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

by Stadiem, William

  Enter Temple Hornaday Fielding. Actually, Temple Hornaday Fielding had already entered, publishing his first Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe in 1948, in the eleven-hour era of the Constellation flights, although most of his readers tended to be first-cabin habitués of the Queen Mary or the France. As was Fielding. Both he and his wife, in shades of Sinatra, were secretly terrified of flying. Not that fear stopped him from being the advertising face for the new jets of SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System). When Fielding spoke, travelers listened. He was the Good Housekeeping seal for luxury in mobility. This was one pathfinder who would never rest on his laurels or his research. He was a one-man Michelin Guide, always testing, always current.

  But Michelin was a staccato, wordless, star-ratings guide only to France, while Fielding was a garrulous, Menckenesque wit who took on the entire continent. “Watch your step at Orly (Airport),” he warned his readers. “The flooring is as slippery as a Marseilles gigolo.” So clever, so nasty, so acute, and so totally self-confident were his critiques that, rather than being a means to the end of Europe, the Fielding Guide became an end in itself, in that readers traveled to see Fielding’s Europe, and only Fielding’s. The man defined the continent, Europe as the grab bag to savor the treasures that Fielding, and only Fielding, was able to unearth. By the advent of the jets, the Fielding Guide had grown to nine hundred pages, weighed over two pounds, and sold nearly a hundred thousand copies a year at $4.95 each.

  There were a lot of words, and they were the last word. Until Temple Fielding changed his mind. This naturally kept the airlines, the hotels, the restaurants, the emporia, all on their toes. The German word for “guide” is führer, as in Hitler. Fielding was a führer of pleasure, an autocrat of self-indulgence, and a pied piper for American sybarites in search of the very best of the Old World. President John F. Kennedy, who, along with Jackie, did more to create the mass mystique of Europe than even Juan Trippe, carried only four books on his 707 Air Force One: the Bible, Webster’s Dictionary, a congressional directory, and Fielding’s Guide. It was the ultimate compliment from the ultimate “Guidester,” as Fielding called his acolytes. He carefully avoided the word “tourist,” which, to him, had near-Communist connotations, of the herd, of the extirpation of choice and free will and free enterprise. Travelers, voyagers, pilgrims, explorers, pioneers, anything that smacked of luxurious self-determination and self-indulgence, were all fine. But to call a Guidester a tourist would be the unkindest cut of all.

  “We shoot for the snob reader,” Fielding freely admitted. Fielding, six feet tall, with jet-black dyed and slicked-back hair and lacquered nails, dressed in ascots and bespoke mohair suits by Brioni of Rome, looked the part of a European boulevardier or, to some, an aging Via Veneto gigolo. He was anything but that. He was a Princeton man, an army man, an OSS man. He saw himself as one of the Juan Trippe Ivy elect. But Fielding was dealing with a new kind of snob. His readers weren’t cultural snobs; they were food and lodging snobs, and Fielding, who detested sightseeing, was just their man, their voice. These people collected memories of staying at the Ritz and eating at the Tour d’Argent like art lovers might collect memories of seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Fielding told these forerunners of “foodies” and “roomies” precisely where to eat and sleep, and gave them bragging rights for sharing the same good taste. Fielding himself barely mentioned the Louvre. He hated shopping as much as he hated museums and cathedrals, but he knew his readers liked to shop, so he left that section of the guide to his wife, Nancy, a former literary agent.

  TEMPLE OF GASTRONOMY. Preeminent travel critic Temple Fielding, hamming it up with unmelancholy Danes in Copenhagen on his fiftieth birthday, 1963. (photo credit 5.2)

  The Jet Age reign and regime of Temple Fielding, alongside that of Juan Trippe, was a product of the evolution of the Grand Tour. The Tour, which originated in the late 1600s with post-Etonian English gents visiting the Renaissance Continent with both a guide, or cicerone, and a physician. The idea was to visit the great ruins, like the Forum and the Colosseum in Rome, and the great works of art, in palaces like the Uffizi and the Louvre. There were no real restaurants then to go to, so the travelers had no choice but to dwell on the culture. The art of living was secondary, though any visit to the court of Louis XIV was bound to give a tourist some fancy ideas. Nonetheless, what gave the English upper class its snob cachet was its cultural superiority derived from this peripatetic education, even more than its lands and wealth. Knowledge (then, at least) was power.

  The nineteenth-century advent of steamships and steam railways opened the continent, if not to the rube masses, at least to a wider swath of the populace. The first Cook’s Tour took place in 1841, though it had nothing to do with either culture or pleasure. Thomas Cook was a Derbyshire teetotaler who was a devotee of, and a proselytizer for, the temperance movement. When he organized a railway trip for 540 nondrinkers from the city of Leicester to a sobriety rally eleven miles away, the travel agency was born. Although he went bankrupt with the temperance people, Cook hit pay dirt by switching to the would-be Midlands culturati. His first big triumph was transporting Englishmen, in the thousands, across the Channel to the 1867 Paris World’s Fair.

  Cook followed this with tours to post–Civil War America, where the still-bloody battlefields were the hottest tourist ticket until his company made another fortune taking voyagers to the Pyramids and up the Nile. American Express, originally a shipping company part owned by Wells Fargo stage lines, entered the tour business when J. P. Fargo took his own Grand Tour to Europe and couldn’t get cash anywhere outside the major capitals. He invented the traveler’s check, and American Express became the giant of the trip business.

  Around the same time as the Cook’s tours were starting, the first guidebooks began to appear. The undisputed leader was the Leipzig firm of Karl Baedeker, whose name became synonymous with travel books, which were translated into many languages. However, the Baedekers were very Germanic, very scholarly, and no fun at all. The idea of describing a hotel or restaurant with the respect accorded Notre Dame or the Pantheon would have been considered both radical and frivolous. Leave that to the French, whose red Guide Michelin began to appear at the turn of the century with the rise of the autocar.

  The Michelins were originally far more concerned with where a driver could fill his tank than his stomach. It was a basic list of gas stations and garages along the French roads. Only in the decadent, gastronomic thirties did Michelin introduce its three-star restaurant rating system. And it was only for France, the presumption being that nowhere else in Europe had good food. After World War II, Temple Fielding found a continent full of bargain pleasures that was completely uncharted. He had the guidebook field all to himself, and he ran for a touchdown.

  In addition to being America’s reigning oracular epicure, Fielding was also a ladies’ man, and not necessarily his wife’s. Just as the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century was designed for gentlemen, so was Fielding’s twentieth-century version. His was a man’s world. His wife was always with him, but as he was paying the American Express bills, her duty was to do her shopping and avert her eyes. Fielding liked to drink and carouse and whore around. The Guide had a substantial “nightlife” section, but because these were the high-prudery Eisenhower years, Fielding cloaked the whores in euphemistic innuendo, of which he was a master. To wit, a typical passage, this one on the top bordello in Madrid:

  For men only, Casablanca is still the best, in spite of its recent flood of hog mannered U.S. drugstore-cowboys who make me ashamed to be an American. Stage show of 20 performers; 2 Latin bands with some of the best and loudest Caribbean music on the Peninsula. It’s the hangout of Spanish painters, sculptors, writers, gents occupied in the arts and gents interested in pursuing the arts. Huge 4oz. drinks cost roughly $2.50. Go around 12:30 AM. Hostesses galore, both at the balcony bar and at the downstairs tables … Open all year, except Holy Week.

  Fielding went on to rhapsodize about the Spanish “hostesses�
� in print as “the most chic, most beautiful, most mannerly group of casual companions to be found anywhere … Disease is almost unknown … Many make successful marriages.” He felt it necessary to issue his own apologia for his fifties double-standard hypocrisies, cloaking it in cross-cultural anthropology. One of his most important travel tips—actually, an edict—was to leave the wife at the hotel, shaming her into even considering doing the town with Big Daddy:

  It is not only bad taste but downright stupidity to take ladies of your family to establishments in this special category. This isn’t Paris or New York, where slumming can be done on a casual basis by anybody; the Spaniards have an ironclad code of manners and behavior in this direction, and they look upon the occasional American girl who, through ignorance or curiosity, pops up in one of these places as a silly, brainless busybody who combines all of the legendary crassness and pushiness of the least attractive type of U.S. female. They despise both her and the man who permits it.

  How Fielding so blatantly and sexistly justified prostitution in his “family” book is a sign of his times, yet even after feminism asserted itself in the sixties, he remained the bestselling travel writer of all time. Perhaps the wives wanted to know the best restaurants so badly that they forgave Fielding and their spouses their boys-will-be-boys antics.

  One main difference between Temple Fielding and Igor Cassini was that Fielding didn’t “chase strawberries,” as the saying went, shorthand for the status quest of the fashionable people who flitted from Ascot to Henley to Longchamp to Gstaad to Capri to Mykonos. He didn’t need a top table at Princess Grace’s Red Cross Ball in Monaco or to be on the list for Stavros Niarchos’s Christmas gala in St. Moritz. That kind of event snobbery held about as much interest for Fielding as the sales at Lanvin. Nonetheless, he was the most finicky man on earth about knowing the right suite at Monaco’s Hôtel de Paris or St. Moritz’s Badrutt’s Palace Hotel.

  What went on in the ballrooms below simply bored him, just as it would his target reader, whom he described as “the banker in the small town who is a big shot, has security and respect in his community, and to whom Europe is a jungle.” Fielding’s fifties Babbitt may have never looked at a Cholly Knickerbocker column. But his Main Street wife probably did, and she probably dreamed of getting mentioned in it one day. To cater to him, Fielding told him where he could go for a “nightcap” while his missus recuperated from her shopping spree. To cater to her, Fielding let her know where the stars ate and slept, but he left it to Cassini to keep her current on whom they ate and slept with.

  Temple Fielding trafficked in incendiary stereotypes, fortunately for him, in an age before political correctness. He was an ethno-racial profiler long before the term came into existence. His was a White Man’s Burden view of the world. For example, he marveled at how “clean and industrious” Spaniards in Spain were, compared to his experience of “lassitude and filth in the Indian-peasant segments of Mexico and South America.” Here’s his take in the Guide on Southern Italians: “The ubiquitous Sig. Doe of this latitude is squat, with broad face and beetle brow. He is ignorant, superstitious, disinterested in government, touched only superficially by civilization. He is a primitive man …”

  Admitting that “some of us … tend to categorize a nation of 47 million good people as ‘wops’ (taken from guappo, a Neapolitan greeting),” Fielding then shows what a broad cosmopolite he is by using more stereotypes to combat his others: “To think of the typical Italian as the arm-waving comedian of a Class-B motion picture is as ridiculous and insulting as to think of you and me—typical Americans—as the fat, crass, back-slapping Babbitt who lights 2-foot cigars with $20 bills and scars every table top in sight with his cowboy boots.” Somehow the public ate this up, because he was reflecting the prejudices of his country-club readers, albeit with verbal panache that sugarcoated the bitter pill of racism. This was the “comfort” travel writing that Fielding’s perpetual bestsellers were made of. Europe, to him, was a big Bronx Zoo of luxury suites, groaning tables, accommodating prostitutes, jolly peasants, jack-booted Nazis. He was a cultural anthropologist who could demystify a Europe that, to most Americans, was as intimidating as a Lost Continent. The genius of Temple Fielding was his ability to transform his basic xenophobia into his art and his fortune, charting, for other xenophobes, a wide world that could not be denied.

  Temple Fielding was born in 1913 in the Bronx, in a thirty-two-room house adjacent to the Zoo, where his maternal grandfather, William Temple Hornaday, was the distinguished director. After a privileged adolescence, the teenager had a rude awakening in 1929 when his father lost everything in the Crash and had to be supported by the retired grandfather’s pension. Young Temple, who had been taken twice to Europe as a child on the great liners, was abashed by his fall from grace. He tried to keep up a facade by going to deb parties, where he met his dream girl on the skyscraper roof garden of the Hotel Pierre. Too bad that he couldn’t afford the two dollars to take her out for a post-ball supper. That dream got away. Dispirited, in 1930, he dropped out of his Connecticut prep school, near where his family lived in Stamford, and began taking odd jobs, including one as the manager of a beach club, where the seeds were planted for the high standards he set for the concierges of his future life.

  The two ubiquitous East Coast questions Fielding couldn’t stand were “Where did you prep?” and “Where did you go to college?” Determined to have a good answer to the latter, Fielding went back to Stamford High School at age twenty-one and applied himself so diligently that Princeton accepted him and gave him a scholarship. Fielding’s version of Princeton was anything but This Side of Paradise. It was more like This Side of Bankruptcy. As an older student and scholarship boy, Fielding was out of the eating-club loop and expected to wait tables to help defray his tuition. Too ashamed to do that, he decided to hustle cash by conjuring up a host of enterprises, starting a student lottery, selling rah-rah-raccoon coats, anything to make a buck. He kept up collegiate appearances by writing for the student paper and leading the marching band as a baton twirler. He somehow found time to study, graduating cum laude in 1939 and going off to war.

  In 1941, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as a second lieutenant in the army, he got his chance to write his own Baedeker, “Guide to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center.” The assignment was handed to him by General Edwin “Speedy” Parker, who had unsuccessfully assigned three other officers, including the chaplain, to create a manual that made sense of the sprawling new 550-building complex in the Carolina sandhills. The tone of the camp guide was a forerunner of that of the Europe guide; only the accommodations would change. Fielding was full of tips, most seemingly obvious but helpful nonetheless. He warned recruits of weekly inspections, “Tip: Get ready the night before. You’ll save yourself and your sergeant a mess of headaches.” Or Fielding on haircuts: “Each regiment has its own barbershop, staffed by civilians. It’s good and it’s cheap. Don’t think that you look like a monkey after your first G.I. trim. Short hair is an Army custom.”

  Catching the writer’s bug that had run in his family, Fielding began doing more general-interest magazine articles and finally found another dream girl. Her name was Nancy Parker, and she was one of the first female literary agents in New York. Although short on credits, Fielding charmed Parker into signing him as a client. Two months later, he charmed her into marrying him. Shortly after their honeymoon, Fielding was dispatched overseas. After spending time in Algeria and Italy, the new OSS took advantage of Fielding’s undergraduate training in psychology to turn him into a propaganda expert. His focus was on the Balkans, doing black ops that almost got him killed but ultimately rewarded him with a decoration that honored him with arranging the voluntary surrenders of over thirty thousand enemy troops. It was an award he proudly displayed but, true to his spy code, refused ever to elaborate upon.

  Back in New York after the war, Fielding resumed his magazine efforts, with little success. Realizing how hard it was to earn a pittance,
much less a living, from freelance writing, he got a job with an advertising agency representing Canadian Club whiskey. He discovered his own market niche in the area of travel. They were doing a “European” campaign, but Fielding was convinced they were clueless about what the real Europe looked like. He talked them into sending him abroad to create something more authentic, with actual continental backgrounds.

  In preparation for this 1946 trip, Fielding went looking for a guidebook that told him where to eat and sleep while overseas. He couldn’t find one. Wandering through the aisles at Scribner’s, Fielding, who had gotten to know Europe somewhat during the war, could find no guide that looked at the continent as a whole and none that went into any detail about the legendary lodging and dining shrines that Fielding had admired on his travels, or even where to find a noninfested bed and non-moldy board along the way. When he complained to his wife, she saw not inconvenience but a golden opportunity. Write your own book, she exhorted him, and she promised she could sell it.

  What Fielding came up with for Canadian Club were a series of advertisements recounting whiskey-fueled adventures, which turned out to be ironic misadventures. Typical was his ill-fated effort to go sponge diving in Greece with a local aquatic champion named Nick (what else?). “I dived so deep for an Aegean sponge that the champ had to dive for me.” It was the male whiskey answer to those “I Dreamed I Was Marie Antoinette in My Maidenform Bra” ads of the era. High adventure, danger, genuine locales, wit, and booze to top it off. Plus a plug for TWA that provided Fielding with free Constellation tickets. “As I left to make my TWA plane connection, I told Nick I’d never dive for a sponge again in anything deeper than a bathtub.” The storyboard concluded, “As travel-starved Americans again go wandering, they tell of being offered Canadian Club in 87 lands.”