Letitia Baldrige, the imposing author, etiquette adviser and business executive who
became a household name as Jacqueline Kennedy's White House chief of staff, died on Monday in Bethesda, Md. She
was 86. Her death was confirmed by Mary M. Mitchell, a longtime friend and
collaborator.
At 35 Ms. Baldrige, known as Tish, left her job as public relations
director for Tiffany & Company to help out a friend and fellow Vassar
alumna, the former Jacqueline Bouvier, becoming, in essence, the social
secretary of the Kennedy White House as it emerged as a center of culture, art,
youthful elegance and sparkling state dinners. Ms. Baldrige left the White
House in June 1963, less than six months before President John F. Kennedy's assassination, to work for the Merchandise Mart, a Kennedy
family business enterprise in Chicago. She went on to found her own public
relations and marketing business.
In the 1970s she established herself as an authority on contemporary
etiquette, writing a syndicated newspaper column on the subject and updating
“Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette” in 1978, less than four years
after Ms. Vanderbilt’s death. Ms. Baldrige’s face soon appeared on the cover of
Time magazine, which hailed her as the nation’s social arbiter.
After that, her own name was enough to attract readers, and in 1985 she
published “Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to Executive Manners,” which dealt
with behavior in the workplace and outside it. In that book, she declared it
acceptable to cut salad with a knife. She recommended that whoever reaches the
door first — either man or woman — open it. And she suggested infrequent
shampooing when staying on a yacht, to be considerate about conserving water.
Ms. Baldrige, who stood 6 feet 1 inch tall and became known for her
elegant silver hair, long contended that the heart of all etiquette was
consideration for other people, rather than a rigid set of rules. “There are
major C.E.O.’s who do not know how to hold a knife and fork properly, but I
don’t worry about that as much as the lack of kindness,” she told The New York
Times in 1992. “There are two generations of people who have not learned how
important it is to take time to say, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’
and how people must relate to one another.”
In addition to her all-purpose etiquette guides, she narrowed her focus
in books about weddings, social lives, job success and child-rearing. Even when
she went far afield of her specialty, as with “Public Affairs, Private
Relations” (1991), a novel about romance and class differences in Washington,
she threw in comments about manners. She wrote at least three books that
capitalized on her brief, shining White House career: “In the Kennedy Style:
Magical Evenings in the Kennedy White House” (1998, with Rene Verdon); “A
Lady, First: My Life in the Kennedy White House and the American Embassies of
Paris and Rome” (2001); and “The Kennedy Mystique” (2006, with four
co-authors). Those books’ revelations tended toward menus, recipes and minor
shockers, like Mrs. Kennedy’s habit of referring to Helen Thomas and another
newswoman as “the harpies.”
In a 1964 oral history interview for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, she
remembered the Kennedy's as perfectionists and the president as an amazing
manager. “He was like a wonderful department store manager who goes through the
store and knows everybody’s name and knows how all the departments work and
knows how to wrap packages better than the wrappers in the wrapping
department,” she said.
Letitia Baldrige was born on Feb. 9, 1926, in Miami and grew up in Omaha, the
youngest child of Howard Malcolm Baldrige, a Republican state legislator who
became a United States congressman in 1930, and the former Regina Connell. (Their
son Malcolm was secretary of commerce in the Reagan administration.) Growing up
with two older brothers helped make her tough, Ms. Baldrige said. Speaking to
her hometown newspaper, The Omaha World-Herald, in 1997, she recalled the time
her brother Robert had swung his new baseball bat, a holiday gift, too close to
her. “I was knocked unconscious for three hours,” she said. “My brothers called
it the best Christmas so far.”
Like her future employer Mrs. Kennedy, Letitia attended Miss Porter’s
School in Farmington, Conn., and received a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College. She did graduate work at the University of Geneva in Switzerland
but still found that she had to learn secretarial skills to find a good State
Department job. Beginning in the late 1940s, she worked in Paris as social
secretary to David Bruce, the United States ambassador to France, and his wife,
Evengeline; then in Rome as assistant to Clare Boothe Luce, at that time the
ambassador to Italy. On that first job she made a major faux pas by unknowingly
seating a Frenchman next to his wife’s lover at a dinner party. As a
result, she often said, she learned the value of heartfelt, repeated apologies.
When she returned to the United States, she went to work for Walter
Hoving, the chairman of Tiffany & Company. Her first book was “Roman
Candle” (1956), a memoir about her European adventures, which one critic,
Elizabeth Janeway, accused of managing “to invest Rome with as much color and
atmosphere as if it were her native Omaha.” Her last book was “Taste: Acquiring
What Money Can’t Buy” (2007).
Most of Ms. Baldrige’s career was spent as an entrepreneur, as head of
her own businesses in Chicago, New York and Washington, where she had a home at
the time of her death. Yet she continued to be identified with her White House
days. “That’s all right,” she told The Times in 1998. “It was a moment in
history, and to be part of it is incredible.” Ms. Baldrige married Robert
Hollensteiner, a real estate developer, the year she left the White House. He
survives her, along with their daughter, Clare Smyth; their son, Malcolm
Baldrige Hollensteiner; and seven grandchildren.
Family, Ms. Baldrige believed, was where the patterns for manners,
humanity and true civilization were set, and the American family was failing to
do its job. “We are not passing values on to our children,” she told The
Toronto Star in 1999. “We are not sitting down at the dinner table talking
about the tiny things that add up to caring human beings. Jackie learned from
her mom, who had beautiful manners.”
NY Times
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