At a luncheon, at the Regency Hotel, in honor of Cyd Charisse, the dancer and actress, because her legs were the first pair of legs to be elected to the newly established publicity abstraction called the Hall of Fame for Famous Legs, two women said these things to each other:
FIRST WOMAN: Men don’t know how to talk to each other. Men will go out and they will play a game of tennis and they will have a drink, but they don’t know how to touch. They don’t know how to get into their emotions.
SECOND WOMAN: Yes.
FIRST WOMAN: I feel sorry for men. I look at them and they look so helpless, and I think, God!
SECOND WOMAN: Yes.
FIRST WOMAN: I think things are changing little by little, though. I think among a few men there is beginning to be some loosening up.
SECOND WOMAN: Yes.
FIRST WOMAN: I was talking to the designer Emanuel Ungaro the other day, and I asked him, because he is a Frenchman, who of the men he knew in America today he would say represented this new kind of attitude in American men. I mean men who are beginning to seem more open about themselves, about the problems men have getting through in the world, about how they really deal with their feelings. And you know what he said? He said that the only man he could think of was Alan Alda. And you know what? I had to agree with him.
SECOND WOMAN: Yes.
FIRST WOMAN: Alan Alda is a very interesting man. Did you know he was named Man of the Year? I have heard him talk on television shows about his life. He is very sensitive to the needs of women—especially women in a marriage situation. You know, he is the star of a TV show and he has to work in Hollywood, but he makes sure that every weekend he gets home to New Jersey and sees his wife and his children, and he and his wife talk to each other every day. And I don’t know if you know that he is a very good-looking man. But that’s it—he doesn’t let his good looks go to his head. He’s still regular, he still wants to go home to his wife, he still wants to see his children. I think that will be part of being the new type of man we’ll be seeing. I think that men will know that they are good-looking and they will just go beyond it, you know—not try to use it like some kind of weapon. Then they can get into other areas, other things.
SECOND WOMAN: Yes.
FIRST WOMAN: Are you married?
SECOND WOMAN: Yes.
FIRST WOMAN: Then you know what I am talking about?
SECOND WOMAN: No.
—October 6, 1980