Modern Living: A Guide to Temple Fielding

(4 of 10)

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-basement 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