The Feminist tasteful Lady

"You're always remembered," Letitia Baldrige says, "if you are tall."

Tish Baldrige is a very memorable character. At 6 ft. 1 in., with her strong, intelligent head held at full altitude, her white hair swept back in the Fifth Avenue mane, she enters a room with queenly bearing. But Tish manages to mitigate her formidable presence: she is a direct and funny woman with a clear gaze and a trace of self-mockery. Far from stuffy about good taste, she is even given to repeating the awful and ancient schoolyard joke that is a painful memory to every oversize woman: "Confucius say, boy who dance with tall girl get bust in the mouth."

Although she has revised Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette, nothing of the sedate Vere de Vere clings to Baldrige. She has been charging full blast most of her life. She approaches manners from the perspective of a working woman who did not marry until she was 35, a mother of two, an executive feminist who wears black dresses and pearls, and head of her own Manhattan public relations firm, Letitia Baldrige Enterprises, Inc. At 51 she serves on the board of directors of three companies (the New York Bank for Savings, Dean Witter Reynolds Inc., and Outlet Co. of Providence) and writes a weekly column, "Contemporary Living," which is syndicated in some 40 newspapers by the Los Angeles Times.

Not surprisingly, Baldrige's theory of manners is brisk: apart from simple kindness, she says, their chief purpose is to make life more efficient.

Tish came from a well-off, but by no means rich lawyer's family in Omaha. Her father, Howard Malcolm Baldrige, a strikingly handsome athlete at Yale who was decorated in both World Wars, served as a Republican Congressman from Nebraska for two terms.

At 14 Tish was sent east to Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn. She went to Vassar at 16, graduating at 19 with a B.A. in psychology. After a year at the University of Geneva, Tish decided she wanted to work in Europe. She displayed even then her persistent ability to stand back, set goals and methodically fulfill them. The State Department said she would need secretarial skills even to apply for a job overseas; she knocked off a year-long secretarial curriculum in eight weeks.

Her career began with a series of lucky strokes. In her first job in the Foreign Service, she worked in Paris for David Bruce, who was helping to set up the Marshall Plan. When Bruce was named U.S. Ambassador to France, Tish became social secretary to him and his wife Evangeline. In 1951 she worked briefly for the CIA on "a lot of secret stuff." Then, having learned Italian from a contessa and a tape recorder, she landed a job as social secretary to the U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, who became a close friend and is now godmother to Tish's 13-year-old daughter Clare.

Back in the U.S., Baldrige became Tiffany's first woman executive, their public relations director. When the Kennedys moved into the White House, Tish became Jackie's social secretary, as well as J.F.K.'s protocol officer. She loved the work, although she was disconcerted to find that practically every man who took her out was playing her for a power angle at the White House. She became promotions director at the Kennedys' Merchandise Mart in 1963, then opened her own p.r. company in Chicago. Six years later she folded it to go to New York City as Burlington Industries' first director of consumer affairs.

In 1972 Tish decided to go back into business for herself with Letitia Baldrige Enterprises, Inc. Her company, with a staff of nine, is small but energetic. She has just started a new subsidiary called Business Receptions, which organizes and runs parties and other functions for companies.

In 1963, in Chicago, Tish married Robert Hollensteiner, a real estate executive who, among other things, has the advantage of being nearly four inches taller than Tish. They live with their son Malcolm, 11, in a twelve-room cooperative apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. Daughter Clare is away at the boarding school Tish attended, Miss Porter's.

Baldrige's life is hectic, with twelve or more appointments each day added to a load of domestic details.

Says Tish: "I'll get into one taxi, get in a traffic jam, jump out and walk four blocks, get in another taxi and then finish the last lap in the subway."

Because of her schedule, Baldrige turns down more social invitations than she accepts. Whenever possible she leaves a party at 11--"I have to get my sleep. It's the only way I can keep going." When Tish entertains, it is usually for Saturday or Sunday lunch. The Hollensteiners have a live-in housekeeper, but Tish does practically all the cooking herself.

When she reflects on how she might approach her life if given the chance to start it over again, Tish sees a vision curiously distant from the world of manners: "First of all, I'd go on the line and learn factory jobs, with the goal of someday being chairman of the board of U.S. Steel."

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