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TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I’m Tom Putnam, the Director of the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy
Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I welcome you to
this very special forum. The Kennedy Library Forum Series is made possible through the
generous support of our sponsors, including lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston
Capital, the Boston Foundation, the Lowell Institute, and the Corcoran Jennison
Companies, as well as our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, WBUR and NECN.
We’re joined today by one of my predecessors, Dan Finn, who served as the first Director
of the Kennedy Library and was also a member of President Kennedy’s administration.
As I ask Dan to stand, please join me in expressing thanks to him for his service to this
Library and to our country. [Applause]
This forum is offered in conjunction with the Library’s newest temporary exhibit,
Jacqueline Kennedy Entertains: The Art of the White House Dinner, which we hope all
of you will visit. The exhibit’s document display includes a number of thank you notes -an essential trade-mark of good manners -- from those who attended various White
House events. And one in particular, written to the First Lady by the actress Geraldine
Page, captures the spirit of the exhibit and what Jacqueline Kennedy meant to our nation.
After participating in a dinner honoring French cultural minister André Malraux, Miss
Page writes, “I have decided to gush and be damned. You see, it is like a fairy tale from
my childhood come true: all the legends of sleeping princesses awakened; ugly
ducklings turning into swans; beasts into princes. All the life-renewingness is brought to
mind by the stirring and awakening and coming to life all over the country and all around
the world that is taking place because you and President Kennedy are who you are. You
remind us all who we can be. And the reestablishing of values is bringing us all to life
again.” Miss Page’s note is more effusive than another letter on display, which includes
a quote from Alice Longworth, who quipped that, “The Kennedy’s entertaining style
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certainly beats Franklin Roosevelt’s, who famously served hot dogs to Queen Elizabeth
during her visit to Hyde Park.”
Since the impetus behind tonight’s discussion is Jacqueline Kennedy, let us watch a short
film clip from our permanent exhibit that brings portions of her story to life.
[Film clip plays.]
Jacqueline Kennedy’s unique role as First Lady, as promoter of American arts and letters,
and as a mother was remarkable not only for the fact that she was only 31 years old when
she entered the White House, but also because she succeeded on these fronts without the
benefit of the sage advice of Miss Manners. The truth is, in fact, that Judith Martin was
there in the room when President and Mrs. Kennedy were entertaining, as a reporter for
the Washington Post, where she worked for 25 years as one of the original members of
the Post’s Style and Weekend sections. In 1978, she launched her Miss Manners
newspaper column in a modest effort to save civilization.
Born a perfect lady in an imperfect society, Miss Manners has since become the national
doyenne of civility. By answering readers’ questions concerning the complicated issues
of living in the “do your own thing” philosophy of our times, she has single-handedly
invented a distinctly America etiquette. Her columns remind her gentle readers of
truisms, such as “charming villains,” who have always had a decided social advantage
over well-meaning people who chew with their mouths open.
Judith Martin is the author of a number of books, two of which are on sale tonight in our
bookstore: Star Spangled Manners and, most recently, No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and
Pursuit of Venice. She’s been described by Time Magazine as having transformed
etiquette from the realm of society matrons to a tool for everyday life. The key element
of successful entertaining is knowing who to invite to your party. In our effort to pay
tribute to Jacqueline Kennedy’s role in promoting American arts and values, who could
be better to comment on those efforts in our own time than Miss Manners? Judith
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Martin, you honor us with your presence here today and we thank you so much for
coming.
Moderating this evening’s forum is Boston’s own, Pulitzer Prize-winning, syndicated
columnist Ellen Goodman, one of our country’s most astute commentators on the
challenging world we live in. Ellen Goodman learned her manners from her parents, who
were friends of President and Mrs. Kennedy, and who attended the 1953 wedding of Jack
Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier. Our archives include an oral history done by her
father, Jackson Holtz, who campaigned for John F. Kennedy in his 1952 campaign for the
Senate. Later, then-Senator Kennedy returned the favor when Jackson Holtz ran for
Congress. And our audio-visual collection includes this photo of that campaign with a
young Ellen Holtz on your far right.
According to one critic, in her columns Ellen Goodman takes current events and sees
their universal truths. Or in the words her daughter used with her friends to explain her
mother’s occupation, “My mom gets paid for telling people what she thinks.” So on with
the conversation. We hope that our forums are occasionally enlightening. Yet, listen
especially carefully this evening. For it is not often that we offer a speaker who
promises, for those who follow her dictums, the possibility of living the rest of their lives
without making one false move. Ladies and gentlemen, Judith Martin and Ellen
Goodman. [Applause]
ELLEN GOODMAN: Thank you. I think I should start by a Geraldine Page-like gush
about Judy, and just tell you my own history that proves that she is what she writes about.
Which is when I was a very young reporter, even younger than that picture, I was sent by
the Globe for my first Washington assignment to cover the opening of the Kennedy
Center for the Arts. And I arrived at this giant hall, full of luminaries, not knowing one
Senator from the other, and Judy was there covering it for the Washington Post and very
kindly told me every Senator as they came in -- all the names and faces -- thereby saving
my career! So I owe it all to you. We thought we would start tonight just with Judy
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telling us what she clearly, as a pre-school reporter, remembers of her time at the White
House during the Kennedy administration.
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes, I have to say I was a very junior reporter. I don't want to be
here under false pretenses and play the role of the last surviving Civil War widow who
has insights to offer about what Lincoln was really thinking. I became a reporter about
the same time, maybe a month or two before Mr. Kennedy was elected President. And
what enabled me to get a glimpse of this administration was the press set-up at the time.
We had a women's section. This was before the style section. It was called "For and
About Women.” Because at that time everybody knew that only women were interested
in food, in children, and parties. That men didn't eat, and they didn't have children, and
so on. So they didn't care. But we had an editor who believed that the party beat -- and
the party beat in Washington would be the White House and the embassies – this editor
said, "It's no different from the police beat.” Well, it was. We ate better, actually, on the
party beat. It was a little different. But as the most junior person, I had to work
weekends and during the Eisenhower administration, apparently everything shut down on
the weekend.
The Kennedy administration was busy going seven days a week. And so I went over to
the White House for the briefings and whatever occurred then. And I was sometimes sent
along as help to a real, experienced reporter on various events, parties, which is how I got
to the famous party that the Kennedy's gave for the president of Pakistan at Mount
Vernon. And it's how I came to be shot by the fife and drum corps. We were all out in
the front of the President's house -- President Washington's house -- and “The President's
Own,” which is what the fife and drum corps in colonial costume were called, came out
to do a little maneuver, and they all had their rifles like this, and then they put their rifles
down like that. They were facing a little group of us press people who had been herded
there. And we didn't think much of it. We thought the rifles, you know, back on their
shoulders, and they … they shot us. They moved down the audience, and they shot.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Now, they just wanted to.
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JUDITH MARTIN: And President Kennedy started laughing. I said, "That's some
protection to your citizenry. And then they moved back, and we were still in shock, and
we thought, "Okay, we’ve survived that." And then another group of them came and shot
us again. And I still regret I did not have the nerve there, in my youth, to grab my bust
and fall to the ground. But somebody did wave a white handkerchief. And, anyway, so I
got in on some of the periphery of some of these things and it was extremely exciting. I
needn’t tell you. But I have to say. I’m sure you or most of you have seen, or will see,
the exhibit downstairs, which is wonderful. And I’m sorry that my profession overcame
me down there, and I thought, “Why are so many people typing their thank you letters?”
Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. [Laughter.]
ELLEN GOODMAN: Geraldine Page, however, wrote it.
JUDITH MARTIN: She wrote it out. It’s interesting to think about how the
atmosphere of the White House had changed from the Eisenhower administration, which
had been considered pretty dutiful and staid, to the Kennedy administration in which
glamour became, you know … Many people, now looking back, think of it more as that
was the epitome of formality and so on. What they did, actually, was to change the
whole concept of formality. They didn’t move to informality, by any means. But the old
rules that had been in effect for a long time -- the E-shaped table, one table for all the
guests, and you sat by rank, so it didn’t matter if you had even a language in common, let
alone a conversational topic in common. Mrs. Kennedy changed that to the round tables.
They allowed people to smoke and smoke at the table. They served cocktails, which the
Eisenhower’s had not done. Mrs. Kennedy often wore strapless or sleeveless dresses.
That was a big no-no. Your dinner dress … You weren’t supposed to wear a strapless
dress because you looked naked above the table. And maybe she thought, “So what?”
You know? Which she wore -- this puzzled me -- with eighteen-button gloves. And she
would have them on before, and she would have them on in the entertainment, so they
must have been a wonderful strip show when she peeled them off, like Gypsy Rose Lee.
I don’t know what she did with them then, when she got them back on. They went to
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black-tie rather than white-tie for many occasions. The White House had always been
white-tie.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And black-tie’s considered less formal than white-tie?
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes. Oh, yes. Absolutely.
ELLEN GOODMAN: They didn’t have tails, or they had black-tie and …
JUDITH MARTIN: No, no, no. A white-tie is white tie with a waistcoat and tails, and
black-tie is the dinner jacket that we consider formal today. But when it was first
invented -- around the turn of, not this last, but the century before -- it was considered
informal and even shocking. And they started out with white-tie, as the Eisenhower’s had
done, but then they had most of their dinners black-tie. And they often did not have
themselves announced. They just walked in and without the fanfare. It depended on the
occasion.
ELLEN GOODMAN: The President was the first president to be hatless … to ruin the
hat industry …
JUDITH MARTIN: But she helped the hat industry, because people liked the pill-box
hats. But, if you recall at his inauguration, he had a high, silk hat.
I remember from reading about the Roosevelt administration -- I wasn’t there at the time
-- but it was informal, the food was lousy, the whole White House was sort of a New
Deal commune of sorts with strange people living upstairs, or …
ELLEN GOODMAN: Strange people?
JUDITH MARTIN: [Laughter] … Running the government. Louis Howe was … And
Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t care about …
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ELLEN GOODMAN: Mrs. Roosevelt was out doing other things.
JUDITH MARTIN: That’s right, but the White House … First of all, America has
never solved the question of dignity versus man of the people. And if a president is too
formal, people say, “Who does he think he is? A King?” And if he’s too informal, they
get equally mad. And they say, “Well, you know, why him? I’m just as good; I should
have the job.” And it’s gone back and forth. I mean, nobody was more informal than
Andrew Jackson, who opened the doors and let the hordes in to destroy the house.
The difference between the Eisenhower’s, the shocking change -- and it did shock people
-- that the Kennedy’s made was to lessen the old protocol rules in the interest of a good
party. Whether the party was a good party or not was not an issue before, in the previous
administration, as it is not under many very rigid circumstances. The round tables were
so that people could talk, so that there wouldn’t be … so ranking wouldn’t be so obvious.
King Arthur invented that. Mrs. Kennedy didn’t. But it worked in the White House.
And that’s the kind of thing that gave it glamour. People had a good time.
ELLEN GOODMAN: We looked downstairs and you can also see downstairs this
wonderful … It almost looks like an art form of who sat where at the dinner, the André
Malraux …
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes, at the André Malraux dinner. They did that for every dinner.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Who sat where. And one thing I noted is there didn’t seem to be
a single donor, a single fund-raiser at that party. Was that just an anomaly or …
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, that particular party was the super-star cultural party. They
were not unaware of political necessities, believe me. But that was a particularly starstudded dinner.
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ELLEN GOODMAN: I wanted to talk a little bit, in Star Spangled Manners, you talked
about the American etiquette of equality. And I wanted to talk about that, because I think
it’s interesting in thinking about the Kennedy’s. The Kennedy’s are now sort of routinely
referred to as, you know, royalty or our aristocracy, as if that were a good thing. But, of
course, Americans have always been ambivalent. We want our candidates, at least, to be
completely sleeves rolled up, man of the people, or woman of the people, now. And then
they arrive in the White House, and we also want a little glitter.
JUDITH MARTIN: It’s been a problem for every single president. George Washington
wrestled with that problem and started dressing down a bit, because he liked to dress up a
lot. And it has always been a problem because we are ambivalent. And, if you recall,
Mrs. Kennedy was not very popular at the beginning of the administration. She was
considered a little hoity-toity there. And.gradually people began to appreciate the beauty
of what she was doing. Some people, not everybody. She was not the most popular First
Lady at the time. Because people thought she was aloof. Now …
ELLEN GOODMAN: But has there ever been an unambiguously popular First Lady?
JUDITH MARTIN: Probably not. No. I mean, yes. We always … every First Lady
we want … She’s either dowdy or she spends too much on clothes. If she entertains well
as, of course, Mrs. Kennedy did, then they think, “That’s all she cares about. Oh, she’s
frivolous, she just cares about entertaining.” And there’s always that kind of division of
feeling about it. And people struggle with it the best they can. President Kennedy got
through that with his humor. Because he was funny. And he was funny at press
conferences and other things. And so people related to that, and it broke it down.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Continue talking a little bit about -- I interrupted you -- about the
etiquette of equality. What does that phrase mean to you, that you use?
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, it says that we’re all created equal. But what does that
mean? One of my predecessors in the etiquette business, who also happened to be a
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President, dealt with this. Thomas Jefferson, who invented the etiquette, Pall Mall
Etiquette. He said, “Okay, then we’re not going to make any distinctions at all.” And so
he would treat an ambassador or minister at that time. And he would treat a minister and
his valet the same way. He had no seating arrangements. Everybody ran into the dining
room and grabbed for themselves, and so on. Bless his heart, he was trying. But it was a
master flop. It was terrible, because people want to know where they stand.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Yet he had [inaudible, simultaneous conversation.].
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes, but other issues. But right now I’m addressing the question of
protocol. And I know protocol does not work, as he found out. Interestingly enough, he
also wrote a protocol book for Congress, which I believe is still issued to them. I don’t
know. They don’t seem to be following it. He’d actually written it for the Virginia
Legislature, and it’s given out to Congressmen. Because, among other things, you cannot
conduct business in a legislative body, unless people are observing etiquette rules. So,
anyway, all the presidents have struggled with that. And we have gone back and forth,
saying “Isn’t it terrible about Nixon and guards’ uniforms? Isn’t it terrible about
President Carter wearing a sweater vest?” You really can’t win. And very few have
struck a balance, but I think Kennedy was one of them because, as I say, of his humor. He
could use the humor against himself. And it sort of brought down that royalty look, which
…
ELLEN GOODMAN: And he did sort of allow … I mean, women were often
considered the arbiters of what was civilized. And so he sort of gave that role to his wife.
JUDITH MARTIN: He liked women, yes. We know that.
ELLEN GOODMAN: But he gave the role of being the civilizing influence, or the
party person, to his wife, so he probably had … was able to keep one step removed from
that by giving it to her, too.
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JUDITH MARTIN: No, he was somewhat involved. And all president’s wives, whether
they like it or not, are the hostesses of the White House, or some other female relative of
the president. So that was established to be her job. And whether the First Lady actually
does it or not is another question. But she presides. And, of course, there’s massive help
from the protocol office of the State Department and other offices within the White
House, who help this. Mrs. Kennedy was one of the ones who really put her thought into
how they wanted to do the parties and not just took orders from what was done
previously.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Did she have sort of a grand American design behind it or …
JUDITH MARTIN: Not that I know of. She did not confide in me. I think she wanted
people to have a good time at a glamorous event. And they did.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And downstairs, it was interesting, because she gave notes to the
staff, I mean, as if she were a director of a show.
JUDITH MARTIN: She was a very active participant. She was. She was the director of
the show. She was a very active participant in staging these things. She can’t do it alone.
There’s a vast army of people who help. But she did the designing and the command post
as very few first ladies have done.
ELLEN GOODMAN: I believe you told a story about coming back to the White House
years later. I’m not sure what administration it was in. And seeing one of the same people
still working there?
JUDITH MARTIN: Oh, yes. I was at a … The White House, like everybody else,
brings in extra help when they have a big party. And I was, just a year or two ago, I got a
small award. And I was at a White House dinner. And there was the … I got a little tap
on the shoulder, from the back. And there was a waiter that I recognized from all those
years before who, when I was a young reporter, would bring me a drink before the
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important people. And so on. And so we threw our arms around each other and we
thought, “Politicians come and go, but we watch.” [Laughter.]
ELLEN GOODMAN: Politicians come and go, but Washington reporters are still there.
JUDITH MARTIN: Right, and waiters. That’s true.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And was the reporting different at that era? Was it at that time
…
JUDITH MARTIN: Was it ever. Yes. As I said, within the women’s section, there were
an awful lot of very bright and able people who saw that they were not going to make it
on city side. So some women did, but very few. And so, we ran the “For and About
Women” section almost as a separate newspaper. And Meg Greenfield, who was later
editor of the editorial page, when she was a reporter at the Reporter Magazine, did a
piece on “If you want to understand Washington, read ‘For and About Women.’” I was
her secret source on some of that. And she said, “If the president declared war tomorrow
at a luncheon speech at the Women’s National Democratic Club, the Post would carry it
in the women’s section. And we did run this very much separately. And we covered the
embassies and the White House. I would go out and stop by the national desk before I
went to an embassy party and find out what happened that day. And the ambassador, who
had been refusing to take calls from other reporters, you walked up to him in a little party
dress and said, “What’s going on?” They would spell it out in very damaging detail. And
then we would write the stories. And the next morning they would call the managing
editor, furious, and they would say, “How was I to know that little girl was a reporter?” I
was a little girl then. And the managing editor would say, “Well, did she identify herself
as being with the Washington Post?” “Well, yes.” “Did she take out a notebook and
write down what you said?” “Yes.” So maybe they should have understood.
But there was distrust even within the paper. And another Kennedy story: When the
Kennedy baby, Patrick, who died shortly after birth, when we were covering that story,
we had the White House reporter here, outside of Children’s Hospital, being briefed by
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Pierre Salinger. But it just so happened that I knew someone who was a pediatrician in
Boston. And I called him up and I said, “Do you know anything about the …“ And he
said, “I can’t hear you. I’m in the room with the Kennedy baby, and there’s too much
going on here.” So I said, “Call me back.” And he called me back and he told me the
situation. And I went out to the national desk and I said, “This is really bad. This baby is
not going to survive.” And they said, “Oh, no, no, no. Pierre Salinger said the downward
trend had been stopped.” And I went back to my source, and I said that that’s what they
said. And he said, “That’s not what that means. We momentarily stopped the downward
trend. That is not an upward trend.” And I said, “Well, they want to go with the headline
in tomorrow’s paper, ‘Kennedy Baby Improving.’” And he said, “Well, if they do, the
child is going to be dead when the paper lands on your porch.” And I told them that, but
they went with it, “Kennedy Baby Improving,” and I heard the thud on my porch in the
morning, and by then we knew that the child was dead. So they thought, you know, this
isn’t … What the women do back there can’t be real reporting.” [Simultaneous
conversation]
ELLEN GOODMAN: I was in one of those sections, too. As is another former
colleague of mine from the Globe who was also in that section with me before. It’s
interesting, I just wanted to read something that you wrote in one of the books, “The
tradition of suspecting its presidents, and especially their wives, of using state ceremony
to indulge their personal taste for social grandeur … To this day, we foist the highest
state entertaining on the president’s wife, so we can sneer at her for caring too much
about parties.”
JUDITH MARTIN: Exactly. Exactly.
ELLEN GOODMAN: You still agree with yourself.
JUDITH MARTIN: I do. And Mrs. Kennedy came in for a lot of that. And
subsequently -- look at Mrs. Reagan when she bought China, so they could give people
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matching plates to eat off of. It was treated like her self-indulgence. And Mrs. Kennedy
came in for a lot of that.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And did Mrs. Clinton, too? The former Mrs. Clinton, current
Senator? [Laughter.]
JUDITH MARTIN: Not so much, but she, as I said, as with the presidents and the First
Ladies, she was faulted for not caring enough.
ELLEN GOODMAN: So is it important? I mean, is entertaining in the White House
important? Was this all frivolous stuff?
JUDITH MARTIN: It’s not frivolous. You need state ceremony. But I do think that -not just this country, but every country ought to revisit the idea of the enormous amount
of state-sponsored entertaining that is done. The idea is supposed to be, “Oh, you get to
be friends with people, and you can go across barriers.” Well, you don’t go across
barriers. In the embassies, someone who was of high enough rank could get to anybody
they wanted to talk to. And the friends … I remember in the early 60s, again about this
time in the Kennedy administration, there were several Arab nations that had … were
doing a lot of lavish entertaining. And you would see the Kennedy people and, later, the
Johnson people at these parties. And they would have toasts by good friends, and so on.
When the Six-Day War started. Boom. Everybody was on the other side. It didn’t
matter. These are not friendships. They are very lavish demands on people’s time. And
very often the illusion … Sometimes the people themselves fall for the illusion of
friendship. And very typically in Washington people will leave office for one reason or
another, sometimes just because they retire at the end of a long career. And they say,
“Oh, we have so many friends here. We’re going to stay here. They’re wonderful.” And
then, a year later they’re bitter and they say, “Oh, our friends have all deserted us because
we’re not, you know.” Well, they weren’t their friends. These were people who were
being paid to entertain them because they were important. And now the money goes to
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entertain the people who are important now. So those who do not build a private life are
in for a shock later.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And what about entertaining in the White House? I mean, is it …
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, you need some state ceremony. There are many countries,
as you know. The formality of showing alliances, of showing good will is part of how
international politics is conducted. Diplomacy is the last step before war when you
disagree with people. You try to deal with them. And you deal with them under very
strict etiquette rules in order to get things done in a way that might be otherwise done
through violence. I mean, that’s when diplomacy breaks down and you have war. So a
certain amount of it, yes.
But, as you know, many countries will have two people in the job. They have a president
whose name nobody knows. Or they have a king or queen whose name everybody knows.
And then they have a prime minister or other figure who does the work. And another
person does the entertaining. We split it between the couple, which means that a lot of
women who have no interest in this, are subpoenaed to do it. And the …
ELLEN GOODMAN: That subpoena arrives under the door.
JUDITH MARTIN: It certainly does. Yes. If you look when, a year or two before
elections, you always see the wives who are trying to talk their husbands out of running,
partly for this reason. It can be an enormous burden, and I think it could be lessened
terrifically. And let people have their lives, and their private lives, and their free time.
But I do believe in a certain amount of state ceremony.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Well, what do you think would happen if Senator Clinton
becomes the next president?
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JUDITH MARTIN: You mean, “Tee-hee. Is he going to put an apron on?” No. But
they will continue to entertain. I mean, when she was First Lady, she presided and so on.
But I think she did not make the kind of decisions that Mrs. Kennedy made. Mrs.
Kennedy really threw herself into being head of the social staff. But there is a social staff
there. And the state ceremony can go on. I have no doubt of that.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And she seems to have had the notion that she wanted to change
the way in which people were honored by the White House, as well as …
JUDITH MARTIN: Are you talking about Mrs. Kennedy?
ELLEN GOODMAN: Mrs. Kennedy. I’m sorry.
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes.
ELLEN GOODMAN: … by bringing in people of cultural accomplishment.
JUDITH MARTIN: They did an enormous job there, and it’s funny. They’re often
credited with perhaps just simply indulging their own tastes in things. They had
wonderful music there, for instance, but President Kennedy had to be signaled when to
clap, so he wouldn’t -- because he’d be the first to clap -- so he wouldn’t clap between
the movements. He did not know music. And Mrs. Kennedy did not start the clapping,
either. They had the good taste to pick the best of America, but it wasn’t necessarily what
they had in their parties that we were not allowed to cover, upstairs, when they were
doing the twist and whatnot, and they had Lester Lanin in when they wanted to have a
good time with their friends. And so, but it was an enormous contribution to American
life. And there were people who felt that was very uplifting to do this.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And I was interested, because there have been two references
here to the Roosevelt’s serving hot dogs to the king and queen …
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JUDITH MARTIN: That was something of -- not exactly a joke, but they did that
tongue in cheek, knowing that the King and Queen would love it. Because they have no
lack of going to state visits, and so on. And this was a kind of populist, and President
Roosevelt certainly knew how to give a state dinner. As you know, this comment came
from relative, Alice Longworth, who didn’t like that branch of the family. But, in fact, the
hot dog thing was a huge success with the King and Queen because it was a novelty for
them.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Have you ever considered the possibility of creating a state
dinner? What your state dinner would look like?
JUDITH MARTIN: No, then I could criticize it. I’d much rather … Ellen, my dear,
we’re reporters. We like to stand on the outside and criticize other people.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Well, it makes me feel that the … or do you feel that the kind of
criticism by reporters has changed over the years? And perhaps particularly by social
reporters who were …
JUDITH MARTIN: There aren’t so many social reporters any more. I mean, they have
simplified things at the White House in ways that, old stick-in-the-mud that I am, I don’t
care for. They don’t use Russian service anymore. They don’t come and let you serve
yourself from the platter. And when I wrote a rather snide piece about that, you know,
that they just plop a plate down in front of you, about it … Well, the answer came back
from the White House, “Well, people don’t know how to serve themselves anymore.
We’re just saving them embarrassment.” And I thought, “Oh, come on.” You know?
People know how to eat. So they have kind of, a little bit, dumbed things down.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And I’m wondering where … The one time I had dinner at the
White House, it was a movie night, and it was … It was interesting. My husband and I
…
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JUDITH MARTIN: Which administration?
ELLEN GOODMAN: It was in the Clinton administration. You would have guessed
that it was not in a Republican administration. And it was a movie night, and I remember
that the movie was “Wolf.” Do you remember? A highly forgettable movie, I might add.
And my husband and I … I sat at the dinner table … It was a wonderful event. I sat at
the dinner table between Mike Nichols, who was the producer of the movie, and whoever
it was who owns the chain of Sunglass Huts, who was clearly a major donor. And Mrs.
Clinton was at the table. But the interesting thing to me, aside from the wonderfulness of
just kind of being there, and then the informality … I had a wonderful conversation with
Mike Nichols about sort of … Well, we were discussing how you know when a movie
succeeds, because you don’t see it until it’s almost all done. We had this conversation.
Then we went down and saw, possibly, the most dreadful movie in the history of the
world. A movie my husband and I decided we would have walked out of, if we hadn’t
been at the White House. You definitely can’t do that at the White House. But that kind
of semi-formal evening …
JUDITH MARTIN: Surely you would have had the same kind of conversation with
Mike Nichols if you’d met him at anybody’s dinner party.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Yes, but in the semi-formal evening of the, you know, movie
night, he was at …
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, the difference between that and the Kennedy’s is the
Kennedy’s had them upstairs, so we couldn’t cover them. They had plenty of informal
nights, but they kept that separate, which is probably a good idea. [Laughter.]
ELLEN GOODMAN: We’re going to open it for questions in a few minutes, but I was
also interested that Mrs. Kennedy, at one point, showed, or gave a tour through the White
House that was shown on television and became a, if not controversial, some people liked
it, but she showed the renovations of the White House all through it.
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JUDITH MARTIN: Well, she put an enormous amount of work into that, and she really
improved the White House terrifically. I mean it was a fabulous project. But then when
she showed people around and then, of course, people made fun of it. And she had this
little girl voice, and everybody started imitating it, and so on. But the project itself was a
very valuable one.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And every presidential family gets to refurbish their own
quarters.
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes, they do. And the president’s office is refurbished. And,
according to his taste or the taste of whomever he appoints. And Mrs. Kennedy carried it
further and did the State Rooms.
ELLEN GOODMAN: To your knowledge, has anything amazingly important occurred
at one of these state dinners?
JUDITH MARTIN: Amazingly important. No. It’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to be
a show of, a symbolic show of quote unquote friendship between countries and things
like that. And, of course, we would live for the moments that, if they had … If there were
faux pas or people said … And there were presidents who would drink before a state
dinner and sometimes gave us wonderful moments. We loved that. But it’s a ritual. You
don’t think of it, really, as …
ELLEN GOODMAN: Well, you are, in many ways, pro ritual.
JUDITH MARTIN: I think, in its place. Yes, I think the White House does these ritual
dinners, and they should be done. It doesn’t mean you want to go to them every night, or
that there shouldn’t be raucous dinner parties on different occasions.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And do people have a strong desire to get on that guest list?
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JUDITH MARTIN: A strong desire? Ask any social secretary. They’d kill. And people
have come up with all kinds of lies.
ELLEN GOODMAN: How do you get on one of those lists?
JUDITH MARTIN: I didn’t get on it. I don’t know how I … once or twice in my life.
They have to have a reason. And they should have a reason. We’re paying for those
dinners, we taxpayers. It should not be anybody who elbows his way in. It should be
people that the White House feels it is valuable to the country to show good will to.
ELLEN GOODMAN: I had a few little things from a White House Q and A that I’m
going to dare to ask you. Who was the First Lady occupant of the mansion who hung her
laundry in the East Room?
JUDITH MARTIN: Abigail Adams. I knew you were going to do this.
ELLEN GOODMAN: In the War of 1812, the British set fire to the mansion. Who
redecorated the charred mansion in the French style and met with much opposition?
JUDITH MARTIN: Dolly Madison. Come on. This is too easy. Give me a hard …
ELLEN GOODMAN: Elizabeth Monroe.
JUDITH MARTIN: Dolly Madison had been … It’s a trick question. Mrs. Monroe had
to clean up afterwards, but Dolly Madison was well under way. Well, I am not pretending
to be a historian of that …
ELLEN GOODMAN: I’ll give you one more, and then I’ll just tell, you know, this one.
While the country was split by war, she overspent by $6,700 the $20,000 congressional
appropriation for the White House redecoration.
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JUDITH MARTIN: Mary Lincoln.
ELLEN GOODMAN: You passed all of those.
JUDITH MARTIN: I’d like to bring up a question that I actually had an occasion to
bring up to Mrs. Kennedy. And we never answered it, but it’s a matter that interests me
enormously. After she was in the White House, as you know, she became an editor. And I
think the first book she did was In the Russian Style, which she did for Viking. And, in
lieu of a book tour, what Viking did was they had a luncheon at the Carlisle Hotel for her
and a few reporters. And I was one of them. And they read us ground rules beforehand -that we could only ask her about the book. Well, nobody was there because they were
interested in the book. But they all asked her questions about Russian history, and so on,
and so on. It was going nowhere. And sticking within the rules, I said to her, “You have
in this book pictures of Catherine the Great’s underwear. You have letters and anecdotes
about her lovers.” I said, “I could go downstairs to the newsstand, and pick up half a
dozen magazines that would purport to tell me similar things about you. Which, I
presume, you think is in bad taste. What’s the difference?” And first Mrs. Kennedy said,
“The fact that she’s dead is the difference.” But then we pursued that a little bit. And
President Kennedy was dead, and there was scandal coming out about him at the time,
which she didn’t care for, so she kind of retreated from that. And I didn’t get an answer,
and I’m not sure I know an answer myself. Because it was … We didn’t have a feeling
of prurience reading about Catherine the Great, but a lot of people did from reading about
her. So …
ELLEN GOODMAN: But that does lead into something -- that she did think about
quite a bit, which is this difference between public and private life.
JUDITH MARTIN: Which she tried to maintain. And I admire her very much for that.
But what about Catherine the Great’s private life? You know. Where does it cross the
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taste border -- to be interested in this kind of thing and to pursue it. And, as I say, we did
not get an answer, but it’s a question that has always interested me.
ELLEN GOODMAN: What do you think over the years of having reported on first
families?
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, you surrender. I mean, you voluntarily surrender a great
deal of your private life. And then the question comes up, “Well, can you maintain a
little bit of it for your children?” Which she did. And, for that matter, which Mrs.
Clinton was able to do.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And the Bushes were able to do for their daughters.
JUDITH MARTIN: Somewhat. It’s harder when they are older and out in bars, and
then it’s hard to control it.
ELLEN GOODMAN: That’s definitely public.
JUDITH MARTIN: But public property, you can’t protect them. Young children are a
different thing. Do you take the interest -- the personal, gossipy interest --- that people
have in you, and try to turn it to some good? And you asked if anybody was much
admired. A close friend of mine, Sheila Weidenfeld, was the press secretary to Betty
Ford. And she took Betty Ford’s problem, which were legion, and Mrs. Ford is someone
who certainly did not expect to be First Lady or even acquiesce to the point that the
others did. “Well, all right. If you’re going to run, honey, what am I going to do?” He
didn’t run, the first time. And they were able to turn that around into something that was
useful for the society. And I don’t know of another case like that.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Well, perhaps if Mrs. Edwards …
JUDITH MARTIN: Yeah, well she’s not First Lady yet. She might.
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ELLEN GOODMAN: But I wonder. To think of the group of people who are running
now and the line between their private and public lives. Mrs. Edward’s health, you
know, Hillary and Bill’s marriage.
JUDITH MARTIN: The line is a lot harder to draw because the old rules of journalism,
which astounded me when I was a young reporter, that people would ignore all kinds of
things that would be reported now. You can argue now how much is a personal life
actually influential on the professional life. But when I was a young reporter, there were
two or three Congressmen who were always drunk in the House. Now you can’t say that
doesn’t affect their work. And that was never reported. Sexual peccadilloes were never
… In Kennedy’s case, I mean, there was a lot that we all knew in Washington that other
people in the country did not know. And there was a kind of hands off thing there. And so
the reporting was more decorous, but it was a little less honest because it didn’t apply
equally to everybody.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Now, the technology has changed so that there’s no private
space almost. I’ve thought about the U-Tube of John Edwards …
JUDITH MARTIN: I feel pretty?
ELLEN GOODMAN: Getting his hair made up on the …
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, the presidents are also partly responsible for this, for taping
their own sense of history. Nixon, they got him on his tapes. He made those tapes. That
was his choice. So on the one hand, talk about ambivalent. They want to get everything
out, provided it’s favorable. And in the old days, they were able to get away with a
picture of the perfect family. “I must be a nice guy, because look at this wonderful little
woman who loves me and these nice children.” And then, when the press said, “Oh, well,
and what about your mistress over here? This nice lady?” “Oh, that’s off bounds. That’s
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private.” Well, they were using the private life, as long as they thought it was favorable.
And then they would not want to use it if it’s not favorable, and the press got tired of that.
ELLEN GOODMAN: It fascinates me, too, in the Roosevelt Administration that the
press corps photographers …
JUDITH MARTIN: Showed the fact that he was …
ELLEN GOODMAN: … Never photographed him getting in and out of a wheelchair.
And if a new photographer came into this little core group, they would literally surround
the president and prevent a photograph. Imagine that, today.
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes. If Sheila Weidenfeld had been there, she would have said,
“Look, you can help the disabled by showing it can be done.” And he didn’t. He passed
it up. But that protective thing gave a false picture of what was going on. Never mind
leaving aside the prurient. Do we go too far now? Of course we do. But they didn’t go far
enough, before, to really show what the situation actually was.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Now, before we go to questions, I have to ask you about Venice?
She’s written a wonderful book on Venice.
JUDITH MARTIN: Thank you. I have veered from my etiquette mandate to go around
telling people retroactively to hand write their thank you letters to the White House to my
latest book, which is about Venice, a city I adore. And it’s about the history, and the
present time. It’s a light book, but it’s for the Venetophile -- people who fall, like me,
who fall in love with Venice. But I can tie the two things together.
ELLEN GOODMAN: I knew you could.
JUDITH MARTIN: There is a great American connection. Venice was a republic. It
never had feudalism, because one of the things you need for feudalism is land. So it never
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had the attitudes of feudalism. They never looked down on labor, the way European
countries did, and Asia, too, for many, many, I mean, up until fairly recently. It was an
oligarchy, but they had a good sense of everybody’s rights. And when the Constitution
was being written, there was talk of sending a delegation over to Venice, but Venice was
falling apart at that time and was being conquered and so they didn’t. But we have, from
Venice, the idea of balance of powers; of term limits; of all kinds of things, all kinds of
safeguards. Venice was determined never to fall prey to a hereditary princedom or the
problems that the other Italian city states had at the time. And Americans were fascinated
with that and learned a lot from it. So we’re all Venetian at heart.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Good, but we have time for questions. And I think that you are
welcome to come up to either of these microphones and ask Judy any questions that you
would like her to answer.
JUDITH MARTIN: Or you.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Or me.
JUDITH MARTIN: You answer questions, too.
QUESTIONER: What is the place of the Internet and e-mail in new etiquette. I would
always hand write a note if I’d been hosted, if I’d been given a present. But sometimes I
write somebody an e-mail thanking them for something or praising them for something.
JUDITH MARTIN: E-mail is a wonderful tool, but it does not push out all the other
tools. It simply adds to them. So, yes, if you have, “Thanks for giving me a cup of coffee
today or yesterday, and it was great,” e-mail is fine. If you’re going to say, “Thank you,
Mr. President, for inviting me to a state dinner,” it’s not so fine. There’s a whole range of
formality down to informality. And important occasions still require a hand-written
letters. Condolence letters, for instance. You don’t send off an e-mail, “Hey, too bad
your father died,” you know. It’s a very breezy kind of colloquial way of dealing with
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people, and it’s wonderful. It’s between the telephone call, which is immediate but
interrupts people, and the letter, which does not interrupt them but takes forever to get
there.
QUESTIONER: It’s interesting that you mention, “Don’t send a condolence note by email,” which I wholly agree with.
JUDITH MARTIN: People do.
QUESTIONER: Yet people often facilitate and will send out health announcements. If
somebody is ill, they want to keep their friends up-to-date.
JUDITH MARTIN: But that’s different, excuse me. To say the kind of thing that you
might telephone people to say. “So-and-so is really not doing very well, and we’re hoping
for the best,” or whatever, or is on the mend, that’s all right with e-mail. A condolence is
when somebody has died, and you’re writing to the bereaved who are not in a good
mood. Excuse me.
QUESTIONER: Thank you.
JUDITH MARTIN: I’m trying to cough away from the microphone.
QUESTIONER: Miss Manners, on a number of occasions this evening, you have
mentioned the name of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Actually her father made a proper
description when he said, “I can run the country, and I can raise Alice”-- Alice’s mother
had died in childbirth -- “But I cannot do both.”
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes.
ELLEN GOODMAN: I think he remarried.
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QUESTIONER: But what I wanted to ask you was, certainly you can say, “Oh, well,
you want to have quips about presidents,” or “You want to have, you know, jokes,” all
over the place, or even a line of hers. What’s so wonderful is when told that Calvin
Coolidge was dead, she said, “How can you tell?” You know, and her whole life was like
that, and irreverent, too, at times.
JUDITH MARTIN: Oh, yes.
QUESTIONER: The question I would like you to address is, “Are there others?” And
as I say about Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien, that’s not family.
JUDITH MARTIN: That’s not?
QUESTIONER: That’s not family.
JUDITH MARTIN: What, the Roosevelts?
QUESTIONER: No, no. Jay Leno. Conan O’Brien. David Letterman.
JUDITH MARTIN: Oh, oh. Comedians.
QUESTIONER: In other words, the charm of Mrs. Longworth was that it was family.
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, and she spiced up Washington for decades and decades and
decades. You could always get a great quote from Mrs. Longworth, usually on the snide
side. But she was a kind of national institution her entire life. Being a comedian is quite
different. It’s trying to entertain the public. And you’re dealing with public figures. And
any public figure, particularly a president who thinks that he’s not going to be joked
about, is living in another world, because that’s part of the American attitude. That
“they’re ours,” and we can … They are family, in that sense. They’re ours, we elected
them, and we certainly are going to joke about them.
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ELLEN GOODMAN: We allow people to joke about presidents and the president’s
family. Do we allow presidents and the families to joke?
JUDITH MARTIN: To the families themselves? Oh, sure.
ELLEN GOODMAN: No. Humor, it seems, has become so dangerous.
JUDITH MARTIN: Oh, but as I said about Kennedy, that was one of his great
strengths, is that he was funny. Not everybody’s funny and not everybody who runs for
president is funny. They all try. And they all know. That’s why they go on the comedy
shows, themselves. Certainly as candidates. Sometimes, as president, even. Because they
realize that’s where you reach the audience. And if you’ve ever gone to those deadly
White House Correspondents dinners where they all try to be funny, and some of them
occasionally bring it off, but usually not. But it’s recognized that humor is the language,
an important part of the language of politics.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Yes.
QUESTIONER: Excuse me for addressing you as Judith, but Ms. Manners, tell me.
You know, there are people who savor living in a sort of manner-free environment, in
today’s environment. I haven’t read Star Spangled Manners, yet. But I bought it, so I
will. But in today’s environment, people entertaining in their home -- and surely you go
to something other than state dinners -- what do you think are the three major faux pas
that people are committing?
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, first of all, there’s no such thing as a manners-free
environment. And people who tried it were on the Internet, when the Internet first
existed. They thought there would be no rules whatsoever and very quickly found they
couldn’t accomplish anything. And the chat groups and the other things started posting
rules, because without manners no kind of activity can take place. What do I think of
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nowadays? Well, I’m often called by feature writers, who say “I’m doing a thing about
the state of manners. What do you think?” And I say, “Which one are you doing? Are
you doing, ‘There are no manners any more,’ or are you doing ‘manners are back?’” I
said, “I can do either.” Because both are true. And there is an extreme abrasiveness in
everyday life that people are finding terribly unpleasant. And a lack a manners and selfcontrol have created this. On the other hand, the improvements are forgotten. There were
major improvements in the late 20th Century, and now, in manners. It was never polite,
but it used to be accepted to make the most ghastly, bigoted remarks and jokes that
nobody could get away with now. It used to be perfectly all right to blow smoke in
people’s faces, whether they liked it or not. You no longer get away with that. There are
a lot of improvements as well as a lot of deterioration.
QUESTIONER: Thank you.
ELLEN GOODMAN: I was thinking of the recent Don Imus flap, where his remarks,
that had been brushed off, and, you know …
JUDITH MARTIN: Exactly
ELLEN GOODMAN: And one of the boys for so long became a career-ending move.
And at the same time, what you were talking about, in the blogosphere, where there had
been a rash of quite threatening e-mails. And some bloggers on the west coast -- one
woman in particular, literally decided that she couldn’t go and speak at an event, because
she had felt so terrorized by it. And in response, as you said, the bloggers started saying,
“Okay, we’ve got to have a code of conduct.”
JUDITH MARTIN: They’re reinventing etiquette.
ELLEN GOODMAN: They are reinventing a code of conduct for a certain group, and
they’re almost reinventing a hierarchy or a concentric circle of conduct that, when you
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enter here, this is the code of conduct. And they’re going to state it many times. But if
you go over here, there’ll be no code of conduct.
JUDITH MARTIN: But then that deteriorates
ELLEN GOODMAN: That was part of the code.
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes, to people. Yes. As I say, there is really no activity that can go
ahead without some form of etiquette rules and the more controversy -- one of the slurs
against etiquette is the idea that it always suppresses controversy. The opposite is true.
The more controversy there is, the more you need etiquette, which is why etiquette is so
strict in courtrooms, in sports, in warfare -- which is not to say people don’t violate these
things right and left. But you take a courtroom where there are rules about how to dress,
when you stand up, when you sit down, how you address people -- much stricter than the
society in general, because they want to get on with the business. And if you have no
rules, and people start screaming this and that, nothing happens.
QUESTIONER: And is the code of conduct for a presidential family campaigning very
different than the code of expected conduct for the presidential …
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, campaigning, they say, “Come into our house. We welcome
you. We’ll tell you anything.” And they get elected president and they say, “Wait a
minute. This is none of your business.” It’s a big difference.
QUESTIONER: Do you have a favorite First Lady as hostess?
JUDITH MARTIN: Do I have a favorite First Lady? Not really, because what we
looked for, as reporters, is not friends -- which we would never be -- but we look for the
good story. So one of the favorite presidents -- not the First Lady, but for presidents, for
reporters, was President Johnson. Because he would walk up and say anything. And we
got great stories from his indiscretion and his tendency to think that, if he made a point to
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you, you must admire him and that you can’t be standing off to one side criticizing him.
So what a reporter looks for in a First Lady, it would be very different from what you
would look for in someone to look up to as a role model.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And the reporter often looks for something to criticize.
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, if it comes across your venue, you do. Yes.
ELLEN GOODMAN: I was thinking of Mrs. Reagan that way.
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, also the press. And, as I say, I thought a lot of this was rather
unfair. By the way, she deflected it with humor when she did that second-hand Rose
thing, and suddenly it turned it around.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Right. If you don’t remember, she was criticized very much for
spending a lot of money renovating the White House and for dressing herself in a year
when Reagan was cutting back on programs. And then she came to the Gridiron Dinner,
was it? Or the White House Correspondents?
JUDITH MARTIN: One of them, yes.
ELLEN GOODMAN: And she sang a ditty about second-hand Rose, which was …
JUDITH MARTIN: In the clothes, and it turned everything around, because humor is a
very powerful tool.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Whether it should have or not.
JUDITH MARTIN: Whether it should have or not, but she was criticized for spending
too much in clothes. Mrs. Kennedy was, too, but she was eventually admired for her
elegance. So, you know, how do you balance those things? You can’t win.
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ELLEN GOODMAN: That’s the etiquette of equality.
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes, that’s equality. You will not win. You can’t win. Do the best
you can.
QUESTIONER: Just two short questions. First of all, of all the presidents you have
met, who was the one that was most involved in the social aspect of organizing dinners?
Not only the First Lady, but the president really liking their job as hosts? And second,
you don’t seem to have mentioned any Republican president or First Lady.
JUDITH MARTIN: We were just talking about Reagan. I think he was a Republican.
ELLEN GOODMAN: [Simultaneous conversation] And was quite involved and
seemed to like his job as host?
JUDITH MARTIN: Reagan seemed to enjoy it. I mean Johnson loved parties. And I
think Kennedy enjoyed them. No, there was an omission when I should have mentioned a
Republican. When we were talking about the Kennedys and music and they got all those
credits for really knowing music. Well, they deserved the credit for presenting it, but
they didn’t know it. Nixon knew music. He really knew classical music, and he really
cared about it. And he put on very good, private little sessions with classical musicians.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Nixon knew wine, too, but the stories!
JUDITH MARTIN: He didn’t serve it to his guests, yes.
ELLEN GOODMAN: He only served it to himself.
JUDITH MARTIN: That was one of the great rudenesses of all times.
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ELLEN GOODMAN: You tell that story.
JUDITH MARTIN: He had a special bottle of wine that would be served to him with a
towel wrapped around it that was a lot better than what he was serving his guests. Not
nice.
ELLEN GOODMAN: This falls into the “Don’t try this at home.”
JUDITH MARTIN: Yes, not nice.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Do we have any questions from the floor? How about the
Bushes?
JUDITH MARTIN: What about them?
ELLEN GOODMAN: How has Laura Bush fared as First Lady?
JUDITH MARTIN: She has come in for remarkably little criticism, actually. I think
people got exhausted from the amount of criticism they piled on Hillary Clinton. I mean,
she was almost exempt from that thing. Now, she’s absent a lot. And she is interested in
things that everybody … sports, literacy, and so on. And she’s been quiet. And so she’s
brought it off, I think, rather well. Of course, they entertain. They’re not crazy about it,
and they have had many fewer state occasions than other president.
ELLEN GOODMAN: In fact, the President just had his first tails event.
JUDITH MARTIN: White tie, yes. They decided to have white tie for the Queen, for
Queen Elizabeth. But they do not like entertaining, particularly. They do it. But they do
it when they have to. And it’s gone according to what Mrs. Kennedy did. They’re still
using Mrs. Kennedy’s round tables and with this one exception, black tie. And cocktails.
And the same pattern that she set, and it still works.
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QUESTIONER: It’s a pleasure to be here, Miss Manners. I thought I had all your
books, but then I just realized you wrote ten of them. I had an experience the other day -this is a question about general civility -- and I was going down a staircase, and the
people were coming up the staircase on what I consider to be the wrong side. And I
muttered to myself, “I wonder what Miss Manners would think of this.” And, pardon me,
but I said, “I wonder if she’s still around.”
JUDITH MARTIN: Last I checked.
QUESTIONER: And I’m thrilled that you are. And that very day, I opened up the
Improper Bostonian and found a listing of this event, so I cancelled another meeting to be
here. But a lot of times, I wonder, I deal with young people a lot -- high school, college
age people – and we’ll be engaged in a conversation and in the middle of the
conversation, they take out the phone and start talking to somebody else. But my
question is people will say to me, “That rule no longer applies. [Simultaneous
conversation.] I would never wear white after Labor Day.
JUDITH MARTIN: They’re not authorized etiquetteers. People will always say to you,
“This rule never applies,” when it’s in their interest. And the teenager will say that
nobody writes thank you letters any more; that’s gone. And the grandmother who
expected some acknowledgement of her present does not agree. This is why you have
me. I’m looking at all sides. Watch out for those people who say, “This no longer
applies,” because they’re only thinking of their point of view.
QUESTIONER: Well, as a recently middle aged person, I find myself saying a lot, “In
my day, tah-tah-tah-tah-tah. And I’m wondering if there’s a cut-off point for me to say,
“Well, I’d better get with the program and … or just keep trying.” And my other pet
peeve is that my whole life I had to get up and let adults sit down on the trains, and now
people are getting up and letting children sit down, and I’m like, “No, it’s my turn to sit
down.” Although I’m greatly insulted when someone asks if I want to sit down. So my
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question is if what we grew up believing we should continue to believe until our grave, or
just take the snide remarks from the side lines?
JUDITH MARTIN: Well, first of all, the time which we all remember when everybody
really behaved did not exist. So we have to acknowledge that. And, as I said, there are
things, horrendously awful things that were going on then that are not allowed now. And
so you have to recognize that. But there is more general disobedience to the simple
courtesies. I mean, you talked about the people going up and down the stairs. There’s an
example of if you don’t have an etiquette rule, it’s chaos. It’s like, it doesn’t matter what
the rule is. There are countries where you drive on the right, and there are countries
where you drive on the left. But if everybody’s driving in opposite directions, you’re
going to have a lot of crashes. This speaks back to this idea that we can have a …
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had an etiquette-free world? We’d all be natural. Well,
not after you’ve seen it.
This goes in cycles in history. It’s interesting. That you have the periods of noble savage,
where people say, where etiquette gets … There are times when etiquette gets so
complicated that it is a burden on people, on the individual. And then people say, “Why
can’t we just be ourselves? Why can’t we just be open, natural, and sincere?” And then
they do that for a while. And then they’re repulsed by the way other people behave
toward them. And then they say, “Can we have a few rules here?” And when I first went
into the etiquette business, which was 1978, the very word was not used. It was
considered laughable. We’re all free and natural. And so I was really kind of surprised
that there was any response. I was doing this on the side. I had a different job. But the
growing sense that we didn’t have to live in this abrasive a society where you’re
constantly being pushed and insulted, and so on. Really, we could do a little better. And
so suddenly I see etiquette -- not practiced everywhere, but at least discussed everywhere
when people begin to realize it. So I’m waiting for the balance between the two.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Judy, I’m curious how your e-mail runs. I’ll tell you why.
Those of us who are in the opinion business in journalism, one of the things that has
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happened with the advent of e-mail is, and almost a permission slip coming from maybe
talk radio or who knows where, a kind of permission slip to ratchet up the hostility and
the language, is that the e-mail that we get is so abusive compared to what anyone would
have written in a letter. I mean, I used to, as a columnist, you used to get postcards from
retired colonels in Boca Raton, who were all very angry and they’d run out of space, and
then start writing around the edges. And they used a lot of explanation points.
But those, you know, it’s the e-mail language that you get now, and then sometimes you
will e-mail back to this person. It will be the first time that he or she -- usually he -realized that there was an actual person that they were e-mailing to. And then they’re
second response will be, “Oh, I didn’t mean to be quite that severe.” But the anonymity
of e-mail plus, it seems to me, the permission that’s come from things like talk radio that
this is how you can talk in public, has really ratcheted up the, excuse me, incivility.
JUDITH MARTIN: It has. I mean, the send button, the danger of the send button. I
used to get that kind of mail before …
ELLEN GOODMAN: Do you get it now?
JUDITH MARTIN: No, they’re afraid of me, so I don’t get it. I’ll give you some hints
about that. But the hostility level that people report that they feel to other people, of
course, is greater. Most of my mail is not, “How should I behave?,” but “How do I get
even with the person whose behavior I don’t like?” And then there’s an enormous amount
of the regretful. People who feel they should send their personal lives, I won’t go into
detail, on the office mail and then they push the send all. And the abusive stuff, the
intimate stuff, and so on. Yes, do you remember like twenty, thirty years ago?
Everybody used to say the answer to all our problems would be if people would
communicate more? Well, I think the answer is if they would communicate a little less.
QUESTIONER: Interesting story. First of all, where are the parents? And somebody
just said, “Back in the day,” and so on. And middle aged. Those of us who are a little
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older from our parents -- and I don’t think the parents did a teaching of proper etiquette
and manners to their children, because we don’t have the family time that we used to
have when we grew up, where you had dinner and there was no interruption, there was no
TV and cell phones. You had dinner and you participated in that family time and you
learned etiquette.
A young fellow who worked for me, who I was getting ready to put out on the road, and
we was going to be, for lack of a better word, a traveling salesman. And I was going to be
moving him to the mid-west. And I had invited him to come to a dinner with his
colleagues, his senior colleagues who were coming into Boston for a meeting. And we
had it at a restaurant, in a private room, and we invited him because he was going to be
going out on the road in the next month. And I look down at the end of the table, and he
was drinking his lobster bisque, picking up the bowl. And I turned to his superior, his
boss, and I said, “I don’t think he is ready to go out on the road again.” And I contacted a
local woman here in Boston, Judy Bloomen, who is an etiquette coach, and I had her
come in and had a charm school for 35 of my staff members. And I invited some other
successful business people, men and women, to come if they wanted to, because this
event was going to be a little costly, and they said, “Maybe. We won’t stay for the whole
two hours.” Well, we had a section, a classroom section. We had a cocktail party with
how to handle food and a dinner, and taught them how to interact, how to exchange
business cards, how to greet, how to engage, how to disengage. And it was wonderful.
And it’s not taught today, and there should be more.
JUDITH MARTIN: Isn’t it pathetic that we have to do this remedial work? That, as
you very rightly point out, the parents should be doing.
QUESTIONER: Thank you.
JUDITH MARTIN: And I don’t have any great sympathy with “but television takes
time” and “this activity takes time” and “that activity takes time.” The television set has
an off button. And what is more important than the family? Not only the training, but the
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solidity of the family that comes from sitting down at dinner together? So I think it’s a
tragedy that parents are not doing this, and I’m not just talking about, you know, the
overworked, strressed, poor, single mother, whatever. Very well-off people who are
child-oriented and who mean well do not understand the importance of this. And the
same people who are trying to teach their babies to read flash cards and improve their
minds and so on are not teaching them how to feed themselves. What could be more
elementary?
ELLEN GOODMAN: When was the last time you sat down at a party and found a
finger bowl in front of you?
JUDITH MARTIN: The finger bowl’s a funny thing -- I’ve occasionally used them -because the finger bowl now is most used when it’s not needed, right? At a very formal
dinner, you’re not eating anything with your hands. So the finger bowl is pure ritual. You
just take it in a little doily and you put it aside, and then you have your dessert. But if I’m
having people over informally for lobster or something messy, I might have finger bowls.
Because that’s what it’s for.
ELLEN GOODMAN: But it’s more or less extinct?
JUDITH MARTIN: Not totally. But, as I say, it lives on in this useless form.
ELLEN GOODMAN: It’s the appendix of social graces.
JUDITH MARTIN: It’s the appendix. There are certain things that people fasten on to
when they have no more meaning. The forty year old, thrice-married woman who wants
her father to give her away, right? Her father never had her under control. How can he
give her away? But people get attached to certain rituals and they keep them. A very
formal dinner, you will occasionally see a finger bowl.
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QUESTIONER: Miss Manners, my sister and I have been asked to teach etiquette to
some children in the fall. And also we’ve been asked to teach Sunday school. And so
we’re getting ready to write a kind of curriculum. And we’d like to know, could you give
us any advice?
JUDITH MARTIN: Write the curriculum. Realize that you are dealing with children
who are deeply in need of remedial etiquette, who have not been taught the simple
manners of being respectful to other people, of eating, of saying hello to people, and so
on. Far too often, when I read about organizations that are teaching etiquette to children,
it’s in a very fancy restaurant, how to order a French meal. Well, you know, they can’t
get their Pablum into their faces. Or how to ride in a limousine, limousine being a word
that, in etiquette, we never use anyway. And they don’t know how to ride the bus without
annoying other people. And the simple activities that speak to the main lesson of life,
which is the hardest lesson to learn, and we all work on it all our lives, which is other
people do have feelings and you have to take them into account. It does not come
naturally. It doesn’t mean you always have to yield to those feelings, but you have to
realize that they have them. What age group are you talking about?
QUESTIONER: It’s ten to fifteen.
JUDITH MARTIN: Ten to fifteen years. [Laughter.] Good luck. They probably don’t
have the simple courtesies. But you can take advantage of the fact that at least some of
them are at the first stage in life where they really care what other people think of them,
because they’re beginning to have crushes.
ELLEN GOODMAN: Puberty is a great [simultaneous conversation]. I think that the
young people do have an idea of other people’s rude behavior. Why not give them a
bunch of video cameras and ask them to videotape what they regard as really rude
behavior, so that you would start with where they actually do see it?
JUDITH MARTIN: And they’d start being funny and throwing food at one another.
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ELLEN GOODMAN: Well, you might, just to see.
QUESTIONER: Thank you.
GOODMAN: Well, thank you very much. I think we’ve just about run out of time. And
thank you, Judy, for being with us. Judy will be available to sign both of her wonderful
books afterwards, and thank you all for joining us.