Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  Travel, however, Ned’s passion, would be limited hereafter. As if to compensate for his inability to tour again, Emily, though exhausted from tending her son, accepted an assignment to write a pamphlet to be called Motor Manners, under her own name but certainly informed by Ned, the longtime automobile buff of the family. The woman who had never driven a car in her life now very publicly contributed to the fourth national highway safety campaign. Free to readers of Look magazine and Bell Syndicate newspapers, Emily’s pamphlet, published by the National Highway Users Conference, seemed to reprove her audience, her slightly irritable tone out of character. Barely engaged press coverage quoted the same material in papers throughout the country: “A gentleman will no more cheat a red light or stop sign than he would cheat in a game of cards. . . . A courteous lady will not ‘scold’ raucously with her automobile horn any more than she would act like a ‘fish wife’ at a party. Primitive, irresponsible, discourteous and impatient behavior behind the wheel of an automobile has no place in society.”

  Always one to rework her material, she proceeded (with Ned’s help) to write several promotional columns about safety on the highway. That spring her newspaper column headed “Etiquette for Truck Drivers” must have startled some of her readers. Finally, as if her career had been revital-ized by this foray far afield, in June, the New York Times announced that Emily Post would be heading for television, “where she would be cofeatured in a five- minute film series with animated puppets dramatizing etiquette subjects. Mrs. Post had signed a television contract with Telescoops, and the production firm already was at work on the initial series for fall broadcast.”

  There is no sign that the program went forward, and her family doesn’t believe she completed the project. “I was there the first few times people tried to film her,” Bill recalls. “I remember the acute embarrassment on everyone’s part as they realized my grandmother simply wasn’t capable of this. It was a disaster.” Intrepid as ever, Emily was stepping up to participate in the latest medium, but even she wasn’t agile enough this time to make the leap.

  CHAPTER 67

  HOWEVER SHE FAILED AT TELEVISION, EMILY WAS STILL AT the helm of her Blue Book. To help Funk and Wagnalls promote the upcoming 1950 edition of Etiquette, Emily invited several executives from Franklin Spier, the advertising agency her publisher had hired, to her apartment for lunch. Peggy Brooks, an enthusiastic young account executive, accompanied her boss to talk over publication strategies for the new edition. Because of Funk and Wagnalls’s identity as a “sort of fuddy duddy publisher,” with “only the dictionaries and Emily Post,” Brooks assumed Emily herself would be dry as dust. “I was a bit intimidated,” she recalls, “until the moment when Mrs. Post invited us all to inspect her new walk- in closet. She was just folks after that.”

  It was an awareness of the firm’s stuffy image that motivated Funk and Wagnalls to update the language of Etiquette, or at least edit a few of the mise- en- scènes. Peggy Brooks was not sympathetic to such changes: those characters that had amused Edmund Wilson and Scott Fitzgerald delighted her as well, and she believed the publisher’s choice to minimize their appearances wrong- headed. “They were old- fashioned but vivid just the same,” she says. In spite of the strategy session, very little of Etiquette was altered. But the occasional compressed sentence, as if Emily’s Gilded Age lo-quaciousness needed cutting down to size, subtly echoed the waning of the real presence behind those words, someone who must be ancient by now, many book buyers believed. Squeezed out as well were some of the quintes-sential Emily Post–isms of a paradoxically ageless quality. The 1950 revision “didn’t sell as well as later etiquette books did, written by more contemporary authors than Emily Post,” Brooks remembers.

  Only the rare reviewer noticed minor but meaningful shifts from Etiquette’s edition of five years earlier—or, for that matter, the changes made periodically from its beginning. Instead, writers, without acknowledging the decades of incremental revisions, typically compared the original 1922 edition to the current adaptation, pronouncing “startling evidence” of the social changes—both “manners and morals”—that had occurred over a “short span of thirty years.” Those critics who had followed Etiquette throughout its lengthy career observed Emily’s increasing if reluctant accommodation to divorce, one of the most telling demarcations of the book’s social history. Emily Post, in book or newspaper, now routinely tackled realities ranging from shared custody to couples living with in- laws to multiple families occupying one house. It appeared that she flinched from nothing.

  Now she had new irritants. She devoted two pages of the 1950 Etiquette to a problem she hadn’t needed to address in 1922: the etiquette of the radio. Being such an avid listener herself, she professed shock at the “gross inconsistencies of [otherwise polite people] interrupting friends who have perhaps forgone other pleasures to stay home in order to hear a broadcast.” Perhaps, she suggested, one could simply list the title and duration of the program under way on a slate marked “Please Enter Silently” and hang the notice “where visitors can see it.”

  As always, Emily had worked hard to stay up to date, the now stout seventy- seven- year- old seeming to instinctively register cultural shifts as if adapting to such changes were second nature. In an observation later borrowed by Cleveland Amory as the linchpin for his bestselling book Who Killed Society?, she explained the evolution of the social world: “In the general picture of this modern day, the smart and the near- smart, the distinguished and the merely conspicuous, the real and the sham, and the unknown general public, are all mixed up together. The walls that used to enclose the world that was fashionable are all down. Even the car tracks that divided cities into smart and not- smart sections are torn up. . . . There is nowhere to go to see Best Society on Parade,” she professed boldly in her introduction to the 1950 Etiquette.

  If Emily needed proof that she—and her writing—still mattered, early that year she got it. The staff of the women’s magazine Pageant (its cheese-cake cover shots the sexy progenitors of today’s Cosmopolitan magazine, its contents more like Redbook’s) queried 272 American newswomen to select the five women who had most influenced “modern life” in the twentieth century. An executive editor called Emily to announce that she had placed second—just behind Eleanor Roosevelt. Though the official list was said to be secret, her publisher steadily leaked the list to major news outlets for several weeks. In March several of the top five winners, Emily and Eleanor Roosevelt among them, appeared more than once on Mary Margaret McBride’s radio program.

  Finally, in April, the magazine officially released the results of the poll, the lead shared with the cover story, “Giving the Lie to 25 Sex Beliefs.” “If it really takes a woman to judge a woman, this is The Word. Here’s how 272 women journalists ranked for Pageant the influence of America’s most famous women,” the feature announced. “The Most Powerful Women in America: Who Are They?” it asked, answering: “Number 1 was Eleanor Roosevelt; Number 2 was Emily Post.”

  Eighteen names followed, most of whose company Emily was proud to keep: Sister Elizabeth Kenny; Clare Boothe Luce; Dorothy Thompson; Senator Margaret Chase Smith; Dorothy Dix (Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer); Princess Elizabeth; Hattie Carnegie; Anne O’Hare McCormick; Mary Margaret McBride; Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas; Grandma Moses; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit; Mary McLeod Bethune tied with Helen Keller; Lillian Gilbreth tied with the Duchess of Windsor; Kate Smith; and, tied for No. 20, Eve Curie and Irene Dunne.

  Emily’s citation stressed her unswerving authority and her paradoxical timeless timeliness: “She still influences the manners and perhaps the morals of the nation,” Pageant noted.

  BUT WHEN 1951 OPENED, the curtain was slowly closing on the drama of Emily Post, as America’s cast rehearsed a new play. Korea and Joe McCarthy were peeking around the corner. Already the new decade vibrated to the sounds of Nat King Cole, Hank Williams, and Louis Jordan, even as it sponsored innovative faces that would become icons of their age, Audrey Hepbu
rn and Hubert de Givenchy. Emily’s nation, composed of thirty- seven states at her birth, now encompassed forty- eight. An equally seismic expansion, much too late for her generation, was the discovery—or acknowledgment—that healthy women liked sex. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female would recount the stories of six thousand women willing to detail their most intimate sexual practices, an exposé unimaginable since the year after Emily’s birth, when the anti- pornography and—at least as significant—the contraceptive- banning Comstock law had erected barriers to pleasure in Americans’ bedrooms.

  That January, Anne Kent gave an interview to the omnibus magazine Cosmopolitan in her employer’s name. Identified as “personal assistant to Emily Post for more than 15 years,” Kent was tasked with listing the most important social changes Emily’s recent revision of Etiquette had recorded. Quickly, however, the emphasis shifted from Anne Kent as Emily Post’s amanuensis to Kent the authority, heir presumptive: “Miss Kent finds no fault with this practice [of calling people by their first names] in circles where it’s taken for granted. She says that position and age should be respected, and children shouldn’t call adults by their first names.” Kent cataloged Emily’s latest changes: women could now wear slacks, though they remained “improper for city wear.” Typewriters could be used even for personal notes, though formal correspondence was still better written by hand, and sympathy letters seemed “warmer and more sincere if handwritten.” And Anne Kent delivered the definitive answer to the question of the day: a woman could now smoke in public whenever or wherever she had the whim.

  Partly to stake a claim in territory unmarked by her aggressive assistant and, even more, as a gift to Ned, a gourmet from the earliest days of his father’s training, Emily agreed to do a cookbook with her son, who, she would later admit, had “written every word of it.” She added, “Calling this book The Emily Post Cookbook is evidence of the degree to which untruth can go! I have never cooked a single dish in my life.” After his early retirement, Ned had renewed his amateur’s interest in culinary arts. The Emily Post Cookbook, published in 1951 by the Emily Post Institute, gave the gourmet something to focus on following his stroke. “My son Ned,” Emily would later write to her longtime friend journalist William Hunt, “is a cook of really wide reputation—particularly in France.”

  Emily’s mark was nonetheless present, as if she refused, for ethical reasons, to contribute nothing but her name to a book she had supposedly written. Just as she had provided advice booklets for almost any commercial product she had endorsed, now she supplied the foreword, skirting the subject of Emily Post in the kitchen. She concentrated on the economic changes of the day that made “good professional cooks” far too costly for most homes, with “expensive restaurants” off- limits as well. She explained to Hunt privately that “I think there is a real need for this book on the part of the many who can no longer keep pace with soaring prices and wages— and must now learn to cook! Hoping this doesn’t mean you!!”

  The Emily Post Cookbook book still reads as an exemplar of an easy- to- follow guide to basic popular foods. Its preface contains a thorough, well- translated list of cooking terms, many foreign; measurements and equivalents; and menus accompanied by recipes. Family and friends remember that Ned expected the book to be highly successful, in spite of Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking having cornered this particular market in the early 1930s. To launch “her” cookbook, Emily (or probably Ned) convinced Funk and Wagnalls to fly thirty- two food editors and writers on a DC- 3 from New York (plus a few from Boston as well) to Edgartown, where an entire meal was constructed of recipes from the cookbook. Clam bisque, oxtail stew, and apple pandowdy were all on the menu, but Emily later gave the game away when she told an interviewer from the Vineyard Gazette that other than the “Baltimore caramels,” she had made nothing. “If I were forced to cook for myself, my diet would be bread and water,” she cheerfully admitted.

  The introduction to the cookbook concluded with her supposed “favorite dessert, Pennsylvania Apple Pandowdy.” Her friends must have laughed: the simple, sweet country mixture of sliced apples, brown sugar, molasses, and cinnamon, with a thick latticed top, was famously southern. Trying to credit the menu with more national appeal—or just out of ignorance—Ned had misrepresented its regionality. The woman with chocolate ice cream on her mind day and night may well have yearned for an occasional homecooked pandowdy instead, but not one that came from Pennsylvania, where, Josephine had often lamented, coal came quicker than cuisine.

  That October, Emily revised her earlier will (no copy of which survives), perhaps to remove formally a beneficiary she had planned to reward. Anne Kent, the one- time dedicatee of Etiquette, “mysteriously disappeared” from Emily’s life around this time, Bill Post remembers. “Because my family and I were living in Bogotá, I didn’t get much firsthand information about Anne Kent’s disappearance,” he says. He assumes there was a fallingout: “It had been a great personal relationship at first,” he recalls. “Grandmother was very fond of her. But I did hear suggestions that Anne Kent assumed she was Emily Post’s heir. My grandmother wanted family, not outsiders, handling the institute after she died, mostly for the continuity of her personal vision, not for financial reasons, in spite of the money being good. Perhaps the Anne Kent schism was due to this situation. Libby and I decided to return from Colombia primarily because of Grandmama’s needs for the institute. She was reaching the point where someone had to take over, and my father just wasn’t able. All I know is that when Libby and I moved back to New York, Anne Kent was gone, and she was never mentioned again.”

  Emily rarely left her apartment those days. “Pet,” as Emily fondly called her new assistant and secretary, Isabel Paulantonio, had a small lobby office in the co- op building Emily had created, and her employer phoned her to come upstairs whenever she was needed. “I was with her every day, I think, throughout the fifties. Mrs. Post was very kind, very generous, very, very nice; we had lunch together often,” Isabel remembers. “But she sometimes didn’t remember who I was or what I was doing there.”

  By 1952, many of Emily’s friends had died, and at times, it almost seemed as if there were no real Emily Post either, just a symbol instead, to be used by the public as it best served them. On May 23 newspapers around the country reported on a Los Angeles lawyer’s wife who had sued the Pa-cific Telephone and Telegraph Company. The phone company had ignored the woman’s demands to list only herself, not her husband’s ex wife too, as “Mrs. Carl Warner.” The divorced wife should go by “Mrs. Jeanne Warner,” with the man’s first name reserved for the current wife alone, decreed the supreme authorities of the land, quoting from “English common law,” “social usage,” “American custom”—and, they claimed, “Emily Post.” Once again, Emily’s words were twisted to suit the governing assumptions: Etiquette’s dictum, both in 1922 and now, stated the contrary to such a ruling. “A woman who has divorced her husband retains the legal as well as the so-cial right to use her husband’s full name, in New York State at least”—thus spake Emily Post for real.

  CHAPTER 68

  OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, THE DICTION OF EMILY’S DAILY COLUMN changed, enough to alert an especially observant reader to an outside presence. Lacking Emily’s genteel though quick rhythm, the answers, though largely written by Emily, became artfully efficient, crisply edited by Ned and Isabel. Enough moments that were “pure Emily” assured the careful reader that she was nonetheless still in command: “The test of a lady is nowhere greater than in situations where the advantage is her own. It isn’t possible to advertise lack of quality more blatantly than the overbearing, inconsiderate shopper, who rudely criticizes everything a saleswoman shows her, who treats her as though she were someone of a completely inferior class.”

  In her June 15, 1952, column, Emily addressed a question from a mother who thought it more polite for her child to leave food on her plate at every meal. During World War II, the writer acknowledged, “when food was
scarce, it was considered proper to eat all the food on one’s plate, but does that same rule apply today?” For Emily, there was no ambiguity: “Leaving food on your plate is not good manners—and never was because it not only shows lack of appreciation of your hostess’ food, but also ‘wanton’ priorities. Wasting a precious commodity could never be an ethical choice.” Immediately following this quick dispatch, the second query concerned an “innocent offender” in the office who had the habit “of spraying everyone in the face whenever he talks to them.” Because much of the colleagues’ work demanded that the two sit side by side, the writer said, he was “frequently sprayed,” “a most unpleasant experience.” Emily cut to the quick: “Unhappily, I know of nothing except trying to keep out of his range.”

  Most important, in 1952, Emily Post would confront a real contender for her position as front- runner in all things etiquette, the first serious threat since Lillian Eichler. Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette would sell 900,000 copies by the end of its first six months on the market. Van-derbilt’s book sales quickly overtook Emily’s oddly stagnant—and un-doubtedly inaccurate—figure, “1 million copies,” cited repeatedly over the years. Asked if she was bothered that other books were copying her own— politely, no names were cited—Emily amicably responded that the more good books on the subject of good manners, the better. For most of the decade, Amy Vanderbilt’s book ran neck and neck with Etiquette. Doubleday was the publisher, and this time, in contrast to the anonymity Lillian Eich-ler had been dealt decades before, the book cover included the author’s name.

  Later that summer, as if proving that she was still current, Emily Post tackled beach manners—her way. She wrote a lengthy column comparing European with American beach habits; she noted that on “European beaches...sex is always dominant, whereas in America, it does not count!” Perhaps her awareness that swimming in Edgartown was easy and relaxing— no shame involved when neighbors walked by—caused her to prefer her own country’s habits to beach protocols in Europe. There, she pointed out, the beaches were meant for spectacle rather than exercise. At “Trouville-Deauville or the Lido,” she estimated, “not more than 25 per cent” of those in swimsuits go in the water, unlike the nearly “100 per cent” of American beachgoers so attired. As usual, she saw nothing inherently wrong with ei-ther choice: they were simply different, demanding sensitivity to one’s en-vironment. Emily, who for years had lauded the habits and manners of sophisticates overseas, now found herself more comfortable in her own American skin.