Miss Devereux had inherited her seat in the Society Editor’s chair from her mother, Mrs. Arthur Devereux, who had already turned the job into a harsh dictatorship. Madame Devereux, as Mrs. Devereux was called, had introduced a little book called Who’s Who: A Society Register … for Cincinnati, which listed her highly biased choices of which families were considered “social,” as opposed to those who were not. No Jews were included, though there were a number of prominent and wealthy Jewish families in the city, and Roman Catholics were in noticeably short supply. Similarly, Madame Devereux had had little use for the old German families who had made their money in beer, lard, and sausage. Madame Devereux had also arbitrarily reorganized “reception days,” those days of the week when ladies were at home to callers, assigning a different day of the week to each part of town. This arrangement, Madame Devereux explained, was only a “suggestion,” but her suggestion had very quickly become the rule, and those who had dared to break or bend it soon found their names omitted from the following year’s edition of Who’s Who.…
On her death in 1910, Madame Devereux’s duties were taken over by her daughter Marion, then a spinster of thirty-seven, who had worked for several years as her mother’s assistant. Madame Devereux had already developed a notably florid prose style, to which her daughter proceeded to add elaborate embellishments, swirls, and flourishes. She resurrected long-dead words, and never used an everyday term if an archaic one would do. A woman’s gown, for instance, was her “toilet,” or sometimes “toilette.” She also invented words. Her collective noun for the women at a party was inevitably Femina, always capitalized, as in, “For this supreme occasion, Femina had resplendently arrayed herself in some of the most scintillatingly exquisite creations evoked by the couturier’s wand of enchantment.” Debutantes were “rosebuds,” and two sisters presented at the same time were “twin rosebuds on the parent stem.” A table was a mahogany, and a large dining table was “the central mahogany.” If a phrase sounded too commonplace in English, she tried French, or at least her version of it. At one party, she noted that tuxedos for the men were “de rigeuer,” and at the opera one evening, “the Hinkle box was a scene of constant va and vient.” On one occasion, writing up a wedding, she penned:
Into the hush of this ambient twilight came the bridal procession, the feathery green of tender laurel that wreathed choir stalls, pulpit and rood screen, and the curving fronds of a few giant palms massed in the chancel pointing the way to the altar, where the snowy chalices of tall Easter lilies were sentineled by blazing candelabra, seven-branched … Very pretty, with lovely light brown hair and gray-blue eyes, the bride’s youthfulness suddenly seemed to take on a certain queenliness as she swept from end to end of this line of light. Her gown of soft white, crinkly crepe was the essence of simplicity, and therefore the perfection of chic … Held close to her well-poised head, her fair hair visible through its delicate mesh, this airy unsubstantial fabric drifted in long, broad folds for yards behind her, as fragile as mist, enmeshing her tall figure, concealing her face, and in its upturned brim that circled her shapely head, forming the semblance of a halo, that gave her the air of one of the saints or angels that, in color, looked down from the gorgeous memorial windows on every hand.
At first, Cincinnati was simply amused by Miss Devereux’s deep-purple prose. Soon people were collecting favorite Devereux-isms, such as “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Conroy have been the center of many merry moments since their return from their honeymoon.” Or “Miss Ruth Harrison whose toilet of black satin was relieved by a touch of ermine.” Or “An hour of agreeable intercourse will follow this series of events, the membership being all cocked and primed to stay on to enjoy it.” But Miss Devereux was rapidly becoming a force as well. And as her reputation grew, so did the Enquirer’s circulation. She sold papers, and, accordingly, her editors gave her more leeway and more space. On and on she trilled and warbled, and it was not long before a single day’s social events at the height of a Cincinnati season would be accorded sixteen full columns of Devereux, or two full pages. Soon an unbreakable rule was established at the paper: not a word of Miss Devereux’s copy could be altered; not a word could be cut. Thus when Miss Devereux described a group called the Bachelors as “young celibrates,” one could never be sure whether there had been a typographical error or whether Miss Devereux had written it that way. Thus there were also times when no one reading her stories had the slightest clue to what she was trying to say, as in:
In nothing to the Philistines are the May Festivals more intriguing than in the boxes and the Audience. Last night these themes of and corridor and foyer were paramount to the carnal-minded devotee of these two yearly events.
Miss Devereux was quick to recognize her growing power, and quick to use it. Though she was not below average height, she ordered the legs of the chairs facing her desk cut down, so that visitors to her office at the newspaper sat before her almost on their knees, like supplicants. At the office she was known to be a holy terror when crossed, and was not above hurling an assistant’s copy across the room if it did not come up to her own exacting standards. She would summon a copy boy from a distant part of the building and, when he arrived, order him to stick his head out her window and tell her if it was raining. A copy boy was regularly assigned to walk her home at night.
Her personal vendettas became famous, and, of course, these also made good copy. Her favorite method of revenge upon someone who had offended her was the Fashion Attack. She would write, “Mrs.—appeared in her customary brown,” or “Mrs.—wore the green toilet in which she always looks so well,” or “Mrs.—appeared in the blue dress which has graced several previous occasions.” A recent widow, who had fallen from Miss Devereux’s favor, had appeared at a horse show because her son was to be one of the stars. The widow was all in black, but, to show her what she thought of her, Miss Devereux reported that the lady appeared in her box “in a gorgeous red toilette.” Jewels of the unfavored were dismissed with faint praise, such as “Mrs.—wore a string of pearls.” And who knew what barb might be intended when Miss Devereux wrote, as she did on several occasions, that a certain woman appeared “in a lovely bead neckless”? Then there were her taunts, which surely had to be tongue in cheek, such as the time a couple of whom she disapproved married rather late in life and departed for a Florida wedding trip, and Miss Devereux wrote that “on their honeymoon [they] will follow the trail of Ponce de Leon in his quest for the Fountain of Youth.”
Readers could usually tell when Miss Devereux was out for blood and when she was simply making mischief. She obviously disapproved of a certain woman at a party who “arrived with two or three swains who were constantly in her train. Her frock was white, simply fashioned.” And her way of noting that a popular young woman was in a delicate condition was to report her absence at a party, adding, “but of course she is not going out in any large way at present.” Her snips and jibes and bitchiness also sold papers, and only when threatened with a libel suit did Miss Devereux turn all dewy-eyed-repentant and apologetic. But there were never any retractions.
Her bailiwick extended far beyond that of any ordinary society editor or, for that matter, any ordinary mortal. Since she controlled absolutely the amount of ink that would be expended on any social event by the city’s leading newspaper, it was wise to consult her before planning anything. If it was a wedding, Miss Devereux would not only set the date but would also select the orchestra, the caterer, the florist, and the site of the reception. Any bride who had the temerity to defy her would not have her wedding reported in the Enquirer. Marion Devereux also decided who could be a debutante and who could not, and arranged the winter’s schedule of coming-out parties. To a hopeful mother Miss Devereux might say, shaking her head sadly, “No, I don’t think your daughter is ready to come out this year,” or “I don’t think Doris would be happy as a debutante. The crowd this year is so different from hers.” One way to court Miss Devereux’s favor was with gifts and—some said—money, though wh
ether she ever accepted cash outright is uncertain. From the parade of carriages and limousines that appeared before Miss Devereux’s apartment building at Christmastime, bearing brightly wrapped packages, it was clear that she did like presents. But even a gift was no guarantee to someone she had decided was a “social climber.”
The Sinton Hotel, which was one of the city’s best, hit upon a clever idea. It offered Miss Devereux a suite of rooms, rent-free, and the little gesture paid off handsomely. Thereafter the Sinton was selected for more than its share of wedding receptions and coming-out parties—though it must be said that she did at times pick other places—and the management could be sure that, whenever the Sinton was mentioned in her columns, its décor, appointments, food, and service were elaborately described. “In the long, lofty ballroom of the Hotel Sinton, framed in the replicas of Eighteenth Century panels, gold-bordered, lighted by stately, sparkling chandeliers of faceted crystal placed among the Bourcher [sic] clouds and cupids of the ceiling a la Louis Seize, the second of the Bachelors’ Cotillions took place with such success as to seem to the guests the ultimate in entertainment.…” And on, and on.
Marion Devereux felt, with justification, that Mary Emery belonged to her fiefdom. The Emerys, after all, were very much Old Family. They were very rich, and very civic-minded. The Emerys would even, in time, be elevated to the ranks of European nobility. John J. Emery, the brother of Mary’s late husband, had remained unmarried until fairly late in life. Then, in his sixties, realizing that there would be no male Emerys to carry on the family’s far-flung enterprises, he married, promptly fathered five children, and died shortly thereafter.* One of his daughters, Audrey, would marry, first, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch, a cousin of Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, and, second, the Georgian Prince Dmitri Djordjadze.
Mary Emery thoroughly disapproved of Marion Devereux, and of the way Cincinnati society bowed and scraped and kissed the hem of Miss Devereux’s garments. She found it pitiful that Cincinnati should tolerate Miss Devereux’s terrorist tactics, and felt that Miss Devereux, by placing so much emphasis on parties, gowns, and interior décor, was deflecting society’s interests from more worthy pursuits. When Mary Emery referred to Miss Devereux at all, it was to “that dangling participle.” Miss Devereux, meanwhile, had developed another intimidating technique: the Midnight Tirade. Learning that a party had taken place without her imprimatur, Miss Devereux thought nothing of telephoning the errant hostess in the small hours of the morning and shouting, “How dare you give a party without consulting me? Don’t you know that I am the social arbiter of Cincinnati?” For further punishment, the offender might find herself labeled in print a “climber” or, another Devereux favorite, “a social highway robber.” Or she might discover that she had been banished from the society pages forever, along with all her heirs and assigns.
But Mary Emery was one woman in Cincinnati who was immune to Marion Devereux’s attacks. She defied the tyrant by refusing to take part in the world Miss Devereux wrote about. Mary Emery could be neither extolled nor damned on the society pages because she stalwartly refused to be social. What, after all, could be said about a sweet-faced little old lady who looked like a grandmother on a chocolate box, who kept to herself and her gardens and art collection, and whose only eccentricity, if it could be called that, was that she daintily ate the plump grapes from her prize vines with a knife and fork? (She carefully sliced each grape in half with a fruit knife, extracted the seed, then placed the halves in her mouth one at a time.)
Mary Emery had made it abundantly clear that she had no use for Miss Devereux, and Miss Devereux was aware of her feelings. But when Mrs. Emery did appear at a public function, Miss Devereux could not even employ the Fashion Attack because Mary Emery, in her plain, long-sleeved black dresses and little bonnets, defied what was fashionable. Thus did she keep Marion Devereux at arm’s length throughout her career. At the same time, Marion Devereux could not simply ignore the city’s most important patroness—and so, whenever she mentioned her in her column, it was “Mrs. Thomas J. Emery, very Grande Dame.” Even that did not please Mrs. Emery. “Listen to that,” she would mutter, pointing a small finger at the printed page. “I am not a Grande Dame!” Upper-class values again. When Mary Emery announced a major project, such as the building of Mariemont, the news made the front pages, not the society columns. Marion Devereux might be the Tsarina, but Mary Emery was a lady.
Mariemont was well under way when Mary Emery died in October 1927, at eighty-three. Because her philanthropies had been, in a real sense, international, newspapers from as far away as San Francisco and Paris noted the passing of the shy, lonely little woman who had spent half her lifetime mourning and memorializing her husband and sons. In her extraordinary twenty-one page will she left a personal bequest of $500,000 to Charles Livingood, along with instructions that he “follow through” with Mariemont. She left gifts of $ 100,000 to each of her Emery nieces and nephews, who, after all, would never be poor, and her church and favorite charities were also generously remembered. The sum of $2,500,000 was set aside to provide a trust, out of which sixty-nine friends would be paid annuities throughout their lifetimes in amounts ranging from $200 to $5,000 a year (one of these, at $2,000 a year, was the writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher).* At the end of this list she noted, “I desire that the names of the persons mentioned in this Item be not given any publicity.” It didn’t matter. The newspapers printed them anyway.
To the Cincinnati Art Museum she modestly offered “so many of the oil and other paintings that I may own at the time of my death as the said Museum may care to accept.” (The collection, then valued at $3,500,000, now hangs in the Emery Wing of the museum.) The bulk of the estate, some $25,000,000, was then left to create the Thomas J. Emery Memorial, and one of the Memorial’s chief tasks would be the completion of “the planned community of Mariemont.”
The stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed slowed things down somewhat, but Mr. Livingood carried on. During the Depression, however, Mariemont began to take on a life and character of its own that its founder could never have anticipated. In the 1930s the poor, for whom Mariemont had been intended, had become the penniless, and the middle class, who had been comfortably off a few years earlier, were tightening their belts and looking for smaller homes that were easier and less expensive to maintain. It was these folk who now began snapping up the reasonably priced houses and apartments in Mariemont—albeit Marion Devereux still did not recognize Mariemont as an address.
One day in 1939, Marion Devereux walked out of her office at the Cincinnati Enquirer to consult a doctor about a small pimple on her cheek. She never came back. She was discovered, it was said, to be suffering from at least three serious ailments, one of which may have been a mental illness. Her convoluted prose style had been becoming harder and harder to follow and her temper tantrums more frequent. Aside from planning parties, attending them, and writing about them, she had seemed to have no life whatsoever, but now the woman who had enjoyed thirty years of glory and unchallenged power retired from the public eye altogether, into a deep and total seclusion. How she passed her time no one knew. She was not heard from again until nine years later when, after her seventy-fifth birthday, the Enquirer heralded in banner headlines:
DEATH TAKES “TSARINA” MARION DEVEREUX,
LONG ARBITER OF CINCINNATI’S SOCIAL LIFE
Of her, Cincinnati chronicler Alvin Harlow commented, “There has never been anyone else quite like her in America, and Cincinnati for one fervently hopes there never will be again.”
The construction of Mariemont was halted by the Second World War, and it was not until 1965 that the model town was finally “finished,” the last tree planted, the last floral border in place. A few things had not worked out. The central steam-heating system, for one, had failed. For its day it had been quite a daring idea. Central steam heating for downtown business districts had been installed successfully in the past, but such a system, involving liv
e steam piped underground for considerable distances, had never been tried before in a residential development. The steam-generating plant had been built on the banks of the Little Miami River, and had worked well for a number of years. It had even survived the Great Flood of January 1937, when the waters of the Ohio and the Little Miami reached record heights, knocking out at least one of the plant’s transformers and rising dangerously close to the boilers. Still, while the rest of Cincinnati shivered, Mariemont had heat. In the end, it was, of all things, termites that did the system in. The underground steam lines had been insulated in sleeves of wooden logs lashed together, and the termites had attacked the logs. To replace the logs with vitrified tile insulation was considered prohibitively expensive, and so Mariemont converted to city gas. As it did in any emergency, the Emery Memorial stepped in to help Mariemont residents with the costs.
But otherwise the little town was exactly as it had been in the plans John Nolan had brought to Mary Emery for her approval.
Except, of course, the plan itself had not really worked—for the simple reason that it had worked too well. The slums of the city were still where they were, and Mariemont had become a garden suburb of such quality that it had developed into one of Cincinnati’s choicest residential enclaves. The Tudor central square, the landscaped mall, the intimate little tree-lined drives and lanes, the arch-covered cul de sacs, the pretty street lamps and wrought-iron street signs, the distinctive bell tower, the lovely English-style church (Episcopal), the excellent schools and hospital, the well-built houses and apartments, and above all the continued benevolence of the Emery Memorial in maintaining the public areas, had proved a powerful magnet not to the poor, but to the successful and upwardly mobile—young executives moving up the corporate ladder at Procter & Gamble, doctors, lawyers, engineers, educators, entrepreneurs … and all white.
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