As the year came to its wobbly conclusion, This Week magazine published Emily’s article “How to Treat Them,” which Reader’s Digest reprinted the following February. The essay was updated from the advice she’d given in the wartime edition of Etiquette: disabled veterans required special tact; a “wife or mother or sweetheart” must prepare herself ahead of time for whatever she would discover. Emily’s description reads like an incident from William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, the lessons of which were served up in Etiquette first. Her insistence that physical injuries obvious to the eye somehow be acknowledged—even as love reduced them to insignificance—would be a theme of Wyler’s 1946 movie.
“From now on,” Emily noted in This Week, “more and more of our seriously wounded will appear in public. What are we going to do and say when they leave the hospitals and take their places in the world for which they have given so much? We will do well to follow the first rules of good manners, which are: don’t stare, don’t point, don’t make personal remarks.”
Some soldiers, Emily conceded, might want to talk about their injuries, a desire to be respected and responded to. “But most of them will resent such callous impertinence—bitterly.” What they and people close to them inevitably sought in potentially awkward situations was to be treated without fuss. “The greatest kindness we can show our injured is not to let our own thoughts dwell on their handicaps,” she wrote. To that end, when their impairments created special needs, one must proceed as if “matter- of- fact,” whether leaning over to cut a man’s steak or helping him into his coat when he stood up.
Most challenging would be the need for courage in the case of great disfigurement: “The supreme requirement of tact will be exacted of the one whom a badly hurt man most longs and yet most fears to see—that first meeting when a man searches his wife’s or mother’s face to measure the degree of his handicap. Both wife and mother must school themselves to keep tears under control. They must remember that the one thing that helps is to make him realize he is not any different from the man he was—and to assure him that he is NOT to be set apart.”
CHAPTER 64
AS THE WAR INCREASINGLY OCCUPIED THE SCHEDULES NOT only of middle- class workers but of America’s young socialites as well, who volunteered to wrap bandages, visit the sick, or provide transportation, their mothers gathered at a series of forums chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. At one such seminar, Emily met Doris Stevens, a well- known leader of the suffrage movement and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s assistant years earlier. There is no trail for their friendship, no clues suggesting how it deepened, but their epistolary exchange casts important light on Emily’s awareness of her own limitations and her lifelong resolve to rise above them.
After the colloquium, Stevens wrote Emily a letter, offering her a copy of her autobiography. Upon receiving the book, even before opening it, Emily immediately sent off a chipper thank- you note, accompanied by a newspaper clipping from the pen of Christian Science Monitor reporter Mary Hornaday, a watchdog over the first lady. Hornaday’s article apparently criticized Eleanor Roosevelt, including her support of suffragettes, quoting disparagingly some of Roosevelt’s opinions, which Emily assumed Doris too would disdain. “I can’t bear to have you miss [Roosevelt’s] ‘garblings’ enclosed. Of all the glamourous sobbings this is the sobbingist! It was so nice seeing you—do make it soon again and here.” It was signed, “Affection-ately, Emily Post” with a scribble on the bottom: “Many thanks for lovely card.”
Her deep respect for Doris Stevens and her desire to be liked by her peer resonate in their correspondence. But Emily had miscalculated her new friend’s own highly political history. Snuggled down in her bed to read Stevens’s Jailed for Freedom, seventy- one- year- old Emily stayed up through the early morning to finish the activist’s memoir. Horrified, she soon realized that she had not only inadvertently insulted its author with her flippant note but had dishonored herself as well. She tried to phone Stevens several times, getting no answer.
A note from Stevens soon arrived, remonstrating with Emily for her disrespect toward those early feminists who had marched for voting rights. Chastened, Emily immediately replied. After typing “Dear Mrs. Stevens,” then nervously crossing out the “Mrs.” and writing “Dr.” instead, she began in earnest: “Please forgive what I said about being against Suffrage—what a dreadful thing to say to you! Moreover, it is not true. (I have never been an obstructionist, but I find I was appallingly ignorant of what you went through.) Having had no interference with my own liberties, the right to earn a living, to keep what I earned, to have entire guardianship over my children and to get extraordinary credit for efforts that would have been nothing for a man (or a trained woman worker), left me sitting in the situation of having everything pleasant brought to me on a silver platter.” As if afraid she had not been frank enough, Emily scribbled next to the typed paragraph, “I was very unaware of other points of view.”
Whatever response Stevens sent to the apology, the ease of Emily’s subsequent note wishing her correspondent a good trip implied she had been forgiven. As further appeasement, she offered to lend Stevens “Suzy,” her Dictaphone, for the activist’s summer project. She explained eagerly that she herself could carry a duplicate machine from Manhattan to the Vineyard. She signed her brief reply “Affectionately,” in a communication that sounded wistful, as if Emily Post wished, after all, that she’d gotten a real education too.
In its own way, Emily’s belated acknowledgment of her privileged position echoed the confession Virginia Woolf had made to working women the previous decade: “to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending [my earnings] upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher’s bills, I went out and bought a cat.”
Privilege, however, saved a person from only so much. Though basically healthy, Emily herself didn’t travel much anymore, finding that her infirmities drained her energies if she wasn’t careful. On August 5, 1944, Billy got married in a wartime ceremony without his grandmother present. William Goadby Post and Mrs. Elizabeth Lindley Cookman wed in the nation’s capital, where they would live throughout his tour of duty. “Libby,” whose first husband had been killed in the Pacific theater the year before, brought to the marriage her infant, Allen, immediately adopted by her new husband. As soon as they had a chance to slip away, the couple visited Emily in Edgartown, where she was already planning an addition to the cottage for baby Allen and the other children she was sure would follow.
“Upon our first meeting,” Libby Post recalls, “she greeted me in the doorway of her house in Edgartown, with a broad smile and warm greeting. I particularly remember her bright red dress and red shoes—her favorites. Later I found out she had a closet full of red shoes. She made me feel very comfortable and immediately welcome.” Bill and Libby saw Emily frequently for the next several years. The relationship between granddaughter-in- law and Emily was “extremely cordial if never intimate.” But then, looking back, Bill remembers, “Grandmama and I always maintained a certain distance ourselves.” Fond of the elderly woman so dear to her husband, Libby was nonetheless aware “of a certain narcissism, of her needing to be the center of attention. And of being very much into control.”
Emily returned to Manhattan that fall to gratifying press: Time magazine cited her as one of the Bell Syndicate’s stable of prize writers, used to woo Washington columnist Drew Pearson away from United Feature Syndicate. And she had the pleasure of hearing her name invoked by one of her favorite comedians, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, on his prime- time NBC radio show, with its nationwide audience of millions. Using his puppet Charlie McCarthy, Bergen routinely poked gentle fun at national figures, and teasing Emily Post, who later appeared on one of his broadcasts as “a vulture for culture,” elicited one of the incongruous horsey guffaws her grandson remembers so vividly.
For the next few months
, Emily worked on what Funk and Wagnalls correctly assumed would be her postwar version of Etiquette—essentially the same edition published three years earlier, except for minor changes. The “War-Time Supplement” was retitled “Military and Post-War Etiquette.” Material added in 1942 would be reprinted in the 1945 version, including the espionage chapter, which would be dropped in 1950.
For the first time since 1922, there was a price hike, from $4 to $5. More significant to Emily, however, was her new dedication page, years after she had stopped dedicating Etiquette to anyone: “To Anne Kent, My invaluable assistant in affectionate recognition of her liberalizing influence through-out our long association.” Kent had been clever from the start, carefully but quickly consolidating her power over Emily’s “empire,” becoming, she believed, indispensable. Emily, who in her younger days would not have tolerated the implicit disrespect, now looked the other way. The daily columns were beginning to wear on her, and she knew efficient help was hard to find. She wasn’t about to play the prima donna with an impressive woman her son had, with great diligence, finally located for her. Still, it is hard to imagine Emily Post comfortable around someone who pretended not to hear her employer when she called upstairs for assistance.
Determined to keep current, Emily had hired the much younger woman in part to keep herself in touch with changing trends. Often, Emily used the daily column to address issues new to her and, she assumed, to others as well. In January 1945, the Journal of the National Education Association reprinted an article by a teacher complaining about high expectations and low pay. Most of all, the young woman felt imprisoned by the expectations governing her conduct and appearance. In the same issue, Emily responded:
There are a number of things that I have long wanted an opportunity to say. One of these is to protest against those who seem to have kept a mid-Victorian hold on the conduct of teachers—and on them alone.
The point I should like to make, to parents and school boards both, is that teachers are exactly like the rest of us. They must possess normal intelligence and sufficient education. They must be citizens. Surely then, they should not be denied the normal pleasure of social contacts, and the right to free expression of their views. To keep watch on how they spend their free time, what they say in the company of their friends, and to dictate the cut of their clothes, makes us look like Gestapo agents. On the other hand, a teacher— either young or old—has to realize that like the perfect parents, she is an unceasing example to the children in her class. If she is a really qualified teacher, her influence is immeasurable, and can easily be permanent.
Emily’s unfortunate use of “Gestapo” in the context of teachers’ wardrobes was motivated by her immersion in all things war, as she prepared her new edition of Etiquette. But however inappropriate her choice of words, she didn’t deserve the comparison she would draw to the German führer just after the war ended. Speaking to 150 welfare workers at the Gary, Indiana, YMCA, a psychiatrist from Buffalo, Dr. Nathaniel Canton, told his audience that “Hitler and Emily Post are the two most detrimental personalities to present society.” After all, he explained, grievously misreading one of his exemplars, both popular leaders bullied people to fit only one pattern, exerting “insidious control” over society as they did so.
DURING THE WAR, more copies of Etiquette were requested by GIs than any other book. As they prepared to return to civilian society, soldiers ordered an average of 16,000 copies a week. Impressive sales figures even today, in part because Etiquette was published only as a hardback and never sold through a club, they were by no means singular. By 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care would hit the marketplace, soon to leave numbers such as Emily’s far behind. The war produced a flurry of popular paperbacks, with book clubs driving hardcover figures back up soon after it ended.
Emily was sick for longer periods those days. In a letter she wrote in March 1945 to Betty (“Mrs. Kyle Ward”), her young secretary on the Vineyard years before, she explained why she was late congratulating the Wards on their new baby: she had been “contagious up to now” and unable to get to the post office. Working hard to make up for lost time, she had suffered a relapse. Then, trying to send a telegram of congratulations to the Wards, she had learned that during wartime, “telegraph and telegrams of congratulation are out.” Only now was she strong enough to walk to the bank, buy the baby a bond, and put it in the mail.
Her illness delayed slightly her preparations for the Vineyard. She was in New York to read the perfervid headlines of a world still in the clutch of anxiety. On April 12, 1945, before she left for Edgartown, sixty- three- year-old President Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, just three weeks before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender on May 8. Six days after the president’s death, forty- four- year- old Ernie Pyle was killed by a sniper as he stepped ashore on a small island west of Okinawa. It was unsettling to lose two national icons so close together; the president had been in office for twelve years, and the reporter had followed the war from its beginnings. Sandwiched between their deaths, on April 15, Edward R. Murrow reported the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The fateful month came to a grisly end with the indelible image of Benito Mussolini hanging upside down by his ankles in the center of Milan. At least the war would be over any day now.
As if promoting business as usual, in early July, New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia read the Sunday comics over the radio during a newspaper strike, emphasizing that the world did not depend on the print media, even for the frivolous. Meet the Press began on NBC, and it, not a music show or soap opera, would become the longest- running radio program in history.
In August, there would be Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
FOLLOWING THE WAR’S END, marriages seemed to dissolve at an accelerated pace. Except for the Depression era of the 1930s, the decade ahead would witness divorce rates rising to the highest in American history, with almost one in three marriages ending during the 1950s. But there were immediate positive social changes as well, with Americans widely embracing the concept of “the weekend,” the employees’ right to enjoy two entire, adjacent days of leisure in lieu of their jobs. Just as in Edwin’s age, when the stock market and the fast car proved epochal markers, those two days off guaranteed that workers would become, according to some scholars, “the chief temporal institution of the modern age,” a force to be reckoned with because now their presence couldn’t be taken for granted. Suddenly bosses had to plan around their workers’ schedules, with the weekend the new regulator of twentieth- century life.
Emily’s problem was the opposite of seeking time off: she disliked days when she wasn’t occupied with her job. Nonetheless, she was forced to take more breaks, if only to protect her eyes. Enforced recreation had its own rewards once Libby and Bill, who had accepted a job with Pan American airlines, moved to Rye, New York, just as Ned moved overseas. A reasonable thirty- minute drive to Manhattan, Rye wasn’t a particularly strenuous distance from Martha’s Vineyard either. “Emily was delighted to have great-grandchildren and was very fond of them, as they were of her, even as babies,” Libby remembers. Yet in a bemused afterthought, she adds: “But I could never forget that she was definitely a character, very different from other women of the time. From all the women I knew, at least.”
It was around this period that Bill first met his half uncles, the children born to Emily’s ex-husband after the couple’s divorce. At a Palm Beach hotel, a man in the lobby greeted Bill with “Hi, I’m your uncle Henry, your father’s half brother.” Neither Ned nor Emily had ever mentioned to Bill the existence of a second family, though Ned had enjoyed many summers at Babylon with the boys when he and Bruce were young men. “If I had pursued all this, and asked Grandmama about them, she would have answered. But she never would have talked about my grandfather,” Bill asserts. In spite of Ned’s closeness to Edwin, Ned too would fail to discuss him with Bill. Implicitly, Emily demanded a kind of allegiance from those she love
d that proved their loyalty.
A few years later, in Boston, Bill would encounter his grandfather’s widow, Eleanor (“Nellie”) herself, in the dining room of the Ritz Carlton: he had heard nothing of her either. Asked what he thought of the “dauntingly dramatic English actress” that her granddaughter Nora Post recalled, Bill answered simply, “She seemed nice . . . perhaps a bit flamboyant.”
A LOUD EXCLAMATION mark punctuated the end of 1945 for Emily, who, twenty years earlier, had written for McCall’s magazine that she herself was “rather old- fashioned and, reluctantly, didn’t feel confident enough” of her appearance “to dance in public these days.” Now, at seventy- three years old, America’s first lady of manners lost her panties in the middle of Manhattan. After watching them fall unceremoniously “to the pavement,” she bent down and, “stuffing them” in her purse, proceeded. A rare reference to this bizarre episode was her offhand remark to an interviewer who, at length, had won the aging woman’s trust. To Jeanne Perkins, Emily Post joked that she had finally “dropped her drawers on Broadway,” the shocked reporter failing to connect the elderly woman’s lifelong love of center stage to her cheerful pun.
Several years later Emily recast the incident into a more polite anecdote for an interview with Suburbia Today, reprinted in Reader’s Digest. In this telling, an embarrassed lady, waiting in a White House receiving line, “realized with horror that a piece of her underwear was slipping. Before she could think what to do, her feet were entangled in a web of lace- trimmed silk. Instantly the aide was at her side. With grave dignity, he bent, picked up the offending panties and disappeared. Only the couple directly behind saw what had happened. Later, as she left, a footman offered her, on a silver tray, a discreetly wrapped package.”
Emily Post Page 48