Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners - Couverture rigide

Claridge, Laura

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0375509216 ISBN 13 : 9780375509216

Editeur : Random House Inc, 2008

Synopsis

Book by Claridge Laura

A propos du livre

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CHAPTER 1

It happened like this—in many respects an old tale, with nothing original to recommend it. A society man was caught cheating on his wife, and now, his blackmailers agreed, he would have to pay.

Emily Price Post, the adulterer’s wife, was furious. Shocking even herself, for the briefest of moments the usually even-tempered young matron yearned for revenge. Against her spouse, his lover, the blackmailers, and society: anyone who had contributed to this pain. Still in love with her husband, the thirty-two-year-old woman had long ago given up hope that he felt the same about her. She had made peace with her private anguish. What she had not anticipated was public humiliation.

During the hottest days that summer of 1905, the aftermath of Edwin Post’s betrayal played out daily on the front pages of New York City’s newspapers. Such flamboyant publicity bolstered Edwin’s damaged self-image even as it shriveled his wife’s. Now Emily wore, to those few who knew her well, an aura of sadness only emphasized by her husband’s exuberance.

Edwin’s friends had warned him to be discreet, but he had ignored them, sure, as usual, that he knew best. By late April 1905 the cocky thirty-five-year-old stockbroker had become careless about how he conducted his affairs with chorus girls and fledgling actresses. So in the middle of June, when one of them whined, mistaking his attentions for relationship collateral, he made a fatal misstep. He reacted callously, warning her to vacate the Connecticut cottage he kept for such intrigues: she bored him.

Within days of toasting his new freedom from the starlet he had suddenly found cloying, Edwin received a call from a representative of Colonel William D’Alton Mann, publisher of the articulate gossip sheet Town Topics. Mann, already embarked on this summer’s vacation abroad, had left his business in the hands of Charles H. Ahle, his second-in-command. The officious Ahle suggested that he and Edwin Post meet—soon. On June 25 Ahle visited Post, who was unceremoniously instructed to ante up the cash or be exposed to scandal: Town Topics was about to go public with some juicy news of certain interest to Edwin. Luckily, Colonel Mann had left instructions to suppress this gossip if Post subscribed to a vanity book to be printed sometime in the distant future. Five hundred dollars would neatly cover the costs for Post’s copy. He should be grateful, Ahle added unctuously; some other men—more important than Post—had been taxed a far greater amount for the same “project.”

Thus it was that Edwin Post joined the Gilded Age prey, a group of select men (and several women) stalked by the redoubtable publisher. Colonel Mann abhorred what he considered the duplicity of society. He took immense satisfaction in supplementing his own income at the expense of a careless millionaire’s misalliance. The jovial Civil War hero, a suave, condescending, robust Santa Claus, mixed in his complicated person two sometimes contrary impulses. He was a true believer—no sloppy grammar or careless vernacular would be published under his masthead. But he was also a cynical extortionist, impatient with public figures so inane that they discarded their private lives for a night of pleasure.

This hypocritical reformer had become an object of dread among the city’s most prominent citizens: J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, William K. Vanderbilt, and William C. Whitney. His method was simple: hire aggrieved servants, disgruntled friends, or a furious spouse to spy on suspects. Then bully those miscreants into paying for a “subscription” to a mostly phantom, wildly expensive illustrated book about leaders of society. Various prices were assessed for each victim, with an eye to what the sinner could afford. What could be easier than such a scam, in the shadow of the Victorian mores that still darkened the resplendent Gilded Age? Money and fevered morality, a glorious mix for a con artist with ethics like Mann’s.

Pleading a shortage of money, Edwin bought some time to consider his options. Two days later, Ahle came looking for him again. The wayward husband bargained with Mann’s representative. “Give me a little more time and I’ll get you the money,” he pleaded, adding, “please don’t publish the article on Friday”—the usual pattern for expensive gossip sponsored by Town Topics.

Here the truth becomes a matter of conjecture. The official line, constructed by Emily years later, maintained that the victim was unable to produce the $500 “fee” for the vanity book (worth about $5,000 in today’s currency)—his extensive costs of paying for a mistress aside. Before divulging the news to his wife, Edwin had first sought advice from the couple’s mutual ally, prominent society lawyer Phoenix Ingraham (whom Edwin knew to be smitten with Emily). Predictably, their friend had insisted that she be brought into the discussion, whereupon Emily immediately agreed to help bring down this corrupt operation that had netted so many of their friends. There was no question: the Posts should not pay off the bribe. The prospect of a public spectacle, with her husband its sacrificial lamb and she herself the object of prurient gossip, supposedly failed to discourage the always decorous Emily Price Post.

Throughout the years, Emily would contend that the couple’s private discussions had centered upon Edwin’s lack of money as well as their mutual determination to end the insidious blackmail of their friends. But such a grand explanation allowed Emily to displace her husband’s painful, real weakness: his inability or, even worse, his unwillingness to protect his wife from scandal.

The week following July 11, 1905, both the New York Times and the New York Tribune sustained a running commentary on the sting. “Stockbroker’s Way of Dealing with Bribe Offer” trumpeted the Tribune’s front page. Edwin Post, the article continued, was a partner in a brokerage firm and lived—in the summers—with his wife and children in Tuxedo Park. A terse sentence followed: “[Post’s] action in the case was taken on the advice of Mrs. Post.” The Baltimore Sun, Emily’s hometown paper, ran a short front-page article on the affair, failing to mention that the betrayed wife was the daughter of their famous homegrown architect, whom, till then, the city had proudly claimed as its own any chance it got. However briefly, Edwin Post was finally at the center of Emily’s life.

She never forgave him.

CHAPTER 2

He knew he’d struck gold when she tried so hard to impress him, stifling her girlish giggles and self-consciously checking her slight slouch. A fetching enough sixteen-year-old from the Pennsylvania countryside, she had been turned out by Baltimore’s best finishing school, polished with the high patina of shiny anthracite coal. Josephine Lee won Bruce Price’s loyalty, if never quite his heart, within minutes of their meeting at a debutante ball in the winter season of 1869.

Young Bruce, an aspiring architect, was undeniably looking to marry money, and Josephine’s father, Washington Lee, possessed a postwar fortune in want of spending. The Lees were no anomaly: one of Lee’s railroad compeers demonstrated his recent profits, in 1865, by throwing what was the most lavish party in memory. The menus were lettered in gold, the dining room “smothered in rarest flowers.” Each of the host’s guests was presented with a silk cushion embroidered with his name. The wines cost $25 a bottle, the prestigious singers were paid $1,000 for two songs, and the final bill for the extravaganza totaled $20,000 (almost $3 million today), to bravos all around.

Emily Bruce Price, Washington Lee’s granddaughter, would be a daddy’s girl throughout her long life. She unabashedly bragged about her devotion: to Emily, Bruce Price was a giant among men. At six feet, two inches, the architect whose charms were legendary came of age at the end of the Civil War, but he would have stood out in any era. Handsome, naturally convivial, confident, generous: it is easy to understand his daughter’s lifelong infatuation. Her adoration, in the end, merely echoed that of Bruce Price’s many friends and relatives, who, after being with him for five minutes, seemed convinced they’d made contact with something significant. His niece, a countess by marriage, still recalled, almost fifty years after his death, Bruce Price’s “outstanding personal beauty and personal charm” and his “unpretentious confidence in himself.” “Everyone” revered him, she said. Emily worshipped him.

Born in Cumberland, Maryland, at the end of 1845, Bruce Price had arrived a week and a half too early to be the Christmas baby his parents had anticipated. What would become his trademark of nearly obsessive punctuality stamped his earliest days. The boy, one of an eventual seven brothers and sisters, spent most of his childhood in Baltimore. Hugging the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s third-largest city enjoyed a seventy-mile buffer from the Atlantic, a distinction only one other major American port, Philadelphia, could claim. The location was ripe for a transportation liaison, which the railroad barons of the nineteenth century would pursue with relish, even when slaves were needed to turn dreams into reality.

William Price, Bruce’s father—“eccentric,” sniped some who didn’t understand him—was an important lawyer in Baltimore during the turbulent 1860s. A restless man, Price graduated from college eager to leave the outskirts of Washington County in favor of the more prosperous legal garrets of Cumberland. There he met and quickly wed Marion Bruce, a Scottish lass who could minister to his practical side. Their oblig...

Présentation de l'éditeur

“What would Emily Post do?” Even today, Americans cite the author of the perennial bestseller Etiquette as a touchstone for proper behavior. But who was the woman behind the myth, the authority on good manners who has outlasted all comers? Award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the first authoritative biography of the unforgettable woman who changed the mindset of millions of Americans, an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Age to the 1960s.

Born shortly after the Civil War, Emily Post was a daughter of high society, the only child of an ambitious Baltimore architect, Bruce Price, and his wellborn wife. Within a few years of his daughter’s birth, Price moved his family to New York City, where they mingled with the Roosevelts and the Astors as well as with the new crowd in town–J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt clan. Blossoming into one of Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Emily went on to marry Edwin Post, planning to re-create in her own home the happiness she’d observed between her parents. Instead, she would find herself in the middle of a scandalous divorce, its humiliating details splashed across the front pages of New York newspapers for months.

Traumatic though it was, the end of her marriage forced Emily Post to become her own person. She would spend the next fifteen years writing novels and attending high-powered literary events alongside the likes of Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, but in middle age she decided she would try something different.

When it debuted in 1922 with a tiny first print run, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest–and a country at its wildest. Claridge addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success and gives us a panoramic view of the culture from which Etiquette took its shape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decade to keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing social landscape.

A tireless advocate for middle-class and immigrant Americans, Emily Post became the emblem of a new kind of manners in which etiquette and ethics were forever entwined. Now, nearly fifty years after her death, we still feel her enormous influence on how we think Best Society should behave .

Praise for Emily Post

“Given the ubiquitousness of her repeatedly revised magnum opus, Etiquette, first published in 1922, we think of Emily Post as an institution rather than a human being. But she was a woman of substance and sensitivity. The first to fully portray this pioneer, Claridge is becoming the sort of biographer readers will follow anywhere, and one hopes she’ll continue in the vein that yielded Norman Rockwell (2001) and now this absorbing study of a keenly perceptive ethicist second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in the immensity of her influence. A child of privilege born in the wake of the Civil War, smart and beautiful Emily Price married a rascal. The pain and humiliation of her divorce from Edwin Post fostered her devotion to writing (she was a successful novelist) and seeded the compassion and advocacy for women that shaped her highly moral approach to etiquette. Claridge chronicles Post’s remarkable ability to discern the needs of a Claridge chronicles Post’s remarkable ability to discern the needs of a burgeoning American public transformed by immigration, industrialization, war, and women’s and civil rights, and hungry for guidance in social and familial situations. A best-selling writer and hugely popular radio personality, Post equated etiquette with character and ensured a ‘democratization of manners.’ Claridge greatly deepens our appreciation for Post’s achievements and brings forward the impressive woman behind the do’s and don’ts.” ---Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“It was the genius of Emily Post to show us that manners are the small coin of morality….Emily Post became perhaps the most important and certainly the most influential moralist of the 20th century. It is Laura Claridge’s genius to explain the surprising and improbable background and equally amazing personality of Emily Post.” — P.J. O’Rourke, author of Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People

“What she [Claridge] has given us is not only a canny and insightful read, but when she calls her Emily ‘a domestic anthropologist,’ you know she’s right. Brava!” –Nancy Milford, author of Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Laura Claridge has given us so much more than a mere biography of this august arbiter of good manners; [She] has flung open the doors of an entire society — she has shown us in enchanting, mesmerizing detail how the modern city of New York was built and made.” -- Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life

“… a biography as rich and engaging as a portrait by John Singer Sargent.” — Daniel Mark Epstein, author of The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage

“Laura Claridge’s masterful Emily Post tells the story of a lively heroine, raised in a Gilded Age New York of silk-stockings and debutante balls, who wrote one of the enduring bestsellers of the 20th century…. Laura Claridge’s vivid, graceful biography of Emily Post is an essential contribution to American social history.”   ——Eric Homberger, author of Mrs. Astor’s New York

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0375509216
• ISBN 13: 9780375509216
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 525
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarie