By Glenn Arbery
Published in December 1st, 2005
Friendship was once understood as a necessary part of the good life.
Aristotle, for example, spent many pages of his Ethics dealing with it, concluding that a person would be lucky to have one good friend in a lifetime.
But friends on this level meant "one should in two bodies" - an ideal that long ago slipped away from us culturally, except in the best of marriages.
But the life on enjoyable friendships need not be so singular.
Real friendships are never calculated for their usefulness of one's ambitions in business or society.
More than any other insight, that's the key to the new book by Roger Horchow and his daughter Sally.
I asked sally Horchow whether they wrote The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple rules for Making Meaningful Connections with her father because Malcolm Gladwell mentioned him so prominently in his best-selling book The Tipping Point (2000)?
Yes and no, she said. Her friendship with Gladwell goes back to a time well before his own book was written.
She met him when friends set them up on dinner date in the early '90s.
"We hit if off as friends but nothing more than that," she said on the phone last week form her home in California.
"He actually wrote part of The Tipping Point in my house.
He kind of camped out here for a couple of months one summer working on his book."
Roger Horchow pioneered the first luxury mail-order catalog without a store to go with it (The Horchow Collection)
and produced major Broadway hits (Crazy for You and Kiss Me Kate).
Sally grew up in Dallas, where her parents and sisters still live.
She attended Hockaday through ninth grade before leaving to attend boarding school out east.
Although she hasn't really lived here since then, she has kept up her local connections,
and she drew on her friends for her October piece on Dallas for the Travel section of the New York Times.
But she always draws on a family trait that Gladwell discovered about the Horchows while he was writing his book: the ability to make and maintain friendships.
Sally introduced her father to Gladwell, who included him prominently in The Tipping Point as an example of a "Connector."
Gladwell, who had devised an "acquaintance survey," was astonished by the number of people that Roger Horchow knew, and he was convinced that friendship was part of his business strategy.
He was surprised to discover that Horchow never thought of friendship that way.
"It wasn't that his connections hadn't helped him," writes Gladwell.
"It's that he didn't think of his people collection as a business strategy."
That insight about her father is the key to the book that Sally Horchow is writing with him.
The Art of Friendship is available online to Christmas shoppers through either Neiman Marcus or Horchow, but it is also scheduled for publication by St. Martin's Press in the late summer of fall of next year.
The book both does and doesn't stem from Gladwell's prominent mention. They wanted to write in anyway.
"I met David Hale Smith, a Dallasite who is a book agent," said Roger Horchow.
"We had lunch and after hearing some of the old man's stories (mine) he suggested it might make a book.
After writing a first draft we decided it needed a more professional writer - which my daughter Sally is - so she took over re-doing the book, and finally the publisher and its editor helped as well.
Sally is a good writer and has the voice for this book."
But the fact that Gladwell had given them a segue did not hurt.
"In the introduction of the book we quote something from The Tipping Point which Malcolm said about how Dad cultivated these friendships, simply for the joy of doing so," said Sally.
"Making meaningful connections with peoples such a timely thing right now because our world is so cut up and no one has enough time."
Father and daughter at first thought that they would have different perspectives on friendship since he is in his 70's and she in her 30's.
"We thought it would be interesting to do a multigenerational look at maintaining friendships - and a sort of 'He said, she said' way to go about it."
It didn't work.
In fact, they agreed so much on the basic principles of connecting that the only real difference turned out to lie in whether they preferred e-mail (as she did) or long letters (as he did).
The idea of formulating "rules" for friendship also came out of practices that has always been implicit in the way they treated friendships.
One of her own favorite rules is "don't keep score."
"People tend to have a lot of expectations about friendships," she said.
"Some people are good hosts and they love to entertain.
Someone else may not be comfortable doing that at all.
But what they do do is provide a great ear when you are really having a problem."
What about her father's favorite rule?
"Don't keep score," he says, unaware that she had said the same thing.
"It's hard not to do, but in the long run, if you really like someone, you may often have to make three calls for every one or none that you get from them."
But speaking of connections, Sally gives the perfect example without even meaning to.
"The craziest fun thing happened with Malcolm!" she said.
"A close friend of mine in Los Angeles is a screenwriter named Steve Gaghan.
He wrote the movie Traffic. He and I were talking on the phone this summer and he was like,
'Oh, I didn't know you were such good friends with Malcolm Gladwell.
I just read Blink" - which hit the best-seller lists earlier this year - "and I think I know how to make it into a movie.'
"So I introduced Steve to Malcolm and they hit it off.
Long story short, last week they signed a $6 million deal with Universal to make the movie."
It's what friends do.
|
