The Best of Taste

U.S. housewives this fall will be taught the proper way to serve all the dishes they are taught to prepare on TV's countless daytime cooking shows. Giving them expert advice on the correct fork and the perfect place setting, as well as on dozens of other subjects--from Kissing in Public to Asking Personal Questions--will be Amy Vanderbilt. the latter-day Emily Post, author of Doubleday's 700-page Complete Book of Etiquette.

Flashing Inlays. In Chicago last week, Amy completed the filming of 39 five-minute TV shows and flew back home to Westport, Conn, to rest up before making 39 more films this fall. It had been a job tough enough to strain even the ineffable Vanderbilt poise. The films were shot in ten days, none were rehearsed, and all of them, except for the commercials (for American Bakeries Co.), were written by Amy. To keep her weight down, Amy lived on orange juice, water and buttermilk during the shooting; to counter the hot lights on the set, she took 50,000 units of vitamin A each day; to avoid disconcerting her audience by flashes from the metal inlays in her teeth, she had them all replaced with plastic.

Amy's makeup was handled by Specialist Syd Simons, who each day spent an hour and five Max Factor bases on Amy. He shadowed the sides of her nose ("That's not to say there's anything wrong with her nose, but we didn't want it to broaden under the bright, flat light"); shaded her cheeks to "minimize the puffiness" and darkened her neck so that "if she keeps her head up the folks won't see her double chin." Tastefully dressed in simple Sally Victor hats and Hannah Troy dresses ("We figure they won't be obsolete for five years," explains Producer Walter Colmes), Amy appears on the screen in a set modeled after her own living room. As she speaks in her mannerly, well-modulated voice, the camera picks up actors demonstrating the right and wrong ways to do things. Sample subjects: Kissing in Public ("A man must always remove his hat . . ."); Talking to Strangers ("Sometimes the most charming people are the most unscrupulous . . ."); Sitting Down ("It's wise to look at the piece of furniture first . . ."); Breakfast ("The one meal at which it is perfectly good manners to read the paper . . .").

Remove Your Hat. Many of Amy's ideas are briskly practical: "I just notice what most people would do under what we would call genteel circumstances. If I go to the Colony restaurant and see that half of the women are without hats, I can't say that you can't go into a restaurant without a hat." Amy's own life reflects the sociological change she feels has transformed fashion and etiquette. Born an authentic Vanderbilt (but not a Social Register one), Amy, 45, has three children and has married and divorced three husbands. She has been a book reviewer, an account executive and president of a public relations firm that represented clients as diverse as Ethiopia and the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers.

Amy has already earned $10,000 for her work on the TV films, expects to make about $90,000 more. She is calmly optimistic about the future of her TV show. Says unruffled Amy: "I have precognition, so I always know exactly what is going to happen. I knew the book would be a success, so I'm not at all surprised by the show, either. We've seen the rushes and we're not worried."

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