She held no truck with those wistful for the past. Women today, unlike in her youth, were not weighed down by “yards and pounds of water- soaked flannel,” almost drowning as they tried to learn the breaststroke, she said. One of Emily’s readers protested against the skimpy swimming suits showing up on the beach. “One might as well go bathing with nothing on at all,” she complained, adding, “I trust you don’t approve of young women in those postage- stamp suits.” Emily responded that, as always, it depended on the context. But does Mrs. Post condone such immodest clothing? Emily knew her fan would wonder. Bluntly, she answered the imaginary query: “Young women, I do! Old women, decidedly not! ...‘Modesty,’ says the cynic, ‘is consciousness of one’s own imperfection.’ ”
That September, in response to Amy Vanderbilt’s competition, the Bell Syndicate issued a press release commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of “what has become the definitive handbook of social usage, Emily Post’s Etiquette.” The feature, “Emily Post’s Etiquette Book Has Changed Star-tlingly in 30 Years,” compared the first edition to the most recent one. Readers who had not bought the revised editions through the years wouldn’t have realized from the ads how little the essentials of the current volume differed from the one in 1945.
ON OCTOBER 1, in the house at Tuxedo Park that Bruce Price had built and given to Emily, Katharine Collier, age ninety- four, suffered a heart attack in her sleep. She was dead within minutes. At least there were other things to balance Emily’s loss: not only did Emily’s great- grandchildren bring her a sense of revitalization, but finally, her son and his longtime companion, loved by Bill and Libby as well as by Emily, were free to wed. On April 9, 1953, after obtaining a divorce in Mexico City, Marietta Szveteney Persico married Edwin Main Post in Rockleigh, New Jersey. The daughter of the late Baron and Baroness George Szveteney of Budapest, Marietta had moved to the United States in 1936 and become an American citizen in 1944. Legally separated in 1930 from her husband, the Italian ambassador Giovanni Persico, consul general for Italy in Berlin, Marietta had a long-standing agreement that as soon as the ambassador had retired and was no longer vulnerable to public scrutiny, he would support their divorce.
Ned and Marietta had been patient, their family, including Emily, en-tirely sympathetic all these years. “We adored Marietta,” Bill remembers, “Grandmama as much as anyone. There was no question of disapproval. There were no children whose parents were damaging their lives.”
In 1954, with their four toddlers, Bill and Libby resettled in Rye, New York, ensuring that Emily would always have her family nearby. Living again in the United States, the timing of his move due mostly to his Grandmother’s frailty, Bill started his own company. Libby tended their four young children—and painted, whenever she got the chance.
After Ned worked out a system to continue the newspaper column abroad, he and Marietta, secure that Bill was on hand for Emily, moved to Italy, where they already owned a house. For a short while the plan worked: Isabel helped Emily choose a few of the new letters, sometimes pulling from the files an old one not previously used. Then the secretary wrote down Emily’s responses, sending the selections and answers to Ned, who, after “editing”—in truth, often writing—the column, mailed everything back for Isabel to transcribe. “The system proved unwieldy and didn’t last for very long,” Bill Post remembers. After a few years, as his mother became less capable, this complicated scheme became too great a strain on every-one, and Ned resumed living in Manhattan for a few months each year to oversee Emily and the institute.
There were other signs that Emily was gradually ceding control of her life. That summer she reluctantly parted with the ebony jewel box her father had made for Josie, donating it to the Museum of the City of New York. The New York Times, detailing the twenty- five sets of fine gemmed jewelry inside the velvet- lined drawers, described Emily’s father as “one of the foremost architects in this country,” who, while “struggling” and “young” at the early stages of his career, had married Josephine Lee. Around the same time, though she generously lent her name to the Reader’s Digest twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine’s Braille edition, her solicitation letters for charity subscriptions were clearly written (Emily’s signature imitated) by an assistant.
Emily herself still traversed the ages. That August, for instance, when a salesman complained about the “TV Boors,” she sought to clarify the new rules governing a subject she cared about deeply: the use of media within the home. If an appointment had been previously arranged, she ruled, the household television must be turned off when the salesman arrived—if he was on time. If the salesperson came earlier or later, or did not have an ap-pointment, no such rules applied, and the viewer’s wishes received priority.
At the very least, television reminded Emily that women inhabited a modern world she hadn’t even dreamed of. That same year, in 1954, a poor southern girl, Brownie Wise, began selling a bowl that unceremoniously burped its way right into the American kitchen, Tupperware making Wise and many other savvy women rich. Business Week would anoint Brownie the first woman ever to appear on its cover. It was the kind of success story Emily Post would have been thrilled to read about—she never forgot that she herself had felt compelled to talk down her success when she first began to work.
Even now, years after seeking entry into such a world, Emily enjoyed the chance to appear as a professional businesswoman whenever she could. Though her increasing forgetfulness surely gave pause to her sponsors, if not to herself, she accepted a television spot on behalf of rayon, a no- iron fabric marketed in the early 1950s as a labor saver for housewives. No copies of Emily’s appearance have been located, and her grandson doesn’t recall such a project, but Emily clearly followed through. A news release for the American Rayon Institute confirms that “Mrs. Post recently made a television appearance, her debut, in a film released by the institute, which was formed by the producers to step up promotion in line with expanding production.” When the institute opened new offices at 350 Park Avenue that October, the president of the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs gave her an award, recognizing her “contribution to gracious Amer-ican living.”
The following May, Emily had the chance to put into practice her les-sons from the past, presiding over a meal that was, at least in theory, under her control. Funk and Wagnalls invited forty guests, mostly journalists, to a buffet lunch at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, to celebrate the forth-coming 1955 tenth edition of Etiquette. Even the venue implied a connection between the modern and the past. The Waldorf-Astoria, with its restaurant and hotel, had long since overtaken Delmonico’s as “the place” to dine; now the St. Regis trumped the Waldorf. The publishers had clearly been unsettled by Amy Vanderbilt’s book for Doubleday, which, though no more modern in its advice, was written with a more casual diction, suggesting a younger writer assumed to be suitably current. Doubleday’s publicity em-phasized that its author (meant to supersede the now dated Lillian Eichler) was a working woman supporting children in school—and that, in addition, she was a Vanderbilt. Just as Emily’s Etiquette had, early on, depended upon her presence in Best Society, so Amy Vanderbilt’s familiarity with the café set that had overtaken old money vouched for her credibility.
Ned returned for the launch of the new edition, helping to host the party at the regal St. Regis. Bill received guests alongside his grandmother, both he and Emily seated on a “settee,” the New Yorker’s dated locution meant to imply the era the party seemed to evoke. “William Goadby Post,” in “his thirties,” was “wearing a Countess Mara tie crawling with monkeys,” while Emily wore a straw hat with red trim and a black crepe dress with red and white silk pleats. For the most part, the press simply ignored the author. Ned smoothly chatted to the reporters, explaining the current shape of his mother’s empire: Emily’s column appeared in 160 newspapers seven days a week, inspiring around three thousand letters weekly. About 5 percent of the letters were nonroutine and were forwarded to Emily herself to a
ddress. Otherwise, her full- time, year- round secretaries stationed in Edgartown and New York worked with Ned to answer nearly all of the letters on his mother’s behalf.
Interested in scoring some juicy quotes, the reporter asked Ned what Emily most disliked about the current era. The loyal son parried, responding with a stale canard: “She regrets most the loss of the art of conversation.... Discussing a book doesn’t exist today. No one’s read a book.” Anxiously listening in on the interview, the Funk and Wagnalls’s represen-tative rushed forward “to clarify their own case: The advance sale [of this edition of Etiquette] is three times that of any previous revision.” Perhaps frustrated by the lack of frisson in the air, the petulant New Yorker reporter noted sourly the absence of water glasses. Even worse was the bland menu—chicken consommé, chicken Tetrazzini, and ice- cream cake. Ned explained apologetically that desserts were the only part of a meal that really interested his mother, “especially ones with chocolate and whipped cream.... She doesn’t like the rest of the meal at all,” he said. As if to dispel the myth of the preternaturally perfect Emily Post, Time magazine noted that “as reporters dawdled over cocktails, the arbiter of proper behavior cried: ‘I’m hungry. Where’s the food?’ ”
CHAPTER 69
A FEW YEARS AFTER EMILY DIED, THE NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT of Education would conduct a survey it called “The Ten Reference Books Indispensable in Any Public Library.” Etiquette came in fourth. But in 1955, the last edition of Etiquette officially revised by Emily Post met with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Nonetheless, it was enough of a literary touchstone of its time that one sharp critic, at least, considered its appearance noteworthy. Comparing the original version of 1922 with its present incarnation, Geoffrey Hellman, who had written thoughtfully about Frank Crowninshield just before his death, now detailed “The Waning Oomph of Mrs. Toplofty” in the New Yorker. Some of the changes Hellman enumerated had occurred as Emily herself matured, such as her renunciation of wit used at another’s expense. Showing greater sensitivity to the damage language can cause, she had also toned down some of her theatrical descriptions from the early version of Etiquette: “How can you go about with that moth-eaten, squint- eyed bag of a girl!” asked a charmer in 1922 who “admired her own facile adjectives” and wanted to impress a young man. His answer had been a one- two knockout: “Because the lady of your flattering epithets happens to be my sister.” The updated version, over thirty years later, now read, “How can you go about with that squint- eyed girl!” “Because she is my sister,” this aggrieved brother responded.
On a larger social scale, Emily’s famously creative names had, by 1955, and at the insistence of her publisher, yielded their implicit Knickerbocker heritage to a mixed crowd from Boston or Philadelphia: Mrs. Katharine de Puyster Eminent, for instance, was now Mrs. Katharine Sedgwick Penny-backer. The seemingly minor changes throughout the book suggested to Hellman that a “regional expansion,” marked by “flights from provincialism,” had taken place on Emily’s part. Certainly she had bowed to majority opinions. She, who treated the punctuality of her own meals as sacrosanct, now omitted completely the Toploftys’ earlier stern solution for latecomers.
These days, Emily had decided, the polite response was to welcome the tardy guests to the table and help them catch up on the meal. In 1922, the Toploftys had simply bid the servants serve the latecomer whatever course everyone else was then eating. In spite of her relaxed vigilance, however, Emily held tight to a few nostrums. Mrs. Toplofty’s initial response to an obnoxious guest, for instance, remained intact. Both in 1922 and 1955, “Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself [at a dinner party] next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, ‘I shall not talk to you—because I don’t care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four’—and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her. As soon as she politely could, she turned again to her other companion.”
Funk and Wagnalls’s nearly frantic promotion of the 1955 edition as “new” obscured how Emily’s book had regularly adjusted to its moment throughout the years, at least twice each decade. What were now touted as radical changes—the disappearance of fingerbowls, the appearance of divorced parents, maids allowed to entertain male friends—had been made gradually throughout the preceding years. The presumption that etiquette was somehow timeless tricked journalists and even, arguably, Funk and Wagnalls into defining the subject at its most trivial level, shortchanging the constancy of Emily’s record of social changes through the decades. The publisher had deliberately dated its author by claiming that until four years ago she’d taken for granted that everyone had maids—a bizarrely inaccurate assertion. This error was further compounded in publicity for The Emily Post Cookbook, which portrayed Emily as having assumed until recently that everyone had a cook. Suddenly, Funk and Wagnalls proclaimed, she was coming “to [the] help” of people without a “calling card.”
While the New Yorker engaged in a comprehensive comparison of Emily’s early and late texts, Newsweek simply avowed that “Mrs. Post had made heroic efforts to keep her advice current,” citing as one example her recent advice on women helping their dates pay for restaurant meals. To such modern positions, the journalist contrasted her edict from 1922, when Emily had written that a lady was always seated in the back of a car, to the right of the gentleman, noting that “a lady ‘on the left’ is NOT a ‘lady.’ ”
Long ago, Arthur Schlesinger and Edmund Wilson, followed by contemporary writers such as Michael Korda and James Cate, had drawn attention to the contradictions that plagued Emily’s early discussions of the mythical “Best People.” By 1955, however, she had staked her claim clearly: Best People weren’t born, they were made. In 1922, she had trotted out a nominee’s pedigree, rather than her true practice of etiquette: “Mrs. Titherington Smith . . . is the daughter of the late Rev. Samuel Eminent and is therefore a member in her own right, as well as by marriage, of representative New York families,” she wrote as an example of a letter of recommendation. By 1955, birth no longer determined desirability; distinction according to one’s merits was what mattered. “Mrs. Titherington Smith,” this passage now read, “is a person of much charm and distinction and when you meet her I am sure you will agree with me in thinking that she will be a valuable addition to the club.”
Hellman also observed how Emily’s treatment of class had changed from that of 1922. Her tone was “less snobbish, for Mrs. Post has replaced social inferiority with ignorance as a whipping boy.” Emily, however, had always maintained that social inferiority came from lack of knowledge, however poorly she had expressed that conviction. Ignorance had consistently been her primary target. Emily’s current locution, “people who know better,” revised from her 1920s “persons of position,” reflected a pivotal change in American culture between the Gilded Age and the post–World War II era, when the doors to a rarefied class had been shown breachable after all. Emily had understood this from the beginning.
DEMENTIA GAINED GROUND toward the end. As other cultural icons located their bearings, Emily lost hers. Civil rights, the cold war, and rock and roll: they would proceed without Emily Post. From the creator of the Eames chair, to a young and earnest Abigail Van Buren, to an even younger and more tenacious Martin Luther King: Emily Post would offer no comment on society’s incipient revolutions, her confused private world finally fixated on the past. By the time that Soviet and American rockets were vying for supremacy, the woman who had never driven a car had nonetheless weathered enough cultural change to cede the stage to others.
Sometimes Emily’s confusion was merciful. It is unclear whether she understood fully at this point that eighty-one-year-old Alice Lee Beadleston Post, her longtime travel companion and “double” relative from both her mother’s and ex-husband’s sides, died after a long, difficult illness. A few years earlier, President Eisenhower had begun the great interstate highway project, enabling car trips
that Emily and Alice would have taken in a heartbeat, back in the old days.
At the end of 1957, Bill arranged for round-the-clock nursing for his grandmother, shortly before an article appeared in Newsweek lauding both Etiquette and Amy Vanderbilt’s book on manners, currently in its fourth edition. Newsweek described the latter as more modern in tone. While Emily Post “is more inclined to act as a gracious Delphian oracle proclaiming How to Behave,” Amy Vanderbilt instead reported “How the Best People Are Currently Behaving,” the journalist opined. In a sentence Emily herself would never have used, Vanderbilt explained that she was trying “to find out what the most genteel people regularly do” and then report on those practices. What gentility is, how it is defined, who the “most genteel” are: Vanderbilt’s implied roster suggests the metaphysically vague notion of “Best People” Emily herself had acknowledged to be a cultural, not a natural, construction. Newsweek fêted Vanderbilt’s forthcoming publication, adding that Amy Vanderbilt had been writing a column syndicated by 150 newspapers for the past four years. At this point, it is unlikely that Emily knew or cared about the competition.
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