Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  Fielding’s research drill was always the same. For hotels, he’d have his local chauffeur wait outside in the hired Rolls, while he’d enter the establishment, his Guide proudly in hand as his calling card, introduce himself at the reception desk, and ask for a tour of the premises. Inside the variety of rooms and suites he’d ask to inspect, he’d plop down on the beds, run his fingers over window- and doorsills to check for dust, put his ear to the wall to check for noise from the next room, survey the decor, and turn on the shower, if there was one, to check the water pressure, sometimes soaking his Brioni suit in the process. His job done, he’d retreat to his hired car and have the chauffeur drive out of sight and park. Then Fielding would spend the next half hour scribbling observations, puns, and other mal mots apropos of this last investigation that, when he returned to Majorca, he would decipher and transcribe for the next year’s Guide.

  For restaurants, booking under an alias (usually “Mr. Parker”), Fielding would often consume several lunches and dinners each day, sometimes in the company of local acquaintances, sampling—of necessity, sparingly—his four high-fat, artery-clogging, pre-Pritikin test dishes: eggs Benedict; coquilles St. Jacques; vol au vent, the puff pastry filled with a creamy ragout of meat or fish; and bouillabaisse, when he was near enough to the Mediterranean to get it. He took his notes during the repast, under the tablecloth, in a notebook disguised as a cigarette case.

  As for nightclubs, the gent did protest a bit too much that this hands-on research was forced labor. He claimed to compress all his research for each city’s after-hours section into a single-night bar-crawl debauch. He feigned an attitude of “it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.” Still, his descriptions of the low-rent fleshpots were often more inspired than those of the gilded grand hotels. Here he is on a club called Bikini, his favorite spot on Hamburg’s high road of low sex, the Reeperbahn (Rope Street):

  Bikini has a telephone on every table, which will ring furiously as soon as the hostesses spot you … In the center, a small elevated stage slides out over the dance floor; one of the performances I saw was a wrestling match between two naked and determined gals—in 12 inches of slimy, gooey mud! Adjoining is a bar room, where patrons calmly sip their schnapps, discuss the economic intricacies of the Saar, and casually glance at the sexy, privately produced movies which flash on the screen every 20 minutes or so.

  Fielding’s gusto for the male-only part of his Guide may have come from the fact that, aside from the art and antiquities—which Fielding wasn’t interested in—what made Europe different for him, at least in the Eisenhower fifties, was the wide-open sex. America had great hotels, such as the Waldorf, the Plaza, the Palmer House, the Mark Hopkins. America had great restaurants, such as Le Pavillon, 21, the Pump Room, Ernie’s, Trader Vic’s. What America didn’t have was a Reeperbahn, a Pigalle, a Soho, red-light districts with legal prostitution and high-end sex clubs like the above-described Bikini. They were what Fielding liked, and his target Main Street bank president readers seemed to like them as well.

  But the bankers couldn’t tell their depositors back home in Middletown what they were really doing on their summer vacations. They needed bragging rights, trophy beds at the Savoy, trophy meals at Maxim’s, plus some photos at Versailles and the Pantheon. What Fielding understood best of all was the insecurity of the American plutocrat. In the midfifties, he had a new brainstorm. He not only would tell the banker where to go, he would, in effect, go there with him. He announced his manifesto in a major press release in 1957:

  Nancy and I are so tired of watching snooty European headwaiters treat Americans like country cousins that at last we’ve decided to do something about it. During 11 years of roaming for our European Travel Guides we’ve squirmed in silent agony dozens of times as these snobbish ex-busboys have pushed around clean-cut, well-mannered US guests like cattle.

  At home, these travelers are often so important that places like 21, the Colony, and the Pump Room break their backs to roll out the red carpet for them.

  But across the Atlantic it’s different. To the average maître d’hotel, the president of a steel company is just another American tourist off the street, to be patronized, herded behind a pillar, and ignored.

  Fielding’s solution to this gastronomic lèse-majesté was to create the Temple Fielding Epicure Club, which he asserted was a “nonprofit foundation,” ostensibly to fight discrimination against Yankee plutocrats. For a $15.50 annual membership, a couple would get a fancy passport-like membership card and twenty vouchers that would be flashed to an imperious restaurateur. Then, as if a cross had been shown to a vampire, Monsieur Arrogant would be reduced to Mr. Obsequious. The couple would be shown to an A table, complimentary champagne would be poured, and a trophy meal would be at hand.

  Fielding assembled twenty of Europe’s most esteemed dining temples to join his foundation, an Igor Cassini list of the best of the best, the snootiest of the snooty: Tour d’Agent and Maxim’s in Paris; Mirabelle and Le Caprice in London; Hostaria dell’Orso in Rome; Giannino in Milan; the Jockey Club and Horcher in Madrid; and a dozen more. Horcher, as an example of exclusivity, was Hitler’s favorite restaurant in Berlin, which relocated to Madrid after the war with no hard feelings. Thomas Edison ate there, and Charlie Chaplin still did. It had become as much of a Madrid institution as the Prado. Fielding was offering more than food; he was retailing history.

  What was in it for the restaurants? Guidester customers, and lots of them. Every table in Europe dreamed of having the Fielding imprimatur. The membership fee paid for the free champagne. Otherwise, the restaurants charged full fare for their food, though what a bargain it was at, Fielding noted, $10 to $15 a meal in Paris, and “the sunny side of $5.00,” as Fielding put it, everywhere else. He insisted that he was getting no kickbacks, no commissions, no profit on his dining club, though the unspoken value was publicity, endless publicity, that sold even more Guides.

  Although Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy were both big fans, Temple Fielding was generally detested by intellectuals and social critics on both sides of the Atlantic. He was widely criticized for taking the adventure and certainly the culture out of travel and replacing it with conspicuous, despicable consumption. His champagne-swilling, suite-dwelling, whore-chasing steel-company president became the model for the Ugly American, or at least the Ugly Rich American. That unfortunate moniker, which came from the title of a 1958 novel set in a fictional Vietnamish Southeast Asian country, was quickly appropriated by the press to describe all boorish Americans abroad, from American Express’s penny-pinching package tourists to Fielding’s high-rolling gastrotourists.

  Fielding may well have been the most envied travel writer of all time. As such, he was bound to create a backlash, and he did, in the meek persona of a New York backroom lawyer named Arthur Frommer, who chose to stake out the opposite, cheap end of the travel spectrum. It could be said that Arthur Frommer was born at a discount, in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1930. There his father worked in a low-priced pants factory named Oberman’s. He grew up during the Depression, hawking newspapers on corners and dressing in wholesale pants from Oberman’s. He learned from the earliest age exactly what things cost, and never to pay full price. In 1944, the Frommers moved to New York. A dedicated student, Arthur made Phi Beta Kappa at NYU and went on to Yale Law School. But Frommer’s Ivy League was as different from Fielding’s as his future guidebooks would be.

  Like Fielding, Frommer got his guidebook start in the army. After Yale, he was drafted and, in 1954, was sent to Germany to the Army’s intelligence school at Oberammergau. It was brainy grunt work compared to Fielding’s glamorous OSS (Oh So Social, as it was known), but it sufficed to get Frommer to Europe his first time. Oberammergau was known for its anti-Semitic, post-Nazi ambience, so Frommer escaped every weekend to visit somewhere different—the Alps, Munich, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Venice, and his favorite, Paris. He never used any guide on his travels, especially the ritzy Fielding’s, priced way out of
his league. He found he didn’t need one; he did fine on his own.

  Amazed at how much he could do and see on his meager private’s salary, Frommer decided he wanted to share his adventures in budgeteering. So, while stationed in Germany, now Berlin, he wrote a little book, more a pamphlet, of ninety pages called The G.I.’s Guide to Traveling in Europe. In addition to outlining cheap boarding and cafés, he had sections on free air force flights and other government handouts. He was hoping that the army newspaper Stars and Stripes would publish his opus as a service document, akin to the way Fielding’s guide to Fort Bragg got into print.

  Stars and Stripes said no. Frommer, undaunted, decided to self-publish. He found a printing press in Berlin that ran off copies, which, using his boyhood newsstand experiences, Frommer got distributed on every corner of Berlin that sold Stars and Stripes. When he was shipped home, he left his little guide as a message in a bottle to his fellow Cold War soldiers. Back in New York, he got a cable telling him the G.I.’s Guide had sold out. He was flattered, but the success didn’t change his life. Why should it? He had just gotten a job at one of New York’s most prestigious law firms, Paul, Weiss, in 1950 the first major Wall Street firm to move uptown to Park Avenue.

  The firm had the biggest entertainment practice in the city, and its chief rainmaker was distinguished former judge Simon Rifkind, who also made the firm Gotham’s leader in pro bono cases. This was the firm that proudly boasted the city’s first major female partner, the wife of Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas. It had the first black associate in William T. Coleman, Jr., future secretary of transportation, and it soon would have Adlai Stevenson as head partner in its Chicago office. Arthur Frommer may have been wearing wholesale pants, but whatever his attire, at Paul, Weiss, he was dressed for success.

  For all the promise of his legal future, the short, boyish, bookish Frommer couldn’t get the writing bug out of his head. On his first Paul, Weiss summer vacation, he flew back to Europe, tourist class, and began researching a guide that would do for civilians what he had done for GIs. The book, then still a gleam in his eye, would be called Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. It took two summers of sleeping around before he had enough material to fill a book, which, once again, he ended up self-publishing. And once again, his book caught on and sold out at the newsstands, proof that while money talked, saving money could speak just as loudly.

  For all its initial grassroots success, 5 Dollars remained a newsstand novelty item and no threat whatever to Fielding. Frommer was the gnat on the hide of the Fielding elephant. For its first seven years, 5 Dollars was a summer hobby for Frommer, who toiled as a litigator at Paul, Weiss on cases like defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover against the U.S. Post Office on obscenity charges. In 1962, when Frommer divined that he was not going to become an august Paul, Weiss partner, he decided to give up his day job. Assisted by his wife, an English actress whose stage name was Hope Arthur, he started living on his writing. Had he become a partner, with all its attendant prestige, he probably would have taken his place in the pantheon of Manhattan lawyers rather than searching for cheap pizza at the real Pantheon in Rome.

  Frommer’s timing couldn’t have been better. He was blessed by the sixties’ changing demographic, as the baby boomers came of college age and travel age. Waiting for them at the nation’s airports were the new big jets, ever-lower fares, and a proliferation of even cheaper charter flights designed to cater to student wanderlust. Not only were these collegiate Odysseuses generally too strapped for funds to purchase a Fielding Guide, much less follow its recommendations, they also tended to be rebelling against the “capitalist pigs” Fielding was writing for, whose trough might well be shared by the parents at whose authority the kids were chafing.

  The fat-cat haters and the Fielding haters could unite in admiration of Frommer for offering a more “authentic” travel experience, roughing it among the “real Europeans,” as opposed to Fielding’s hermetically sealed universe of toadying bellmen and busboys. One of Frommer’s signature pieces of advice was “Never ask for a private bath.” A shared bathroom was one of Fielding’s worst nightmares. The only “real Europeans” that Fielding seemed to brush up against were prostitutes. That his most inspired writing was about this velvet underbelly of his otherwise too perfect beau monde seemed to make the case for Frommer better than he could himself.

  After all, Frommer did not write that much more about the sights and the culture of Europe than Fielding did, other than to tell his readers what day they could get in to the Bargello or the Neue Pinakothek for free, or where to find the very lowest-priced souvlaki stand at the base of the Parthenon. Aside from the students, who turned to Frommer’s guiding light out of economic necessity, many of the adult voyagers who bought his books were as obsessive about saving money as Fielding’s Guidesters were about spending it. These people were hunting for biggame trophy bargains the same way the Guidesters were collecting trophy blowouts. To them, cheapness was a virtue, savings a triumph. It was reverse ostentation, showing off for the folks back at home what a great deal you had found. The very concept of Europe on five bucks a day was the stuff game shows were made of: Who could be the biggest Scrooge? Unfortunately, a compulsive tightwad could be every bit as ugly an American as the compulsive show-off.

  The liberal Stevenson Democrat Frommer was, if anything, much less adventurous than the conservative Eisenhower Republican Fielding, who admitted that he had gotten too addicted to creature comforts to start searching out B and B’s. Frommer didn’t like to get out of his own comfort zone, which was Western Europe. He avoided Eastern Europe, where he admitted a paranoia that his army intelligence background could get him waylaid. Surprisingly, for such a budgeteer, he was far more interested in getting rich than Fielding, and far more entrepreneurial, starting a package-tour company, even building Arthur Frommer Hotels in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. He would eventually divide and conquer Europe not with one massive Fielding-esque tome but with individual guides to countries and, eventually, cities. For Fielding, Europe was forever one continent and one Guide; while Frommer, like the Fodor guides, founded in Paris in 1949, followed the Baedeker model of a separate book for every nation and, soon, every capital.

  One of the first of the latter was Surprising Amsterdam, surprising to many by being paid for by KLM, the Dutch airline. Although travel writers weren’t generally held to the same journalistic, no-conflicts standards of, say, a Walter Lippmann or Joseph Alsop, who covered global diplomacy, Temple Fielding, for one, took great pride in trumpeting in the front of every edition of his Guide, that he had never in his life taken a penny in any kind of kickback or buy-in. “This book is 100% independent and 100% clean. In its making we stick to one inflexible rule always: no commissions, rake-offs, cuts, kickbacks, or outside compensation in any form—from anybody … We’re proud to say that we’ve always been faithful to our principles as working reporters—and we’re going to stay that way.”

  Fielding insisted on being above reproach, no ads, no favors, and he was known for cutting hotel pals as quickly as he embraced them, if he found dust on a lintel or a bidet with a weak spray. Evidence of his incorruptibility was that, by 1958, he had incurred twenty-one major libel suits and lost only one, to a Brussels taxi concern that he labeled as “the biggest crooks and racketeers in Europe.” That bit of hyperbole cost him $3,800, which was chump change compared to the $1.5 million the cab company was seeking. He also kept a scrupulous accounting of his tax-deductible travel expenses—the $15,000 in 1958 would balloon to $60,000 in 1968 and to nearly $200,000 by 1980. In the booming eighties of the big-money Reagan presidency, even Arthur Frommer had to throw in the budget towel and kill the dollar amount on his covers, fearing it would scare readers away. Starting in the Reagan years, nothing on earth could match the inflation of the price of travel, which was dizzying at the Frommer end but astronomical at that of Fielding. The room at the Ritz in Paris that may have seemed out of reach at $25 a night in 1965 was out of this world at $300 a night i
n 1985. The worst was yet to come, and it keeps on coming. As we look back in envy, the era of the 707 has proved to be the biggest bargain of the twentieth century.

  AS THE NEW JETS, ALONG WITH THE NEW ADMINISTRATION, USHERED IN THE great travel boom of the early sixties, a war of sorts erupted for the hearts and minds and value systems of this next generation of travelers. The information rivals in this conflict, Fielding and Frommer, were both American, differently rooted but similar in terms of education and ambition. On the other hand, the hotels and restaurants—which constituted the bulk of the information Fielding and Frommer were conveying—represented a much more clear-cut clash of opposites, between cultures, values, and continents. Here was a genuine war of the worlds, between Europe and America, between Old and New. Two warriors stood out: Frenchman Claude Terrail, who owned Paris’s La Tour d’Argent, was the most famous restaurateur in the world; American Conrad Hilton, who owned the Waldorf Astoria, the Plaza, and many other temples of sleep, was the most famous hotelier. Both were tall and handsome and rich and wildly successful. Interestingly for competing archetypes, the success of one had nothing to do with the failure of the other.

  Theirs was a spiritual and symbolic rivalry fought not by them but by the Old World versus New World adherents of the opposing philosophies the two men so colorfully stood for. While Fielding and Frommer never even met, Terrail and Hilton ran in the same fast Jet Set world. Both men married in to the Hollywood flashocracy, Terrail to Barbara Warner, daughter of Warner Bros. movie mogul Jack Warner, Hilton to movie star Zsa Zsa Gabor. Neither union lasted; both men were compulsive Casanovas with boldface conquests. But their styles couldn’t have been more opposite. Terrail was a clubby polo player; Hilton was an open-range cowboy. While Terrail was the quintessence of bespoke-tailored, hand-kissing, multilingual European sophistication, Hilton embodied the rolled-up-shirtsleeves can-do true grit of the American West. What the opposites did have in common was their enormous success. Theirs was a brotherhood of achievement; they had the highest regard for each other, and each other’s position at the pinnacle of his “art.” Nonetheless, the “battle” of their lifestyles really defined all the issues of the jet age.