EMILY’S WELL- WORN GARDEN log bears in equal measure the marks of her pain and her resolve to be happy. To this day, her descendants marvel at her intricate notes on each bed of plants: their favorite fertilizers and elaborately detailed planting schemes colored with every shade of crayon she could find. She designed the garden on her own, with the help of a seed merchant in Philadelphia to whom she wrote detailed letters. Henry Dreer served, without knowing it, as a surrogate therapist to help the bereft mother avoid thinking too often of her son’s empty room inside.
“Dear Madame,” the fastidious merchant responded that first July after Bruce died. “There isn’t any doubt but that the combination of one part of Muriate of Potash and four parts of Bone Meal [are] better for your dahlias than Stim- U- Plant.” A long letter ensued, the patient Dreer explaining every facet of fertilizer Emily must have queried, from the proper bone meal mix to the proportions of nitrogen and ammonia. It was almost as if she became a midwife to her flowers.
John Enos, serving as both her gardener and her handyman, proved as loyal in his way as her old coachman in Manhattan and Tuxedo Park had been. John’s now elderly successor, Tony Bettencourt, still remembers the daily routine: Emily walked into her garden right after lunch. After a thorough discussion of any horticultural activity during the preceding twenty-four hours, she’d go sit in the shade (usually pleased at the growing success of her latest enterprise) and watch Tony nurse the weakest plants back to health. She was always “thinking big,” he recalls fondly.
Over the subsequent summers, she would record everything planted: “June 5, 1st iris (one) in bloom (about 30 spikes). . . . 2 Lupins (1 blue in longbed—1 white in picking and in first bloom). Nearly all lupins dead. . . . First Dalilias [sic] (house plants 4 to 10 millimeters high). Gladiolii planted in keg about May 1 well out of ground (1 to 3 inches).” The chronicle continues, her planting and watering and fertilizing detailed fastidiously, almost as carefully as she measured the growth of her flowers. Determined to repair any omissions in her garden that compromised its health, she could have been documenting Ned’s height every month, as she had over thirty years before, implicating with each note the swift passage of time: “Too tall for path beds” she marveled now when her progeny exceeded her expectations.
Putting things together, piecing a whole out of its parts, making sense of things: this theme was a constant in Emily Post’s adult life. Now, at quiet times when neither hired help nor friends were at hand, Emily enlisted new support: hand- cut plywood puzzles that Parker Brothers had recently begun selling. She chose traditional scenes of English history or American landscapes. “I don’t remember much from that period—I was only five or six—but I do recall the summer when my grandmother became dedicated to the Pastime Picture Puzzles. She’d get so involved she wouldn’t hear anything else,” Bill Post reminisces. “They became a family hobby, with all of us joining in. She and I had an ongoing mock argument about the better way to arrange the pieces: I preferred to group by shape, but not Grand-mama. . . . She’d lose herself in the pieces. She’d select by colors and orga -nize the blues and the reds together.”
Crafted in 1926 or 1927, each high- quality puzzle piece cost 1.5 cents. Typically a scene would require 100 pieces, twelve deliberately shaped like recognizable objects. A complex 750- piece puzzle would cost $7.50, with 1,000- piece puzzles commanding $10 ($100 today). Emily scoffed at the “exorbitant” price: she and her grandson would make their own puzzles, she said. But, Bill recalls clearly, she bought a secondhand saw, a “cheap model” that no one could make work. Before long, she was forced to cede the ground to Parker Brothers.
The boxes still stacked high in her grandson’s closets suggest that Emily was rarely without a puzzle in progress after Bruce’s death. On the top of each cardboard container she scribbled the date she finished it, noting as well any help she wangled along the way. Recording the visits her family and friends made, the carefully documented lids substitute for a more conventional diary of her life. One obvious favorite, its box tattered and held together with string, displays the first Thanksgiving dinner at Plymouth Rock. As if reminding herself of her family’s perpetuity and renewal—her connection to the May f lower’s John and Priscilla Alden—she framed a reality that helped reorder her shattered life. It is hard today to finger the tiny irregular pieces and not feel close to the woman who used them to heal herself.
But of her myriad diversions, the most reliable, the sturdiest, was the revision of Etiquette she had been working on for months. Although subsequent newspaper advertisements emphasized society’s need for an updated version, her publisher had an added incentive: Emily’s contract expired at the end of the year. They wanted to keep their star, and from now on, her royalty rate would be whatever she negotiated. Funk and Wagnalls placed a large ad in the New York Times on the last day of November, trumpeting, “The first edition of Mrs. Post’s Etiquette has already gone through seventeen printings.” The continued interest in the subject, and the “many changes that have occurred in the social amenities in recent years,” had required modifications. Emily, desperately in need of more diversion than gardening and puzzles could provide, relied on Etiquette to save herself.
CHAPTER 46
THE 1927 EDITION OF ETIQUETTE, APPEARING THE YEAR HER SON died, reflected Emily’s growing awareness of life outside the circle she knew best. The booming postwar economy had contributed to a confused new social blend, the same people showing up at a speakeasy one night and a Southampton dinner party the next. How did—how should—Best Society (whatever that was) act these days?
Americans had witnessed radical changes over the past five years, since Etiquette’s original publication. Emily explained that “the increased pace of living,” embodied by the “automobile, airplane, radio” and, as well, by “apartment- dwelling,” had created a new sensibility, even allowing for a “young woman [to go] out alone with a man.” The new car culture, especially, had changed the rules; in 1921, Warren Harding had governed a nation that boasted one automobile for every eleven residents. By the end of the decade, the number of cars had almost tripled, with one for every four and a half residents. Sanguine about the inevitable battle between parents and their children that such significant and rapid changes created, Emily agreed with correspondents who thought it unrealistic for a mother to expect her daughter not to do what all her friends were doing with the new freedoms they’d been handed, including going on late- night dates that ended with good- byes said in the car.
That December, Time magazine published a slightly smug review of the new edition of Etiquette. The writer summed up the genre, as he saw it: “The Idea: A dictionary of etiquette for 1928. The Motive: To tell those who do not set standards what is being done by those who do”. The Washington Post was more flattering, believing the new edition important enough to be reviewed on Christmas Day. “The customs and manners of a people” decidedly “change with the times,” the article observed, and Emily Post’s revisions neatly illustrated radical changes in the conduct of men and women since the early twenties. Young girls, for instance, now did pretty much whatever they wanted, the review pointed out, a change that had caused Etiquette’s 1922 chapter “The Chaperone and Other Conventions” to be replaced with “The Vanishing Chaperone and Other Lost Conventions.” This revised edition included instructions for a woman to go “out alone with a man.” Such a shift in emphasis exemplified “the wind of women’s independence,” the Post opined.
Even more important than the trials of the newly liberated flapper were the fears of housewives who had read the 1922 edition and become totally confounded about what to them was a major issue: how to give a formal dinner party without the staff Emily assumed readers had. Trying to host a dinner based on the descriptions in Etiquette, women readers had frequently failed. They lacked the butlers that seemed pivotal to formal entertaining, and so they wrote to the author, earnestly wondering, “What shall I do?” How could they entertain with the requisite style
and grace though lacking six or eight servants?
Emily had been so impressed with the deluge of mail on this topic that by the end of 1922 she had already devised a solution, and now she included it in the newly revised Etiquette: Mrs. Three- in-One, the hostess, cook, and waitress. Pondering the anxious letters, she had invited six friends to dine with her and Bruce in their apartment. From this experience came her story of dinner with the “Toploftys, the Gildings and the Worldlys,” all of them delighted by their hostess’s ingenuity. Emily admitted that the efficient Mrs. Three- in-One she created did employ a kitchen helper; none -theless, the menu didn’t depend on such luxuries. Emily’s main course was “chicken hash.” For a surprise, there was ice cream cranked earlier in a dessert freezer, which she’d cheerfully concealed under her chair. At the end of the meal, reaching below and extracting the finale “caused a mild sensation,” with her guests clapping delightedly. Essentially the ambassador of a highly organized method that enabled food to be served from the head of the table, Mrs. Three- in-One, following her formal debut in 1927, would become almost as much a part of Etiquette’s iconography as its royal blue cover.
Mrs. Three- in-One represented a huge leap of Emily Post’s imagination. In the five years since her book had made its debut, Emily had come to realize that the issues that resonated most deeply with her readers had to do with their insecurity over class. Now she was taking into consideration more fully the amorphous group striving always to belong to the chimerical all- knowing group they believed would validate them. This middle class, its economic and social status fluctuating along with its definition, feared above all else looking ignorant. Thus, with respect and aplomb, Emily gracefully explained what Josephine would have thought beneath her daughter: how service pieces were used, where they were set on the table, how to talk to servants if you were lucky enough to afford them. She had come to realize that the lack of savoir faire displayed by Bruce Price’s newly rich customers, such as George Gould and his family, was not idiosyncratic after all. The very notion of the middle class was starting to refer to desire, to the effort to become upwardly mobile. Being rich, as the Prices had always known, was not in and of itself a virtue.
Though sensitive to her audience’s anxieties, Emily urged her readers to exchange confidence for ill- placed alarm: “One of the fears expressed time and again in letters from readers is that of making a mistake in selecting the right table implements, or in knowing how to use one that is unfamiliar in shape. In the first place queerly shaped pieces of flat silver, contrived for purposes known only to their designers, have no place on a well appointed table. . . . [E]tiquette is founded on tradition, and has no rules concerning eccentricities. In the second place, the choice of an implement is entirely unimportant—a trifling detail which people of high social position care nothing about.”
Realizing, nonetheless, that those in the middle class—not “people of high social position”—were the ones dog- earing the pages of her book, she continued in a practical vein, aware that before indulging in the luxury of breaking the rules, one had to know what they were: “In order that you may make no mistake, you need merely remember that you are to take the outside, that is the furthest from the plate, spoon or fork first. If the places are not set in this order, then the fault is that of the person who set the table, and not yours. If you are in doubt,” wait until your host or hostess has picked up his or her utensils, “and do likewise.”
The majority of the 1922 text didn’t change. “Best Society” was still defined “not [as] a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentlefolk. . . . [G]ood form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities and instinctive consideration of the feelings of others are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” But to her chapter on the businessman, she added an equally long section on the ways for the “business woman” (whom she clearly admired) to get ahead: working long days, almost like an “efficient machine,” was an order of the first importance.
Furthermore, one’s entire career could be sidetracked by the seemingly trivial, making it no wiser to ignore the banal than the profound. Overlooking “careless” odors, for instance, whether from eating garlic “or neglecting frequent bathing or because of digestive or chemical defects,” might well subvert one’s best efforts, causing people to dwell on the superficial before there was any chance to get to the core.
Most of all, Emily quietly acknowledged the larger field she was playing on. Her book no longer even pretended to be about things less than vital: “Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners.” “One’s Position in the Community” (the Choice) became “Making One’s Position in the Community,” the egalitarian implications of the new heading no doubt horrifying the Old Guard. Tellingly, another chapter, “American Neighborhood Customs,” contained advice meant for the first- generation Americans she now realized she was tutoring. “The history of New York City cannot be told without figuring in immigration,” as Pete Hamill has said. Nor could the story of the rest of the country.
The letters that poured in after Etiquette’s first edition had made her conscious that her real public was this vast national community, from lower middle class to rich or aspiring to be, all seeking to learn courtesies from A to Z. Such a response encouraged her to address Americans outside the East Coast that she knew so well, a task she now realized had begun during her cross- country car trip on the Lincoln Highway. Even the immigrant soccer league players common to New York City knew—or their wives did—that there were occasions when everyone needed to play by the same rules. Women moving to the city from rural communities and new citizens arriving from foreign countries: Emily wanted these transplants to know how to get ahead. To Emily Post, knowledge and the choice to use it wisely were all anyone needed for a good life.
Over the years, she would come to better understand the dynamics of social power that undergirded her life versus those of a struggling underclass, and her awareness allowed her to address more clearly the need of that world’s inhabitants to fight their way up the ladder to success. In order to remain relevant, Emily was forced to open her eyes to the grim realities with which Jacob Riis, a photographer dedicated to social reform, had confronted the nation years earlier. At some level, she was beginning to understand that her turn- of- the- century New York “had reeked of racism, religious bigotry, class prejudice, and sexual exploitation.” Emily had grown since those Gilded Age days, and her new edition, with its genuinely democratic ideals and sympathies, made that clear.
CHAPTER 47
THE CONTEST TO BUILD THE TALLEST SKYSCRAPER WAS BACK ON. In the booming economy steadily heating up ever since the troops came home, the leading architects waged bets against one another, speculating about who they thought would go highest and how long it would take them to get there. Their rivalry reminded a wistful Emily Post of how her father had been a key player in the similar competitions at the turn of the century. His aging friends were amused and a little nostalgic to see what they had assumed to be their story now being told for a second time. These days, everyone was talking about the Chrysler Building, two years from its completion, and how it had just been blindsided by the Empire State Building, scheduled to enter the race as well, with its driven architect determined to bludgeon his competition if only by a measure of inches. Both skyscrapers would be more than three times the height of Bruce Price’s American Surety Building on Broadway.
But Bruce’s daughter was too busy these days writing about more modest dwellings to waste time speculating on the grandiose. That spring, she herself was engaged in a competition centering upon the leading contemporary aesthetic. Aware of the heated contest between old and new, representatives from the International Exposition of Art in Industry chaired an afternoon debate between Emily Post and eminent photographer Edward Steichen. During his talk entitled “The Ameri
can Point of View in Modern Decoration,” Steichen urged his audience to embrace the modernist position that valued function over ornamentation: “Consign . . . useless bric- a- brac” to the attic, he urged. Emily’s impassioned defense of the indi-vidual’s right to her own aesthetic won the greater applause, if only because the event was held at Macy’s department store: “I hope modern decoration won’t lead any of you to throw away your old pieces,” she told her well-heeled audience, “for I am especially fond of eighteenth- century works. While I think the new movement is a serious one, combining beauty and utility, I feel each home should represent the taste of the individual living in it, and not be filled with things some one else said were the things to have.”
Without a doubt, Emily was her own woman—or at least she meant to be. Before retreating to Martha’s Vineyard that summer, she posed for Old Gold Cigarettes’ ad campaign, a commission her mother would have found shocking: tobacco, messy and masculine, was clearly never meant for a woman. Josephine might have been somewhat mollified had she noticed the familiar names imbedded deep in her daughter’s assignment. Pierre Lorillard’s dynasty included the American Tobacco Company, with Edward L. Bernays (a nephew of Sigmund Freud’s) the corporation’s public relations genius. Shrewdly, Bernays encouraged women to take up smoking by linking it with the suffrage movement. During the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue the following year, ostensibly promoting “equality of the sexes,” he would choreograph debutantes marching in public as they puffed away on “torches of freedom,” in the name of the emancipated female.
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