The Guider

Perhaps never again will there be anything quite like the cool authority of an obiter dictum from Emily Post. On the proper dress of a lady's maid: "She never wears a cap, and bobbed hair would be most unsuitable." On the House with Limited Service: "The fact that you live in a house with two servants, or very well with only one, need not imply that your house lacks charm or even distinction . . ." But the world that turned on such fine points as How to Pay a Visit to a Lady Who Has No Maid, and The Manner in Which a Lady Speaks of Her Husband, has dwindled into nonexistence, and Emily Post, its grand arbiter for almost half a century, lamented "this modern-day society, when the smart and the near-smart, the distinguished and the merely conspicuous, the real and the sham, and the unknown general public are all mixed up together."

Cards to Chicken. Today, as Mrs. Post prophesied, the mix-up is on in high gear. There is still a society where the placement of finger bowls is of some concern, but the more people who can afford--or choose to afford--finger bowls, the less important an issue their exact placement becomes. Though manners themselves are still an issue, they are a different set of manners for an increasingly classless society. Where once it mattered how to present a visiting card, now the question is how a guest in evening dress should handle barbecued chicken. Though contemporary society neither needs nor would accept such an absolute authority as Emily Post, it does welcome some guidelines, and since Mrs. Post died two years ago, the unquestioned chief guider has been Amy Vanderbilt, 54, an energetic latter-day member of the genuine Vanderbilt clan.

Great-Great-Grandfather Oliver Vanderbilt helped found the mighty Bank of Manhattan; Grandfather Joseph joined Abner Doubleday in introducing baseball; and Cousin Cornelius manipulated his vast holdings in stocks and railroads to become one of America's richest early millionaires. But Amy's favorite forebear is Great-Great-Grandmother Vreedenburg, who staved off bands of Tory marauders singlehanded during the Revolutionary War, having plunged the vast sums of gold she had into her copious bosom.

Amy, who started clutching gold to bosom at the age of 16 with a job as society reporter for the Staten Island Advance, has done well by Granny's example. This week she publishes the first major revision of her standard Complete Book of Etiquette (Doubleday; 733 pp.; $5.50), which has sold 1,300,000 copies since its publication in 1952. Her column is published in 100 newspapers in the U.S., Canada and Latin America, has an audience of more than 40 million; and she is the official etiquette consultant for outfits ranging from the World Book Encyclopedia to the U.S. State Department.

Coterie to Custom. Every generation is convinced that manners are not what they once were and still should be; complaints about today's young people--who adamantly stick to their seats on buses and trains while sick old ladies lurch about on their feet--make up a good part of almost any dinner conversation. To Amy Vanderbilt, there is no fighting the inevitable and growing relaxation, nor should there be. Manners, says Amy, are largely a matter of custom: "In generations past, a small coterie of so-called society people set our manners. Most of today's fashion-setting is observation of sociological change, and a lot of it is common sense. Certainly no one would ever have fixed it so we couldn't have any servants. Economics fixed it--so etiquette has to follow."

Follow it Amy did, by including a chapter in her book on the servantless household, even though her own staff numbers six--three secretaries, one housekeeper, one maid, and an odd-jobs man. Thrice divorced and the mother of three sons, Amy Vanderbilt lives and writes in her century-old brownstone on Manhattan's East Side, where she does "quite a lot of entertaining and much of my own cooking."

In her Etiquette, she deals with such current problems as the bikini ("It is for perfect figures only and for the very young"), women's credit cards (men are urged not to argue when the female reaches for the check at a business lunch), and psychiatric patients ("No one undergoing treatment should be embarrassed to mention the fact"). As for those pesky teenagers, Miss Vanderbilt advises: "Parents are wise to overlook seemingly disrespectful outbursts from time to time . . . The parent must get across the idea that 'I love you always but sometimes I do not love your behavior.' "

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