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reprinted from The Times of London (April, 1997) Crusader to the manner bornEtiquette is all to the formidable Gloria Petersen. Americans are flocking to her seminars, which are designed to stem the rising tide of boorishness, says Quentin Letts. Business is good right now for Gloria Petersen and it is all down, she says, to the "McManners" generation of modern America. Ms Petersen, a tidily powdered, spangle-eyed Chicago dame in her middle years, teaches etiquette to the American Midwest. Her charm school seminars, which are attended by all ranks of people from bank chairmen to junior office orderlies, teach people the most basic facts of dainty life. She puts them right on how to shake hands, how not to hold a knife like a pen, the intricacies of "kerbside etiquette", "elevator etiquette", and even how to behave at that modern business phenomenon, the "power tea". "The Nineties are going to go down as the decade of diplomacy," reveals Ms P in a central Chicago restaurant, blotting her lips with a napkin in the approved fashion before drinking from her lunchtime beaker of water. It is daunting to dine with a doyenne of the etiquette world. One frets, fidgets. Is there spinach in one's teeth? Has one put one's knife and fork at "20 past the hour" on finishing the main course? What about that partially picked chicken bone? As if reading my thoughts, Ms Petersen summons the air through her neat nostrils and says: "We do NOT involve the fingers." This is one of her sayings, along with "do not talk with your cutlery" and "don't make puppy sounds", which she conveyed to me just after I had taken a glug of drink. Also: "Don't kill and saw the meat—it is already dead," That one is an important reminder for a region famed for its calf-sized steaks. "We have taken rudeness as far as it will go," she continues, little pinkie tucked neatly into the glass. With her two children having grown up, and her husband, sadly, now off the ranch, she tours the more prosperous districts off the American heartlands in search of souls troubled by their lack of social grace. Hundreds of thousands have heard her speak. "An entire generation is now out there which does not know how to behave. They want to know. That's what I can teach them. It pays pretty well. The rates vary on size of class, but she likes to clear $2,000 (about £1,250) for a group session. She has an associate, Maryann Downes-Bagley, who teaches manners to children. They start as young as eight years old and parents pay as much as $165 (£100) a day for Junior to be taught how not to eat like a monkey. The market is booming. Ms Petersen declares—and it would be impolite to doubt her—that instruction in the art of etiquette is more dearly needed now in the United States than ever before. She traces the breakdown of polite society back to the inauguration of John Kennedy as president in 1961, when the youthful Democrat wore no hat. Gradually, dress codes faded and, and with the permissive society and the anti-Vietnam War protests and the rise of "latchkey kids" and the retreat of traditional household meal times, the family dynamic disappeared. Nowadays, you have the kids of parents who themselves were not brought up proper, so it should hardly be a surprise that they wear their baseball caps back to front and know how to utter the magic word "please". Ms Petersen started her charm school in 1985 after working for 16 years in the corporate world. She realised that when it came to corporate entertaining, younger executives were increasingly nervous about the prospect of having dinner with their boss. Would their table manners meet approval? How about the spouse's? Away from the table, people whose childhood evenings had been spent gawping at primetime television realised that their small talk was inadequate. How should they keep a conversation going? There were plenty of areas of doubt: the thank-you letter, how to remember names, make introductions. Here was Gloria Petersen's vocation. For some, there is no higher calling than to convert pygmies to the Anglican faith. Others strive to save the whale, or to play cricket for England. For Chicago's Gloria Petersen, true satisfaction was to be gained in coaching Midwesterners out of their boorish tendencies, to train them not to peer pointedly at their watches during dinner of sneeze theatrically in polite circles, not to pick their teeth or chew their nails or give basso profundo burrrps when meeting dignitaries. She has a list of the most commonly asked questions she receives. "What conversation topics should be avoided?" is a common one. Ms Petersen's answer is tailored to suit America: "Sex, religion, politics, and money." In the US, as she explains, people often blurt out gaffes such as "how much do ya earn?" and "gee, nice watch—bet that cost ya a bit!" She shudders. Other questions on the list include: "How do you let someone know they have poor hygiene? How do you tell a man he has food on his moustache? How can I keep my name from being mispronounced?" In a city with so many Poles, that last question is a real poser. Ms Petersen's ingenious solution is to say: "Ah, Mr Zbghnwickcz! Kindly teach me how to pronounce your name." At the Petersen class I attended, there were 12 adults, mostly well-to-do female executives from the telephone company AT&T and a leading Chicago bank. Sandra, a smiling fortysomething, had old-fashioned standards and wanted to improve herself. Heidi, rather younger, was the "victim of a merger and in transition" (a polite way of saying that she was out of work). She wanted to burnish her etiquette to help her chances of landing a good job. Joyce was heading back to her home state of Ohio to start her own business and wanted to brush up on her social skills. She would probably be doing some entertaining and wanted to know the proper form. Ms Petersen showed them a typical place setting at a restaurant and probed them on which knives to use when, on where the side plate belongs, and how to spoon soup away from oneself. On that classic dilemma of how to peel a banana at a state banquet, the Petersen doctrine is that one should "avoid ordering what is not attractively eaten". She reminds her classes that the hamburger, while a high point of American cooking, is a tricky piece of kit when one is entertaining certain South American folk, for whom eating by hand is a no-no. Modern American etiquette also involves deft teaching in electronic conversation via telephone, computer or fax (quite rightly she forbids the speaker phone), plus the stolid dogmas of political correctness. For instance, Ms Petersen recommends to clients that they learn to refer to the "waitron" (a revolting term which is slowly replacing "waiter" and "waitress"). They are also urged to learn to refer to "briefings" rather than "meetings", and to talk of overseas acquaintances as "non-American-born² rather than "foreign". "Good God," I blurt out, "What on earth is wrong with foreign?" Ms Petersen explains: "The dictionary definition of 'foreign' is that it is something that does not belong." On the first-names-versus-surnames controversy, she is a traditionalist. "We jump to first names too quickly in this country," she says, "You will absolutely never offend anyone with formality." I was "Mr Letts" throughout, and felt a rare sense of inner calm that night. The brash may say that it is all a waste of time, and that in a world which becomes ever more commerce-led, we will all end up as mannerless oiks. Maybe. But with people like Gloria Petersen at the front line, the battle is not yet lost. Pupils of her excellent charm school are given a "workbook" which is decorated with helpful quotations. William Thourlby said it all: "In this world there are two kinds of class—first class and no class. You must develop the first or you will have to live with the second."
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