A LITANY OF GOOD WORKS
Mary Emery’s first important philanthropy came not long after her husband’s death, when she donated $250,000 to build a YMCA in Newport, specifically for the Army and Navy enlisted personnel who were stationed there. She had noted, she wrote in a letter outlining her plan, that Newport offered the military men little in the way of entertainment or recreation except “bar rooms and picture shows.” Her YMCA, she hoped, would provide “a better rallying place than you now have for your leisure hours … preferring it as a resort.” As would become typical of her giving, however, she was secretive about it. She was not present at the cornerstone laying, and the identity of the donor was not made public until half an hour before the event. The plaque placed on the building did not even include her name, but merely read:
A MOTHER’S MEMORIAL TO HER SONS
SHELDON AND ALBERT EMERY
To her alma mater, Packer Institute, Mary shipped off $50,000 Brooklyn Union Gas Company bonds to establish a teachers’ pension fund, directing that the fund be named in memory of a favorite mathematics teacher, Miss Adeline L. Jones. In her home town, another $250,000 was presented to the University of Cincinnati Medical School to endow a professorial chair named in honor of her pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin K. Rachford. Another large gift went to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and a grand total of $20,000,000 was set aside to establish the Thomas J. Emery Memorial Fund in memory of her husband. Because her husband “had a kindly and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the Negro race,” she built a 250-bed “Negro orphan asylum” in Cincinnati, as well as a black YMCA. Clearly, as the widow of a builder, she had acquired a taste for building things.
In Cincinnati, meanwhile, the gossips said that Mary Emery and Mrs. Charles P. Taft were not, as they appeared to be, best friends at all, but were actually bitter philanthropic rivals. It was noted that whenever Mrs. Emery stepped forward to support a project, Mrs. Taft withdrew her support from that particular endeavor. Annie Sinton Taft was also very rich. Her father, David Sinton—though the fact was politely overlooked by the time of the second generation—had been a Civil War profiteer. Sensing, with the South talking of Secession, that a war was in the offing, and having a good hunch that war would mean a demand for pig iron, Sinton had cornered the prewar iron market. From the fortune he made selling iron for cannon balls to both the Union and the Confederacy, Sinton had built, among other things, Cincinnati’s Sinton Hotel, which rivaled the Emerys’ Netherland Plaza in both size and luxury. Annie was David Sinton’s only child.
Actually, what Mary Emery and Annie Taft did in Cincinnati—it was often the subject of their daily “breakfast letters”—was to divide things up. When Annie Taft’s interest in the Cincinnati Symphony began to wane, and she became more interested in the Cincinnati Opera, Mary Emery took over the Symphony and built the 2,200-seat Emery Auditorium, where, for years, the Symphony performed. Considered acoustically perfect, the auditorium contained—and still contains—a giant Wurlitzer theatre organ, one of two or three of its kind in the world. The Emery Auditorium, which was completed in 1914, was designed along the lines of the great opera houses of Europe, with a “Diamond Horseshoe” first balcony. For reasons of fashion as much as anything else, the arms of the horseshoe sweep down to the edges of the proscenium in grand curves, embracing the audience as it were, so that the gowns and jewels of the gentry in the boxes are on full display for the lesser folk downstairs in the stalls.
To assure that Culture, or at least a bird’s-eye view of it, would also be available to the least affluent, the architects also included a steep and lofty second balcony, which offered narrower and harder seats in more closely packed rows. The theory in theatre architecture at the time seemed to hold that, though the rich and poor might be permitted to attend cultural events under the same roof, it should not be necessary for them to rub shoulders with one another, and, to that end, admission to this steerage section of the great hall was possible only through a single rather narrow stairway and a separate entrance from the street. (Because this arrangement failed to satisfy later fire-law requirements, the second balcony is no longer used.)
Hard by the auditorium, to fill up the block, perhaps, Mary Emery built the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute, a school devoted to the teaching of trades, which later became part of the University of Cincinnati system. Its capacity was 4,000 students, and an industrial museum adjoined it. Though the Emery name appears on the auditorium’s marquee, Mary’s name is nowhere affixed to either of the two other buildings.
Putting the lie to tales of a philanthropic rivalry, Mary Emery and Annie Taft did sometimes cooperate on the same civic projects. Both women were animal lovers, and at one point each pledged $125,000 for the Cincinnati Zoo, provided other citizens would do the same. Others did. But the Sinton-Taft fortune was never a match for Mary Emery’s. Her annual $40,000 contribution to the Cincinnati Community Chest, plus another $25,000 from the Emery Memorial Fund, made her for twenty years the city’s largest individual donor.
Reciting a list of Mary Emery’s benefactions in Cincinnati and elsewhere very quickly becomes a litany of good works, but among the more important were the building of the Parish House for Christ Church in Cincinnati; a farm for the Fresh Air Society; the Ohio-Miami Medical College for Cincinnati’s General Hospital; The Vacation House, a farm and home for children on the Ohio River; the Central Building of the Cincinnati YMCA (in addition to the “colored” YMCA); the Reception & Medical Building at Trudeau Sanitarium in Saranac, New York; memorial buildings at Tuskegee Institute, Berea College, Lincoln University of Kentucky, Miss Berry’s Schools in Rome, Georgia, Sewanee University, and Hobart College of San Juan, Puerto Rico; the Administration Building of the Children’s Home in Cincinnati; the Salvation Army Rescue Home for Colored in Cincinnati; the waterworks for the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky; “cathedral houses”—children’s shelters, in memory of Sheldon Emery—in such far-flung places as Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Circleville, Ohio.
The list goes on. She endowed free beds in St. Luke’s Hospital, Denver; in St. Luke’s Hospital, Phoenix; at Children’s Hospital, Denver; at Esmeralda Hospital, Sewanee, Tennessee; at St. Luke’s Hospital, McAlester, Oklahoma; at St. Margaret’s Hospital, Boise, Idaho; and at Good Samaritan Hospital, in Cincinnati. She also endowed Emery Free Day (free admissions on Saturdays) at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Mary M. Emery Chair of Pathology at Ohio-Miami Medical School. She established the Emery Foundation of San Francisco, the Emery Arboretum “for the study of trees and shrubs in the Ohio Valley,” and the Mary M. Emery Bird Reserve, a plan to “bring back the birds to the city.”
Among the social institutions she actively supported were the Ohio Institute for Public Efficiency, a foundation with headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, whose goals were to improve state and municipal administration; and the Council of Social Agencies, a centralizing bureau of some eighty benevolent and corrective agencies in Cincinnati. She presided over the Cincinnati Model Homes Company, which supplied “ideal housing to over 200 families, mostly negroes.” (In this latter endeavor, she skated on thin ice. Since the “ideal housing” was rented out to the tenants, she was accused of “commercialized philanthropy.”)
For years, the identity of a mysterious “Madame X,” who had given $250,000 to build a “working girls’ home” for young Frenchwomen of slender means called Cercle Concordia, at 19 rue Tournefort near the Bon Marché business district of Paris, was a secret. The home, built in 1907, accommodated 120 young ladies. It was not until Mary Emery’s death twenty years later that it was revealed she had been Madame X.
Like Isabella Gardner, Mary Emery had young protégés, though she never uncovered a talent comparable to that of Bernard Berenson and there was never the suggestion of a romantic involvement with any of them. There was a young man named Chalmers Clifton, whom she helped as a conductor and composer, and Charles Hackett, an opera singer. Marion Green, an actor who once toured with a road company in the title role of Monsieur Beaucaire, was another. Though none of these young talents was ever to become exactly a household word, she helped with their schooling and they were frequent house guests at Mariemont.
Through all this, Mary Emery was exceptionally fortunate in having at her side, as her right-hand man in every decision, Charles Livingood. A New England aristocrat and cum laude graduate of Harvard—where he majored in English literature, history, and philosophy—Livingood was not only a man of the utmost probity but also a man of intelligence, taste, and sophistication. He was a gentleman and scholar of the Old School, and his personal enthusiasms were the life of Petrarch, prehistoric man, and the history of Provence—“anything that begins with P,” he used to say. But he was also a shrewd, tough-minded businessman. Every morning Livingood met with Mrs. Emery in her library at Edgecliffe, and when it was time to go to Newport, he and his family followed her to Mariemont, where the Livingoods occupied a comfortable cottage nearby. Livingood would carefully go over her accounts, managing the intricate details of her huge estate, advising her which stocks or properties ought to be bought, which might be sold, and how much might be left over to be given away.
Understandably, Mary Emery endured what is the bane of every philanthropist—the endless stream of requests for money, from individuals as well as from organized charities, that arrived daily at her doorstep. No sooner had an Emery gift been announced than thousands of letters asking for more arrived in the mail. The effect of this on Mary was to make her more reclusive, more secretive. She had to be. If word got around that Mary Emery was buying up land for a bird preserve, real estate prices instantly shot up. The successful philanthropist must be a cynic, and develop a hide of rhinoceros thickness when faced with the pathetic entreaties and tales of woe—some perhaps true, many more probably false—which never cease. Mary Emery, however, was incapable of cynicism, and admitted that softheartedness was her most serious flaw. Fortunately, she had Charles Livingood as her cynic-in-residence. Sometimes, after being moved by a particularly doleful letter and request, she would reach for that piteous communication and say, “Now, Mr. Livingood, don’t you think we just might—?” Slowly but firmly he would shake his head and reply, “No, Mrs. Emery, we might not.” Screening the letters, sifting the legitimate requests from the shady and suspect, became Charles Livingood’s job. Of, perhaps, five hundred mendicant letters in the morning’s mail, Livingood might select as many as two or three which he deemed worthy of Mrs. Emery’s serious consideration. Then, if she approved of a project which he considered worthwhile, he would review the whereabouts and sizes of the various pieces of her scattered fortune to see from which of the little stacks of figures funds might become available. Theirs was a perfect working partnership. Always addressing each other formally, they never quarreled. In the end, they always agreed.
Though Livingood managed her books and wrote out the checks, there was one area in which he felt he was not qualified to advise her: her growing art collection. He did, however, see to it that she got the best advice possible, in the person of Joseph Guest, the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Since her husband’s death, Mary had made it a point to buy at least one important painting every year, and soon her collection included Titian, Rubens, Van Dyke, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Lorenzo di Credi, Mabuse, Bronzino, Murillo, Fouquet, Dirk Bouts, Hals, Nattier, Le Brun, Gainsborough, Romney, Lawrence, Raeburn, Israels, Lhermitte, and a great many masters of the Barbizon School. But she was a safe and cautious buyer, and never purchased anything without Mr. Guest’s approval. Though she occasionally bought through Joseph Duveen, who was always on hand when rich people were spending money on art, she did not, like Eva Stotesbury, give Duveen carte blanche. Joseph Guest was always her agent and go-between in the negotiations—much to the displeasure of Duveen, who was always looking for ways to deal with Mrs. Emery directly. She kept herself at arm’s length, however, and when she and Guest had decided, say, to buy Velásquez’ Philip IV, Mrs. Emery would write a note to Guest, saying, “Now be sure to tell Mr. Duveen to place the painting in a suitable frame, and install the right picture-light above it.…”
Because, like Livingood, Joseph Guest was a tough trader, there were occasional hackles raised. When Guest purchased Titian’s Philip II for her, at something over $300,000, there was a great outcry in England at the news that the painting was leaving British shores for the United States. And a few mistakes were made—it was almost inevitable that there should have been. Mary Emery’s Rembrandt later turned out not to be a Rembrandt, and had to be redesignated “after Rembrandt.” But for the most part Guest’s choices were astute ones, and their prices were in line with the market of the day. After all, it behooved Guest to select the pieces of Mrs. Emery’s collection carefully. She had made it clear to him that she considered herself only the temporary “guardian” of the collection, and that one day it would all go to his Cincinnati Art Museum, as indeed it has—housed in the Emery Wing, which she also donated. (As Fiske Kimball in Philadelphia often reminded everyone, Eva Stotesbury’s collection might have suffered a kinder fate if she had taken his advice instead of Duveen’s.)
In 1914, however, a plan even more ambitious than Mary Emery’s art collection—by then valued at more than $3,500,000—was under way, and the details of it were consuming more and more of Mrs. Emery’s and Mr. Livingood’s working days. It was to be Mrs. Emery’s ultimate philanthropy to her adopted city, and naturally, considering its size and scope, the utmost secrecy was essential. Aside from herself and Livingood, only a few carefully chosen aides and confidantes had any notion of what was afoot for Cincinnati. Nor would anyone else get wind of it for several years.