I actually learned to tie a bow tie from a friend of my parents', a friend my father dismissed as someone who "thinks he's Peter Pan." Mike, my parents' friend, lived in New York. He had gone to Harvard, class of 1928, and spent his working life in the retail business as an executive, starting in handbags. My junior year in college I used to escape from my family during vacations and stay with Mike and his wife, who always welcomed young people. Mike wrote poetry. He took Chinese-cooking courses at a time when Chinese restaurants specialized in egg foo young and brown sauces. He specially painted a wall of his apartment on which he projected films of the sea crashing against rocks, so that he could "hold nature to my bosom." He owned a negative-ion machine, which he would turn on when he retired for the night in a pessimistic mood; it would pump out enough good vibrations during his sleep to allow him to awake an optimist. "A bow tie is like the ideal life," Mike told me. "You have to play with it, tweak it, to get it right. Even then, of course, it's always a bit askew. But it should be." He stood next to me in front of his full-length closet mirror and walked me through the steps: "Let the ends hang down, left side longer than right. Left hand over right hand, make a knot, form a bow with the front piece, flip over the back half, search for the little hole . . . and pull the end through. Now you fiddle and diddle and decide who you are in the bow-tie spectrum."

"What do you mean?" I asked Mike, as he undid my tie and signaled me to try it.

"Well," he said, "the little-polka-dot people are generally lawyers, professors, or doctors. Stripes are what these same lawyers, professors, or doctors wear on weekends--more informal. A tie with a single stripe and little figures like animals represents a club--golfing, social, or professional--to which the wearer belongs. You will be expected to know this and not to inquire as to what these little figures mean."

I know that bow-tie people tend to appear cocksure of themselves--people like Professor I. B. Cohen, of Harvard; Archibald Cox, of the Watergate hearings; Louis Farrakhan. They are also often short men, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Senator Paul Simon. Mike at the time told me to be careful of short men who are cocksure of themselves. Luckily, I suppose, they often wear bow ties--the dead giveaway.

I practiced my tie-tying back in Boston, thrilled that I could master the art without having to give extra points to my old roommate.

One of my other roommates that junior year was James MacArthur, Helen Hayes's son, a man who later played the role of Dano on television's Hawaii Five-O. His mother was about to open in a play on Broadway, Time Remembered, by Jean Anouilh. Her co-stars were Susan Strasberg, the daughter of the director Lee Strasberg, and a young Welshman starting his American career, Richard Burton. The play was having tryouts in Boston, and MacArthur's roommates were invited to opening night and to the cast party afterward, at the Ritz. I wore my club bow tie, the kind you are not supposed to ask about. At the cast party I haunted Susan Strasberg, knowing that she had to fall for a Harvard junior with just the right hint of insouciance at his neck. The more I chased her, the more she chased Richard Burton, escaping me constantly by jumping onto his lap and burying her head in his neck. Burton was drunk, and talking about how he was responsible for the discovery of Dylan Thomas. I kept trying to butt in to their conversation. At one point Strasberg excused herself to go to the ladies' room. Burton looked at me as if I were an annoying undergraduate. He pointed a finger at me--or, rather, at my bow tie. "Which are you?" he said, in that incredible voice. "A waiter or a clown?" I flushed my bow tie down the Ritz toilet system and into Boston Harbor, and I heard Helen Hayes tell her son, as I was leaving the party, "He seems like such a nice young man . . . so neatly dressed."