Wallflower at the Orgy

by Nora Ephron

  Judith Austin, face-lifted wife of the chairman of the board: “Oh God … she wanted him so! She needed someone to hold her and tell her she was lovely. She needed love. She wanted Robin!”

  The Love Machine is a far better book than Valley—better written, better plotted, better structured. It is still, to be sure, not exactly a literary work. But in its own little subcategory of popularly written romans à clef, it shines, like a rhinestone in a trash can. The novel deals primarily with the rise and fall of Robin Stone, who rises and falls from the network presidency. His psychological problems are straight out of Hitchcock (to be specific, Marnie). And he runs through the lives of half a dozen women in the course of the book, leaving all of them scarred and mutilated—a couple of them literally so. With the possible exception of Cosmopolitan magazine, no one writes about masochism in modern women quite as horribly and accurately as Jacqueline Susann. Here, for example, is Amanda, the high-fashion model, speaking of her feelings for Robin Stone: “Sometimes I wish I didn’t love him this much. Even after he’s spent the night with me, when he leaves the following morning, I snuggle against the towel he’s used. Sometimes I fold it up and put it in my tote bag and carry it with me all day. And I reach for that towel and touch it. And it almost smells of him … and I get weak.” There is a streak of masochism in most women that should ensure Robin Stone’s becoming one of the most popular characters in modern fiction.

  The Love Machine is the second book in recent months based on the career of a television network president; the first, “The CanniBalS” by actor Keefe Braselle, was unreadable. Incidentally, Miss Susann sent the bound galleys of her book to her friend Aubrey a couple of months ago, but she has not heard a word in response. “I can’t imagine why,” she said. “Can you?”

  Yes.

  Simon and Schuster paid two hundred fifty thousand dollars for the hardcover rights of The Love Machine. (Miss Susann signed with them after buying out her contract with Bernard Geis for four hundred thousand dollars in an out-of-court settlement.) Bantam Books has advanced two hundred fifty thousand dollars for the paperback edition. A one-million-dollar movie offer from 20th Century-Fox has been turned down by the Mansfields, who think it is inadequate. An initial advertising budget of seventy-five thousand dollars is planned—much of it to pay for full-page newspaper spreads of Miss Susann’s face, false eyelashes, and a one-shoulder silver sequined dress—and it is a fraction of what will ultimately be spent promoting the book. Said Simon and Schuster’s Korda, “You have to push this book beyond regular book buyers to people who probably haven’t been in a bookstore since Valley of the Dolls was published in hard cover.”

  In the meantime, Miss Susann has already begun her third novel. It is tentatively titled The Big Man. The theme, said Miss Susann, “is a girl’s search for the big man. Her father was a big man. I think most girls have a thing for their fathers, don’t you?”

  Yes.

  Eating and Sleeping With Arthur Frommer

  June 1967

  This year three hundred fifty thousand Americans—one out of five who travel to Europe—will go with Arthur Frommer. They will eat with Arthur Frommer and, as something of a witticism has it, sleep with Arthur Frommer.

  Not content to leave it at that, some five thousand of them will write to Arthur Frommer. They will tell him they could never have done it without him; they will tell him they call his book the Bible; they will tell him they swear by him. Some will write ten-page, hand-written letters on lined paper telling Arthur Frommer every single hotel, restaurant, train, plane, bus, and beaded bag that happened to them on their way through Europe. Not a day passed, writes Mrs. Ray Westgate of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, that she did not bless Arthur Frommer’s name.

  The Arthur Frommer involved is the author and publisher of Europe on $5 a Day, a 552-page guide to seventeen European cities, the best seller of the best-selling series of travel books published today. Begun as a modest 50-cent G.I. guide to European travel, it has become a $2.50 paperback written by Frommer and his wife, Hope, with yearly revisions and yearly sales of two hundred thousand copies.

  It is the base of a travel-book empire that includes nine $5-a-Day books (Europe, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Israel, New York, Washington, South America, Mexico); six $5-and-$10-a-Day books (England, Scandinavia, Japan, Hawaii, the West Coast, the Caribbean); nine Dollar Wise guides providing cost information on travel for all price ranges; several miscellaneous books, including Surprising Amsterdam and Happy Holland by Frommer.

  The empire also includes a quarterly newsletter, The Wonderful World of Budget Travel; the $5-a-Day Travel Club, which provides two $5-a-Day books, a copy of Surprising Amsterdam and travel discounts, all for $5 a year; and $5-a-Day Tours, a wholesale travel agency that this year will furnish thirty-five thousand American tourists with bed, breakfast, and guided tours in New York for $5 a you know what.

  And coming soon: America on $5 a Day, a series of travel guides for senior citizens; Europe on Five Diapers a Day, the story of how Arthur and Hope travel with baby Pauline; and the biggest baby of all, the Arthur Frommer Hotels, the first of which will be under construction this summer in surprising Amsterdam.

  The hotels, which Frommer describes as “less hotels than machines for sleeping,” will provide no lobby, no convention facilities, no banquet halls, no sun lamps, no vibrators in the beds—nothing but a simple compartment with bed and sink for $3 a night per person. “I have a dream,” says Arthur Frommer, “that one day in every city there will be a Conrad Hilton on one end of the scale and on the other an Arthur Frommer.”

  By the time that construction boom is over, the Bibles and blessings and swearings-by-Arthur-Frommer will probably have mounted to the point that there will be a small religious cult of Frommerites, recognizable—as they rush about saving nickels hither, dimes yon—by the simple aluminum $5 signs they will wear around their necks.

  They are visible enough as it is. Today’s Frommerite carries his big red book like a banner, daring natives to cheat him, challenging fellow tourists to underspend him. He worries as much about losing his book as he does his passport; and at least one anxiety dream has been reported: an employee of Paraphernalia claimed to have had a nightmare in which she was on a train going from France to Germany and could not find her Arthur Frommer.

  The missionary behind all this is a black-haired, pink-faced, thirty-six-year-old lawyer who began the $5-a-Day books as a side interest eleven years ago. Frommer was raised in Jefferson City, Missouri, has a B.A. from NYU and a law degree from Yale, where he was a member of the Law Journal. During 1954–1955 he traveled widely and economically in Europe on his pay as a private first class in military intelligence in Germany. Before returning to New York and a job with the prestigious law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, he wrote and published a small pamphlet of travel tips for soldiers in Europe. Its immediate success convinced him there was a market for a book on budget travel.

  In 1956 he went to Europe for a month’s vacation to write the first Europe on $5 a Day, a 128-page book with a first printing of twenty thousand copies. By 1963 sales of that book and two others he had commissioned—New York and Mexico—and an increasing volume of mail forced him to give up his law practice.

  Frommer is zealously devoted to his books. He has been known to telephone money-saving hints to his authors in the middle of the night. He refers to the hotels and restaurants recommended in his book as “my hotels” and “my restaurants.” Once he turned red with rage on the Rue de Rivoli when one of his restaurants changed owners and raised its prices. Though he and Hope and baby Pauline live quite comfortably in a nine-room apartment on Central Park West, they rarely live according to their means abroad, and when they do, says Frommer, it is always a terrible mistake.

  Frommer practices what Frommer preaches: the premise of all the $5-a-Day books is that budget travel is not a matter of necessity, it is a matter of choice. The only way. “Know the natives,” shout Frommer and
his band of writers. Live as they live on the level they live; eat breakfast in their kitchens; have croissants with their sanitation workers. And as you travel, actively disdain luxury travel, all its amenities, and, above all, the foolish tourists who travel that way, drink Coca-Cola, show pictures of their children to waiters, and meet only other foolish tourists who travel that way.

  This premise occasionally runs away with itself. Even in Washington, D.C., writes Beth Bryant in Washington, D.C., on $5 a Day, “it is far more delightful to stay in a grand, old reconverted townhouse … to share the TV lounge with FBI trainees, Supreme Court law clerks, and a female group of French social workers—than to spend $20 for a swank room in a 16th Street hotel where you meet no one but fellow American tourists.” In fact, people who travel with $5-a-Day books have considerably less chance of meeting the natives than of meeting other people traveling with $5-a-Day books, all of them swearing by Arthur Frommer, saying they go to bed with him, and dying to compare costs to see who is saving more doing what.

  Travel on $5 a day, a sum that includes room and board, can be accomplished by following Frommer’s “rules of the game.” Never, for example, take a room with a bath. Don’t be put off by hotels without impressive façades and lobbies. Never patronize a restaurant without a menu in its window. Don’t go to Washington while the cherry trees are in bloom, Israel during Passover, or Radio City Music Hall at night, when the rates go up. The cafeteria is king. And if the resulting trip bears some resemblance to the one Bean Blossom Township High School’s graduating class took to New York in Lillian Ross’s “The Yellow Bus,” well, that’s how it has to be in the wonderful world of budget travel. “My readers do not go for a gourmet experience,” says Frommer.

  My own experience, shared by many, is that budget travel is not a matter of choice, only of necessity. I like ice-cube machines in my hotel, gourmet experiences twice a day, please, and I have no desire whatsoever to sit in a TV lounge with an FBI trainee. But I have traveled with $5-a-Day books and find them utterly indispensable. Their bread-and-butter details—on public transportation, cultural events, hotels and restaurants—are unequaled, essential for all but the least cost-conscious travelers. More important, the books have convinced thousands of Americans who probably would never otherwise have traveled abroad that it is possible to do so on a severely limited budget.

  They have also made it possible for several hundred of them to pursue a free-lance writing career of a sort. The $5-a-Day books now contain long sections of reader suggestions culled from reader mail and rewarded with a copy of a $5-a-Day book; many of them are useful; many are terrifyingly ingenious. “When we leave on our trip,” writes Martin Jansson of Bowie, Maryland, “our suitcases are bulging with clothes, but many of them are garments to be worn just once more before discarding. This saves laundering, lightens the load progressively and gains space for purchases abroad. Our only problem resulting from this practice has been with cabin stewards, who … neatly pile the discarded clothes beside the berth. This necessitates a trip topside to throw them over the rail.” The suggestions give the books a sort of tacky charm, something like Sidney Skolsky’s column when just anyone was allowed to submit his Oscar picks.

  If the books are indispensable, they are by no means perfect. The writing, with few exceptions, is humorless, uninteresting and given to rhetorical questions and exclamation points. (“What do the Dutch eat for lunch?” writes Frommer. “Well, most of them eat a second breakfast!”) The books are also quite uneven, ranging from the excellent—Europe, England, Japan, Mexico, Greece, New York—to inadequate—South America, the Caribbean. Frommer emphatically denies the most frequent criticism of the books: that restaurants and hotels raise their prices as soon as they are mentioned. What happened more often, he says, is that they earn so much money as a result of being listed that they make improvements and become higher-quality establishments.

  The books, particularly Europe, are remarkably up-to-date, an achievement Frommer credits to KLM, Royal Dutch Airways, which sponsors the book and receives in return its symbol on the book cover and a subsequent identification with budget travel. Unfortunately, Frommer has repaid KLM unwisely and too well: he fails to mention Icelandic Airlines, the only low-cost way to fly noncharter to Europe, and his enthusiasm for Amsterdam can only be looked upon with suspicion.

  The surprising thing about surprising Amsterdam, it turns out, is that Frommer devotes more space to it than to any other European city. In addition, he insists that the city is the ideal gateway—arrival and departure point—for a European trip. Is it, as he claims, because the auto rentals are so low? Because of the sincere, warm way the Dutch speak English? Because of the taxfree shopping available at its airport? To use Frommer’s style and punctuation: I doubt it!

  These faults are regrettable in books that not only are otherwise incorruptible but also can easily afford to go un-subsidized, particularly by companies with such direct interest in the product. The food tasters for the Guide Michelin are not, after all, testing tire treads. One hopes Arthur Frommer will stop pinching his own pennies—by taking aid from KLM—so that others may better pinch theirs.

  Publishing Prophets for Profit

  August 1968

  There are those in the publishing world who say that the whole thing would have happened much sooner had it not been for Life magazine and its attack on poor Bridey Murphy in 1956. There are others—more disposed toward theories of occult causation—who believe that the spirit world just couldn’t exert sufficient power over the publishing world until a few years ago. Still others—practical types—explain it as the book-buying public’s response to the increasing complexity of modern living.

  Whatever the reasons for it—and it remains for the sociologists to supply them—American publishers have discovered of late that there is a great deal of money to be made in convincing readers that the fault is not in themselves but in their stars. Books on parapsychology, mysticism, and the subjects that seem to follow inexorably from them—yoga, ESP, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, astrology, witches, mediums, ghosts, Atlantis, psychokinesis, prophecy, and, most of all, reincarnation—are flourishing. At least three paperback publishers—New American Library, Paperback Library, and Sherbourne Press—have begun series exclusively devoted to books on the occult; Paperbound Books in Print lists 203 titles under the category, “Parapsychology and the Supernatural.” In hard cover, industry sources estimate that there are four times as many books on the subject now being printed as there were five years ago, though exact figures are virtually impossible to come by. The most recent parapsychological best seller, Jess Stearn’s The Search for the Girl with the Blue Eyes, has sold forty-six thousand copies.

  In these books, terms like “karma” and “odic force” appear, without any explanation or definition, as if they were in everyday use. The names of Jesus Christ, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur Conan Doyle, Keats, Yeats, Jung, Einstein, and Jackie Gleason (who once told Hedda Hopper that he was at times precognitive) are taken, sometimes in vain, as examples of famous men who were true believers. Respected writers who used to feel compelled to pretend skepticism when writing about the occult now confess to living with ghosts, speaking to dead relatives through mediums, and participating in automatic writing.

  “The public interest has been way ahead of the publishers’ response,” said Lee Barker, executive editor of Doubleday and Company. “People in general want to read about these things. After all, there’s the possibility of discovering the meaning of life. We can’t get enough good books on the subject.”

  Doubleday, which published The Search for Bridey Murphy and The Power of Prayer on Plants, to name just two parapsychological classics, is probably the most active hardcover publisher currently in this field. The fact that it cannot get enough good books on the subject has not prevented it, or other publishers, from printing what they think the market will bear. Books on parapsychology, Barker admits, are sadly inferior to most science fic
tion; indeed, they are also sadly inferior to most books written on gardening, pet care, and UFOs. It is almost incredible that so many authors could take such a fascinating subject and make it as boring as they do. Reading these books is a little like eating pressed duck: all the juice has been drained out of something that one knows was once meaty and succulent.

  Generally speaking, there are two types of books written on parapsychology: those by psychics and those by journalists. The former, usually written with the assistance of a ghost writer (the term takes on new meaning here), are modest tables of how the author got his gift, how he resisted it for several years, and how he ultimately came to use it to help mankind without thought of personal profit. A recent example of the genre is The Reluctant Prophet (Doubleday), a book about a young man named Daniel Logan who became a big-time psychic as a result of his appearance on the David Susskind Show, where he predicted the 1967 summer riots, the end of the Northeast water shortage, and Elizabeth Taylor’s 1966 Academy Award.

  The second group, by far the more successful, are written by reporters/outsiders impressed by evidence they have uncovered or experienced themselves. What they have experienced, incidentally, has often been the result of contact with a stock company of psychical figures, which includes prophets Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon (who predicted President Kennedy’s assassination), mediums Eileen Garrett and Arthur Ford (who figured in Bishop Pike’s famous séance), and psychometrist Peter Hurkos. The most prominent authors in the outsider category are Ruth Montgomery and Jess Stearn. Miss Montgomery, the Hearst columnist who claimed to be without psychical talent when she wrote the 1965 best seller, A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeane Dixon (William Morrow and Company), now admits that she has been up to her neck in occult experiences for years and believes in reincarnation. Her forthcoming book, Here and Hereafter (Coward-McCann) is dedicated to her sister Margaret, with whom, Miss Montgomery writes, “I have trod many other happy paths in ages past.”