THE TSARINA AND THE LADY
The phrase “Lady Bountiful,” if used at all in the 1980s, is invariably used with scorn. But it is important to remember that in the more trusting, more naïve world of America before the First World War, to be a Lady Bountiful was a very respectable occupation. It was even considered a high calling, and Ladies Bountiful abounded. Some were ostentatious and outrageous. Others, like Mary Emery, preferred to remain in the background, bestowing their bounty through functionaries. But though their individual styles might vary, their motives were almost never questioned. Gratitude, in those days, was an acceptable response, and a Lady Bountiful was deemed a valuable asset to her community.
Today, Mary Emery’s thirty-year career of giving away money would doubtless be diagnosed as an extended ego trip. Hers, after all, was a life spent receiving letters of entreaty, followed by letters of lavish thanks and praise. And certainly there were earthly pleasures to be gained from seeing one’s name, or one’s loved ones’ names, chiseled in marble on some large public building, insuring some sort of immortality on the planet. But from all the evidence, if Mary Emery was ever tempted to congratulate herself on the extent of her benefactions, she did her best to stifle the temptation. Her motives were somewhat different.
For one thing, as a descendant of at least two Protestant clergymen, she was a firm believer in such old-fashioned notions as the Golden Rule. Pious and churchgoing, she was a firm subscriber to the Christian Ethic, and doubtless also believed that for good works on earth she would be rewarded in the Protestant Hereafter. She was also an instinctive advocate of what were then considered American upper-class values, and the concept of noblesse oblige.
The curious thing about noblesse oblige in America is that it is deemed a subject, like sex, too delicate and too important to talk about. Noblesse oblige exists in the same shadowy, but also somehow sacred, area as what goes on behind closed bedroom doors. One would never hear an upper-class American say, “We do such-and-such out of a sense of noblesse oblige.” Nor would an upper-class American ever say “because we are upper-class.”*
Nevertheless, upper-class values—including do-good principles—were taught carefully, subtly, by example, in the homes and classrooms of the well born and well bred of Mary Emery’s era. What she might have missed from her minister father was supplied by the Packer Collegiate Institute between 1857 and 1862. When the school was dedicated a few years earlier, in 1846, the Reverend Dr. William B. Sprague of Albany had declared in his address that a Packer education was to be “employed for the formation of human character—for the development and ultimate perfection of human faculties,” and that it would offer proper young ladies “such a culture of the faculties as shall constitute that appropriate preparation for an honorable and useful life.” This was how Dr. Sprague viewed the role of an aristocratic woman:
Providence has designated to her, her appropriate sphere, and though it be a retired, quiet, and if you please in some respects a humble sphere, it is a glorious sphere, notwithstanding—glorious, because Heaven has crowned it with the means of honorable usefulness … I do not disparage but honor her, when I say that her throne is the nursery, and beside the cradle … Think it not hardship, ladies, that public opinion excuses you from appearing in the arena of political conflict, or from saying at the ballot box who shall be our rulers, or from standing forth as God’s commissioned ambassadors to treat with a dying world.
Dr. Sprague’s version of feminism did concede that a woman would not be a good sovereign of the nursery if “she has an undisciplined and unfurnished mind.” These words sound pompous and patronizing today but were startlingly liberal in a day when most members of both sexes thought that educating women at all was a waste of time. A few years later, in 1850, a report to the trustees would stress how successfully the school was instilling upper-class values among its young charges:
No medals or prizes are offered to stimulate ambition, but the pupil is taught that love of excellence for its own sake, which brings its own recompense.…
In proof of the exemplary conduct of the pupils, the trustees have only to state that among the 650 young ladies attending the academy during the past year, not one unpleasant case of discipline has occurred.
The love of neatness and good order, so constantly inculcated by the teachers, is mutely taught by the beautiful grounds attached to the institution.
A habit of forbearance and respect for public property are [sic] fostered here, and as an evidence of the morality in little things, manifested even by the youngest, it may be stated that no one is ever found touching a flower or defacing a grass plot.
In a course called Composition, the young ladies were instructed to write themes which were not only properly spelled and well constructed but which also were marked by “sound moral and religious sentiment.” And, in a course called Manual of Morals, came something close to a spelling-out of the notion of noblesse oblige: “It is ever the duty of she [sic] whom God has favored with worldly possessions to assume some of the burden of those less fortunate than she.”
With such training, and with God’s will behind it, how could Mary Emery have done other than she did? With these convictions, Mary, in 1914, embarked upon her most ambitious project. By that year the blight of Cincinnati, as it had long been in other cities, was beginning to be its slums. If anyone could cure this blight, she and Mr. Livingood reasoned, it would be she and Thomas J. Emery’s fortune, which, despite her giving, was actually growing larger under Livingood’s guiding hand. She and Livingood had both visited the model cities and villages and New Towns that were being built in England. Unlike Edith McCormick, Mary Emery did not plan to build a city of yacht basins for the rich. She wanted to move the slums to the fresh air and green grass of the suburbs—to provide a good life for the poor. From the beginning, it was to be “an interpretation of modern city planning principles, applied to a small community to produce local happiness—a national example.” And it was to be called Mariemont, after Mary Emery’s summer home in Newport.
The site she and Livingood selected was a 254-acre tract—later expanded to more than 400 acres—in a sparsely populated, wooded area of low, rolling hills about ten miles northeast of Cincinnati on the banks of the Little Miami River. Quietly, Mary began buying up the land she wanted. Great secrecy had to be observed, of course, to keep prices from skyrocketing, and a real estate agent from as far away as Chicago was hired to oversee these transactions so that no one would suspect a connection with Cincinnati real estate interests. Even the local real estate firm, which made the contacts and completed the purchase of the various parcels, had no idea whom it was working for, and some of the rumors that circulated—that the land was to be the site of a large, noisy, and smelly factory—actually had the effect of driving prices down.
The Mariemont Company was formed, and a prominent city planner, John Nolan of Philadelphia, was hired. Mary Emery then purchased the initial stock in the company for about $2,500,000 to give it some working capital, and presently the plans emerged from Mr. Nolan’s drawing board. The streets of Mariemont were designed to radiate from a central square and village green. Along the wide main street, with its landscaped mall which made up the central square, would be buildings for shops and offices and a small inn with a restaurant, with a garden terrace behind it. The new town would have its own elementary school and high school, its own hospital, its own church and cemetery, its own city hall and fire station, its own theatre and museum, and its own central heating plant to serve the entire community. Plenty of space was given over to parks and playgrounds, and near the center of town a tall bell tower with a twenty-three-bell carillon was to stand as Mariemont’s symbol. Just to the south of the town an industrial park was laid out, the idea being that residents could live close to where they worked, because Mariemont was envisioned as a town for “the working man” and his family.
The little side streets were laid out in graceful arcs and curves to discourage heavy traffic, and there were plenty of cozy cul-de-sacs. Mrs. Emery asked that two of these—Albert Place and Sheldon Close—be named after her two sons. In general, the housing was to be of three types—small private homes, garden apartments, and “group houses,” which were attached town houses. Through the center of each block of housing ran a service alley, so that garbage cans would not have to be placed on the street. The architecture was a loose mixture of English exposed-beam Tudor and New England saltbox, and the result was intended to be almost a storybook version of an English village that would dance perhaps a bit precariously on the edge of cuteness without quite falling over the rim.
The First World War imposed a temporary halt on the construction of Mariemont, but by 1920 the project was able to move forward again and, on April 23, 1923, Mary Emery, in her black bonnet and one of her almost dowdy-looking long black dresses, presided over the groundbreaking with a silver spade in her hand. By 1926 the first families were able to move in; at first most of Mariemont’s homes and apartments were leased for low rentals, and renters were given options to buy. And, on March 19 of that year, a small “Greeting” from Mrs. Emery appeared in the first issue of the Mariemont Messenger:
Good morning, Is the sun a little brighter, there in Mariemont? Is the air a little fresher? Is your home a little sweeter? Is your housework somewhat easier? And the children—do you feel safer about them? Are their faces a bit ruddier, are their legs a little sturdier? Do they laugh and play a lot louder in Mariemont? Then I am content.
There was one thing, however, about which Mary Emery was not content, and that involved a woman named Marion Devereux. Miss Devereux was a newspaper reporter, but she was somewhat more than that. Commenting on social events for the Cincinnati Enquirer, she had gradually made herself what she called “the arbiter of Cincinnati society.” She was also irreverently called “the Tsarina,” but unfortunately, in her ascent to power, Cincinnati, in its relaxed way, had begun to take her seriously. Though she was of obscure origins herself, her reign over the city had, by the early 1920s, become all but complete. It was a reign of terror and a reign of cruelty. Miss Devereux considered herself the grande dame of Cincinnati, and, in Mary Emery’s opinion, her influence had become malevolent and destructive.
Miss Devereux had inherited her seat in the Society Editor’s chair from her mother, Mrs. Arthur Devereux, who had already turned the job into a harsh dictatorship. Madame Devereux, as Mrs. Devereux was called, had introduced a little book called Who’s Who: A Society Register … for Cincinnati, which listed her highly biased choices of which families were considered “social,” as opposed to those who were not. No Jews were included, though there were a number of prominent and wealthy Jewish families in the city, and Roman Catholics were in noticeably short supply. Similarly, Madame Devereux had had little use for the old German families who had made their money in beer, lard, and sausage. Madame Devereux had also arbitrarily reorganized “reception days,” those days of the week when ladies were at home to callers, assigning a different day of the week to each part of town. This arrangement, Madame Devereux explained, was only a “suggestion,” but her suggestion had very quickly become the rule, and those who had dared to break or bend it soon found their names omitted from the following year’s edition of Who’s Who.…
On her death in 1910, Madame Devereux’s duties were taken over by her daughter Marion, then a spinster of thirty-seven, who had worked for several years as her mother’s assistant. Madame Devereux had already developed a notably florid prose style, to which her daughter proceeded to add elaborate embellishments, swirls, and flourishes. She resurrected long-dead words, and never used an everyday term if an archaic one would do. A woman’s gown, for instance, was her “toilet,” or sometimes “toilette.” She also invented words. Her collective noun for the women at a party was inevitably Femina, always capitalized, as in, “For this supreme occasion, Femina had resplendently arrayed herself in some of the most scintillatingly exquisite creations evoked by the couturier’s wand of enchantment.” Debutantes were “rosebuds,” and two sisters presented at the same time were “twin rosebuds on the parent stem.” A table was a mahogany, and a large dining table was “the central mahogany.” If a phrase sounded too commonplace in English, she tried French, or at least her version of it. At one party, she noted that tuxedos for the men were “de rigeuer,” and at the opera one evening, “the Hinkle box was a scene of constant va and vient.” On one occasion, writing up a wedding, she penned:
Into the hush of this ambient twilight came the bridal procession, the feathery green of tender laurel that wreathed choir stalls, pulpit and rood screen, and the curving fronds of a few giant palms massed in the chancel pointing the way to the altar, where the snowy chalices of tall Easter lilies were sentineled by blazing candelabra, seven-branched … Very pretty, with lovely light brown hair and gray-blue eyes, the bride’s youthfulness suddenly seemed to take on a certain queenliness as she swept from end to end of this line of light. Her gown of soft white, crinkly crepe was the essence of simplicity, and therefore the perfection of chic … Held close to her well-poised head, her fair hair visible through its delicate mesh, this airy unsubstantial fabric drifted in long, broad folds for yards behind her, as fragile as mist, enmeshing her tall figure, concealing her face, and in its upturned brim that circled her shapely head, forming the semblance of a halo, that gave her the air of one of the saints or angels that, in color, looked down from the gorgeous memorial windows on every hand.
At first, Cincinnati was simply amused by Miss Devereux’s deep-purple prose. Soon people were collecting favorite Devereux-isms, such as “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Conroy have been the center of many merry moments since their return from their honeymoon.” Or “Miss Ruth Harrison whose toilet of black satin was relieved by a touch of ermine.” Or “An hour of agreeable intercourse will follow this series of events, the membership being all cocked and primed to stay on to enjoy it.” But Miss Devereux was rapidly becoming a force as well. And as her reputation grew, so did the Enquirer’s circulation. She sold papers, and, accordingly, her editors gave her more leeway and more space. On and on she trilled and warbled, and it was not long before a single day’s social events at the height of a Cincinnati season would be accorded sixteen full columns of Devereux, or two full pages. Soon an unbreakable rule was established at the paper: not a word of Miss Devereux’s copy could be altered; not a word could be cut. Thus when Miss Devereux described a group called the Bachelors as “young celibrates,” one could never be sure whether there had been a typographical error or whether Miss Devereux had written it that way. Thus there were also times when no one reading her stories had the slightest clue to what she was trying to say, as in:
In nothing to the Philistines are the May Festivals more intriguing than in the boxes and the Audience. Last night these themes of and corridor and foyer were paramount to the carnal-minded devotee of these two yearly events.
Miss Devereux was quick to recognize her growing power, and quick to use it. Though she was not below average height, she ordered the legs of the chairs facing her desk cut down, so that visitors to her office at the newspaper sat before her almost on their knees, like supplicants. At the office she was known to be a holy terror when crossed, and was not above hurling an assistant’s copy across the room if it did not come up to her own exacting standards. She would summon a copy boy from a distant part of the building and, when he arrived, order him to stick his head out her window and tell her if it was raining. A copy boy was regularly assigned to walk her home at night.
Her personal vendettas became famous, and, of course, these also made good copy. Her favorite method of revenge upon someone who had offended her was the Fashion Attack. She would write, “Mrs.—appeared in her customary brown,” or “Mrs.—wore the green toilet in which she always looks so well,” or “Mrs.—appeared in the blue dress which has graced several previous occasions.” A recent widow, who had fallen from Miss Devereux’s favor, had appeared at a horse show because her son was to be one of the stars. The widow was all in black, but, to show her what she thought of her, Miss Devereux reported that the lady appeared in her box “in a gorgeous red toilette.” Jewels of the unfavored were dismissed with faint praise, such as “Mrs.—wore a string of pearls.” And who knew what barb might be intended when Miss Devereux wrote, as she did on several occasions, that a certain woman appeared “in a lovely bead neckless”? Then there were her taunts, which surely had to be tongue in cheek, such as the time a couple of whom she disapproved married rather late in life and departed for a Florida wedding trip, and Miss Devereux wrote that “on their honeymoon [they] will follow the trail of Ponce de Leon in his quest for the Fountain of Youth.”
Readers could usually tell when Miss Devereux was out for blood and when she was simply making mischief. She obviously disapproved of a certain woman at a party who “arrived with two or three swains who were constantly in her train. Her frock was white, simply fashioned.” And her way of noting that a popular young woman was in a delicate condition was to report her absence at a party, adding, “but of course she is not going out in any large way at present.” Her snips and jibes and bitchiness also sold papers, and only when threatened with a libel suit did Miss Devereux turn all dewy-eyed-repentant and apologetic. But there were never any retractions.
Her bailiwick extended far beyond that of any ordinary society editor or, for that matter, any ordinary mortal. Since she controlled absolutely the amount of ink that would be expended on any social event by the city’s leading newspaper, it was wise to consult her before planning anything. If it was a wedding, Miss Devereux would not only set the date but would also select the orchestra, the caterer, the florist, and the site of the reception. Any bride who had the temerity to defy her would not have her wedding reported in the Enquirer. Marion Devereux also decided who could be a debutante and who could not, and arranged the winter’s schedule of coming-out parties. To a hopeful mother Miss Devereux might say, shaking her head sadly, “No, I don’t think your daughter is ready to come out this year,” or “I don’t think Doris would be happy as a debutante. The crowd this year is so different from hers.” One way to court Miss Devereux’s favor was with gifts and—some said—money, though whether she ever accepted cash outright is uncertain. From the parade of carriages and limousines that appeared before Miss Devereux’s apartment building at Christmastime, bearing brightly wrapped packages, it was clear that she did like presents. But even a gift was no guarantee to someone she had decided was a “social climber.”
The Sinton Hotel, which was one of the city’s best, hit upon a clever idea. It offered Miss Devereux a suite of rooms, rent-free, and the little gesture paid off handsomely. Thereafter the Sinton was selected for more than its share of wedding receptions and coming-out parties—though it must be said that she did at times pick other places—and the management could be sure that, whenever the Sinton was mentioned in her columns, its décor, appointments, food, and service were elaborately described. “In the long, lofty ballroom of the Hotel Sinton, framed in the replicas of Eighteenth Century panels, gold-bordered, lighted by stately, sparkling chandeliers of faceted crystal placed among the Bourcher [sic] clouds and cupids of the ceiling a la Louis Seize, the second of the Bachelors’ Cotillions took place with such success as to seem to the guests the ultimate in entertainment.…” And on, and on.
Marion Devereux felt, with justification, that Mary Emery belonged to her fiefdom. The Emerys, after all, were very much Old Family. They were very rich, and very civic-minded. The Emerys would even, in time, be elevated to the ranks of European nobility. John J. Emery, the brother of Mary’s late husband, had remained unmarried until fairly late in life. Then, in his sixties, realizing that there would be no male Emerys to carry on the family’s far-flung enterprises, he married, promptly fathered five children, and died shortly thereafter.* One of his daughters, Audrey, would marry, first, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch, a cousin of Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, and, second, the Georgian Prince Dmitri Djordjadze.
Mary Emery thoroughly disapproved of Marion Devereux, and of the way Cincinnati society bowed and scraped and kissed the hem of Miss Devereux’s garments. She found it pitiful that Cincinnati should tolerate Miss Devereux’s terrorist tactics, and felt that Miss Devereux, by placing so much emphasis on parties, gowns, and interior décor, was deflecting society’s interests from more worthy pursuits. When Mary Emery referred to Miss Devereux at all, it was to “that dangling participle.” Miss Devereux, meanwhile, had developed another intimidating technique: the Midnight Tirade. Learning that a party had taken place without her imprimatur, Miss Devereux thought nothing of telephoning the errant hostess in the small hours of the morning and shouting, “How dare you give a party without consulting me? Don’t you know that I am the social arbiter of Cincinnati?” For further punishment, the offender might find herself labeled in print a “climber” or, another Devereux favorite, “a social highway robber.” Or she might discover that she had been banished from the society pages forever, along with all her heirs and assigns.
But Mary Emery was one woman in Cincinnati who was immune to Marion Devereux’s attacks. She defied the tyrant by refusing to take part in the world Miss Devereux wrote about. Mary Emery could be neither extolled nor damned on the society pages because she stalwartly refused to be social. What, after all, could be said about a sweet-faced little old lady who looked like a grandmother on a chocolate box, who kept to herself and her gardens and art collection, and whose only eccentricity, if it could be called that, was that she daintily ate the plump grapes from her prize vines with a knife and fork? (She carefully sliced each grape in half with a fruit knife, extracted the seed, then placed the halves in her mouth one at a time.)
Mary Emery had made it abundantly clear that she had no use for Miss Devereux, and Miss Devereux was aware of her feelings. But when Mrs. Emery did appear at a public function, Miss Devereux could not even employ the Fashion Attack because Mary Emery, in her plain, long-sleeved black dresses and little bonnets, defied what was fashionable. Thus did she keep Marion Devereux at arm’s length throughout her career. At the same time, Marion Devereux could not simply ignore the city’s most important patroness—and so, whenever she mentioned her in her column, it was “Mrs. Thomas J. Emery, very Grande Dame.” Even that did not please Mrs. Emery. “Listen to that,” she would mutter, pointing a small finger at the printed page. “I am not a Grande Dame!” Upper-class values again. When Mary Emery announced a major project, such as the building of Mariemont, the news made the front pages, not the society columns. Marion Devereux might be the Tsarina, but Mary Emery was a lady.
Mariemont was well under way when Mary Emery died in October 1927, at eighty-three. Because her philanthropies had been, in a real sense, international, newspapers from as far away as San Francisco and Paris noted the passing of the shy, lonely little woman who had spent half her lifetime mourning and memorializing her husband and sons. In her extraordinary twenty-one page will she left a personal bequest of $500,000 to Charles Livingood, along with instructions that he “follow through” with Mariemont. She left gifts of $ 100,000 to each of her Emery nieces and nephews, who, after all, would never be poor, and her church and favorite charities were also generously remembered. The sum of $2,500,000 was set aside to provide a trust, out of which sixty-nine friends would be paid annuities throughout their lifetimes in amounts ranging from $200 to $5,000 a year (one of these, at $2,000 a year, was the writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher).* At the end of this list she noted, “I desire that the names of the persons mentioned in this Item be not given any publicity.” It didn’t matter. The newspapers printed them anyway.
To the Cincinnati Art Museum she modestly offered “so many of the oil and other paintings that I may own at the time of my death as the said Museum may care to accept.” (The collection, then valued at $3,500,000, now hangs in the Emery Wing of the museum.) The bulk of the estate, some $25,000,000, was then left to create the Thomas J. Emery Memorial, and one of the Memorial’s chief tasks would be the completion of “the planned community of Mariemont.”
The stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed slowed things down somewhat, but Mr. Livingood carried on. During the Depression, however, Mariemont began to take on a life and character of its own that its founder could never have anticipated. In the 1930s the poor, for whom Mariemont had been intended, had become the penniless, and the middle class, who had been comfortably off a few years earlier, were tightening their belts and looking for smaller homes that were easier and less expensive to maintain. It was these folk who now began snapping up the reasonably priced houses and apartments in Mariemont—albeit Marion Devereux still did not recognize Mariemont as an address.
One day in 1939, Marion Devereux walked out of her office at the Cincinnati Enquirer to consult a doctor about a small pimple on her cheek. She never came back. She was discovered, it was said, to be suffering from at least three serious ailments, one of which may have been a mental illness. Her convoluted prose style had been becoming harder and harder to follow and her temper tantrums more frequent. Aside from planning parties, attending them, and writing about them, she had seemed to have no life whatsoever, but now the woman who had enjoyed thirty years of glory and unchallenged power retired from the public eye altogether, into a deep and total seclusion. How she passed her time no one knew. She was not heard from again until nine years later when, after her seventy-fifth birthday, the Enquirer heralded in banner headlines:
DEATH TAKES “TSARINA” MARION DEVEREUX,
LONG ARBITER OF CINCINNATI’S SOCIAL LIFE
Of her, Cincinnati chronicler Alvin Harlow commented, “There has never been anyone else quite like her in America, and Cincinnati for one fervently hopes there never will be again.”
The construction of Mariemont was halted by the Second World War, and it was not until 1965 that the model town was finally “finished,” the last tree planted, the last floral border in place. A few things had not worked out. The central steam-heating system, for one, had failed. For its day it had been quite a daring idea. Central steam heating for downtown business districts had been installed successfully in the past, but such a system, involving live steam piped underground for considerable distances, had never been tried before in a residential development. The steam-generating plant had been built on the banks of the Little Miami River, and had worked well for a number of years. It had even survived the Great Flood of January 1937, when the waters of the Ohio and the Little Miami reached record heights, knocking out at least one of the plant’s transformers and rising dangerously close to the boilers. Still, while the rest of Cincinnati shivered, Mariemont had heat. In the end, it was, of all things, termites that did the system in. The underground steam lines had been insulated in sleeves of wooden logs lashed together, and the termites had attacked the logs. To replace the logs with vitrified tile insulation was considered prohibitively expensive, and so Mariemont converted to city gas. As it did in any emergency, the Emery Memorial stepped in to help Mariemont residents with the costs.
But otherwise the little town was exactly as it had been in the plans John Nolan had brought to Mary Emery for her approval.
Except, of course, the plan itself had not really worked—for the simple reason that it had worked too well. The slums of the city were still where they were, and Mariemont had become a garden suburb of such quality that it had developed into one of Cincinnati’s choicest residential enclaves. The Tudor central square, the landscaped mall, the intimate little tree-lined drives and lanes, the arch-covered cul de sacs, the pretty street lamps and wrought-iron street signs, the distinctive bell tower, the lovely English-style church (Episcopal), the excellent schools and hospital, the well-built houses and apartments, and above all the continued benevolence of the Emery Memorial in maintaining the public areas, had proved a powerful magnet not to the poor, but to the successful and upwardly mobile—young executives moving up the corporate ladder at Procter & Gamble, doctors, lawyers, engineers, educators, entrepreneurs … and all white.
Today Mariemont bustles with civic pride. Woe betide the Mariemont resident who fails to keep his lawn manicured, his hedges clipped, who leaves his garage door yawning or who fails to set out fresh spring bulbs each fall. The little shops, intended to provide the necessities, now sell Vitabath and L’Air du Temps. The theatre, designed for uplifting concerts and plays, offers Walt Disney movies. The Community Center, where Mariemontonians were to have aired their grievances, is now the scene of self-congratulatory town meetings. Mariemont matrons toil for the Art Museum, the Symphony, the Opera, and the Junior League … and for the betterment of Mariemont. Mariemont fathers canvass for the United Appeal, work for the Boy Scouts and the Little League.
Mariemont’s rival suburb is Glendale, and in 1976 Glendale, another attractive community, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was later named a National Landmark. Mariemont would like the cachet of this honor, too, and feels it deserves it. In the summer of 1981 architects and historians of the U.S. Department of the Interior were reviewing Mariemont’s application. If granted, Mariemont would become the second community in Hamilton County to receive this designation.
Life teems with ironies, of course, but it is particularly ironic that Mariemont, Ohio, pop. 4,500, the dream of a little lady who shunned society—who never had her portrait painted, who turned her back whenever a camera was pointed at her—should have become an address for those whose names and faces regularly appear on the Cincinnati society pages.
* Several years ago, New York socialite Marietta Tree recalled being slapped sharply by her mother when, as a little girl, she remarked that one of her school friends was “rather middle-class.” “There are no classes in America!” her mother told her. Then, in a kinder tone, she added, “Of course there are classes. But to use the expression ‘middle-class’ is very lower-class.” Mrs. Tree’s mother was the late Mary Parkman Peabody, very much of Boston’s upper class. It was Mrs. Peabody who in 1964, at the age of seventy-two, led a sit-in by blacks and whites at the racially segregated dining room of a Florida motel. With the local police standing by with tear gas, cattle prods, and attack dogs, the silver-haired mother of the governor of Massachusetts was arrested and taken off to jail. As she was being led away from the demonstration, she expressed upper-class values perfectly when she said calmly, “We are just what they say we are—do-gooders.”
* This situation contributed to a certain “coolness of relations” between the John J. Emery children and their Aunt Mary. It was clear that she had her half-share of the original fortune intact; the children’s share would have to be split five ways.
* Chalmers Clifton, her former musical protégé, was also remembered. He and his wife were each given an annuity of $3,000 a year.