A BOOT CAMP FOR HIGH SOCIETY : YOU CAN TRAIN TO BE ROYALTY, OR JUST ACT LIKE IT, COURTESY OF AN ETIQUETTE EXPERT'S CRASH COURSE.

Byline: Glenn Gaslin Daily News Staff Writer

Darlene Prijatel can't get the string bean onto her fork.

She tries to get under it with the tines. It rolls off. She tries to stab it, pierce it, subdue it. It slips aside.

Eating anywhere else, she might use her fingers, maybe scoot the bean onto the fork, maybe just pick the thing up. But not here. Not in the swank Wyndham Bel Age Hotel in West Hollywood.

And certainly not in front of Marta Monahan, of all people. Not in front of this most elegant, this most upright, this most proper woman curiously watching the struggle with a string bean. Monahan passes behind the visibly nervous Prijatel and suggests using a knife to push the vegetation onto the fork.

Simple. Elegant. Just like Monahan.

``You should do what is common sense. That is very important,'' says the teacher, as she has said time and again during her daylong seminar on manners, on high etiquette, on how to eat and talk and behave, on how to handle a napkin, a slippery green bean and, most important of all, yourself.

The Sherman Oaks stickler teaches peerless, royal manners, speaking in the even, careful voice of the Old World. She practices what she calls ``the highest etiquette in the world,'' the most complete, the most elegant of all rules, covering everything from the proper way to blow your nose (not into a napkin and, please, ``Don't look at what you blow'') to the way queens eat oranges.

In a time when motherly advice has become best-seller material, in a time of ``The Rules'' and ``The Code'' and Martha Stewart, in a time where the laws of human decency are passed down not from parents but from talk-show hosts and talking heads, Monahan speaks of kings and queens and gourmet chefs.

``Manners are to make people comfortable with you,'' she tells the class. ``If you are doing it just to impress, it is bad manners.''

She moves around the small room, between the students' tables, gesturing with graceful, controlled movements, wasting no motion.

The weekend boot camp only skims over what she knows, what she keeps cataloged in a large blue binder, what she is working into a series of as-yet-unpublished books. She disseminates the rest through private sessions, seminars or corporate gatherings tailored to each company. She has also begun working with the Christian Children's Foundation creating a character-building curriculum for rehabilitating gang members.

``I apologize for giving you a crash course,'' she tells the class of seven, her accent lightly flavored with Central America. ``But it is a crash course in an upbringing that would take a lifetime to learn.''

To begin their journey into royal ways, the weekend Eliza Doolittles must insert two puffy pompons under their armpits. The fuzzy orbs will discipline the arms, keep them tucked into the body during a meal. If you gesture too much, if you threaten the order and serenity of the table, the pompon will fall out.

``This one has a hair on it,'' says pupil Francine Katzenbogen, scowling at her balls, her head aflame with red hair, her shoulders draped in synthetic tiger fur. She heard about Monahan like everybody else does, through word of mouth. She heard about Monahan through her facialist.

``I even canceled a facial to be here today,'' says the Studio City socialite.

Her classmates range from entertainment-industry executives to a guy who makes and sells artificial limbs. Several of the students have taken the class before. Others plan to tackle the Mastery Course, Monahan's three-month, $1,200 intensive character-building workshop. Still others see her every week, one on one, like a therapist.

``She saved our marriage,'' gushes Heather Sanzone of Burbank, as she and husband Vito smoke outside the hotel during a break from the eight-hour lesson.

``I had a bag packed. We were having stupid arguments about whose couch to keep when we move in together, things like that,'' she continues. ``She taught us the language of respect and, by the third time we had seen her, our relationship was better than it ever was.''

Vito nods. He adds that he has become more aware of how people treat each other, their food and themselves, especially on business trips overseas.

``No matter where you go,'' he says, ``people are slobs.''

He considers Monahan's teachings vital, not just to his marriage, but to the world in general. The whole planet has gone barbarian.

``There's no respect for anything anymore. Not just in L.A., but all over,'' he says. ``People get on airplanes wearing sweatpants.''

But few people have the background of Monahan, whose father worked in diplomatic circles, whose childhood home in El Salvador resembled a royal court, whose boarding-school training in New Orleans and mentorship under an international manners consultant sharpened her sense of Right and Wrong.

``I grew up in a very lovely environment. I had a code of behavior. I had a simple, uncomplicated childhood,'' explains Monahan. ``Good manners was a way of life.''

She builds her canon upon centuries of fine dining and lovely conversation. She adds lessons of her youth and borrows from codes outlined in Spanish diplomacy manuals.

``The first kings were barbarians,'' she says. ``But starting with Henry II, when kings began to settle, they began to have social gatherings. They created a code of court behavior, or courtesy.''

Monahan focuses on the manners of royalty so intensely, so exclusively, so entirely without apology, that she doesn't even know who Martha Stewart is. She doesn't pay attention to the popular explosion of behavioral experts, of mass-marketed mothers telling the American public how to behave. She doesn't follow ``The Rules'' or compete with Miss Manners or Ms. Demeanor.

The common man, Monahan says, doesn't get it.

``If you want to be liked by the masses,'' she says, ``then you have to live with mediocrity and not complain.''

This applies to her students, herself and all those who strive for perfection.

And at the Saturday workshop, the real test of dedication begins when the meal arrives. The room falls quiet. The students do not talk much at first, tucking pompons into their pits, scooping soup from the outer edge of the bowl, slicing and chewing bite-size bits of chicken without switching the fork from one hand to the other, wiping their mouths before and after sipping water.

After the meal, after dessert and coffee, Monahan talks about shyness and conversation tips and how to walk with dignity and poise. Being shy, she says, means being afraid people won't like you. Being liked means having to cater to others. But being respected means sticking to your convictions, your manners.

``To this day,'' she says, ``nobody has ever told me that I'm nice. And that's fine.''

The students nod and smile. They take quick notes. They like her. They want to learn the rules of her ``silent language,'' the way to be polite but not overbearing, the way to sift through the mediocre and find the exceptional.

Most of her rules will go unnoticed, though, if taken into public, into $8-entree restaurants with actors for waiters. But so what, she says. Practice them anyway. Make them be the only rules you follow.

``Most people have two sets of manners, one for home and one for company,'' Monahan says. ``I have only one. You must have only one.''

She talks about each person's life as a series of choices, of having to constantly decide between what is convenient and easy, and what is True, what is Right, what will make you more fit to eat with kings.

``We deserve it,'' she insists, ``to live like this.''

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Marta Monahan gives pointers on proper use of utensils to Darlene Prijatel during one of Monahan's manners workshops.

(2) A waiter at the Wyndham Bel Age Hotel serves etiquette students Vito Sanzone, left, Francine Katzenbogen and Darlene Prijatel under the watchful eye of Marta Monahan.

(3) Students in Monahan's class learn that bread may be torn with the fingers.

(4) Etiquette student Damian Evans watches Marta Monahan demonstrate proper use of utensils.

(5) `Most people have two sets of manners, one for home and one for company. I have only one. You must have only one.'

Marta Monahan

Etiquette expert

Phil McCarten/Daily News