Cocktail Kissing

At last month's opening of Lincoln Center. Conductor Leonard Bernstein seized an intermission well-wisher with operatic gusto, dropped a kiss upon her cheek, and offered her his own, slightly more ravaged, cheek in return. The kissee, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, looked pleased; but the moment, recorded on nationwide television, brought some cries of public outrage. "Distasteful'' and "disgusting," sniffed the proper to the polltakers; and though Gossip Dorothy Kilgallen soothed one righteous reader by explaining that "it was the sort of 'social' kiss customary in high society," she went on: "it's the New Frontier, so you've got to expect the members to make a few new rules. Maybe kissing the First Lady on TV indicates an even higher status than being pushed into the Attorney General's pool with your clothes on."

Whatever its status and whoever the seekers, the kiss as greeting has moved out of the domain of theater and show business circles (where everyone has already kissed everyone else, and only the handshake denotes abiding love), and is fast becoming party protocol across the U.S. Like players in a familiar charade, men and women purse lips and brush cheeks with each other; besides the laying on of cheekbones, the gesture is accompanied by a smacking of mouth to air.

Targets & Practices. The social kiss requires a behavioral code of its own. Men who once marched forward into cocktail parties with abandon, hands outstretched and mouths dry, now find themselves skulking around doorways, trying to remember whom to kiss and whom not to (skip the wife's slinky onetime roommate, don't forget the host's plain sister). General rule is to leave the initiative to the woman. The man's problem is to be ready for a kiss, but not so far committed that he cannot smoothly recover if he is offered only a hand. And he must be clear about the target area--a few inches forward of the ear but well clear of the lips; smearing the lady's makeup is unforgivable.

Wives who loathe the hostess, love the host, clearly cannot kiss only the latter. (Best choice: kiss both.) Professionally, what about the boss's wife? (Let her kiss first.) Physically, how to avoid the host determined to bestow a really really warm welcome? (Embrace his wife until spontaneity ebbs.) Does a kiss upon entrance demand a similar display on the way out? (Only if the host blocks the only exit.)

Dilemmas & Differences. The hand shake may have looked awkward, certainly permitted less warmth and variety of delivery than the cocktail kiss. But it also posed fewer problems; in Chicago, for instance, where party circles often look more like squares, only good friends, college classmates and best friends of husbands and wives get kissed. In San Francisco, social kissing is frowned on for young adults and the unmarried, practiced mainly by married women over 30. Said an elderly man, withdrawing from a young woman's embrace: "I wish she wouldn't kiss me. It makes me feel so old." In Los Angeles, the cocktail kiss is as common as divorce, is most usually accompanied by the unbroken phrase: "Darlingwonder-fultoseeyouhowareyoucouldn'tbebetter-where'sthebar?'' And in Dallas, says one constant partygoer. "Since it all has to start somewhere, you may kiss anyone you have been introduced to, but you shouldn't look as if you would like to do it more than once."

The exception to the trend is Washington. Although there is more than enough inter-Kennedy kissing per Capitol to balance the usual cold formality of embassy and cabinet parties, most of the partygoing public is made up of people who got to Washington and to its parties by shaking hands, and are not about to forsake what has become a way of life.

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