Modern Living: A Guide to Temple Fielding

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outsiders find rather cloying. Temp is "Ole Simon," as in Simon Legree; Nancy is "Den Mother"; Joe Raff is "Tío 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