How to make new friends

Advice from Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, Russell Baker, and Jim Davis (creator of Garfield the Cat)

            A rule of thumb when riding New York subways: Never make eye contact with fellow passengers. It could be considered confrontational and lead to an argument or worse. But I’ve also noticed that when a handicapped person comes down the aisle looking for coins, it is usually the most poorly-dressed people who give.

In this troubled new age we constantly have to remind our children to be wary of strangers. But how do we start friendships with new people we really want to get to know? Do we always have to remain behind the walls of Fortress Self? Obviously we all have to make choices, but in many settings – in church, at work, in meetings, we are usually safe to reach out to new people.  But there are still all kinds of barriers, including our own emotional baggage of shyness, or memories of past cocktail-party slights where we began a conversation with a stranger only to have him move on when you were in mid-sentence.

Does shyness mean you are anti-social?  Psychologist Louis Schmidt of McMaster University in Canada has used brain wave machinery to test that statement. He found that shyness activities are connected with the left side of the brain while sociability traits are associated with the right side. The same individuals may have both traits that are at war with each other at parties and other social gatherings. They are shy about approaching people, but at the same time they want to talk with them. Shyness becomes a Berlin Wall they have to breach or tunnel under to obtain the freedom and pleasure of talking with other people with different ideas and viewpoints.

Fortunately many successful people have mastered the art of meeting others and making them feel comfortable.  They automatically use tools of humor, candor and sometimes self-effacing comments to put others at ease.   Here are four people I have met who have made their days richer with these enlightened personality traits.

I drove past miles of Georgia red soil to Plains to interview the former President and First Lady, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.  The Carter home is hidden behind a high concrete wall. A disembodied voice greets you from a hidden speaker as you pull up to the gate and asks you to identify yourself.

            The house itself is very modest, the same one Jimmy and Rosalynn had lived in before the presidency. A secret service agent rechecked my identify and then led me into a tiny living room.  I was nervous at the prospect of talking with two of the world’s most famous people.

Rosalynn  came into the room with a wide smile and rushed up to me as if her Cousin Burt had just come to visit after a ten year absence.

             “Jimmy will be out in just a minute,” she said.  Then she immediately began asking me about my work.

             “I write books and magazine articles about interesting people and about unusual places to travel around the world,” I said.

            “Oh, you write about travel,” she said. “I have a story for you.” Then she lowered her voice as if she were about to tell me something very confidential. Which she was.

            “When you finish your interview, go into downtown Plains. Right across from the railroad station you’ll see the Plains Bed & Breakfast. Go in and tell them I sent you. Ask if you can go up to the second floor and see the front bedroom.”

            “What’s the significance of that room?” I asked.

            She lowered her voice even more so that I had to tilt my head toward her to hear.

            “That’s where Jimmy was conceived.”

After a few seconds of silence following this announcement, she said, “Jimmy’s mother and father honeymooned in that room and nine months later he was born.”

After that sudden burst of unexpected candor, I felt like I really was cousin Burt come to visit the Carters. I was completely relaxed for the interview with the former President and my new friend, cousin Rosalynn.

A few minutes later Jimmy Carter came into the room.  He seemed a little stiff at first.  But he sat next to me on a large couch with Rosalynn on the other side. It was a small physical gesture that made me feel at home.

I began by asking about his travels after he left the White House.

“We try to make our trips multi-dimensional,” Carter said. “If I’m going to do any negotiating or have any conversations with foreign leaders, I have to do pretty extensive briefing. But we try to schedule our trips when we have options to do other things. In the fall we would go hiking. I like fly fishing. And we have just taken up skiing eight days ago.”

Then Carter told me a story that presented a different side of his personality, a willingness to be self-effacing. In Egypt he had gone for an early morning sightseeing tour of the pyramids, accompanied by Secret Service agents and Egyptian officials.

Coming down the road was an old man leading a somewhat unruly camel.  The man stopped and stared at Carter and began to gesture and speak loudly. Carter asked one of the Egyptian officials what the man was saying.

“He would be honored if you rode his camel.”

Jimmy Carter is a remarkably kind man. He is also a politician who knows a photo op when he sees one.

“I climbed on the camel,” Carter said. “It was about three times the size of a normal camel. Suddenly the camel bolted, and I was hanging on for dear life. I had an audience by that time of other people. It was an absolutely ludicrous situation.

“Finally I was ready to get off, but language was a barrier, and I didn’t want to appear to be too distressed. I was trying to be manly and presidential. The villager grabbed the camel and led him about a hundred feet down the street. He finally forced the camel to kneel. When I got off, one of the interpreters told me what the old man was saying.  He was trying to congratulate me because I was the first person who ever rode his camel.”

Rosalynn said, “I wrote that up for our book, but Jimmy was too proud to let me use it.”

I felt I was in the company of people who had mastered the art of friendship with strangers.

How I came to be sitting across from Diane Sawyer on the set of CBS Morning News one day is worth retelling, possibly entitled Pride Goeth before a Fall.  But I did learn several valuable lessons in getting along with others.

Some months before I had written Consumer Handbook for Travelers, published by Simon & Schuster. The S&S pr department had arranged for me to be interviewed by Joan Lunden on ABC’s Good Morning America. The talent coordinator for the program was a very helpful woman I will call “Helen” (because I have forgotten her name).  Helen was very friendly and helpful.  She told me what to expect on my first appearance on national TV.   After the interview, I sent her a bottle of wine and a note, “Thank you for being so helpful and giving a boost to my career.”

Months later Helen became a talent programmer for CBS Morning News. She remembered either me or the bottle of wine because her assistant called me and asked if I would agree to be interviewed by Diane Sawyer about the growing interest in Bed & Breakfast travel.  Naturally I gave an explosive “Yes!”

Diane was charming as we talked before the program. I asked her some general questions about her work on TV.

She said, “I’ll bet people want to know, what’s Diane Sawyer really like?”

During the show, I talked about the growth in travelers’ interest in B&Bs and some scenes from a rural B&B that a CBS crew had shot the day the program was to be aired.  I thought afterwards the interview and meeting Diane Sawyer had been a great experience.

About three weeks later my answering service picked up a message from someone at CBS. I had trouble understanding the name. I was involved in a rush writing project and didn’t get around to returning the call until about a week later.

I reached the man’s secretary and asked who he was.

She said, “He’s president of CBS News.”

“Let me talk to him,” I said, as quietly as my increased heart beat would allow.

He came on the phone. “We’d like to have you join us on the CBS Morning News. You would report on travel and recreation.”

After a long pause, I began to ask questions about what would be involved.

He said, “I can’t negotiate salary or benefits with you. That has to be done through your agent.”

“I have only been on TV twice in my life. I don’t have an agent.”

“Well, I can call Dan Rather’s agent and ask him to represent you.  Would that be satisfactory?”

“Certainly,” I said, hoping that the sound of my heart was not noticeable over the phone line.

A few hours later the agent called. He said he would negotiate fees and working arrangements. “My commission is only 5% because you already have the job.”

Later that week I was in the CBS office signing employment papers. The agent had done very well. I would be paid $700 for each appearance. I would be picked up for the program at my home by limo and then returned home by the same driver.

I was, to put it simply, in hog heaven. And much of it had happened because I had made friends with a woman named Helen.

I was assigned a production assistant who suggested travel topics and helped brief me on what to do.  For the next ten months I made regular appearances, meeting fascinating people in the Green Room, ranging from Isaac Asimov to Candace Bergen.

 Then I talked on camera with either Diane Sawyer or Bill Curtis. Bill Curtis was always friendly but seemed to enjoy asking me questions I couldn’t answer.

My pride (and ego) grew with each appearance.  I was invited to more parties. The Governor of Michigan took me to lunch at a very upscale New York City restaurant to tell me about his beautiful state.   My mail swelled.  I even heard from long-lost Gieseking relatives in Ohio.

However, in March, I suddenly stopped receiving calls from my production assistant informing me about the next show to prepare.  My calls to her were not returned.  I later learned from the grapevine that CBS had hired Danny Kaye’s daughter, Dina Kaye – a travel writer, to replace me.

I went through the usual rationalizations probably most of us do at times of deep disappointments.  I just had my “fifteen minutes” of fame.  Nothing lasts forever. I had a great run and met great people.

But there was one rationalization that was really true.  My ego had been getting out of hand. I have learned that I am a much nicer person to everyone when things are not going that well for me.

I also had learned a lot  by watching the pros such as Bill Curtis and Diane Sawyer, particularly how they  handled interviews and dealt with awkward moments to put others at ease.

Which brings me back to that moment I was talking about earlier, sitting across from Diane Sawyer during one of my first appearances.

A young man was crouching beneath a TV camera across from Diane as she sat on a stool doing an intro for a story. As she talked and gestured, her skirt began to inch up her attractive legs, and the young man tensed like an Olympic sprinter on the starting line. As soon as there was a commercial break, he dashed across the studio and tugged her skirt down.  His job would certainly qualify as one of the more unusual ways to break into show business. He had become the Official Sawyer Skirt Puller.

Diane seemed to sense the embarrassment he felt and the probable ribbing he must have taken from fellow workers. When he did it again at the next commercial break, she beamed and said, “I think I’m in love.”

Lessons learned. Be kind to everyone who helps you along the way, up and down.

Keep doing things – even when you fail. You give serendipity more chances to work for you.

Every failure can sometimes open up other doors. Years later the VISA card marketing people selected me to tour the country as their radio/TV travel spokesperson, directly as a result of my appearances on CBS.

 “Life is always walking up to us and saying, ‘Come on in, the living’s fine,’ and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.”

That quote is classic Russell Baker, with philosophy and humor served on two slices of wry.

Mention the name Russell Baker today and many people think of the rather staid, dignified-looking man on Masterpiece Theatre on Public Television. This former New York Times humor columnist, best-selling author and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has hosted this program since 1993, writing and delivering his  sometimes offbeat and insightful views of the production viewers are about to see.

I met Russell many years before he became Mr. Masterpiece Theatre, at his apartment in Greenwich Village. I wanted to talk with him about the role of humor in making friends and creating a more congenial atmosphere for everyone. Here is what he told me.

“Humor is nothing more than an eccentric perspective. It’s looking at the same event that everybody else looks at, but seeing it in a different way. One of the chief elements of humor is surprise. What makes you laugh is the sudden surprise of the unexpected thing you’ve just seen or heard. The way you release this surprise is with a laugh or a smile.

“Humor lowers the temperature, gets the blood pressure down, slows the pulse beat a little. You know, there is something relaxing about a laugh. It’s good for you. People in emotional fights or shock can be changed with a laugh.  It changes the physiology.

“But don’t be a wise guy. Nobody likes a wise guy. If you’re telling a humorous story, make sure the joke is on you or you’re involved in the story. It’s much better to be the butt of your own humor. If you make someone else the butt of a joke, you turn that person into a victim.  If I’m dealing with you in a roomful of people, and I make you look like a complete fool and have the whole room laughing, then if I ever need your help or your friendship I sure won’t get it. I am never going to get it. Whatever I do for you in the future, you’ll keep thinking. ‘That’s the guy who made a fool of me.’  If you’re going to make a fool of somebody, you’d better make a fool of yourself. Then you get the sympathy vote of your listeners.

“Humor is like a fine oil; it lubricates motors, it makes the difficult easier. If you have to say something difficult to somebody and you can do it in a humorous style, it can ease the tension.

“But you have to use judgment. I think one of the worst things you can do is practice two or three jokes and go around repeating them.  That often makes people tense because after a time we all get to know the punch line.  And here that person comes again with his canned smile and his canned joke, and you feel your facial muscles tensing up. You’re getting ready to laugh whether it’s funny or not. And it really creates tension in the person you’re dealing with unless you’re a natural joke teller. I know only five or six people who are natural joke tellers. These are very rare people. 

“You also have to be careful with irony. Readers or listeners may say, ‘Oh! what a thing to say!’ And you’re saying just the opposite, but they just don’t get the irony.  Their minds just do not work that way. And there are a lot of different styles of minds.

“Be very careful about using irony in business communications. My rule about business communications is essentially the same as if I were an officer in the Marine Corps. Tell people what you mean and make sure they understand it.

“For the same reason you have to lay off the satire in business communications. It’s like walking through a nest of rattlesnakes. When I write a business letter, there’s none of that. I just want to tell people as straightforwardly as I can what business I have.

 “Humor is like using a straight razor. You want to be very good at it or very careful with it.

“Humor can sometimes be very effective in making a point.  Many people who have been good in the U.S. Senate have been good storytellers. They calm things down, with a story or a laugh at themselves.

“I remember one day when Lyndon Johnson was a Senator and responding to one of his colleagues he disagreed with. He said, ‘Somebody’s been trying to have it both ways. The Senator reminds me of a time back in Texas in a little school district. They had to hire a new teacher, back in the Great Depression. Jobs were very hard to get and a poor, destitute teacher drifted into the county and had applied for the job. He was interviewed by the school board. The head of the board told him that his credentials looked pretty good. But that he should know there was a big dispute in the community. Half the people said the world is round and the other half said the world is flat. How would he teach that subject to his class? The teacher said, ‘I can teach it either way.’

I asked him about the other aspects of humor in our lives.

“Spoken humor is entirely different from written humor. There is no relationship. You can be very funny on paper and be a dreadful bore on the platform and vice versa.  There are great TV comics in this country. Some are very funny. But if you asked   them to write a paragraph, they could put you to sleep before you got to the period.

“If you’re giving a speech, you don’t have to list all of your accomplishments. As I said before, I think the best way to start is to have a laugh at your own expense.  You want to tell the audience, yes, I’ve had some success in my life, but I’m just as human as you are. I mash my thumb with a hammer when I try to hang picture on a Saturday afternoon.  No one expects you to tell yawkers like a TV comic.  But you can create a feeling of good humor about yourself simply by showing that you are human.

“Humor often can’t cross national boundaries. What’s funny in one country may not be funny at all in another. Humor is part of the product of a particular culture and comes out of that culture.

I asked Russell to give an example of some jokes he told on himself.

“Well, I’ve never understood money. You know, I realize that investing is a good thing to do for tax reasons apparently. But I’m a real idiot about it. I remember having lunch with Art Buchwald one day, and he was telling me about his money. And he said in all seriousness, ‘You ought to get into cattle.’ I didn’t want to seem like a complete fool, so I said, ‘Wow. No kidding. Get into cattle?’

“I walked back to the office, and I kept thinking. How do I get into cattle. There’s no brokerage house along the way I can ask about getting into cattle. Who do you call and say, ‘I want to get into cattle.’  But all of it seemed utterly baffling to me. Like reading Sanskrit.”

I asked Russell where he got his ideas for his columns.

“Nobody knows where ideas come from. It’s the brain chemistry. I read a lot. The most important thing in writing for newspapers is to be current. When I sit down to write, I’m like any businessman in a sense. I think I’ve got to reach a big market – readers in 300 newspapers.  I’ve got to write about something that is going to interest enough of them to keep them reading. So I begin by saying, ‘What subject is everybody interested in?’  I have to change gears sometimes, or I become a bore.  So you start looking for offbeat things, about which there may not even be much interest.  But then you begin to think, if I can put the proper twist on it and make it attractive, I can get people to read. But those are hard periods in writing when there’s little apparent demand for a given subject. That’s when you work the hardest.

‘’You’ve got to keep seeing people and stay in motion. If I hunker down too long in a burrow, it gets harder and harder to generate new ideas. Also things happen to you when you go out. I start with something little.  I go out on the subway and somebody steps on your toe. A story on subways. I remember working on a Sunday, and I couldn’t do a thing in writing. I worked for three hours. Then I walked up the street – maybe I would see something. At that time I lived on 58^th street across from a 48-story high-rise apartment house. I walked up the street and I walked back. As I started to go into the door of my house, there was a huge splat right next to me – a potato. Somebody had thrown a raw potato off one of the top floors of that 48^th floor building. If it had hit me it would have killed me. And I was delighted. Here’s a column. What a way to die! I could see the headline, ‘Potato mashes man.’ And I had my column.”

Ron Hoff was my boss and friend for many years at Ogilvy & Mather, Inc., in New York. He headed a creative group that developed some outstanding advertising campaigns, including the “Only in America” ads for the United States Travel Service that helped bring more than a million visitors to the United States and the “Merrill Lynch is Bullish on America” ads that have become an advertising classic. It was in Ron’s group that I first met Dick Kline, soon to become a lifelong friend, and Bob Clive, the former art director of LIFE and Time magazines who later became my business partner in Gieseking & Clive, Inc.

Ron went on to other major advertising positions and became a nationally-known presenter and keynote speaker. His book  I can see you Naked has been called “America’s best book on making presentations.”

In this book he finds many ways of showing how to build rapport with an audience. My favorite section is when he talks about two dogs that entered a business meeting and showed how they could endear themselves instantly to an audience in ways other human presenters could emulate. It also happens to be a formula for making friends.

Here are a few of the dogs winning traits:

1.      Dogs always seem glad to see you.

2.      There is no artifice or pretense about their greeting. They just come right up to you and make friends.

3.      They show the same affectionate attention to everybody.  They’re demonstrative without being pushy.

4.      Their message is simple. We like you. We like being here. We’ll help you any way we can.

5.      They have no hidden agendas.

6.      Dogs have a great sense of knowing when they’re no longer the center of attention. They just go over and lie down. They don’t go overtime.

But now I would like to leave the dogs and tell about a cat-lover who knows how to make a point without offending people.

            As Jim Davis has discovered, sometimes the way to make people like and trust you is to be candid, but whenever possible add a lighter touch that shows you are on their side. He created Garfield the Cat, star of hundreds of Sunday funnies, in that spirit.

We all know from the newspaper headlines that obesity is a growing problem (no pun intended), particularly among teenagers.

How would Garfield, no slim cat himself, handle this obesity question.  I asked Davis about Garfield and diets. It turned into an audio comic strip because Davis’ voice and inflections really changed when he answered first as himself and then as Garfield.

Jim Davis:  “Garfield seems to touch something in many people. For example, I get many letters from overweight people. They tell me that Garfield helps to relieve some of their guilt feelings and put things in perspective. While there are medical reasons for some people to control their weight, being a little overweight may not be the worst thing in the world for others. Garfield is a militant cat who proudly defends his right to be just what he is – a tubby tabby.”

Garfield:  “Ooo – I’m not overweight. I’m undertall.”

Reinventing yourself

Think about:

Re-read what Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter and Russell Baker said during their conversations. Each, almost by second nature, used a different way to quickly build rapport with a stranger. Rosalynn used the surprise of sudden candor, creating an immediate intimacy. Jimmy Carter was not afraid to tell a story on himself, a U.S. president out of control on a wild camel. Russell Baker was also not afraid to use self-effacing humor. I have never seen them again and a number of years have passed, but I remember each of them with genuine pleasure.

Take action:

Do something nice or say something pleasant or funny (in a kind way) to at least one person today. You may create a memory that lasts a long time.

Words to consider: 

“The test of an enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.”

Logan Pearsall Smith