Gunn's Golden Rules (24 page)

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 Digest
for 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 Lucy
fan 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 suspect
it. My mother says I’m crazy, but she wasn’t there.

A
NYWAY, 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 Times
for 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 Fair
at 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!

M
Y 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!”