The list goes on. She endowed free beds in St. Luke’s Hospital, Denver; in St. Luke’s Hospital, Phoenix; at Children’s Hospital, Denver; at Esmeralda Hospital, Sewanee, Tennessee; at St. Luke’s Hospital, McAlester, Oklahoma; at St. Margaret’s Hospital, Boise, Idaho; and at Good Samaritan Hospital, in Cincinnati. She also endowed Emery Free Day (free admissions on Saturdays) at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Mary M. Emery Chair of Pathology at Ohio-Miami Medical School. She established the Emery Foundation of San Francisco, the Emery Arboretum “for the study of trees and shrubs in the Ohio Valley,” and the Mary M. Emery Bird Reserve, a plan to “bring back the birds to the city.”
Among the social institutions she actively supported were the Ohio Institute for Public Efficiency, a foundation with headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, whose goals were to improve state and municipal administration; and the Council of Social Agencies, a centralizing bureau of some eighty benevolent and corrective agencies in Cincinnati. She presided over the Cincinnati Model Homes Company, which supplied “ideal housing to over 200 families, mostly negroes.” (In this latter endeavor, she skated on thin ice. Since the “ideal housing” was rented out to the tenants, she was accused of “commercialized philanthropy.”)
For years, the identity of a mysterious “Madame X,” who had given $250,000 to build a “working girls’ home” for young Frenchwomen of slender means called Cercle Concordia, at 19 rue Tournefort near the Bon Marché business district of Paris, was a secret. The home, built in 1907, accommodated 120 young ladies. It was not until Mary Emery’s death twenty years later that it was revealed she had been Madame X.
Like Isabella Gardner, Mary Emery had young protégés, though she never uncovered a talent comparable to that of Bernard Berenson and there was never the suggestion of a romantic involvement with any of them. There was a young man named Chalmers Clifton, whom she helped as a conductor and composer, and Charles Hackett, an opera singer. Marion Green, an actor who once toured with a road company in the title role of Monsieur Beaucaire, was another. Though none of these young talents was ever to become exactly a household word, she helped with their schooling and they were frequent house guests at Mariemont.
Through all this, Mary Emery was exceptionally fortunate in having at her side, as her right-hand man in every decision, Charles Livingood. A New England aristocrat and cum laude graduate of Harvard—where he majored in English literature, history, and philosophy—Livingood was not only a man of the utmost probity but also a man of intelligence, taste, and sophistication. He was a gentleman and scholar of the Old School, and his personal enthusiasms were the life of Petrarch, prehistoric man, and the history of Provence—“anything that begins with P,” he used to say. But he was also a shrewd, tough-minded businessman. Every morning Livingood met with Mrs. Emery in her library at Edgecliffe, and when it was time to go to Newport, he and his family followed her to Mariemont, where the Livingoods occupied a comfortable cottage nearby. Livingood would carefully go over her accounts, managing the intricate details of her huge estate, advising her which stocks or properties ought to be bought, which might be sold, and how much might be left over to be given away.
Understandably, Mary Emery endured what is the bane of every philanthropist—the endless stream of requests for money, from individuals as well as from organized charities, that arrived daily at her doorstep. No sooner had an Emery gift been announced than thousands of letters asking for more arrived in the mail. The effect of this on Mary was to make her more reclusive, more secretive. She had to be. If word got around that Mary Emery was buying up land for a bird preserve, real estate prices instantly shot up. The successful philanthropist must be a cynic, and develop a hide of rhinoceros thickness when faced with the pathetic entreaties and tales of woe—some perhaps true, many more probably false—which never cease. Mary Emery, however, was incapable of cynicism, and admitted that softheartedness was her most serious flaw. Fortunately, she had Charles Livingood as her cynic-in-residence. Sometimes, after being moved by a particularly doleful letter and request, she would reach for that piteous communication and say, “Now, Mr. Livingood, don’t you think we just might—?” Slowly but firmly he would shake his head and reply, “No, Mrs. Emery, we might not.” Screening the letters, sifting the legitimate requests from the shady and suspect, became Charles Livingood’s job. Of, perhaps, five hundred mendicant letters in the morning’s mail, Livingood might select as many as two or three which he deemed worthy of Mrs. Emery’s serious consideration. Then, if she approved of a project which he considered worthwhile, he would review the whereabouts and sizes of the various pieces of her scattered fortune to see from which of the little stacks of figures funds might become available. Theirs was a perfect working partnership. Always addressing each other formally, they never quarreled. In the end, they always agreed.
Though Livingood managed her books and wrote out the checks, there was one area in which he felt he was not qualified to advise her: her growing art collection. He did, however, see to it that she got the best advice possible, in the person of Joseph Guest, the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Since her husband’s death, Mary had made it a point to buy at least one important painting every year, and soon her collection included Titian, Rubens, Van Dyke, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Lorenzo di Credi, Mabuse, Bronzino, Murillo, Fouquet, Dirk Bouts, Hals, Nattier, Le Brun, Gainsborough, Romney, Lawrence, Raeburn, Israels, Lhermitte, and a great many masters of the Barbizon School. But she was a safe and cautious buyer, and never purchased anything without Mr. Guest’s approval. Though she occasionally bought through Joseph Duveen, who was always on hand when rich people were spending money on art, she did not, like Eva Stotesbury, give Duveen carte blanche. Joseph Guest was always her agent and go-between in the negotiations—much to the displeasure of Duveen, who was always looking for ways to deal with Mrs. Emery directly. She kept herself at arm’s length, however, and when she and Guest had decided, say, to buy Velásquez’ Philip IV, Mrs. Emery would write a note to Guest, saying, “Now be sure to tell Mr. Duveen to place the painting in a suitable frame, and install the right picture-light above it.…”
Because, like Livingood, Joseph Guest was a tough trader, there were occasional hackles raised. When Guest purchased Titian’s Philip II for her, at something over $300,000, there was a great outcry in England at the news that the painting was leaving British shores for the United States. And a few mistakes were made—it was almost inevitable that there should have been. Mary Emery’s Rembrandt later turned out not to be a Rembrandt, and had to be redesignated “after Rembrandt.” But for the most part Guest’s choices were astute ones, and their prices were in line with the market of the day. After all, it behooved Guest to select the pieces of Mrs. Emery’s collection carefully. She had made it clear to him that she considered herself only the temporary “guardian” of the collection, and that one day it would all go to his Cincinnati Art Museum, as indeed it has—housed in the Emery Wing, which she also donated. (As Fiske Kimball in Philadelphia often reminded everyone, Eva Stotesbury’s collection might have suffered a kinder fate if she had taken his advice instead of Duveen’s.)
In 1914, however, a plan even more ambitious than Mary Emery’s art collection—by then valued at more than $3,500,000—was under way, and the details of it were consuming more and more of Mrs. Emery’s and Mr. Livingood’s working days. It was to be Mrs. Emery’s ultimate philanthropy to her adopted city, and naturally, considering its size and scope, the utmost secrecy was essential. Aside from herself and Livingood, only a few carefully chosen aides and confidantes had any notion of what was afoot for Cincinnati. Nor would anyone else get wind of it for several years.
17
THE TSARINA AND THE LADY
The phrase “Lady Bountiful,” if used at all in the 1980s, is invariably used with scorn. But it is important to remember that in the more trusting, more naïve world of America before the First World War, to be a Lady Bountiful was a very respectable occupation. It was even considered a
high calling, and Ladies Bountiful abounded. Some were ostentatious and outrageous. Others, like Mary Emery, preferred to remain in the background, bestowing their bounty through functionaries. But though their individual styles might vary, their motives were almost never questioned. Gratitude, in those days, was an acceptable response, and a Lady Bountiful was deemed a valuable asset to her community.
Today, Mary Emery’s thirty-year career of giving away money would doubtless be diagnosed as an extended ego trip. Hers, after all, was a life spent receiving letters of entreaty, followed by letters of lavish thanks and praise. And certainly there were earthly pleasures to be gained from seeing one’s name, or one’s loved ones’ names, chiseled in marble on some large public building, insuring some sort of immortality on the planet. But from all the evidence, if Mary Emery was ever tempted to congratulate herself on the extent of her benefactions, she did her best to stifle the temptation. Her motives were somewhat different.
For one thing, as a descendant of at least two Protestant clergymen, she was a firm believer in such old-fashioned notions as the Golden Rule. Pious and churchgoing, she was a firm subscriber to the Christian Ethic, and doubtless also believed that for good works on earth she would be rewarded in the Protestant Hereafter. She was also an instinctive advocate of what were then considered American upper-class values, and the concept of noblesse oblige.
The curious thing about noblesse oblige in America is that it is deemed a subject, like sex, too delicate and too important to talk about. Noblesse oblige exists in the same shadowy, but also somehow sacred, area as what goes on behind closed bedroom doors. One would never hear an upper-class American say, “We do such-and-such out of a sense of noblesse oblige.” Nor would an upper-class American ever say “because we are upper-class.”*
Nevertheless, upper-class values—including do-good principles—were taught carefully, subtly, by example, in the homes and classrooms of the well born and well bred of Mary Emery’s era. What she might have missed from her minister father was supplied by the Packer Collegiate Institute between 1857 and 1862. When the school was dedicated a few years earlier, in 1846, the Reverend Dr. William B. Sprague of Albany had declared in his address that a Packer education was to be “employed for the formation of human character—for the development and ultimate perfection of human faculties,” and that it would offer proper young ladies “such a culture of the faculties as shall constitute that appropriate preparation for an honorable and useful life.” This was how Dr. Sprague viewed the role of an aristocratic woman:
Providence has designated to her, her appropriate sphere, and though it be a retired, quiet, and if you please in some respects a humble sphere, it is a glorious sphere, notwithstanding—glorious, because Heaven has crowned it with the means of honorable usefulness … I do not disparage but honor her, when I say that her throne is the nursery, and beside the cradle … Think it not hardship, ladies, that public opinion excuses you from appearing in the arena of political conflict, or from saying at the ballot box who shall be our rulers, or from standing forth as God’s commissioned ambassadors to treat with a dying world.
Dr. Sprague’s version of feminism did concede that a woman would not be a good sovereign of the nursery if “she has an undisciplined and unfurnished mind.” These words sound pompous and patronizing today but were startlingly liberal in a day when most members of both sexes thought that educating women at all was a waste of time. A few years later, in 1850, a report to the trustees would stress how successfully the school was instilling upper-class values among its young charges:
No medals or prizes are offered to stimulate ambition, but the pupil is taught that love of excellence for its own sake, which brings its own recompense.…
In proof of the exemplary conduct of the pupils, the trustees have only to state that among the 650 young ladies attending the academy during the past year, not one unpleasant case of discipline has occurred.
The love of neatness and good order, so constantly inculcated by the teachers, is mutely taught by the beautiful grounds attached to the institution.
A habit of forbearance and respect for public property are [sic] fostered here, and as an evidence of the morality in little things, manifested even by the youngest, it may be stated that no one is ever found touching a flower or defacing a grass plot.
In a course called Composition, the young ladies were instructed to write themes which were not only properly spelled and well constructed but which also were marked by “sound moral and religious sentiment.” And, in a course called Manual of Morals, came something close to a spelling-out of the notion of noblesse oblige: “It is ever the duty of she [sic] whom God has favored with worldly possessions to assume some of the burden of those less fortunate than she.”
With such training, and with God’s will behind it, how could Mary Emery have done other than she did? With these convictions, Mary, in 1914, embarked upon her most ambitious project. By that year the blight of Cincinnati, as it had long been in other cities, was beginning to be its slums. If anyone could cure this blight, she and Mr. Livingood reasoned, it would be she and Thomas J. Emery’s fortune, which, despite her giving, was actually growing larger under Livingood’s guiding hand. She and Livingood had both visited the model cities and villages and New Towns that were being built in England. Unlike Edith McCormick, Mary Emery did not plan to build a city of yacht basins for the rich. She wanted to move the slums to the fresh air and green grass of the suburbs—to provide a good life for the poor. From the beginning, it was to be “an interpretation of modern city planning principles, applied to a small community to produce local happiness—a national example.” And it was to be called Mariemont, after Mary Emery’s summer home in Newport.
The site she and Livingood selected was a 254-acre tract—later expanded to more than 400 acres—in a sparsely populated, wooded area of low, rolling hills about ten miles northeast of Cincinnati on the banks of the Little Miami River. Quietly, Mary began buying up the land she wanted. Great secrecy had to be observed, of course, to keep prices from skyrocketing, and a real estate agent from as far away as Chicago was hired to oversee these transactions so that no one would suspect a connection with Cincinnati real estate interests. Even the local real estate firm, which made the contacts and completed the purchase of the various parcels, had no idea whom it was working for, and some of the rumors that circulated—that the land was to be the site of a large, noisy, and smelly factory—actually had the effect of driving prices down.
The Mariemont Company was formed, and a prominent city planner, John Nolan of Philadelphia, was hired. Mary Emery then purchased the initial stock in the company for about $2,500,000 to give it some working capital, and presently the plans emerged from Mr. Nolan’s drawing board. The streets of Mariemont were designed to radiate from a central square and village green. Along the wide main street, with its landscaped mall which made up the central square, would be buildings for shops and offices and a small inn with a restaurant, with a garden terrace behind it. The new town would have its own elementary school and high school, its own hospital, its own church and cemetery, its own city hall and fire station, its own theatre and museum, and its own central heating plant to serve the entire community. Plenty of space was given over to parks and playgrounds, and near the center of town a tall bell tower with a twenty-three-bell carillon was to stand as Mariemont’s symbol. Just to the south of the town an industrial park was laid out, the idea being that residents could live close to where they worked, because Mariemont was envisioned as a town for “the working man” and his family.
The little side streets were laid out in graceful arcs and curves to discourage heavy traffic, and there were plenty of cozy cul-de-sacs. Mrs. Emery asked that two of these—Albert Place and Sheldon Close—be named after her two sons. In general, the housing was to be of three types—small private homes, garden apartments, and “group houses,” which were attached town houses. Through the center of each block of housing ran a service al
ley, so that garbage cans would not have to be placed on the street. The architecture was a loose mixture of English exposed-beam Tudor and New England saltbox, and the result was intended to be almost a storybook version of an English village that would dance perhaps a bit precariously on the edge of cuteness without quite falling over the rim.
The First World War imposed a temporary halt on the construction of Mariemont, but by 1920 the project was able to move forward again and, on April 23, 1923, Mary Emery, in her black bonnet and one of her almost dowdy-looking long black dresses, presided over the groundbreaking with a silver spade in her hand. By 1926 the first families were able to move in; at first most of Mariemont’s homes and apartments were leased for low rentals, and renters were given options to buy. And, on March 19 of that year, a small “Greeting” from Mrs. Emery appeared in the first issue of the Mariemont Messenger:
Good morning, Is the sun a little brighter, there in Mariemont? Is the air a little fresher? Is your home a little sweeter? Is your housework somewhat easier? And the children—do you feel safer about them? Are their faces a bit ruddier, are their legs a little sturdier? Do they laugh and play a lot louder in Mariemont? Then I am content.
There was one thing, however, about which Mary Emery was not content, and that involved a woman named Marion Devereux. Miss Devereux was a newspaper reporter, but she was somewhat more than that. Commenting on social events for the Cincinnati Enquirer, she had gradually made herself what she called “the arbiter of Cincinnati society.” She was also irreverently called “the Tsarina,” but unfortunately, in her ascent to power, Cincinnati, in its relaxed way, had begun to take her seriously. Though she was of obscure origins herself, her reign over the city had, by the early 1920s, become all but complete. It was a reign of terror and a reign of cruelty. Miss Devereux considered herself the grande dame of Cincinnati, and, in Mary Emery’s opinion, her influence had become malevolent and destructive.
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