Gunn's Golden Rules (29 page)

Slowly but surely, I’m learning where to draw the line and what does or doesn’t make sense when it comes to do-gooding and to time commitments.

I ran the Parsons Fashion Benefit for years. I enjoyed doing it, but it kept getting more and more overwhelming, and I started to realize people would have gladly paid more not to
attend. I constantly sat in opposition to what the party planners thought was best for the event. My belief is: Shorter is better. Always. But the people in charge always thought the more money people were spending the longer the evening should be. Wrong! They want to go home.

We have to rethink these things. It should be about collecting the money and saying thanks. A French luxury-goods organization used to have a ridiculously lavish benefit every year.
How much did the food cost?
I always wondered.
The flowers? How much money is left after all this?

I
DO A LOT
of speaking engagements and love it. In spite of how formal I look with my suits and ties, I try to keep lectures very casual and relaxed. I don’t like podiums. I like to walk around. And I keep track of how the audience is responding. If they seem bored, I just stop altogether. I usually designate someone in the front row to keep track of the time for me and to raise her arm when it’s time to wrap it up.

At that point, we can have a Q&A, or we can just leave. Teaching helps me to do a decent job with pretty much any auditorium full of students, because I can really read a room. I’m lucky to have this skill and the humility to put it into practice. By contrast, celebrities typically come with a script and don’t know how to improvise or wrap up quickly if things go off track.

The worst ever was Phil Donahue. He was an honoree at a benefit, and I was presenting an award after his acceptance speech. I heard the stage manager remind him that he had three minutes to speak, but he talked for forty minutes. Forty minutes.
It was mind-numbing. The first thing I said when I walked out was, “I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to say.” It got a big laugh.

Recently I was at a college event. There was to be a talk, then a Q&A, and then a forty-five-minute book signing. The schedule was mapped out, and I was looking forward to getting back to the hotel by nine thirty p.m. even if it ran over. I could almost taste the room service.

During the Q&A, I noticed that a third of the audience had left, and I thought,
I really must have droned on.
But no, they were all in line for the book signing, a signing planned for no more than fifty people. Several hundred were already lined up. When I realized this, I thought,
Uh-oh.
There was no one to save me, and I didn’t want to disappoint anyone, so I just bit the bullet and kept signing. I was there until one a.m. and was a wreck the next day.

I am trying to get better at saying no. Someone gave me these hilarious cards to hand out that, instead of a name and phone number, simply say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I’m too polite to use them, but they crack me up.

Once at a book signing, a woman came back to the table, pointed at her signed book, and said accusatorily, “You didn’t sign this!”

I looked at the book.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Right there.”

“You printed!” she said angrily. “That’s what I expect from an elementary school student! I want a signature.”

I explained to her that that
is
my signature. That’s how I sign a check. I print, because I studied architecture at one point and block printing rather than cursive became ingrained in me.

She ranted and raved to anyone who would listen about
how I didn’t sign her book. Luckily, there are a thousand lovely people for every one like that.

But let’s talk some more about the bad ones, because they’re the most fun to gossip about, and they deserve a little public shaming.

I receive a lot of fantastic e-mails from fans. I don’t have time to respond to all of them, though I read them all. I feel so lucky that so many lovely people enjoy what I do. Only, some love me a little too much! One woman in Chicago said that her boyfriend said he’d marry her if I performed the ceremony.

I wrote her back. I said I’m not ordained, and I’m not a ship’s captain or we could go out on Lake Michigan, so she should tell her boyfriend it’s not going to happen. I wrote that if they loved each other, they should go ahead and get married.

She thanked me but made another appeal. “Tell me when you’d be available,” she replied, quite seriously.

At that point, I’d already gone out of my way. Her expectations were way too high. And I think that’s a good lesson for all of us. Don’t try to manipulate other people into responding. Remember Rule 2: The World Owes You … Nothing? Well, I want to tell these people, I also owe you nothing! I mean, I am happy to pose for pictures, sign autographs, and participate in shows and speaking engagements that people might find entertaining or useful, but once I do all that, I don’t have a lot to give.

A father has been stalking me since my Parsons days about meeting with his daughter and giving her an indoctrination into the fashion industry. They showed up at a book signing in New Jersey and cornered me. I was, I thought, lovely to them both. I talked to his daughter and encouraged her to go to a summer program when she’s sixteen (she was eleven at the time).
That’s
done,
I thought, when I’d exhausted my advice and moved on to the next person on line.

But no. Still the father calls me every three months to plead for a Liz Claiborne Inc. tour for this daughter, a girl whom I can’t imagine is as desperate to see our conference room as her father thinks she is. It really does seem to be all about him and what he wants for her rather than what she wants for herself.

If she is in fact just as pushy, then she has my pity. In my world, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get the grease. Instead, I just stack the sandbags higher. People have even called my boss and said I wasn’t being responsive!

Well, I immediately shut out anyone who does something tacky like that. I will write to the person and say, “I must not have been making myself clear. This isn’t going to happen.” It’s like negotiating with terrorists. You can’t let rude people win.

Hilariously enough, it’s frequently the people who hold themselves up as paradigms who are the worst behaved. The countess from
The Real Housewives of New York City
wrote an etiquette book and e-mailed to tell me she’d told her publisher that I might write the foreword. I thanked her for asking me, but said I had a conflict of interest with my own publisher and so would have to decline.

She responded that if I wouldn’t do it, she’d write it for me.

I said, “Ha-ha. Very funny.”

“I’m serious,” she said. This was for a manners book!

Perhaps sometimes forewords are really written by the author and then reviewed and signed by the foreworder and this was what she was contemplating, but I’d already made it clear that the issue wasn’t about having time to write but with using my name.

I told her that if she was serious, then her lawyer should talk
to my lawyer.

I never heard more from her.

I
F YOU DON’T SET
boundaries, it can get to the point where nothing’s ever enough.

Case in point: I joined the board of directors of GMHC, the wonderful AIDS organization that I’ve long supported. I’ve hosted the event Fashion Forward for them since its inception and have been happy to do so. But then they made me a board member, about which I felt thrilled and honored at the time. I didn’t think it would change my life very much, but it totally did. Suddenly, I was signing letters asking people for money. And I kept hearing back from fancy people saying, “If I help you with GMHC, you need to help me with this.” I really couldn’t give any more time or money to anyone, so I thought,
I need to scale back here.

After much consideration, I said I had to bow out as a board member.

Well, guess what? They wouldn’t let me. Their CEO said, “‘No’ to me means ‘later.’ You can just do these things for us later.”

She said using my name had really helped them, and that was enough.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really,” she said and talked me down off the ledge.

She reassured me that I was off the hook and they would stop asking me to do things all the time.

I relaxed and thought,
Phew, no more obligations, no more invites, no more events.
Two hours later I got an e-mail from her asking when I could go on a retreat!

Luckily, I now have an agent who handles charity requests, and he can say no for me. What I’ve learned from him is that boundaries are very liberating. They can be readjusted all the time, but it’s important to have them. Always. When you don’t have a shopping list, you can easily go astray in the cereal aisle. If you burn out, no one’s going to benefit. So it’s in everyone’s interest for you to do what you can and then make it clear that you can do no more.

N
OW THAT WE’RE WRAPPING
up our conversation, I think it’s time to talk about the eternal mysteries. I was raised as a loose Episcopalian, but I’m fascinated by all religions. God knows they’re at the core of every society and culture on this planet. I’m also fascinated by the ceremony of it. But I haven’t been to a church since my niece was baptized, and she’s now twenty-three. None of the weddings I’ve been to since then have been in a church. I consider myself an agnostic, because I believe there are many things we don’t fully comprehend.

Going to church was not my favorite thing when I was young. From a very early age, I was very suspicious of our priest. My parents thought I was crazy and just trying to get out of going to services, but I said, “No, there really is something weird about that man.”

Indeed, one day when I was nine or ten, the priest was up at the pulpit. He went into a silent prayer and … never came out of it. After a few minutes the ushers realized he’d left the plane of reality the rest of us were on, so they had an intervention and took him away.

And yes: I smiled very smugly at my parents all the way
home.

That’s the mind-set I had when I went to see a psychic once about thirty years ago. I was in the middle of a personal and professional crisis. A dear friend, who is a clinical psychologist said she’d been to see this psychic, had an amazing experience, and encouraged me to go, too.

I scoffed and said, “One of those people with a neon sign?”

“No,” she said, “I did my homework. This woman Jean MacArthur works three months of the year each in New York, Paris, London, and Washington. She’s a consultant to NASA and the FBI.”

Why not?
I thought. I’m certainly not a crystal person or an astrology person, but I figured it would be good for a laugh if nothing else. I went with another friend of Pat’s named Molly. Molly is a dear friend of mine, too; she’s the painter with whom I shared a studio during my years as a sculptor. She’s extremely smart and doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so for her also to agree to see this person was disarming to me.

I was so disappointed when Jean MacArthur answered the door, because I was expecting to see Isadora Duncan, and instead she looked like the checkout lady at the Safeway. She looked very haggard and had scars running along her neck. She shook my hand, and we sat down. She told me to write down my date of birth. Then she said that I couldn’t lie to her, and that whatever I said to her went through God and back to her and vice versa.

I was sitting there thinking,
This is ridiculous.

“You will put your work as an artist on the shelf,” she told me. “This will happen soon. You will enter the academic arena.”

I was thinking,
Fat chance.
I hated school.

She told me a lot of things about my father that I thought she couldn’t have known without talking to him or other members of my family.
Did she talk to Molly in advance?
I wondered.

She said she didn’t believe in talking about prior lives because such talk wasn’t useful, but then she paused and said, “However, I have never met a new soul … until today.”

I can still hear her saying that, and it still gives me chills. It’s not that I put any factual stock in it, but there was something about it that sounded right somehow. When she said that, I thought,
New soul is at least an apt metaphor for my openness and sometimes naïve belief in people.
I’d just had my heart broken, and felt duped and humiliated, and I liked that notion of “new soul” more than “fool.”

“Whatever I see in my third eye I will never share unless it’s something you can change,” she said next. “If I tell you the train’s coming, watch out—that means you have a shot at getting out of the way. But if the train’s going to hit you no matter what, why say anything?”

I thought that was kind of a relief, and kind of a disappointment. After our session, she told me about all these surgeries she’d had. She said her third eye takes a terrible physical toll on her. I left my session thinking,
What a charlatan.

Meanwhile, when Molly left her appointment, she looked stricken and said, “I have to see a doctor. Jean said something’s wrong with my blood.”