Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making it Work

by Tim Gunn

  Then the artichoke went away, and I thought, Lovely first course. Then this teeny container of sorbet came out a few minutes later. I thought it was a palate cleanser, but no, the sorbet was dessert. Meal over.

  I thought: Are these hosts so bombed that they forgot there’s a chicken in the oven? But I didn’t smell anything cooking. Some of the guests were making eye contact with one another as if to ask: Is this really it? But nothing was said, and the party ended not long after dinner. I think we all hit McDonald’s on the way home.

  The next day, I sent a note. I don’t lie, but I can be diplomatic and disguise things in politeness. I told the truth and said it was “an unforgettable party.”

  I received an e-mail back that said, “We so enjoyed having you there and thanks so much for coming!”

  What I really expected to hear back was, “Thank you. We were so embarrassed when we later realized we forgot to serve the roast.” There was never any acknowledgment about the mysteriously sparse meal. I’m constantly thinking there must be an answer to the sphinx. You wouldn’t sit down at a table formally set with silverware with no food to serve, would you?

  I actually was thinking about that modest dinner at a lunch I attended at the White House on July 24, 2009. I was even seated at Mrs. Obama’s table, which was a tremendous thrill for me. She is such a fashion icon and has amazing presence. (At the lunch, she was wearing Michael Kors. I just love how she supports American designers.)

  The first course that came out was a tiny salad. The main course was crab cakes the size of silver dollars with cannellini beans and grilled summer squash from the White House garden. A lovely woman sitting next to me made some comment to a table companion about how teeny the portions were, and Mrs. Obama overheard and chose to address it.

  “When we arrived at the White House,” she said, “I could not believe how wasteful we were in what we served people and how much we threw away. I’d rather have people leave lunch and go get an ice-cream cone than to throw away so much food.”

  Indeed, everyone ate everything. Not an ounce of food went to waste. And I really liked her attitude. First of all, how classy was it that she frankly and warmly addressed an overheard complaint? Mrs. Obama made the guests feel comfortable and taken care of. No one starved. We’re so used to these huge portions, but they’re not necessary. It wasn’t a ton of food, and indeed I did grab a little snack that afternoon, but the food was very tasty, the company was excellent, and unlike my artichoke friends’ meal, the lunch consisted of three courses!

  PERHAPS YOU REMEMBER HOW at the Obamas’ first State Dinner there were two crashers, a couple who wanted to be a part of the Real Housewives of Washington, D.C. I won’t mention their names because they’ve gotten enough newsprint already. As you’ll probably recall, they managed to wheedle their way into this exclusive party in spite of not being on the guest list (though they claim a misunderstanding). They even got close to President Obama and Vice President Biden.

  Well, I was truly shocked by this on all levels.

  Speaking as one who merely went to lunch at the White House, I simply can’t fathom how anyone could get in without being invited. When I went, the layers of security were intense.

  Several weeks before the lunch, I had to fill out a questionnaire, giving my Social Security number and my date and place of birth. I even had to call my mother and find out the name of the hospital where I was born. (It was the since closed Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C., for those of you who like those sorts of details.)

  At the check-in when I reached the White House, one of my fellow guests arrived with a surprise date. (The audacity!)

  The staff was lovely to the uninvited guest and said, “We are so sorry we are not able to have you attend, but we have a sitting room where you may wait for your friend, and we’d be happy to bring you a plate.”

  There were many more checkpoints between the door and the event. The final obstacle was the first lady’s chief of staff, Susan Sher, who waited at the top of the stairs with the guest list.

  It was probably the tenth time I saw the list. Luckily, I was still on it, and she recognized me and greeted me warmly. It was only then that I relaxed. It was such an elaborate process, I was nervous that they weren’t going to let me in!

  And yet somehow these horrid party crashers were able to waltz right into the first State Dinner of the administration. What kind of message are these reality-show hoodlums sending to our young people? “You feel like going to the White House? Dress up and head on over there!”

  Where is the penalty for that kind of brazenness? What kind of culture do we live in where someone can say, “I want it, so I’m going to have it now—circumstances be damned”?

  People like this want the cheaper version of fame: celebrity. They want to be famous, but not for having done anything. That’s the opposite of what I think our young people need to be taught, which is: It’s wonderful to aspire to things. Aspire to be invited to the White House. Maybe one day you will be. To accomplish such a feat, it’s very important to practice good qualities of character.

  Shortly after the crasher scandal, I was interviewed by a blogger who sees these crashers as national heroes.

  “It’s what we all should be doing,” she said.

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha,” I responded.

  “I’m not joking,” she replied. “I’m altogether serious.”

  “This is egregious behavior,” I asserted. “It’s the White House and the president. It’s a State Dinner. One doesn’t crash the White House. One doesn’t crash a wedding. One doesn’t crash anything that’s invitation only.”

  “It shouldn’t be exclusive,” she said.

  “What?” I said with incredulity. “They’re private events!” I wondered if she thought Andrew Jackson’s 1829 inauguration, at which the public showed up at the White House ball and trashed the place, was a good model. “Are you just trying to get a rise out of me?” I asked.

  She assured me that she was not.

  “What do you say to your children?” I inquired, fearing the answer.

  “I tell them: ‘You go wherever you want to go! You do whatever you want to do!’”

  I said I thought that underscored a dangerous sense of entitlement. Young people need guidelines. What are they going to do? Just arrive at orientation at Harvard and say they want to go there and so they will, even though they haven’t been accepted and haven’t paid tuition?

  “What’s your feeling about domestic violence?” I asked. “Is anyone entitled to act out in any way?” (I was being interviewed about Liz Claiborne Inc.’s support of domestic violence prevention programs before we’d veered off to talk about the crashers.)

  “Having been on the receiving end of domestic violence, I don’t feel that way,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “you have experience that tells you otherwise. Maybe if you were the host of an invitation-only dinner party and people whom you weren’t expecting showed up and you had no place to seat them, you would realize that’s wrong.”

  I still believe that to be true, even if people like those terrible White House party crashers are constantly providing a counterexample in which trashy behavior is rewarded. To cheer myself up, I try to remember the difference between short-term and long-term success. Living a really good life and making a real mark on society is a marathon, not a sprint.

  NOW, BACK TO REGULAR old parties. I confess to you, and I’m somewhat ashamed of this: I don’t particularly like entertaining. I know I should, but I just don’t.

  I love cooking. I cook for myself every day. I like the ceremony of it. It takes me into a different zone. I make a lot of pasta and meat loaf (ground chicken or turkey and only occasionally ground beef). Rather than buying in bulk, I just grocery shop every day. I know my rate of consumption, and that way I can just pick up some produce and whip something up. I haven’t bought red meat in a long time. I’d like to say it’s because I’m so ecologically conscious, but the truth is,
I can’t make a good steak.

  But cooking for a crowd of five or ten or, heaven forbid, twenty?

  No, thank you. I don’t like feeling like a slave to the care and feeding of my guests. Whenever I’ve had parties, I’m in the kitchen mixing drinks for the entire evening, and I never actually get to enjoy and converse with anyone. Maybe that’s why the only people I see with any regularity are my friends the Banus, who drink only champagne. It makes hosting so easy. All I have to do is say, “Want some more?” and pour away.

  Honestly—and maybe some of you can relate to this—I just can’t stand the pressure of being responsible for hosting a memorable (and not in a bad way) evening. Martha Stewart, bless her heart, intimidates me. That level of entertaining is so over my head: What do you mean, you didn’t dig up your own potatoes for this dish? You didn’t make the doilies? The plates didn’t just come out of a kiln?

  I love Martha, but it gets ridiculous.

  And yet, I have learned a few things in my many years of party attendance.

  Bad weather is good for parties. You get only those people who really want to be there.

  Entertaining shouldn’t be about showing off. It’s all about making people feel comfortable and setting a stage for everyone to have a good time, make new friends, and have stimulating conversations. You want to leave a party thinking: If I hadn’t gone to that, I never would have met this wonderful person, or had that delicious meal, or felt that sense of camaraderie with the people I met at the dessert table. You don’t want anyone looking at the clock, thinking, When can I leave?

  NOW, WHERE ARE MY single ladies and men? It’s hard, isn’t it, when you don’t have someone to take to a party full of couples? At office parties and certain events, there is pressure to bring someone. People are constantly trying to hook me up with dates, but I’d just as soon go alone.

  Even my own mother (to whom I’ve never officially come out) says, “What about your old age? Don’t you want to be with someone?”

  Lately, I’ve started to say, sincerely, “Maybe not.”

  The truth is, I don’t have time to be a good partner. Relationships take commitment, and all my energy goes into my work. I wouldn’t want to let someone I cared about into my life and then never be home, or always be distracted. To be a good partner, I would have to give something up. What would it be?

  There are a lot of perfectly happy single people in this city. It just matters who you are and what you want. And I would never want to be one of those serial monogamists who have a different partner every year and are always wondering why it never works out. Generally speaking, there’s a reason why people can’t sustain a long-term relationship. They think, It can’t be my fault, when the odds are pretty good that they’re doing something at least subconsciously that tells the world they’re not ready to settle down. At least I know I don’t want to settle down!

  That’s why parties where people are expected to bring a date even if they are single can be so stressful.

  It’s not quite as bad, though, as parties where people bring dates who aren’t expected. That’s one of the most egregious social sins anyone can commit. It’s hugely presumptuous.

  I’ve been at fairly small dinner parties to which someone’s unexpectedly brought someone with an excuse like, “My sister was in town.”

  The host is typically accommodating but secretly seething.

  Someone I know had people who showed up to her wedding who had not RSVP’d. She didn’t have food for them or a place for them to sit, so she said, simply, “You should have told us you were coming,” and sent them away. Good for her!

  Fortunately, bad behavior by others can sometimes work to your advantage. At events with tables for ten someone sometimes shows up with an unexpected guest, and suddenly there are too few place settings. Usually, this is about the time I’m dreaming of being back home in front of the TV, so I will graciously say, “Please, take my seat! I will just disappear.”

  “No, please don’t!” my tablemates will insist. “Stay!”

  “No,” I say gallantly, “things happen for a reason. I am happy to sacrifice for the good of the table.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, I wonder if I can get home before House Hunters International starts? (I watch a lot of HGTV.)

  The only trick is: Don’t look back. Keep going. Pray there’s no coat check. Don’t stop for a taxi. Get around the corner and then hail one.

  Honestly, it’s fun to get dressed up, but I prefer simpler affairs. I like it when I go to parties and there’s a pitcher of something sitting out for people who don’t know exactly what they want right away. And I like when you can just go get your second drink yourself. It frees up the host and lends an air of informality to things. Similarly, it’s good to make dishes in advance so you can just heat them up.

  I also like having at least one person around who is widely disliked among your crowd of lovely people. You never know who’s going to get along with whom, but you do know people need someone to gossip about later, and you don’t want it to be you.

  My niece and I were just talking about Thanksgiving, and she was saying there was someone she wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing.

  “But if she weren’t coming,” I told my niece, “maybe you’d be picking on me!” It’s always good to have someone in that pariah category, because they let the rest of us off the hook.

  Maybe I’ll start entertaining more since I just moved into a more party-friendly apartment. For the first time in my adulthood, I have a dining room table. It’s beautiful, and I love having it. But no one’s ever sat at it. Maybe this will be the year I actually start enjoying party giving … Or maybe I’ll continue to put my gorgeous dining room table to a slightly less social use: doing crossword puzzles in my pajamas.

  ALAS, UNLESS YOU ARE made of stronger stuff than I am, there is no avoiding the holiday-party circuit. From what I can tell, the holiday season is just an excuse for bad behavior. Party season is like a military gauntlet, with cocktails being flung at you instead of clubs.

  I knew I had entered into a real state of Grinchdom when I was chatting with the maintenance man who was putting up a tree in the lobby of a company I was doing some work for and heard myself say: “This tree looks like a metaphor for this company: anemic, ratty, and artificial.”

  Well, we bonded over our ambivalence about both our employer and the sorry state of the old plastic tree, and that was a nice moment of holiday cheer—our laughter around the tree. But, in general, I have trouble getting into the spirit.

  I travel by train on the holidays. Leaving New York for Delaware one year, there was a power outage on the tracks. It was like the evacuation of postrevolutionary Russia. When power was finally restored and the first train left the station, there was a cheer at Penn Station. Then they put four Acela trains together, and everyone was sitting on suitcases. We were just lucky to get out of there. My niece and I had been talking about how we were going to have a Merry Skype-mas, whereby we would all sit around our computers and talk with one another over the Internet rather than gathering under the same roof.

  Well, once we arrived at our destination, it was one thing right after the other. My mother had a high blood pressure attack. She had to go to the emergency room and stay in the hospital for three days. That night, my nephew, Mac, took his parents’ car to a party. At four a.m., the police were pounding on the door. The car was found in a ditch. Mac was in his room, covered with blood and mud.

  My sister called me at a quarter to six in the morning from the emergency room to report on Mac’s condition. I drove to the ER in Mother’s car and picked them up. They didn’t volunteer details, and I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to have to tell my mother. I could honestly say that I knew nothing. Better that she should hear all about it from my sister.

  Unfortunately, at a quarter to ten, my drama-queen niece called and told me the whole story before I could tell her I didn’t want to know. So then when my mother asked what had happened, I had t
o fill her in. I could have faked ignorance, but as you know, I am pretty much incapable of telling a lie. Alas!

  Wallace told me on the way back that she’d started out feeling sorry for Mac, then she felt sad for the family, and then she just felt mad. I said, “You should feel mad. Anger is good.”

  At the same time, it wasn’t such a bad holiday season over all. Nobody died!

  EVEN BEFORE THE HOSPITAL visits and car crashes, family get-togethers have been fraught. One year, my sister-in-law (she’s my sister’s husband’s sister, if you like the details of convoluted relationships) used Thanksgiving dinner as an opportunity to fight with her brother about who would host their mother for Christmas.

  “You led me to believe that she spent three days with you, but I happen to know she was only with you for a few hours,” my sister-in-law said accusatorily.

  “What?” my brother-in-law said. “We had her for three days.”

  “That’s not the information I have,” his sister said.

  It’s not as if this can’t be verified one way or the other, and is Thanksgiving dinner really the time to do it?

  When she behaves that way, she acts like she and the person she’s speaking to are the only people in the room. I hate it when couples do that.

  Quite a few years ago, when my niece and nephew were very young, old family friends joined us for our family Thanksgiving dinner. Owing to Wallace and Mac’s young age, there were knock-knock jokes and probably some references to farting and other bodily noises.

  One of the invited guests turned to her husband and stage-whispered, “Bob, would you please do something to ratchet up this conversation! I’m about to fall asleep from boredom.”

  I started to stew.

  My sister was talking to my niece and nephew about whatever preteens are interested in, and meanwhile this lady is huffing and puffing dramatically.