At that point, the teenager weighed seventy pounds; he barely survived typhus while he was cared for by nuns in a German hospital. After he regained his strength, he began working in an American officers’ club. “One day a very nice lady visiting the Frankfurt club on behalf of the Red Cross talked to me,” Isaac recalled. According to Isaac’s daughter, Bonnie Hass, Emily had volunteered with UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) to help orphans abroad. UNRRA, founded in 1943 as an organization of fifty- two countries, helped around eight million refugees from at least seven European countries, excluding Germany. Even there, if a German child sought to be united with a family member already in America, efforts would be made to find the relative.
“Emily Post somehow ended up at the officers’ club, where she inquired about young Holocaust survivors,” Bonnie Hass explains. “The officers told her about my father, and she met and spoke with him. He told her that he had been going all over Germany, by bicycle, poring over lists of survivors, hoping some of his family was still alive. He had found none,” she recalls. “But he did remember an uncle in Brooklyn, his father’s older brother, who had emigrated to the United States after World War I.” At this news, in her straight- ahead manner, Emily set her sights on getting the boy to New York. But he was twenty years old by then, and the children’s immigration bill had a mandatory cutoff of eighteen. To ensure his entry into the United States as a juvenile, Emily briskly instructed Isaac: “From now on, you are seventeen.”
On the Spielberg Holocaust survivors’ series, an aged Hass cried as he explained, “Emily Post helped me get documentation saying I was under age; she wanted to make sure I was even a year younger than the cut- off date. All of this was her idea, not mine.”
Isaac Hass left Germany on June 12, 1947, after being given instructions by Emily to be at the dock in Bremerhaven, where he would board the USS Ernie Pyle. On July 22, he entered New York Harbor, greeted by the statue that had served as his benefactor’s dollhouse a half century earlier. Realizing Emily Post’s celebrity only years later, he told his daughter his story, adding that “Mrs. Post was such a great, fantastic lady, and I want you to be a great lady too.” Bonnie Hass was sent to finishing school, where she learned etiquette. She also learned, from her father, to give people the benefit of the doubt. “He never let me forget that good people went out of their way in order to help others,” she says quietly. “Emily Post saved my father’s life.”
After a few years in his new country, Isaac Hass was drafted into the U.S. Army. Upon completing his tour of duty, he became an executive vice president of the American Machine and Foundry Company of New York. But he always owned his own small business on the side to make sure he could feed his family, no matter what happened. He was exactly the kind of man Emily Price admired.
Though she could not work a similar magic for the elderly Bertha Leach, her faithful New York City seamstress, Emily returned home, tired but determined to ameliorate the woman’s poor health. She knew that her longtime acquaintance was seriously ill, so in mid-July, in spite of her own fatigue, Emily took Bertha on a car trip upstate, centered upon a visit to the curative waters at Saratoga Springs. In the Adirondacks, however, Bertha became so sick that she required immediate surgery. The ensuing operation revealed that she had advanced stomach cancer—the disease that had killed Emily’s father. Told she had at best weeks to live, Bertha was reassured by her friend and client that she, Emily Post, would take care of everything. Upon dying at the end of July, the woman was buried at Emily’s expense. Bertha’s family had little money, and Emily sent them $1,300 to cover the fuel bill for the upcoming winter, as well as a present on her old friend’s behalf. She asked that they buy a bassinet for Bertha’s newborn grandniece.
EMILY CONTINUED TO be deeply interested in the generations that would follow hers. On Martha’s Vineyard, residents welcomed her into local activities, even appointing her president of the Edgartown Boys’ Club for a short period. Once, in an apparent social misstep that gave rise to gossip that she was “losing it,” when it was her time to serve refreshments for the Garden Club, Emily sponsored a barbecue instead of setting out the regular tea sandwiches. Rather than the gaffe others assumed, this was entirely intentional: grilled meats seemed a more festive offering than old- fashioned ladies’ food, in her practiced opinion.
She still reveled in the attention drawn by her well- tended gardens, with their shoulder- high dahlias. Tourists routinely paused to observe, saying, “Oh, this is Emily’s Post’s home.” Occasionally, she would ask someone admiring her flowers to come inside and join her for tea. She was proud that each summer her house was included on the tour of Edgartown benefiting the local hospital. Every year, Emily trotted the paying guests to her closet, with its munificence of red shoes, which ranged in number from twenty- five to one hundred, depending upon the imagination of the visitor. Eileen Robinson, a longtime resident, recalls observing Emily on her daily walk each midday to the post office, always “very very erect in those red shoes, and beautifully dressed.”
Eileen remembers vividly the time that she had a “close- up with Mrs. Post, after I told my mother that I wanted to get married. I was about to graduate from high school and had met my future husband already. Mom secretly asked Emily to counsel me, and one day I was asked to her house for ‘tea.’ I thought this was for several people, but I arrived to find only Mrs. Post and me, which alerted me to something from the start. She started right in, telling me how important an education was, and that I was too young to get married. She did not mention that she had married at the same age I planned to, at nineteen! What I actually remember most vividly is the glass walkway over Mrs. Post’s garage leading to the upstairs living room, where we had tea.”
Toward the end of July, in the co- op at 39 East Seventy- ninth Street she had helped Emily and her son design, the seventy- nine- year- old Minnie Gray Coster succumbed to an illness of several years’ standing. In Minnie’s obituary, the New York Times again concentrated on her late husband’s feat, highlighted in newspaper accounts of their wedding in 1900 as well: William Coster, who had died in 1919 from aftereffects of the Spanish flu epidemic, held the record for walking fastest to the stock exchange from the New York Athletic Club. As if only yesterday, her daughters’ marriages to foreign titles were rehashed, as well as the Times’ moniker for Minnie, the “leader of the American colony in Paris” until World War II. In recent times, she had become a “supporter for the benefit of various activities for the blind,” including the Lighthouse on East Fifty- ninth Street, the donation in homage to the sight problems of her dear friend. Ned urged his progressively frail mother not to return to Manhattan to attend the funeral; he would go in her place. Reluctantly, she agreed.
That autumn, while Americans rationed themselves one slice of bread daily and endorsed meatless Tuesdays to help feed the needy abroad, Anne Kent, without fanfare, took her employer’s place on the Emily Post segment of a radio quiz show. No explanation was offered to family members or to the media. Kent also commandeered the daily newspaper column, although Emily insisted on responding herself to questions that required more than a routine answer. Several years into the next decade, readers would still be writing Emily Post about war- related anxieties. Occasionally she would use a “composite of a half dozen [letters] sent . . . within the week” to illustrate a recurring theme: “I married a war widow. Her exmother- in- law is having the son’s body brought to this country for burial here. (1) Should my wife go the funeral? (2) If so, alone or possibly with his family? Should I be with her in either case? (3) Also, what about our sending flowers? From my wife or both of us? (4) Would the fact that I had not known her first husband alter your answers?” Emily responded, “(1) yes. (2) This depends upon your, as well as her, relationship with his family. (3) Yes, but from her alone. (4) No, but the relationship between you and his family does matter.”
As 1947 came to a quiet end, wrapped in almost twenty- six inches of snow bl
anketing New York, Emily mourned again. On December 29, she attended the funeral of Frank Crowninshield, against the protests of her protective son. Weather be damned, as Crownie would have expected. Three hundred close friends showed up. The service was held at St. James Protestant Episcopal Church on Madison and Seventy- first Street, no walk at all for Emily in the old days. This time she took a cab.
CHAPTER 66
ON JANUARY 18, 1948, THE BOSTON GLOBE PUBLISHED AN EDITORIAL lauding Emily so celebratory that Funk and Wagnalls reprinted the article as a full- page ad. “Emily Post will be remembered, says a friend, as the great revolutionist of this age,” the essay began. The postwar class revolution had created her largest playing field yet, the Globe explained, one including not only the children of immigrants but others wanting to join the Best People. “Etiquette is carrying the nation a long way in the direction of equality,” the article celebrated in italics. “In a country where education is spreading, and the people possess Code Emily Post, all those who seek to maintain an aristocracy of any sort will find the going exceedingly hard.”
In spite of such perceptive analysis, the press more often sounded as if it were humoring a nice, slightly eccentric old lady. In April, the New Yorker wrote up the high- profile “tea party” Funk and Wagnalls sponsored at Emily’s apartment in honor of her forthcoming fourth edition of The Personality of a House, the publisher even providing a “willowy young lady” to host the event. When the efficient helper guided a new arrival toward Emily’s chair, saying, “Mrs. Post, I’d like to present Mrs. Chase, of Vogue,” Emily’s face lit up. “Why, Edna! . . . My very old friend! How nice of you to come!” Edna Chase, Vogue’s editor, had insisted on attending Emily’s tea, in spite of her own terrible cold.
Emily had honored another friend, the popular radio host Mary Margaret McBride, by asking her to “pour.” The two women had met in the studio years before, when their paths crossed while they were recording their shows. “My grandmother really liked Mary Margaret, her honesty and spontaneity and good nature,” Bill Post recalls. “Once, when Emily was on her way to appear on the Edgar Bergen show with Charlie McCarthy, we rode to the studio with Mary Margaret, and they chatted like old friends the whole way.” Initially the cheerful country woman had demurred at Emily’s request, protesting that she had never “presided at a tea table” in her life, but her friend had insisted.
In spite of McBride’s celebrity, many critics regarded the radio star with near contempt. Nor was such disdain unusual: as one commentator has noted, “In a lot of cases . . . the [media] historians were men and didn’t regard ‘women’s shows’ or what women broadcast as particularly important. Historically, the voice of ‘authority’ was a male voice.” Where there were famous pairs, like Gracie Allen and George Burns, or Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the men were ceded control even if the ditzy wife wielded the power behind the scenes—or the apron. American culture since the Civil War had depended on ensuring that women and black men were kept in their place: “It was men who could vote, men who made decisions, men who were out in the public sphere . . . . When radio came along, it was gen-dered the same way society was . . . . [Women] were supposed to be good at conversation but not terribly knowledgeable the way men were expected to be. Jokes about how dumb women were permeated popular culture,” notes social historian Donna Halper. For better or worse, Emily was in a “female” arena: women were the bearers of a society’s manners, where at least they could hope to influence its mores as well.
A year after serving at her friend’s tea, Mary Margaret McBride would make public the inner strength that supported her cordiality, a characteristic that had clinched Emily’s affection and respect. Like Emily, Mary Margaret wed ethics to etiquette. At the Yankee Stadium fête of her radio show’s fifteenth year on the air, she enthusiastically, to the shock of the crowd, bear- hugged the celebrated head of the NAACP, Walter White.
THAT SUMMER, A NEW sign adorned the tour buses that for years had regularly made a stop at Emily’s Edgartown house. Instead of the usual ads, this banner read “Grand Old Lady of Etiquette.” Indeed, Emily now seemed to represent the island. Neighbors on Fuller Street routinely returned home from running errands to find that strangers had walked into their unlocked houses and were resting for a minute while they reloaded their cameras to shoot the house where Emily Post lived. The Lamborns, Emily’s neighbors across the street, found themselves entertaining sight-seers more than once, motivating their teenagers to paint their own sign, which read “The Lamborns live here,” and prop it up on their lawn.
One day, Mrs. Lamborn (whose daughter would marry Emily’s great-grandson Peter) apologized for the noise her children had made the night before while walking home from the yacht club, their singing and chattering easily heard on a summer evening when everyone’s windows were wide open. “I hope you could sleep, Mrs. Post,” the worried neighbor said. “My dear,” Emily answered, “it is I who should apologize to you for my snoring.” Mrs. Lamborn admits today, “She snored so loud it was almost a village legend. If you walked out of the club on one end of the street, you could hear Emily Post snoring at the entire other end. All the way down Fuller Street.”
If Emily could have done something about the snoring, she would have. As she grew older, considering others’ feelings only became more important to her philosophy of life. People reacted to tone and implication, she was convinced, even more than to the actual message. That November, unlike much of the nation, she was not shocked when Governor Dewey lost to Harry Truman. She thought the outcome was predictable if one contrasted Dewey’s hauteur with Truman’s unfailing ability to put others at their ease, the mark of the true gentleman or lady. Even when an impudent reporter from the Washington Post beseeched Emily to confess her age, she teased him gently as she impugned his insensitivity: at seventy- five, she considered it “downright cruel” of him to ask. (She was, in truth, seventy- six.) When the journalist explained more carefully that he needed to record Emily’s correct age to update his publication’s file for 1948 (or its morgue, in newspaper lingo), Emily perked up: “Oh, an obituary. Well, if they’re not going to print it until I’m dead, I don’t care.”
The logic of a dramatically younger audience being tutored by a woman whose photographs and interviews seemed increasingly of another era began to sit uneasily with everyone, from Emily to her publishers to her fans. As the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex became a defining moment the following year, Emily Post’s tenor bespoke a woman come of age in the gay nineties. Gently reporting that “the years are catching up” with Emily Post, a reporter from the American Weekly would quickly add, as if a gentleman always cushioned the truth, “But she will never grow old.” Instead, the very idea of Emily Post was starting to seem tarnished.
EVEN AS WORLD WAR II began to recede mercifully into the past, Emily’s columns continued to be loaded with war- related questions, the after -effects of battle clearly not yet exhausted. Her columns that autumn reflected the odd dissonance of real life as it was being experienced. A typical day’s questions would include unrelated themes. Should dinner- table candles be lit on a daylight summer evening? It’s up to you, she answered. Should a newly engaged war widow finally remove her dead husband’s wedding ring from her right hand, or could she continue to wear it until she and her fiancé actually married? Emily dispatched her wisdom as briskly as ever, urging the woman to take off her wedding ring when her engagement was announced.
But such lucidity was unreliable. Yvonne Sylvia remembers a new suspicion of others cropping up in her employer around this time, partly the result of Emily’s growing old and feeling defenseless, especially without the loyal Hilda at her side. There were also signs of incipient senility. “Mrs. Post sometimes decided someone in the house, one of her trusted servants, had taken something,” Yvonne recalls regretfully. “Later she always found it.” At least once, Emily used the local paper to locate a “prized gewgaw” she thought had mysteriously disappeared from her b
reakfast tray. She placed a discreet item in the local newspaper, appealing for the object’s return by “the person, perhaps young and certainly thoughtless, who yielded to impulse.” Inevitably, the anecdote was repeated in a national publication, Time magazine. No one remembers the fate of the missing object.
IN THE MIDST of such domestic dramas, sometime in 1949, in the middle of a bridge game, fifty- six- year- old Ned had a serious stroke, and Emily suddenly found herself needed again.
Bill and Libby and their children had moved that year to Bogotá, Colombia. Visiting their families back home for long periods each summer, they would return to New York permanently five years later, in 1954, four children in tow. Now, on the day of his father’s stroke, when Emily phoned her grandson early in the morning, Bill at first assumed the call to be routine: the woman so centered on the most efficient use of time kept forgetting the one- hour time difference between Bogotá and Manhattan. “Grandmama often phoned; she absolutely refused to write,” he recalls. “Once in a while she even rang us at bizarrely early hours, while she lay in bed eating her zwieback toast. So I wasn’t alarmed when I heard her voice.” But then Emily explained the reason for this early morning call: Ned’s stroke was severe, though Bill was to sit tight for the time being, not uproot everything to return home precipitously. Within days, it was clear that Ned would recover, though he was left with a permanent limp and other minor deficits.
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