Gunn's Golden Rules (25 page)

I went to the local grocery store, ran to the packaged meat section, grabbed a package of bologna, and ate the whole thing standing there in the aisle. Then I paid for the empty container. I proudly help PETA with their antifur campaign, but they know they’re not going to make a vegan out of me. And yet they still named me their 2009 Man of the Year (Ellen DeGeneres was their Woman of the Year) because of my crusade against abuse in the fur trade.

Vegetarianism can make for social awkwardness at times, especially if you’re at an event where only hunks of meat are served. You may think this is rare, but vegetarian friends tell me that it does happen. In those situations it really is a question of just eating enough not to insult the host.

One person I know was at a fancy luncheon at which they were serving venison and nothing else. There was no way to get around it, so he ate it. I am very impressed that his manners trumped his feelings. I don’t even know if I could have gone there, because I have a psychological aversion to the meat of animals I find especially adorable, like deer—the same goes for rabbit, lamb, and veal. My gag reflex kicks in. But I am very much a believer in not insulting a host, so perhaps I would have been able to choke down Bambi had it come to that.

Parsons used to have a lovely graduation at Riverside Church with a lunch afterward, to which we invited our honorary degree recipients. One year two of our guests were Sister Parish and Albert Hadley of Parish-Hadley, the legendary interior design firm. I was sitting at Mrs. Parish’s table, and she was an incredible character. I said, “You must receive lots of awards and accolades,” and she said, “No, this is the first since I was given a perfect-attendance medal as a young girl. It came with
a pig.”

Well, this award did not come with a pig. It came with a very odd lunch of sea scallops that I was pretty sure were raw. Sister Parish corroborated this when someone asked her, “How’s lunch?”

“Terribly chic,” she replied, “but inedible.”

As much as I believe it’s good manners to eat what’s put in front of you as long as it won’t send you into anaphylactic shock, I also believe that, when a host, you really need to think about what will suit your guests. I think it’s bizarre when you assume no one is a vegetarian or has an allergy. It doesn’t hurt to have a salad on the side so your vegan guests can fill up on that rather than having to struggle through the coq au vin.

This does seem to be a modern dilemma. I don’t want to challenge the allergies, but they do seem to be proliferating at a frightening rate.

You see parents sometimes hovering over perfectly healthy and allergy-free children, saying, “Oh no, she can’t! He can’t!”

I think in those extreme situations children get to the point where they are afraid to disappoint their paranoid parents, and so they profess an aversion to pretty much everything but chicken nuggets, hold the sauce.

When I grew up, I don’t remember anyone having allergies to food. I went all though elementary school and never knew anyone with any allergies at all. Certainly some allergies are deadly and all too serious, but if there’s a way to make yourself a more flexible eater, I think you should.

I think it is good, though, that nonsmokers are protected these days from the clouds of smoke that used to hover in every public space just a couple of decades ago. Can you believe
there used to be a smoking section on airplanes? You could smoke in theaters. It hasn’t been that long. I remember watching TV award shows and when they did a wide shot you’d see the lasers cutting through dense smoke that filled the auditorium.

I never took up smoking. When I was nine or ten, my father was diagnosed with pleurisy. It scared the daylights out of him, and he quit cold turkey. For years my mother would have one cigarette a day, in the evening. My grandmother smoked until the last day of her life. I still remember going to the doctor with her when she was in her eighties. Her doctor said she had to stop smoking.

“But it’s one of the few things she still enjoys,” I said. “Let her smoke!”

That’s not to say I’m pro smoking. When I was at Parsons, I was sad that with each successive year, more students would smoke. Maybe it’s declining now, but in that place at that time, it was definitely on the rise.

Not only did I not smoke, I didn’t have a drink until I was thirty and moved to New York. Any association with alcohol was a turnoff because there was so much of it around my family.

Now, my mother denies this up and down, in spite of hard evidence. My grandmother had a huge box of correspondence. After her death, my mother and sister and I read these letters out loud, and I said, “Isn’t it funny how often she talks about people drinking? Everyone was always drunk and falling off horses and wandering off into the woods.” My mother insists they weren’t drunks; they just knew how to have a good time.

Yes,
I thought,
by getting loaded.

Anyway, because of that association with booze, I would go out to people’s houses and just have tonic water. Now, since moving to New York, I love having a drink now and then.

So maybe I’ll grow to love sea slugs, too? I kind of doubt it.

I’
M CRAZY ABOUT
M
ARTHA
Stewart. We’ve done a lot of things together, and I’ve always loved watching her show. But sometimes her domesticity gets a little out of control.

One day I was watching her cooking show. While roasting a pan of nuts, she said something I have never forgotten: “Life has few disappointments greater than a room-temperature nut.”

After Martha had been through the ordeal of her trial and jail time at what was referred to as Camp Cupcake, I asked her if she still stood by that quote.

“I said that?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I think about it all the time.”

“Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t say it now!”

F
OR A 2009 SEGMENT
for
The Dr. Oz Show,
I went to D.C. and met an extraordinary testimony to courage. My assignment was to help a veteran shop for clothes. Sgt. Reinita Gray is an amazing woman: a mother of five who did four tours of duty and lost her leg to a missile while on a noncombat mission in Iraq, earning her a Purple Heart.

She hadn’t been out of the hospital since the loss of her leg, so we brought a special wheelchair van and I wheeled her in and out of it and through Bloomingdale’s.

We had my usual fight about size.

“It’s too small!” she insisted.

“It’s not too small!” I said. “Look at the sleeves and the shoulders. It fits!”

We talked about all the outfits we thought were a hot mess. We teased each other. It was all such fun—and very moving. She’s just learning to get around on her prosthetic leg, and one time she walked out of the Bloomingdale’s dressing room unassisted.

But where it became even more inspiring was back at the hospital. The bigger picture of inspiration and emotion for me was being at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. While waiting in the lobby for our contact there, we saw people go by who were badly burned, completely bandaged. That was the visual. But when we went to the amputee center, the big wing at Walter Reed, we spent an hour or so in the physical therapy area, and would you believe I didn’t see one person who looked miserable?

The spirit in that room was so uplifting. The room was full of people who had lost a limb or two or even more, and I expected to be met with individuals full of anger and self-pity and depressed by their situation, but instead they seemed so full of life. What they go through is incredibly tough. Sometimes it takes two years for these patients to build up the strength in their stumps so that the prosthetics will work. I felt almost joyous about the spirit of the human will. There was no self-pity in that room. The refrain was: I’m so happy still to be alive. Again
and again, people said that to me, and they
smiled.

That experience put so much in perspective for me. I tried to remember how many people seemed that happy and grateful the last time I was at a fashion event full of well-off, successful, gorgeously dressed guests eating wonderful canapés and drinking champagne. In high society, you have people walking around complaining that they haven’t had their nails done in two weeks. Well, I want to say to them now, “At least you have nails to do! At least you have a hand!”

Maybe it’s the gift of having become successful late in life, but I feel so incredibly lucky to have the life I do. I am blessed to work in a field I love, to do projects I care about, and to be appreciated for what I bring to the table. When someone hands me a glass of champagne, I sure don’t check the label to see whether it’s worthy of my consumption.

Back to Walter Reed. I thought these soldiers would be furious and sad. I spent a long time with Sergeant Gray, and we spoke very frankly, so I know she has moments of despair, but she pulls herself out of them. She is committed to moving forward. And that’s a quality I saw in all of these soldiers: a total commitment to working hard and figuring out how to make the most of whatever they have.

“How do you rationalize this tragic accident to yourself?” I asked Reinita.

“I don’t even try to,” she said. “Things happen, and this happened. I’d like to think things happen for a reason. We never know why, but this has given me such a sense of who I am, independent of this leg I’ve lost. I’ve focused on my family in a way I hadn’t before.”

I have so much respect for her, and for everyone at that hospital, and for all our veterans. Each day I think about them and
the other people I’ve met in the course of my travels who are enthusiastic about their lives, and I try to remember them when I encounter someone who has everything—money, fame, and legs—and yet complains constantly about how hard they have it.

That’s something the staff at Walter Reed has no patience for: whining. They give tough love. They are not coddling those patients with whom they spend so much time. When Reinita was struggling to get up from the mat on which she was doing her physical therapy, I bent down to get her crutches. The physical therapist shot me a look.

“I shouldn’t do that?” I asked her.

She shook her head. And together we watched Reinita learn to stand up on her own.

I am so grateful to Dr. Oz for giving me the chance to go to Walter Reed, let alone to be a part of his core team. I always love appearing on his show, because I genuinely believe he’s having a hugely positive impact on his viewers.

When the producers approached me about being a regular guest, I thought it might be fun. I had seen Dr. Oz on
Oprah
and liked his bedside manner. But it’s been even more fulfilling than I anticipated. He has genuine warmth and a very clear and articulate way of communicating. He doesn’t dumb things down, but the way he speaks is accessible (his producers have suggested that I with my fancy vocabulary don’t always manage this …). He’s not an alarmist, which is so refreshing.

I love the part of his show that teaches the audience about what is and isn’t normal when it comes to their bodies. The audience has placards with
normal
written on one side and
not normal
on the other, and they vote on topics before he explains the truth behind them. I learned that snoring was not
normal, for example. There’s a lot of content packed into his show. And I’m not surprised that he has one of the top daytime TV talk shows in America.

Dr. Oz was the one who wanted us to go to Walter Reed to take a look at the place and see what we could do, and it really did change my life. I am tempted to rent a bus and drive a bunch of self-involved New Yorkers down to D.C. to see the physical therapy wing. “We’re going to take a little trip, people! Come with me, all you mopers!”

Can’t you see Martha Stewart standing there in the middle of Walter Reed? She’d kill me for saying this, but I like to imagine the pre-Camp Cupcake Martha surveying the scene and then saying, “This is nothing compared to the disappointment of a room-temperature nut.”

N
OW
I
WANT TO
talk seriously about people who aren’t just depressed about their nails, but who are truly depressed or who are going through hard times without a staff of military doctors on hand. I have been there, and I want to reassure you that I know how impossible it feels. I promise you that things will get better if you are committed to climbing out of whatever hole you find yourself in.

First of all, there is no shame in undergoing therapy. I know there’s still a stigma in much of the country, and I think that’s too bad. Here in New York, the questions you hear most often are, “Where’s your apartment?” and “Who’s your therapist?”

I don’t think everyone needs to go all the time (nor can everyone afford to), but I do think everyone at some point or other can benefit from a little chat with a psychologist, whether it’s when the kids leave for college or when you’ve lost your job or
when you’ve had a painful breakup or when someone close to you has died or when you’ve for no discernible reason lost the joy in life.

I think people are afraid to admit to problems, because once they admit to them, then those problems become real. But everybody has problems. If you think you don’t have any, then you do have a problem. Being in denial or feeling you can’t talk about things is so dangerous. You have to do
something
about whatever your struggles are. It’s what gives us resources to move forward. It’s what life
is
.