Manners: 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...

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