Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

It feels ridicules to complain about a call from Bette Midler, but I feel like I can, because it’s not like she ever calls just to chat.  It’s always about an event.  Not long ago, she called to invite me to a fund-raiser for the New York Restoration project, her tree-planting initiative here in New York City.  Well, it wasn’t really an invite so much as an order.  “You are coming to this even I’m having, aren’t you?” she said. “And you are buying a tree, aren’t you?”
I did go, and I bought two trees, and it was all perfectly charming—but also, like all these things, a little painful.  I was sitting next to Martha Stewart at the dinner, and the second Bette stood up to speak, Martha vanished.  I turned around and she was gone, without a trace.
“Where’d she go,” I whispered to someone at the table.
“When she knows she’s about to get hit up for money, she does a disappearing act,” the person replied.
I should have her teach me that trick, I thought.

Usually people think of me as a surprisingly nice person as fashion people go, but occasionally someone will corner me on the street and say: “You’re so mean!” Often this is because people mistake me for Clinton Kelly from What Not to Wear—which I’m sure would disturb him to no end, because I could be his grandfather. When I determine that’s the case, I say, “I think you have me mistaken for—” Then they’ll interrupt and say, “I’ve been watching that show for years!” And I will say, “Then you really should know I’m not Clinton Kelly.”

With a certain amount of maturity, we can set up our own constraints. That’s a lot of what education is about—letting people set those assignments for us so that when we graduate we can start to set them for ourselves. Even now that I’m in my fifties, I still face certain situations where I have to admit that I need some rules to help me figure out what I should do. Bosses should think of themselves as fulfilling this kind of boundary-giving function that school and parents do. They need to be clear about expectations and rules so everyone knows when an employee is doing well or not doing well. And when expectations are not met, there should be logical consequences, whether that’s the loss of the job, a decrease in salary, or something less drastic. There is no reason, in any case, ever to yell. And yet we’ve all seen it: bosses who lose their tempers constantly.

When the news is happy, e-mail is fine. You can e-mail congratulations about babies, weddings, anything. But when it’s not? If it’s a death or other bad news, you have to be more formal. I wasn’t the only one who was a little horrified by Ashton Kutcher’s reference to his former girlfriend Brittany Murphy’s death. He wrote on Twitter: “2day the world lost a little piece of sunshine. My deepest condolences go out 2 Brittany’s family, her husband, & her amazing mother Sharon.” People use texting and e-mail for everything, but it’s not appropriate for somber situations. If you win an Oscar, tweet away, but if you’re talking about a death or an illness, you need to use more formal channels.

One little technology-taming tip, If you, too, are surprised by typos: I like to print out things I’m working on to read them on paper before I send them off. You miss a lot of things on the screen that are apparent when you’re looking at them on the page. Yes, there is the environment to think of, but—to paraphrase a certain celebrity on the topic of her fur coat being dead when she got it (“I didn’t kill it!” she said)—the tree’s already been taken down.

Going to church was not my favorite thing when I was young. From a very early age, I was very suspicious of our priest. My parents thought I was crazy and just trying to get out of going to services, but I said, “No, there really is something weird about that man.” Indeed, one day when I was nine or ten, the priest was up at the pulpit. He went into a silent prayer and … never came out of it. After a few minutes the ushers realized he’d left the plane of reality the rest of us were on, so they had an intervention and took him away. And yes: I smiled very smugly at my parents all the way home.

When people hear that I haven’t had a boyfriend since 1982, they often whisper, “Does he not have sex?” That’s right! You know, much of my one long-term boyfriend’s “I’m over this” was about not having the patience for me with regard to sex. I’ve always been kind of asexual. So now I can’t even consider sex without thinking about him and his disapproval. Talk about something that will make you lose the urge. That breakup was a cold shower to last a lifetime. Could I get psychiatric help and resume some kind of sex life at some point? Probably. But it’s a little late for that. And frankly, I am happy being celibate. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had thoughts. I am a human being. But I love my life and don’t feel any need to change it. Getting used to being alone was hard, but now that I’ve made a life for myself alone, I really like it. It’s been years since I’ve been interested in anyone. And I really think if you don’t need it, you don’t need it. As hard as it is for a lot of my friends to believe, I really am happy alone.

What do they say: Do what you love and the money will follow? It’s always been true for me. I had no expectation of personal success through this show. I never expected there would be a second season, much less a seventh. And I never expected to get famous in a million zillion years. While we were making Season 1, I just thought, If nothing else, this is going to be great cocktail-party-conversation fodder.