Gunn's Golden Rules (8 page)

Then they’ll interrupt and say, “I’ve been watching that show for years!”

And I will say, “Then you really should know I’m not Clinton Kelly.”

During the
Project Runway
Season 3 auditions, which were held at Macy’s, I went into Au Bon Pain every morning to get a coffee and a croissant. The first day, the woman behind the counter pointed to me and said, “Look, it’s Michael Kors from
Project Runway
!”

I didn’t want to disappoint her and I didn’t think it mattered, so I just took the high road. I smiled at her and said hello and thanked her for watching the show. But the third morning, she got closer and said, somewhat concernedly, “What happened to your nice tan?” Finally, I told her I was the other guy on the show. She seemed so confused that I almost regretted not having done my best Michael Kors impression and told her, “Good call! I gotta get back to the beach.”

W
HEN
I
WAS LITTLE
, I had a great uncle who was verbally abusive. I’ve never forgotten a particular dinner he ruined with his bile. I still remember the tone of his voice at that holiday get-together, even though this was easily fifty years ago. I remember the room, what people were wearing, the candles, and then the excuse people kept offering one another: that he was ill. It didn’t make a difference to me. If he was going to be that nasty, why didn’t he stay in bed?

I also have vivid memories of people behaving kindly.

My godparents, Earle and Suzanne Harbison, who are thankfully still alive and well and live in St. Louis, have always been so good to me. When I think of them, it warms my heart.

When I was first in New York, they always used to come to town and take me out for big, delicious dinners. I was so
grateful, because I was struggling on my teacher’s salary. Well, usually they would have me over to their hotel for a drink beforehand, but one time I said, “You’ve never seen my apartment. Why don’t we have a drink there this time?”

This was early in December. They came over and were lovely and talked about how nice it was at my tiny little place. They were incredibly gracious about every ratty piece of furniture and beat-up pot and pan. I lived paycheck to paycheck and wasn’t able to save anything, much less to furnish my apartment properly. But it was cozy, and I loved it.

Well, I received a Christmas card three weeks later from my godparents, and in it was a check for $10,000. That money at that point in my life changed everything for me. I was able to get some decent housewares, and I had a financial cushion for the first time in my life. It was a godsend.

Wow,
I thought when I saw all those zeroes on that check,
they were really horrified by the apartment!

Though I think that was part of it, mainly I think they just wanted me to feel secure. They are wonderful people who really looked out for me, and they wanted to do what they could to make my life easier and happier.

In my own godfathering I’ve done my best to imitate their concern and generosity.

It hasn’t always worked. My mother took the family to Disney World twice. The first time we went, my niece, Wallace, said in a pseudo-whisper to her mother, my sister Bub (her real name is Kim, but I have called her Bub or Bubby since she was born and I couldn’t say “baby” correctly), “Don’t worry about me, Mom. You have your hands full with Mac [her brother] and Uncle Nag.”

“What did she call me?” I asked, horrified. “Uncle
Nag
?”

Noting my annoyance, Wallace turned to her mother, nodded in my direction, and said: “See?” She was seven or eight.

It was a good reminder that I needed to be more fun with the kids. I’ve tried to be good to them and to put whatever skills I have at their disposal. I always used to make my niece’s Halloween costumes. My favorite was the year I transformed her into a Life Saver.

My mother is a huge pessimist and often says, “If everything is fine, then I’m pleasantly surprised.” Years ago, my mother seemed to take great relish in predicting a doomed marriage for my sister: “It will most certainly end in divorce—soon!”

My sister has been married to her husband for more than thirty years. She’s never complained about him once. They are totally committed to each other. My mother thrives on the negative, so her daughter’s happy marriage is a big missed opportunity for complaint. That’s no way to live.

After all, why would you choose to be the angry great uncle in the corner rather than the beloved godparent with the long and happy life?

O
NE DAY WHEN I
was working in academia, I had to get some things postmarked by five, and before they went out they needed to be signed by a senior administrator. At three, I knock on her door, but she’s in there with a young woman. I’m told to come back. Finally, it’s four and we’re about to miss a deadline, so I open the door and peek in.

The administrator is standing behind a girl, lifting her arms up and then pushing them down, and yelling, “Serve from the left! Take away from the right! Now you do it! Serve from the left! Take away from the right! More vigor! Serve from the left! Take away from the right!”

The girl was practically in tears.

I gathered she was preparing for a fancy dinner and the girl was going to be serving. It was a little terrifying. I gathered my signed papers and scurried off to the post office, rather traumatized after witnessing this borderline abusive enforcement of dining etiquette.

This was a rather horrible example of the Bad Boss, a type with which I am far too familiar. To wit: Once we were having a staff meeting, and the boss said, “I’ve decided we need a café
au lait at the front desk.”

“That’s nice of you to consider the coffee needs of the visitors,” I said.

“What coffee needs? I’m talking about a light beige,” she corrected me. “A charming English major out of Howard University.”

My jaw dropped. These are the kind of outrageous racial remarks we were dealing with in the seventies. It happens even now, but back then it was particularly prevalent and grotesque.

Which reminds me: In circumstances like that, you have to say something. It isn’t bad manners to point out when someone is being gallingly racist. You have an obligation not to let it slide. Alas, why is it that childish, bigoted, or foolish people so often seem to wind up in charge?

One of the worst bosses I ever had was a producer on
Guide to Style.
He always wanted to make sure everyone knew he was in charge, so he would assert himself in very aggressive ways.

In Episode 2 of Season 2, the adorable Gretta Monahan and I were doing the reveal of our subject’s new look to her family and friends. Well, the soundstage was unbearable. It was 120 degrees, and there was no air circulation. The model fainted. I caught her and then heard, from the audience, the boss say, annoyed, “Well, we’ve got to do it again!”

I followed him into the production room and said, “This can’t continue. We have seven more hours. This is abusive. We can’t go on like this. You can do whatever you want to me, but not to them. The crew and the audience are suffering. They didn’t sign on for this.” The walls were paper thin, and everyone knew something was going on because I never walk off the set. When I got back, the crew gave me a round of applause.

But it wasn’t over. The producer ran onto the set and started
yelling at me.

“
They
signed on to this!” he yelled, pointing to the audience while poking me in the chest.

“Can we please not do this here?” I asked. I don’t like to fight in front of the crew with anyone, much less our boss. He ignored my request and kept poking.

“They signed on to be guests,” I said, “but not to a sensory-deprivation environment with no water and 120-degree temperatures.”

We fought until we had no fight left in us. The model revived. We got through it somehow. But I thought:
I am never working for this man again.
And I never have. One day my wonderful assistant told me, “I have your old boss on the line. He’s at Ralph Lauren and wants to buy you a suit?”

“Hang up on him,” I said.

At the same time that I see people wielding power badly, I’ve seen a backlash against holding power of any kind, and I just don’t get it. For example, I don’t understand that be-a-pal parenting style. Children don’t need more friends. They need parents. You’re the adult, and they need you to act like one. And if you think you want your child to be your friend, you need to be in therapy.

Dale Carnegie wrote an insanely popular guide for salesmen called
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
It has been in print for something like seventy years, and it contains stories about how to become a better conversationalist. It’s basically about how to trick people into liking you.

In one of the book’s illustrative stories, a man is told to run the refreshment booth at a fair. He arrives to find two elderly ladies disgruntled because they feel their power has been usurped. So he hands one of them the cash box to manage
and asks the other to show the teenagers how to use the soda machine. This supposedly gives them a sense of power and control and ensures that “the evening was very enjoyable.”

This is supposed to be a happy story, but it doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. You were in charge. You were handed the cash box. You’re new. The person running the event was a veteran. There’s probably a
reason
why those ladies weren’t in charge.

That kind of behavior guide is all about giving insecure people something to make them feel good about themselves. But it’s so patronizing.

In another story in the book, a student in a beginning crafts class asks to go into the higher class. The teacher agrees. Everyone’s happy, and a lesson has been learned about “our deep desire to feel important.”

Well, I don’t know about that.

During my time as chair of the Fashion Design Department at Parsons, too many of my students would say on the first day of school, “I’m more advanced than this class. I need to take a junior rather than a sophomore class.”

I always responded, “We have four weeks to add/drop. I’ll speak to your faculty, and they will know within a month if you are so adept that you can go to the next level.”

Did it ever happen? Never!

In
Life’s Little Instruction Book,
which has sold more than ten million copies, the writer advises us to: “Compliment three people every day.”

Well, maybe, but only if they’re worthy. And do you keep a checklist?

“Buy great books even if you never read them.”

“Own a great sound system.”

“Sing in the shower.”

Really, it’s like: “Act aggressively happy whether you are or not.”

A lot of that book is about busting out of social constrictions and getting all touchy-feely and feel-goody. Well, I think a lot of people feel entirely too good about themselves and bust out of social constrictions entirely too much.

My now twenty-three-year-old niece, Wallace, much matured from the “Uncle Nag” days, often picks me up here in New York City and then we take the train together to see the rest of our family. I adore my niece, and I am so impressed with her great manners. She is so respectful of people. She sends thank-you cards. It’s great fun to do things with her and to have her visit because she’s good company and seems genuinely to appreciate a dinner out or whatever we choose to do together.

Also, the visits are planned well in advance, so there are no surprises. (One of the cardinal rules of visits:
Don’t drop in.
People who drop in drive me to despair. It’s simply not acceptable.)

People need boundaries and rules. Society does, too. You don’t flourish if you’re left to do anything in any situation. I say this about art and design all the time, and it doesn’t always make me incredibly popular.

A few years ago, I was at a conference of fashion design educators in Copenhagen. I was the only American, and I was reviled because I was from
that place.
What they hated about American design was that we look at design through a lens of commerce. They thought it constrained creativity. I maintain that having constraints is very helpful for the creative process.

On
Project Runway,
the designers do better work when they have a very specific challenge. And for me, it’s easier to discuss
their work when there’s a real point of departure, rather than the do-whatever-you-want challenges, when all I can say is, “Well, if this is the look you wanted to achieve, you did it!”

With a certain amount of maturity, we can set up our own constraints. That’s a lot of what education is about—letting people set those assignments for us so that when we graduate we can start to set them for ourselves. Even now that I’m in my fifties, I still face certain situations where I have to admit that I need some rules to help me figure out what I should do.

Bosses should think of themselves as fulfilling this kind of boundary-giving function that school and parents do. They need to be clear about expectations and rules so everyone knows when an employee is doing well or not doing well. And when expectations are not met, there should be logical consequences, whether that’s the loss of the job, a decrease in salary, or something less drastic. There is no reason, in any case, ever to yell. And yet we’ve all seen it: bosses who lose their tempers constantly.