December features the birthdays of two mostly forgotten gentlemen who elevated America’s Perfect Propriety: Walter Hoving, who revitalized Tiffany & Co. from 1955-1980, and Lucius Beebe, a fiercely intelligent gourmet, rail travel enthusiast, and proponent of café society. Both had their criteria for what was the Best, and they successfuly brought other Americans their vision. The last century might have looked a bit different were it not for them.
Walter Hoving (born December 2, 1897) might be considered the polar opposite of Chicago’s Marshall Field, who famously told his clerks “Give the lady what she wants.” Mr. Hoving countered with “Give the customer what Tiffany likes, because what it likes, the public ought to like.” As the New York Times observed in Hoving’s obituary, “His firmness in matters of taste took Tiffany’s from $7 million worth of business in 1955 to $100 million for the Fifth Avenue store and its five branches in 1980.” The man was on to something, focusing on good design and the best materials — and on marketing them as Perfectly Proper and Perfectly Desirable.
Hoving became merchant tastemaker par excellence by educating himself on what was Best. He was a great believer in education, not always with someone else’s curriculum. He emphasized to his sales staff and executives that they needed to be more knowledgeable about their merchandise and its design history than their customers. Clare Boothe Luce said of him that he “had an ‘eye,’ something present in every person of taste I have known.”* Hoving’s eye led him to good design and genuine materials. Under him Tiffany sold no silver plate and no Lucite. And the idea that no gentleman would wear a diamond ring came almost direct from Hoving, who would not even consider allowing Tiffany to sell them.
Part of being a tastemaker, like being a good hostess, is taking infinite pains (or having a staff to take infinite pains for you.) But Etiquetteer loves Walter Hoving most because, according to his obituary, he forbade “charge accounts for customers found being rude to the salespeople.” That is taking a stand not only for your staff, but also for Perfect Propriety. That said, he was not always easy to work for.
One of Hoving’s greatest blows for Perfect Propriety was the slender volume Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teen-Agers, a revolutionary book for a pre-revolutionary (1961) time. “At Tiffany’s, our interest in attractive tables set with good china, glass, and silverware makes us equally aware of the importance of good table manners,” he wrote in its Foreword. “It is dangerous to have one system, or no system, for home consumption and another for dining out . . .” arguing that consistent table manners would reduce anxiety. “There are other systems, and we don’t quarrel with them, but we think this system is attractive, graceful, and above all natural.” Consider this no-nonsense and non-judgmental book as a holiday gift for your favorite teen.
Lucius Beebe (born December 9, 1902) first came to Etiquetteer’s attention thanks to the celebrated Brennan’s of New Orleans. Breakfast at Brennan’s was Beebe’s idea for a cookbook to rival the runaway success of Dinner at Antoine’s, published in 1948 by Antoine’s, the restaurant most often associated with New Orleans. According to Breakfast at Brennan’s: The Egg Edition, Beebe and restaurateur Owen Brennan, Sr. “drafted a menu on the spot and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Beebe loved food and wrote extensively and exquisitely about the pleasures of the table, from fancy to plain. “Gustatory Souvenirs,” a column in his book Snoot If You Must**, celebrates not just “the jugged saddle of hare at Luchow’s,” but also the devilled grilled beef bones of Boston’s Durgin-Park, Hamburger Heaven on Madison Avenue "(“Only the original will do”), and “On Saturday nights in New England, the kidney beans baked by Friend’s Bakery in Malden, Massachusetts . . . something divorced from all the other baked beans in the world.” Because excellence is where you find it, and that doesn’t have to be the Ritz, or ritzy.
Beebe’s longtime companion, Charles Clegg, described him best as “a highly civilized nineteenth-century gentleman at odds with the mass uniformity and mediocrity he saw around him.” Beebe’s cri de coeur is really Etiquetteer’s, too: “If anything is worth doing it is worth doing in style, and on your own terms, and nobody’s Goddamned else’s!” As a journalist, Beebe embodied this creed with his professional wardrobe. “. . . he refused to adopt the average newspaperman’s tweed coat and slouch hat with press card stuck in the hatband. What he did wear on duty popped his employer’s eyes, and in self-defense he wrote ‘I wear formal clothes, morning or evening whenvever they are called for and regard them quite literally as the livery of my profession. I would no more think of appearing in a restaurant out of dinner dress than I would in swimming trunks.’ Then he thoughtfully added, ‘And anyway you get better tables and better service.’”
What qualities do Hoving and Beebe share? Impeccable tailoring, discernment, commitment to hard work, imperiousness (not to say autocracy), supreme self-confidence, and an absolute insistence on the Best, wherever it might be found — including from themselves. Beebe once listed some people he thought of, like himself, as Renaissance Men and Women because “they all did something well and never in their lives thought to consult anyone else as how to conduct their persons***. They all possessed that one radiant qualification: the knowledge of excellence.” This applies equally to Beebe and Hoving. They set an example in their day we might well do to follow. What could be more Perfectly Proper?
*Quoted in A Lady, First, by Letitia Baldrige, page 129.
**What a way with words! Who but Etiquetteer would know that this is a play on the poem “Barbara Frietchie” by Whittier: “‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head//But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.”
***The inclusion of Tallulah Bankhead on this list raised Etiquetteer’s eyebrows, but no one can deny she did recognize excellence.