Queen of Couth Still Minding Country’s Manners

KEWANEE, Ill. —  Forget about tax reform, the deficit and foreign policy. To hear Marjabelle Young Stewart tell it, presidential politics boil down to a matter of manners.

And why not? Stewart, who presides over a multimillion-dollar etiquette empire and who has been dubbed the Queen of Couth, has been sitting at the head of America’s table, minding the nation’s manners, for a quarter of a century.

“It was so very difficult when (Jimmy Carter) was allowing Amy to sit at the table and read a book in front of a dignitary,” she said recently, critiquing the Carter years. “Or when he decided to have his peanut butter and jelly sandwich parties on the White House lawn with his buddies in their blue jeans.

“That’s my White House!” she sniffed. “Americans want their elected officials to mind their manners or they are going to get booted out. It didn’t play!”

But since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and his resounding reelection in 1984--which she credits to his and the First Lady’s “wonderful manners”--things have been looking up.

Business Is Booming

For starters, the etiquette business is booming. And Marjabelle Young Stewart, 53, is delighted. The author of 17 books on etiquette and president and chairman of a corporation that franchises etiquette classes for children in more than 400 U.S. cities and Japan, she was preparing for a nationwide to promote her latest and weightiest book--a 467-page encyclopedia entitled “The New Etiquette: Real Manners for Real People in Real Situations.”

The work covers everything from a la carte to zippers. And it covers a good deal in between--ground that Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt dared not tread.

Consider these entries.

Abortion: No one should be anything but sympathetic to a woman who, as a result of amniocentesis or for any other reason, has had to make the painful decision to have an abortion.

Cohabitation: While cohabitation may be more accepted these days, no one sends engraved announcements.

Gays: Gay couples should be treated just like any other couples. Gay has become the acceptable term to describe homosexuals. To persist in using older terms is to risk giving offense.

Singles’ Bars: Singles’ bars for the most part are frequented by people who are looking for a one-night liaison. Before going into one of these bars, understand that this is the ground rule.

“Etiquette books used to be written for the upper crust. But how many people today need to know whether their butler should wear white gloves before noon?” Stewart asked. So she concerns herself with more contemporary issues.

But hers is not a Johnny-come-lately interest. It started in the ‘50s when she moved to Washington and found herself in a social swirl that included the capital’s elite.

Twice Reprimanded

At one party, she was reprimanded--not once, but twice--for washing her grapes in the finger bowl (a no-no that won her the reproval of the Spanish ambassador) and later for wearing a strapless gown (“And I thought I looked just like Rita Hayworth”) at a formal dinner.

“My deah,” social butterfly Perle Mesta scolded, “never wear a strapless gown to dinner. Above the centerpiece you look absolutely naked.”

From that day forward, Stewart (then Mrs. Young) vowed never to be ignorant of manners. She learned her lessons, and learned them well, parlaying her new-found knowledge into a television show, “Meet the Models,” and running a popular modeling agency.

In 1954, John Fitzgerald Kennedy tutored her to run for Congress, but she abandoned her political aspirations. Instead, she founded Mrs. Young’s School for Young Ladies where she taught children, such as Tricia and Julie Nixon to be socially correct.

In 1965 she hooked up with Ann Buchwald, wife of syndicated columnist Art Buchwald, and the two wrote “White Gloves & Party Manners,” a book of etiquette for young ladies, which recently sold its millionth copy. They followed it with a guide for boys in which Art Buchwald wrote the introduction.

“Marjabelle Stewart has done as much as anybody to inflict manners on children,” Art Buchwald said in a telephone interview. “She is really dedicated and religious about these things that she teaches.” And she “persisted in this thing in the ‘50s and ‘60s when no one wanted to know anything about manners, when kids were throwing mud in their parents’ faces.”

Times have changed. Today, when he and his wife give a youngster an etiquette guide, “the kid will pretend to hate it and take it to his room and read it like it was a dirty book.” They want to know about manners, he said.

For this attitude change, Stewart credits President Reagan. “There’s no one that I can think of that could show, under pressure, manners like he has,” she said, citing “this little scandal,” the Iran- contra affair.

Wonderful Yuppies

Credit also goes to the yuppies. “Aren’t they the most wonderful group?” she asked. “I feel like I raised them (with her children’s classes), married them (with her wedding planner), and got them their first jobs and promotions (with “Executive Etiquette”).

“Who minds the manners and mores of America?” she asked aloud last week in the 100-year-old, 19-room home she shares with her husband, William, and teen-age son in this small town in Western Illinois. “Well, we have Letitia Baldrige, Judith Martin (better known as Miss Manners), Elizabeth Post and Marjabelle Young Stewart.”

And do they ever disagree? Oh, do they ever! “I’m all for curtsying,” said Stewart. “Not just because I do a great curtsy, which I do, but when in Rome. . . . “ But Miss Manners objected in an article: “I found it incredibly offensive to see an American (bowing) to royalty. We fought a war over that and we won.”

But what they share in common, said Stewart, is that all four are “working women. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t paid her dues. It wasn’t handed to us like it was to Amy Vanderbilt.”

Certainly it wasn’t handed to the young Marjabelle who, at 4, was placed in an orphanage in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “I’ve just recently come to grips with all this,” she said of her childhood. “It was an old tin can I had to get rid of.”

Last year she returned to the Christian Home, at the request of its director, who begged her to show current residents that they, too, can be successful.

So Marjabelle Young Stewart presided over “the most elegant” eight-course dinner, complete with harps, and arranged to set in place her White Gloves & Party Manners classes at the institution after she departed.

“It just proved to me that manners will take you places money alone can’t go,” she said of the dinner.

And if an orphanage strikes some as an unusual place for America’s Queen of Courtesy to have grown up, well, fiddlesticks, said Stewart who offers yet another paradox.

“Do you know I live in the Hog Capital of the World?,” as her hometown of Kewanee is billed. “Why even the piggies here are well-mannered!”