paper, paint, tape, and glue provided exactly what he needed. Month by month, more architectural commissions poured in, and Emily’s employment gave her more joy than anything she’d ever done.

  By the spring of 1907, Emily had found that life as an unmarried woman suited her quite well. Her sons—Bruce, now twelve, and Ned, almost fourteen years old—were installed at the prestigious Connecticut
boarding school Pomfret, and she was free to arrange her schedule as she preferred. Often she’d spend long weekends, extended sometimes even to a month, at Connecticut’s Ben Grosvenor Inn, visiting her sons nearby, always treating them and their friends to ice cream. Vivacious and pretty, she made Ned and Bruce proud, as the other boys clearly envied them for their fine mother. “She was then just past thirty-five [actually, she was thirty-four] and at the height of her beauty,” Ned remembered. “Her freedom and the sense that she was coming into powers whose full scope she did not yet know exhilarated her to an even greater loveliness, gaiety, and charm. The entire Sixth [his class] was in love with her.” An overeager master, having palavered her with compliments and plied her with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lush poetry, “gorged” one early May afternoon on Emily’s “beauty, wit, and flattering attention to his somewhat jejune observations, and he succumbed to her charms: he begged her to marry him.” Gently, she said no, sweetly asking him, “If I were to marry you, what would the boys call you?”

  Occasionally Josephine accompanied her daughter to the inn, and Ned Post remembers his grandmother’s visits in a tone of affectionate condescension: “When she would come up to visit us at school, the boys never believed she was our Granny. She looked younger than many of the mothers, though she was always impatient about spending time on the punctilio of her appearance. Emily had persuaded her to use an eyebrow pencil to remedy her lack of noticeable eyebrows. The improvement in her looks was great, when she remembered to pencil both brows. Often she would go down ready to go out, but with only one eyebrow. . . . Bruce and I were constantly on guard to see that this did not happen.”

  In spite of their pride and affection, Emily’s sons occasionally wished their mother as well as Josie would stay home. As active adolescents, they didn’t particularly want Emily’s gaze fixed on them or her presence interfering with their plans. Sometimes, too, her well-meaning attentions threatened to smother them. Her grandson would recall: “She could seem stifling at times, even though she was in general a formal-type woman, a product of her times, even with me, who was very close to her. But when she turned her gaze on you, that was that. It was like a spotlight, very intense. I’m sure my father and my uncle wanted to beg her to leave, but they would never hurt her. That was the problem: she always meant well and you couldn’t just push her away.”

  DURING THAT YEAR Emily exhibited the classic signs of a newly divorced woman trying on various identities for size. She developed what would prove a passing interest in a field hitherto foreign to her, “metaphysics,” as the pseudoscience was grandly called. The vogue of the day, metaphysics functioned as an umbrella for various occult and spiritual systems, all heavily weighted with arcane symbols. When “Mr. G.” had flirted with Emily through intimations of the otherworldly, she had dismissed him.

  But that phase of her life had given her an idea for her next novel, the treacly Woven in the Tapestry. While working out her short-lived fascination with metaphysics through writing the book, Emily deepened her friendship with Tuxedo Park’s Julie Olin Benkard. According to Julie’s memoir, she and Emily progressed from mere acquaintances to fast friends the day they both called the clubhouse at the same time to request a “jigger,” the “tiny rickety bus” that ferried Tuxedo Park residents around the complex and to the train station. Emily boarded a few stops after Julie. Aware of the younger woman’s occult interests, she almost immediately began talking about “thinking out” the plot of Woven in the Tapestry. The two women saw each other frequently from then on, Julie especially pleased to have a friend at the dauntingly regular dinners at Tuxedo Park. She, like Edwin, found the social scape here in the Ramapo hills claustrophobic, the identical guests showing up night after night at dinners sponsored by a select group. “Emily Post, Newbold Edgar, the Pillots and Tiltons and the Freddy Piersons alternated locations, each evening one group hosting everyone else at his or her cottage,” she would recall. Such a “glass house” didn’t upset Emily, but she could nonetheless sympathize with Julie’s wry lament. “There weren’t any secrets in the Park. Still, it was fine if one simply sustained social expectations and didn’t strain the atmosphere for others. Your private life was your own.”

  Though it would quickly become clear to Emily that Julie (who later converted to the Baha’i faith and endowed the organization handsomely upon her death) took inquiry into the mystical far more seriously than she did, the combination of Julie’s flamboyant life but impeccable breeding implied a courage Emily respected.

  When Emily and Julie became friends, they both already knew Lewis Chanler—Julie far more intimately than Emily. Chanler (later lieutenant governor of New York) had built a house at Tuxedo Park for his wife and children. There and in Rhinebeck, where Julie also had a house, Lewis Chanler and Mrs. Philip Benkard, née Julie Olin, had met and fallen dramatically, flamboyantly, and entirely indiscreetly in love. They would live in sin for seventeen years because Alice Chanler, unlike Philip Benkard, refused to give her spouse a divorce. That Emily felt comfortable now, as an adult on her own, drawing close to Julie and sharing her and Lewis’s set of friends, speaks potently to the changing times, and to Emily’s own sense of belonging to the “blemished” circle. Nearby Rokeby mansion, for instance, was no longer open to Emily because she was a divorcée and Margaret Ward Chanler emphatically did not receive divorced people; her ill-behaved brother Lewis was not, after all, divorced. He was just living in sin with a woman who was not his wife.

  Julie and Emily quickly discovered that they were each a connoisseur of dressing well, their clothes a major pleasure to them both because of the self-expression they allowed. By this time, Emily had found a perfect seamstress in Manhattan, and she generously shared her with Julie. Bertha Leach was a “genius” with a needle, according to her grandniece, Evelyn Perrault. Married young, Bertha was early widowed and needed to earn a living. Though the divide between employer and employee was always present, Emily and Bertha developed a friendship that granted them both great satisfaction.

  Bertha could provide only one of the outfits for the charity bazaar at Tuxedo that year, and her loyalty lay with Emily. The “Best Dressed Woman in the Park” contest nonetheless ended up pitting the two friends against each other for the winning entry. Julie would recall the event years later: A “tall dial recorded the way things stood. As the proceeding went on, the candidates having few votes were progressively eliminated and finally only two remained, Emily Post and myself,” neck and neck. Emily just pulled it off, at the end. It was fun “because we were great friends,” Julie remembered. Apparently, in spite of her determination to be seen as a professional woman, she allowed herself time off to be silly once in a while.

  Emily and Julie probably were “only” friends, in spite of the paradoxical ease with which women of the period could have lesbian relationships. In light of the lingering Victorian assumptions about female sexual desire, females were granted extensive cover for same-sex relationships, and certainly Julie was quite willing to break rules and cross boundaries. But by the time she got divorced, Emily had accustomed herself to Victorian expectations of limited physical pleasure for wives. Even her grandson would decide that Emily “ wasn’t a sexual person. She wasn’t gay but she wanted to live her own life. She liked what she had made of her own life; she was asexual but passionate about life.” She had decided: no man—or woman—would ever hold her hostage again.

  In her astute analysis of the late-Victorian mores that shaped major female writers of the early twentieth century—Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Wharton—Claudia Roth Pierpont has remarked on the “astonishing” lack of “practicing heterosexuality,” the extreme “aversion to the male.” The “ambitious woman” making the “dangerous crossing from the nineteenth century into modernity” had no model that underwrote her role as a fully invested, highly successful professional woman with a man at her side. Wharton, whom Emily would closely observe in person and in her writing, was ruthless as s
he portrayed ways society deformed the fairer sex, including teaching her to waste even a formidable intellect in the pursuit of the trivial. At least Emily recognized the danger of entering too many “Best Dressed” contests, however much in jest.

  EMILY POST WAS BECOMING a professional, and she reveled in her new identity. Her longtime friendship with Hop Smith was furthering connections worlds away from metaphysics, which was at most a passing fancy for the pragmatic daughter of Josephine. She was much more at home at Uncle Frank’s Sunday night buffet suppers, where she mingled with important male figures in the art and literary worlds: the elderly poet Richard Watson Gilder (the editor of Century magazine until he died in 1909 and, equally impressive to Emily, one of the founders of the Society of American Architects); George Barr Baker (an editor who, through Uncle Hop, had become like family to Emily); Condé Nast (the publisher of Vanity Fair, who would convince Frank Crowninshield to become its editor in 1914); and Frank “Crownie” Crowninshield himself, he who was equally expert in the art and literary worlds. Decades later, Emily would let it drop, in an unguarded moment, that Crownie, between his convoluted romantic relationships, had been “a one-time suitor.”

  The divorcée’s freedom to attend social dinners at friends’ houses reflected the changes in society that had even upper-class women rethinking their assumptions about the old restrictions of gender. If Emily had needed a place to work away from home, for instance, the Colony Club, an organization her friends were forming—Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Mrs. Walter Damrosch, Miss Elizabeth Marbury, Mrs. Payne Whitney, and the diligent, hardworking suffragette Miss Anne Morgan—ministered both to the professional working woman and the nonemployed socialite as well.