Living: 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.