Minding Our Manners Again

By Otto Friedrich

A witty columnist sees a new concern with civility

Bastardy was the harsh, old-fashioned word, then illegitimacy, but now the letter asks a little desperately about a "nonmarital family." The husband in the affair has a nonmarital wife who is doing her best "not to keep things secret" and a nonmarital child of nine who "knows what the dynamics are." But there is also the marital wife who "knows, but tries to ignore the nonmarital family," plus some teen-age children who "sense something amiss." The husband is struggling--manfully, one might say--to deny everything. So, the letter asks, what would be "the ideal social relationship" among the various children, who are beginning to develop "mental-emotional problems"? And between the two rival women? And the grandparents and other relatives?

DEAR Miss MANNERS: . . . Please help.

To this reasonably typical confusion in the contemporary lifestyle, Judith Martin, 46, the inventor and sole proprietor of the magnificently omniscient syndicated persona called Miss Manners, offers a brisk answer: "The ideal social relationship, since you ask, would be one big happy family, all gathered together at Thanksgiving to enjoy this interesting and varied network of relationships." But since that is highly unlikely, Miss Manners urges that "tolerance and kindness should be summoned, at least to those who are nonvoluntary participants in the relationship, the legal wife and all the children."

GENTLE READER:. . . Miss Manners is also trying to work up some sympathy for the father, but is finding it difficult . . . Miss Manners confesses that she would be pleased if the two families got together and eliminated their common problem, namely him.

Judith Martin used to spend much of her time on "what we called the garbage run," flitting from White House dinners to Embassy Row cocktail parties as a society reporter for the Washington Post. (Her most memorable distinction was being officially banned from Tricia Nixon's wedding.) While acting as a features reporter and a drama critic, she asked her editor one day in 1978 if she could try a column on etiquette; she got a very skeptical go-ahead. "Editors all thought etiquette was dead," says Martin. "Even the word was a joke. I thought I was just writing for a bunch of old cranks like myself, but then I started getting floods of mail from young people. These were the people who were supposed to think etiquette was stupid and ludicrous, and they were all writing me and asking me questions. I found out that these people realized that they had been lied to by their parents."

The lie, basically, was the moral debris of the 1960s, the sentimental notion that just about anything goes, that everything is relative or simply a matter of personal choice. In the Reagan era, many things now look different to the hard-pressed graduates of the baby boom. "They were told," says Martin, "that if you are good-hearted and natural and mean well, you can do anything you want, and there are no rules, and everything will be fine. When they got to the age where they cared what people thought of them, which is to say, when they fell in love or wanted a job, well, then they found that this wasn't true."

It is common to speak of etiquette or manners as a question of which fork to use at a formal dinner (and who goes to formal dinners anyway?). But that is not the problem (or if it is, use the fork farthest to your left). The real question is how people treat one another, in late 1984, at a time when all relationships keep changing, in both the two-job home and the unisex workplace. The conflicts are small but significant. Some people are offended at being called by their first name; some people are offended at not being called by their first name. Some people get infuriated by cigarette smoke and start shouting at the smoker; some people are at least equally infuriated by such shouting. And is it or is it not acceptable for the (male) Democratic presidential candidate to touch the (female) vice-presidential candidate?

In addition, technology keeps changing things. Some people dislike having a telephone call answered by an answering machine, so they hang up. Some people find the resulting gap on their answering machines unnerving (maybe a lost job, or maybe a sex freak was on the line?). And what is the correct response to transistor radios at the beach by people who cannot bear the sound of transistor radios at the beach? And the computer: If the terminal in your office beeps with an incoming message while the telephone rings and somebody has just approached your desk, who should be answered in what sequence?

Miss Manners prospered. Her thrice-weekly column became syndicated; it began appearing in the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle--nearly 200 newspapers by now. Her first collection of admonitions, Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, hit the bestseller lists in 1982. Her new book, Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children (Atheneum; $19.95), is out in a printing of 100,000 copies, and already the reviewers' praises are swirling around her.

Now Martin is working the TV talk shows around the country to preach her message, that "manners are the basis of civilized society." Says she: "One of the biggest sorrows in America is that people want to retaliate against rudeness with rudeness. One of my main missions is to say, No, there is no excuse for rudeness. Ever. Period."

As part of the process of making herself a national institution, Martin likes to affect not only a Victorian prose style but a Victorian look: high-necked blouses, a brooch at the throat, hair upswept in a chignon worthy of a Gibson girl. "You look like Miss Manners," says the cashier at a drugstore near her office in a town house just off Washington's Dupont Circle. Says Martin, as she pays for some new stockings: "I am."

DEAR Miss MANNERS: What am I supposed to say when I am introduced to a homosexual "couple "?

GENTLE READER: "How do you do?" "How do you do?"

The triumph of Miss Manners is both a cause and a consequence of something stirring in the American subconscious. Since etiquette is largely symbolic of manners, and since manners stylistically express what people think about other people, the revived interest in what used to be called proper behavior implies a new sense of what behavior should be.

The evidence takes many forms. Clothing is becoming a bit more formal, more traditional, more conventional. Young men are getting their hair cut short. "One minute I was wearing Betsey Johnson sex clothes, the next I only had eyes for a nice Burberry," wrote Style Columnist Cynthia Heimel in Manhattan's Village Voice this month. "And gray flannel pleated trousers. Harris-tweed jackets. Simple shirtwaists in unsullied cotton . . . You know what this means, don't you? It means that people are going to be voting for Ronald Reagan again."

Eating and entertaining are becoming more elaborate, in sometimes confused ways. New Yorker Cartoonist William Hamilton, a sharp-eyed chronicler of manners, recalls being invited to a black-tie dinner with a group of typical yuppies, nervously ambitious professionals in their late 20s--but there were no servants. "Wearing black tie and cooking your own dinner is like make-believe," says Hamilton. "It's like the whole nation is trying to reinvent the 1930s, including '30s manners and mannerisms." Over brandy and cigars the host complained that his "greatest problem was when his father came by on his motorcycle with his latest old lady."

Mating rituals on the college campus are reacquiring a rich patina of hypocrisy. "College students are much more conservative now than they used to be," says Lisa Birnbach, co-author of The Official Preppy Handbook and now creator of Lisa Birnbach's College Book. "There's more dating, more courtship, a return of women's 'reputations' and the good old double standard. People are still sneaking around to have sexual relations, but they don't talk about it. It's viewed as kind of'icky.'

Debutante cotillions are back, and nightclubs (the Latin Quarter is reopening on Broadway in November) and old-fashioned weddings (at $10,000 and up). "The extravagant second marriage is a phenomenon not seen ten years ago," says the president of a Long Island firm that deals with such occasions. "The same people who wed in blue jeans and flower garlands back in the '60s and '70s are remarrying in tuxedos and long white dresses in the '80s." Says Paul Lichtner, manager of the Arthur Murray dance studio in Boston: "We have a two-week waiting list for wedding couples who want to learn how to waltz." Letitia Baldrige, author of the revised and expanded Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, concludes that "the flower generation tore tradition to shreds, but in the 1980s some magic sewing machine has stitched it all up again."

DEAR Miss MANNERS: I am remarrying my ex-husband . . . How do I inform the proper relatives . . . and not appear to be asking for gifts?

GENTLE READER: How many times has Miss Manners said that . . . for the bridal couple or the guests to consider a wedding invitation as a solicitation for dry goods is in disgusting taste?

But what are the wedding invitations supposed to say? Does a first husband get invited if the children want him there? What does the bride wear if she is pregnant? Questions that once seemed to need no "correct" answers now support a whole manners-teaching industry. The 1,018-page 1984 edition of Emily Post's classic Etiquette, updated by her granddaughter-in-law Elizabeth Post, contains a special section on pregnant brides ("It should be remembered that this is a happy occasion . . ."). More explicit among the recent manuals are SexEtiquette, by Marilyn Hamel ("Should I? Can I? May I? Must I?"), and Sex Tips for Girls, by Cynthia Heimel ("Including important advice on 'Zen and the Art of Diaphragm Insertion' "). On a more humdrum front, Baldrige is now writing a compendium on how to behave at work, while George Mazzei has published The New Office Etiquette: A Guide to Getting Along in the Corporate Age.

For those who find such reading burdensome, there are classes. Baldrige offers lectures and seminars for ill-mannered executives at banks, insurance companies and other protocol-minded firms. "Young managers," she says, "are simply not aware of the nuances of social behavior. It's appalling that young people graduating from Vassar, Harvard and Stanford don't know the meaning of an RSVP. They often don't show up when they're invited, or they show up with a date." To mend their ways, Baldrige charges a sobering $3,500 a lecture, $6,000 for a full-day seminar.

"Americans work very hard to get to the top, and they want to feel comfortable there," says Marjabelle Stewart, who has been giving etiquette lessons for nearly two decades and now savors a sense of triumph. She offers "Petite Protocol" for preschool children; she also conducts executive seminars in table manners, which she optimistically touts as "International Dining: Eating Your Way to the Top." Stewart has franchised some 480 apostles around the country to teach "White Gloves and Party Manners" at $15 an hour, and enrollment has tripled in the past two years. Like a number of others, she credits the new mood to Ronald Reagan (and let us not forget Nancy and all those mink coats at the Inauguration and the $210,000 new chinaware at the White House). Says Stewart: "One of the greatest things this President has brought is good manners. He shows you can be nice to your wife and comfortable with her admiring you. It's a fabulous example of American manners."

Others read the signals in other ways. "Society today is sitting next to your hairdresser at dinner," according to Liz Smith, gossip columnist for the New York Daily News. She was inspired to that judgment by a White House Rose Garden party attended by, among others, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, a Secretary of State and a Supreme Court Justice, and Mrs. Reagan's New York hairdresser, Monsieur Marc (who later quoted the Liz Smith line on the jacket of his memoirs, Nouveau Is Better Than No Riche at All).

Monsieur Marc, 50, a white-haired Belgian who presides over a chandelier-lit salon on Manhattan's East 65th Street, sees considerable variety in his clients' current styles. "We have very elegant women and sporty women," says Monsieur Marc, stroking Tanya, the German shorthair that has the run of the place. "They might arrive in an evening gown or they might come in an exercise suit. They behave like ladies." Adds one of his colorists, Alain: "They set high standards. After all, what else is there?"

DEAR Miss MANNERS: Some time ago, a lady was dancing with her male friend at the White House and her under-slip dropped off on the dance floor, and the lady just kept dancing as if nothing had happened. Was this the proper thing for the lady to do?

GENTLE READER: Yes, the thing to do is to ignore it. A general rule of etiquette is that one apologizes for the unfortunate occurrence, but the unthinkable is unmentionable.

It is perilous, of course, for anyone less sagacious than Alexis de Tocqueville to make generalizations about American manners. Men and women often have wildly different ideas about what is courteous behavior; so do the young and the old, whites and blacks, smokers and nonsmokers. Regional differences are strong, and so are those between large cities and smaller ones. Despite a general decline in courtesy in recent decades, many Southerners pride themselves on having retained quite formal manners; New Yorkers, by contrast, take a perverse pride in their fellow citizens' rudeness.

Southern Californians cherish a style unlike anything elsewhere. One Hollywood hostess, Stacey Winkler, 36, wife of Henry ("the Fonz") Winkler, is noted for her elaborate invitations. She summoned guests to a Halloween party, for example, by writing messages on the sides of pumpkins, wrapping the pumpkins in ribbons, and having them delivered by a chauffeur in a ghost costume. She was dismayed, on the other hand, when a hired bartender arrived in a tuxedo; she immediately sent him home to change into Bermuda shorts. "No one who knows us," she says proudly, "would wear a tie to one of our parties."

In less ebullient communities, the rules are quite different. Susan Turley, a corporate speechwriter in Memphis, says she has often been "given grief for wearing pants." As for formal dinners, she goes on, "the big thing these days is white linen, shined crystal, elegance all over the place--and then after dinner, take off your shoes, lie down on the floor, and play Trivial Pursuit all evening. I guess what's significant is that Trivial Pursuit just hit Memphis about a month ago." Comments an employee at an advertising agency: "You ask me about nightclubs? There are no nightclubs in Memphis. My God, we just heard of fettucini here in June."

Despite the evidence of a revived interest in manners and elegance, a number of people would argue the exact opposite, that manners continue to get worse and are nearing the point of invisibility. "Manners have taken a beating these last 25 years," says Eppie Lederer, a.k.a. Ann Landers, the advice columnist. "It isn't just that men aren't opening car doors for women or offering them seats on subways or buses. It goes deeper than that. The high crime rate is one thing that discourages openness and courtesy to strangers. The chances are that a man who takes an old lady's arm to help her across the street may be planning to grab her purse."

Fran Lebowitz, who made her mark as a caustic social critic with Metropolitan Life (1978), also feels that things are getting worse rather than better. "I don't think people have manners," she says. "I don't think people teach their children manners. I think boorishness is the order of the day. There has been a return to convention, but that's all nostalgia. It's just fear, and fear isn't the same thing as manners."

Lebowitz's catalog of boorishnesses is somewhat eclectic: zealous nonsmokers, people who go to work with colds, waiters who introduce themselves before handing out menus. Worst of all, says Lebowitz, who once drove a cab, are cab drivers. Says she: "Manners may be too polite a word. Many cab drivers just seem to be mildly insane. I would rather pay and just let the guy sit in the back while I drive."

There is something about driving in general that seems to bring out the beast. "It's almost a game to see how many people can make it through a yellow or red light," says Steven Beebe, a professor of communications at the University of Miami. In New York City, it is more than a game; the number of pedestrians hit by cars, many of them running lights or crowding a curve, runs to 15,000 a year. In Houston, where traffic altercations periodically lead to violence, the Chronicle offered a few friendly tips: "Try to release your anger in constructive ways. Running another automobile off the road is not constructive or legal . . . When all else fails, do not pull out a gun."

Such behavior, of course, can be interpreted as part of the antimanners of an elaborate antistyle. Not everyone is wearing a blue blazer and short hair. At the crowded Astor Place Haircutters, a few dozen blocks from the orchid-scented salon of Monsieur Marc, the walls are decorated with a cellophane-taped montage of punk haircuts: the teeth cut, the rainbow cut, the fungi cut, the oh, s&$151;---- cut ("We call it that," says Owner Enrico Vezzo, "because that's what the customer says when he looks in the mirror").

Vezzo's salon, which used to be a very nondescript establishment, boasts 20 red leatherette barber chairs, and the young customers wait in line seven days a week. The elaborate cuts start at only $6 for men and $8 for women. The atmosphere is, as they say, informal. "There's no etiquette here," says Vezzo. "I keep a baseball bat next to the door in case there's trouble."

DEAR Miss MANNERS: Some months ago, I was mugged . . . Everywhere I go [people] ask me for the details of what happened. Why do they do this? It was a nasty experience and I would like to forget it.

GENTLE READER: Because they are dying to know if you were raped. Do not tell them.

Criticisms and arguments on American manners are among the nation's oldest traditions. As early as 1795, a would-be colonist named Isaac Weld went to live in the New World and then returned to England complaining of Americans that "civility cannot be purchased from them on any terms; they seem to think that it is incompatible with freedom." By the time Frances Trollope came to write The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), she was scandalized by, among other things, "the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife." Charles Dickens, in his American Notes, deplored the national pastime of chewing tobacco, spitting toward spittoons, and often missing--"odious practices . . . most offensive and sickening . . . an exaggeration of nastiness."

Americans liked to defend their forthright manners in those heady early years by insisting that they represented the new democracy's rejection of class-ridden Europe. Thomas Jefferson made a point of receiving foreign diplomats and all other White House visitors without any distinctions of rank, which led to a scramble for seats that he called the "rule of pell-mell." "When brought together in society," Jefferson wrote in a memo to his Cabinet, "all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office." ("Nowadays," Judith Martin observed in the course of giving a lecture on philosophy at Harvard in May, "he might have worn a tag: 'Hello! My name is Tom. What's yours?' ")

The myth of a classless society did not last long. In the three decades before the Civil War, more than threescore guides to manners appeared--written, then as now, mainly by women--and their message was best summed up in one title, The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility. Throughout the century, a dominant class that felt threatened by raucous immigrants and the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution saw etiquette as a means of establishing and maintaining a hierarchy. The up-and-coming aped the manners of the rich, the new rich aped the old, and everyone looked yearningly back toward aristocratic Europe.

Miss Jennie Jerome, daughter of a Wall Street broker, married one of the Churchills of Blenheim Palace, and a whole generation of debutantes sailed across the Atlantic in hopes of doing as well. By contrast, one of Ring Lardner's social-climbing heroines went to stay in an extravagantly expensive Palm Beach hotel in the hope of meeting a grandee like the Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago. When she finally did encounter her in a corridor, Lardner's narrator relates, the great lady only said to her: "Please see that they's some towels put in 559."

In a somewhat more egalitarian age, today's self-styled arbiters of elegance do their best to disavow the slightly embarrassing equation of good manners and money. While Emily Post's original guide was full of such now esoteric information as what color livery the footmen should wear, Elizabeth Post insists that she and her grandmother-in-law both regard etiquette as "a code of behavior, based on kindness and consideration." Says Ann Landers: "Good manners are important because they show how you care about another person. Bad manners indicate a lack of caring." Marjabelle Stewart maintains that "manners will take you places money never could." All the etiquette books now talk of being friendly, kindhearted, relaxed. Use common sense. Avoid snobbery.

Nobody supports this humanitarian thesis more strongly than Judith Martin. "Good manners are not just for the very rich," she says. "Good manners are for everyone. Good manners are free." She was correspondingly appalled when Reagan's first protocol officer, Leonore Annenberg, curtsied to Prince Charles on his 1981 visit to Washington. "If there is any basic principle of American life, it is that we do not recognize that anyone is born at a higher level than anyone else. We do not bend the knee to anyone except God, or in some cases his representative. I found it incredibly offensive to see an American official doing so to royalty. We fought a war over that and we won."

Martin was hardly less appalled to hear that there are now etiquette camps where children learn practices like kissing hands. "That is just a perversion of the idea of etiquette," says Martin. "Hand kissing is not an American custom. It's incredibly pretentious for Americans to do it, and for toddlers to do it is unspeakable. I mean, this is just disgusting. These etiquette schools were done solely to teach snobbery, which is against everything I believe in."

What Martin believes in--and her book on children encompasses the full range of adult behavior as well--is that "we are all born ignorant and oafish," and it is the duty of all parents to teach their younger selves how to behave properly. The only way to do so, she says, is by providing a good example plus tireless nagging. "It takes 18 years of constant work to get [a child] into presentable enough shape so that a college will take him or her off your hands," she announces. The child must be taught not just to say thank you, not even just to treat other people with consideration, but to see that the world is organized in a certain way, and that the rules were created to make life more bearable.

One of the main reasons for the confusion in manners, Martin believes, is the blurring of the line between public life and private life. In public life there are hierarchies of money, power and talent because that is the practical way to get things done. In private life, everyone can be equal. To blur the distinctions causes pain. To let money govern private relations is immoral. And to the child's traditional question "Why?", Miss Manners proposes the traditional answer "Because."

DEAR Miss MANNERS: I want my kids to feel that I am their friend, but I can't make them understand why l can't stand it when they and their friends call me "Pops" and tell me to get snacks for them and . . . turn on the television when I'm trying to read the paper . . .

GENTLE READER: If you took the role of the father, you wouldn 't have to, because you could set the rules. Why don't you?

Despite Miss Manners' spartan dedication, it seems hard to believe that the perplexed readers who write her 10,000 letters a year are really inspired by either idealism or altruism. Yuppies, in particular, are pragmatic people who expect a dollar's value for a dollar spent. Such expectations apply to etiquette guides too. As Marjabelle Stewart puts it, "In today's competitive society, manners are a matter of survival."

That is why Cartoonist Hamilton, who has just finished a book titled Up in Class, was so struck by the black-tie yuppies' dinner with no servants in attendance. "Everything I can see in the way of new manners is very ersatz and copied, very nostalgic for something they've gotten from old movies, from some hopeful rumor of a more distinguished period in which to live," says Hamilton. "They're just dressing up. They all love suspenders, art deco, fragments of an earlier grandeur, and that's the new conservatism. Reagan isn't the cause but just another symptom of the urge to find some order."

Even when there are no promotions or pay increases immediately involved, today's etiquette is often based on the struggle for status, or what Californians like to call "personal space." At a chromed and carpeted temple of body worship on Santa Monica Boulevard, for example, everybody scrupulously obeys certain unwritten rules. No more than three swimmers are allowed in each lap lane. It is rude to swim the backstroke unless the swimmer is alone in the lane. "Neo-manners" is what Cynthia Heimel calls such rituals. "There don't seem to be enough resources for everyone."

Or consider the elbowing at the most elaborate California dinner parties. "People consider it chic to arrive late," says Wallis Annenberg, stepdaughter of the celebrated curtsier. "This is the land of the grand entrance, and God forbid that the audience isn't assembled when one arrives." In a variant ploy, the guest arrives on time but then immediately asks to use the telephone for "an urgent business conference" and disappears for an hour.

Even the current preoccupation with healthy diets can become a form of skirmishing. Television Producer Irwin Rosten now asks his guests what they do and do not eat when he invites them to dinner; this can get quite complicated when the guests not only observe various religious dietary rules but shun salt or white bread or refined sugar. So many have given up red meat that Stacey Winkler no longer serves it unless she knows in advance that all her guests eat it. At large dinners, she says, she offers several smaller dishes at each course. Says Annenberg: "Some people are like nannies, saying, 'You should watch your cholesterol,' or 'Watch your salt.' I think it's very bad manners."

Among academicians who study such things, the rituals of status seeking at the dinner party or the formal dance are as old as human memory. "Any society that has upward mobility as a major feature pays a great deal of attention to manners," says Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. "Young people today are concerned with making it, and part of making it is setting the table properly when the boss comes over for dinner. Self-improvement is a big part of the American dream, and learning manners is part of self-improvement." Or as Author-Editor George Plimpton sums it up, "Manners are better because they help you get along and get ahead. All this provides a sense of security and belonging."

So there is undeniably a certain element of hypocrisy and snobbery in all the talk of revived elegance, but when was it ever otherwise? And what is the harm in behaving well--or trying to behave well, or pretending to behave well--for selfish reasons? It was a kind of historical aberrancy for large numbers of people to think, as they did in the '60s, that life could be improved by boorish self-indulgence. And if there is now a return to more mannerly behavior, it is not necessarily a result of a new political conservatism. "I think it is the other way around," says Martin. "I think the political conservatism is based on people's dissatisfactions with the way they live."

DEAR Miss MANNERS: I recently viewed a friend's granddaughter performing on TV, and the friend asked me how I liked it. I told her that I enjoyed it very much, which pleased her. Actually, I hated it. Was I a hypocrite?

GENTLE READER: Miss Manners tries very hard to understand the concept of emotional human duty in a society whose members are bothered by their consciences for the deed of having pleased a grandmother by complimenting her granddaughter . . . Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.

Bravo, Miss Manners! For your good example and constant nagging, you deserve our thanks, perhaps even a tip of the hat.

--By Otto Friedrich.

Reported by Dan Goodgame/Los Angeles, Carolyn Lesh/ Washington and Adam Zagorin/New York

With reporting by DAN GOODGAME, Carolyn Lesh, Adam Zagorin