That phrase “travel-starved Americans” kept resonating with Fielding long after he penned it. He traversed Europe over five months and filled countless notebooks with the logistics of his journeys. He returned to New York, delivered the series to Canadian Club, and repaired to P. J. Clarke’s bar on Third Avenue, scene of Billy Wilder’s recent 1945 hit movie The Lost Weekend, and wrote most of his first Guide. It took him nine months. Nancy Fielding sold it in one, to the newly founded William Sloane Associates, whose owner was a true blue, or rather orange, Princeton man, Class of ’29, eager to lend a helping hand to another literary tiger.
The first Guide was a slender 250 pages and a cheap $2, but it filled a glaring need for travelers seduced by the ad-blitz campaigns of Juan Trippe and Howard Hughes to get thyselves overseas. The book took off, and after three successful annual editions, its success enabled the Fieldings to take off as well. They and their young son, Dodge, moved first to Denmark, a destination in the early Guides that Fielding proclaimed his favorite in the whole world. Copenhagen’s famed amusement park, Tivoli Gardens, was a forerunner to Disneyland; clean, wholesome, and perfect, it became a must for Americans on their postwar grand tours. Here was Fielding’s pitch, in tiny part:
“Don’t miss it! Of all the 90-odd foreign lands I’ve ever visited, Denmark is the closest thing to a 3-ring circus—and closest, too, to my travel heart … Don’t take your Hamlet too seriously—because if there’s a single melancholy Dane left, I haven’t met him … They’re the Pucks of Scandinavia, the Bob Hopes of Europe … And cleanliness is a national fetish. Even the United States looks soiled and grimy by comparison. Cockroaches? Bedbugs? Silverfish? Lice? I’ll buy you a snaps for every one you find in your hotel or restaurant in Denmark.”
Cleanliness was godliness to germophobic Americans, who seized on Fielding’s pitch. Cool Denmark thus became a hot spot. Fielding was doing even more for the country’s image than Danny Kaye would in his smash 1952 MGM musical Hans Christian Andersen. A tourism study concluded that over half the American visitors to Denmark were Guidesters who had traveled there because Fielding told them to. Flattered by the attention and fattened in the coffers, the Danish government gave him its highest order of merit, making him a “Knight of the Royal Order of the Danish Flag.” With the knighthood came a house, a maid, and an annual stipend. It was a lottery-level largesse the Fieldings couldn’t refuse. In 1951, they moved from New York to their new, free house in Hornbaek, thirty miles from Copenhagen, located on the silver strand known as the Danish Riviera.
When they arrived at the airport, they were greeted by a motorcade led by the prime minister. The house was a stunning Nordic modern log cabin set in a deep forest. Outside, an American flag was flying; inside, a pitcher of martinis was waiting. The maid was in uniform, waiting to serve the succulent rib roast she had made. It was perfect, too perfect. The Fieldings loved the country, but they hated feeling like freeloaders. In under six months, they had decided to flee and move to Majorca, the idyllic Mediterranean isle a hundred miles off Barcelona, before it was discovered by heat-seeking Northern European package tourists. They renovated a villa in Formentor, a dramatic cape at the northern tip of the island.
The Villa Fielding, though it had only one guest room, was the Platonic ideal of the European grand hotel that would have earned Fielding’s highest accolades. The bar had 116 varieties of liquor. There were six uniformed servants and a larder with gastro-exotica that would have shamed Zabar’s: albacore tuna from Oregon, Scotch-grouse pâté, pheasant in Burgundy jelly, Norwegian kippers, Skippy peanut butter. The luxury and service were European, but the comfort and convenience were purely American. The medicine cabinet was a virtual corner drugstore, overflowing with Alka-Seltzer, Band-Aids, Bufferin, insect repellent, a Fahrenheit thermometer. Despite the sea breezes, there was frigid air-conditioning. A black Cadillac convertible, flying both American and Danish flags, was the house car. To ensure that stateside visitors were as at home as they would be in a Holiday Inn, there was a ready supply of filtered ice water, big American-style coffee cups, and no language problem whatsoever. Despite their endless travels, neither Temple nor Nancy Fielding could speak Spanish or, for that matter, any other foreign language. Americans liked that about Fielding. That was why they bought his books. For all his Princeton-ness, he was still something of a babe in the European woods. His struggles were their struggles. He was just like them.
And every year, there were more and more of them. In 1958, even before the jets took off, Fielding was in awe of how many people were going to Europe and, of course, buying his Guide. “If the Russian bear and the Wall Street bear behave, and if Abdullah Doe in the Middle East can keep his fez on, 1958 will be the dizziest, busiest merry-go-round in European travel history,” he exulted, careful to temper his exuberance with a dollop of geopolitical caution. Seven hundred thousand were expected to hit the road or, rather, the sea and the air, in roughly equal numbers, and a good 20 percent of those were Guidesters. The shorthand for the guide, Fielding’s Europe, was more than just a title. He seemed to own the continent.
In staking that claim, Temple Fielding was the beneficiary of a huge assist from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, who were the best travel agents Europe ever had. It started with the Marshall Plan, officially the European Recovery Program, which traced its genesis to a 1947 commencement speech at Harvard by General and Army Chief of Staff turned Secretary of State George C. Marshall. A Euro-stimulus plan to pour vast sums of money into war-ravaged Western Europe, it aimed to restore capitalism as the bulwark that would prevent Communism, the bête noire of the postwar period, from taking over.
Many Republicans, then as now, were opposed to any handouts, especially to “foreigners.” One Ohio congressman publicly fretted that the stimulus funds would end up in the silk pockets of the old aristocracy, who would squander it, as they had done for generations, at the casinos in Monte Carlo and Baden-Baden. “The United States of America pays and pays and pays while the royalty of the Old World plays and plays and plays.” Eventually, however, the Truman Democrats carried the day, and in 1948, they enacted the plan.
One of the compromises made to get the law passed was setting up a tourism program. Many lawmakers lacked confidence that the ravaged, disorganized European countries would effectively use the relief funds to rebuild their industries and economies and thereby be able to afford American exports. But these same lawmakers had immense confidence that American travelers could spend a fortune visiting Europe and thereby replenish the continent’s coffers in their pursuit of what Europe had and we didn’t: culture and pedigreed luxury, the latter being the raison d’être of the Fielding Guide. As one conservative paper, the Indianapolis Star, editorialized, “We might as well soak up a little old world culture for our dollars.”
Congress created the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) to administer the Marshall Plan. An ECA subdivision, the Travel Development Section (TDS), would fund new hotels, subsidize and bolster ship companies and airlines, and restore Europe’s hospitality infrastructure to make the Old World safe for, and alluring to, Guidesters. The stimulus behind this stimulus was none other than Juan Trippe’s “stooge” and Howard Hughes’s nemesis, Maine senator Owen Brewster, before Hughes drove him out of Washington in 1951. Trippe was not only licking his chops at all the Americans he could pack onto his new prop planes, and his jets to come, but licking them even more at the thought of all the beds he could fill in his planned lodging chain, InterContinental Hotels.
Although Brewster had failed to make Pan Am the U.S.’s “chosen instrument,” Trippe knew his friend the senator would generate other flying favors and hoped Brewster would also get him the consolation prize of Marshall Plan stimulus financing to help build his hotels. To facilitate Trippe’s goals, Brewster got appointed as headman of the TDS one of his Maine constituents, a post–World War I émigré French aristocrat named Theo Pozzy, who had built a new fortune in food canning and electronics in the Pine T
ree State. During World War II, Pozzy ran the Plaza Athénée in Paris, the sister hotel of the nearby George V, as a luxe barracks for American officers.
Trippe was under no illusions that tourism in Europe would ever return to the elegance and decadence of the thirties, even if Igor Cassini might chronicle in his column pockets of such resurgence in the Swiss Alps and the French Riviera. That was the era of the Lost Generation, and it was lost forever, remembered mostly in the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Noël Coward, now as anachronistic as Pan Am’s luxurious flying boats. Trippe was way beyond aristocrats, intellectuals, and artsy expatriates by now. He wanted the masses. Aside from pursuit of monopoly, his biggest project after the war was to convince the International Air Transport Association (IATA) into letting him divide his formerly one-class (first) planes into two sections. Trippe’s proposed name for the back of the plane was “tourist.” Trippe’s efforts had begun back in the late forties, before “tourist” became a pejorative word, an insult to adventurers. When the jets were launched in 1958, Trippe would change the class appellation to “economy.”
What sounded like an obvious, democratic no-brainer proved to be a labor of Hercules. Trippe himself ranked the creation of tourist class as one of the three seminal events in aviation, behind only the flight of Lindbergh and the creation of the jet. IATA, formed in 1944 and dominated by the nationalized foreign carriers BOAC and Air France, feared Trippe almost as much as Europe had feared Hitler. As state monopolies freed from the imperatives of competition (as Trippe had wanted to be), they had to act as a bloc to prevent him from running the show. They liked keeping prices high. High prices meant high standards. So what, that they were catering to their national elites? That’s what Europe was, then as it always had been, in the air as on the post-feudal ground, a society based on the class system.
After years of trying to negotiate with IATA, Trippe called its bluff. He announced he was doing tourist without IATA approval. He bet that no foreign country would suspend Pan Am’s landing rights for being the renegade, because that would cost them millions, billions, of American tourist dollars. He bet correctly. In May 1952, Pan Am’s DC-6, the Betsy Ross, left Idlewild bound for Paris with eighty-seven passengers, most cramped into new seats in the back of the plane, an area that normally carried only fifty-four. The “tourists” got no champagne, no liquor at all, and no fancy meal, only sandwiches and Cokes. But they got the same eleven-hour flight, and they got Paris, for a round-trip fare of $550, compared to the $1,040 the champagne drinkers up front were paying. The tourists had to be plenty well heeled to afford the $550, but they didn’t have to be moguls. Indians, not chiefs, but from a good tribe, they, too, were now the target Fielding readers. In the long run, Trippe’s class system would lead to mass tourism, with legions of backpackers that would have caused fastidious Fielding conniptions. But in the fifties, Trippe simply expanded that well-heeled demographic. The moral of the story is that you didn’t have to be rich to help make Temple Fielding rich. Fielding owed Juan Trippe, big-time.
Fielding also owed Theo Pozzy, who was as fastidious a hotel critic as Fielding was. Without Pozzy constantly hectoring the French hotel industry to raise its standards to American levels, Fielding would have had hardly any hotels in France to which he could give his blessing. And if France was bad, the rest of Europe, with the exception of Switzerland, was far, far worse. These “American standards,” which seemed to revolve around modernity and cleanliness, were best encapsulated by the gleaming new Memphis-based motel chain Holiday Inn, started in 1952, whose advertising slogan was “The Best Surprise Is No Surprise.” If there is something incongruous about the Holiday Inn telling the Ritz how to run its show, that was because American money talked very loudly. The American love of cars had grown into a love affair with motels. You want American dollars? Give them American suburban comforts, give them what Holiday Inn does: private baths, double beds, ice water, air-conditioning, deep coffee cups, and above all, no tipping.
Most Americans had no idea how to deal with all this service, the maids, valets, porters, concierges, maître d’s, all seemingly with palms out, any more than they knew what to do with the bidets that were often the only item of plumbing in a French hotel room. Nothing seemed to confuse Americans more than whom to tip and how much, and that confusion translated into more sales for Fielding, whose annual Guide spelled out in minute and painstaking detail exactly what to tip whom in each country.
Pozzy’s fiat-like “suggestions” to cater to the Yankee dollar caused immediate revulsion, and almost a revolution, in the French tourism industry. But just as Vichy capitulated to the Germans, there were plenty of French hospitality people who were more than willing to kowtow to the Americans. One thorny problem arose when some Paris hoteliers, bending over backward to cater to “American standards,” began refusing to accommodate African-American tourists, just as Holiday Inns in the South might “reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” as the sign in every Dixie motel read, shorthand for “no blacks.” In the country of “égalité,” this was way over the line, and the French intellectual journals made a huge issue of it. Only because there were so few African-American tourists in Europe in the fifties did this brushfire not become a conflagration.
The Franco-American hospitality wars had begun with an insult. In 1949, Pozzy, prodded by his patron Brewster, who was prodded by Trippe, leaned on Paris to drop its visa requirement for Americans. A lot of French leaders were loath to do this. They feared that Mormon missionaries or American blacks or just plain American radical beatniks could get into the country and stir up trouble over French imperialism in Africa and Southeast Asia. Pozzy, preaching dollar diplomacy, won the day. But then America refused to grant reciprocity. In the view of nativist Americans, France was full of French Communists who might come to America and subvert the American Way. So No Way on no visas. The French were appalled. They started to resent Americans telling them how to run their hotels and their restaurants and how to tip. And the ice water? Sacre bleu! The French called it Coca-Cola-nization, and they weren’t going to be subjugated to America’s new imperialism. It was Freedom Fries in reverse.
For Temple Fielding, the French nationalistic backlash was grist for his mill, one more tempest in his teapot that made for piquant copy:
Generally speaking French hotels are either very fine or very poor … In Paris and the big cities, you’ll find plenty of both extremes. In the Provinces, however, your “average” hostelry is likely to be a dank, musty fleabag, vintage of 1893, with a hot and cold running proprietor complete with seedy vest and toothpick … French provincial hotels … are the dowdiest and least beguiling regional inns of any European land.
Don’t forget always to check every item on every bill. The chiseling of many French hotels is disgraceful; big, fat “mistakes” in favor of the house are as common as dandelions.
Don’t expect a private bath; don’t look for any kind of shower; don’t be surprised if you shave in tepid water … The plumbing is tattered, tired, odious—and usually five city blocks from your room.
About the only virtue Fielding could find in French hotels below the government’s “deluxe” category was that gentlemen could bring filles de joie upstairs for short visits without reprisal. “Unlike Spain, there’s no law against inviting an unaccompanied lady to your hotel room. You won’t be stopped by the elevator man; he’ll probably beam his blessings.”
His Guide’s leering randiness must have been hard for his supposedly liberated professional wife, Nancy, to take. Fielding clearly left his all-American family values at home in Majorca when he took off for his annual five-month one-man road show to update the Guide, trolling or retrolling through 300 hotels, 350 restaurants, and 150 nightclubs. Aside from his moral compass, he didn’t leave much else back at Villa Fielding. He traveled like a seventeeth-century grand tourist, with every appurtenance minus the doctor. In the days before excess baggage charges, Fielding toted, in a bulging raffia palm basket and
a commodious Spanish leather satchel, all the comforts of home, ranging from a portable phonograph to play his Frank Sinatra albums; Tribuno (American) vermouth, to make the martinis that few European bartenders could master to his satisfaction; an ice bucket, to chill his drinks; a big bag of Planter’s peanuts, to munch with the martinis; Manhattan cocktail mix, for variety; a bottle of maraschino cherries, to top the Manhattans; and a bottle of Fernet Branca bitters, for hangovers induced by this traveling bar.
Beyond the alcohol, Fielding packed tiny American cigars; a Bible, perhaps for atonement; a yodeling Swiss alarm clock; three pairs of glasses; lots of toothbrushes; sleeping pills; and instant decaf coffee to wash down his ritual morning breakfast of a ham sandwich, slathered with the French’s mustard that he brought along. “I’m so sick of croissants, I’d rather eat my shoes,” he explained to a reporter. He also lugged a stationery store full of notebooks and pens.
Despite his goal of trying to negotiate the continent mostly by rail and by ferry, Fielding sometimes had no choice but to take a dreaded airplane. To ward off the evil spirits, he wore more good-luck charms than a Margaret Mead island shaman. A Time cover profile enumerated the following: “his World War II dog tags, a St. Christopher medal, a brass taxi whistle from Cartier, a gold medal that was presented to him by Pope Pius XII, still another that was a gift from Haile Selassie, a gold-plated English penny and a charm in the shape of a naked lady.” “I’m not afraid of flying,” he told the magazine, “but these things are what keep the wings on the airplane.” He also lugged, or had porters lug for him, two vast suitcases filled with tuxedos, silk pajamas, lounging robes, sealskin slippers, those Brioni suits, a vicuna and cashmere topcoat (his research trips were always in the cold off-season), and thirty-five Swiss linen handkerchiefs embroidered with his signature, a potent leave-behind souvenir for those “research” filles de joie.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 13
