At least she missed the fluffy press about the current Broadway production of A Private Affair, heralded in the New York Times that spring, the cast prominently listed. If Emily had not followed her star onto the stage, Edwin’s second, more suitable wife had: among the eight actors the Times was fêting was Nellie Malcolm. Just as Emily had sought to justify her writing career through financial need, Nellie now insisted she had returned to the stage only because of her husband’s drowning and the need to support herself—in spite of her sons’ private educations and her entreaty to the social register to be readmitted. From the positive reviews that followed her successful stage career as a character actor, it seems that Nellie Malcolm, like Emily Post, had a superb sense of comic timing. She would go on to get larger parts, until it would become impossible, a decade later, for Emily, impaired vision or not, to miss the theater reviews of Miss Malcolm’s impressive performances.
Stretching her own dramatic limits whenever she had the chance, the writer crafted an account of her tedious confinement that she would trot out for reporters every year or so. The story referred not to her courage or to her condition but to an amusing if self- congratulatory anecdote about Walter Winchell, that “New Yorkiest” of all writers. When the popular Winchell, wishing her well, broadcast news of her operation one Sunday night, she received hundreds of telegrams, homemade jelly, and a roomful of flowers—the belle of the ball once again.
Luckily, the eye surgery proved moderately successful, and Emily was eventually able to manage her permanently weakened vision by using three pairs of glasses, each with a different prescription. So that she could easily tell them apart, she painted the frames various bright colors, notching them according to their ocular strength. Even so, her trouble seeing caused Emily to turn over more of the detail work of her columns to Anne Kent, the secretary she had, at Ned’s urging, recently hired. She knew that she’d have to train someone to help her answer her mail from now on.
THAT FALL, RADIO PROVED more powerful than ever. Father Coughlin, the latest incarnation of Reverend Parkhurst’s self- righteousness, formed the Union Party and used radio to attempt to jettison the president. In the November election Roosevelt, running for his second term, and his relatively moderate Republican opponent, Alfred Landon, each spent $2 million on radio appearances. Though she was still recovering from her surgeries, Emily, who felt strongly that Katharine’s nephew was steering the wrong course, acted atypically and took her politics public. On October 5, 1936, she appeared on the Landon Radio Club Program, where she emphasized her support of Landon, whose triumph over a hardscrabble past—he had grown up even poorer than Abraham Lincoln—she particularly admired, believing it an advantage in the prevailing economic climate. Unlike Lincoln, however, Landon would carry only two states, Maine and Vermont, making Roosevelt’s election the largest landslide since 1820.
For the most part, the convalescent was still confined to listening to, not broadcasting on, the airwaves. And at times they seemed to be wafting by just fine without her. Benny Goodman had successfully introduced his big band (the first popular multiracial group to play at Carnegie Hall) to radio that year, the medium and music a perfect match for the jitterbug. Tuning in, Emily realized she’d now have to deal with parents lamenting about how their daughters used “dabs of nail polish” on their ankles “to hold [their] bobby socks up.” Still a different audience worshipped Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller: lately music, not the news, seemed to hold the nation in its thrall, as if the voiceless songs of the airwaves succeeded in drowning out sounds of the Depression.
Regardless of her limited sight that winter, Emily couldn’t escape the news of the king of Great Britain’s romantically doomed reign. In addition to the radio’s feverish daily updates, Hilda kept her abreast of the ongoing drama. After 327 days, Edward VIII had decided to give up his crown for the commoner he loved, and on December 10, 1936, he turned over the throne to his brother George VI. Some people believed that such a scene— a king renouncing his throne for a woman—would have been inconceivable thirty- five years earlier, when Queen Victoria died. But now the truly unimaginable had occurred. On December 11, Edward VIII announced on the radio, “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love”—a Baltimore girl, about whom Emily surely knew the suspicious scuttlebutt whether she wanted to or not. Edward was a hero to many, though the ever- practical Emily Post considered such a match foolish, not romantic.
“When I listened to the abdicating King’s address,” she later recalled, “I saw those rows and rows of crosses in France, the graves of Englishmen who gave their lives ‘For King and Country.’ I felt they had been betrayed. Who cares whether the king is happy or not? Happiness is less important than many other things.” Emily had not changed her mind at all: marital happiness ranked far below duties to others.
When the newly common ex–royal husband and his wife visited the United States the following year, Emily was sent a question she would answer briskly. How do we address the new “queen”? she was asked. “If you happen to meet the duke and duchess of Windsor while they are in America, call the duke ‘Your Royal Highness’ but his wife just plain ‘you.’ ” The answer was picked up and reprinted by hundreds of the country’s newspapers.
To capitalize on the fairy- tale Windsor marriage, CBS began broadcasting a fifteen- minute show, Our Gal Sunday, about a Colorado orphan who marries a British aristocrat. Originally a Broadway play starring Ethel Barrymore, this radio version, complete with the theme song “Red River Valley,” would air until 1959. Every episode of the soap opera began with a kind of rehashed thesis from Emily’s own days as a novelist: “Can this girl from a little mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?”
CHAPTER 56
BY THE END OF 1936, ETIQUETTE WAS SELLING BETTER THAN it had in a decade, and Emily was contemplating her next major revision. Funk and Wagnalls, planning a strong campaign for the following autumn, urged their author to take time to reassess the culture: What advice should she modify? Could she preserve the gist of her 1922 volume and still sound modern now, fifteen years later?
If only because of the span of topics her book encompassed, Emily felt she had no choice but to stay up to date. How else could she justify herself as an authority of the age? And certainly radios, now sprouting pushbuttons, made it impossible for anyone to ignore completely the nation’s political, economic, and cultural changes. President Roosevelt signed the U.S. Neutrality Act, while the British would try to appease Hitler with the Munich Agreement. No one could escape political realities, nor was the United States singular in its financial woes. Britain had hit bottom toward the end of 1932, with France following a few years later. As if reflecting the uncertainties of the age, the nostalgic novel Gone with the Wind, an almost instant classic in 1936, would vie with Dale Carnegie’s of- the- moment How to Win Friends and Influence People for bestseller of 1937. Readers might immerse themselves in the past, but most didn’t blink at the present either.
Yet another sign of the changing times occurred on January 2, 1937, when Emily and Ned attended the wedding of Katharine Collier’s granddaughter, Priscilla St. George, to Angier Biddle Duke. The union presaged an American dynasty. Held at Tuxedo’s St. Mary’s, where Bruce and Ned had been baptized four decades earlier, the wedding was a homecoming for Emily. Her retinue of friends from the past were all in attendance, the bride’s mother, Katharine Collier St. George, having grown up under Emily’s watch. Bouquets of blossoms alternated with hothouse flowers in full bloom, all tied in baskets at the rails of each pew. The St. Georges held the wedding reception at their Tuxedo Lake home, built by Bruce Price. It seemed a bower of bliss, but this radiant couple too would be divorced.
The illustrious list of invitees included President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Though Priscilla’s great- aunt Mrs. James Roosevelt was present, Franklin
and Eleanor did not attend. The Tuxedo Park crowd tended toward the conservative in their politics. An interviewer would report that while Emily Post counted Sara Roosevelt, “mother of the president, as an old and valued friend, . . . she has no more sympathy for the New Deal than have her other friends of the Tuxedo Park tradition. Her views on labor were conservative. ‘I wish,’ she says of the demands of factory strikers, ‘that I had to work only thirty hours a week.’ ”
THE WEDDING’S OLDER GUESTS hardly had time to reminisce about days gone by when the media reminded them of the newfangled age they inhabited. On January 19, Howard Hughes broke the transcontinental speed record, flying nonstop from Burbank, California, to Newark, New Jersey, in a record seven hours and thirty- one minutes. It was as if, after the ground had been conquered with the automobile, which ambitious men had created, the sky became the new limit. And in the fight of man against nature, women too were gaining ground: the previous year had closed with the spellbinding news of Amelia Earhart’s plan to fly around the world the following summer.
In yet another reminder that people were no longer limited by their environment, the inauguration for President Roosevelt’s second term was held on January 20, just as planned, weather forecasts and naysayers aside. Whether or not she wanted anything to do with Franklin’s administration, Emily was increasingly often consulted by his State Department on matters of etiquette. Not everyone, however, believed protocol important. Major General Johnson Hagood, who had recently retired from the army after clashing with President Roosevelt’s administration, weighed in once more, this time haranguing the Chicago Daily Tribune: “Shooting should come before saluting,” he declared. Too much emphasis was placed on military etiquette these days, he practically spat, with the result that saluting was “the Emily Post of military training,” and expenditures for smart uniforms were overriding practicality: “Let ’em wear overalls,” the general huffed.
Though not as eager to indict her, another writer dubious of Emily’s currency interviewed her in February for the New York Woman magazine. Speaking energetically, Emily obliquely referred to Lillian Eichler’s book (still selling strong) as the motivation behind Etiquette in 1922. A recent bestselling etiquette book had wrongly implied, she explained, that “the American woman, to whom it was addressed, had neither common sense nor kindliness. It patronized the reader.” But the journalist was completely uninterested in the author’s tales of her competition, instead positioning Emily’s Etiquette as a relic, “like the Bible . . . a perfect picture of a sort of society that is fast disappearing from the world, if it has not already vanished.”
By early spring, Emily was engaged with the lawsuit her former newspaper agent, Holman Harvey, had been pursuing since she’d cut him from her professional life in 1933. Now, in April 1937, his case finally came to trial in New York County Supreme Court. Court records revealed that 10 percent of the net profits from Emily’s newspaper columns, spanning November 16, 1931, to February 27, 1937, totaled $8,616.14. Emily’s net came to around $45,000 ($950,000 today)—if, that is, she were paid only 50 percent of the profit, the deal Harvey was insisting still held, and not 60 percent, the new deal she had brokered herself with the Bell Syndicate.
In his suit Harvey maintained that his contract had guaranteed a permanent percentage of any new agreements Emily signed with the Bell Syndicate for the life of their connection. Both Emily and Bell refused to budge: the agent’s original contract was a one- time arrangement, and the writer hadn’t needed him since. They were, in fact, no longer connected. After losing his case, Harvey would appeal the decision again in Albany, on June 3, 1938, at the State of New York Court of Appeals, where he would lose one last, definitive time.
PRESCIENT CITIZENS COULD HARDLY be blamed, during the cold spring of 1937, for equating the late blossoms that year with the worldwide chill that threatened them. Those who read omens in misfortune grew pale at the explosion on May 6 of the two- year- old German zeppelin named for the country’s previous president, Paul von Hindenburg, and one of the two largest aircraft ever built. Just as it started to land in Lakehurst, New Jersey, near the George Gould estate Bruce Price had created, the bullet- shaped “ship”—its nationality already making it suspect to many Americans—blew up, killing thirty- six of the ninety- seven aboard. The stunned reaction of Herb Morrison, a visiting broadcaster from Chicago’s WLS, would itself be recorded in history, transforming news coverage more than the actual event did.
Forcing herself to turn off her radio, Emily ceded some of her precious listening time to the heavy schedule of print interviews Funk and Wagnalls had arranged to promote Etiquette’s forthcoming revision. In May, before she set out for Edgartown, she welcomed to her co- op apartment a Saturday Evening Post reporter, Margaret Case Harriman.
Harriman was the kind of woman—from a hardworking family—that Emily admired. Her father was Frank Case, the éminence grise of the Algon quin Hotel’s bar, the now famous hangout for writers. Case had started there as a clerk in 1907, buying the Algonquin by the time he was twenty-seven. He had carefully cultivated the bar as a watering hole for the best and brightest of the 1920s, especially the loosely connected New Yorker writers. Among a crowd at the Round Table that included Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker sat Robert Sherwood. Destined to win the Pulitzer, among other prizes, he was the son of Rosina Emmet Sherwood, who had urged Emily, while painting her portrait in the 1890s, to make something of herself. Because Rosina Sherwood was the first woman Emily had encountered who had both a successful home and a professional life, she’d always remembered her and her family fondly.
Now, in the spring of 1937, from Harriman’s perspective, Emily Post looked “considerably younger than her age, which is sixty- four . . . her face still has that fine transparency of line and texture that never quite leaves a woman who has been beautiful.” The interviewer noted that Emily’s “compelling manner” and unusual height might intimidate some people. Fortunately, such daunting authority was tempered by her “fluttery way of talking and a nervous habit of moving her hands continuously in small gestures—pleating a fold of her dress, fussing with a cushion or a letter or anything that happens to be within reach. She doesn’t smoke or drink, but her hands are as unrelaxed as those of any habitual cigarette smoker or cocktail nurser. She is endlessly careful about her own choice of words in formal conversations.” But her “contacts with the world of industry” had clearly colored” Mrs. Post’s language, even allowing her to emit the occasional “damn” or “godawful” during the jovial interview.
Emily opened up to Margaret Harriman more than usual. She admitted that she sometimes wished she were “celebrated as an architect and designer of houses rather than as an etiquette expert,” though “she had no quarrel with the kind of fame the years have brought her.” She struck the reporter as an almost dauntingly friendly woman, still listing her phone number in the Manhattan directory and, in spite of her rigid schedule, spontaneously meeting almost anyone who stopped by to see her, especially university students. Sometimes she’d even invite sightseers in for a cup of tea. But the journalist missed the underlying message: Emily was lonely. With her career stabilized, one son dead, Ned and Hilda were her only constants. Ned came to dinner only once a week during the city months; in the summer, she barely saw him at all. He didn’t like Martha’s Vineyard, and nowadays Emily was staying in Edgartown almost six months of the year.
Harriman’s impression of Hilda didn’t do the servant justice. Though Emily’s personal housekeeper was not, even her employer admitted, the perfect maid, she was far more than the “dour and devoted” employee Harriman observed. The reporter noted, with some mystification, the sororal relationship, uneasy that Hilda and Emily dryly referred to servants who had been in the house for several decades as “the new” girls. Yet Emily was clearly the boss: she admitted to dragging Hilda along to the movies because she was her first choice of companions, not because of interest on her maid’s part. An odd turn of phrase suggested
Harriman’s preoccupation with the class issues that domestic hired help raised, even when employers like Emily meant to avoid them: “Like most people who are resigned to what life has brought them, Hilda is a fine restful companion.”
Servants were a mainstay of Emily’s adult life. Years after Harriman’s interview, one of Emily’s summer secretaries would recall “how jealous the servants always were of Mrs. Post’s attention.” Surely Emily was pleased at such a show of “love,” reminiscent, on some level, of being courted in her debutante days. What needs the gruff servant with a heart of gold Hilda Ogren fulfilled through her relationship with her employer are unclear. No records of Hilda’s life remain, and no family members or friends have yielded clues to interested queries. What seems evident is that neither Hilda nor any other woman or man, after her divorce, entered into an intimate relationship with Emily Post. Apparently, she was celibate after Edwin betrayed her. But what Emily obviously received from this long- term relationship with her servant was a seminal friendship, secured by an excellent salary and personal concern for Hilda’s well- being.
In effect, Emily bought the human contact she needed. Her relationship with Hilda didn’t require complicated human interactions: the line of command was clear, and Emily could afford to be unfailingly gracious and generous, because she was in charge. It was a striking instance of the way one woman married the conflicting legacies of her upbringing to the desires and possibilities bred by the current age. She finally was able to get what she wanted, as long as she didn’t expect others to give her such close attention free of charge. But the cost was high, the combination of loneliness and sadness, as she aged, a harsh price to pay for having things her way.
During Emily’s interview with Margaret Harriman, she reassured her audience that she was well taken care of and that her health was now in good order following her eye operations. Walter Winchell’s earlier public conveyance of good wishes was flattering, but it had also alerted her entire audience to her possible blindness. Emily emphasized how she had completely recovered from her cataract surgery, and Harriman dutifully reported her progress: “In spite of the restrictions put upon it in the past year, Mrs. Post’s daily routine continues to be a considerable whirl. She wakes up regularly at half past five in the morning and has her breakfast—coffee in a percolator which she plugs into an electric- light socket in the early dawn, and a slice of zwieback—from a tray arranged beside her bed the night before. After breakfast she works, lying in bed in a flurry of pencils, paper and galley proofs, until half past seven, when her servants get up. She writes fluently.” In light of the reality—the astonishing amount of rewriting and self-editing sprinkled throughout her transcripts and rough drafts—Emily had cleverly managed to tell the story her way once more. She made things look easy—part of her code as a lady—but the truth was otherwise. For a long time, Emily Post had worked harder than anybody she knew.
Emily Post Page 42
