Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  On March 12, 1907, the club had finally opened, complete with guest rooms for visitors from out of town. Local papers were confused at the egalitarianism of an upper-crust organization that charged $100 for annual dues (around $2,000 today) and an initiation fee of $150. “Women of the highest social standing in New York are numbered among the club’s members, and with them are literary women, women of the stage, and business women. There is not one member of the type known in New York as ‘the club woman,’ ” noted one newspaper. The Colony Club was a place where even eligible middle-class working women could belong. Almost as notable, most of the club’s spaces had “no restrictions against smoking”—and it had a woman chef.

  Emerging from a city and an era both in flux, the Colony Club was inevitably denounced as immoral, elitist, and damaging to women’s health. It was unworthy of inhabiting a neighborhood of churches, clergymen complained. Would the women drink as well as smoke? The club would surely doom families, suddenly bereft of their guiding light, as women began aping their husbands and spending their evenings away from home. Civic opposition also arose: How could sensible women justify the luxury of such an innovation? The country was still struggling to help rebuild San Francisco in the wake of the earthquake, whose reverberations had followed by a year the Russo-Japanese War, pinching the American money supply. As if to emphasize the women’s supposed oblivion, the day after the Colony Club opened, there was a sudden collapse on Wall Street. One commentator noted wryly that, all in all, the timing was not good for “conspicuous luxury.”

  Because of her friends’ outrage at the opposition, Emily tried to care about the Colony Club debate. For the most part, however, she was single-minded and felt no desire for camaraderie these days. She sought the opposite: to be left alone, allowed to adhere to her now rigid daily writing routine. Initially, she woke at six-thirty, then ate toast and drank coffee in bed, served by her kitchen staff. After noticing how sleepy her servants were at that hour, she switched to a self-service routine, her tray set up the night before. She wrote in bed until noon, with a midmorning break to talk to her household help, and then she rose to visit friends or tend to business matters.

  When she was not writing, she accepted commissions from Bruce’s associates to construct models for their buildings. Her knowledge of furniture and fabrics was considered first-rate, well served by her keen sense of style and fashion. Often using paper cutouts for staircases, windows, and doorways, she didn’t hesitate to suggest structural changes to her employers, most of which they accepted. From such work, she received tremendous pleasure as well as a generous supplemental income. According to her later, probably unreliable memory, for the first few years following the divorce, her writing and decorating together earned her an average income of $2,000 a year (or $40,000 today), none of which went toward housing: she owned the Tuxedo Park house given her upon her marriage by Bruce and Josephine, as well as the Manhattan residence bequeathed her by her grandparents. Hers was no hardscrabble life. She was suffering in genteel poverty, enjoying every minute of her current independence. Her new life included her cheerful mother occasionally underwriting her daughter’s lifestyle with a surprise delivery of groceries or an unexpected dress and plumed hat she thought perfect for her daughter.

  From an interview Emily would give decades later, she was also supplementing her income during this period with “anonymous confession writing” and with jokes she sold to magazines. Though no record of them remains, we do know the way she tested them. Before she sent an item to a publisher, she first read it aloud to her mother. If Josephine laughed, the joke was no good. If she didn’t get it—or, just as bad, was “disapproving”—Emily knew “she had a winner. The system never failed.”

  Frequently letting her apartment and staying at Josephine’s home on West Tenth Street, Emily carefully compressed her household expenses, even leasing her Tuxedo cottage for a few months in the spring or autumn, when rentals went for top dollar. Reduced appearances in public and her decision to rent out the city apartment she’d inherited from the Lees suggest that, however luxurious her reduced circumstances must have appeared to many, she was taking seriously the mandate to support herself and her sons. When gently reminded by her friends that of course she should remarry, she shocked them by suggesting that she actually preferred being single.

  FINALLY, DURING THE SUMMER of 1908, Woven in the Tapestry was released. It was a very bad book and a brave one: Emily Price Post was willing to fail. An odd blend of the occult, the mysterious, and the philosophical, the novel, meant to be semihistorical, is a wobbly period piece that reflects Emily’s era. The early part of the century thrived on fantasy, whether the Nordic myths of Das Rheingold co-opting the Metropolitan Opera those days or the general intellectual preoccupation with magic. Five years later, Emily’s ex-brother-in-law A.V.Z. Post would write a bestselling novel, Diana Ardway; its Hudson Valley heroine’s “strange insight for the occult” was inspired by the Rhinebeck crowd whose parties Emily attended. Around the valley, traveling in their cars or on the train into New York City, partygoers claimed to have witnessed table turning at the séances sweeping the elite parlors of the Rhinebeck mansions. The phenomenon, noted jaded observers, was amazingly similar to an epidemic several years earlier.

  A small press, Moffat, Yard and Company, noted for its specialization in books on metaphysical subject matter, published Woven in the Tapestry. The novel had a second small printing soon after its modest publication, suggesting perhaps that at least some of the readers Emily had developed with her previous two books were willing to take a risk. They must have been bewildered, if not slack-jawed, as they read prose of outlandish artifice:

  “Why do you look so searchingly? What do you seek, Artaras?”

  “Only that which all men seek—which I am seeking ever! Taking all that I can make my own—whether it falls my way, or whether I must needs pursue.”

  The plot is entangled in windy language that no one, including the reviewers, seemed to understand. Emily intended the novel as an allegory of life versus art, but the plot is so underdeveloped and the language so overwrought that the reader remains unsure of the story’s meaning. The Times’ reviewer seems to have deliberately aped the novelist’s opaque style: “There are times of fairy and dream, to every young soul, entering upon life, feeling rather than knowing the mysteries before him, seeing the task of living through some medium, that lends it hues of purple and gold, seeing it unreal, not as it will be, but akin to it, as the shadow in a lake is akin to the rocky height it reflects.” By the end of the review, it still wasn’t clear if the journalist admired or detested the novel.

  Several weeks after Woven in the Tapestry was published, Emily was transported back to her less fantastic world with a wallop of a stomachache. She suffered through several days of severe abdominal pain—probably, according to later suggestions, endometriosis, a gynecological complication. Her mother urged her to rely upon the Christian Science doctrine of self-healing, which Josie herself still embraced wholeheartedly, in spite of its uselessness when her husband lay dying. But if Emily had ever been so inclined, Mark Twain’s open contempt for the religion’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, expressed in his recent visit to Tuxedo Park, had won Emily’s allegiance; he’d excoriated Eddy for what he considered her cruel concept of “healing.”

  Josephine’s insistence that Emily could control her “indigestion” with mental nostrums backfired when, a few months later, Emily paid her mother back for her lack of sympathy. When Josie herself started crying from the throbbing of an abscessed tooth, Emily tartly reminded her of Christian Science doctrine: “You have no pain . . . that is just error. Error of mortal mind.” The two women had never really understood each other, and now their alliance was based on little but familial love, which, luckily, they were finding was more than enough.

  CHAPTER 29

  EVER SINCE ALVA VANDERBILT’S VICTIMIZED DAUGHTER, CONSUELO, had wept openly as she walked down the aisle to wed her disagreeab
le but aristocratic groom, readers had gobbled up tales of American fortunes traded for Old World bloodlines. With some embarrassment at her own untoward curiosity, Emily herself, along with her cousin Sadie and her friend Minnie Coster, had lunched at Juliet Hamilton’s house in order to compare notes about the lavish wedding, the high point of the autumn social season in 1895. One of Consuelo’s bridesmaids, Edwin’s cousin, armed with firsthand backstage chitchat, was clearly the star for the day, and the other women tried, without success, to look nonchalant as she launched into her stories.

  Now, thirteen years later, Emily shrewdly realized that the time had come to capitalize on her familiarity with this highfalutin social world by writing a novel about exchanging European titles for American cash. She had been making good money writing articles on royal romances for Everybody’s Magazine, even winning the lucrative $5,000 first prize in the monthly’s short-story contest. Wisely, she spent much of 1908 expanding that story into The Title Market, which would prove her strongest novel yet. Some of its most memorable anecdotes were supplied by her friend Helen Gould, who happily repeated stories about the reconstruction her niece Anna had undergone at the hands of her husband, Count de Castellane: after the count had tactlessly revised his homely wife’s wardrobe and restyled her hair, he’d proceeded to shave the trail of black hair that grew up her back. Certainly Emily didn’t lack for material.

  Intent on searching out the choicest of such stories, Emily had begun treating herself to short trips abroad in addition to her annual pilgrimages to visit her titled relatives and friends. Visiting the best addresses, she eagerly collected tales about royal marriages and their aftermath, a subject the upper-class loved to chronicle. Even as the oldest European coffers were being emptied distressingly fast these days, Gilded Age fortunes with no titles to precede them were in great demand.

  Whether it was Monte Carlo, the Swiss Alps, or the Portuguese coast, Emily’s travels left her little time to feel sad. Even in Europe’s choicest resorts, there were problems more pressing than hers. It was impossible, for instance, for guests to mistake the despondency in residence at Minnie Coster’s French villa these days. Minnie’s husband, the investor William Coster, was torn over whether to move the family back to New York while the New York Stock Exchange investigated his brother’s suicide. Charles Coster, it seemed, might have killed himself after he was discovered to be embezzling investors’ funds. The haze of uncertainty that hung over Minnie was one with which Emily could sympathize: she had experience now.

  Such hard-won wisdom paid off handsomely, and Emily’s confidence grew. That autumn, her self-assurance clearly impressed those around her. The New York Times commented that even her wardrobe seemed to be making a new statement these days. The photograph titled “Mrs. E. M. Post in Pink” captures a secure young matron aware of her good looks. Still fresh and vivacious, she emits a new seductive certainty. To the Tuxedo Park horse show, she wore a “walking skirt and coat of dull rose-colored cloth” in a “modish” short length. The suit’s “plainness” subtly managed to emphasize the wearer’s figure. As always, her subtly stylish hat harmonized with her ensemble. Given the article’s topic—the dark and subdued colors predicted for this fall’s fashions—Emily, brightly and boldly dressed, was asserting her individuality. Her patrician good looks almost daunting, she felt she was in control again, just as she’d been before she’d married Edwin.

  THE FOLLOWING FEBRUARY, Everybody’s Magazine began its monthly serialization of The Title Market, the installments appearing from February through September 1909. At the end of the novel’s run, the New York Times helpfully recounted the plot, which trotted out the shopworn contest between American ingenuity (and innocence) and European sophistication (and decadence). What kind of life would a girl from Fifth Avenue discover if she married a duke or a prince from the old country? Was life in a drafty, decrepit castle better or worse than living more modestly in familiar surroundings?

  The novel is less tentative than her earlier work; her prose had gained texture that it lacked before. In spite of its tired subject, The Title Market is a credible romance in part because of the charming Old World stories her friends and relatives shared with her. The novel’s Italian husband, a charming, handsome gambler, was based on the spouse of a distant cousin of Bruce’s. Every time The Title Market’s Prince Sansevero needs more cash, he convinces his American wife that this time his will be the winning bet: “Just this once—you will help me, won’t you?” The wife inevitably yields to his charming, “boyish” entreaties, though in the ten years they’ve been married his schemes have almost depleted her inheritance. Her “boy-like” husband has also caused the woman to age prematurely: she has the worried “vertical lines” of a woman of “thirty-five.”

  Emily’s cousin Nina (the daughter of Josephine’s first cousin) was the model for the story’s eponymous ingénue. Relying upon her own new reality—paying the bills and keeping tabs on the family’s expenses—Emily portrayed a heroine learning to pinch pennies. In an exchange the author could not have written five years earlier, Nina worries aloud about her aunt’s lack of heating oil: “I don’t understand! You don’t have to think of such a thing as the expense of keeping warm, do you?” Nina asks, horrified.

  “Indeed we do,” the older expatriate (Prince Sansevero’s wife) answers. “Fuel is a very serious item.”

  The Title Market “is one of the most convincing stories of the season, and one that a reader cares to remember,” the Tribune pronounced. Nina comes to prefer the forthrightness and sturdy good character of the American man to the admittedly smoother manners of her European suitor. Emily probably modeled Nina’s choice, the gallant and trustworthy Jack, upon George Barr Baker, the magazine editor who had given her her start when he’d recommended publishing The Flight of a Moth. Her subsequent appointment of Baker, Uncle Frank’s longtime friend, as guardian of her sons testified to the high regard he elicited in Emily.

  She continued writing about marriage, a subject she felt she knew well. In April, while The Title Market was still in magazine serialization, Emily published a short article in Life magazine that must have startled even her closest friends. “On the Care of Husbands” gently satirized the woman who greeted her tired husband at the door with a list of complaints. Warning that such insensitivity was a sure way to lose a man, Emily implied by her writing that she herself, a very publicly divorced woman, was an expert on preserving one’s marriage; she, in other words, was the innocent party in her own household’s demise.

  That summer, partly to promote The Title Market’s forthcoming publication as a book, Emily wrote a long piece for the New York Journal, one of New York’s popular dailies, on real-life marriages of the sort her novel depicted. “ ‘Outrageous to Wed Titles’: Mrs. Post Blames Mothers,” the headline trumpeted in bold letters, though the article itself proved less provocative. Emily’s brisk tone betrayed her impatience with any but practical considerations. Should American girls marry titled foreigners? It all depended on the individual’s circumstances: a girl should weigh the options against her sense of self. In what follows, however, Emily made it clear which side she was on:

  If she prefers a man who will smooth out the path of life; who will always be alert to please; to serve in the lesser things; who has finesse, manner, an amazing understanding of the art of making women comfortable, then I say an American girl might marry, and marry happily, a foreigner. [But] if she prefers the man with the stalwart, reliant, almost brutal force of love; with no frills; with no understanding of what might be termed the art of life—rather one who has a contempt for it—then she is happier as the wife of an American.

  Even during the courtship, Emily pointed out, there were trade-offs no matter which model you chose. In America, for instance, men tended to ignore the older generation. In Europe, suitors virtually courted the parents of the girl they sought. A European sophisticate “devotes himself to the mother,” she wrote, deferring to her power over his marital prospects.<
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  Just as important were the dissimilar aftermaths of the weddings. American women, unlike their European counterparts, failed dismally as intellectual equals. Often they couldn’t even talk about detailed household finances with their husbands, let alone discuss international politics. Those few American women who took the time to learn the nuances of export and import tariffs gained the potential to exert a strong impact on the economy. Indirect influence, in other words, the same method Josephine had deployed to handle Bruce Price and the family finances, was the key to a married woman’s success.

  For a while, in 1909, as her novel’s installments were appearing monthly in Everybody’s Magazine, Emily was satisfied. Indeed, it seemed that everyone—at least everyone she and her mother knew—was talking about The Title Market. Even Josephine, while warning her daughter of the dangers of pride, must have been gratified to see neighbors reading a chapter from her daughter’s novel. Increased warmth between the two women following Emily’s decision to share her mother’s Manhattan apartment surfaced in their frequent mutual social appearances.

  And to Josephine’s great relief, Emily was beginning to understand how to market herself. Proud of her daughter’s strength, she had accepted her headstrong child’s success as a professional writer. At least Emily looked the way she should, a successful young woman back on the marriage market—while she wrote her books in the meantime. For now, Josephine enjoyed the chance to claim her own time with Emily, but she also believed her daughter far too young to become an old maid, even a formerly married one.

  Emily was indeed thinking about men these days, though not for the reasons Josie anticipated. One day, striving to sound nonchalant, the writer confided to her mother that she thought she was ready for the next step: she needed an agent.