The Guest Who Is Always Asked Back

Truman Capote’s invitation was a short, bossy document. It went out in the autumn of 1966 and asked for black and white, nothing in between, and a mask on every face. Some of the guests commissioned theirs from the best milliners in New York, a young man called Halston among them, and on the evening of 28 November the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel filled with 540 publishers, poets, politicians, film stars and heirs, all dressed in two colours and a disguise. Supper, at midnight, was chicken hash and spaghetti, with pastries and coffee.

Think about that menu for a moment. The party that is still called the party of the century fed its guests something you might cook on a Tuesday. What made it famous was the effect. Capote said he wanted the evening to hold together the way a painting does, and the photographs show that it did: a ballroom of people who were used to being the exception, arriving in precisely the colours they had been asked to wear. (Several New Yorkers who were not invited let it be known that they had been called away that night to London or Monte Carlo, which is its own small lesson in manners. Even an absence can be handled with grace.)

That is the part of high society that never makes it into the pictures. It ran on a great many people doing exactly what the invitation asked, and doing it gladly. Every invitation is a loan. A host lends you a boat, a bedroom, an evening, a table in a restaurant where she is known, and a share of her good name with the other guests. The loan has terms, and almost nobody prints them. A guest who has understood this is asked back for decades. One who hasn’t may never find out what went wrong, because hosts are far too polite to say.

What follows is an attempt to print the terms: seven gestures in three settings, the kind that turn up in every serious account of the subject, from the etiquette books to the crews who work the Mediterranean charter trade. Not one of them costs money. Several are things a person either already does or has simply never been told.

How the Modern Guest Was Invented

Hospitality is as old as doors, but the guest we are describing belongs to one particular generation, and the dates are easy to place. In the autumn of 1958 jet airliners began crossing the Atlantic on a timetable. A house party that had once drawn its guests from within a day’s train journey could now draw them from three continents over a long weekend, and did. The newspapers had a name for the people doing the flying: the jet set. The name stuck because it caught something new about them. They were forever arriving, somewhere, as somebody’s guest.

The other half of the old arrangement was vanishing at the same time. The Edwardian weekend in the country had assumed a household of servants. Someone met you at the station, someone unpacked your bag and drew your bath, and before you left you were expected to put something into the hands of each person who had looked after you. By the 1960s most hosts, and a good many rich ones, were managing with a cook who came in and little else. What a servant had once done for the guest, the guest now had to do for himself, and the old books, which were mostly about precedence at table and the correct handling of staff, had very little to say about that.

Letitia Baldrige noticed. She had learned her trade in the American embassies in Paris and Rome, and in 1961 Jacqueline Kennedy brought her to the White House as social secretary and, in effect, chief of staff, which is a polite way of saying that she was the person responsible for making the Kennedy years look easy. She was good at the invisible parts. She recalled afterwards that when the president forgot he was due to give a toast at a dinner, she wrote him a note on the back of her place card. He got to his feet, smiled, and told the room that the social secretary had informed him a toast was required.

After she left in 1963 she spent the rest of her career writing the rules down. She brought Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette up to date in 1978 and published guides of her own through the 1980s and 1990s, among them the Complete Guide to the New Manners for the ’90s. Her argument hardly changed. The heart of etiquette, she kept saying, was consideration for other people rather than a rigid set of rules, and in 1992 she remarked that she cared far less whether a chief executive could hold a knife and fork properly than whether he was kind.

I want to borrow that reading, because it turns a list of arbitrary customs into something with a logic. Every gesture below is a way of lifting a cost off the host: the cost to the deck, to the crew’s morning, to the quiet of the house, to the evening’s bill, to her peace of mind about what you will make of it all. Once you see that, you can work out the right thing to do in a situation no book has covered.

Seven gestures, then, starting with the setting that forgives nothing.

I. On the Water

A yacht is the least forgiving of the three settings, because everything on it is small, varnished and meant to last for decades. It is also the quickest teacher. The rules are physical, and nobody has to be told why.

1. The Soft Bag

Bring luggage that folds. A hard-shell suitcase on wheels has nearly everything against it on a boat: corners that mark paintwork and varnish, a fixed shape that fits no locker, and a rumble across the deck that announces you before you have said a word. Cabins are designed around people who unpack and bags that then disappear. A duffel or a holdall, once emptied, rolls up into the bottom of a wardrobe and is forgotten, which is the right status for luggage.

It disciplines the packing, too. A week on the water wants a few linen shirts, something for the evening ashore, one pair of proper shoes, and very little else. Whatever does not fit in the bag does not come.

Gesture 1: Bring luggage that folds, and pack only what fits in it.

2. Shoes at the Gangway

Teak is soft, expensive and the reason a good yacht looks the way it does. Dark rubber soles leave marks that no amount of scrubbing removes, and a heel dents the wood for good. So nearly every yacht keeps some version of the same custom: at the foot of the gangway, or just inside the saloon door, a basket or a rack waits, and your shoes go into it. Some boats allow clean, soft-soled deck shoes with non-marking soles, kept for the boat and never worn up from the quay. If you would rather not go barefoot, ask the captain beforehand.

The skill lies in noticing the basket before anyone has to point at it. The same alertness covers the rest of the sea’s etiquette. You rinse off the salt and the suncream on the bathing platform before you come into the saloon. Wet swimwear stays outside. You use the towels you were given for the deck, and nothing that was meant for the beds.

It is a small humility, and I suspect it is why the custom has lasted. Everyone who steps aboard, from the owner’s oldest friend to a stranger on a day charter, begins by taking off their shoes and putting them in the same basket.

Gesture 2: Shoes off at the gangway, salt rinsed at the stern, nothing wet in the saloon.

3. The Crew Are Professionals

Whoever runs a yacht is running a small, moving hotel with an engine room. The crew are seamen, engineers, cooks and stewards, often working at a standard you would pay a great deal for ashore, and a good guest behaves as though he knows it. He learns their names in the first hour and uses them. He treats the captain as the final authority on anything to do with the sea or with safety, because under maritime law the captain is responsible for everyone on board, and he listens to the safety briefing as if it mattered. He stays out of the galley and the crew quarters unless he is asked in. And he leaves the crew room to work. Cabins have to be cleaned and beds made, so a guest who is off swimming or ashore after breakfast is giving them the one thing they most need, which is an empty cabin.

None of this is wasted. A former crew member once told Boat International that a polite, happy guest made him work a little harder to get everything right, and I believe it.

Then comes the end of the trip. On a charter, a gratuity for the crew is customary, usually ten to fifteen per cent of the charter fee, though brokers quote anything from five to twenty depending on the waters. It goes to the captain, in a sealed envelope or by transfer, and he shares it out among the crew. If you are the guest of an owner rather than a charterer, the arrangement is the owner’s business and the etiquette is less settled, so ask your host quietly beforehand whether something is expected and how it should be handled. Either way, write a note to go with it. The envelope pays for the service. The note is the courtesy.

Gesture 3: Learn the crew’s names, keep to your side of the galley door, and thank them at the end in a way they will actually feel.

II. Under Someone’s Roof

A house is harder than a boat, because its rules are not physical. Nobody will tell you that the kitchen belongs to the family at seven in the morning, that the one bathroom has to stretch to four people, or that your host would like very much to be alone for an hour. You are expected to know. This is the setting in which the disappearance of the servants matters most, since the work they used to do is now yours.

4. The Letter

The bread-and-butter letter is an American name for an old habit. It turns up in print in the 1890s, and in 1894 a writer in the Ladies’ Home Journal was already telling young women to send one within a day of arriving at their destination. Modern authorities are more lenient. Debrett’s allows two or three days before the thing begins to look like an afterthought.

The timing is only half of it. A text sent from the airport, while your host is stripping the bed you slept in, tells her that you got home. A letter, which arrives some days later and which she opens alone at a time of her choosing, tells her that you are still thinking about her house. That is a much better thing to be told. Paper also stays. It goes on the hall table or into a drawer, and it is found again years afterwards.

What goes in it? Not the thing she already knows, that you had a lovely time. Anyone can write that sentence in a minute, and it would fit every house in the county. Mention something only you could have noticed: the walk to the chapel before breakfast, the plum cake, the book she left on your bedside table that you finished on the plane. Then, in the last line, do what separates the grateful guest from the merely polite one, and ask them back.

Dear Anna, I am still thinking about the walk to the chapel before breakfast, and about your mother’s plum cake, which I tried at home and which turned out to be a lesson in humility. Thank you for having us. You must come to us in the spring.

That last sentence turns a visit into a friendship, and it goes a long way towards explaining why the best houses are always full.

Gesture 4: Write within two days, on paper, about something specific, and finish by asking them back.

5. Being Easy to Have Around

A good houseguest takes up less room than he has been lent. He keeps the bathroom as he found it: towels hung, wash bag zipped, nothing of his left standing on the shared basin. He asks, on the last morning, whether he should strip the bed, and accepts whatever answer he is given. He arrives when he said he would and leaves when he said he would. Benjamin Franklin’s almanac famously compared guests to fish, which begin to smell after three days. Most hosts will stretch to a week, but none of them should have to find the words to announce an ending.

On the first evening, ask the one practical question that saves everybody trouble: what time does the house get up, and what should I do about breakfast? Then fit in. Eat when the house eats. Do not expect to be entertained for every hour of the day; bring a book, and read it. And when you see that your hosts are tired, or are exchanging the glances of people who have not been alone since Friday, go for a walk. A host should never have to invent a polite way of asking for her own house back. The guest who removes himself for an hour, before anyone has asked, has given the best present of the whole weekend.

Gesture 5: Take up less room than you were lent: a tidy bathroom, the house’s own rhythm, and a walk when your hosts need the place to themselves.

6. The Gift That Makes No Work

A gift should arrive without creating a job. A loose bunch of flowers pressed into a host’s hands as eight other guests come through the door sends her off to find a vase, scissors and a surface, in the one part of the evening when she most needs to be at the door. A bottle of wine may be perfectly good, but she may have planned the meal around something else, and the kind thing, as you hand it over, is to make clear that it is for later.

The better gifts have one quality in common: they can be put on a shelf and enjoyed after you have gone. A book chosen for her and inscribed on the flyleaf. A jar or a bottle from the place you live. A good bar of soap. A record you think they would like. The test is whether you were listening. If she once mentioned a writer she loved or a recipe she had lost, the right present is hiding in that remark.

If you do want to send flowers, send them afterwards, arranged and delivered the day after you leave, when the house is quiet and a vase is easy to find. Let them arrive with the letter. None of this requires a large budget, which is rather the point. The measure of a gift is how little it asks of the person receiving it.

Gesture 6: Bring something that can be enjoyed after you have gone and needs nothing from your host: no vase, no fridge, no decision.

III. At the Table

The restaurant is where the arithmetic is out in the open, and where a guest’s manners show most plainly, because there is a waiter to watch them.

7. Who Asks, Pays

Debrett’s states the principle with its usual economy: the person who requests the pleasure pays for it. If you were invited, you were not asked to share the cost of the evening. You were asked to be its other half. A guest’s task is to receive that well, which turns out to be harder than paying.

It begins with the bill, or rather with the absence of any struggle over it. One mild offer, if the occasion seems to call for it, is acceptable. If your host brushes it aside, thank her, mean it, and say that next time is yours. Then stop. A tussle over the cheque is a small piece of theatre performed for the staff, and it turns your host’s gift into a negotiation.

It continues with the order. Let your host go first, or ask what she recommends; the answer tells you what she is comfortable with, and you can stay roughly within it. The old advice to choose from the middle of the menu is sound, and Debrett’s agrees that it is safer, and kinder, to avoid the most extravagant dish unless your host suggests it. If she says that the lobster is superb, she is telling you something, and you may follow. Leave the host’s jobs to the host: the wine, the bread, the second bottle, the summoning of the waiter, the moment for coffee. And do not criticise the food or the table. In a family-run place where your host is known, her standing with the house is part of what is on the table. The maître d’ is watching her for cues, and a guest who asks to be moved, or sends a dish back, is spending capital that belongs to somebody else. If something is truly wrong, the complaint is hers to make, or to decide not to make.

Finally, return the invitation, in your own way and at your own scale. Nobody wants to be repaid for dinner. They want the pleasure to come back to them, and a good host can tell the difference between a guest who accepted an invitation and one who joined a friendship.

Gesture 7: Let whoever invited you pay, order within their range, leave the running of the table to them, and return the invitation.

What It All Costs

Go back over the seven and notice what they cost. A bag that folds is no dearer than one that doesn’t. The basket at the gangway is free, and so is a captain’s name remembered. A stamp, a sheet of paper, ten minutes at a desk. A walk. A second-hand book with a line written inside the cover. None of it needs money, and all of it is invisible to anyone who is not paying attention, which is rather the point. The grand versions of these settings, the yacht and the villa, belong to very few of us. The principle works at every scale, and applies as well to a friend’s sofa bed or a rented cottage shared with cousins as it does to a boat in Capri.

Return for a moment to the ballroom at the Plaza. What survives of that night in the photographs is how well it held together, and that was not the work of the dresses, which were only dresses. It was the work of 540 people reading a short, bossy invitation and doing what it asked. A host can feel that in a room full of strangers, and she can feel it across a weekend with a single friend.

At the end of a good stay the host says, “You must come again.” It is the most ordinary sentence in the language, and hosts say it to nearly everyone. The guests who find that it was meant are the ones who made her job easy, and she remembers them for a long time.

If you enjoyed this, Vedlen arrives every week: one quiet look at what living with class meant, where it can still be found, and how to bring a little of it into an ordinary Thursday.

Vedlen · The Unspoken Code of Class

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