By the time of her death, Emily’s Etiquette had sold close to 1.5 million copies and Eichler’s revamped Emily Holt book only half that; Eichler’s volume had faded from view by 1960. To some extent, the sales comparisons had been flawed from the beginning, Edmund Wilson among others noting the odd discrepancies in the figures from the early 1920s through the 1950s. Various reports showed Eichler wildly outselling Post; other charts suggested a sudden reversal of figures. The problem stemmed largely from Nelson Doubleday’s innovative selling techniques, which, in Lillian Eichler’s case, meant repackaging the author’s original version into so many commercial variations that accurate sales were impossible to track.
Over those three decades, Doubleday experimented with countless variations, ranging from 59-cent volumes to elaborately boxed editions. In 1947, the firm licensed promotional rights for an adaptation packaged by Old Dutch Cleanser. The irony of Eichler, a daughter of immigrants, touting a product that played on its Knickerbocker past wasn’t wasted on her biggest rival.
OVER THE YEARS Emily would increasingly emphasize the surprise of Etiquette’s success, though she generally failed to mention the threat posed by Lillian Eichler. In light of the glut of etiquette books in the early 1920s, the publishers, anticipating a small initial draw that summer, had printed only 5,000 copies. But after a week or two of sluggish sales, word of mouth sold so many books that Funk and Wagnalls was motivated to pump money into expensive advertising. Before long, newspapers were paying for syndication rights, with urban centers, such as Boston, running excerpts daily for several weeks, starting that September. As 1923 began, announcements for Etiquette implicitly acknowledged the competition with Eichler: “Friendly Example—Not Ridicule,” a typical notice declared. Funk and Wagnalls launched another campaign, this one touting Etiquette’s “50,000 copies” sold in six months. The race was on.
CHAPTER 43
EMILY WAS PLEASED AT THE ATTENTION SHE WAS GETTING, BUT two worries continued to nag at her. She wanted her twenty-eight-year-old son to find himself. After the war, Bruce—who, as his mother had predicted, hadn’t returned to college—tackled several jobs with only minor success, probably because none of them interested the artistic young man. Suddenly coming upon a solution, Emily arranged for him to apprentice with architect Kenneth Murchison, a family friend with whom Emily’s father had occasionally worked, and who was like a favorite uncle to Bruce Price’s namesake.
Satisfied that her younger son finally seemed well situated, Emily turned to her other challenge. Determined to finish a novel started years earlier, she found her days at home distracting and concluded that she should make this year’s trip to France longer than usual to escape the daily disruptions. As usual, she would stay with the widowed Minnie Coster, who was raising her granddaughter abroad, while the child’s flighty mother, Matilda, sampled one royal liaison after another.
On April 25, Emily sailed to Europe on the Paris, a year before the ocean liner was sold for scrap. The travel notice in the New York Times included unusual detail about the passengers on board, possibly because its readers were weary of the Teapot Dome scandal and craved some relief. In any case, these travelers were more interesting than the average social crowd. Anne Morgan, for instance, was returning to Europe a hero because of her earlier unstinting war efforts on behalf of the French. Dr. Katharine Bement Davis, former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, was also on board. The manifest read like a roll call of the new woman.
While Emily was traveling, she was honored in absentia: Will Rogers believed Etiquette important enough to use for an extended comedy routine. Everyone knew you had “arrived” when the popular humorist used your work as the butt of his jokes. Now he played with the differences between “out West” in California and eastern traditions. “Allow me to present” versus “May I introduce”: How, Rogers implored, was he to know that the first was supercilious and the second correct? Emily Post’s Etiquette would save him, he quipped.
Just now Emily felt in need of salvation herself, still unable to move her novel in the directions she’d wanted. Remaining abroad late that season, she chose to miss the annual autumn ball at Tuxedo, in spite of the advance notice that this was to be an especially grand year. On October 27, 1923, the party met with record attendance. “Every resident of the Park entertained guests over the week end at their villas,” the New York Times announced—the shift in idiom from “cottage” to “villa” as striking as the cache of new hosts unknown to Emily.
Katharine Collier’s married daughter, Katharine St. George, headed a dance committee this year, while others her age arranged for side rooms where they could play mah-jongg. This wildly popular game of Chinese origin, which had first appeared in the States around 1850, was suddenly new again in the 1920s. Ned and his wife, “Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Main Post Jr.,” friends of the St. Georges’, were in residence for the fall festivities as well. Barbara Loew Post, now a new mother, especially enjoyed the mix of the young and old at Tuxedo Park: “My mother was very interested in people of all ages, very social, but rather restrained nonetheless,” her son, Bill Post, related, offering a description that could have fit his grandmother Emily at the same age. Regardless of the group’s welcome, however, neither Emily nor Katharine Collier attended this year’s gala, their absence signaling Tuxedo Park’s changing of the guard.
By Thanksgiving, the fifty-one-year-old writer had returned to Manhattan. A week before Christmas, she gave a dinner for Ned and Barbara, where her little grandson was treated to Uncle Bruce playing Santa Claus. Determined to help her son (whose bachelor status increasingly worried his mother) find himself, Emily had begun inviting eligible young women to dinner, including the recently relocated daughter of a family friend.
The journalist Nanette Kutner told the story many years later about that Christmas “during a dark year of her life” when Emily sensed her loneliness and invited the depressed girl to a Christmas Eve celebration. Everyone drank southern eggnog and opened presents around an enormous tree. Eager to do good all around, Emily hoped that Bruce and Nanette might connect romantically. There was no spark, however, at least from Bruce’s side. Emily’s talented and clever son had not given serious thought to any girl, but his mother persevered in trying to jump-start his romantic life, regardless of how difficult a prospect it seemed.
THE NEW YEAR BEGAN with another salute to Emily in the New York Times. On January 6, 1924, Delight Evans, usually one of Screenland magazine’s reporters, instead interviewed for the newspaper “Mrs. Price Post,” whose society novel Parade would be published soon. Uncharacteristically late for her noontime meeting, Emily rushed into the drawing room for her interview. She apologized, explaining that she had been “dashing” about since six-thirty that morning, typical of her daily routine. “When I work I forget everything else in the world. I work ten hours a day as a rule. . . . I give up everything except reams and reams of paper and my typewriter.” She went on to share more details about her writing, admitting that she jabbed at her typewriter with four fingers, entrusting the stenographer with the final draft only. Implying a tension about the demands of her job that would resurface throughout her life, Emily seemed to be answering an unspoken complaint uttered by her still uncomprehending family and friends: “I cannot be flying here and dashing there when I am writing.”
Finally deep into the novel that had given her such difficulty, Emily would reveal only that it was about a contemporary “soulless butterfly” who breaks the hearts of those who woo her. The excited reporter, however, allowed her no pause, imploring her to work “even more than ten hours a day” so that she could finish and get the novel into her audience’s eager hands. As if overcome in person by Emily’s compelling authority, the journalist eagerly ranked her among Edith Wharton’s literary company, elevating her diverse abilities above anyone of her own acquaintance, and causing Emily, actually delighted, to protest: “Super-woman has an unpleasant sound. . . . There is not a nice ring to it. It i
s smug. One visualizes a somewhat stodgy female of imposing proportions and the courage of her convictions. Super-woman!” Such modesty merely egged on the writer to try harder: “Books should be written about [Emily Post], if they haven’t been. She is one of the most interesting women of her day.”
As Emily was basking in public admiration, she continued to observe the disintegration of her personal retinue of Best People. She witnessed the humiliation of her good friend Juliet Morgan when a short, pithy article in the Times announced William Hamilton’s trip to Nevada to remarry, mere weeks after his divorce from Juliet had become final. (Hamilton had recently retired from J. P. Morgan and Company, where everyone knew he had served as an executor of Morgan’s will in 1913.) Nine months after the divorce, the Times would feature a much longer article with the headline “Mrs. Hamilton Gets Country Seat Back.” Before leaving Juliet, Hamilton had sold her family’s 760-acre “country seat” to Dwight Morrow, the sale forcing Juliet to vacate the grounds at the time of her divorce. Morrow, also professionally involved with J. P. Morgan and Company, was now selling the land back to Juliet.
The land was important to Emily’s longtime friend for more than monetary reasons: it defined one of the fledgling attempts Juliet had made to break out of the mold she’d assumed unreflectively when she and her girlfriends had married. Like Emily, she, too, had found ways to grow. Inspired by her younger sister, Anne, sponsoring her similar wartime projects overseas on behalf of Frenchwomen, Juliet (vice president of the Women’s Land Army of America) had underwritten even more extensive professional training for “farmerettes” in New York than she had originally planned at the start of the war. But the grounds abutting Tuxedo Park had eventually gone fallow once the women’s work was deemed no longer necessary. Juliet Morgan Hamilton saw no reason that she should not reclaim the land.
THOUGH EMILY AND JULIET occasionally lunched together in the city that year, the novelist went into near hibernation following her interview with the gushing journalist who was certain that the talented writer could work harder. Determined to finish Parade by late autumn, she succeeded. Soon after, as if rewarding herself, she briefly spoke twice on the radio, enamored of this new art form. She was deeply disappointed that her voice came off sounding so tinny, but soon she had her proofs to correct, and she once again happily sequestered herself, this time to prepare her novel for its publication.
Perhaps the subject of Parade—a poor but clever girl finagling a marriage proposal from a Gilded Age socialite—caused Emily to forget the real world she inhabited nowadays. During the lull before publication, uncharacteristically finding herself with little to do, Emily became involved in a very public and unattractive conflagration concerning race and, inevitably, class. Leonard Kip Rhinelander had recently made headlines when the New York Times learned of his secret marriage to Alice Beatrice Jones, a laundress and the “daughter of a Pelham taxicab driver and odd-job man.” More important, Alice’s father was “colored.”
Tuxedo Park (where Kip’s mother, Anna Kip, had died in a fire in 1916) was agog. Over the subsequent drawn-out newspaper coverage, the Rhinelanders would repeatedly be labeled as “one of the wealthiest New York families” and “one of the oldest Dutch families in the country.” For six weeks the press hounded the Jones family, exposing what did, in fact, look like a conventional hasty marriage between a lovesick young man and a crafty opportunist. Inevitably, Kip’s love proved no match for the Rhinelanders’ might. Filing for an annulment, the young man claimed that Alice had sworn that she had no touch of Negro blood when he proposed to her. Since he had been dating her for three years, regularly visiting the family home, his professed shock didn’t convince anyone. But the truth was not the point.
In support of Kip’s family, in March 1925 Emily wrote to the social register (at its peak that year, containing twenty-one individual city directories), requesting that the blue book of society omit the name of a new bride who, according to New York state law, was guilty of miscegenation.
Related to the Posts by marriage, the Rhinelanders had always awed Emily. Now she made it her cause to help save them; several fine women, including at least one countess, had been dropped for what many considered minor bad behavior. The alarmed officials quickly explained that they had included Mrs. Rhinelander only to denote the change in status for Mr. Rhinelander; the couple would be omitted from future issues.
Not everyone in society approved of the stuffy register. Though some members of the social registry, like Emily, found the list a practical way to locate their friends, many of the oldest names as well as the newly rich city residents found it an anachronism, embodying an absurd, misplaced notion of class. Such iconoclasts refused permission even to include their names. One of that group sent the New York Times a copy of what was meant to be Emily’s private letter of protest to the register, to be read only by the secretary, not by the Times’ audience. A subsequent newspaper article about the Rhinelander affair shamelessly quoted it: “I happen to know that you announce all the misalliances [members’ ill-advised engagements or marriages] of those on your list, . . . a stand which I have greatly admired and one which in certain prominent cases has shown no little courage of principle on your part. . . . [F]or the sake of race, as well as for the decency of society, which you do uphold, please explain.” Miscegenation was widely believed to weaken the gene pool of everyone involved.
Delighted, for reasons unclear, at the chance to flaunt her disregard for Emily Post, a previously outcast member of the register immediately wrote a letter to the editor, snidely skewering Emily for being pompous: “To an arbiter of social etiquette such as Mrs. Emily Post has proved herself to be in the outlying villages of the United States (I hear the sale of her book was very large), this exchange should indeed be final, and yet now that a touch of the tar brush has dimmed the luster of the Social Register, who knows?” The truth underlying the woman’s sarcasm lay outside the scope of Emily’s imagination, and that of other American citizens as well. By the end of the decade forty-two states still banned marriages between whites and citizens of color, whatever that meant.
In spite of the prevalent mythology that the Roaring Twenties was a time of unshackled freedom, the era’s ethnic stew boiled over after the war’s end. The middle years of the new decade would prove one of the most vicious periods in America’s tortured history of black-white relations. Many intellectuals had assumed that the teamwork of men fighting side by side in the trenches of World War I would finally put an end to the Civil War. Instead, from Chicago to the Deep South to the nation’s capital itself, lynching proliferated. Following the brief color-free brotherhood occasioned by the Great War, enmity toward people with dark skin triumphed once again.
CHAPTER 44
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DECADE, EMILY WAS WRITING THE RULES of proper behavior for a population whose first lady wore flapper clothes so effectively that the couturier Charles Worth awarded her a French locket on behalf of the garment industry. Unlike the increasingly plump author, Grace Coolidge, with her slender, athletic body and her interest in sports, captured the epoch perfectly. Rumor had it that female skiers were even training to compete in the next Olympic games.
Though Emily didn’t measure up to the era’s demanding physical standards, she had nonetheless anticipated perfectly the new model of the self-determined woman accepted on her own terms. Emboldened by the spirit of the age, taking herself seriously as an amateur architect, she finally decided to design a building herself. She had long had the project in mind, she happily confessed to a New York Times reporter, noting, “But the sites offered from time to time by various brokers were either inaccessible or unpromising of sunlight.” For now, she moved into a luxury rental—in part to study its operations.
The Gladstone, centrally located at East Fifty- second Street and Park Avenue, was heavily advertised in 1925 as “a definite departure in apartment hotel arrangement,” an “artistic and distinctive home plus superb hotel service”—upper-class accomm
odations perfect for Emily’s needs at the time. Living at the Gladstone offered conveniences that enabled occupants to dispense with the tedious details of running a house. And, for Emily, observing up close how the building worked helped her plan the dream residence she planned to build. By pursuing such a course as if she were a professional, she was again traveling the path laid down by Edith Wharton, who had written The Decoration of Houses in 1897.
Emily was also capitalizing on a mid- 1920s conviction that Manhattan was “just a village,” as Harold Ross, whose New Yorker magazine had made its first appearance in February, insisted. As she analyzed life at the Gladstone, she realized that her ideal home would be a building whose inhabitants were all friends and acquaintances. They would invest monthly in the building—covering the expenses of its maintenance and staff—and they would buy their individual apartments just as they would a house. Yet again, Emily was following her father’s lead. In the late 1880s, soon after he’d moved to Manhattan, Bruce Price had scandalized old- liners with the multiunit buildings he had designed and built. Within another few years, single- family dwellings, mansions and humble houses alike, had begun yielding to apartments, where people lived under shared roofs. Now, in 1925, his daughter felt she was taking up his cause, though in truth the starchy resistance of forty years earlier had almost entirely crumbled.
Emily scoured the city, deciding upon a good Upper East Side location at 39 East Seventy- ninth Street, at Madison Avenue. Next, she invited Minnie Coster and Alice Beadleston Post to lunch to help her work out the logistics. Then, following several mistrials, she obtained architectural blueprints to her exact specifications. Within a few weeks, over half of the still unplotted units were presold. Eventually, seventeen of Emily’s friends invested in the fifteen- story building, which cost a total of $1.3 million, roughly the equivalent of $13 million today. In contrast to the 60 to 80 percent membership in the social register that most Park Avenue apartment buildings boasted, 100 percent of Emily’s co- op members were listed.
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