Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  For the most part, Emily filtered her experience of such urban politics through the radio and, even then, primarily through her favorite commentator. Though she enjoyed several newscasters, her loyalty lay with Lowell Thomas. “Grandmama had a brightly painted radio in every room of her house,” Bill Post recalls, “even a pink one and one with glitter she had pasted onto it. And Thomas on NBC was one constant, an absolute in her life at this time, no matter how busy she was.” Until the mid- 1930s politically left-leaning, by the end of the decade Lowell Thomas would claim that President Roosevelt’s reliance upon government spending had turned the reporter into a conservative. Thomas was the kind of person Emily admired: true ladies and gentlemen, she believed, did not depend on the felicities or fortuities of wealth to define themselves. The homeschooled boy could recite by heart hundreds of “great” poems by the time he was ten. After a stint out West for Thomas’s father to (unsuccessfully) mine for gold, his family moved back to Ohio, his birthplace. While still friendless in his new school, he was elected captain of the football team, in part because of his excellent speaking skills, and most of all because he was a hard worker.

  Lowell Thomas also appealed to Emily’s sense of wanderlust, something the writer too seldom felt able to indulge these days, except in memory—or through newscasts. She identified with him as a New Yorker as well: both Thomas and newsman Edward R. Murrow lived in Pawling, just over an hour from Manhattan. In a manner similar to Murrow’s—and one that allowed Emily herself to happily fantasize—Thomas delivered reports “from airplanes, from balloons, from mountain tops, from ships at sea, from battlefields, from the depths of mines.”

  And yet, very much in the style of Emily herself, who treasured stability in the midst of change and excitement, Thomas achieved popularity for his calm, predictable nightly opening and closing words as much as his sense of adventure. “Good evening, everybody,” he greeted his listeners; “So long until tomorrow,” he concluded, warmly bidding them good night in a voice that conveyed his certainty about the future.

  EMILY CONTINUED WITH her project of helping the bludgeoned architects, the previously privileged profession as devastated as any other except for the most radically destitute, such as farmers, particularly in the Midwest. The Women’s Division of the Architects’ Emergency Committee funded a new relief “pot” of $100,000, not only sponsoring house- repair jobs but also selling objets d’art for those still able to afford them. Emily was one of six committee women who commissioned a Lenox china limited-edition tea set. The Architects’ Tea Set, decorated with colonial scenes, was displayed at a shop on Park Avenue and Fifty- seventh Street. Unlike the days when her links to society might have secured the project, now it was her business connections that eased the women’s way; Lenox had recently hired her to write a promotional brochure.

  The tea set’s theme was keyed to the upcoming inauguration. Franklin Roosevelt’s old Dutch family had preceded the British. He had grown up in privilege, moving among the Best People represented by such nostalgic china, with its colonial scenes of quiet affluence. Americans now turned to him in hope and desperation. As if signaling a new day, this March 4 inauguration would be the last controlled by the threat of bad weather. Times had changed, and Roosevelt’s leadership would not allow a blizzard to forestall the government. Hereafter, there’d be no waiting for a month with a milder forecast; American presidents would assume office in January.

  If only because of her personal connections, Emily was more interested in this administration than usual. Franklin Roosevelt was the beloved nephew of her dear friend Katharine Collier; Katharine was the sister of Sara Roosevelt, the new president’s mother. “I remember,” Bill Post comments, “when FDR won his first term as president, it delighted my grandmother, who disliked Roosevelt’s policies, that Katharine Collier, FDR’s aunt, sent him a lighthearted telegram saying ‘Personally I congratulate you, politically I abhor you.’ ”

  As part of his efforts to get Americans to believe in themselves again, in the heart of the Depression Roosevelt would initiate a series of “fireside chats,” laying the groundwork for his New Deal. Enormously popular, the thirty talks, which the president used to gain support for his agendas against a conservative Republican legislature, were broadcast on an irregular schedule from March 12, 1933, until June 12, 1944. Although Emily never missed a chance to convey her dislike of Roosevelt’s politics, she would proudly relate, any chance she got, FDR’s comment to his aunt Katharine that the greatest compliment he received when he began his fireside chats was “You’re as Good as Emily Post.”

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  WHATEVER THEIR POLITICS, most people sympathized with the new president’s challenge. When Roosevelt took office, unemployment had risen from 8 to 15 million (roughly one- third of the nation’s nonfarmer workforce) and the gross national product had decreased from $103.8 to $55.7 billion. That March, 40 percent of the farms in Mississippi were on the auction block. Roosevelt’s near- immediate action upon becoming president was to close the banks for a full week, a decision not designed to re -assure the class Emily (as well as the president himself ) hailed from. His radical action was aimed at rescuing a banking system that had failed to function.

  It seemed as if nothing would stay fixed. Whenever the country felt itself on the mend, able to imagine standing tall again, something would knock it off course. Less than a week after Roosevelt took office, over 130 Californians died in a deadly earthquake that ripped through Long Beach. For those who were superstitious, the passing of an era, when all things in California seemed golden, was formalized in April once the United States decided to go off the gold standard. The optimism of San Francisco’s world’s fair eighteen years earlier, when Emily had made her cross- country car trip, suddenly seemed from another age.

  Almost everyone felt the trickle- down effects of the Depression. Doctors were not paid because their patients had no money. Construction slowed to a dribble. Manhattan was rife with the savaged remnants of the upper class, its citizens so accustomed to keeping up appearances that even now they sometimes chose to hide their reduced circumstances. When one man Emily knew slightly lost his Wall Street job, he and his wife, hungry and unable to make their mortgage payments, lived in their mansion while they awaited the bank’s foreclosure. His friends assumed he was still a millionaire until the couple was turned onto the street.

  Difficult for the middle class to sympathize with, Emily’s social community, brimming with bank executives and stockbrokers, was especially hard hit. In some cases, the owners themselves destroyed their houses in hopes of collecting insurance money. Colonel Frank B. Keech, a proud descendant of John Jay, arranged for a spectacular fire to burn down his house near Tuxedo Park. Insured for $232,000, the building netted him $177,000 in the settlement. Five years later, the Orange County Grand Jury would indict the seventy- seven- year- old colonel, a member of General Pershing’s staff in World War I, for paying his former chauffeur to commit arson. Keech was spared the ignominy of a public trial when he jumped under the Lexington Avenue subway train on March 9, 1937.

  LIKE THE PRIVILEGED president whose politics she disdained, Emily Post remembered and represented an earlier age, even as she eagerly greeted the future. She registered history’s minutiae, capturing the moment with every step she took and every page she wrote. On April 16, still self- conscious over her lack of formal schooling, she nonetheless moderated a debate between Smith and Lafayette colleges on New York City’s WJZ; the topic was “Resolved: That Modern Manners Should Be Deplored.” Two women defended the “social conduct of the modern girl,” while their male counterparts upheld the “degradation” of today’s etiquette. Those listening to the four- thirty broadcast could act as judges, mailing in their votes. The timing for such an event was perfect: this April, for the first time since Prohibition began, beer (3.2 percent) could be sold legally. The moment was ripe for college- aged drinkers to discuss proper behavior.

  Emily’s confidence, always abundant, had gr
own steadily through the years since Etiquette had proved a success; now she was willing to tackle just about anything. After all, having concluded that Paul Reynolds was no longer useful, she had been without an agent since the beginning of the 1920s, and she had done just fine. To negotiate her newspaper deals, two years earlier, she had shrewdly hired Holman Harvey to represent her. That spring, when she renewed her contract with the Bell Syndicate, she realized that she was ready to take charge of those negotiations as well. Nervous as a rookie columnist, she had subsequently become, in business parlance, a newspaper veteran—as long as she was willing to write about etiquette.

  The contract Harvey had brokered was typical for its time: the Bell Syndicate received 40 percent of the net profits, Emily 50 percent, and the agent 10 percent. Now, applying her mother’s business savvy, Emily informed Bell’s representative H. Sniveley (named, improbably, like a guest at one of Etiquette’s fictional dinner parties) that she expected to receive 60 percent of the profits. She was forcing Bell to either cut out Harvey as middleman or reduce its own profit. Shocked, Sniveley wrote a frantic note to Harvey (whom Emily had not fired, since, she reasoned, she had never rehired him). Do you understand, he implored, that Bell can’t possibly af-ford to receive only 30 percent of the total profits? That you are out of a job? Sniveley had explained all this to Mrs. Post, he lamented, but she’d refused to budge. He had stressed to Emily that Bell couldn’t possibly give up more than the 60 percent it was already spending for her interests. None -theless, Emily had held firm, he said. Sniveley clearly was worried that Harvey would come after the Bell Syndicate if Bell didn’t convince Emily to retain him.

  Harvey, pontificating, finally wrote to her: Emily must stay with Bell or risk losing her readership, he lectured. The letter, suggesting how little Harvey understood his client, only stiffened her resolve to do things her own way. On November 3, 1933, Emily signed a contract with Bell that she alone had negotiated: 60 percent of the profits would now go directly to her, in addition to Bell’s generous provision of secretarial support. Harvey was told that his services were no longer required.

  ON MAY 27, while Emily was reviewing her strategy with Bell, the 1933 Chicago world’s fair opened, its theme “A Century of Progress.” In the flush of Roosevelt’s first months in office, in spite of the country’s nonstop dramas, the president had convinced the nation that there was room for optimism. As usual, the exhibits at the fair were aimed at the cantilevered middle class. Fan dancer Sally Rand drew large crowds, but so did the Lincolns, Cadillacs, Pierce-Arrows, and, anointed best of show, the Packard, the stuff of dreams. Among the largest moneymakers were a “midget village” peopled with “Lilliputians,” an exhibition of baby incubators lined with live infants, and exotic displays of dancing African Americans, their lavish headgear alone causing spectators to gasp.

  In its two years, the fair attracted nearly 50 million visitors, making this the first time in American history a truly international fair had paid for itself. In defiant contrast to the 1893 “White City” that George Post had helped a troupe of architects build for Chicago’s beige- and- white world’s fair, this spectacle was splattered in an Art Deco array of rainbow colors. Scheduled to close in November, the Century of Progress Exposition proved so popular that after a winter break, it reopened the following May, finally shutting its doors in October 1934.

  During the summer of 1933, Emily bypassed the fair she heard about constantly, a pageant she wouldn’t have missed a decade earlier. By now, however, her Edgartown routines had taken on their own rhythms, and she found the hoopla surrounding overwrought exhibits too taxing. A week or so after the other servants had aired out the seaside house and stocked it with groceries, she and Hilda Ogren traveled to the Vineyard. The house staff had grown to love the seasonal rituals. Loyal and trustworthy, her longtime employees were close- lipped, feeding gossip to no one; they were invested in their employer’s well- being and genuinely fond of her as well. On the other hand, even Hilda always acted “as a maid, doing Emily’s hair and helping her dress every morning. And Hilda only ate in the servants’ dining room—never at the table,” Bill Post remembers. Yet in many ways, Hilda was more of a companion than a maid, a paid friend who, conveniently, never forgot her place. If Ned and Bill could make a polite getaway whenever Emily threatened to smother them, Hilda was fixed fast: she couldn’t afford to offend. Nor did she want to. At least once a week the two women attended the local movie theater, where Emily could see her beloved Shirley Temple movies, the spunky child star surely reminding Emily of herself as a girl. (She was not alone in her adulation but part of a Depression-era worship that, from 1933 to 1935, would triple the number of newborns named “Shirley.”) Vineyard residents knew Emily as an “inveterate movie- goer” always accompanied by “her companion . . . Miss Hilda Ogren.” The two were “seen so often at the movies, or going to and fro, that this was one of the most familiar of seasonal patterns.” Hilda, inevitably grumbling that she didn’t even like the movies, was nonetheless always at Emily’s side, linking arms with her employer afterward to walk to the local ice- cream parlor. She and Emily often commiserated over trying— and failing—to lose weight.

  Back in Manhattan that fall, Emily toured NBC’s new eleven- story building, just west of the seventy- story RCA Building. NBC had outgrown its former headquarters on Fifth Avenue in just six years; this current structure housed two national networks and two local stations. Barely open by Armistice Day, the facility would be tested during November, when the stations themselves seemed besieged by endless accounts of unremitting dust storms battering the Great Plains. The storms that had been sweeping the prairies throughout the decade failed to abate, until, on November 11, 1933, they seemed to climax in a final defeat when “the farms blew away.” The swirling dust would blanket the land for the next three years. On the holiday, tales of the storms’ horrors competed for airtime with celebrations, grit and glory paying a belabored tribute to the battered farmland.

  In spite of—or because of—the seemingly nonstop chronicles of sand everywhere and warnings of financial ruin almost as common, the end- of- year Vanity Fair eschewed the sensationalist reports of desperate citizens all over the country “fighting for scraps of food like animals” as they picked over restaurant garbage, and emphasized the paying customers instead. In its feature “Private Lives of the Great,” the magazine published caricatures by Mexican society painter Miguel Covarrubias. “Emily Post, social arbitress, in a moment of quiet abandon chez elle” was shown relaxing at home, her bare feet propped up on a table, next to a framed portrait of Queen Victoria. Pictured reading about scandals in the Police Gazette, she drank from a cup with her pinkie raised disdainfully (a gesture she had in fact repeatedly disavowed as supercilious). Her filmy coral- toned dress with its long pearls looked graceful and sophisticated, more redolent of the late 1920s than the somber 1930s.

  In annual reports on the year’s major trends, jigsaw puzzles headed most lists. An odd accompaniment to the finally relaxed alcohol laws, the fad apparently fed the citizens’ need to reunite broken parts into a whole, a desire to exert control and a sense of mastery amid the seemingly endless chaos. This was one of the few times when Emily Post was in the vanguard; she’d ordered her Parker Brothers sets years earlier, when jigsaw puzzles were new and she needed help putting herself back together again. From the time that her father helped her build her first dollhouse, she had always liked making the pieces fit.

  CHAPTER 54

  THE 1934 RIOTS IN PARIS STARTED AMERICANS WORRYING THAT France was on the brink of civil war and that their ally’s internal conflicts might spread. American tabloids were riveted by killings, from the Nazis’ assassination of the Austrian chancellor to Bonnie and Clyde’s dramatic final shootout. The very symbols of youth gone wild, the twenty- three- and twenty- five- year- old renegades, sitting in their car, listening to “Blue Moon” on the radio, required a posse of police and sharpshooters and 167 bullets to bring them down. No finger
s remaining on her right hand, Bonnie was photographed still clutching a bloody pack of cigarettes in her left, as if a sign that the Roaring Twenties had expired for good.

  But there were broadcasts of public events that felt less foreboding as well, those that proved a tonic even to the underfed, such as the birth of quintuplets to Canada’s Oliva Dionne, all of whom, miraculously, survived. Such signs of better times to come were instantly transmitted nowadays. With 60 percent of the nation’s households owning a radio, the airwaves spread a shared culture among a wildly disparate audience. If you had a job and one of the country’s 1.5 million automobiles with radios, you could even listen to the news on your way to work.

  From January through April 1934, several times a week Emily appeared on WOR’s ten A.M. half- hour variety show for a fifteen- minute segment, sharing the venue with musicians and guests such as cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden. She also stayed busy revising Etiquette, grateful that Funk and Wagnalls saw the need for another update. Lillian Eichler was rewriting her own Book of Etiquette as The New Book of Etiquette, to include passages on serving wine, divorce, and plane travel. At least Eichler’s books didn’t appear on the bestseller list, if only because their purchase was not calculated in a traditional way: Doubleday routinely included pamphlets and excerpts sold separately in sales tabulations for her book. But now the publisher advertised Book of Etiquette as having sold a million copies, a distortion of the truth that irritated Emily profoundly.