Текст книги "Gunn's Golden Rules"

Автор книги: Tim Gunn

Соавторы: Ada Calhoun
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

I said that would be great, and he did, and we went out and had a wonderful time. We started seeing each other whenever he was in town. About two months in, I started to think, This could be something.I really liked him and he had a lot to recommend him: He was my age. He traveled a lot. And he had almost no stuff.(This was key because I was nowhere near ready to merge households with anyone.) I was, for the first time since my horrible breakup, really and truly happy about being in a relationship.

Well, I made the foolish mistake of sharing my happiness with a colleague whom I trusted.

When I told him about Daniel, he had no reason to wish me anything but congratulations. We weren’t lovers. He had a partner of many years. But he went crazy and called me a fool.

“A flight attendant?” he spluttered. “What a stereotype!”

“Your boyfriend’s a florist!” I said, furious. “You don’t call a fashion designer and a florist being together a stereotype?”

We had a big falling-out over it. But he succeeded in shaking my very fragile faith in this new relationship. At least indirectly, it caused me to say good-bye to Daniel.

This was eighteen years ago. Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to Daniel. He was a really good man, and I’m sure he’s made a good life for himself, unlike my former friend, who now lives in a town called Crossville. I think it’s a good place for him, because he is still constantly cross!

You know people like this, right? People who are incapable of enjoying anything? I’ll never forget the time when someone I know ruined the rehearsal dinner of his dear friend’s daughter by throwing a fit because she hadn’t had him make her bridal gown. He went on and on. By the end of his litany, his friend was sobbing. It was so painful and horrible. He was mad that the wedding wasn’t about him.

Have you noticed how depressed people seem to show up at memorial services? Maybe it’s because they want to show that they’re still here. Or maybe they can get behind an unhappy event because there everyone feels the way they do every day.

Some people walk around under a rain cloud of their own making. In my encounters with Narciso Rodriguez and Isabel Toledo I’ve always found them a bit sulky, but at least they make sulking look glamorous, and they can express joy when need be. “The world is a beautiful place,” gloomy Narciso effuses in a cheerful print advertisement for a cell phone. “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” I shouted at the magazine page. But I am impressed that he was able to crack such a big smile.

So there’s a secret that should be hidden: unbridled pessimism. If you think the world is terrible or that someone shouldn’t be so happy with a flight attendant or in any other situation, keep it to yourself.

Then again, you need to be true to yourself, and for me that means not being coy about my sexuality. One thing that causes me to well up with emotion is when young men come up to me and say that I’ve helped them handle their sexuality; that is, coming to terms with being gay. It reminds me how lonely I was as a child with no gay role models.

Everyone needs a role model to look up to. When I was young and thinking I might not be John Wayne material, all I had for a role model was Paul Lynde from Bewitched.You may remember him as one of the more insane people on Hollywood Squares? Well, he was completely gawky and ridiculous on screen, and then in 1965, his boyfriend fell out a hotel window and died. (They may have had a few drinks.)

So that’s what I felt I had to look forward to as a gay man: playing ridiculed characters and having a tragic personal life. The gay people in the popular imagination back then were all predators or weirdos. Meanwhile, my straight friends had Clark Gable, Tony Curtis, Charlton Heston, and a million other heartthrobs to look up to. (A lot of famous fifties actors were later revealed to be gay; if only I’d known at the time!)

I often say in keynote addresses to college students that I figured out what I wasn’t before I figured out what I was. That struggle to find out who you are is so hard. You have to keep eliminating things that you aren’t and then see what’s left over. Most important, you should never pretend. There’s nothing harder than living life as someone you’re not, even if being what you are is very hard, which is what being gay was for me for a very long time.

One of the few times my father was physically violent with me was the evening we were to meet my grandfather’s new wife. They were coming to our house. That afternoon, I was putting together my sister’s Barbie & Ken Little Theatre (“After the show everything folds neatly away until the next performance!”).

My father saw me playing around with these dolls in what I can only imagine was an effeminate way, and he started smacking me with a wet washcloth. “You’re not going to be seen doing this!” he yelled at me.

It was terrifying, and I had no idea what I’d done to make him so mad or why it would be so awful if these people saw me with Barbie’s theater. In retrospect, I can see he thought I was heading down a less-than-macho path, and he was hoping to beat it out of me. Well, sorry, Dad—didn’t work!

When I told a friend of mine this story recently, she said, “Do you think maybe your father was secretly gay and disturbed by it?”

It has definitely occurred to me. He certainly did protest too much about those Barbies …

“And you don’t think he and J. Edgar Hoover were an item, do you?” she added.

Well, let me tell you, I’ve been there.

I have no proof, and I’m going to say right now, my mother would deny it up and down, and so, probably, would many biographers of Hoover; I’m likely just totally wrong about this. But … The men were incredibly close. They were both arguably repressed. So even if they were sleeping together, you can bet they never would have admitted it, even to themselves. He would have really beaten it back. He certainly wanted to knock it out of me, literally and figuratively!

I don’t believe my father ever had an affair. He was very respectful. He may never even have been tempted. He had strong moral fiber, and I can’t believe he would have betrayed my mother. But I do think it’s very possible that he was a big closet case.

I’ve always thought there was a touch of lavender in that bureau. There certainly were some issues. Of my father’s close circle of work colleagues, every one of the men committed suicide by gunshot after retiring. In two out of four, it was to the head; the other two were to the chest. Talk about an angry, horrible way to die; there’s a big mess to clean up. Dad was the only one who died a natural death. And from what I could tell, all the wives, aside from my mother, were barely functioning alcoholics.

I remember dinner parties at our house where the next morning you’d find people on the lawn. They would all get completely wasted. My father was a great enabler. He didn’t drink wine—I think he thought that was too fey—but he drank everything else: scotch, vodka, beer, whatever. He spent the parties behind our bar, always filling glasses. He never let a glass be empty, even if you protested. This behavior was either extremely generous or completely crazy.

Lately, I’ve been thinking more about men of that era, specifically my father and his colleagues. Last week I was on the plane from Los Angeles to Portland, on a little plane and in first class, which was a nice change of pace. The guy next to me was Ron Howard’s business partner, Brian Grazer. He was with a woman I didn’t recognize, and they were talking movies. Specifically, they were talking about a biopic of Hoover.

It was hard, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew that I held within me some deeply personal stuff, and I didn’t really want to tell these stories to a plane full of people I didn’t know. Still, I did keep thinking: Boy, could I fill in a lot of blanks for them.

My father was an FBI special agent for twenty-six years and then retired and ran the Washington Bureau of Reader’s Digestfor ten years. As you’ll recall, he was J. Edgar Hoover’s ghostwriter. He wrote his books and speeches and traveled with Hoover.

J. Edgar Hoover: Now there was an interesting figure, to say the least. He was the director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972. I did go to Hoover’s house occasionally. He had the only Astroturf lawn I knew of in all of Washington—I believe so he wouldn’t have to have a gardener. He was very afraid of being spied on.

As most people now know, there have long been rumors that Hoover was a cross-dresser and gay, and that he was possibly having an affair with his deputy, Clyde Tolson. Hoover did surround himself with a lot of very handsome men, but I wonder whether or not he was capable of having gay affairs without anyone knowing.

The rumors came out full force after my father was sick with Alzheimer’s disease, and thank God, because my father was a very macho guy and would have been outraged. He supported Hoover unconditionally. He would have said it was a left-wing conspiracy.

But one thing happened that made me wonder if maybe he did know something about Hoover’s supposed love of dresses and wigs. My sister and I used to take the FBI tour once a year. It was a big deal in D.C., and we never missed it. One year, 1961, when I was eight, I was on the tour and my father asked me if I’d like to meet Vivian Vance. According to Helen Gandy, Hoover’s secretary, Vance was visiting Hoover, and she said she’d be happy to meet us.

I was a rabid I Love Lucyfan and was beside myself with excitement.

“Ethel Mertz is here?” I screamed. My father smiled and took my sister and me into Hoover’s office, where I shook Vivian Vance’s hand and chatted with her. I was thrilled.

Years later, I was reminiscing with my sister about the meeting, and suddenly I realized something. “Does it seem odd to you,” I asked her, “that when we met Vivian Vance in Hoover’s office, Hoover wasn’t there?”

I’ve since looked at photos of both Hoover and Vivian Vance from that period of time, and the similarities are rather eerie …

I’ve called some Vivian Vance experts, including Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, who wrote Meet the Mertzes: The Life Stories of I Love Lucy’s Other Couple;none of them knew of any meeting between Vance and Hoover.

I’m not saying at the age of eight I definitely met J. Edgar Hoover at his office in the FBI wearing a dress and makeup, only that I strongly suspectit. My mother says I’m crazy, but she wasn’t there.

ANYWAY, THIS WOMAN ON the plane kept talking about Helen Gandy, Hoover’s personal secretary, and how important she was to him. And yet, she never once mentioned Clyde Tolson, the associate director of the FBI with whom Hoover had lunch and dinner every day and traveled constantly. Tolson inherited Hoover’s estate, and they’re buried side by side.

She leaned over to me at one point and said, “I’ll trade you my New York Timesfor your Vanity Fair.I thought she meant for the flight, but no, she meant for keeps. I saw her read an article about the military contractor and Blackwater founder Erik Prince and then put it into the flap in the back of the seat. I thought: Give it back to me!

Anyway, a few minutes later she started saying, “Let’s do a biopic of Erik Prince!” She said it as if she was free associating.

And I thought: Wow, you are shameless! I just read that same article. I could contribute more to this one than to the Hoover one!

But: Take the high road, right? I bought another Vanity Fairat the terminal. It’s not worth five dollars to get into a scrap.

Let that be a lesson, though. Who knows what kind of amazing stories she could have gotten out of me if, instead of swiping my magazine, she’d just offered me her paper and started up a friendly conversation?

Not that I love chatting on airplanes, or ever. I do like to keep to myself, a fact that drives my family insane. My mother in particular is incredibly outgoing. She doesn’t believe anyone else should have secrets from her, ever. She’s the kind of person who runs her gloved finger along the top of a picture frame to see if there’s dust on it. I think that’s ridiculous. Who cares if there’s dust up there? If the house is a mess, let’s talk about the dust that’s down here on the table.

When my sister was living in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, my mother and I were visiting once, and as usual Mother was snooping. She went up into the attic, which was a bedroom, poked around, and came down to the first floor to tell me to go up there.

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

“To see how horrible it is,” she said.

“I don’t want to!” I said. “I wasn’t invited.”

“I want you to see it!” she insisted.

“I don’t want to see it!” I insisted back.

This is the kind of thing we fight about: whether or not to go into my sister’s attic to look at dust. I am all for people getting to keep private rooms private. Not so my mother. In fact, her snooping is such that she thought nothing of breaching national security.

After the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Warren Commission put together its famous report of what happened. Well, my father had an early, top-secret copy. He brought it home with him from work one night and, knowing my mother was eager to peek at it, hid it well—or so he thought.

My mother found it and locked herself in the bathroom so she could read it in peace. My father banged away at the door, but she wouldn’t open it. Finally, my father took the door down with an axe. You’d think that would be enough to convince my mother to let secrets stay secret, but no, she’s still just as snoopy as ever.

When it comes to what to conceal or what to reveal, I err on the side of privacy but also honesty, as you may have guessed by now.

I think it’s best never to lie, because when you tell lies, you have to remember them. It makes life really complicated. I always tell the truth. It gets me in trouble sometimes, but at least I don’t have to keep track of a whole bunch of crazy stories—at least not crazy ones that are made up!

When in Rome …

I Still Wouldn’t Eat Monkey Brains

MY FAMILY IS ORIGINALLY Norwegian. We were thrown out of Norway in the ninth century and wound up in Scotland. Our coat of arms says, “Make peace, not war.” It may as well have said, “No live food, please,” for we are a timid people when it comes to eating, and my extensive business travels through Asia have definitely challenged my constitution, and my sense that what constitutes good manners must be universal.

For example, one doesn’t firmly shake hands in Malaysia. Traditionally, you put both your hands out and then touch your heart. And invites aren’t always real. I was asked to someone’s home in Malaysia and said, “Yes!” Well, the person asking me was deadpan. He walked away without saying anything else. The people I was with said, “You have to say ‘no’ the first two times you’re asked, and then you say ‘yes’ the third time.” I wasn’t actually invited to dinner! It was just the first ask.

It’s important to do research if you’re going to another country, especially if you’re doing business there. You have a responsibility to know the ways of the culture. What if someone from Malaysia comes here? Should they shake our hands? I think generally it’s good to practice house rules, to make an effort to adopt local customs. But it’s also good to be flexible when it comes to our expectations of people from abroad.

When it comes to food, I never want to be an ugly American, but I also don’t want to end up in a hospital, if only for psychological reasons. I’ve had some very disquieting food experiences, and they have seriously tested my ability to be a gracious guest. Let me tell you a little about how I wound up in Korea and Japan, and then I’ll tell you about things crawling off my plate.

Parsons developed academic options abroad called Two Plus Two Affiliate Programs, whereby students would spend two years at a Parsons affiliate abroad followed by two years at Parsons in New York. I was flying somewhere in Asia once a month for eight years, and for example, I was not permitted to visit Seoul, South Korea, and Kanazawa, Japan, on the same trip, because culturally it would be insulting to each party to reveal that you were traveling for any business other than theirs. You’d like to think you could just pretend you’d arrived fresh from New York City, but they would find out. I learned a great deal about homage and ego in these cultures.

And the food did occasionally scare me. At one dinner in Korea at a Japanese restaurant called the Great Wall, a plate came out with something on it that looked like a big Tootsie Roll. I was looking at it and waiting for everyone to be served before beginning. And as I was contemplating it, it started to squirm its way off the plate. It was a live sea slug.

I waited for it to squirm completely off the plate and reach the table. Then I put my plate on top of it and casually leaned on it. If I was even going to think about eating it, I had to kill it first. But then I realized I could leave it under there, and it would look like I’d cleaned my plate. The person who came to clear noticed the flattened slug under my plate, but he politely picked it up and carried it off.

My general rule of thumb is that if it’s alive, it shouldn’t be any bigger than an oyster. And it should not have eyes. And it shouldn’t be able to walk off your plate under its own steam.

When I was in Kanazawa, I took a stroll in the seafood market and couldn’t believe how expensive everything was. I saw a $5,000 crab! The dean of Parsons and I were taken to a seafood meal by a group of businessmen who were part of the Chamber of Commerce. There was a man-made stream running through the restaurant and an aquarium by the entrance full of tiny goldfish. While we were waiting, people on line were reaching into the aquarium and popping these little fish in their mouths—like Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, only alive.

At the table, a whole fish was presented to us ceremoniously. The waiter took what looked like an eye-drop bottle that we’re told was filled with sake. He dropped a little into the fish’s mouth, and the fish, which was flayed, mind you, started to writhe. I was horrified, but I did have one happy thought. I leaned over to my colleague and said, “Remember when you were asked yesterday if you’d rather go to the seafood restaurant or the beef restaurant? Thank you for saying the seafood one. Can you imagine what they’d do to a cow?”

The bill was $7,000 for six of us. Evidently in the Japanese culture people live modestly except when it comes to going out. Torturing fish with sake drops isn’t cheap.

But it brings up an important question: How polite does one have to be? After bearing witness to its torment, I couldn’t eat the fish. Fortunately, in the Asian culture there are usually several courses, so you can bow out of the ones that scare you and say, “Thank you, but I think I will save myself for the next atrocity.”

For the record, I know people eat insects in certain cultures, and I am much more okay with that than with the writhing live animals. I’ll go with a bug over a mammal any day. At least they don’t look you in the eye.

Also, for the record, I’m not against eating animals. I wear leather and I eat meat, but I draw the line at inhumane fur. I’ve worked with PETA to help educate the public about it. I say, know where your food comes from, and take responsibility for it. I’m no zealot; I just think we should be as humane as possible, and when it comes to fur, there are alternatives.

I got involved with PETA because Parsons was inviting the International Fur Trade Federation to speak, and I thought the students needed to hear the other side. I don’t think fur is always bad. I visited a Saga Furs of Scandinavia fur farm in Denmark, where they raise fox and mink in an ethical way. I always say, if you absolutely must have a fur, make sure Saga is the fur source. They have bred the animals’ natural instincts out of them over time so their foxes and minks are basically domesticated and have a very happy life before they become stoles.

I really do understand vegetarianism, even though I’m a failure at it.

In college I was so traumatized by the slaughterhouse scene in James Agee’s short story “A Mother’s Tale” that I became an instant vegetarian. I swore off meat. It repulsed me.

Then, several months later, I was feeling weak, and a voice from within said, “I need meat! I need it immediately!”

I went to the local grocery store, ran to the packaged meat section, grabbed a package of bologna, and ate the whole thing standing there in the aisle. Then I paid for the empty container. I proudly help PETA with their antifur campaign, but they know they’re not going to make a vegan out of me. And yet they still named me their 2009 Man of the Year (Ellen DeGeneres was their Woman of the Year) because of my crusade against abuse in the fur trade.

Vegetarianism can make for social awkwardness at times, especially if you’re at an event where only hunks of meat are served. You may think this is rare, but vegetarian friends tell me that it does happen. In those situations it really is a question of just eating enough not to insult the host.

One person I know was at a fancy luncheon at which they were serving venison and nothing else. There was no way to get around it, so he ate it. I am very impressed that his manners trumped his feelings. I don’t even know if I could have gone there, because I have a psychological aversion to the meat of animals I find especially adorable, like deer—the same goes for rabbit, lamb, and veal. My gag reflex kicks in. But I am very much a believer in not insulting a host, so perhaps I would have been able to choke down Bambi had it come to that.

Parsons used to have a lovely graduation at Riverside Church with a lunch afterward, to which we invited our honorary degree recipients. One year two of our guests were Sister Parish and Albert Hadley of Parish-Hadley, the legendary interior design firm. I was sitting at Mrs. Parish’s table, and she was an incredible character. I said, “You must receive lots of awards and accolades,” and she said, “No, this is the first since I was given a perfect-attendance medal as a young girl. It came with a pig.”

Well, this award did not come with a pig. It came with a very odd lunch of sea scallops that I was pretty sure were raw. Sister Parish corroborated this when someone asked her, “How’s lunch?”

“Terribly chic,” she replied, “but inedible.”

As much as I believe it’s good manners to eat what’s put in front of you as long as it won’t send you into anaphylactic shock, I also believe that, when a host, you really need to think about what will suit your guests. I think it’s bizarre when you assume no one is a vegetarian or has an allergy. It doesn’t hurt to have a salad on the side so your vegan guests can fill up on that rather than having to struggle through the coq au vin.

This does seem to be a modern dilemma. I don’t want to challenge the allergies, but they do seem to be proliferating at a frightening rate.

You see parents sometimes hovering over perfectly healthy and allergy-free children, saying, “Oh no, she can’t! He can’t!”

I think in those extreme situations children get to the point where they are afraid to disappoint their paranoid parents, and so they profess an aversion to pretty much everything but chicken nuggets, hold the sauce.

When I grew up, I don’t remember anyone having allergies to food. I went all though elementary school and never knew anyone with any allergies at all. Certainly some allergies are deadly and all too serious, but if there’s a way to make yourself a more flexible eater, I think you should.

I think it is good, though, that nonsmokers are protected these days from the clouds of smoke that used to hover in every public space just a couple of decades ago. Can you believe there used to be a smoking section on airplanes? You could smoke in theaters. It hasn’t been that long. I remember watching TV award shows and when they did a wide shot you’d see the lasers cutting through dense smoke that filled the auditorium.

I never took up smoking. When I was nine or ten, my father was diagnosed with pleurisy. It scared the daylights out of him, and he quit cold turkey. For years my mother would have one cigarette a day, in the evening. My grandmother smoked until the last day of her life. I still remember going to the doctor with her when she was in her eighties. Her doctor said she had to stop smoking.

“But it’s one of the few things she still enjoys,” I said. “Let her smoke!”

That’s not to say I’m pro smoking. When I was at Parsons, I was sad that with each successive year, more students would smoke. Maybe it’s declining now, but in that place at that time, it was definitely on the rise.

Not only did I not smoke, I didn’t have a drink until I was thirty and moved to New York. Any association with alcohol was a turnoff because there was so much of it around my family.

Now, my mother denies this up and down, in spite of hard evidence. My grandmother had a huge box of correspondence. After her death, my mother and sister and I read these letters out loud, and I said, “Isn’t it funny how often she talks about people drinking? Everyone was always drunk and falling off horses and wandering off into the woods.” My mother insists they weren’t drunks; they just knew how to have a good time.

Yes,I thought, by getting loaded.

Anyway, because of that association with booze, I would go out to people’s houses and just have tonic water. Now, since moving to New York, I love having a drink now and then.

So maybe I’ll grow to love sea slugs, too? I kind of doubt it.