The news from Texas is bad. A survey of young professionals, questioned about etiquette, has found that 55 percent were unable to say what should be done with a napkin when a person leaves the table at a dinner party. Forty-five percent were unaware of the correct approach to buttering a bread roll.
The study of 200 fledgling accountants, lawyers and politicians was undertaken for Fitz and Floyd, a Dallas-based purveyor of china whose list of customers includes the White House under both the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Considered accurate to within four napkins, the survey found that most respondents wrongly thought dirty napkins should be scrunched up and left amidst the dinner-table debris. Many were similarly adrift when faced with the challenge of what to do with a finger bowl.
These and similar matters have been persistent American concerns since the closing of the frontier, a transition that, as one historian put it,
”left no place in American life for the half-wild, the half-tamed.”
What followed, during the period of urbanization known as ”the movement to town,” was the vine-like growth of an American etiquette. This system of social customs came to serve as the bylaws to the basis of proper behavior, the Golden Rule.
There remains, however, much work to be done-in Chicago as well as Texas- as one Gold Coast society hostess learned last year at the Chicago Boys and Girls Clubs Ball at the Chicago Hilton and Towers. The lesson was delivered when a prominent Illinois congressman had to be asked several times not to jump on the ice sculpture.
Even at the top, Chicago can be a tough town. Some recent cases:
– At the Casino, a private club in the shadow of the John Hancock Center, a diner became angered when a waiter tried to remove her plate from the wrong (i.e. left) side. She ground a lit cigarette into the back of his hand.
– Leaving a North Astor Street dinner party, a husband pulled at his wife`s wrist, trying to get her to depart too. She bit him on the hand and, according to a witness, he ”bled all over the place.”
– Another Gold Coast woman phoned a Lake Forest matron and shouted: ”I`m through with your husband! You can have him back now.” (”He (had) dumped her,” noted a friend, analyzing why the Chicago woman would make such a call.)
Observing etiquette during periods of marital problems is difficult, but lawyers agree it is unseemly for an ex-wife to attack an ex-husband`s clothing with scissors, or for an estranged husband to put his wife`s cat in the freezer. (The cat survived, but was mad at both of them for months.)
Dinner parties and fancy balls also can be tricky. When it comes to seating, ”it`s important to know the personal lives of every one of your guests,” one busy organizer observes, recalling a lamentable night at the Brookfield Zoo Ball when a husband, wife and mistress found themselves at adjoining tables. ”I`ll (hug) your husband anytime I want,” the mistress shouted. ”Go (away),” retorted the wife.
Keys to social success
Some traits are annoying, such as that of a stockbroker who insists that his family share dental floss. Each day, he cuts off a length-and that`s it.
Some are unsafe. A hostess in Lake Geneva, Wis., got mad at any guest who left a toilet seat up. ”That`s damn dangerous,” she snapped. The madcap heir to a coal fortune once entered the Disc de Maxim`s, then at 1300 N. Astor St., in a gorilla suit, a costume in which he also confronted golfers leaving the Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest. ”I`d come out of the woods at dusk and watch
`em lay rubber for a hundred yards,” he recalled.
Others are puzzling. Novelist Nelson Algren once took an artificial leg to a party on East Walton Street as a present for the hostess. Later, second thoughts set in. ”What if somebody at the party is, well . . ,” he wondered. A lawyer`s wife recently complained that on a trip, her husband took her through a nude car wash in Montreal. ”It was terrible,” she told friends.
”It cost $50 and there were streaks on the side and they didn`t get all the salt off.”
Poet Delmore Schwartz once claimed that ”the motivating force in American life is fear of failure,” but others note that, to be socially successful, one needs high energy and a keen sense of insecurity. To help chart difficult situations, etiquette serves as a way to put a good face on things.
”You simply have to talk to the person next to you,” one frequent Chicago dinner guest said, though arbiter Emily Post once wrote of a woman who was seated next to a man she despised.
”I shall not talk to you because I don`t care to,” the woman said.
”But for the sake of my hostess I shall do my multiplication tables.”
Forcing a smile, she began (”twice 1 is 2, twice 2 are 4 . . ”), working upward until, ”as soon as she politely could, she turned to her other companion.”
”There are some etiquette situations every young professional is going to encounter,” said Jim Shade, Fitz and Floyd`s public information officer, in a telephone interview from Dallas. ”While most dinner tables are not equipped with finger bowls today, successful managers are expected to butter a roll correctly. Good manners create an image of self-confidence and ability. Bad manners can ruin the best image in an instant.”
In the Texas survey, 23 percent did not know what to do, upon completion of a meal, with the silverware. Ten percent thought it proper to leave dirty tableware on the tablecloth. (It is not. Used utensils should be placed parallel on the plate in a ”four o`clock” position. In addition, police note, it is not proper to pocket silverware, even when it matches a set at home.)
This is distressing data to Letitia Baldrige, a former Chicagoan who parlayed her skills as White House social secretary during the Kennedy years into a role as a sort of national tastemaster general. Author of a definitive manual, ”The Complete Guide to the New Manners of the `90s” (Rawson), Baldrige recently crafted ”Public Affairs, Private Relations” (Doubleday), a politely received novel of etiquette. She has, as they say, views.
To Baldrige, etiquette is ”like a map.”
”Knowing the rules of etiquette means you get through life more efficiently, more graciously, more attractively,” she said in a phone interview from Washington. ”Nobody likes to sit and look at somebody who has his mouth overly full of food, chewing and talking, not using his napkin properly, bits of gravy all over his tie. That`s not attractive.”
Gaucheries du jour
On the other hand, she said, ”manners means caring about how other people feel, about jumping in, about helping out.”
Baldrige knows perfectly well how to keep a napkin in play. (Leave it loosely folded, soiled sides hidden, on your chair during temporary sorties;
leave it folded on the table at dinner`s end. Never tie a knot in it and throw it at the hostess.) And how to consume a bread roll. (Snap off a small piece, butter it, stop talking, eat with mouth closed.)
What concerns her these days are more modern forms of crudeness. Such as: – People who bring cellular phones to the table.
– People who take calls in restaurants.
– People who are not doctors but carry beepers.
– People who use fax machines ”to send invitations and thank-you notes so you get a slimy piece of paper, not a nice piece of good stationery.”
– People ”who sit down at a dinner party, after the hostess has gone to a lot of trouble, and declare: `Red meat! I can`t eat that!` ”
”Diets are the most boring things in the world,” Baldrige said. ”If people don`t like what`s being served, they should pretend to eat, shove around their food-and shut up.” What really unsettles her at a party is
”just when you`re about to jump into someone`s delicious hot fudge ice cream meringue and someone says, `Oh, how fattening!` ”
”A man`s life should be a stately march to a sweet but unheard music,”
Henry Thoreau once remarked, but these days, according to Baldrige, ”we are short-cutting the world, forgetting the nice touches. We don`t say `thank you,` or take time to be nice. The more `push-buttony` we get, the less human we become. We need each other terribly. We need to sit around each other`s dinner tables.”
In the exhausting `90s, Baldrige admitted, a two-career couple, battling job stress, traffic and bills, might feel beat at workday`s end. ”But if you`re cooking for each other anyway, you can easily put on two or four other places,” she said. ”Bring over some people, sit down, talk to each other, console each other, tell some jokes. Make people feel glad they`re alive.”
Details are important
There are signs of an increasing attention to niceties. At Exit, an Old Town nightclub for the mohawk-and-leather set, where knives, axes and a chain saw hang over the dance floor, the management has designated every Wednesday as ”Bondage Night,” when ”ladies chained to the bar drink free.”
”It`s absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious,” Oscar Wilde once remarked. But details are important. Don`t drink from finger bowls, experts advise, no matter how delicious the rose petals. Don`t shuffle place cards. Beware the fate of an aging public-relations executive who four years ago was barred from an Episcopal church after whispering lewd suggestions during the after-service coffee hour.
Sometimes, a touch of deafness helps.
At a funeral last year in Lincolnwood, two elderly women sat in the chapel before the service.
”That`s a very nice purse,” said one.
”Thank you, I had it done this morning,” said the other, fingering her hair. Both smiled, and moved on to other news of the day.
