But, as other New York papers pointed out, Edwin Post’s action “was taken on the advice of Mrs. Post.” She was the one with the nerve, for she was the one whose private injury would become public knowledge. When the dust settled, Emily did something even nervier, something she would never have put her fictional characters through. She filed for divorce. Believing her changed status—still a rarity at that time—demanded a changed name, she christened herself Mrs. Price Post, as if to reiterate “I am my father’s daughter.” One also suspects, given the names in Ahle’s briefcase, that Emily felt no man could measure up to Bruce Price. In her early 30s, at the height of her beauty, she closed up shop, romantically speaking. For the rest of her life, Emily Post would cross all ballroom floors alone.
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We are workers,” her father had said, and next to raising her two sons, work was all she wanted. In three years Post published three books, beginning in 1908 with Woven in the Tapestry, a slim volume of strange fables written in a perfumed Symbolist style, and dedicated to Bruce Price. Archaic and esoteric, it was not a success. The Title Market, in 1909, was. This best-seller about American heiresses in pursuit of titled Europeans made Post an instant authority on society marriages. The book showcases Post’s strength—her keen feeling for the way character is revealed through manners (the content in form!). And it also betrays her weakness: good guys and bad guys who are simply too good and too bad. In 1910, with The Eagle’s Feather, Post tried for complexity—a misogynist hero, a martyred heroine. And still the book ends with everyone illumined, forgiven. Post knew darkness—she just couldn’t bow to it.
With the boys away at school at Pomfret, then Harvard, Post lived at Tuxedo and used the house on 10th Street when visiting editors and friends in the city. She was keeping meticulous scrapbooks of her reviews, marking particularly positive mentions with red (her favorite color) and negative comments in light blue. And now she was in the best magazines, including Collier’s, edited by the bon vivant Frank Crowninshield, a close friend who was soon to become the editor of Vanity Fair. “Crownie” was full of ideas for Post, and in 1915 he came up with a doozy. Using the new Lincoln Highway—a dirt road in some states—would she motor from New York to San Francisco, dispatching reports to Collier’s along the way?
Why not? Edwin junior took a leave from Harvard to be chauffeur, cousin Alice Beadleston squeezed in with the luggage, and the three were off—27 stops in 26 days. After the custom-made car’s first breakdown 20 miles from Utica, Post wrote, “Is there anything more exhilarating than an automobile running smoothly along? Is there anything more dispiriting than the same automobile unable to go?” When an old man comes along in a buggy, she notes, “He grinned as the owner of a horse always does grin under such circumstances.” This is the voice that emerges in By Motor to the Golden Gate—game, engaging, getting right to the heart of human nature. It is a voice tuning up for something larger.
Back in New York, Post watched her elder son, Edwin junior, leave for war, where in 1917 he was cited in French Army Orders for bravery. In these years, at the behest of friends who admired her eye for interiors, Post developed a second career helping these friends redesign their homes. She loved making cardboard dioramas of rooms, showing where a staircase should go, where a window. In a later era she might have followed her father into architecture, which she thought the highest of the arts. But it was still writing that paid the bills.
Post was pasting together a model of a house, a makeover for the daughter of Mrs. Stanley Mortimer, when she received another Crownie call—not actually from Crowninshield, but at his suggestion. Richard Duffy of Funk & Wagnalls felt there was a market for a good book on etiquette, and having called Crowninshield for advice, he was told, “If you want a book for the 10,000, get Edith Wharton. But if you want a book for the millions, I would suggest Emily Post.”
Mrs. Price Post wanted no part of it (she thought Duffy was selling encyclopedias). When she finally understood what Duffy was proposing, she refused to consider it. Crownie, however, was not the Diaghilev of cultural New York for nothing. He sent Post a lately published book on etiquette, a condescending work that stressed pinkie fingers and fish forks. Post read late into the night, then threw the book from bed. As she would later explain, “It was all so wrong. The ultimatums they laid down would merely have made people unpleasant. Their attitude was false and silly and cheap. At 3 o’clock in the morning, I called up Mr. Duffy.” In 1921, at the age of 48, Emily Post began research on the book she was born to write.
Crowninshield had been onto something. As gifted a storyteller as Post was, her novels did read like second-rate Edith Wharton. The very qualities that made Post’s fiction a bit simplistic—her endless optimism, her ingrained sense of fair play, her authorial presence too much in the room—were exactly the qualities that made Etiquette embracing, accessible, intimate. Here was Post’s own American Surety Building, a site on which to apply those golden means (like golden rules) she’d lived with all her life—the Price ideals of scale and proportion. She wrote the book sitting on a high stool at an architect’s drafting table, no doubt remembering her father’s words “Living is building.” It was 18 months in the making, 38 chapters, moving from “Introductions” (“Most people very much dislike being asked their names”) to every aspect of social interaction, the last line pointing to “the Golden Age that is sure to be.” Emily Post’s Etiquette was monumental, a blueprint for a better civilization.
Chapter I—“What Is Best Society?”—sets the standard. “Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. . . . Thus Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which good form . . . and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” Anyone could be of Emily Post’s “Best Society,” if only they understood the code. Correctness could be learned, but it rang hollow without kindness.
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Still, there was nothing sweet or simpering about Post’s text. Upon reading the 1922 edition, America’s reigning literary critic, Edmund Wilson, wrote, “I had no conception of her extraordinary book till I looked into it recently, [and] fell under its spell. . . . Mrs. Post is not merely the author of a comprehensive textbook on manners: she is a considerable imaginative writer, and her book has some of the excitement of a novel.” Post had indeed brought her fictional skills to bear on the book, and her characters had names right out of Restoration drama: the Oldnames, the Toploftys, the Gildings, Clubwin Doe, the Kindharts, the Littlehouses, Mr. Richan Vulgar, the Upstarts. In other hands they might have been mere chess pieces, but instead, wrote Dorothy Parker in The New Yorker, “these people in Mrs. Post’s book live and breathe; as Heywood Broun once said of characters in a play, ‘they have souls and elbows.’”
And they elbowed their way into satire, sometimes even slapstick. There are scenes in Etiquette which once read can never be forgotten. Edmund Wilson’s favorite is “The House Party in Camp,” where Mrs. Worldly “looks at her napkin ring as though it were an insect.” (Dorothy Parker writes of Mrs. Worldly, “I know of no character in the literature of the last quarter century who is such a complete pain in the neck.”) The classic, though, is “How a Dinner Can Be Bungled.” In this lesson an eager young wife (“You,” the reader) oversteps herself, attempting a formal dinner before her household has proved itself on smaller occasions. Post achieves a mounting comic horror, the slow drip toward social disaster you get in Jane Austen. Example: “And then comes the soup. You don’t have to taste it to see that it is wrong. It looks not at all as ‘clear’ soup should! Instead of being glass-clear amber, it is a greasy-looking brown. . . . You look around the table; Mr. Kindhart alone is trying to eat it.” Drop into Etiquette anywhere and it’s impossible not
to keep reading.
“Etiquette books surface at different times in history,” says Judith Martin (Miss Manners). “It’s either in periods where life is so complicated that you can’t possibly just imitate your parents and hope to get away with it. Or times like the Renaissance, when people want to develop aesthetics in behavior as well as in building and arts. And then the other big time—times of social upheaval. So, yes, you had an influx of new rich then. We have it now. America is founded on this idea, that you get ahead through your own merit.”
As Duffy intuited, an authoritative guide was just what 1920s America—its economy booming, its classes in flux—wanted. In a kind of call and response unique in the history of American letters, Babbitt topped 1922’s best-seller list for fiction while Etiquette leapt to the top of nonfiction, edging out Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ. Overnight, Emily Post was writing from the mountaintop. The new social arbiter of America, the first to be so accepted, she was, in the words of novelist Katherine Anne Porter, “the high priestess of good manners, expounding the scriptures even in the temples of the most high. She carries the word to the population, and is at once the interpreter and apologist—in the classic sense of that noble word—of society.”
“She was the founder of this in America,” says Letitia Baldrige, who writes etiquette books herself and served as chief of staff for Jacqueline Kennedy. “There had been many other writers on etiquette before her, but she was the first one who reached the popular vote. She did not talk in too starchy and cold a way, like the ones before her did. She didn’t scare you.” And the bungled dinner party? “How amusing that is and how it relaxes the reader.”
“She’s dealing very thoroughly with the subtext as well as the text,” explains Judith Martin. “The outward rules of etiquette are not all that complicated, and one could set them down once and forever. It’s the subtext, what it shows you about human conflict, that’s fascinating.”
“She’s full of feeling,” says Eleanor Elliott, who was social secretary to John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. “There’s an emotion to her. She explains certain relationships and how to do things very adroitly, and her philosophy was not the crooked little finger; it was about treating people correctly. The how-to-do-it may have changed somewhat, but the principles haven’t. She’s timeless.”
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Fifty when Etiquette was published, Emily Post rose to her new role without missing a beat. She finished the novel she had been working on when Duffy first phoned her—Parade, a story about a society beauty who is sexually cold (rather convincingly written, it may suggest Emily’s own failing of Edwin way back when)—and with its publication in 1925 left novel writing forever. Her day, beginning as always around six, was focused on writing her newspaper column (syndicated in some 200 papers), answering letters (she received up to 6,000 a week), and planning revisions to the next printing of Etiquette (by 1945, the chapter “The Chaperon and Other Conventions” had become “The Vanished Chaperon and Other Lost Conventions”). She emerged at lunch, one on the dot, and her social life took place mostly at home within a closed circle of friends and family. She hated restaurants because she hated the waste of time waiting for food. “Punctuality at meals was a real fetish with her,” recalls Emily’s only grandchild, Bill Post Sr., the son of Edwin junior.
She was a household word, an institution—or as one newspaper observed, “Three great factors in American civilization: parcel post, Saturday Evening Post, Emily Post.”
She was constantly queried for her opinion on issues of the day—from the length of Queen Mary’s skirts (too long), to Prohibition (“I am a wet,” she said, “a sopping wet!”), to corn pone, crumble or dunk? (depends on neighborhood custom). She was a role model constantly watched. When Post spilled a bowl of Swedish lingonberries at a Gourmet Society dinner, the event was reported in The New York Times. “Some regard me as a mechanical robot,” she is quoted as saying. “I’m not at all, really, as you can see.”
Perhaps the happiest period of Post’s life was these years, the mid-1920s. After a few false starts, her younger son, Bruce, had become an architect, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, much to Post’s pride and joy. His career dovetailed with her need for a new home. Looking for a place to live in New York City, Post could find nothing suitable. The apartments didn’t have enough windows, closets, or adequate rooms for the service staff, and the rents were outrageous. In 1925, over lunch with friends at the Colony Club (of which Post was an early member), she decided to build her own co-op, signing up friends as joint owners, including Bessie White (Stanford White’s widow) and Mrs. James Roosevelt. It was a move that only the daughter of Bruce Price might dare to do, and the building that went up on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 79th remains one of the dozen or so tenant-sponsored co-operatives in New York City history. Post hired the esteemed firm of Kenneth M. Murchison, where Bruce was employed, and mother and son helped design the building. It was pure Price Post. “Very reserved and simple,” says Christopher Gray. “Nothing show about it.” The following year, on their own, Bruce and Emily renovated an old sea captain’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. Winters in Manhattan, summers in Edgartown.
The greatest sadness of Post’s life hit in 1927. Just when her younger son, in the words of the Times, “had given evidence of inheriting the talent of his grandfather,” Bruce Post died at 32, from peritonitis following an appendectomy. “She was devastated,” says Bill Post Sr. Post did not openly grieve. She kept up with her work. But in the months following Bruce’s death, in the blank spaces and empty edges, she made herself do puzzles, intricate jigsaw puzzles, to keep her mind off herself and her sorrow. And in Etiquette she revised her section on mourning, adding the line “Most of us merely do the best we can to continue to keep occupied and to avoid casting the shadow of our own sadness upon others.” Nothing “show” about it.
Emily Post had no peer, and Etiquette’s new 1945 subtitle—“The Blue Book of Social Usage”—reflected that stature. This was the guide. During the 1930s, Post reached millions through weekly radio broadcasts, one of the first females on the air. And World War II brought yet another surge of popularity. With the country again experiencing upheaval, new decisions on decorum needed to be made. (Was it all right for women doing factory jobs to hitchhike to work? Post said yes.) Even servicemen were making a run on Etiquette. According to war correspondent Ernie Pyle, if boys wanted to be officers, they had to “know their Emily Post.” The chapter Post added to the 1945 edition of Etiquette, titled “Concerning Military and Post-War Etiquette,” is not only a rich slice of American history, but also unexpectedly moving. Under the heading “When the Disabled Man Is Her Son or Husband or Betrothed,” Post writes of the moment when this man searches a woman’s face “to measure the degree of his handicap by its effects on her”: “She must above everything remember that abandonment to tears is not the way to help him. The one thing that does help is to make him realize that to her he is not any different from the man he was—and to assure him that in the years to come he is not to be set apart.”
That “not” is pure Emily Post, a commandment of compassion: Thou shalt not break his heart. It is no coincidence that, soon after its publication, Etiquette ranked second to the Bible as the book most commonly lifted from bookstores and libraries.
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She really ruled,” says Mrs. Howard Cox, archivist at the Colony Club (and mother-in-law of Tricia Nixon). “If you heard someone say, ‘Oh, Emily Post wouldn’t approve of that,’ well, that was the rule, that was law. Emily Post was taken very seriously.” In fact, at this time the two most powerful women in America were Eleanor Roosevelt and Emily Post.
And what was the powerful Post, a woman making almost $100,000 a year at the age of 72, like in real life?
“She was a very natural person,” says Yvonne Sylvia, Post’s secretary in Edgartown for
15 years. “She was very generous. When I had my second son, I still went a full day, but she paid for a baby-sitter for my children. She seemed very content. I think she was perfectly happy with her grandson and great-grandchildren. She didn’t need the companionship that other people do.”
“She was a lovely, lovely person,” says Isabel Paulantonio, Post’s devoted secretary in New York City. “I was a little in awe of her, considering her background and Etiquette. But she immediately put me at ease.”
“That was one of her charms, one of her talents,” says Elizabeth Post, wife of Bill Post Sr. (and the woman who would take over Etiquette after Emily’s death). “She made you feel totally at ease. She was imposing, a very large lady. She held herself very erect. But she had a very kind face. And she laughed a lot.”
“She enjoyed being Emily Post,” says Bill Post Sr. “She liked to tell stories on herself.”
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