(8 of 10)
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