Etiquette Challenges in 1992

Letitia Baldridge was a wise woman: “For every step forward in electronic communications we've taken two steps back in humanity,” Ms. Baldrige said. “People know how to use a computer and answering machines but have forgotten how to connect with one another. Our society is unraveling. We're too self-obsessed. Look at all those unattractive people talking about depraved things all day long on TV talk shows. People can talk about themselves, yet the art of conversation, which has to do with sharing, is disappearing. I feel as though I am chasing a runaway locomotive.” Sadly, Baldrige died in 2012, at the age of 86. One has to wonder what she would have thought of today’s social media platforms.

At Tea with Letitia Baldrige

(She was the Calming Voice of Civility in Uncivil Times)

O TEMPORA! O mores! The mores are enough to make Letitia Baldrige, the guru of social niceties, put down her cup of tea and wring her hands in Ciceronian despair. She reeled off some recent examples.

The bride-to-be who faxed her wedding invitations. The cellular phone that rang during Mass. The young executive who goes from word processor at work to VCR at home and does not know how to make small talk.

“For every step forward in electronic communications we've taken two steps back in humanity,” Ms. Baldrige said. “People know how to use a computer and answering machines but have forgotten how to connect with one another. Our society is unraveling. We're too self-obsessed. Look at all those unattractive people talking about depraved things all day long on TV talk shows. People can talk about themselves, yet the art of conversation, which has to do with sharing, is disappearing. I feel as though I am chasing a runaway locomotive.”

In this automated society, etiquette has an anachronistic ring. But in reality, Ms. Baldrige’s message is not one of clinging to old-fashioned manners when all around are losing theirs but how best to adapt with civility to a changing world.

That's often where tea comes in: people need it more than ever, Ms. Baldrige said. (Yes, Ms. “I'm a businesswoman, and Ms. is an appropriate form of address,” she said. She is known as Tish to friends.) Ms. Baldrige views tea not as a ceremonial or snobbish throwback, but as a relaxing break in the daily routine, and one that is quieter, less complicated and often less demanding of one’s time than lunch or dinner.

With a background in governmental protocol and 18th-century decorative arts, Ms. Baldrige, 66 years old, has progressed from updating Amy Vanderbilt's book of etiquette in the 1970's (with advice on how to address an invitation to a couple who are not married, revolutionary stuff at that time) to writing a guide to manners for executives in the 1980's to sorting out the “new manners” of the 1990's. She is currently revising the executives’ guide, paying attention to issues like sexual harassment, child care and the proper use of beepers.

Before catching a shuttle from New York to Washington, where she lives with her husband, Robert Hollensteiner, a real estate developer, she was having tea at the Mayfair Regent Hotel, one of her favorite places. “They know how to serve it here,” she said as she poured some orange pekoe from a china pot through the silver strainer balanced on her cup. “You'd be surprised how much easier it is to conduct business over tea than over lunch or dinner in a bustling restaurant.”

She selected her tea without hesitation from an assortment of eight. Her utter confidence and sense of command in making her choice, as much as in handling introductions or in keeping a conversation going, are warmly reassuring, never intimidating.

Tea can make people comfortable in a similar fashion. In business situations, Ms. Baldrige believes, the logistics of tea are actually easier to handle than those of a full meal, especially for people who have yet to figure out which side their bread-and-butter plate is on. Once the formality of pouring is out of the way, the participants can get down to business, without spending too much time. No need to worry about elbows on the table because the table is often too low.

“I've seen business deals confirmed over tea and people fired over tea,” she said.

Ms. Baldrige, who now conducts seminars on behavior and corporate relations, cut her social teeth as the personal secretary to the Ambassador at the American Embassy in Paris. That job was the beginning of her career in protocol: she went on to Rome with Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce and then, in 1961, to Washington with the Kennedys. More afternoon teas than she can remember. And enough stories to last for a month of afternoon teas.

“In Rome, I accidently introduced a new Ambassador from Pakistan as the Ambassador from India in front of the entire diplomatic corps,” she recalled. “He exploded and left, and I spent the next four days apologizing with calls, letters, visits, flowers. If I did something like that today, it would be all over the media, and I would probably have been fired. I learned to apologize in a major way.”

She is more careful about introductions and greetings these days. As Ms. Baldrige was considering a little tray of tea sandwiches at the Mayfair Regent, a woman recognized her and stopped, mentioning an occasion when they had met several years ago. No flicker of puzzlement crossed Ms. Baldrige's generous, open face as she waited for the woman to finish. “Of course,” she said brightly, as though the previous encounter had occurred just yesterday. Afterward, she said: “I never would have recognized that woman, but she had the good sense to introduce herself by name. Everybody forgets names and faces, and it's just inconsiderate to expect someone who isn't your boss or your sister-in-law to know exactly who you are.”

What do you do if you fail to pin a name on a familiar face? “You come right out and ask the person's name and then say something about how you know you've met before, but there are days when you even forget your own children's names.”

Not that she is likely to, in the case of her own children. Her daughter, Clare Smyth, 26, is named for Mrs. Luce, and her son, Malcolm Baldrige Hollensteiner, 24, is named for her oldest brother.

She confesses she is somewhat appalled at her son's table manners. “I think he really does it to twit me,” she said. “He's always got the spoon in the ice cream carton, because he can't be bothered with a dish.”

Ms. Baldrige has written a dozen books, many about etiquette. But these days instead of merely talking about manners in her seminars, she digs beneath the formalities to reveal the logical, civilizing nature of social protocol.

“There are major C.E.O.'s who do not know how to hold a knife and fork properly, but I don't worry about that as much as the lack of kindness,” she said. “There are two generations of people who have not learned how important it is to take time to say ‘I'm sorry’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and how people must relate to one another.

“But that does not extend to allowing perfect strangers to address you by your first name. With me they're better off sticking with Baldrige, because too many people have trouble getting Letitia right.”

Ms. Baldrige admits to having some old-fashioned values and holding views that some would call sexist. “I marched in the pro-feminist parade with everyone else in the late 60's,” she said, “but that does not mean that women should abdicate their roles in the family. Women have the babies, and they have to be the ones to teach manners and ethics. Men won't do it because they're more concerned with making money, keeping fit and having a good sex life.”

Ms. Baldrige grew up in Omaha, but you'd never know it from her Eastern establishment accent. She still loves the Midwest for what she calls its relative lack of artifice. She went to Vassar and then, in 1946, enrolled in graduate school, the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute of Psychology at the University of Geneva. “I fell in love with Europe and decided I would do anything to get back there after I finished my studies,” she said.

She landed the job at the American Embassy in Paris after reluctantly taking a secretarial course, a requirement for a woman trying to get a job in those days. “For me to be in that atmosphere, with people like Dean Acheson coming to the Embassy, was incredible,” she said. Once in the Embassy, even with steno pad in hand, her career was off and running.

When she returned home after three years, she began liberally sprinkling her conversation with French words. “I was thoroughly obnoxious, a big blond snob, really bad news,” she said.

She then worked at the Central Intelligence Agency on a psychological warfare project. “In retrospect, what they were doing was not so different from public relations today,” she said. In 1953, thanks to her command of Italian, she became special assistant to Ambassador Luce in Rome. By 1956, she was in New York at Tiffany & Company as the first director of public relations and the first woman to be an executive there.

“Those were the glorious days of Walter Hoving,” she said, referring to Tiffany's former chairman. “He would not sell scarfs and handbags.”

She took advantage of her job at Tiffany’s to purchase a full set of sterling silver flatware for herself. “I was single, a career woman, but you do not have to be a bride to want beautiful things and to use them when you entertain,” she said. “It should be no different today.”

Then this arbiter of taste looked around the area off the Mayfair Regent lobby where tea is served. Her eyes lighted on the giant floral arrangement in the center of the room. “Look at those fabulous flowers,” she said, adding in a conspiratorial voice, “Sometimes they put in a few fake ones to help out.”

Oh?

“I know it,” she went on, “because I felt them when no one was looking. I'm always doing things like that.” – The Living Section, NYT, 1992

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia