Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  At the end of 1937, a lengthy essay in the New York Times rewarded her fastidious attention to the world around her. Deferential, it was nonetheless tinged with the condescension common to so many of the reviews of the current edition. In part such a response reflected the times: facing global conflict and trying to recover from the long national financial debacle, the populace and its pundits were in no mood to honor the work of a mistress of manners, set on ensuring that etiquette stayed up to date. Teasingly, the reviewer noted that “it still isn’t proper for Mary to take John’s arm except when approaching a puddle.” But Emily’s 1937 text didn’t endorse this kind of rule at all, and only an already prejudiced reader could have made such a misinterpretation; instead, she asserted women’s new rights to walk the streets without any ironclad rules at all, except for respect for others. Too many strictures about how men and women should interact landed people back in the Victorian age, and Emily saw nothing laudatory in that. As she had asserted on her radio show six years earlier, “If a rule seems to be like sand in the gear box instead of the lubricating oil it is intended to be, get rid of it and use home made oil instead.”

  Unremarked by the mainstream press, a major shift had occurred in Etiquette’s original purebred assumptions. Emily’s book was now a crossbreed, absorbing new codes and passing them on, observing the country’s mutations as they traversed young and old, immigrants and citizens, women and men. Etiquette was a maelstrom of the culture that had spawned it, a palimpsest replacing the prior version of its behavior and beliefs with a new one every five to seven years.

  CHAPTER 58

  IF EMILY THOUGHT ATTENTION TO HER EYE PROBLEMS WAS A THING of the past, she was in for a rude surprise at a most unlikely venue: as the evening’s speaker at New York’s Gourmet Society banquet. Held for the first time “across the East River,” the Times noted, in unfashionable Brooklyn, the dinner proved a culinary extravagance that would have done even Sam Ward proud: “Breast of England Pheasant en casserole with champagne sauerkraut Continentale, to serve seventy- five,” the paper reported in loving detail. “Russian hors d’oeuvre first, followed by clear green turtle soup, Japanese toasted rice crackers, Chinese celery, assorted national breads and a lavish French dish: ragout fin en coquille, Madame Pompadour fleurons”—followed by a dessert of lingonberries.

  But the event proved most remarkable for Emily Post’s blunders: she spilled her lingonberries and spent most of the three- hour dinner with her elbows on the table. The scarlet fruit thoroughly soaked the tablecloth, the mishap causing the president of the society to jump in quickly to explain that Mrs. Post’s “elbow had been jiggled,” no doubt “by a careless waiter.” Emily would have none of it and insisted on taking full responsibility for the gaffe: “People . . . generally think I’m made of tin, a sort of mechanical robot, but it is not so,” she explained as the mess was cleaned up. She smiled, then propped her elbows back on the table again. The woman who, in the privacy of her home, preferred corn on the cob, meat loaf, and chocolate ice cream, graciously exclaimed, “Never have I eaten such beautiful foods. Or observed such wonderful table manners.”

  The Associated Press quickly circulated a wire, provoking newspapers everywhere to reprint their own version of the dinner, always starring the shocking etiquette blunder of Emily Post, turning her slipup into fodder for their public’s amusement. “Mrs. Post Unbends at Gourmet Dinner” and “Here’s Real News! Emily Post Spills a Cranberry Dish” typified the genial if condescending titles. “Emily Post . . . has spilled something on the tablecloth,” the Times gossiped. “And of all places. It had to happen at a dinner of the Gourmet Society, which includes some of New York’s fanciest feeders.”

  The topic proved fascinating enough that a week later, on January 30, the New York Times reprised it. At least Emily’s writing received attention in the process. The sixty- five- year- old author was famous not only for the five million words she had reportedly printed on etiquette but also for texts on architecture and interior decoration, as well as several novels. “Even official Washington is said to have accepted her authority,” the article avowed, referring to the State Department protocol. The overwrought, disproportionate coverage of the inconsequential event highlighted the nation’s insecurity about manners. Forcing Emily Post to stand in for the one thing she had always emphasized should be forgotten and forgiven—an innocent mistake—journalists were gleefully casting the doyenne of etiquette as part of a system they feared, not one that she endorsed. They thought they were getting some of their own back, but Emily Post, more than willing to confess her faults, had never sanctioned these journalists’ notion of income or prestige- driven “Best Behavior.” She may have thought of her compeer Edith Wharton, who had famously lamented, “After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.”

  In spite of the catty coverage, Emily chose not to reveal the true reason for the accident. The operations, while successful in saving her sight, had left her vision impaired. She had no intention of trading on pity, however, so she briskly and cheerfully dispatched the gossipmongers, determined not to skip a beat. From February through April, she accepted advertising appearances on shows such as CBS’s popular soap opera Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories as well as continuing her own weekly etiquette program. Eager to stay current, she tackled ever more modern social issues, including “Problems of the Second Wife”—a subject that, thirty- two years ago, during those grueling weeks she’d spent testifying against her husband in court, she’d never dreamed she’d discuss with anyone.

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  EXCITED WITH THE LOOK of what she had achieved with a few fledgling attempts the previous season, in late spring Emily instructed John to help her coat just about everything else in the house with oil- based paint, resulting in compliments from the neighbors, sincere or merely polite. Color, always a pleasure to her, now became a vital part of her life, compensating for the dull glaze her damaged eyes spread over everything. What seemed to others in Edgartown yet another whimsical project was as much Emily’s response to her continuing vision problems as it was her latest aesthetic. “Red, red, red,” recalls her grandson. “The house also had lots of red- and-blue combinations. And when Grandmama wanted something done, she wanted it done yesterday. So she’d try to do lots of things herself, often succeeding. Now she decided to paint her mahogany dining room table blue, and after deciding it looked very nice, she painted many other items in bold color. Every few years she would repaint—often all on her own—to keep the colors fresh.” No doubt she also repainted to lift her spirits when she was feeling low, as well as to remind herself that an intelligently conducted life could always accommodate change.

  She spent the rest of the summer catching up on her personal correspondence. Not only her social or professional acquaintances but her employees would vouch for her genuine concern over their lives, and the complete trust she inspired in them. More than Manhattan, Martha’s Vineyard, with its seasonal, less formal attitude, allowed Emily to blur the boundaries between workers she employed and island friends. One such helper, young Betty Osborne, had written Emily about the exciting changes she’d undergone. Betty’s family lived on Martha’s Vineyard, and through her mother, the town librarian, Emily had discovered the recent high school graduate to be an excellent secretary during the summers.

  Betty had recently moved to Virginia, to live with her grown sister, and Emily took the time to write her a loving, detailed letter to catch her up on local news: “Partly busy and completely happy re doing a house that some very old friends of mine have just bought—the Furlauds from Tuxedo,” Emily related. Eleanor Furlaud was the daughter of Richard Mortimer, an early resident of Tuxedo Park. Eleanor’s sister and her brother both owned houses in the park, and when it turned out Eleanor would be living at Martha’s Vineyard, the women had excitedly realized that Emily could redesign the Furlaud residence in Edgartown.

  Betty’s ancestors had
once lived in the Furlaud house, Emily reminded the young woman. “It had a big piazza across it until yesterday, when I had the pleasure of seeing it taken off. As soon as I finish this letter I have to go over to design the top of the door which will need some sort of entablature where the roof of the porch has been torn away. I have also designed new doors for the old school house–Boys’ Club. It is a lovely old building and it is too good not to repair correctly.” She closed by reassuring the young woman of “how much and how often I miss you.” Generously praising Betty’s replacement, she elevated the earlier employee at the same time: “Natalie is a darling child, she couldn’t be sweeter, but she is not you.”

  Emily talked easily to young people, engaging especially in conversations with the daughters and granddaughters of friends and acquaintances. Such encounters had shaped her opinions when, in August, she wrote candidly about the characteristic girl of sixteen. “Emily Post says the typical 16-year- old American girl has boy friends, uses lipstick, talks about sex and has radical political opinions,” announced the Dallas Morning News. A Hollywood studio, developing the screen character of Nancy Drew, had sent education and social leaders a questionnaire, seeking to define the female youth. Emily’s responses captured the headlines. “Mrs. Post was short and to the point in her answers,” the paper related. “She said the typical American girl of this age does not smoke, uses lipstick but no rouge, has a spending allowance of 50 cents a week, has no steady beau, is athletic but has a sketchy musical education, belongs to one club, expects to marry, is a tomboy by day and thoroughly feminine by night, talks about sex matters with other girls but doesn’t know as much about the subject as she pretends she does, can cook a little, is more obedient to her father than her mother.” But, the article went on, “Mrs. Post protested the narrow choice of answers, saying that to expound on the ‘typical’ sixteen- year- old was useless.” There was no such thing as “typical.”

  That September, her concerns were refocused dramatically on the home front, when she was affected by a historical event that touched her personally, a natural disaster that gave her little choice but to get involved. A storm that had percolated off the coast of Africa paused, on its way to New England, long enough to ravage Long Island. The hurricane obliterated the Dune Road area at Westhampton Beach, smashing her son’s house into oblivion. Ned, who spent his weekends on the beach until it turned uncomfortably cold, was lucky to escape injury; twenty- nine people in his area died, and an additional twenty- one deaths occurred over the eastern end of Long Island. The storm flooded the South Fork, obliterating the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road, so important long ago to the fortunes of Emily’s father and grandfather and their good family friend Hop Smith. Montauk, where the Tile Club members had finished their hike, was turned into a temporary island.

  Nowadays referred to as the Great New England Hurricane or the Great Hurricane of 1938, the storm killed between five and seven hundred people on Long Island and in New England while causing what would be today $6 billion in damage. Finally Emily had an indisputable edge in the gentle running argument between mother and son over which beachfront was superior.

  As usual, in the aftermath of upheaval, she converted her anxiety into action, helping Ned draw up plans to rebuild. Just as she herself felt emotionally settled, in December she received a desperate letter from Betty, her summer secretary. Could Mrs. Post send her some money and perhaps even allow her to come stay with her temporarily in Manhattan? “Betty dear, what can have happened?” Emily began her alarmed response. “Your great distress is hard to understand. If I only knew more about it I might be better able to help. One thing of course I can do—tide you over temporarily, but not for very long. Nor can I advise you to come to New York to get a job. Jobs are scarce, pay low and living high. But if that is the only thing you can bear to do, I can stake you to room and board—expenses at the ‘Y.’ For a few weeks in which to find a job—or at least find yourself.”

  Still, Emily beseeched her to explain: “Only please tell me what it is. Is he married or has he a baby or what has he done?” The unsaid question was, Has he gotten you pregnant?

  Apparently Betty had implied that she had serious romance problems. Emily’s advice sounded like what she would have told her own children, parental dicta she believed led to healthy independence: “I know it must be something serious—yet I hate to have you who are blameless of whatever it is run away from it—because the things we don’t face leave us weaker. The things we face leave us, after the encounter, stronger.”

  Worried that the girl would feel deserted, Emily added, “Anyway, my thoughts are with you—if necessary you can come to N.Y.—but then? I don’t know—but my love to you. And I am sorry.” She signed the letter with a few indecipherable letters, an E and a scribble, followed by a P and quick lowercase t—not so much a sign of her hurry as a signature that bridged the way she signed professional or business letters and those she wrote to friends and family. She added a P.S., saying that she had just made out a check, which she had already put in the mail.

  Years later, Emily’s baby gifts to Betty and her husband suggested that the girl’s dilemma—whatever it had turned out to be—had had a happy ending.

  CHAPTER 59

  ATTENTION TO ITS OWN DIDN’T MEAN THAT THE COUNTRY was tuning out the rest of the world entirely. The bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, by the German Luftwaffe and their Italian subordinates had inspired Norman Corwin to write, for his Words Without Music radio series, “They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease,” a song Emily loved to hum. Directed at the horrors of fascism, the song premiered on February 19, 1939, prompting one thousand favorable letters to be sent to CBS.

  However much she hummed the theme, Emily spent the winter far from its concerns, busily compiling a commercial brochure of popular etiquette queries for Bab-O cleanser. By the spring, Bab-O had announced that it would be conducting an extensive campaign through newspapers, national magazines, and radio to publicize its exclusive offer of 101 Common Mistakes in Etiquette—and How to Avoid Them, by Emily Post. A slender book of popular questions, their subjects ranging from table settings to bridal invitations, the brochure was not about “mistakes” at all. How Bab-O convinced Emily to use a title that was so contrary to her whole philosophy about manners—perhaps by not telling her before publication—is unclear. Obviously the company was building on the enormous success of the earlier Lillian Eichler book that had contained both corrections and cartoons on every page.

  SIGNS OF A SOCIETY still in need of simple instructions—two steps forward, one back—abounded, nowhere more than in the inconsistent racism that usually went unnoted by the press, its attention focused on covering the war. Louis Armstrong was at the Met one day, and the next day he’d be recording “Jeepers Creepers” for Decca Records. Even when the nation relapsed into the racism of its past, it seemed intent on making amends, on creating a country for everyone. After they realized she was black, for instance, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow opera singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall, but citizens protested. Black soldiers could die abroad under the American flag, but black musicians couldn’t perform on sanctified American soil. That Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, before a live audience of seventy- five thousand and a radio audience of millions, NBC broadcast a free concert by the rich-sounding contralto. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she began by singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”

  THAT SAME APRIL, television would make its national debut at one of the largest imaginable venues, the New York world’s fair. Emily watched at home as Franklin Roosevelt, officially opening the fair, delivered the first presidential address over the new medium. For four years, a committee had worked on this exhibition organized around “The World of Tomorrow,” making it the largest international event in twenty years. Now, the grand opening registered 200,000 people, all eager to glory in America’s newest technological achievement. Americans, fe
eling themselves recovering from the decade’s financial chaos, were willing to spend the reasonable prices the fair commanded. Over the next two spring seasons, the 45 million visitors would generate approximately $48 million.

  Even so, the spectators’ pleasure was offset by organizational bad planning: the expensive fair proved a complete financial failure. There were just too many serious exhibitions for a nation in need of fun. Neither the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, promoting the concept of a modern Jewish state, nor the grandly reassuring medical arts building, displaying methods to administer safer anesthesia, interested journalists or the public. At least the IBM and the Ex-Lax exhibits drew crowds. Then, of course, there was always the car, a winner every time it roared into life. This year General Motors exhibited a seven- lane cross- country highway system meant to give it room to roam.

  Another innovation with more immediate gains for residents as well as the tourists who would continue to flood the city was the special subway line (the 7) built to transport traffic to and from the fairgrounds. The fair was held at what is now Queens’s Shea Stadium, a site that would become the home of the New York Mets and remain in use until the season’s opening day in April 2009, when a newer, bigger stadium next door, Citi Field, was scheduled to take its place.