CHAPTER 30
ON OCTOBER 17, 1909, THE INTREPID FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD JOSEPHINE, always ready for an adventure, accepted the offer of her friend Mrs. Charles Coulter to accompany her and her twelve-year-old son Charles on a beautiful, color-drenched Sunday drive in the Hudson Valley. Crisp and bracing, it was the perfect autumn day to take the car out, chauffeur John Scully had proclaimed. Mrs. Coulter stopped to pick up Mrs. Price at around three-thirty, and they drove to Arden, six miles away, where they leisurely toured the grounds of Tuxedo Park’s late railroad tycoon Edward Henry Harriman. His assets (estimated variously at $100 million to $400 million) would surpass the $80 million worth of J. P. Morgan’s estate when he died a few years later.
There was no reason for the women to feel worried about others observing their curiosity—who would even see them in the seemingly endless miles of forested roads? The grounds were said to be magnificent: several decades earlier, Harriman had bought 7,863 acres for $52,500, adding 20,000 acres over the next few years, all of which he connected with forty miles of bridle paths. Mrs. Price and Mrs. Coulter had already heard the rumors about Harriman’s widow planning to donate the lands to the state, and they wanted to see the property up close while the estate was still off-limits to the general public.
As they drove with the breeze wafting over them in the open touring car, the gentle swoosh of late-afternoon air against their faces felt divine this time of year. The low rumble of the tires against the gravel, lulling them as they drove, probably quashed any desire to talk. Maybe the little group lingered too long, unable to tear themselves away from such perfect weather. Maybe, suddenly aware of the lengthening shadows, they urged the driver to go just a bit faster: they were returning home and it was time for the substantial tea that the women assumed would segue, as usual, into an early dinner.
Chauffeur Scully sped up a bit when he got onto the clear, level roadway cut through the estate. Nearly in front of the manager’s house, the Coulter car came upon another tourist driving more slowly in the same direction. Scully maneuvered to pass the vehicle, but he misjudged the width of the road. His car’s wheel caught in a rut, causing the vehicle to skid off the edge of the lane, toward a ditch three or four feet deep. The roadway crumbled beneath the heavy touring car, which then plunged into the ditch, overturning against a tree straight ahead, the front of the auto “striking the trunk with considerable force,” as the New York Times later reported.
Josephine Lee Price slammed headfirst into the oversized pine bordering the road. Thrown from the car, she had her “skull . . . crushed,” the newspaper related, the graphic description surely numbing Emily as she read it. The “machine” pinned Josie’s body against the tree, the smashed car and the tree making a gruesome sandwich out of Josephine, who died while the driver of the other vehicle tried to pry her from the entrapment. Mrs. Coulter and her son were not seriously injured, though the broken, twisted arm the mother sustained as her son landed on top of her required that she be hospitalized. They and their bruised chauffeur would recover.
The woman who’d meshed the Civil War era with the brash Gilded Age was finally claimed by the very emblem of modernity, the automobile. Her blameless daughter yet again became the object of the public’s prurient attention, as Josephine’s violent death among society’s lush private grounds naturally proved irresistible fodder for the city’s papers.
EMILY, TELLING HER sons their grandmother was sick, arranged for them to take the train home from Pomfret. Instead, when the boys arrived in Tuxedo, she gently explained why she was taking them to buy new suits. Concentrating on her sons’ sadness over Josie’s death, Emily was relieved to have something to distract her from her own grief. Since her father’s death, she had drawn increasingly close to her mother, in spite of what she considered their radically different personalities. She had even come to appreciate how important Josie had been to Bruce’s achievements, through her stolid financial wisdom and her no-nonsense determination to anchor the architect’s fancies. Maybe, Emily had reflected, there was more of Josephine in her than she’d realized.
Josie was cremated, her funeral held on a late Tuesday morning at St. Mary’s in Tuxedo Park. After the service, Emily and the boys took a train to Wilkes-Barre, where Josephine’s ashes were buried alongside Bruce’s. Following her mother’s interment—which her sons, always more amused than moved by their grandmother, remembered primarily for their pleasure at seeing Great-Uncle Charlie again and for the chance to miss school—Emily returned to the solace she always sought in times of distress: she went to work. Her next novel, The Eagle’s Feather, which Dodd, Mead hoped would ride the crest of her successful serialization of The Title Market the year before, was due to the publisher soon. Finally, she meant to honor her mother as well as her father through her success.
On November 5 the will was read. Lack of income would never again be a problem for Emily Post. Josephine had bequeathed her daughter and her grandsons all her carefully controlled assets. She also asked Emily, in the name of Bruce Price, to continue the monthly $75 allowances she had been making to two of her late husband’s relatives, until they died. Josie made generous $10,000 gifts to various extended family members—to be bestowed, however, only upon the premature deaths of Emily and her sons. The exact amount left to her only primary heir, her daughter, went unspecified, but it included all of Josephine’s real estate: four houses at Tuxedo Park and her apartment in New York City as well.
On the dedication page of the second printing of The Title Market, Emily would acknowledge her mother’s untiring willingness to listen as her daughter tried out plot alternatives aloud: “As though you did not know each page, each paragraph, each word; as though for months and months the Sanseveros, Nina, John, and all the rest, had not been your daily companions—Madre Mia, this book is dedicated to you.” Four months after the accident, Josie’s mother, Emily Lee, died. For some years she had been living in the New Jersey home her husband had maintained for two of his unmarried sisters. Now Emily’s mother and grandmother were both gone. Increasingly, Emily Post was on her own.
Taking solace in keeping busy, Emily appeared at the Tuxedo Park horse show the following month in a much-noted “hand painted chiffon gown with a cerise cloak” and a “small little black hat, much like a tricorne, with a great brush of stiff, rose-colored aigrettes pointing backward.” Between her mother’s bequest and her own income, she had enough money to splurge on a luxury or two. In later years, as if unable to justify continuing to work any other way, Emily would simply dismiss the inheritance and vaguely suggest that her mother had left her a “small fortune” which soon “vanished in bad investments.” All evidence suggests otherwise.
Josephine would certainly have appreciated the kind of attention, all within the boundaries of good taste, her daughter was receiving these days. Publishers Weekly focused on Emily’s charming home design instead of her books. A month later, a few days after Christmas, a short syndicated newspaper interview meant to promote The Title Market identified the author as “particularly well-suited” to discussing overseas romance. Was marrying a title a good thing or not? The novelist advised that as long as a wife created a fulfilling home for her family, domestic or foreign marriages contained equal opportunities for happiness. Women didn’t fully appreciate the influence they exerted within their own households, private kingdoms that could inspire “state and country,” wherever the wives lived.
Such domestic scenes were far removed from the concerns of most contemporary women: at times Emily’s emphasis seemed anachronistic, harking back to her parents’ era. Debates about social injustices rather than royal weddings held sway these days in the conversations of most educated women. The classes were mixing things up, and the newspapers were full of the urban potpourri that followed. Readers learned about the Colony Club speeches, where striking shirtwaist factory workers were the guests of honor. The incongruous images skillful writers conjured of such a social mix seemed far more relevant than the fai
ry-tale kingdom of overseas marriages. Right here, in New York City, sympathetic club ladies were passing the hat in the name of their less privileged sisters, in one meeting collecting $1,300 (worth $27,000 today) on the spot.
But women would prove a no more solid voting bloc than any other constituency, quickly separating into their own idiosyncratic concerns. Workers, for instance, broke ranks among themselves when some of their members dared accept support from high-profile society suffragists. Newspaper articles about rich, outspoken women like Alva or even the notoriously shy Anne Morgan parading against sex discrimination only irritated their less fortunate sisters. The image of J. P. Morgan’s earnest but incalculably rich daughter—interested throughout her life in the welfare of women—setting up meetings to support factory workers incensed some observers. Class issues became more confusing than gender; what seemed like logical alliances didn’t fit after all. Girl strikers might be recounting their woes to millionaires one day, while the next morning the same young women would denounce these wealthy socialites for wasting their time on the vote: What did such privileged ladies think they knew about politics anyway?
In some cases, their rage was well aimed. Emily avoided the maelstrom by claiming, when asked her opinion, that she hadn’t studied the issues enough to justify taking a position. It was an ignorance she later rued, a lack of awareness that her uninformed mother had unwittingly fostered. Gradually, as she educated herself about the ways a society functioned, Emily would realize that class and gender were issues that never went away, regardless of the vocabulary they came clothed in.
CHAPTER 31
ON JANUARY 1, 1910, ENRICO CARUSO SANG IN THE METROPOLITAN Opera’s first live radio broadcast. Though the country was still a decade away from easy access to radios, this moment marked the real changing of the cultural guard, a democratizing of possibilities. Emily Post, never as strongly interested in music as in its spectacle, would nonetheless grow to value the radio for its unimaginable potential to connect her with her readers. She understood that the future was upon her and she had to find a new way in. That awareness is part of what funded her decision to hire an agent.
She was also motivated by her ex-husband’s trespass onto her territory. Weeks earlier, Emily had heard about Edwin’s own impressive achievement, writ large on her landscape. His glossy piece of fiction entitled “The Blue Handkerchief” had appeared in the relatively new journal the Smart Set. Until its demise in 1930, the magazine would present important new writers, introducing its readers to literary modernism as it published new authors from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker to Eugene O’Neill. Though its circulation was small in 1910, the Smart Set already enjoyed a reputation for being intelligent but slick. When Edwin’s story appeared that February, Emily must have been annoyed to see her ex-husband listed among a group that included George Jean Nathan, H. L. Mencken, and Louis Untermeyer. Even harder for her to swallow was the source of Edwin’s good fortune. William D. Mann—Colonel Mann himself, the hated publisher of Town Topics—had founded the Smart Set, his name listed prominently on its cover for all to see.
“The Blue Handkerchief” is a fluff piece full of double entendre and smug club references. Based on actual anecdotes that Edwin’s sophisticated, unmarried older brother had heard and shared with him, the story features a couple of society men who duel over the dishonor dealt to a third. Only at the end does the reason for the rapiers surface: Monsieur de Nancy, the man challenged to fight Raol, had implied that Raol’s friend Armand fathered the child of the Comtesse de Crèvecoeur. Because the toddler possessed the eccentric carrot-red hair of Armand himself, Monsieur de Nancy had dared conjecture about the boy’s patrimony. The story ends with everyone laughing, merrily reconciled.
Those socialites in their old circle who had preferred Edwin to Emily must have relished his current success. Surely the snider ones connived to ask Emily her professional opinion of his piece. She was too savvy not to deflect such arrows easily. But she was smart enough, and a good enough novelist, to realize that Edwin was a natural writer in a way that she could never be. Her ex-husband could produce on the spur of the moment highly crafted sentences that would have taken Emily several rewrites to create. Still, she also realized that he had never written anything over ten pages; even his prose might flag if he held himself to the grindstone, discipline he’d never be able to exert.
PAUL REYNOLDS, a “tall, spare, awkward, shy, and modest man,” had done graduate work under William James at Harvard, earning an M.A. with honors in philosophy. The gawky, earnest gentleman scholar moved to New York City, where he meant to follow his dream to become the junior editor of a publishing house. Instead, he became the country’s first literary agent, the luminaries his office represented ranging from Willa Cather to Sir Winston Churchill, Theodore Dreiser to Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw to Norman Mailer. Reynolds was successful enough from the start to turn down Gertrude Stein because, he confessed, he couldn’t understand her writing.
Reynolds’s acceptance of Emily as a client suggests his confidence in her literary future. Luckily, Reynolds hated the phone. The resultant frequent—sometimes several times a day—exchange of letters between his New York City office and her Tuxedo Park home, the trains running reliably between Manhattan and the park every few hours, document her writing career in ways available nowhere else. Clearly building upon Emily’s reputation as a society novelist, Reynolds immediately sought magazine commissions for his new writer. The Cosmopolitan contracted for a piece entitled “What Makes a Young Girl Popular in Society?” for $250 ($5,000 today), and Emily spent February and March working on the article, her usual pace slackened due to a respiratory problem that wouldn’t go away.
She had been disappointed in Dodd, Mead’s efforts on behalf of The Title Market, its sales (ranging from 40,000 to 70,000 copies, depending on the telling) entirely respectable if not impressive, yet still far less than she’d anticipated. Now, holed up in Tuxedo Park during the late winter and early spring to write undisturbed, she told Reynolds, who was in England, that her new novel, The Eagle’s Feather, was definitely “not finished” yet and needed heavy revision before it could be published.
In March Reynolds commented in an internal memo to his staff that Emily would be sending him a few trial essays from her proposed new series, “Letters of a Worldly Godmother.” He hoped to get the collection published as Emily’s first nonfiction book. The rough drafts proved strong, and the agent peppered Emily with enthusiastic suggestions. Why not discuss one particularly sticky topic: young women forced to marry for financial reasons? Or might she tease out the consequences of a girl entering society without a chaperone? Emily was amenable to all his suggestions, though she insisted on including one subject of her own: dance partners for young ladies. Without hosts’ tactful preplanning, parties too often relegated the unpopular girls to the sidelines for the entire evening, and in the social world, this was a crime for everyone involved.
In April, the agency was disappointed when it received the month’s figures for newspaper syndication rights to The Title Market. Breaking this news to Emily, Reynolds assured her that he’d come visit her in Tuxedo Park within the next week to think through new strategies. Instead of placating his author, however, his letter elicited a frantic telegram: “In midst of moving cannot think writing for two months postpone visit for present.” Emily had made the mistake of assuming that her career would automatically accelerate, but instead she felt she was lurching forward at best, in spite of having an agent. Now she used her yearly transfer to a summer cottage and a trip to Europe as a smoke screen to buy herself time to think.
Reynolds responded promptly, gently explaining that even the “sure sale” of her essay “What Makes a Young Girl Popular in Society?” to Cosmopolitan had proved less than definite after all. There was good news, however: the popular Delineator, a monthly women’s magazine, had requested a few more pieces of advice from Emily’s “worldly godmother” persona. In spite of the ja
unty air of her response, Emily was clearly disappointed: “Perhaps I had better go into house furnishing—I have to go into something to pay my bills since I find [even small] dolls’ houses come high.” She had decided to move into one of Bruce’s smaller cottages, refurbishing it to her taste.
In fact she had no real financial problems, even with the perhaps surprising expenses young men of fashion, such as her two adolescent sons, could incur. Harvard, which Ned was eyeing, didn’t come cheap, and Emily may have legitimately worried that her safety net from Josephine could easily collapse under too much pressure. But the real concern her household worries voiced was her deep disappointment that her career as a writer seemed to have gone off track.
She decided she would accept almost any editorial request but one: under no circumstances was anything she wrote to be submitted to the several magazines connected financially with Colonel Mann, the person she held responsible for her humiliation. As she reminded Reynolds, “Frank Crowninshield read ‘Negative 7’ when he was at Munsey’s [a fiction magazine] and Munsey’s wanted it. I was furious that Frank had let the Munsey readers read it as it was sent only to him personally as he and I had talked of the story at Monte Carlo and it was a purely personal thing. I do not want to sell anything to Munsey or Town Topics or the Smart Set or Pearson or Smiths or the Black Cat!!!!!! Please never to any of those!” Then she went on to explain what she really wanted—to appear in a more intellectual publication: “I’d burst with pride if I ever got between the Atlantic’s covers.”
In July she received a check for $300 from the Delineator for the advice piece intended for Cosmopolitan, “What Makes a Young Girl Popular in Society?,” which would appear in November. Though Emily was eager to publish in journals that scholars bought, she understood that the Delineator reached a larger audience. Theodore Dreiser had edited it until that year, and the magazine published everyone from Jacob Riis to John Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling to A. Conan Doyle; at least it was not just another women’s magazine. A full-page photograph accompanying Emily’s rather slight article shows the writer at her best. Her hair is softly dressed around her face; she is serious, not sad; and she shows a touch of the demure even while commanding the space with an authoritative upright pose.
Emily Post Page 24
