Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  A novice writer, Emily is often obviously present in the text, using her own experiences too visibly as grist for her story. The Flight of a Moth records (at times literally) the increasing marital distance Emily was enduring just as she needed her husband more than ever. While she’d written her first drafts, her father had lain dying. It was not, she was telling Edwin through her text, fashionable European counts who should arouse his jealousy. They were good for flirtations. But for life, for love, she wanted a Lord Bobby, and she was throwing down her ladylike gauntlet as hard as she dared.

  That October, the New York Times took its first notice of Emily Post not directly connected with her social world, in an article titled “Recent Fiction: Emily Post’s Study of the Restless American Woman.” The reviewer, admitting that there had been a run of the fictional-letters genre of late, noted that occasionally something rose to the top of the overstacked heap and declared Emily’s version a contender. Her novel was “lively and thoughtful, more than the spate of similarly structured novels” by virtue of its “wit, grace, and liveliness of style” and, the journalist added, the author’s firsthand knowledge of society.

  Even as the reviews appeared for The Flight of a Moth, Emily was plotting her next novel, which she would title Purple and Fine Linen. The positive press and decent sales figures for The Flight of a Moth ensured her respected publisher’s continued commitment to its author. As she added to the daily hours she spent writing, her friends began to worry aloud. “You will be careful, won’t you? . . . It would be a great pity if you became Bohemian. It is not your style, my dear,” Juliet Morgan Hamilton gently counseled. As Emily worked at becoming a writer, she made fewer appearances in the social pages. Her friends, of course, proved right: her writing cut into what had been called her free time. In November the Times further validated her plan for a career. “Magazines for 1905: Some of the Plans of the Important American Monthlies for the Coming Year” listed under Ainslee’s “clever” fiction, including “novelettes” from, among others, Ralph H. Barbour, Elizabeth Duer, and Emily Post.

  Emily’s older son recalls a significant flirtation his mother engaged in at this time. A temporary lodger at Tuxedo Park (carefully coded in Ned’s memoir as “Mr. G.”) started spending afternoons at their house, especially when Edwin wasn’t home. The mysterious Mr. G. used his knowledge of the period’s so-called spiritualist writers, steeped in a false medievalism, to woo Emily. Mr. G. begged her to be his lady and to listen to him recite poetry daily—after he had read aloud yet another scene from Joyzelle, Maeterlinck’s drama about love triumphant first produced in Paris and Brussels in 1903. Joyzelle relied on signs to represent ideas, though few of his audience were sure what their correspondence was. Emily encouraged Mr. G. to tutor her on the arcane; Maeterlinck, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature a few years later, was the name on the literati’s lips those days, and it felt good to be in the know.

  She saw herself as an autodidact, the model of which she would create in Purple and Fine Linen. Mr. G.’s literary gruel, however, was too thin for Emily’s taste. As she gradually gained confidence in her own powers of perception, she explained to her dismayed, ethereal tutor that she found bestselling F. Hopkinson Smith’s writing far more credible than the “wispy Princesses and knights-at-arms alone and palely loitering.” Such people did not exist, she insisted, and even fantasy had to be rooted in reality to keep her attention.

  Emily wrote Purple and Fine Linen while her own marriage was in limbo. Her husband, flouting minimal protocol, hardly bothered to show up at Tuxedo Park anymore, much to the writer’s embarrassment. Ned and Bruce observed their mother dressed beautifully for the evening, hopefully taking the carriage to the train station, then returning by herself, night after night, head still held high. “Jealousy is the suspicion of one’s own inferiority,” her narrator would claim in Purple and Fine Linen. Perhaps she planned to effect Edwin’s spousal resurrection through her text. In part, she was writing to save her marriage. If she rewrote and revised often enough, she knew she could make it all come out right.

  BUT IN EMILY’S real world, she didn’t get to choose the ending. Her friends understood the type of marriage she had settled into, or settled for. Tuxedo Park held its first round of winter parties, and at one of the few Edwin bothered to attend, he talked to the Times social reporter about his business ventures. Cocky as ever, he explained that he was busy reorganizing a new firm, an “alliance with some large financial interests.” In fact, nothing was in the works.

  Whether from shame, or job pressures, or romantic liaisons elsewhere, Edwin increasingly missed important social functions where the husband was expected. He completely ignored the large weekend crowd of well-known society people who showed up for the season’s inaugural weekend of Tuxedo’s parties, luncheons, and dinners. The gala honoring England’s Duke of Newcastle, which included the Grenville Kanes and the Cooper Hewitts, was “led off by Mrs. Edwin Post.” Edwin was not present. But when a “special dinner” was given at the clubhouse, with a “bridge whist tournament” afterward, both Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Post participated, though Emily left early.

  Cards were ideal for Edwin’s personality; anything that required strategy excited him. Unlike his wife, who disliked lingering over a task, Edwin appreciated the art of waiting out one’s opponent. After all, a hunter had to be patient. Edwin Post was a man of extremes: he could linger as long as a duck dared him, or he could enter a bid in a heartbeat and lose a million dollars almost as fast. His two published short pieces, his hunting chronicle in Field and Stream and his fiction a few years later in the prestigious Smart Set, showcase his intelligence and his fine sense of style, a benefit of his having had his already strong mind further educated at Columbia. But while he respected sophisticated, knowledgeable men, women confounded him. On the one hand, he appreciated those who could transcend the limits society had levied on them. Yet he also assumed that his wife would devote her energies to being his helpmate and the mother of his children, and that she would define herself completely in those terms.

  Emily’s husband was clearly dissatisfied with his marriage. The trail of elegant actresses he would pursue for years suggests that he really had valued the Emily Price he thought he was marrying, the theatrical woman of the amateur stage, the dauntless banjo player who commanded the limelight in her own right. Emily, neglecting her own sensibilities while trying to emulate Josephine’s support of Bruce, had instead deeply disappointed her husband, who felt betrayed. Edwin had counted on having it all: the usefulness of a Josephine but the glamour of the stage that his bride had promised. He had played straight from the beginning, as he saw it, but his wife had shifted the ground under him. The reality was less dramatic: Emily had found such a complicated, contradictory role beyond even her prodigious abilities.

  CHAPTER 25

  AT MIDNIGHT ON JANUARY 1, 1905, AN EPOCHAL DISPLAY OF fireworks illuminated midtown Manhattan’s first skyscraper, the thirty-two- (or, depending upon the person counting, twenty-five-) story Times Tower at One Times Square. The year that Emily became a published author ended with the modern city emerging during that celebration at Times Square. At Seventh Avenue and Broadway, the building embodied the paradox of New York City: like the Price family, the tower looked forward and back at the same time, its awkward Beaux Arts façade defining its aesthetic as much as its steel-frame construction, electric lights, and fast elevators.

  It would be another ten years before New York’s grip on the nation’s cities was secure. But even now, with horns blasting and ragtime blaring, crowds accustomed to commemorating the New Year at Trinity Church capitulated noisily to the celebration at Times Square. With the showy fireworks, New Yorkers’ self-contained, cloistered little island magnanimously reached out to the entire world, a world well represented here, with subgroups ranging from the Dutch to the Irish to the French to the German; it seemed possible to find someone from every nation on earth in this city. Such an assortment of several thousand
unrelated families couldn’t possibly trace their roots to society’s idealized, largely fantasized homogeneous beginnings. Instead, they braided together an innovative social order, spawned by a bigger and better New York that seemed to grow daily in impossible new directions.

  The old order didn’t stand a chance. Later in 1905, Alva Vanderbilt, her divorce final, would memorably declare herself an activist when she flouted marriage to William. “I was the first” she claimed, proud of “show[ing] . . . the way” to society women. Though Josephine scoffed at women campaigning for equal rights for her sex, she admired Alva’s strength, even if she abhorred her bullying methods. Josie went her own way, quietly counseling her daughter to move with the times even as she held steady to the old. In their dissimilar conduct, both Josephine and Alva nonetheless bore the marks of strong self-determination.

  Josie, after all, came from a family of forceful and eccentrically creative women. Her mother, for whom Emily was named, had resolved to flee the boredom she’d suffered since her husband, Washington Lee, had died. “She learned to ride a bicycle at 80,” Emily would recount proudly. Then, when she was eighty-six, she bought a letter of credit and booked herself a ship berth. “Goodbye, I’m off to Europe,” she wrote to her son.

  Not everyone of Emily’s class welcomed the new freedoms of the age. Much of the Old Guard seemed moody, even moribund. For many, the city’s quilt of cultures evoked real anxiety. Wealthy newcomers encroached upon the old good neighborhoods, whose protective barriers were crumbling. Even society’s well-established haunts were being forced to compete against newcomers. Replacing Delmonico’s as the modish place to go, Sherry’s Hotel paneled its ballroom doors with mirrors, flattering the dancers as well as such visiting celebrities as Sarah Bernhardt. The upper-class looked to the perpetuation of their own bloodlines for security, in events such as the Hyde Park–Oyster Bay marriage merger of the Roosevelts, which reassuringly supported the nation’s founding myths. Emily’s Tuxedo Park friends the Price Colliers and Katharine’s son Warren Delano Robbins proudly attended the house wedding of their nephew and cousin Franklin to their other cousin Eleanor.

  Though he half listened to the detailed accounts of the dynastic merger that the Roosevelt nuptials promised, Edwin found the talk boring. He saw himself as a new son of an old family, eager, unlike society’s dinosaurs, to seize the moment, to play one opportunity off another. Yet however modern he believed himself to be, it was on his wife’s inheritance, first from Catharine Wolfe, and now with the nominal bequeathal from Bruce Price, that Edwin brokered yet another shaky deal and dallied with an ever more beautiful mistress.

  And then he grew careless and ruined everything. In the spring of 1905, Edwin returned from a pleasure trip only to be confronted by a comely actress he had already forgotten. The young woman had been waiting patiently for him in their lovers’ cottage, misunderstanding the finality of their last good-bye. Within days of being scorned, she had contacted the gossip broadside Town Topics.

  EDWIN HAD INTENDED to spend much of that spring and summer out on the Great South Bay, putting in the obligatory family appearance now and then. On May 17, he had even asked Emily’s good-natured mother—whom he continued to enjoy far more than her daughter—to join the couple at the wedding of a mutual acquaintance; the reception was sure to be full of alcohol and male bonding, since the couple’s always amusing, buoyant friends Phoenix Ingraham and Fred Kernochan were attending as well. It was going to be a superior season, he could tell: hot and humid, just the way he liked it—and it was officially still spring.

  When he was approached by one of Colonel William D’Alton Mann’s employees that inglorious summer, Edwin already knew the extortion scheme the publisher boldly exacted, using the pages of his weekly tabloid, Town Topics, more widely read than any other paper in town. Only a few of the bravest, including Edwin’s high-living ex-partner E. R. Thomas, had ever dared defy the colonel, who looked like Santa Claus but never failed to demand his pound of flesh. Edwin had envied Thomas, who didn’t care if Town Topics talked about his love affairs or not. More recently he had experienced a guilty pleasure when word had circulated about the less than dignified resolution of Thomas’s latest contretemps. Even as the blustering stockbroker had noisily flouted the colonel, his bride was quietly paying up to avoid suffering public humiliation. Colonel Mann got his claws into the Thomas bank account after all.

  So on June 24, when Edwin Post was called and asked to meet with a representative of the “Society Editors’ Association,” a group vaguely associated with Colonel Mann and Town Topics, he knew what was coming next. Sure enough, the following day, he received a visit from a Charles H. Ahle, who promptly informed him to pay up or be the subject of a soon-to-be-published article about Edwin’s adulterous habits. Ahle’s bosses were willing to suppress this scurrilous gossip if the stockbroker contributed to a cause they designated—their (mythical) vanity project about the rich and famous.

  If Edwin had really wanted to save his marriage, he could have easily borrowed the $500 (one of Mann’s more modest levies). Emily need never have known about the affair; the colonel was a man of his word—you’d have to give him that. And appearances, Edwin knew, mattered greatly to his wife. Almost as if writing a warning to her husband, a year earlier she had assigned her heroine in Flight of a Moth these words: “The eleventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not be found out,’ is despicable but nevertheless it is the one thing you cannot get away from.” Or he might have come clean with Emily, his brave decision so impressing her, he could imagine, that in spite of her insistance on discretion she would be willing to give him a second chance. He would stop playing the field and they could bring down Town Topics together. Either way, the newspaper would be unable to stake any further claim to his marriage—as long as he gave up the extramarital liaisons.

  These are things he could have done.

  But before Edwin even told Emily, he had already decided: he would set up a sting, becoming a hero in the process. The decision made, he visited the assistant district attorney to put things in motion, and only then did he send word to his wife, “warning her that some attempt might be made to approach her with a view to blackmail.” He would explain everything later, he said. In other words, Ned Post’s subsequent version notwithstanding, Edwin had determined to go public by the time he confessed to his wife.

  AT THREE-FIFTEEN P.M. on July 10, 1905, the Holland House, on Thirtieth Street and Fifth Avenue, a restaurant and bar “renown[ed] for its aristocratic tone,” would cater to less than elegant purposes. Edwin would remember the thunderstorms and the mugginess of the air as he waited in the second-floor lavatory of the ten-story white stone building. From later exhaustive court testimony, we know he was rehearsing his part even as Ahle swaggered in. A policeman had been planted in the toilet stall, and Edwin sought to entrap Ahle into admitting that the “payment” he demanded was, in fact, a bribe. At first, the man failed to take the bait. Then, all at once, Colonel Mann’s tired underling grew envious of this expensively dressed pretty boy strutting in the men’s room. The minion bragged that such an insignificant stockbroker as Post, after all, was just a minnow in the sea of far larger fish his boss routinely snagged. At that, the policeman threw open the door. In what was surely one of the least attractive locations assigned to a high-society rendezvous, Edwin had caught his man.

  The Times publicized the sting, and cheers greeted Edwin as he strolled onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. “Go for them, Post, my boy,” one member shouted. “Don’t let the blackmailing scamps get away. We are with you, for we’ve all been through that mill ourselves.” The men rose as one, as Edwin received the standing ovation that Emily herself had long coveted. For one day, at least, Edwin Main Post was a hero, his sexual profligacy as much as his courage in bringing down Colonel Mann honored by implication. The almost cheerful defiance he would exhibit on the witness stand proved him in great form. In contrast, Emily was humiliated. Known among both her friends and
jealous enemies as a proud woman, she had been felled in front of the entire world—and the particular world that mattered to her. The New York Times would replay the saga throughout the sizzling summer. The unbearable July heat was just beginning when the Posts were splashed across the front pages of all the city’s newspapers.

  CHAPTER 26

  IF EDWIN HAD BLITHELY TRICKED EMILY INTO ABBREVIATING HER trip abroad several years earlier, it was with real trepidation that he forced her to cut short her vacation this time. When the Town Topics imbroglio occurred, she was already at Camp Uncas, J. P. Morgan’s resort in the Adirondacks, where the idea of “roughing it” was quite to her taste. Like most other guests, she had traveled to the “camp” in a private railroad car. Once there, she ate food prepared by French chefs, with rustic, handcrafted birch-bark butter plates one of the few concessions to the setting. Even Sigmund Freud, when vacationing at the site, was dumbstruck at the “incongruous luxury in the wilderness.” The camp in the woods overwhelmed him: “Of everything I have experienced in America,” he said, “this is probably the strangest.”

  Emily, however, had no time to form an opinion. She was at Camp Uncas for only a few days before her presence was urgently required back home.

  As always, she came through. Edwin was right: he could count on her. This time, after what must have been a very delicate negotiation on the sinner’s part, the couple agreed to work together to put blackmailers such as Colonel Mann in their place. Nothing, however, could alter the fact that Edwin had broken their unspoken connubial contract, forcing his wife’s hand, while brilliantly appearing a man of principle in the process as he helped rout the scourge of high-society men. Given who she was, Emily had little choice but to support him publicly, and he knew that.