Not J. P. Morgan — a joke line, earliest printed by Mary Roberts RinehartMary Roberts Rinehart1876–1958 · American novelist · earliest documented printing, 14 Jan 1928
Morgan never said this: in every version of the story the line is the flustered hostess’s blunder, and Morgan is the guest with the famously disfigured nose. The earliest printing Quote Investigator can find is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s humour piece “Just a Touch of Celebrity” in The Saturday Evening Post of 14 January 1928, where nobody is named — the financier is only “Mr. Blank.” Morgan’s name was grafted on by 1936, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, cast as the child in the tale, later said it had “not a grain of truth in it.”
“Will you have sugar and cream in your nose?” not J. P. Morgan. In every telling the line is a hostess's blunder, not the banker's; Morgan is the guest. The earliest known printing is Mary Roberts Rinehart, "Just a Touch of Celebrity," The Saturday Evening Post, 14 January 1928, where no one is named. Morgan and the Morrows were attached by 1936, twenty-three years after his death in 1913, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh said the story had "not a grain of truth in it." Via Quotle.info Verbatim: “Mr. Blank, will you have sugar and cream in your nose?”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to J. P. Morgan. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Evoking the world of Mary Roberts Rinehart — American mystery novelist & Saturday Evening Post regular. Theme: "Will you have sugar and cream in your nose?". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The earliest printing names nobody
Earliest known printing
“Just a Touch of Celebrity,” The Saturday Evening Post, 14 January 1928
Written by
Mary Roberts Rinehart — financier and hostess both unnamed
Morgan’s name attached
O. O. McIntyre, “New York Day by Day,” Hickory Daily Record, 10 February 1936
Status
Apocryphal — denied by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, reported 1999
[A great financier with a very large and bulbous nose is coming to Sunday luncheon. The small boy, Johnnie, is warned neither to stare at the nose nor to mention it. He does neither; when the coffee comes on he is excused, and his relieved mother turns to the guest:] “Mr. Blank, will you have sugar and cream in your nose?”
1928 · nobody named
The setup is summarised; the punchline is the wording as transcribed by Quote Investigator from the January 1928 Saturday Evening Post. Note the guest is “Mr. Blank” — the version that supplies the famous wording is the version that names no one.
Quote Investigator ↗ states that the earliest match for the tale it located is Mary Roberts Rinehart’s piece in The Saturday Evening Post of 14 January 1928, where the guest is “Mr. Blank” and the punchline is “will you have sugar and cream in your nose?”
The joke was still anonymous in 1933, when a Brooklyn Daily Eagle version by Art Arthur called the guest “Mr. Van Blank”; O. O. McIntyre’s syndicated column of 10 February 1936 is the version that names Morgan, the Morrows and their daughter, per QI’s citations ↗.
Morgan died on 31 March 1913 — Wikipedia ↗ — fifteen years before the first printing of the joke and twenty-three before his name was attached to it.
Biographer Jean Strouse tracked the story down and printed the refutation: her New Yorker essay of 29 March 1999 ↗ reports that Dwight Morrow only joined the bank after Morgan’s death and that Anne Morrow Lindbergh confirmed the tale has “not a grain of truth in it,” while conceding it is too funny to die.
✓Public domain
The wording’s earliest documented home is a periodical from January 1928 — The Saturday Evening Post of 14 January that year, which entered the United States public domain on 1 January 2024, when the 95-year copyright term for 1928 publications expired. The anecdote itself is anonymous folklore with no identifiable owner. Two honest caveats: the 1928 text is cited here from Quote Investigator’s transcription ↗ rather than from our own inspection of the issue, and the modern retellings quoted on this page (Jean Strouse’s 1999 essay in particular) remain in copyright to their authors and publishers.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Who gets credited, and why it fails
This is a quote that gets pinned on J. P. Morgan even though he is the person it is aimed at. Three separate errors are usually stacked on top of each other.
✕
The speakerJ. P. Morgan wrong role
Morgan is the guest, not the speaker. In every recorded version the line is the hostess’s slip after she has spent the afternoon dreading that her child would mention his nose — Quote Investigator’s chronology shows the joke works only that way ↗. Nothing resembling the line appears among his own documented remarks on Wikiquote ↗.
✕
The tea partyElizabeth Cutter Morrow, with Anne Morrow Lindbergh as the child denied
The wordingthe “sugar and cream” phrasing mixed sources
“Sugar and cream in your nose” belongs to the 1928 version in which nobody is identified. The Morgan-named tellings say something else: “cream or lemon in your nose” in O. O. McIntyre’s column of 10 February 1936, and “one lump or two” in later retellings, as QI’s citation list sets out ↗.
✓It is a floating joke, not a quotation: the earliest printing researchers have found ↗ names no one, Morgan’s name arrived twenty-three years after his death in 1913, and the woman supposedly in the room said it never happened.
Context
Why this joke stuck to Morgan
J. Pierpont Morgan had rhinophyma, a disfiguring consequence of rosacea that swelled and reddened his nose; Wikipedia notes the deformity and how self-conscious he was about being photographed ↗, and popular accounts compared the nose to a purple cauliflower. He was also the most powerful banker in the world. A joke that needs a famous man with an unmentionable face had an obvious magnet, and it found him.
Jean Strouse, who spent years in the Morgan archives writing his biography, described the story as ubiquitous — one of two anecdotes strangers volunteered to her at dinner parties, the other being the quip about what a yacht costs. The tea party she could disprove from the record: Dwight Morrow was not yet at the bank. The yacht line she doubted on different grounds, calling it implausible for a man she describes as “singularly inarticulate, unreflective… not likely to come up with a maxim worthy of Oscar Wilde.” Her New Yorker essay is where the denial was finally put in print.
“Not a grain of truth in it” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the child in the story
The older version of the joke, and the wording drift
The setup predates Morgan’s fame as a punchline target. Quote Investigator points to a 1901 recitation book, The New Century Speaker, in which a child asks a visitor about the lump on his nose — the same comic situation without the luncheon table or the adult’s slip. See QI’s chronology ↗.
The familiar wording is itself a fossil of the anonymous version. “Sugar and cream in your nose” is Rinehart’s 1928 phrasing about “Mr. Blank”; the tellings that actually name Morgan use different words — “cream or lemon in your nose” in O. O. McIntyre’s 1936 column, and “one lump or two in your nose” in the version Strouse recounts. Anyone quoting “sugar and cream” and crediting Morgan is combining a wording from the version that names nobody with a cast list added years later.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1876–1958 · American mystery novelist & Saturday Evening Post regular
Mary Roberts Rinehart was one of the best-selling American writers of the early twentieth century — a mystery novelist whose breakthrough, The Circular Staircase (1908), helped invent the “had I but known” suspense style, and a prolific contributor to The Saturday Evening Post whose books had sold well over ten million copies by her death. Her January 1928 Post essay on the perils of celebrity contains the earliest printing of this joke that quote researchers have located, told about an unnamed financier and an unnamed hostess. That makes her the first documented teller, not necessarily the inventor: the comic situation — a child who might remark on a guest’s nose — was already in print decades earlier, in the 1901 recitation book The New Century Speaker, though there the child speaks and there is no coached silence and no adult’s slip.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented printing
Earliest documented in Mary Roberts Rinehart, "Just a Touch of Celebrity," The Saturday Evening Post 200, no. 29 (January 14, 1928): 6, 84 (citation as documented by Quote Investigator, "Anecdote Origin: Will You Have Sugar and Cream in Your Nose?", October 24, 2024). Morgan first named in O. O. McIntyre, "New York Day by Day," Hickory Daily Record, February 10, 1936, 4. Denial reported in Jean Strouse, "A Reporter at Large: The Unknown J. P. Morgan," The New Yorker, March 29, 1999, 66, 68.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Will you have sugar and cream in your nose?’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/will-you-have-sugar-and-cream-in-your-nose/