Yes, She Minds Our Bad Manners : Etiquette: Guide author Letitia Baldrige has a word of advice for the uncivil modern age: Think of the other person.

The 1980s will never be remembered as the Decade of Good Manners.

After all, it was a time when even public figures failed as role models for civility. Who can forget Zsa Zsa Gabor slapping a cop, Morton Downey Jr. mouthing off on his TV talk show, Roseanne Barr mooning the crowd at the 1989 World Series and reports of billionaire hotel queen Leona Helmsley snarling at a waiter: “Your nails aren’t clean! Get out of my sight!”

But when it comes to the ill-mannered among us, don’t ask the woman Time magazine once hailed as America’s leading arbiter of manners to name names.

“I don’t ever knock anybody,” Letitia Baldrige says politely, then adds with a hearty laugh, “that’s bad manners.”

Sipping English breakfast tea in the dining room of the Red Lion Inn, the woman who revised “The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette” in the ‘70s and wrote “Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to Executive Manners” in the ‘80s wistfully recalled those bygone days when good manners were the norm rather than the exception.

“And if you were a gas station attendant or a professor or a countess, it was all the same set of manners,” she said. “We were kinder to each other, nicer.”

But that was then, and this is now.

And as Baldrige illustrates in her magnumopus, the 646-page “Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to the New Manners for the ‘90s” (Rawson Associates, $24.95, out earlier this year), the current decade calls for a new set of rules for social conduct.

Technology has created its own decorum problems. And Baldrige, who first came to national prominence when she served as Jacqueline Kennedy’s chief of staff in the White House, set down her teacup and served up a list of her personal pet peeves.

Take the bride who didn’t get her wedding invitations to the printer on time and faxed them instead: “So instead of a beautiful invitation coming in the mail with all the beautifully handwritten envelopes, people got a slimy piece of fax paper.”

How about call waiting, which Baldrige calls an invention of the devil? “It’s just infuriating, particularly when they call you and get you out of the shower. You’re standing there dripping wet, and then they say, ‘Oh, sorry, just a minute,’ and they go to their call-waiting call and come back two or three minutes later. It’s incredibly rude.”

And let’s not forget those people who bring their cellular phones into restaurants “and they have someone call the restaurant just so everybody will look at them. It’s so pathetic. You’re trying to enjoy this relaxing lunch and this jarring beeper goes off.”

Baldrige was in Costa Mesa last week to speak at a luncheon benefit for the AIDS and homeless programs of With Style, a collaboration of the Design Alliance to Combat AIDS and the South Coast chapter of the International Furnishings and Design Assn.

Her appearance was part of a publicity tour for her just-published novel, “Public Affairs Private Relations” (Doubleday, $18.95). The novel, her first, is a love story whose heroine runs a public relations and marketing agency, something Baldrige did for years after working in the White House.

Baldrige even manages to weave manners and etiquette into her novel. During a dinner party, one of the characters is caught rearranging the place cards so she’ll have a better seat. That, Baldrige said, “is one of the worst things you can do, and she’s caught at it.”

And when the interview focus changes to “The New Manners for the ‘90s” and her role as one of the foremost experts on social and professional etiquette, Baldrige is well-mannered enough not to protest.

“Doubleday is used to my talking about manners because I am, after all, known for that, and that’s my persona,” she said. “And it’s important, and I love to talk about it.”

A tall woman (she’s 6-foot-1) with a somewhat regal bearing and a Vassar education, Baldrige tends at first to intimidate people, who fear they must mind their p’s and q’s when they meet her. As she good-naturedly concedes, “Some people get clutched.”

But although she takes the subject of manners and etiquette seriously, the Washington-based columnist and lecturer known as “Tish” by friends and family is gracious, good-humored and as down-to-earth as her Nebraska roots.

Baldrige, the daughter of a two-term Republican congressman, traces her own good manners to her childhood home in Omaha. It all comes back to the home, she says. “That’s where manners are taught to us; they’re ingrained in us. Parents teach children by their example.”

One of the reasons good manners are so lacking today, Baldrige says, “is mom and dad are not home with the kids enough. They’re divorced, they’re playing golf, they’re driving on the freeway, and the kids are on their own.”

Indeed, times have changed. Thus “The New Manners for the ‘90s,” which covers everything from common courtesies and workplace manners to mealtime decorum and dating. There’s no lack of topics.

“Of course,” Baldrige said, “I talk about beepers going off in the middle of a concert and people being late and not apologizing, and people not RSVP-ing, and adult children going back to live with their parents, which we didn’t have in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

In the book, Baldrige lists a dozen details that should be worked out before an adult child moves back into the parents’ home (which usually comes about for economic reasons). They include setting rules for privacy, sharing work around the house and determining what compensation is to be made for room and board.

But pardon the interruption. As Baldrige was saying:

” . . . and I talk about the problems of sex and the problems of condoms. I’ve had more young women say to me, ‘I want the man I’m with to use a condom and he won’t, and I have to go through with it.’ So I tell them, ‘You don’t have to go through with it--either he gets the condom or there’s no soap.’ ”

Baldrige is also bothered by men and women who ask at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of the date.

“That’s a direct insult to the other person,” she said. “It says ‘I don’t care enough about you to ask you ahead’ or ‘You are obviously the 14th person on my list.’ And you may have been the first on the person’s list, but it just doesn’t get around to showing consideration.”

Baldrige says all the technological advances of the late 20th Century have caused a breakdown in person-to-person communication.

“We have lost the art of conversation,” she said. “People are shy and don’t know how to approach other people, and they are missing opportunities for relationships. And no one’s entertaining at home anymore. They’re not having people over for dinner.”

She remembers the days when she and her husband and other couples were at each others’ houses for dinner parties three or four times a week.

“That,” she said, “is where the good communication occurs: friends meeting new people, people telling jokes and telling what went on at the office that was so awful and getting consolation and support from the others. The art of communication consists not only of making conversation, but knowing how to entertain people and doing it.”

So where did we all go wrong? Baldrige traces the trend from good to bad manners to the social upheaval that began in the mid-’60s.

“There was a tremendous change and a lack of respect for older people and authority, and it was youth power, free love, free sex,” she said. “That really upset the decorum of social behavior which people of all economic classes recognized and revered. And now we’ve been freewheeling it. We’ve been absolutely ‘everyone unto his own.’ ”

Baldrige is guardedly optimistic about manners’ making a comeback in the ‘90s, that there will be “a return to grass-roots values.”

“It’s a fascinating time,” she said. “People are very aware that we’re getting nastier. We’re shouting and screaming at one another on the freeways. In the old days when some stupid driver would do something in front of you, you’d cuss at him but inside your car. Now you practically drive him off the road. You open your windows and yell so that everyone can hear your four-letter words at this person, and maybe you get out and fight him.

“That just didn’t used to happen. We dealt with our confrontational nastiness by holding it in and cooling ourselves off. We chilled out, so to speak.”

Are the flaring tempers on our freeways just another indication of society’s increasing lack of good manners? Or is it something else?

“It’s called a lack of discipline,” Baldrige said. “It’s thinking before you act, and it’s holding yourself in. And there’s another thing that’s quite another part of the package: manners. It’s also a thing called kindness and consideration.”

“You know,” she added, “I saw two kids in a McDonald’s the other day. They were sitting at a table across the room and a blind person was having a terrible time navigating through the crowd and bumped into the two kids. And they didn’t help the blind person! They just sat and watched him flounder.

“I couldn’t stand it. I got up and I went over and I whispered in their ears: ‘You’re young, you’re attractive, you look affluent, you’re probably doing all right. Why didn’t you help someone in need?’ And one of the boys said to me, ‘Because we didn’t know him.’

“And I said, ‘Help people whether you know them or not.’ ”

That, Baldrige said, is the bottom line when it comes to defining good manners.

“It’s thinking about somebody other than yourself. It’s being aware of other people and helping them out and not doing anything to offend them and just being nice. And it hasn’t anything to do with money. It has everything to do with character.”