The actual, less elegant event on the sidewalk was oddly out of character not only with Emily’s sense of decorum but with her meticulous grooming as well. One factor might be that her eyes had not fully recovered their earlier vision after the cataract surgery; even at their best, they would never allow her completely clear sight again. Or possibly Emily was losing physical control as she aged, ignoring mundane everyday maintenance such as replacing worn underwear (she had gained enough weight by now to stretch them severely). Perhaps she wanted to deny the change in her size, even if her servants had tactfully suggested buying new garments.
However embarrassing the dropped drawers must have been, the accident that followed at the end of the month brought the year to a more precipitous close than humiliation alone. On December 25, Emily broke her ankle, falling down the stairs as she was leaving her Upper East Side apartment for Christmas dinner. The only public comment about the matter was her own, when, the following spring, she told a reporter that she was grateful for two things at the time of the accident: “Thank heavens, I did not throw up,” she recalled, and, as if mocking herself, added, “What’s more, my hat was on straight the entire time!”
CHAPTER 65
LETTERS EMILY WROTE OVER THE FIRST FEW MONTHS OF 1946 TO her summer assistant suggest that her injuries were more serious than she admitted publicly. Thanking Yvonne Sylvia for the “delicious” holiday “chocolates—which I opened!!!”—Emily explained her silence of late: “Yvonne dear, I thought a floor was level and I fell down 3 marble steps! Am laid up in bed with two broken bones in my ankle and torn tendons and most of me black and blue.”
While recuperating, Emily reread her 1922 edition of Etiquette, leading her to compare women in the business world of 1946 to the almost nonexistent scene a quarter of a century earlier. Inspired, she began writing newspaper columns about the transformations. “Ever-Changing Rules of Etiquette Must Conform to Modern Business” appeared on January 20. How should today’s woman employee courting a man’s business account deal with the social niceties? The seventy- three- year- old’s advice was as practical as ever: treat a man just as you would any business associate whose business you sought. It was a good idea, for instance, to settle a luncheon bill out of sight or to establish a running account at one restaurant that would allow the woman to sign as she leaves. “To insist that a man pay a taxicab fare, lunch check, or even dinner check on an occasion that is strictly business and by rights her obligation is not only uncomplimentary to the woman, but belittling to her job,” Emily noted. If, however, a man hoping to land an account were to ask the woman manager to lunch, he would pay. Emily paused to remind businesswomen that in general, male executives were accustomed to concise lunches: “This is not the place to practice leisurely conversation”—which, she implied, was a finely honed art among well- brought- up women.
Emily couldn’t afford to grow complacent. Just as in the aftermath of World War I, when the market for etiquette books had exploded, a sudden show of interest requisitioned the subject of manners again. Even Vogue magazine had published a book of etiquette. Though she would prove a minor threat, the young Elinor Ames, a prominent Hunter College graduate, surely made Emily nervous. Ames produced a daily “behavior photograph” distributed by the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate. With the unblushing confidence of youth, the twenty- something writer would soon publish Etiquette for Moderns: A Guide for the Executive’s Wife.
As if in retaliation for the threat of defection to a competitor, Emily, albeit gently, began to criticize her beloved New York City. On February 22, 1946, she wrote to Yvonne of her pleasure that her husband had found a good job near Edgartown, saying, “I think it is wonderful!” The young wife had apparently been considering a move to Manhattan, and Emily thought the Vineyard a far better choice: “I should have hated to see you one little atom in a great city like this—or any other! To live where you are among people who know you (and love you—as they do you) is the real beauty of life.” She continued, complaining about the city she used to be in love with, and, an even more startling change, was careless with her punctuation:
At the present time N.Y is almost impossible!!—except to sit at home in (or unless one is able to walk miles!) It has never been like it before. People who have cars are not allowed to park outside of parking lots—far away and jammed! Buses are packed people stand as long as an hour on the corner. Taxis so scarce I had to wait the one time I’ve been out 1 hr 10 minutes before the doorman at a 5th Ave apartment house got me a taxi.
In other words I don’t dare go out because I can’t walk home!!! As for theatres—unless you have a car and a chauffeur who drives round and round the block—or can walk 2 miles, only those who live in a theatre district can make it. (Most people go to nearby churches)
I don’t know what all this is about except I’ve only been able to walk (limp) around the house for about 2 weeks. The bones mended nicely in a month but all the ligaments were torn are taking their own time. So no places in busses or empty taxis. I go around saying “I think I’ll go out and then stay home and complain about being ‘so tired!!’ ”
After citing her plans to go see her two great- grandchildren, Emily launched into a poignant discussion of the portrait that Funk and Wagnalls had recently commissioned:
F and W Co have had my portrait painted by the Miss Havill whose pictures I was so crazy about. I said I thought she did old people so well!! Now I wonder how old those old ones were? I saw my picture the day before yesterday and have been in a state of collapse ever since. White- haired, stoop- shouldered dowdy and slouching old crooked- faced woman aged 88!!! (Possibly 96!!!) It wasn’t finished. And maybe my shock impressed her. I am feeling very much that she is one of those artists who do not believe in painting pretty people. Perhaps I won’t care if age makes a lop- sided jaw and a peanut shaped nose interesting meanwhile an old friend who paints handkerchief- box prettiness has come home from London. But I really can’t sit again.
Her next paragraph, however, switched determinedly to a subject that made her happy: “Etiquette is selling more than ever! 3800 last week! Perhaps the portrait will end it—or who knows, it may sell more than ever because a freaky frump wrote it. Or maybe the ‘FF’ will be lovely when finished—(the picture I mean).”
Over the next few months, Emily and Yvonne exchanged several letters, mostly to discuss Yvonne’s pregnancy. Yvonne would continue to work for Emily over the coming summer, though with shorter hours since she would be tiring easily, and with “a little higher than ‘fair’ pay,” according to Emily’s offer of “$35 a week for 5 hr days.” Emily emphasized that she would be counting on Yvonne’s competent secretarial skills to “keep her on track” when her own great- grandchildren stayed at the Edgartown cottage from the middle of June to August 1.
As Emily and her assistants made their annual transfer to the Vineyard that spring, the last truly revelatory interview she would give was published in Life magazine. The article began with the prototypical Emily Post anecdote: sharing a taxi with a pleasant stranger, Emily had ended up bailing out the embarassed passenger when the woman realized she’d left her wallet at home. But the description tendered by the well- meaning, enthusiastic Jeanne Perkins must have disconcerted readers who thought of Emily as ageless, as well as jolting Emily herself: in her favorite winter outfit, including a formidable black velvet hat and exotic Persian lamb coat, she impressed the journalist as an “attractive, elderly dowager.”
Perkins led off her story with a heartfelt royal coronation: “Emily Post has ceased to be a person and has become a noun, a synonym for etiquette and manners, more widely used perhaps than even the words themselves.” Since Etiquette’s appearance in 1922, it had been “reprinted 65 times, [and] has never sold less than 30,000 copies in one year. During the past few months demand for it has unexpectedly risen and recently it reached a new high of 5,602 copies per week.” The accelerated sales, speculated the journalist, reflected the large number of postw
ar weddings and divorces, the quantities of money “changing hands,” and the subsequent need to learn behavior that would serve in the postwar boardroom, a fancy restaurant, or at a neighborhood barbecue.
Perkins remarked carefully on Emily’s bright red nail polish, “blended especially for her.” As had others, she noted her “rather fluttery hands.” Seemingly at odds with the sure demeanor she otherwise presented, the quick, lissome movements no doubt marked instead a woman who did not, metaphorically, enjoy sitting still and wasting time. Cataloging Emily’s “iron- gray hair” and her careful rouge and lipstick, along with her decision to wear “a lot of jewelry,” the reporter noted that the author’s usual summer dress color was red; in the city, Emily also often wore black softened with touches of pink. Because of eye operations, the author now carried three pairs of glasses. Emily’s ten radios impressed Perkins, whom Emily told, “I would rather broadcast than eat.”
Emily perked up when she started talking about her newspaper column, which now elicited an average of five thousand pieces of mail a week, including letters written on “a perforated sheet of loose leaf notebook paper.” From a woman wondering what to wear to visit her boyfriend in prison to a man writing to complain about his wife’s crude habit of putting salt and pepper shakers on their dinner table instead of keeping the condiments in the kitchen, Emily was speaking to all classes and every sort of problem these days. Predictably, she advised both writers to pursue the practical: dress brightly and smile a lot, she told the worried girlfriend; do what feels best to you in your own home, she enjoined the irritated husband.
For years, Emily’s more intrepid fans had occasionally phoned her in Manhattan, where they usually ended up talking to Hilda. Still not wanting to discourage this sort of random contact, even after Hilda’s death, the author had continued listing her number (under Mrs. Price Post) in the New York City telephone directory. When frantic callers from Detroit or Washington reached her, begging for emergency information, such supplicants were graciously accommodated. Yet what impressed Jeanne Perkins most was not Emily’s accessibility but her claim to rarely notice “errors in the mechanics of etiquette.”
The reporter waxed nostalgic, wondering aloud why, in her seventies, Mrs. Post remained “the unchallenged authority on manners.” Ever the architect at heart, Emily offered two earthbound reasons: one, her book was truly encyclopedic and authoritative; and two, even “more important,” her philosophy was expansive, not restrictive. “Manners are like primary colors,” Emily explained. “There are certain rules and once you have those you merely mix, i.e., adapt, them to meet changing situations.”
Regardless of such flexibility, Emily knew she could no longer do everything herself. From paying secretaries in Manhattan to transcribe her recordings, to handing over more of the business matters to her son, back in New York City after his stint abroad, she was suddenly a fan of outsourcing before the concept even existed. Recently retired from his job with Mack Trucks, Ned Post developed a way for his mother to keep more of her earnings by enfolding her work into a true mini- corporation. That summer, the organization Ned had helped put in place finally came together. Funk and Wagnalls’s treasurer agreed that future royalties and statements would be made out and sent to the “Emily Post Institute, Inc.”
THE MANUFACTURING OF RADIOS resumed as soon as government controls were lifted. In 1947, Bell Laboratories would launch the portable transistor. The AM stations increased in number, from 961 in 1946 to 2,006 three years later. But if this period was important to radio, it also ushered in the next medium to explode: television. As soon as TVs were widely advertised, Emily had arranged to purchase one in New York City. Now she decided she had to have one in Edgartown as well. Someone at the Vineyard sold her a set with “a rotating antenna, so you could point the antenna to get the station you wanted,” Bill Post recalls. “ ‘Okay, I want WBZ in Boston,’ she said, and the salesman told her, ‘I’ll fix it.’ ” But instead he stabilized the television reception to receive only the Boston station. “That was enough for Grandmama; she still loved it. But clearly the salesman had flimflammed her!” Bill still chuckles.
She stayed active in local Edgartown projects, and the townspeople enjoyed spotting her riding in the front seat of the repair shop’s pickup truck, insisting on taking her radios into town herself. “Compared to the past, though, she went out infrequently by then,” Yvonne recalls. “When Hilda was alive, she would walk down to an early movie with her. After she died, Mrs. Post seemed to stop going much of anywhere. But now that I think about it, she’d never really been one for going out a lot anyway. What I remember most is how she loved to throw a ball for the little boys [Bill and Libby’s two young sons] to catch.” Smiling, Yvonne recollects: “Work and grandchildren were her life, and by the time that her grandson and his wife had produced four great- grandbabies for her, she was in heaven.” When they weren’t there, she was lonely.
That November, Emily made a radio appearance on WOR’s popular quiz show. Along with five or six other guests, Emily, who received star billing in the list of the week’s radio programs, was asked to answer twenty questions. There is no record of how she did. Fred Van Deventer and Florence Rinard, the show’s sponsors, took the popular show to television a few years later, but Emily Post would not be included among their guests that time.
EVEN FOR SOMEONE determined to stay current, the years immediately after the war were throwing more fastballs than anyone could catch. Race and class barriers seemed to be crumbling in the euphoria following V-J Day. Jackie Robinson, a brand- new Brooklyn Dodger, became the first “Negro” to play on a modern major league baseball team; and GIs fresh from the battlefield could rent an entire house for their young families, due to the gritty hands- on efforts of Abraham Levitt and his sons, self- taught builders, their innovations shaping the country’s new landscape. On May 7, 1947, Levitt and Sons publicly announced its plan to build two thousand mass- produced rental homes for veterans, and within two days, one thousand had already been leased in advance. Levittown, as the new development would be named, was made possible by the ways architecture had moved forward over the decades, but it was also enabled by the everexpanding population who relied upon Emily Post the most.
This was the same year that Metropolitan Life built the nation’s largest housing project seen to this day, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Manhattan’s returning veterans and their young families were finding affordable housing even harder to come by than soldiers plumbing the suburbs, and the blocklike red- brick structures, 11,232 apartments in 110 buildings between Fourteenth and Twenty- third streets, provided them a built- in community as well as a new home. Met Life would more than double those numbers in New York City with more affordable residences throughout the decade, housing the very class and age and multifariousness of people who yearned for a firm but compassionate, flexible but knowing advice giver like Emily Post.
Certainly her world was expanding everywhere she looked. She reveled in changes that seemed to call out for her interpretation, eager to understand their rationale. She chatted eagerly with her friends’ grandchildren about their favorite books one afternoon, then spent the next flipping through a fashion standard, Vogue magazine, begun at the turn of the last century by Arthur Turnure, the uncle by marriage to Emily’s dear cousin Sadie Price Pell Turnure. To Emily’s amusement, up- to- date women were now wearing Christian Dior’s New Look, inspired by the end of the very belle époque that had witnessed Emily’s and her friends’ debuts as well as the magazine’s. But many of those friends were gone now, she sometimes realized with a start. She found herself thinking about her own death, and taking steps now to ensure that her work would continue after she was gone. Under Ned’s tutelage, she expanded her legal corporation into the Emily Post Institute for the Study of Gracious Living.
“She didn’t do this for the family’s future income,” Emily’s grandson maintains today. “She was concerned instead about the legacy of what she stood for
and believed in. She really wanted her work to survive, and the kind of work she supported to survive.” It was, in part, such healthy narcissism that motivated Emily to stay on radio. Before she went to Edgartown that year, she appeared at least once on the air, the guest for WJZ’s half- hour show Betty Crocker Talk. Bill remembers the taping being set up in Emily’s Seventy- ninth Street apartment, because she had trouble getting to the studio.
But there was a far less self- interested side to Emily Post that her own family knew nothing about. In early June, as part of her spring trip abroad, she spent several weeks in Germany, working to bring orphaned Jewish children to America, an activity she kept secret even from her son. Now, informed of her charity, her family doesn’t understand her silence. The reasons run a gamut of possibilities: she might have been asked by American authorities not to talk; she might have been helping the children avoid undue interest from tedious officials; she might have disliked the thought of being congratulated for simply doing good; she might have been worried that her fame would make her the target of overwhelming numbers of requests for help.
Whatever the grounds for her silence, she worked tirelessly and anonymously during her time in Frankfurt, searching out young victims to help. One documented assistance centers on Isaac Hass, a Holocaust survivor later interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Holocaust archives project. Transported to Auschwitz, where his parents and six sisters had been gassed immediately, Isaac was then transferred to Buchenwald. After incarceration in five concentration camps, he had been shot by the SS and left for dead. In May 1945, he was rescued near Schwandorf, Germany, by American soldiers from Patton’s Third Army.
Emily Post Page 49
