Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  When Vanity Fair ran a full-page Covarrubias caricature of Emily in 1933—frizzy-haired, owl-eyed, bare feet propped on the table, pinkie crooked in a question mark—fans were aghast at the irreverence, while Post thought it “too giggle-making for words.” (She had laughed at herself before in Vanity Fair, when in 1926 Crowninshield talked her into spoofing Etiquette with a quirky, anonymous serial called “How to Behave Though a Debutante.”)

  Post’s great-grandchildren talk about her as if she were just like any other great-grandmother.

  “She’d give us dimes so we could eat ice-cream cones at the local drugstore,” says Allen Post.

  “She was not formidable,” says Peter Post.

  “She was not pretentious in any way,” agrees Bill Post Jr.

  “To be pretentious was the worst faux pas you could make,” continues Cindy Post Senning, who co-directs the Emily Post Institute in Burlington, Vermont. Bill Post Sr. seconds that: “If she had to go to the bathroom, she’d say, ‘I have to go where the king goes on foot.’”

  She was down-to-earth.

  “Almost to the day she died,” says Bill Post Sr., “she could sit perfectly happy on the floor, bolt upright with her legs crossed. For me as a child that was neat.”

  In the last years of her life, in the late 1950s, Post became increasingly forgetful, and the family believes she may have been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. During those years her son Edwin junior wrote her column from Italy, where he had retired, and her faithful secretaries kept up the correspondence. Emily Post died of pneumonia on September 25, 1960, in her bedroom at 39 East 79th Street. She was 86. Her ashes were buried in Tuxedo Park, next to her son Bruce. Today, Post’s Etiquette (which has sold more than 500,000 copies since 1984) is updated by feisty Peggy Post, wife of great-grandson Allen.

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  When those close to Emily Post speak of her, they invariably touch on her love of color, how she impulsively, happily re-painted furniture, radios, whatever struck her as needing new life, and how she adored red—bright Chinese red. And then they remember her shoes, red shoes—a closetful! It’s a fascinating footnote. In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Red Shoes,” a girl puts on scarlet slippers and cannot stop dancing, just as Post, having written Etiquette, could never stop being her book. But the similarity ends there. Emily Post loved the dance she was doing. And she did it with such joy. Who better to teach us the steps than the woman who wrote (under “Rules of Sportsmanship”), “If you are hurt, whether in mind or body, don’t nurse your bruises. Get up and light-heartedly, courageously, good-temperedly get ready for the next encounter. This is the only way to take life—this is also ‘playing’ the game!”

  KATHLEEN HARRIMAN MORTIMER

  TO WAR IN SILK STOCKINGS

  By Marie Brenner | November 2011

  On May 16, 1941, Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the new American special envoy to Britain, W. Averell Harriman, was on a train speeding to London for her first look at war. She would have worn a hat, and probably gloves—that was the kind of girl she was, pretty and very rich, a graduate of Foxcroft and Bennington who wanted to be taken seriously. She had with her a small black notebook and her father’s New York shopping requests: silk stockings and chiffon handkerchiefs for the Churchill family, Stim-U-Dents, Time magazine, The New York Times, and six Guerlain lipsticks—which she knew better than to question. The notebook would become indispensable—the only place where the 23-year-old would feel safe to confide her thoughts—and she would fill pages from her seat at the center of power. All that summer and autumn of 1941, she set down moments small and large, then tucked the notebook away and never discussed its existence or contents with anyone—including her children—for 70 years.

  She gazed at the craters in the streets, the charred remains of towns, children playing in the rubble. “Perhaps someday I’ll be able to figure out what made me want to come . . . pluck has nothing to do with it,” she wrote in pencil in a boarding-school hand. The previous week in London had been an unimaginable hell: the British Museum, Waterloo Station, and the House of Commons had been almost destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Delayed in Lisbon, Kathy, as she was known, had been spared the thousands of buzz bombs dumped on central London, which killed 3,000 people.

  “When are you Americans coming to help us? Because you know we can’t win without you,” she was asked by a woman in her compartment soon after the train left Bristol. Did Kathy let on who she was? By then, her father was already on page one of every newspaper. Averell Harriman was in London on a mission of desperation: to help save the British from Hitler. A senior partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, he was nicknamed “the crocodile” for his outbursts of sovereignty. But Harriman’s own urgency about the need to go to war had given him bleeding ulcers. Months before Japan attacked America at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was still holding off on entering the war even as England was battered by the Blitz. Roosevelt’s stopgap was to send Harriman, the lordly financier and a co-owner of Newsweek, as a personal liaison to implement the new aid program called Lend-Lease. It was understood inside Washington that Harriman’s real task was to help forge an alliance between Churchill and Roosevelt, known for their chilly relationship.

  “Are those silk stockings you’re wearing? Are you American?” Startled by the cheerful conversation, Kathy wrote down the questions, as well as her new friend’s zinger: “Looking at her own stockings of cotton lisle, she announced that hers were far more serviceable.” When Kathy told her of the latest New York fashions—“hip-length jackets, apron skirts, the big competition for bigger and better hats”—the woman was dismissive: “Oh, well, we have all of that. You see, war or no war, we keep up.”

  Kathy had no real reporting experience, but her father had managed to pull a plum assignment for her: she would write of the heroics of the Englishwomen. The series—for Hearst’s International News Service—would be called “The British Woman at War.” “Just give us everything you can observe and think of, sobbing all over the page,” one editor would later instruct her. Her bona fides were that she was intelligent, stylish, and a Harriman. She was clearly worried about the entitlement. “I’m no Dorothy Thompson,” she confided in her diary. She wouldn’t have to be.

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  An expert rider and an Olympic-level skier, she was called Kathy by her friends and Puff by her father, who was, in 1941, the fourth-richest man in America. A member of the elite circle of titans educated at Groton and Yale later known as the Wise Men, Harriman would become an architect of the American Century. Remote and often charm-free, Harriman in private was an affectionate father who pushed his two daughters to excel. He critiqued their schoolwork and encouraged their closeness with his favorite sister, Mary Rumsey, a member of Roosevelt’s inner circle who was an early consumer advocate. She had inspired her younger brother to become a Democrat and helped transform him from a polo-playing rich boy. At 49 he was still dazzlingly handsome. The New York Post’s Dixie Tighe would tell Kathy, “For God’s sake, tell your father the next time I have to cover his conference to wear a gas mask so I can concentrate on what he is saying.” On the slopes, with his head tossed back and wearing sunglasses, Harriman exuded the effortless style of an American aristocrat. So did Kathy, who could out-ski him and out-shoot him. Harriman adored her.

  THINGS OK HERE CABLE WHETHER YOU SERIOUSLY WANT TO COME, he had wired shortly after his arrival in England. Not long out of Bennington, Kathy was marooned in Sun Valley, the Idaho ski resort her father had built at the height of the Depression to be America’s Saint-Moritz. Her favorite Austrian ski instructors had fled to join Hitler or were threatened with arrest as enemy aliens. Put to work writing press releases in the winter of 1940, Kathy wrote in her diary that she felt lost and melancholy. At a time when no reporters were easily cleared for London, Harriman had pressed hard to get her a passport and a job. IT IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND IN N
EW YORK THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WHAT IS GOING ON HERE IT IS A UNIQUE PRIVILEGE TO BE HERE THEREFORE I AM GOING TO ENCOURAGE KATHLEEN TO COME . . . CAN GET NEWSWEEK APPOINTMENT IF NONE OTHER AVAILABLE, he cabled home. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote back: PASSPORTS . . . HAVE HAD TO BE REFUSED TO THE FAMILIES OF OFFICIALS . . . MIGHT PROVE AN ADDED EMBARRASSMENT I STRONGLY ADVISE AGAINST. Other cables followed, to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson and to John Gilbert Winant, the American ambassador to Britain, known as Gil. Harriman’s final cable was to Kathy herself: GET IN TOUCH WITH HARRY. There was no one more influential in America in 1941 than Roosevelt’s top aide, Harry Hopkins, a hero to many, a Rasputin to others, and one of Harriman’s closest friends. Soon Kathy could cable her father: PASSPORT OKAY LOVE KATHLEEN HARRIMAN.

  For years Harriman had struggled to overcome his legacy as the son of the robber baron who started the Union Pacific Railroad, a man President Theodore Roosevelt had blasted as a “malefactor of great wealth.” It was said of Harriman that he was forever trying to measure up to his stern and remote father, who had died when Averell was 17. Desperately ambitious, he had set out to make a fortune in minerals in Russia. He traveled on private Streamliners—America’s first all-coach rail service—and counted among his close friends the New Yorker writer Alexander Woollcott and CBS head Bill Paley. His lust for power and his zeal had alienated America’s old money—especially Franklin Roosevelt. As Washington filled with bankers during the New Deal, Harriman was placed on financial commissions, and not until March 1941 had he been allowed a seat at the table. London would be a test for both father and daughter.

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  Harriman knew that Kathy’s poise and elegant presence would bring him luster. As slender as a model, she wore Worth suits that she could buy off a mannequin. With her wide smile and natural curiosity, she would be a perfect hostess for her father. Harriman’s wife, Marie, an earthy art dealer, had severe vision problems, which kept her in America. For Kathy, “Ave,” as she called him, had always been a bachelor father. Kathy’s mother had filed for a divorce when Kathy was 12, and died seven years later. Kathy and her older sister, Mary, had been raised by a beloved governess, Elsie Marshall. An invitation to London to be with her father was a chance for her finally to have him all to herself—or so she thought.

  Once off the train at Paddington, Kathy typed up her notes and telexed them to a Hearst re-write man. Her schmaltzy column closer was just what her editor had in mind: “These English women may not have my silk stockings, but they have something else, something I’d like to catch hold of.” Captioned “N.Y. Girl Looks at War,” a picture of her at the Stork Club occupied three columns in the New York Journal-American. Her story, “Silk Stockings Still Important in London,” ran all over America and in London’s Evening Standard. She soon discovered that even if she wasn’t Dorothy Thompson she had a good ear for a quote. Her father wrote home immediately, “She is the center of attention among certain groups in London—if it weren’t for her Spartan upbringing (for which I take no credit) she would become unbearably spoiled.”

  Her unstated role was as urgent as her father’s mission—to boost sympathy for the need to help the British. It would also become her burden to be a witness to the affair that would ensnare her father with Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law for the next 45 years. When Kathy died at 93 in February of this year, the Telegraph cut to the chase, saying, “She facilitated his affair with Winston Churchill’s young daughter-in-law Pamela, but following the lovers’ eventual marriage, sued her stepmother for millions.”

  The Telegraph overlooked the real essence of her life: Kathleen Harriman was a link to a vanished world that prided itself on discretion and distinction. The names in her diary represent the pantheon of that historical moment: Winston Churchill, press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, British politician Duff Cooper, even the royal family. And as her father carried on with Pamela Churchill, Gil Winant fell in love with Sarah Churchill, the prime minister’s bohemian daughter. When biographers approached Kathy in later years, her answer to most of them was polite but irrevocable: Thank you, no.

  But a curious revelation startled many who read Kathleen Harriman’s New York Times obituary: Cleaning out the cupboards at his mother’s apartment in the city a few weeks before she died, Kathy’s son David Mortimer, a public-policy expert, noticed a box that held two large brown leather scrapbooks. Inside was a mix of photographs and dozens of newspaper clippings with her London byline, products of a career almost unknown to her family. Page after page had scores of her dispatches with datelines all over England. Later, presiding in Moscow when her father was made ambassador in 1943, she was, noted the New York Herald Tribune at the time, “with the possible exception of Eleanor Roosevelt and Deanna Durbin . . . the best-known American woman in the Soviet Union.” She helped to arrange the 1945 Yalta summit, where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin negotiated the end of World War II.

  The Times detailed her summers as a child spent at Arden House, a 75-room château in upstate New York, on the 25,000-acre Harriman estate. The house, once reached by funicular, was designed by John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings, who also built the New York Public Library.

  It was impossible to conceive that her life had a secret compartment almost unknown to her sons. “Hey, Mom, what is this about?,” David asked her upon discovering the boxes. “Oh, that,” she said, then changed the subject. Since her mind, sharp until her 90s, was beginning to fade, David let the matter drop.

  The news of the discovery caused a frisson among those who knew of the Harriman family’s celebrated history. A cluster of biographies had already mined the vast Harriman archives in the Library of Congress, but in all of them Kathy remained elusive, known from brief quotations from her letters, but little else. This was very much a part of her code. For David and his younger brothers, Jay and Averell, the sons of Stanley Mortimer, the Standard Oil heir Kathy had married at the age of 29, and for her stepdaughter, Amanda Mortimer Burden, New York City’s visionary urban planner, a missing puzzle piece of Kathy’s early life was mysterious and thrilling.

  At first there was hesitation about showing the scrapbooks. The Mortimers are among the last of the old school, who expect to be in the papers only at birth and death. The three sons revered their tomboy mother, who taught them to jump their horses and drove through blizzards to get them to the ski slopes. She served as chair of a foundation, skied through her 70s, rode in her 80s, and supervised forums on public issues, but she always disliked the spotlight.

  The letterheads on her correspondence are impressive: the Dorchester hotel, 3 Grosvenor Square (an area where so many Americans stayed that it came to be called Eisenhower Platz), Chequers (the prime minister’s country house), Cherkley Court (Beaverbrook’s estate). But little of this was ever part of the Mortimer family’s dinner conversations. “We knew our mother had been there—and the names would come up from time to time—but she deftly changed the subject or referred us to Ave’s own book,” said David.

  David and his brothers learned that in addition to her stint at Hearst their mother had written for Newsweek, spending much of the winter of 1942–43 at the London office, working 12-hour days when the bureau chief and the correspondents were transferred to the front. In Moscow, she helped run the embassy, learned a passable Russian, and enchanted Stalin and his Cabinet. Stalin gave the family two horses, Fact and Boston, which followed them home to Arden. Her father went on to become Harry Truman’s secretary of commerce and, later, governor of New York, and in 1952 and 1956 he was a candidate for president. He remained an integral part of international diplomacy and Democratic Party politics until his death, at age 94.

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  London loved the diplomat’s daughter from the first, and Kathy loved her new profession. She kept all the notes from her first real assignment, a profile of Lady Astor, the peppery American-born Nancy Langhorne, who had become a hero
ine to the British. Kathy typed on her Underwood portable: “‘I’ll stand on my head on Plymouth Hoe, if anyone thinks that will help Plymouth.’ That’s what Lady Astor said to me today in the course of an exclusive interview as she drove to Plymouth Station to see 200 evacuating children on their way.” She also quoted Lady Astor asking her, “Child . . . come and tell me about home. What are they thinking and talking about these days?” Kathy telexed the story to the International News Service with her kicker: “If invasion comes, incidentally, I won’t envy the Germans who meet her.”

  Ave threw his daughter into the mix from the moment she arrived. The world she had grown up in was small and tightly bound by the strictest social rules: you wore white in summer, kept Jews out of your clubs, and knew the families of everyone you might marry. If you were a Harriman, your world was expanded: you skied at Sun Valley with champions, had your Labrador on the cover of Life, had Jewish friends who ran networks, banks, and newspapers, or wrote plays and musical comedies. “It will make a real person out of her,” Ave wrote Marie, whose mother was Jewish. On the night Puff arrived, he tossed a lavish party for her at the Savoy and invited every correspondent in town.

  From his 27-room suite of offices in Grosvenor Square, Harriman pulled her into meetings with editors and generals. For the first months, Kathy lived with her father at the Dorchester, a glittering fortress during the Blitz. The dining room had a steady supply of crème caramel and lobster, champagne flowed, and an orchestra played late into the night. The novelist Somerset Maugham was also a guest at the time. During the day, Kathy wrote home, “the telephone never stops ringing in our suite. . . . Combine the war and journalism and you’ll never have a moment of boredom.”

  Some of the best women reporters in the world were in London then—the Chicago Daily News’s Helen Kirkpatrick; the London Sunday Times’s Virginia Cowles; Life’s Mary Welsh, who would marry Ernest Hemingway. But Kathy’s arrival was splashed in the English press. KATHLEEN HAS HAD ROYAL RECEPTION, Ave cabled. He also sent a long letter to Marie: “It is too bad she had so much publicity, but it couldn’t be helped. . . . She is the only girl other than Helen Kirkpatrick reporting in London. (Two others are writing books.)”