The numbers game was particularly vexing in the case of Etiquette, because Funk and Wagnalls’s incomplete reporting had created an illogically static number—around one million—which writers had begun using to convey its popularity as early as the mid- 1920s. Even after subsequent revisions had sold well, the national press and Funk and Wagnalls continued to use the same fixed figure—regardless of the intervening years.
HOWEVER CROWDED HER WORKDAYS had become, Emily always made room for promoting her books. That spring, partly as her effort to prop up sales of a second edition of The Personality of a House, she talked to the American Home about her gardening experiences. In a move that anticipated today’s product placement, Emily’s article contained a cordoned- off ad for the new General Electric refrigerators, capitalizing on GE’s prominent sponsorship of Emily’s current radio appearances. “My Gay Little Garden” is an informal reminiscence of the novice gardener’s experiences over the previous five or six years, her loyal assistant John at her side, a faithful “young man” who really wasn’t “anything of a gardener.” Though she probably didn’t even acknowledge the truth to herself, the faithful young man had filled in for her dead son, allowing Emily to heal as she incorporated nature’s reassuring rhythms into her own. For her present audience, she emphasized the learning curve both she and John had confronted as they studied how to “to plant and pluck and fertilize.”
Rehearsing aloud the pleasures awaiting her, Emily decided to leave early for Martha’s Vineyard. But just before she departed, her old friend Phoenix Ingraham died of a heart attack, at his side the woman he had finally married after Emily refused to take his courtship seriously. A year after Etiquette was published, Phoenix had been elected to the New York Supreme Court, following the path that his father and grandfather, both judges, had established before him. Corpulent and pleasure-loving to the end, Emily’s longtime ally was eulogized at society’s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, home of the crusading minister and Bruce Price’s bête noire, Reverend Parkhurst, many years before. Accompanied by a store of bittersweet memories, Emily walked to the service from her apartment on East Seventy- ninth Street.
She arrived in Edgartown eager to escape from the overload of bad news that seemed her lot these days. She certainly had no desire to read more about the dust storms pummeling the plains, especially since, much to her surprise, she had now confronted their horrors firsthand. On May 11, a dust cloud had dumped dirt over Manhattan for five hours straight, obscuring even the Statue of Liberty. On the Vineyard, she determined to seek out city papers only once or twice a week, her commitment to tuning out an overload of news making it likely that she missed the snide early summer reference to her in the Washington Post.
Ominous in its tinge of condescension, the tone anticipated the amused tolerance younger reporters would soon begin to exhibit. “Devoted as we are to Emily Post, it becomes necessary once in a while to reprimand her severely,” the journalist smugly intoned. Emily had erred a few weeks earlier when she’d answered a fan with rules from a bygone era. When asked if a woman could use the word “swell” and not be stamped “ordinary,” she had gone all “high- hats” instead of sticking to her typical “simple, kindly answer.” Admitting that “swell” was perfectly acceptable as slang, Emily had “incorrectly” deemed it inappropriate in “My dear, I have had a swell time.” The Post admonished her, however playfully, for being twenty years behind with this answer. “We do wish that Emily, swell girl that she is, would keep abreast of the current,” it concluded.
In fact, swimming in the same stream as the modern crowd, Emily, as she prepared to join Lillian Gilbreth and Eleanor Roosevelt as a panelist at the fourth annual Conference on Current Problems, found herself in the middle of a domestic crisis that smacked all too painfully of the current. Social critic Kenneth Burke, writing in 1935 of the success of Etiquette, would speculate that in times of social heterogeneity, such guides were necessary: social labels could no longer be taken for granted. Its author, herself divorced, certainly understood that; now her son was getting divorced. “When I got back home from a trip to Montana, early that September,” Bill Post remembers, “my parents said they had to talk to me.” He was given little time to adjust before he left for his first year of boarding school. “They asked me to sit down,” he recalls, “and they told me of their plans to separate, and that they had enrolled me at St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. I left the very next day.”
The scenario was eerily like the one Emily had presented her sons with when she’d sent them to Pomfret almost thirty years before. She was distressed anew, still convinced that divorce harmed children no matter how hard the parents tried to protect them. Though the publicity during the breakup of Ned’s marriage was nothing like what Emily had endured, the announcement nonetheless proved irresistible fodder for the gossip columnists. Unlike in her case, where her husband was at fault, the speed with which Barbara Post remarried suggested that she’d decided on a new spouse before getting rid of Emily’s son. Ned’s ex-wife planned to wed playboy millionaire Nicholas Holmsen—once he disposed of his current spouse, Mildred Tilton Holmsen, in Reno. Unfortunately, Mildred delayed the path to freedom with her “scandalous” attire at the Nevada court hearing, whereupon the judge demanded that she “dress properly” before appearing in court to end her marriage. Back home, the New York social register very publicly dropped Mrs. Holmsen because of equally “scandalous” though undisclosed behavior its members had uncovered. Barbara Post, finally Barbara Holmsen, would live with her new husband at the conjugal home she and Ned Post (and Bill) had shared. Within a few years of the Posts’ divorce, Barbara inherited her share of the $4 million estate left by her recently deceased mother.
During the summer of Ned and Barbara’s separation, Hilda proved a particularly reassuring presence to her distressed employer, a sign of constancy while Emily worked on her upcoming panel presentation on contemporary social problems. At least the current forum allowed Emily to ponder families outside her own. On September 26, 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt opened the Conference on Current Problems, its theme “Changing Standards.” Ranging from crime prevention to vocational opportunities for youth, the event was the equivalent of today’s invitation- only retreat for high- powered female achievers. Emily’s panel featured the redoubtable Amelia Earhart, but it was Lillian Gilbreth, only six years younger than she, with her determination and near worship of “common sense,” who was perfectly positioned to become her ally and friend.
Both Emily and Lillian, from similarly privileged backgrounds, put efficiency at the center of their lives. Lillian’s marriage and children had been immortalized by the bestselling book Cheaper by the Dozen, written by her now deceased husband, Frank, an engineer who studied motion and how to help people do their jobs faster. Lillian, with her master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Brown University, was, according to some worshipful commentators, a potential candidate for sainthood. While a widow tending her eleven children (one of the dozen died young), she maintained a high- level appointment in the Hoover administration, heading various building projects. Emily appreciated Gilbreth’s intelligent grasp of the rudiments of construction. Yet in spite of their shared enthusiasms and similar age, Emily and Lillian Gilbreth remained mere acquaintances. Probably Lillian’s elevation of “efficiency over graciousness” discouraged any overtures Emily might have made, since Gilbreth wouldn’t have thought an expert on etiquette worth much of her time.
Shortly after their panel participation, Emily worked with Gilbreth on yet another project. At the beginning of the Depression, to sponsor affordable housing for the middle class, Herbert Hoover had helped found the organization Better Homes in America. (Bill Post’s great- grandfather George F. Baker had funded its beginnings.) The group had recently commissioned a model Georgian cottage, the temporary display built on top of the CBS recording studio; the station cooperated fully, even broadcasting news on the construction’s prog
ress. America’s Little House, as it was called, opened on the morning of November 7, 1934. The line outside its doors extended several city blocks until four- thirty P.M., when the exhibit closed, disappointing hundreds who never got inside. More than sixteen hundred men and women had walked through the domestic display.
Emily’s admiration of Lillian Gilbreth’s practical “efficiency model” for the kitchen and nursery was shared by the public, who oohed and aahed over Gilbreth’s feat. Designed “with a view to lightening the household duties of a wife and mother,” Gilbreth’s mock- up addressed housewives’ real needs. On her next day’s CBS broadcast, Emily would review the most popular parts of the exhibit, highlighting “labor- saving devices in the kitchen” along with a home library and basement playroom, all representing “the type of dwelling which the family of moderate means might acquire.” Awed visitors had also been impressed by the “large amount of closet space, the efficient use of racks and shelves behind kitchen doors and other inconspicuous places, and the convenient layout of rooms.”
Alongside her genuine interest in innovative building, Emily remained keenly aware of the hit her father’s profession had taken. Family friend Kenneth Murchison, who had hired young Bruce Post a decade earlier, was urging that the arts be privately as well as publicly funded. In January, he spearheaded yet another Beaux Arts Ball, held earlier than usual in order to assist the unemployed architects. Heavily publicized throughout the month, the affair at the Waldorf was well attended, its three thousand patrons including Ned Post, who even played a part in one of the skits. He appeared on behalf of his mother, who wanted familial respect paid to Bruce Price and his grandson Bruce Post.
Even while Emily continued pushing architects’ appeals and fund drives, she was busily endorsing products in order to increase her own income, as long as such support didn’t compromise her beliefs. Her grandson believes that, however irrationally, she always worried about having enough money, probably because of the quagmire Edwin had made of their marital finances. But he also agrees that it was her ambition for her career, not for income, that continued to motivate her work. She was shrewd, and she knew, better than anyone, that the cultural winds could shift along with the weather. Keeping one’s name in front of the buying public was crucial. In February, Macy’s advertised stationery under her name. A few months later, the Hamilton Watch Company (today owned by Swatch) contracted Emily to write a booklet about time, an assignment that couldn’t have been more suitable.
She herself was driven by punctuality. The studio’s engineers revered her because she carried a stopwatch to each broadcast, timing herself to the minute, never failing to finish exactly “on the nose,” showing an “Old World punctiliousness.” She had no trouble approving the general subject of this new brochure sponsored by Hamilton Watch. Even the company’s location in the coal county of Pennsylvania bespoke Washington and Emily Lee and their daughter Josephine.
The brochure, Time Etiquette, is a long essay Emily pieced together the summer of 1935 from her earlier writings. Clever illustrations of women driving Pierce-Arrows, even now, in the heart of the Depression, made the subject suddenly attractive. Emily exploited the power of appearances to make her argument for being on time: “We all know people who are good- looking, amusing—attractive as they can be. And yet when we think of asking them to lunch or dine—to play bridge or go to a play—we hesitate. Simply because we know that half an hour after every other guest has arrived,” the attractive, well- known young socialite, inevitably and baldly, appears. It was pure “nonsense” for any host to accept “the belief among the unknowing” that “it is smart to be late.” Although the latecomer might possess great talent or charm, she should be allowed a free pass only once.
After Emily made her salient points about behavior, finally, as if reluctantly, she inserted the name of her sponsor, Hamilton Watch. Citing Hamilton watches a total of five times in the sixteen- page article, she seemed to be winking to a knowing audience, her nods to her sponsor almost gratuitous. “Lunching in a great city like New York it is difficult to get through traffic and arrive with the exactness of a Hamilton watch,” she noted. Without a doubt, she sanctioned the larger truth: time is money and power, and until recently, women had neither. They had had no need for a real watch. “My idea of a watch was of an ornament rather than of an accurate time- piece,” she confessed. “In the present day when time is of such vital importance to most of us, a watch may very well be an ornament, but it is first of all an essential equipment . . . . Almost every phase of effectiveness in modern life is a matter of perfect timing.”
CHAPTER 55
ON NOVEMBER 24, 1935, A NOTICE IN THE TIMES ANNOUNCED THAT Let’s Talk It Over would debut nationally the next day on WJZ at four- thirty. Sounding remarkably like shows aimed at women in the early twenty- first century—from Oprah to The View—the program was “designed to reflect feminine opinions on current topics.” The informal half- hour spot would “follow the conversational attitude of the tea table in an earnest attempt to mirror national interest.” A well- known soprano, Alma Kitchell, would be the mistress of ceremonies, with two authors and one editor the guests. Emily was the only participant needing no introduction.
Her radio appearances gave her an excuse to forgo traveling to Washington that December to hand out photography awards, the prizes totaling an impressive $10,000. Sixty- four national newspapers had selected 250 amateur photographs to hang on the walls of the National Geographic Society’s Hall of Explorers exhibition. Though she’d been happy to lend her name to the panel of five judges, among them Sara Roosevelt and, more exciting to her than the president’s mother, Lowell Thomas himself, Emily had few Baltimore relatives now to motivate her to make the trip south, and Roosevelt and Thomas were not certain to attend anyway. Nonetheless, she was gratified with the reports: the winner of first place, a $1,000 stipend, was a young southern high school teacher, described as “all warm and pink with excitement” when she heard the news. Emily had been especially pleased when informed of the industrious young winner’s routine: she had compulsively taken seventeen photographs before she stopped, sure at last that she had gotten just the right pose of a little girl holding a balloon.
Emily felt her absence justified by her need to prepare for her radio appearances. She had continued speaking on Let’s Talk It Over, along with ever more substantial women, motivating her to research their causes and achievements. By the spring of 1936, the radio panels would include presidents of two powerful women’s groups, the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs; the head of the Russell Sage Foundation; Josephine Roche, assistant secretary of the treasury; and Mrs. Herbert Hoover. Not all weeks highlighted heavyweight topics: Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, chatted quite happily about the “philistines of fashion,” a topic that surely prompted Emily to warn, gently, against automatic dismissal of others’ tastes. Given her interest in the younger generations, she probably enjoyed most the president of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, who discussed “the new seriousness of college women.”
Such a varied, fast- paced schedule had helped her deny a problem that was threatening to demand her attention, whether she wanted to give it or not. Sometime during the preceding year, Emily, who, at sixty- two years old, had long been proud of her faultless vision, had started noticing an occasional blurriness as she wrote. Assuming she finally needed glasses, she’d kept postponing going to the doctor’s. Then, on the Fourth of July, 1935, when she and Bill watched the fireworks together at Martha’s Vineyard, she was startled: the blasts were much nearer this year than usual, so close they seemed threatening. Dreading the loss of control that imperfect vision would imply, she was finally forced to admit that there were too many vivid, scary explosions bursting within her line of vision to be real. Bill urged her to see a doctor, but again, she waited. By late autumn, after her vision had become undeniably blurry, Emily capitulated. The doc
tor diagnosed an advanced case of double cataracts; she would need two operations per eye. She should be prepared for total blindness if the surgeries were not successful, he said.
Ned wondered how his commanding mother would handle this possibility, because she “loathed dependence in any form; freedom of movement was as necessary to her as freedom of thought. The possibility of losing this cherished independence was distressing beyond words.” But Emily spent no time brooding. Instead, she asked her son to take her to a nearby farm where Seeing Eye dogs were trained, so she’d be comfortable around the animals before she needed to rely on one as her constant companion. Then she wrote away for information on Braille and investigated recordings for the blind.
She scheduled the first set of her cataract surgeries for April and May 1936, when her radio programs were off the air. Typical of the procedure that was used until midcentury, her post- op recoveries required she spend several weeks in bed in a darkened room, with sandbags braced against each ear to prevent her from lifting her head while her eye healed. The already avid radio listener now commanded everything to cease while Lowell Thomas was on the air: only through the airwaves could she “read” the news as she healed, and she trusted Thomas to give it to his audience straight.
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