Throughout the summer of 1901, the New York Times kept a highly public death watch at Lorillard’s Manhattan apartment, in the process daily confirming long-muttered gossip about the apparent schism within his marriage. This was high drama indeed, demoting the earlier rumors about Cora Potter and Elsie de Wolfe to mere child’s play. It had been public knowledge—among Tuxedo’s crowd, at least—that the Lorillards had not lived together for two years, a circumstance the Baltimore Sun would unceremoniously confirm in print. The Times, with the wealthy Lorillards closer at hand, elected to report the facts more discreetly.
Lorillard, his passion for horses unabated as he aged, had been attending Ascot when he fell ill. One of his innumerable paramours from a “fine family,” Mrs. Lillian Allien, accompanied him back on the Deutschland to New York, where Mrs. Allien’s brother met them aboard ship and helped the sick man debark and enter the hospital. Almost in the same breath that the Times solicitously reported Lorillard’s daily kidney deterioration, the reporter noted the conspicuous absence of the mortally ill man’s spouse: “Members of the dying man’s family have been almost constantly at the bedside, but so far as can be learned Mrs. Lorillard has not been to her husband’s apartments.” Lorillard was said to be alive at this point only through the heavy use of “stimulants” given him by the doctors, to ease the pain of his acute disease. Asked by reporters if there was any chance of his recovery, the doctor admitted that there was always a chance, “but in this case it is a very, very slim one.”
Whatever emotions Emily’s parents felt, they surely condemned the scandal surrounding the man’s final days. Previously private information had once again turned into fodder for the public. Given the closeness between Bruce Price and his patron, it is impossible that Pierre Lorillard’s extramarital liaisons had not, at the least, been implied if not discussed in the Price household. What Emily thought of the double standard—of Lorillard grandly commanding her as an adolescent to renounce the amateur stage (lest she be tainted like the bad women he was bedding)—is a matter of conjecture. Probably it was merely another of the contradictory messages of the age that she had absorbed unthinkingly. After all, Josephine, if only tacitly, had made her daughter realize that her beloved father had been forced to play with the big dogs at times, however distasteful their conduct, and that Edwin would have to do the same.
As rumors circulated, within a few weeks of Lorillard’s death the truth emerged: he had made the mistake of falling in love with the undeniably married Lilly Barne Allien. For fifteen years, it seemed, he and Mrs. Allien had been conducting their affair, which included her managing his best thoroughbreds for over a decade. Even worse, Lorillard had bequeathed her a sizable portion of his fortune, including the racetracks and the horses for which he was now famous. He left a total of $4 million (approximately $40 million today), granting his estranged wife a yearly annuity of a mere $50,000.
As the Times unearthed the details of the founder’s private life, the overflow of information must have caused Emily to reconsider some of the facile assumptions she’d inherited. She could not deny, however munificent he had been to her own family, that Pierre Lorillard had never really cared about anything but his own pleasure. Now his wife was unwilling to let him go to his grave without payback. Instead of acting the part of a long-suffering Victorian wife, Mrs. Lorillard, long a companion of Emily and her mother’s, sought revenge, in public and on her own schedule, and she found many ways to show her marital disregard, throwing parties and wearing flamboyant new clothes.
The papers were agog over the court battle, which would drag on for years, while Mrs. Lorillard pointedly set about entertaining socially even before twenty-four hours of mourning had passed. Two of her daughters, Mrs. T. Suffern (Maud) Tailer and Mrs. William (Emily) Kent, took their father’s side. They remained resolute throughout the winter, even missing Tuxedo’s holiday ball. For months everyone watched the comic tragedy play out, as the Times noted that the young matrons remained in mourning, while “Mrs. Pierre Lorillard wore no mourning whatever.” Mrs. Allien remarried a few years later, taking with her to the marriage a grand inheritance from her benefactor.
By the end of the perfervid summer of 1901, Emily began to think about a second respite abroad. Few wealthy New Yorkers had stayed in the city the past few months if they had any other options. The heavy air bearing down on the streets, shimmering with heat, once again proved fatal: a hot spell from June 28 to July 4 had killed more than seven hundred people and one thousand horses in the city alone, leaving carcasses piled high and smells that gagged its citizens.
At Tuxedo Park, such misery was largely bypassed; extremes of temperature had never been its problem. Still, most of Emily’s friends were in Europe this summer; in July, Tuxedo was already hot, or at least muggy, no matter what Josie insisted. So in August, Emily debarked, the two children and Melanie, the children’s sweet French nanny, in tow once more. After she again deposited the boys at Melanie’s family farm in Normandy, Emily, newly on her own, set out to visit friends.
Near Paris, she stayed for several weeks at a distant relative’s country estate, where a lavish weekend was planned for twelve guests. With amused irony, Emily reported it all to her father, writing lengthy letters home about the daily minutiae of the visitors’ lives, including her own. The closet games of hide-and-seek lent themselves admirably to intrigue by bored spouses, she commented dryly, affecting for Bruce’s sake a tolerant but disengaged authorial voice.
Emily especially enjoyed reporting on the silly maneuverings of any guest who put on airs. She particularly disliked the way “Mrs. B-F” (as she labeled her fellow houseguest) kept trying to pry information from Emily about “a number of people you and I know and some of whom we like very much.” Since Emily despised scandalmongering, she deeply resented the ways the overbearing Mrs. B-F was trying “to ferret out things I might possibly know” regarding others’ private lives. As if reminding her father how much she and he were alike, Emily emphasized that she was willing to offend the woman rather than answer her questions, leaving Mrs. B-F to flounce away indignantly. The stage was thereby set for Emily to extend herself on behalf of a well-meaning but unsophisticated Chicago ingénue whom Mrs. B-F treated poorly.
The young houseguest, Elaine, was the daughter of a millionaire butcher. She had recently married a “dapper little Baron” who seemed, Emily observed, to adore his wife. Several days into the house party, after repeated haughty treatment at the hands of several of the female guests, Elaine, the “Chicago whirlwind,” knocked on Emily’s bedroom door just as she was about to put out the light. Emily started to dismiss her, apologetically but somewhat coldly. To her great surprise, the girl’s eyes teared up. “I was thoroughly ashamed of my rudeness and anxious to make amends,” Emily wrote to Bruce. The girl had approached Emily in hopes that the older woman, whose taste she greatly admired and whose friendliness had encouraged her, would teach her society manners. She was a rube, Elaine admitted, and she didn’t know what to do about it. Worst of all, she was picking up signals that her husband was becoming intrigued with a few of the more sophisticated lady guests.
Emily quickly leapt at the chance to help the deserving young wife while putting an arrogant older woman in her place. She agreed with Elaine, who carefully explained: “We may not be old nobility in Chicago, but where I come from, a woman loves her husband and sticks to him. Or she gets a divorce. But here . . . where do you draw the line between these women and the demi-monde?”
Setting to work immediately, even though it was bedtime, Emily experimented with Elaine’s hair, then pulled “geegaws” off her extravagantly decorated evening dress, explaining that overloading made the girl look twenty years older and forty pounds heavier. Upon discovering that Emily designed her own clothes, Elaine was shocked, saying that she thought her new friend was rich. Laughing, Emily said that she liked creating the patterns she then sent to the couturiers; she’d be happy, she offered, to do the same for Elaine. It wasn’t mo
ney that counted as much as taste.
The following evening, when the girl from Chicago made her entrance—at Emily’s instruction, she was the last to arrive to dinner—everyone gasped. Elaine looked like a “Greek goddess,” her new confidence as much as her appearance guaranteeing the return of her husband’s attention.
Though she was apparently always sexually faithful to Edwin, Emily flirted her way across France during this particular trip, at times actually fantasizing her husband’s demise. She was just starting out upon what she felt to be a new life, she would later remember. Perhaps sensing an incipient rebellion, Edwin decided to call her back home. In a bizarre conspiracy with his mother, he dictated an overseas cable that Caroline sent to Emily, stating that her husband was gravely ill. She must get home as soon as possible. Quickly gathering the children, Emily returned at once, only to find a beaming, sunburned husband greeting her at the Hoboken pier, eager to show her his new purchase: not the sloop or cutter he’d tried to convince himself to settle for but a 129-foot screw schooner, a popular hybrid boat rigged with fore-and-aft sails on two or more masts, its screw propeller classifying the vessel as a steam yacht. He had planned a surprise, he claimed, worth tricking her back to New York however he could. The family was going to enter the Newport race in just a few days with their very own boat, he announced. The Taro could easily accommodate a large crew along with the four Posts and their friends.
Emily was furious. In addition to his thoughtless deceit, buying a yacht was far too significant a decision for one spouse to make without discussing it first with the other. After his wife calmed down, Edwin persuaded her of the family fun the boat would provide, and she reluctantly agreed to participate in the upcoming gala in Newport that would await them at the end of the race.
In confirmation of her fears, however, lurching from side to side made her so seasick that she missed the onshore celebration when they arrived. Though the Taro ’s crew of eight seamen, an engineer, two stewards, and a cook, ensured a well-run household at sea, she insisted that one of their servants take her home by car, leaving her sons delighted to have their father all to themselves.
What Edwin considered her recalcitrance further earned his disapproval, his sour reaction buttressed by earlier disappointing discoveries about his wife. The feminine looks he had initially regarded as enigmatic now seemed evasive or, worse, saturnine. Only during the summers at Newport or Bar Harbor, when women other than his wife entertained Edwin, could he fully indulge his love of the water alongside guests who shared his passion. He had been ambivalent about his desire for her company when he took to the seas, and now this maiden trip on his new yacht convinced him that he would do better without his wife on board.
That summer, Edwin nonetheless meant to show off his newest toy, to parlay its purchase into admiration from others, including his in-laws. A month after Pierre Lorillard’s death, Bruce and Josephine took a weeklong yachting cruise “as guests of Mr. Edwin Main Post on L.I. Sound and at Newport.” Emily, in contrast, almost immediately began defining herself as a “yacht-widow,” comparing her life with that of women who were “golf-widows.” She was hardly alone. Alva Vanderbilt didn’t dislike the water nearly as much as she detested her husband, but the couple’s tacit agreement that she hated the sea allowed William an assortment of onboard female entertainment while Alva was vouchsafed the occasional escape from a man she abhorred.
If not so public, the Posts’ alienation had become obvious at least to their older son. Ned later recalled this period as the time he first realized, though only eight years old, that his parents led separate lives except for public entertaining. “Many husbands and wives did this, [my mother] knew,” Emily’s firstborn would reflect years later. But not many women were as sure of themselves as Emily Price Post, and this complete failure at domestic happiness shocked her.
THE 1901 FALL EXTRAVAGANZA planned for Tuxedo Park, dubbed “the best horse show Tuxedo has ever had,” smelled of Mrs. Lorillard’s revenge. Guests and residents returned to an autumn season at the park that promised to be better than ever—as if its founder’s absence made no difference to anyone. The implication was clear: the lavishly and tastelessly detailed demise a few months earlier of Pierre Lorillard had barely caused a pause, instead inspiring residents to hold up their heads even higher. According to the press, Tuxedo, newly “full of life . . . is gayer this autumn than usual,” with the current season certain to be well patronized, especially by the younger set.
The guest rooms were booked through the season, and park members with their own cottages were already in residence. Emily’s crowd was once again front and center, with cousin Sadie close at hand. Alice Post, Emily’s favorite of Edwin’s stable of cousins, frequented the park that fall. The George St. Georges, for many years frequent visitors during the season, now had their own place, where their dinner parties inevitably included Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Main Post. The Price Colliers had arrived, their presence a particular pleasure to Emily. She and Katharine Collier would grow even more intimate in years to come as marriage linked Emily’s progeny with those of the Colliers and St. Georges.
It’s a good thing that Emily had the Tuxedo community to keep her distracted that fall. In November, the simmering household tensions she had intuited ever since early summer suddenly began to make sense. She had already read the details in the New York Times: a “large proportion of the stockholders of the General Carriage Company of New Jersey” had requested Edwin M. Post and several other partial owners to present a plan of reorganization. Still, Emily never pushed Edwin about what he called the minutiae of his various deals. At least now she could assign her husband’s prolonged absences to the demands of working extra hours. Perhaps he really was busy trying to preserve their assets. Perhaps this latest failure placated rather than vexed her, allowing her to fantasize real, desperate late-night business meetings in place of the love nest that, even before Lorillard’s death, she’d realized was the mainstay of many successful businessmen.
From her subsequent writing, it is clear that by this time Emily had privately acknowledged that she and her husband were disastrously ill-matched. They had no intimate or truly companionate life together. Still, she continued to hope. Instead, as even their young son realized, over the coming months they would set themselves free, with circumspection, to go their own ways. Emily would care for the children, and, as long as Edwin kept his family out of harm’s way, her husband could discreetly take lovers. It never occurred to either of them that Emily might do the same.
CHAPTER 23
WHILE EDWIN ATTENDED POST-CHRISTMAS PARTIES IN MANHATTAN, Emily and their children traveled to Baltimore to celebrate the New Year. In mid-January 1902 she went to a Monday night German, the first she’d attended in a long time. Other than one local Baltimore debutante, only Emily was mentioned by name: among the assembly, the New York Times noted, was “Mrs. Edwin Post of New York, formerly Miss Price of Baltimore, a prominent out-of-town guest. She . . . was magnificently gowned, wearing an exquisite creation of pale pink satin and duchess lace, with diamond and pearl ornaments.” Once again, at age twenty-nine, she was the belle of the ball, a conquering heroine who had held captive not only New York City but ports south as well.
Emily’s respite from domestic worry was brief. When she returned home, even she realized that her preternaturally agile husband couldn’t bargain his way out of the mess he’d made this time. Coasting on his past success, Edwin had failed to factor in the radical expansion and contraction of the market; he had made the fatal mistake of neophytes and believed himself invulnerable to its flux. In spite of a few months of scurrying for solutions—investing here, selling short there—he was forced out of the fast-moving Thomas and Post company before the summer was over. On August 10, 1902, the Times politely announced his resignation, ostensibly so that Thomas could bring in a relative but clearly the result of some financial disaster instead. Mr. Post, who “retire[d] from the firm,” was “well known from the thirteen or
more clubs he now belonged to,” the Times noted, adding, “The clubs do a very large Wall Street business, and a man with influential club backing is a good plum.” The newspaper seemed to be rooting for Edwin Post as he announced that he was moving to a new job: “Mr. Post enters another firm. He married the daughter of Bruce Price, the architect.”
Not even Tuxedo Park offered much bucolic compensation during this tense period for Emily. Rather than fawning over the life of country squires, the New York Times recounted the scandalous, scabrous details of the troubled marriage between Pierre Lorillard’s youngest child and her husband, a tabloid-worthy saga of desertion, parental kidnapping of their only child, and the loss of a magnificent diamond ring. The Times explained that “last winter at Tuxedo it was apparent that they intended to separate . . . and there was a great deal of general gossip about the matter.” It seemed as if the park was starting to lose its luster.
By September things had settled down in Tuxedo, and the newspapers resumed their usual accounts of popular dinners for the well-connected, which were frequently hosted by the Posts. Edwin went about, as Josephine stressed to her daughter was appropriate, making their living. Reorganizing his finances that fall, however, he depleted Emily’s inheritance from Catharine Lorillard Wolfe to form Post & Co. The company agreement required Edwin, as majority holder, to contribute $200,000 of his own money (approximately $2 million in today’s value), toward which his seat on the stock exchange would count for $75,000. Three other partners would supply the remaining $300,000 that the new company required.
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