"I Have Ten Forks"

How come you're so upper class and we're so lower class, and you're our daughter?" a Government economist named Jacob Perlman once asked his sassy child Judith. Not an easy question for the future Miss Manners to answer. Perhaps some kind of metamorphosis began back when Perlman worked for the United Nations and moved his family to the Philippines. Recalls Judith Martin: "My father sat us down, my brother and me, and said, 'Children, we have to tell you something. We have reached the crucial point when the servants outnumber us 2 to 1. It takes a while to get used to this kind of life. It takes about two minutes. And it takes the rest of your life to get unused to it.' "

While still a student at Wellesley, where she claimed to have majored in gracious living, Martin got her first job on the Washington Post. "It was an accident," she says. "My parents wanted me to find a summer job, and I thought the Post would be a safe place to apply, thinking they would never hire me since I had no experience. They hired me as a copy girl--monotonous work with terrible hours and featuring a take-home pay of $27.50 a week and the opportunity to get screamed at a lot."

Since, "you can't be young and miserable forever," as she puts it, Martin eventually won an assignment to report on the Washington social circuit. She enjoyed "that nice, healthy vulgarity" of the Lyndon Johnson regime, particularly when L.B.J. invited her and several other women reporters at a White House party to come upstairs. "We stayed for two hours, eating popcorn from a silver bowl, while he swore he had never wanted to be President."

The Nixons were less amusing. When the White House decreed that reporters covering Julie Nixon's wedding reception had to stay outside and rely on briefings, Martin sneaked in by masquerading as a friend of a bridesmaid. She subsequently found herself banned from Tricia Nixon's wedding, but perhaps that was because she had written that Tricia dressed "like an ice-cream cone." The White House announcement explained that "the First Family does not feel comfortable with Judith Martin." Remarked Martin's husband: "I'm scared to live in a country that's run by a man who's scared by the likes of you."

Robert Martin, 49, an affable, Harvard-educated physician who does research in biochemical genetics at the National Institutes of Health, claims that his own manners have required no polishing during their 25-year marriage because he was "already perfect when we met, and so was she." If anyone has the temerity to address him as Mr. Manners, says Dr. Martin, "I correct them immediately. I tell them it's Lord Manners, not Mr. Manners." (The name Miss Manners derives from a figure in Victorian English folklore who was originally called Lady Manners. She was conjured up so that when children tried to gobble all the food on the table, they could be ordered to leave a little bit on the plate "for Lady Manners.")

Just as Miss Manners urges, the Martins have reared, educated and nagged at two children, who appear to have acquired flawless manners. "It's amazing how much a parent can terrify a child without actually doing anything," says Nicholas, 18, a freshman at Harvard. Jacobina, 13, plays the harp and studies at a private school in Washington. Once when Martin relayed a prying reporter's request to interview the whole family at home, Jacobina objected, "But mother, I wasn't brought up in that manner."

She was right. Throughout Martin's gradual self-transformation from an impudent reporter into a stately personage, she has always maintained a sharp division between her private and public lives. There is no business entertaining at her handsome Georgian brick home near the Washington zoo (a hired couple do the housework), and when she does go out socially, it is usually a family expedition to the theater or a small dinner with friends. "As a rule, I only go to the kind of thing I give," she says, "a dinner where everyone sits down and has real conversation." The seating is limited to ten people, since "I have ten forks of all kinds."

Having left the Post to live by syndication in 1982, Martin now works alone in an antique-filled ground-floor office in a town house a ten-minute bus ride from her home. The bookshelves contain a large collection of etiquette books, from The Book of the Courtier to Victorian Vista. Martin devotes one day a week to writing her column on an IBM word processor. Some of her mail, which may be useful later (she has to work two months in advance), gets saved in wooden trays with such labels as Weddings, Business or Diverse Civilities; other letters receive a standard answer in engraved script on cream paper ("Miss Manners regrets exceedingly . . .")

The remaining four days Martin devotes to other writing: book reviews, speeches, a new novel titled Style and Substance. Her first, Gilbert, a rather arch attempt at a comedy of manners, received generally favorable reviews in 1982. She has also published a collection of newspaper essays, The Name on the White House Floor (1972).

To those who regard Miss Manners as an eccentric anachronism, Judith Martin has a contemporary answer. "It would be ridiculous to say that manners should be static, and we should return to 1948 and behave like that," she says. "The world changes and develops. There are lots of new situations." She has always been richly prepared for them. Printers at the Post, she recalls, tried to embarrass her years ago by telling off-color stories. "I'd look right at them and say, 'I don't understand it. Could you explain it to me?' Have you ever seen a printer blush?"