Alastair Mackintosh (second husband of Constance Talmadge) and secondly Hély, the Marquis de Talleyrand; and Alexandra,[1] who married Benjamin Moore[2] and Robert Gordon McKay.

Emery prepared at Groton for Harvard, where his education was interrupted by World War I when he served as an ensign in Naval Aviation.

He spent one year at Harvard Law School and then went to Trinity College, Oxford, where received a diploma in Economics in 1922.

His grandfather had also assembled sizable real estate holdings in the center of Cincinnati, which was enlarged by Emery's father.

[10] For the hotel he commissioned three works of art that passed to the Cincinnati Art Museum when he sold the Terrace Plaza: a mural by Joan Miró commissioned for the hotel's Gourmet Room, a cartoon mural by Saul Steinberg and a giant mobile by Alexander Calder.

[12] Irene was the daughter of the celebrated illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and the niece of Lady Astor, the first woman elected to the British Parliament.

Together, John and Irene were the parents of four children, all born in Cincinnati:[13] After his first wife's death in 1973, he remarried to widow Adele Sloane (née Hammond) Olyphant (1902–1998)[21] on December 3, 1975.

Emery and his family spent summers in Dark Harbor, Maine on Seven Hundred Acre Island, where his father-in-law, Charles Dana Gibson, had built a house beginning in 1904.