THE spy came in from the damp, striding briskly from his chauffeur-driven Rover 2000, whuppa-da-whupp through the revolving door into the Victorian lobby of Brown’s Hotel, Dover Street, London W.I. To an experienced counterespionage agent, his disguise probably would have appeared too perfect, and therefore suspicious. But there were no M15 types on duty at Brown’s —only a myopic receptionist too vain to wear her National Health Service spectacles and a concierge who had been with the house for 43 years and certainly knew a well-to-do Yank tourist when he saw one: blue suit, rep tie, white handkerchief folded so that exactly half an inch protruded from the breast pocket; razor-cut hair, a bit dark for his age, and well-manicured fingers and lacquered nails clutching a copy of Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe.
In the lobby, the spy paused to scuff at a frayed carpet edge with the toe of one glossy, custom-made Irish brogan. He sniffed the air. His glance shifted to the flowers on the coffee tables, skipped from ashtray to ashtray around the small room. Tilting his head back, he peered at the ceiling plaster and moldings. Finally, almost diffidently, he walked up to the counter and cleared his throat. “Yes, sir? What can I do for you?” inquired the receptionist. The spy plunked Fielding’s Travel Guide down on the counter. “My name,” he announced, “is Temple Fielding. I happen to write this book here. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. I wonder if I could see the manager.”
Temple Fielding! The receptionist turned and fled to an inner office, looking for someone in authority. Fielding had blown his cover. In the multilingual world of espionage, the professionals call it hosen herunterlassen—literally, dropping one’s trousers. Fielding could hardly have caused more of a flurry at Brown’s if he had literally done so. No wonder. An estimated 2,000,000 Americans will visit Europe this year, and an impressive number of them will follow a trail carefully blazed in advance by Temple Hornaday Fielding, at 55 the archon of U.S. guidebook writers.
More than 100,000 will pay $7.95 for the latest edition of his Guide, a 1,485-page, 909,000-word primer for peripatetics that weighs 2 lbs. 3½oz. Another 100,000 budget-minded tourists will spend $2.25 for Fielding’s Super-Economy Europe; the rest of the Fielding five-foot shelf (he is his own publisher) includes a European shopping guide, time and currency converters and a guidebook to the Caribbean. Temp operates Temple Fielding’s Epicure Club —which, for $15.50 a year, guarantees the insecure traveler a somewhat phony VIP welcome at any of 29 top European restaurants, plus free co*cktails for two. Other business deals are in the offing, including a possible U.S. television series on travel, to be hosted by himself. All of this earns Fielding a yearly income that is over $100,000, and climbing.
The G.P. Who Understands
In the 22 years since his first Guide was published, “the normal Mr. and Mrs. Smith of Middletown, U.S.A.” to whom it is frankly addressed, have come to regard Temple Fielding as a sort of traveler’s Dr. Spock—a role he relishes. “If Temp has a cause, and I think he has one,” says his chief assistant, Joe Raff, “it is to ease the passage of the traveler, to assuage his doubts. He’s like the country doctor, the g.p. who understands and cares.”
Hoteliers and headwaiters see another side of Fielding. “Let’s see,” he said, as he sat down with the assistant manager of Brown’s last month (the hotel had hired a new manager, but he was not yet on the job). “In our current Guide, we rate your hotel No. 11 in London.” The assistant manager winced. Fielding imperturbably went on to read aloud his full printed report on Brown’s: “a standby of the elderly,” “generally (not always) comfortable,” with some rooms that “are horribly cramped and inadequate.” Included was a typical Fielding tip: “One infuriated Guidester warns that every voyager should always check against being short-changed in the dining room here. (In fairness, we gave it a test on our latest Brown’s Derby, and our bill was impeccable.)” At that, the assistant manager unbent. “You imply we are a bunch of rogues!” he stormed. “You say one thing and then the other. It seems to me you could have saved the space.”
His annoyance did not keep him from giving Fielding a full hour’s top-to-bottom guided tour of the premises. Trailing along behind the hotelier, Fielding kept up a steady and reassuring patter: “Hmm, new paintwork there, very good . . . Oh, I see you’ve installed 110 volts A.C.—that’s fine”—meanwhile running his hand along the tops of doors to see if they had been dusted. Entering one room, he pointed to the bed, asked “Do you mind?” and flopped onto it, carefully keeping his feet raised to avoid getting black shoe polish on the spread. In a bathroom, he climbed into the tub, fully clothed, to test its leg room, then turned on the shower—soaking his jacket in the process.
The rooms that drew Fielding’s closest scrutiny were the inside singles, known in the trade as “the mother-in-law rooms.” They are, he explains, “the lowest common denominator. You learn a lot about the hotel from just a glance at them.” Tour over, Fielding cordially thanked the assistant manager, ducked back outside to his car. “Let’s do the usual, Mac,” he told the chauffeur, who promptly drove around the corner and parked. Fielding pulled out a notebook and began scribbling away: “Concierge with hotel 43 years. Many improvements under way. When manager arrives, fireworks are expected.” Tucking the notebook into his briefcase, he confided: “Notes are the most precious things. We have nightmares about losing them.”
Temple Fielding has been called “a modern Baedeker.” The description fits only in the sense that Karl Baedeker dominated the guidebook field during the mid-1800s, just as Fielding does today. For kings and governments may err,/ But never Mr. Baedeker, wrote Poet A. P. Herbert. Stolid and scholarly, an indefatigable wanderer and meticulous researcher, Baedeker was the first guidebook writer to rate hotels and restaurants with a star system (similar to that employed by France’s Michelin guides today); he was also a culture demon who directed his readers to every landmark and royal pigeon roost.
Fielding practically ignores sightseeing: he dismisses the Louvre in five lines, the Prado in six, and his main reaction to Roman ruins is that “there’s a permanency about the Colosseum.” In fact, he devotes a total of only 56 lines to the scenic attractions of Rome, v. 68 to those of Sardinia, and the introduction to his chapter on Italy reads: “In Spain the traveler finds a bullfight, in Denmark he stuffs himself in Tivoli Gardens, in Switzerland he buys a watch, and in Italy he goes to the opera. Allowing for seasonal factors, it’s as simple as that.” His wide-eyed, hoked-up style and notions about what tourists want to do with their time abroad would probably make Baedeker turn over in his catacomb.
Clutching the Wallet
“If Wall Street continues to woof happily on its financial looms, if the Peking and Hanoi carpetmakers can be taught to weave a softer warp, and if the Soviets don’t throw their bearskin rug across more frontiers, then 1969 will be the busiest, dizziest sewing bee in European vacation history,” announces the introduction to Fielding’s new Guide, published last month. In that same hortatory fashion, Fielding fusses over his readers’ clothes (“A sport jacket on an adult is considered improper at the leading restaurants”), warns them about con men (“No matter how dazzling the offer, puh-LEEZE don’t change any money on the streets”) and coaches them through customs (“Name, rank and serial number only”).
Fielding’s devotion to his charges is beyond question. He tells them how to beat the airlines out of excess baggage fees (stuff heavy articles into coat sleeves, tie knots in the ‘sleeves, carry the coat) and introduces them to the wonders of the old-fashioned bidet (turn on the spray, balance a pingpong ball on it; the ball will stay there for hours). With the panicky provincialism of a country kid clutching his wallet pocket on Broadway, he continually cautions them to count their change in taxis, to drink only bottled beer in nightclubs (“Mickey Finns are far from uncommon”), and to drive carefully. He observes with a shudder: “Your chances of spilling your blood or dying are three and a half times greater on French roads than on American roads.”
He makes sure that their days are full. For Mrs. Smith he proposes a shopping tour. And what is Mr. Smith to do while the Missus is sacking the stores? Wink, wink. The girls of The Netherlands “take the honors in the firecracker department,” Fielding whispers, and in London, ladies of the afternoon can be located by consulting the “business cards” on street bulletin boards. He defends his genteel pandering on the principle that “people’s lives are their private lives. A husband and wife come to Europe, they’re together, together, together. They’re in a rut. The wife decides to go someplace the husband doesn’t want to go. So he’ll want to know where he can find a good-looking girl. So we’ll tell him. It’s part of life and part of travel.” On the other hand, the Guide makes a point of warning that “there’s a new strain of gonorrhea so hardy that it eats sulfa and penicillin for breakfast.”
If Fielding concentrates on the practical and physical rather than on the cultural, there are always other guidebooks to fill the void. J. A. Neal’s Reference Guide for Travellers lists 942 books on Europe alone. There are shopping guides, currency guides, and guides that tell parents how to travel with their children without losing either their cool or their kids. A clutch of paperback “budget” guides are aimed at people who want to believe that they can travel abroad more cheaply than they can live at home. The opposite extreme is represented by A Millionaire’s Guide to Europe, which is full of advice on how to behave as if you owned that rented Spanish villa. Or how to fly a private jet around the Continent, or hold a party in a rented windmill.
Fielding’s toughest competitor—and critic—is probably Arthur Frommer, a former Manhattan attorney who writes the budget guidebook, Europe on $5 a Day. According to Frommer, Fielding writes “as though the only reason for going to Europe is to eat one grand meal after another. My people don’t want to stay in hotels that have stock market tickers in the lobbies. They’re people who want to test Europe—live on the Left Bank of Paris instead of the Right, eat in the same restaurants the local people eat in.” Frommer’s “people” are mainly travelers in the 30-and-under age bracket—currently nearly half of all the U.S. tourists who visit Europe. He appeals to them so gainfully that within ten years he has parlayed Europe on $5 a Day into a company that publishes 14 separate guidebooks, operates a tour service, owns hotels in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and is currently planning a public stock issue to finance further expansion.
What Frommer says has the ring of solid silver. His Europe on $5 a Day outsells Fielding’s Super-Economy Guide by about two to one, and one reason surely is the Fielding book’s patronizing attitude toward low-budget travel. “What about the bargain-basem*nt Continent of $1 rooms, 500 meals and 250 drinks?” reads the introduction. “Yes, you can ferret out those places—just as the visitor to New York City can ferret out a bed along the Bowery’s Skid Row and a 250 meal at a soup kitchen. But you are an American.” Fielding’s people obviously are not Frommer’s people. But they are undoubtedly more influential than Frommer’s. But what’s more, they believe in Fielding, and belief often borders on adoration.
Midnight Flush
“Fielding’s guide is a kind of Bible to us,” says Montreal Businessman Gordon Mills, 53, who, with his wife Isabel, is currently winding up a month-long European vacation. “Right from the start it made things easier—things like tipping on the ship coming over. It helped us fit in much quicker.” On Fielding’s recommendation, Mrs. Mills shopped at Liberty’s for a tweed suit, at Marks & Spencer for sweaters and lingerie, at Harrods for a 220-volt adapter for their traveling steam iron—”He says you can get anything at Harrods.” They ate dinner at the Elizabethan Room of the Gore Hotel (“The zaniest meal in London,” promises Fielding, with “waitresses who may be pinched at will”). They found it “excellent, and just as he said. A one-time experience. We agreed with him that you wouldn’t want to return every day of the week.”
Juri and Lisa Matisoo, a young couple from Yorktown Heights, N.Y. (he is an IBM physicist, she an active Junior Leaguer) last month visited London, Rome, Florence and Athens and took a four-day cruise around the Greek islands. They followed Fielding “religiously” all the way. Their discipleship, they discovered, carried a hefty price tag —$4,000, despite the fact that they economized by flying tourist class—and their hotel accommodations did not always live up to Fielding’s effusive billing.
At the Eden in Rome (“Truly paradisal,” says Fielding), their room turned out to be tiny and cramped, overlooking a courtyard that was “like an echo chamber”; at the Athens Hilton (Fielding: “Infinitely the best hostelry in Greece”), the Matisoos had to live with a thermostat that was permanently stuck at 80° and a ghostly toilet that flushed all by itself in the middle of the night. Says Juri: “The manager told us that all the toilets in the hotel were flushing, and there just wasn’t anything he could do about it.” But Harry’s Bar in Florence made up for all the lapses. “A must for everybody,” insists Fielding, and Lisa Matisoo concurs: “Harry makes absolutely the best martinis in Italy, and the hamburgers are excellent.”
Anything but Tourists
It takes a special kind of travel writer to steer his readers to steerburgers in Italy. And Temple Fielding is special. He is a superpatriotic expatriate (witness the U.S. flag that flies from the fender of his siren-equipped Cadillac convertible) and a Swinburned sentimentalist. Although he has lived abroad for 18 years, most of them on the island of Majorca, he does not speak a foreign language. His son Dodge, a senior at New York’s Hamilton College, recalls an awkward scene one day when Fielding kept telling a Spanish cab driver that he wanted to pick up some cojónes (testicl*s); he meant cajónes (boxes). In his politics, Fielding leans to the right, but he bends over leftward when it comes to cigars (Cuban) and stands up straight when it means business. As he explains in the style book for his staff: “We are never political in Free World references. Wisecracks or bons mots involving Soviet, Chinese Communist, or similar enemy figures are used if desired.”
However, he continues in the instruction manual, “you will quickly observe how every member of our little group here detests bigotry in the deepest part of his or her heart. (Most of us happen to be political Conservatives rather than Liberals, but this has nothing to do with our unanimous views toward inhumanity.) In an infinitely smaller sense, it is bad business (and bad sales) to be depreciatory toward geographic locations or abnormal unfortunates. Say ‘For the tourists from Cornville’ rather than ‘For the tourists from Sioux City.’ Say ‘For the Gay Boys,’ or similar, without scorn. We sell books. They buy them—much more than one would think.” Fielding, in fact, would just as soon avoid calling them tourists. “Nobody likes that,” he says, and in his Guide, he goes out of his way to use synonyms (“travelers,” “voyagers,” “vacationers”), euphemisms (“pilgrims”) and conceits (“Guidesters”).
Fielding calls his staff his “family.” It consists of Temple, his wife Nancy (“My Nancy”), Joe Raff (ex-managing editor of the Rome Daily American), Raff’s wife Judy and Robert Bone, formerly of TIME Inc.’s Book Division. Each Fielding family member has a nickname, which outsiders find rather cloying. Temp is “Ole Simon,” as in Simon Legree; Nancy is “Den Mother”; Joe Raff is “TÃo Pepe”); Judy is “Kid Chocolate”; and Bone, naturally, is “Billy Bones.” Home is headquarters, and headquarters is home: Villa Fielding, a $400,000 estate in the beach resort of Formentor, a 1½-hour drive across Majorca from Palma, the Spanish island’s capital. The staff spends anywhere from two to seven months a year on the road, inspecting new hotels and restaurants, revisiting those already mentioned in the guide. When a trip is in the offing, Villa Fielding becomes a sort of MI 6 command post. A Hallwag highway map of Europe replaces one of the rugs on the living-room floor. On their knees, hunched over it, staffers plot their infiltration routes, circling “soft spots”—places that have been too long unvisited or, according to field reports, are currently undergoing rapid change. (A “soft spot” in the 1969 guide: Scotland, which Fielding has not visited since 1966.) Ole Simon, as the only operative with an 00 designation, cuts his own orders, and they are invariably the same: he and Nancy do their spying in London, Paris, Rome, Madrid and Copenhagen (a Fielding favorite). The others are assigned to less salubrious spots.
Table for Mr. Parker
Still, the pay is good, and so are the perks. On the road, Fielding, Raff and Bones travel like triplets. They each carry three dark blue mohair suits, tailored with covered buttons and zippered pockets by Brioni of Rome. Their shirts are all of fine white oxford cloth sewn to Fielding’s own design (handmade buttonholes, extra-long French cuffs) by a Majorcan shirtmaker. Their ties are regimental-striped and made in Italy. Their topcoats of blue vicuÑa are cut by English House in Copenhagen. Even their techniques are triplicate.
In restaurants and cabarets, Fielding is always—if he can manage it—incognito. He reserves a table in advance, either under an alias (Parker, Stone and Phillips are his favorites) or in the name of a local friend whom he is taking to lunch or dinner. Temp has four basic test dishes: eggs Benedict (“You can tell a lot from the consistency of the hollandaise”), vol-au-vent (“So often it’s gucky”), bouillabaisse (“Every maritime country has its own version”) and coquilles St. Jacques. He is an expert at moving food around on his plate to make it look as though he is eating more than he is—all the while surreptitiously scribbling away in a gold-covered notebook designed to look like a cigarette case. Despite his precautions, Fielding is occasionally recognized. Then, as he tells it, displaying his notorious aversion to the first-person-singular pronoun: “We suddenly develop chronic urinary trouble and take the long way around to the lav. We look at the plates of the other diners. We time the service of the people at a table in the corner. We watch the movement at the service tables. We listen to what the others are saying about the food.”
Nightclubs are Fielding’s personal bête noire. “I despise them,” he says. “They are all the same, the same smoky clips, the same B-girls, the same tired shows and the same phony booze.” To get it over with, he tries to cram as many nightclub visits into one evening as possible: his record, set two years ago in Paris, is 16.
Keeping the Wings On
Despite the fact that he surely ranks right up there among the world’s most experienced travelers (134 countries, an estimated 2,000,000 miles), Fielding on the road is the epitome of the insecure U.S. tourist. When he heads for the airport, he literally jingles with good luck charms: 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 says, “but these things are what keep the wings on the airplane.”
He boasts that “we have never missed a plane or a train in our life”—and why should he have, since he invariably shows up at least an hour ahead of departure time? At an airport, Fielding’s baggage check-in is a laughin.
Airline Clerk: Ah yes, Mr. Fielding, will you please put your suitcases on the scale?
Fielding (with a flourish): See, not an ounce overweight!
Clerk: That’s fine, sir, but what about those things you’re carrying in your hands?
“Those things” are an immense raffia shopping bag and a calfskin briefcase with more compartments than the Queen Elizabeth 2. In them, Fielding carries enough of home to prove that you can take it with you when you go. One nickel-plated ice bucket. A container of U.S.-made Tribune vermouth, for U.S.-style martinis. A silver flask of Fernet-Branca bitters (ugh!) for queasy mornings-after. Small cigars. A pocket edition of Ecclesiastes. One tube of Epernay mustard (for breakfast he only eats ham sandwiches because “I’m so sick of croissants that I’d rather eat my shoes”). A tiny Swiss alarm clock, three pairs of glasses and a fistful of toothbrushes. Plus, of course, a portable radio (for music to shave and shower by), decaffeinated instant coffee, sleeping pills (two strengths), and a plastic bag of dried, unsalted peanuts. That is only a partial inventory. On a recent British European Airways flight, Fielding ordered a Manhattan co*cktail. “Sorry, sir,” said the steward, whereupon Temp dug into his briefcase and produced a miniature Manhattan bottle of his own. “I’m sorry, we don’t have a cherry for you, sir,” the steward sweetly countered. Fielding dug in again and found a whole bottle of maraschinos.
Doyenne of Shopping
Life on the road sounds sybaritic, but to those who live it, it is hectic and wearying. Except for occasional weekend rendezvous, members of the Fielding “family” travel separately, and when they straggle back to Majorca, the tendency is to collapse. Temp collates his notes in bed. Nancy balances her checkbook in bed. For days they type in bed and eat in bed and only get out to shower, change pajamas and do situps. Fielding has ordered a custom-built electric bed that bends and unbends at the touch of a button.
Not until he feels fully restored does Temp move his base of operations to his office—a sort of travel-trade city room. There, surrounded by 93 framed certificates and photographs, he sits at a U-shaped desk, pounding away at a typewriter in indefectible isolation: his incoming phone calls end at the switchboard of the nearby Hotel Formentor. The basic writing of the Travel Guide to Europe is done by Fielding and Joe Raff, who mimics his master’s prose, which has been described as Rotarian baroque. Judy Raff and Robert Bone are mainly responsible for the Super-Economy Guide, and Nancy Fielding is doyenne of the Shopping Guide.
The Shopping Guide is the only Fielding publication with an entrance fee. Stores listed pay for the privilege, and they are generally the same shops that are mentioned, in the same glowing language, in the Guide to Europe. Fielding shrugs off that touch of commercialism by insisting that the payments (“production subsidies,” he calls them) are too small to be significant and that the shops exercise no control over what Nancy writes about them.
The travel business has more than its share of venality, but during his 22 years as a guidebook writer, Fielding seems to have kept his integrity. He spends $60,000 a year of his own money on traveling, insists that he has never accepted a free plane ticket. There are seven European hotels in which Fielding allows himself to stay without paying because the operator is a close friend and would otherwise be offended. He makes up for that by overtipping: during a two-day sojourn at Madrid’s Palace Hotel, managed by Alfonso Font, he gave away $130 in gratuities.
No. 2 in Dublin
To be sure, Fielding uses the Guide to praise his friends and publicize his prejudices. He has been sued 39 times for libel, but has lost only once, when he had to pay $3,800 to taxi operators he called “the biggest crooks and racketeers in Europe.” Even friendship is no insurance against a Fielding knock if an establishment goes sour. But he knocks in the pained tones of an evangelist trying to persuade a fallen woman to return to the flock.
In 1962, Temp recalls, Guidesters began writing to complain about the Gresham Hotel in Dublin, an alltime Fielding favorite. He collected their letters over a seven-month period, then sent photo copies to his old friend, Manager Toddie O’Sullivan. “I said, ‘Toddie, I don’t like this at all. Something must be wrong.’ ” Next, he dispatched Nancy on an inspection trip, then dropped the Gresham to No. 2 in Dublin, behind the Shelbourne. “We said we hoped it was only a temporary aberration,” Fielding says. At first furious, O’Sullivan took a second look and decided that the Guide was right. After an $850,000 renovation job, he threw a dinner in Fielding’s honor and at toasting time told one and all: “This was one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me.” (Says the ’69 Guide: “Today the Gresham is just like home—only better.”)
Despite his efforts to salvage erring establishments, Fielding frequently errs himself. For annual corrections in cities that the five-member team has been unable to visit, Fielding is forced to rely on a network of friends—florists, restaurateurs, airline employees, local city-guide editors, shopkeepers. They commit numerous howlers—and so has Fielding. In his 1969 book, he says that there are “only 125 miles of turnpike” in France, when in fact there are more than 600. He calls St. Tropez on the Riviera “a sweet little port,” and maybe it is—in the winter. During the warm summer months, it is the closest thing to Coney Island east of Coney Island. The Greek section of the current Guide has obviously not been revised for years: hotels described as “new” are actually in their teens, and Athens’ Costi restaurant, which Fielding calls “our local favorite” and praises for its “excellent cookery and ancient waiters,” qualifies as somewhat ancient itself. It closed down last summer. In Munich, Fielding marvels at a 330-ft.-high TV tower that is really 330 meters high, and manages to overlook three spanking-new luxury hotels.
Regimental Haircut
Pointed out to him, such errors offend not only Fielding’s sense of professionalism but a sort of noblesse oblige which he works hard to maintain. A product of prep schools, Princeton and genial genealogy, Fielding is descended on his father’s side from Novelist Henry Fielding, related on his mother’s to Naturalist William Temple Hornaday. After a brief postgraduate career as a mutual funds salesman, Temp turned to the typewriter and sold his first article to the Reader’s Digest in 1940. He was then called into the Army and sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., where his commanding officer assigned him to write a guidebook to the base. That book was the prototype of Fielding’s Guide to Europe—chatty, chuckly, problem-solving, a little patronizing: (“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.”) Continuing to do magazine articles from Fort Bragg, Fielding met a Manhattan literary agent named Nancy Parker. He became her client—and two months later her husband.
In early 1944, Artillery Captain Fielding was transferred to the OSS and shipped to Italy, Algeria and Yugoslavia to do propaganda work behind enemy lines. After a narrow escape from an ambush on the Dalmatian coast, he was discharged as a major with a citation that credited him with arranging “more than 30,000 voluntary enemy surrenders.” He returned to civilian life as a roving journalist, and as he roved, he discovered that no travel guide catered to his all-American life style.
The first edition of Fielding’s Guide came off the presses in 1948. It was an instant success. The Danish government ran a survey and was amazed to discover that between one-third and one-half of all Americans who visited between 1948 and 1950 had come at Fielding’s recommendation. Nancy and Temple moved from New York to Denmark in 1951, and four months later settled in Formentor, where they built up their remarkable establishment.
Pheasant in Burgundy Jelly
Entering the villa, reports TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott, a guest senses that “he has just checked into one of the grand hotels of Europe.” A staff of six stands ready to perform any service. The bar is stocked with 116 varieties of liquor, including pisco from Peru, ouzo from Greece, Indonesian arrack, Georgia moonshine from the U.S. and a 140-proof Italian pine liquor, which Fielding says is “really too strong to drink.” The basem*nt larder is packed with imported delicacies: pheasant in Burgundy jelly, smoked swordfish, Scotch grouse pâté, quail eggs, Norwegian kippers, whole lychees, albacore tuna from Oregon.
Dinner is an extravaganza. Says Correspondent Scott: “There is lots of cheek kissing. Temp is master of the toast, and he gives them in rapid-fire succession. Each new fill of the wine glasses, which are enormous crystal ballons of the sort normally seen only at the swankiest restaurants, brings an invocation of ‘Hei, hei,’ a friendly salutation which Fielding has borrowed from the hard-drinking Finns. Old anecdotes are dredged up and embellished until they sink again—about the day that Prince Albert and Princess Paola of Belgium visited the villa for skeet shooting and the time that a U.S. Navy admiral suddenly and inexplicably vanished in the middle of a Fielding party. It turned out that he had fallen from the rock garden, broken a leg, and painfully dragged himself half a mile to his waiting barge.”
Like a sort of unheroic Hemingway, Fielding has created a charmed circle and a cult. It involves rituals about food, drink and living in which everything has to be just so. It divides the world into good guys and bad—or, as Fielding has it, “givers” and “takers.” His friends must all be givers—although as soon as they become his friends, they must learn to take as well, since he loves to shower them with thoughtful gifts: a favorite delicacy, a dozen fine Majorcan handkerchiefs embroidered with their signatures, a monogrammed cigarette lighter. For a grown man, he is wildly sentimental; every reunion is a ceremonial occasion, every farewell a moment of mourning. In between, there are Temple’s affectionate letters, punctuated, illustrated and signed with drawings of himself feeling stupid, say, or disgusted, or raffish. Thus:
Some people find all this hard to take. But most of Fielding’s readers, who sense this atmosphere in the Guide, seem to like it because it gives them a feeling of clubbiness. Sophisticated travelers—or those who would like to seem sophisticated—would rather be caught in the Lido nightclub in Paris than be seen carrying Fielding’s Guide (some leave it in the hotel room or carry it with a plain brown wrapper). As American tourists become more experienced, as travel becomes ever more natural and casual, Fielding will have to change or lose his popularity. But right now there seems to be no shortage of neophytes, for whom the Guide is essentially written. Long after the theme has ceased to pervade American literature, Fielding maintains it in his pages: the theme of American innocence abroad. Fielding himself remains an innocent.
In Brussels, L’Epaule de Mouton regularly lists Orange Sabayon Fielding on its menu, and in Madrid, Horcher’s serves chicken salad a la Temple Fielding. He has been decorated three times by the Spanish government, belongs to a royal order in Sweden, and is an honorary citizen of Amsterdam. Yet Fielding is still the cartoon image of the American supertourist—relentlessly energetic about travel but worried about getting gypped, wary of being misdirected or slighted, and rather homesick for America. So last week, when the Italian government notified Fielding that it had awarded him the Grand Cross of the Ordina al Merito della Repubblica, and wanted to decorate him on June 11 in Barcelona, it was in character for Temple Fielding to send regrets. He will be too busy on June 11—getting together with the givers of his college days at his 30th Princeton reunion.
