Still standing, the co- op on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy- ninth Street retains its appeal today, largely because of Emily’s attention to detail. The layout of two apartments on each floor allowed residents to convert rooms into closets and add extra windows and dining rooms as they wished. An “average apartment” consisted of two to four bedrooms, two to three servants’ rooms, and three to five baths. Emily’s own apartment, 9B, was decorated with “chintzes and murals . . . and large oil portraits of her ancestors, odd carvings and a liberal spattering of good Chinese furniture.” Most impressively, it boasted a rather grand nineteen-by-twenty-five-foot living room. Emily would eventually own two units, her office situated on the ground floor while her home remained on the ninth.
Years after the building’s completion, she wrote that “the house which is to be your home—in short, your background—should unmistakably suggest you.” As architecture critic Christopher Gray has mused about Emily’s achievement: “Most people don’t have the energy to do their own brain surgery, their own haircutting, whatever, and they also don’t have the energy to build their own house, especially build their own apartment building.” Especially impressive is Emily’s emphasis on the less than glamorous details: developers usually design the “big splashy parlor, or library or dining room, to hell with the servants . . . [but Emily] knew that if the servants were unhappy, the household would be unhappy.”
Besides the obvious reward to Emily and her friends of living among acquaintances, the project also allowed Bruce Post to further his reputation. Emily hired her son along with Kenneth Murchison as the building’s architects, creators of the place she would call home for the rest of her life. What pleasure for Emily to partner her younger child with her father’s old colleague. Bruce was turning out to be more like his namesake than she had dared imagine, even when she had observed his artistic inclinations in childhood. Now that he didn’t have to compete with his older brother, her younger son was finding himself. And what he found proved more gratifying to his mother than even her own work. He was becoming the architect heir her father had always wanted.
PARADE, ONE OF FUNK AND WAGNALLS’S rare forays into fiction, was published on August 25, 1925. The early reviews were positive, but even the most favorable made the obvious connection between the novelist’s expertise with manners and her new book. If she didn’t realize it earlier, Emily must have sensed that from now on, her identity as the author of Etiquette would trump any critical consideration of her fiction.
In prepublication publicity, Funk and Wagnalls played heavily on the author’s own social position. “A novel by Emily Post, author of Etiquette, . . . said to be a story of life in the inner circles of the ‘400.’ Mrs. Post can be trusted to make her characters behave as society people should,” one ad crowed. The novel was “written by a woman who, through life- long association and personal observation, knows the characters she introduces, and is herself of their social environment.” Funk and Wagnalls promised that the plot would create a new guessing game, with readers arguing over which of the author’s acquaintances had inspired the characters. Some reviewers suggested smugly that the author wasn’t very polite herself if she had used people she knew personally to make her case for courtesy.
Bruce Price, architect, overseeing construction of Tuxedo Park, 1885–86.
Bruce Price, architect’s apprentice, Baltimore, 1872.
Emily in 1890, when she disappeared from society, probably due to illness.
Rocklawn, the Price family home in Tuxedo Park, 1891.
Edwin Post and his fiancée, Emily Price, early 1892.
Emily and Edwin Post, newlyweds, 1892.
Emily Post, society wife and mother, circa 1894.
Emily and Edwin Post’s modest cottage on Staten Island, circa 1893.
Bruce Jr. with his grandmother Caroline Post, Babylon, Long Island, 1897.
Bruce Jr. and Ned with their other grandmother, Josephine Price, on the stoop of one of their father’s Tuxedo Park houses, 1897.
Emily reading to her sons, one of her favorite maternal activities, circa 1898.
Edwin Post, his son Ned, and Bruce Price, Tuxedo Park, circa 1898.
Emily swimming with the boys in Babylon, circa 1899.
The Tuxedo Park train station, 1904. This was where Emily would wait for her husband to return from Wall Street every night.
Emily's first novel, based on her letters to her father from abroad, 1904.
Ned and Bruce, Tuxedo Park, circa 1904.
Emily and Edwin in Gramercy Park, New York City, setting out on their cross-country trip, spring 1915.
Tuxedo Park tennis court circa 1905.
The spring rains of 1915 made the Lincoln Highway impassable at times. Emily experienced frequent delays on her trip out west.
One of the twenty-seven maps Emily created for her trip to the Golden Gate Bridge in 1915.
Selling benefit tickets for the Architects'Emergency Relief Fund. From left: Mrs. Goodhue Livingston, Emily, Alfred E. Smith, and Emily’s favorite cousin, Sadie Price Turnure.
Emily (right) with Sadie Price Turnure, partici-pating in a shoe drive for Belgian children displaced by World War I.
The successful author, circa 1923.
Emily in her New York co-op, the apartments of which were all occupied by personal acquaintances, Christmas 1935.
Emily tutoring a young woman during World War II in the best way to hitch a ride.
Emily promoting Monsanto plastics, mid-1950s.
Emily with her great-grandson William Post, Jr., late 1940s.
Emily on CBS radio in 1932.
Emily and Ned in Edgartown, 1951.
Emily (left) with Mary Margaret McBride, the radio host, early 1950s.
Emily Post with “Suzy,” her Dictaphone, in her favorite position, early 1950s.
Parade took as its theme the exchange of one’s integrity for a place in society. Geraldine was a girl from a poor though honorable family, befriended by a cheerful, kind, but completely uneducated newly rich family called the Jimpsons, whom she accompanied to seaside resorts. Soon she met Oliver Townsend, a wealthy, cultured suitor. Using all her wiles, she convinced him to propose marriage, after which she deserted the naive Jimpsons.
Though the heroine tried hard to love her rich husband, she found his sexual ardor overwhelming. Facing her husband on her wedding night, she reflects, “Perhaps it was only her excited imagination that made her think he kissed . . . differently—with less restraint. And there swept into her mind the consciousness that there was no longer any barrier between them. She belonged to him, body and soul. In sudden panic she struggled against him. He released her at once.”
In her depiction of a woman, like herself, disdainful of sexual pleasures, Emily describes Geraldine as remote throughout her marriage, her lack of physical passion finally helping to drive her kindhearted husband to suicide when she flirts heavily with another man. Turning to her old beau, whom she had really loved but had discarded for the far richer Ollie, she is shocked to discover that he had encountered his own good fortune and now, as a millionaire, is engaged to marry the Jimpsons’ daughter.
Within ten years of Geraldine’s marriage, the Jimpsons had been thoroughly absorbed by Best Society, with even Mr. Jimpson braided into its political structures—all without compromising the Jimpsons’ native kindness. Mrs. Jimpson, whose gaudy ball gowns had originally earned her the nickname the “Circus Queen,” commands the moral center of the novel. She is a woman who never forgets the highest claims of ethics: a woman can go as far as she desires if she possesses charm that comes from within and as long as she has integrity—without integrity, not even charm counts.
The writer Katherine Anne Porter appreciated the novel: “The helter-skelter of the times breaks down all the barricades. The newly rich climbers come stampeding in, and Geraldine faces the great crisis of her life when she discovers that in her early climbing days she had snubbed all the wrong people.” T
hough she didn’t grasp its significance, Porter isolated a major realization that Emily had developed over the decade: “There is nothing to do but cultivate [these vulgar new rich],” the novel emphasized. When the Old Guard relented, they found “hearts of gold beating under these over decorated bosoms. Besides, they all learn quickly, and shortly they are scarcely distinguishable from the elect.”
IN THE WAKE of the attention following Parade’s publication, Emily gave several interviews unrelated to her novel, aimed at the women’s pages of newspapers and magazines. With the same voice of authority she used whatever the subject, she gamely discussed anything the journalist pursued, including who looked best in the new short hairstyles for women. The lengthy article she wrote for McCall’s, “They Who Are Fat Must Suffer to Be Thin,” proved disarmingly honest. No longer the wasp- waisted debutante, she acknowledged her own inability to look as up to date as she might wish. The current fashion of extreme thinness put people who liked to eat fatty foods—like Emily—at a distinct disadvantage, she lamented.
The “New Woman” of the mid- 1920s was “elegant and lean, tall and linear, alluring yet remote.” The olden days were easier for those who liked to eat: in 1892, a Smith College girl had written her parents that she was well on her way to meeting her goal to increase her 137 pounds to 150. Now, a different Smith student wrote her family that “I had the worst scare the other day.” She had weighed in at a shocking 1361/2 pounds, having weighed a feminine 119 pounds only the semester before.
Emily believed that her young readers’ plight was even worse than hers had been several decades earlier: “Never . . . has fat been held in such abhorrence. . . . Thinness to the point of emaciation, is the outline of fashion’s decree.” To women who expressed horror at the girdles used to achieve a wasp waist in the 1890s, she remarked that the strapping down of their chests to achieve the new boyish look was surely just as irritating.
The worst of Emily’s own weight struggle was her discovery that, as an older woman, she could eat no more than eight hundred calories a day if she wanted to become slim again. For the past thirty years, ever since Ned’s birth, she had tried intermittently to shed pounds. Anytime she had succeeded on a diet, she’d quickly gained the weight back. Clearly enjoying her subject, Emily couldn’t resist sharing some of her “wild diets” throughout the years. Once, after losing twenty- six pounds in seven weeks on nothing but milk and potatoes, she’d wound up unable to even look at a glass of milk again. When she found herself overweight once more, she began a stewed-fruit-and-vegetable diet, which upset her stomach violently. Her favorite diet actually caused her to gain weight: its protocol dictated eating as much of one isolated food as desired at every meal. Emily merrily ate her way through stacks of pancakes or chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, not really surprised when this regimen proved too good to be true.
Aside from the nearly constant presence of hunger one had to accept in order to maintain a sleek profile, another major problem with staying thin was the toll the effort took on one’s social life. No one liked being around dieters: not only were their menus restricted, but their usual expansive natures seemed temporarily corseted as well. “I can lose [weight] when I make up my mind that I must and I do lose periodically but I do NOT enjoy the process, nor have I ever found it possible to stay permanently under- weight and at the same time be contented, except morally and esthetically with my character and outline! . . . Dieting is NOT conducive to amiability, vitality or well being. It is entirely a triumph of vanity over mind!” She concluded by admitting that, at present, her only constant diet practice was substituting crystallose (saccharin) for sugar.
Emily’s ease in talking confidently about the trends of the day suggests the self- assurance of an only child, evident throughout her life. She had always observed others closely, and now she noted the drastically different shapes women were currently adopting today—in every way. By one estimate, during the 1920s nearly one- half of all girls had sexual intercourse before marriage. Equally significant, young men tended to lose their virginity with women of their own class instead of paying prostitutes. Even more radically, people were demanding that marriage be funded by love. Emily Post was quite taken with this new Jazz Age, and she was determined to keep her finger on its pulse whatever birthday she was celebrating.
IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1926, Emily gave an interview to Katharine Brooke Daly, an Albany newspaper reporter. Still living at the Gladstone while workers applied the finishing touches to her co- op, she dazzled the writer, from the casually open door Daly discovered upon her arrival to Emily’s “long, slender hands . . . [accompanied by] diamonds and rubies.” In her “fifties, though she scarcely looks it,” Mrs. Post is “distingué,” Daly observed, though, for the sake of the “men who will read this,” she noted, she is still “pretty in the tall patrician way.”
After being further introduced as the “social arbiter from Baltimore, New York [and] Tuxedo,” Emily commandeered the interview, expanding on her new (convoluted) personality theory, the emblem of which was the “enneagram,” a nine- pointed diametric symbol based on an ancient secret numbers system, to some extent connected to the Kabbalah. The enneagram’s current popularity began when American soldiers learned the quasi- spiritual system from their Russian counterparts during World War I. Back home, it fit in perfectly with the success- based how- to books of the age. More important to Emily, it spoke to a long-implied but mostly buried need she felt to locate something spiritually meaningful about life itself, whether exploring metaphysics with Mr. G. or table tapping with Julie Olin Benkard, or ruminating abstractly with the reporter from the Morning Star, investigating “things that mattered.”
Users of the enneagram believed that everyone was dominated by one of nine personality types, due to their inborn temperament and the child rearing by their parents. People were also primarily “outgiving” (good) or “intaking” (bad), Emily explained. Her recent novel Parade had used this dynamic to characterize two sisters, the selfish Geraldine and the generous Dora, who was “beloved by everyone.”
Warming up to her subject, she discussed how successful marriages thrived on wives who were themselves contented: a woman who complained as soon as her husband reached the door would surely soon find herself alone at night. Deliberately or not, her advice echoed that of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, whose newly revised book Happiness in Marriage claimed that it was up to women to “keep romance alive in spite of the influence of the prosaic demands of everyday life.” Growing expansive, Emily enthusiastically enjoined the young reporter, now utterly transfixed by the older woman, to reflect upon her own marriage from such angles.
After leaving the apartment, the writer paused, lauding the generous gaze Emily had allowed “into her ideas and feelings. . . . It is an outgiving door.” Emily was, of course, far too strategic for the exchange to have been as “natural” and uncontrived as the young reporter assumed; it was her skill as an “outgiver” that enabled her to seduce the woman so completely.
Discoursing on such an of- the- moment trend as enneagrams positioned Emily as someone who, no longer young, nonetheless stayed current. Despite doing her best to ignore chronological years as a determinant of attitude, the fifty- three- year- old Emily Post was feeling the gulf between her sons’ age group and her own more than she had anticipated. In an era fiercely focused on and celebrating the new, she had started thinking about growing old, and how to best exploit where she was now. That spring, McCall’s published her essay “The Young Woman of Forty,” a thoughtful but confused commentary promoting the youthfulness of the middle- aged matron, une femme d’un certain âge.
A “very curious thing” had occurred in the last few years, regarding a woman’s age, Emily opined. “Age values have changed—are changing. Today the sophisticates and the intolerants and the disillusioned are the young men and women in their early twenties, even in their teens. And the ingenuous, spontaneous qualities that once belonged to youth, are becomin
g the attributes of age. . . . The woman of forty, even of fifty,” she daringly continued, “is, in the big cities at all events, much younger in her viewpoint, and her interests and her sympathies than she was at thirty. But her daughter is not only older in every way than her mother WAS, she is older than her mother IS, today.”
The middle- aged crowd had rediscovered dancing, though Emily herself, she lamented, was not up to it. “At thirty- eight, I who danced was exceptional. Women of my age went to balls and sat as dowagers watching the season’s debutantes. Today, I am almost exceptional because I don’t dance. Being myself rather old- fashioned, I cannot yet contemplate with any sentiment resembling envy the actions of cavorting fifty year olds—perhaps in ten years I may join their ranks. Who knows?”
Around the same time that Emily’s article about forty- year- old women appeared, the New York Times “Books and Authors” column took note of Lillian Eichler’s forthcoming book, Well- Bred English, reminding readers that the author was broadcasting from WGBS every Monday afternoon from three- twenty to three- thirty, such a regular routine far more impressive than the brief appearances her competitor had made. To Emily’s dismay, Eichler was working hard to establish her radio presence. Because she worked in a major advertising firm, the younger woman was well positioned for such an industry.
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