Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  IN THE FALL OF 2003, I was diagnosed with primary CNS lymphoma, a particularly aggressive brain cancer. Six months later, when I came to know myself again, I could barely remember Emily Post at all. Memorial Sloan-Kettering, where the latest research helped save my life, provided first-rate care. Doctors Lisa DeAngelis and Lauren Abrey, Joachim Yahalom and his kind, intelligent assistants (as well as the adjunct care of Dr. Jackson Coleman, next door at New York Presbyterian–Cornell), and, especially, the dedicated, intellectually capacious, brave, and kind Dr. Craig Nolan healed me. Craig’s medicine even went one better: he asked me to autograph a copy of my last book, as strong an incentive to get well as any chemical agent the devil could devise, a reminder of who I was and who he believed I would be again. If Craig kept me from dying, Dr. Stephen Foster, clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and president of the Massachusetts Eye Research and Surgery Institute, saved my sight, and I am deeply grateful for his courage in expanding conventional treatments in order to help me see again.

  My longtime friends Azra Raza, Sughra Raza, and Abbas Raza kept insisting I would eventually be well, and I figured they must know. The first two, doctors at august medical institutions themselves, were always at the ready, time and again consulting with my retinue in New York. Abbas was the don of my brain, writing so lucidly on his brilliant 3quarksdaily.com Web site that I could almost understand the science his sisters were trying to teach me.

  From my own sister, Marybeth Powell, boarding a plane on the West Coast within hours of getting a phone call, to in-laws spanning Atlanta to Ireland and phoning daily, my family has been unstintingly loyal and fluent with their love. And then there are my four progeny, my tight little mixed clan of genes and glory. Two of them, though they were not, at the time, living in Manhattan, nonetheless made themselves present in every possible way, Colin, the youngest, interrupting his first semester at college to be by my side, Geof, by age the ringleader of our combined family, reassuringly next in command after his father. Even so, for this book, the dedication is a natural, Geof and Colin agree.

  My resolute New York triumvirate of daughter, son, and husband, holding faithful watch at my hospital bedside that interminable night of the soul when even the doctors had given up hope, singing to me, whispering in my ear, insisting (so nurses, friends, and visitors report with awe), against all evidence, that I would be fine: “Just come back,” they urged fiercely, a force I couldn’t resist. “Come back to us.” I am here because of them as much as anything or anyone else.

  NOTES

  Works listed in the Bibliography are referred to in these notes by only the author’s name and short title. All citations of Etiquette are from the 1922 edition unless otherwise noted.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  for the same “project”: The travails of Edwin Main Post and of Colonel William D’Alton Mann’s cohorts come from the following newspaper accounts: New York Tribune, July 12, 1905, p. 1; New York Tribune, July 15, 1905, p. 1; New York Times, July 12, 1905, p. 1; New York Times, July 22, 1905, p. 7; New York Times, July 15, 1905, p. 1; Evening Post, July 14, 1905, p. 1; Evening Post, July 13, 1905, p. 1; New York Times, July 16, 1905, p. 6; Evening Post, July 12, 1905, p. 2; for a more complete account of Mann’s continued problems, relevant to much more than Post’s own ordeal, see Andy Logan’s The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons. Information about Emily’s reactions to her husband’s misalliance comes from family recollections, twice-told tales, and reminiscences of Edwin Post’s daughter-in-law about family gossip. Also relevant was a letter from Stephen G. Post to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, February 17, 1998.

  “Stockbroker’s Way of Dealing”: New York Tribune, July 12, 1905, p. 1.

  any chance it got: Baltimore Sun, July 13, 1905, p. 1.

  CHAPTER 2

  bravos all around: Lately Thomas, Delmonico’s, 147.

  “Everyone” revered him: Samuel Graybill, “Bruce Price, American Architect,” quoting Countess Pesciolini, 25.

  out of expedience: Bruce Price came from an old Scottish family, one that, by his birth on December 14, 1845, had its roots deep in the Maryland countryside. The most useful sources for information on Price’s genealogy are as follows: the Maryland State Archives; J. Thomas Scharf’s History of Baltimore City and County, 1881; Clayton Colman Hall, ed., Baltimore: Its History and its People, vol. 1, History; Henry Whittemore’s The Heroes of the American Revolution and Their Descendants: Battle of Long Island, 1897; and J. Thomas Scharf’s History of Western Maryland. Also see the Federal Census of 1860, p. 90, Eleventh Ward, Baltimore City in the County of Baltimore of Maryland, June 13, 1860. The historical societies of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and Cumberland, Maryland, were useful in helping me understand the family lore.

  For the most meticulous account of dates for events in Price’s relatively short life, see Samuel Graybill’s 1957 Yale dissertation, “Bruce Price, American Architect”; microfilm copies are available through most major academic libraries. Graybill was a student of architect critic and historian Vincent Scully. Graybill interviewed Emily Post, who consulted family histories no longer extant; and she provided the Ph.D. student with a list of friends and family (all since deceased) to contact as well. The New York Times, the New York Herald, the New York Post, and Town Topics all provide exhaustive coverage of the buildings Price created and the social events he attended.

  throughout the war: Many of the exchanges between Price and Lincoln can be found in Lincoln’s correspondence at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., and in the well-indexed, eight-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953). For the type of trusting relationship Price and Lincoln enjoyed, see e.g., “This letter being written by the U.S. District Attorney I have concluded to grant the pardon requested,” from the middle of the war (letter dated December 11, 1862, vol. 6, p. 2, of Basler).

  Price had served as the Baltimore delegate to the House of Delegates Special Session in December 1861, when the urgency of Baltimore’s loyalty was nearly palpable. President Lincoln appointed Price to two terms as U.S. district attorney, beginning the following year.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was a new day: For Washington Lee’s family, I have relied heavily on census data and Luzerne County histories, land deeds, church records, and old newspaper accounts. The Luzerne County Historical Society is a first-rate resource for both specific research on the Lee family and on the coal area itself, as are the archives of the Wilkes-Barre Record newspaper. Again, excellent resources also now exist on the Web: lowerluzernecounty.com/nanticokeborohistory.htm is one of them. Other pertinent documents include George W. Howard’s The Monumental City: Its Past History and Present Resources (Baltimore: J. D. Ehlers, 1873–76); Henry Blackman Plumb’s History of Hanover Township and Wyoming Valley (Wilkes-Barre: Robert Baur, 1885); Oscar Jewell Harvey’s The Harvey Book: Giving the Genealogies of Certain Branches of the American Families of Harvey, Nesbitt, Dixon and Jameson (Wilkes-Barre, 1899); George B. Kulp’s Families of the Wyoming Valley: Biographical, Genealogical, and Historical; Sketches of the Bench and Bar of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania (Wilkes-Barre, 1890); History of Luzerne, Lackawanna, and Wyoming Counties, Pa., with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Their Prominent Men and Pioneers (New York: W. W. Munsell, 1880); and Memorial of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore (Baltimore: Wm. M. Innes, 1861).

  Local newspaper articles from the nineteenth century, death certificates, obituaries, probated wills, and notices of inheritances helped me re-create a past that— oddly, in light of her compulsive tendencies—Emily Post didn’t preserve. Regional libraries and historical societies repeatedly filled in gaps.

  Priscilla and John Alden did join Plymouth Colony for the country’s first Thanksgiving. Arguably more important are the histories of Luzerne and Washington counties’ early ore deposits and the carving of millionaires out of the countryside. The history of Emily Post’s ancestors, trailing opul
ent black coal, is rich for those concerned with early commercial enterprise. In 1823 Colonel Lee (Emily Post’s great-uncle) and George Chahoon leased a mine in Newport and contracted for the mining and delivery of one thousand tons of coal in arks at Lee’s Ferry, Pennsylvania, at $1.10 per ton—the coal selling at Columbia at a loss of $1,500. But by 1829, the coal in the area had gained a reputation as the finest in the country, causing Baltimore capitalists to invest heavily. Pennsylvania, in essence, subsidized the coal industry’s future in the state by allowing for the incorporation of the Baltimore and Pittsburg Coal Company, publicizing the anthracite veins as the best in the nation. The legatees of the Lee family estate sold it to the Susquehanna Coal Company, which rented it out as a tenant house. Josephine Lee didn’t come by her business smarts by accident.

  Washington Lee, Josephine’s father, went to Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and graduated in 1843. He studied law, subsequently practicing his profession for several years in Wilkes-Barre, where he was elected county district attorney. After a few years of comparing incomes from the law with those of the furnace, Lee left the bar and engaged in business enterprises with his uncle Colonel Washington Lee, operating coal mines at Nanticoke and becoming very rich.

  On June 29, 1846, he married Emily Laura Thomas (for whom Emily Post would be named), the daughter of Abraham Thomas. The Lees had five children; their daughter Josephine would be the mother of Emily Price Post. A common cause of confusion for those few interested in researching the beginnings is the following: one of Washington Lee’s daughters, Emily Thomas Lee, married Benjamin C. Barroll Jr. on September 8, 1874. Emily Thomas Lee is the sister of Mary Josephine Lee and aunt of Emily Post. Of their children, a daughter, Emily’s first cousin, was named Josephine Lee Barroll. The Washington Lee family lived part-time in Baltimore—where Josephine and Bruce Price met—and afterward moved to New York, where the patriarch died on March 26, 1883.

  picked quality ore by hand: Tall, dignified, studious, and well liked, Colonel Washington Lee was one of the native sons (named by an Alden woman in honor of the new country’s founding father) destined to become a legend himself in certain parts of Pennsylvania. He became the prime mover in Luzerne County. In 1825, he bought the on-site store and began operating a distillery, probably aimed at the immigrant workers he hired. (Lee’s uncle had ceded him the title to the property just after the War of 1812.) By now hard work came naturally to his family, built into the tradition they passed down. Luckily, hard work paid well, the Lees discovered: by 1828 Colonel Lee was selling bar iron at $120 per ton. It was dirty work, he used to say, but it cleaned up real nice.

  The colonel left an impression on his grandniece Josephine Lee. His gentleness and intelligence struck people as his salient characteristics, and in many ways, including his height, Bruce Price must have reminded Josephine of her favorite uncle. Bruce visited Wilkes-Barre before his marriage, where he was entertained either at the “comfortable mansion” (as county histories described it) erected on the east bank of the Susquehanna River or at the nephew’s estate down the road, the home of Bruce’s betrothed. Colonel Lee’s nephew—this Washington Lee so named in honor of a local empire—had inherited the bulk of his relative’s fields and fortune. The childless old colonel had been quite the businessman, buying a farm of one thousand acres in the early part of the century that he sold several decades later for $1.2 million, a neat inheritance for Josephine Lee’s father.

  created a rebound: Lately Thomas, Delmonico’s, 101.

  nothing if not romantic: See Kenneth D. Ackerman, The Gold Ring.

  very large baby: According to her tombstone, Emily was born on October 27, 1872. In addition, the 1900 Federal Census asserts that she was born in Baltimore that year. But records from the period are not always reliable; she may have been born five days later, or even during another year: October 27, 1873, is the date of birth on her passport from 1923.

  every bulb she planted: Baltimore vital records don’t exist for the 1870s. Throughout her life, Emily would evince a psychologically complicated reaction to substituting for the baby brother so close in age, his gender of such obvious importance to her father.

  CHAPTER 4

  from her stock investments: Edwin Post, Truly Emily Post 3, 8, 31. In otherwise rare praise, Emily consistently emphasized Josephine’s practical nature and frequently remarked how her mother used her idiosyncratic shrewdness to good effect playing the stock market.

  Truly Emily Post, Edwin (Ned) Post’s ghostwritten biography-memoir of his mother, was compiled during the last few years of Emily’s life, when the ghost-writer, Dorothy Giles, had access to whatever logs Emily had kept over the years. From the time she was a debutante, Emily filled ledgers with the minutiae of her days. Unfortunately, except for a garden book, such accounts have disappeared. The surviving family assumes that when Emily’s son moved abroad, the materials got lost in the transition. “We have no idea what happened to those records,” says Cindy Post Senning, Emily’s great-granddaughter. “We have searched everywhere in hopes of them turning up, but they’re gone with the wind or, probably, lost in the various shuttles my father and his wife made between Italy and the United States those last years” (interview, August 3, 2002).

  The only way to confirm the often misdated and exaggerated accounts in Truly Emily Post, whose author died only months after Emily herself, is to cross-reference any anecdote or to present it as conjectural.

  fueled their concerns: Jean Strouse, Morgan, 152. More than anything, as Strouse emphasizes, it was this six-year depression that purged the country’s near-fairyland obsession with the past. Now an expanding economy would be forced to confront urgent monetary issues of the current day, instead of rehashing times past.

  he inevitably answered: Quoted in Harold Evans, “Follow the Money.”

  the Four Hundred: Jerry Patterson, The First Four Hundred, 87.

  really only 273 names: Ward McAllister, “The Only Four Hundred: Ward McAllister Gives Out the Official List,” New York Times, February 16, 1892, p. 5. The list had varied, depending on who was in and out of society at the time.

  like Uncle Charlie: Truly Emily Post, 68.

  until the beans were gone: Emily Post, “Kelland Doesn’t Know What He Is Talking About, Answers Emily Post,” American Magazine, December 1928, p. 13.

  and proper pencils: Eleanor Garst papers, courtesy of the Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa Libraries.

  90 percent rate: Samuel Graybill, “Bruce Price: American Architect,” conclusion.

  “into towering cubes”: Etiquette, 2.

  into the urban fold: By Motor to the Golden Gate, 240.

  CHAPTER 5

  Baltimore houses he had loved: Truly Emily Post, 38.

  “Clearly custom hammered”: Transcript of interview with Christopher Gray, May 22, 2001, courtesy of Laura Jacobs.

  when they weren’t in residence: Truly Emily Post, 68.

  age of commerce and creativity: The birth of the skyscraper, the competition between Chicago and New York, and the major players of the times are the subjects of an ever-increasing library. Two sources particularly user-friendly for the nonprofessional are Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. The latter is the dual story of the Chicago world’s fair and a mass murderer, its subtext the fight between New York and Chicago architects to take the lead in the skyscraper race.

  French women around her husband: Truly Emily Post, 23.

  the buyer’s prestige: “A Glimpse of Fairy Land: ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ at the Academy, Remarkable Success of Benefit Performance for the Mount Vernon Endowment Fund—Brilliant Audience,” New York Times, April 26, 1878.

  paid off when he was able: “Newsboys in High Feather,” New York Times, July 23, 1878. Catharine was related to the Bruces of Scotland, for whom Emily’s father was named. David Wolfe Bruce, one of the executors of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s estate, was a cousin of
the Lorillards and Bruces, making Emily a true blueblood.

  sputter to a wan conclusion: Classified ad, New York Times, May 6, 1879.

  CHAPTER 6

  anyone else in her life: For a detailed account of the trip up the Hudson, see Ronald G. Pisano, The Tile Club and the Aesthetic Movement in America (New York: Abrams, 1999), 30–33.

  everything from painting to textiles: In the 1880s a worldwide movement occurred in almost all areas of art and design, from jewelry to architecture. Western art was newly inspired by the simple beauty of Japanese, Celtic, Viking, and Islamic art and by plant and animal life (including the human female). An aesthetic rebellion aimed at decades of classical repetition in art and Victorian excess in architecture swept across Europe. The movement was called Art Nouveau in Belgium and France, Secession in Austria, Jugendstil in Germany, Modernismo in Spain, and Stile Liberty in Italy (the nomenclature stemming from Arthur Liberty, whose firm crafted jewelry and homeware in the new style). The Tile Club, inspired by such energies, was part of the American reaction.

  even consider moving to New York: Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York, 168.

  travel, painting, and antics: In his The Tile Club and the Aesthetic Movement in America, Pisano emphasizes Frank Hopkinson Smith’s status as talented and genial gadfly. Additional information on the club can be found in William H. Shelton, The Salmagundi Club: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), and Constance Koppelman, “Nature in Art and Culture: The Tile Club” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1985).

  an ill mix: Harper’s Weekly, August 14, 1880, p. 516. The hotel had officially opened on July 13, 1880, with the New York Times hailing the “new watering place” in its coverage the following day.