For the impressionable Frommer, a 25-year-old draftee who spent every spare moment bumming around Europe on a Pfc.'s meager pay, liberation from the dollar's grip on his fantasies was like Paul's encounter on the road to Damascus. Evangelized, he returned to his Army base in Germany and began writing a book of travel tips for fellow GIs. There were no miracles to equal Majorca, but Frommer had made ends meet wherever he roamed. "The difficulty was that I hadn't been keeping notes, and sometimes I didn't even remember the names of the places I stayed," says Frommer, "so I'd say things like, 'You walk to the top of this hill and turn left and you'll see a red building where they'll let you sleep in the basement.' "
Haphazard though it was, Frommer's GI's Guide to Traveling in Europe became a sellout in Army PXs. Back in New York after his discharge, Frommer resumed a promising legal career with the blue-ribbon firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. "But in the back of my mind, turning over and over," he recalls, "was the phenomenon of that crazy little book." Returning to Europe for his summer vacation, Frommer dashed frantically from city to city, researching a sequel for civilians. The result, Europe on $5 a Day (rechristened Europe on $10 a Day in its 15th edition, in 1972), became not merely one of the best-selling travel guides ever written, but a kind of lodestar for middle-class tourists. More than 2.5 million copies have been sold over the years, and Frommer calculates, modestly, that of the three million Americans prowling Europe each summer, one in four travels with his book.
That first edition in 1957, however, sold only a few thousand copies. Frommer never considered taking the book to a publisher—"I'm convinced it would have been turned down," he says—and for several years put it out himself as a sideline. His first editorial headquarters was the Greenwich Village apartment he shared with his wife, Hope, and every vacation was spent tracking European bargains like some impecunious Ahab. Finally, in 1962, his avocation consumed his vocation, and he reluctantly withdrew from the law. By then he had brought out several more $5 a Day books, all written by freelancers, and the drift of his fortunes was clear. Today Frommer, 47, publishes and revises more than 30 travel guides a year; arranges tours, charters and accommodations for some 75,000 travelers annually, and operates hotels bearing his name in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Curaçao.
Ironically, for one who has grown so oblivious to overseas travel that he rarely carries a suitcase (preferring to maintain separate wardrobes abroad), Frommer had sedentary beginnings. Born in Lynchburg, Va., he spent the first 14 years of his life in Jefferson City, Mo., where his father was a white-collar worker in a pants factory. Devastated when his family moved to Brooklyn—"It was like the end of life to leave Jefferson City"—he went home to the University of Missouri in 1947. Transferring to New York University when his mother fell ill, Frommer won a scholarship to Yale Law School and graduated in 1953 as an editor of its law journal. When drafted the following winter, he had seen the inside of an airplane only once.
Today, though the monotony of transatlantic commuting has forever depleted his sense of flight as adventure, Frommer retains an innocent's passion for Europe. And though the quest for economy has become his professional raison d'être, he still is guided by romantic imperatives. Europe on the cheap is, for him, the true Europe, where one lingers over breakfast in back-street pensions and lives for a moment in a past not yet lost. Some tourists go to Europe for sightseeing; Frommer exults in its foreignness. "There was a time when the very primitiveness of your room was part of the European experience," he says plaintively. "Even putting on your robe and going down the hall to take a bath—there's something about that."
Philosophically, Frommer suspects, his readers have little in common with those of Fielding's Travel Guide to Europe, written for travelers with a yen for amenities. "The difference is reflected in the words that used to close Fielding's book," says Frommer. "I haven't looked at it in years, but I remember there was a paragraph that said something like, 'All right, you're home now and you've gone to the icebox and taken out a piece of cold chicken. Isn't it wonderful, after all, to be home?' Well, Fielding's type of reader, I've always felt, is happy to be home. Mine wishes he were still in Europe."
Now presiding over some 150 employees, in New York and in six foreign cities, Frommer personally writes only Europe on $10 a Day, delegating most other editorial chores to subordinates. He has never insisted that other writers duplicate his own exclamatory style (though he believes the best travel books express the enthusiasm of one whose mouth is "just hanging open with wonder"), but he can be a stickler on details. "The key is to take nothing for granted," he says, "to take the reader by the hand and give him everything he needs to know, down to the last telephone number."
From the beginning, Frommer's research has consisted of "getting up early and walking from morning till night, pestering people, asking questions. I learned about the sewer tour of Paris [two francs] while waiting in line for mail at American Express." Setting out from Europe's principal railroad stations, where budget hotels tend to be clustered, Frommer has trudged unrecognized into thousands of lobbies. "I have to use subterfuge," he explains. "I go in as if I'm a tourist whose wife is waiting at the station, and ask if I can see a couple of rooms. You have to get in and out in 10 minutes, and in that way I'm able to see 40 or 50 places in the course of a day." (Fluent in French, Frommer also speaks German, Russian and a bit of Spanish.)
Recently Frommer has cut down on his own inspections but still tries to visit each of the 17 cities in his book at least once every two years. No establishment can buy its way into the book, and listings are updated each winter. Each hotel, trattoria, Gasthaus, etc. is sent galley proofs of anything written about it and is required to confirm prices in writing. "If they don't reply," says Frommer, "they don't go in the book. If they confirm and then raise prices, they won't be in the following year and they'll never get in again."
With inflation rampant, and currencies in flux, all of Frommer's guides carry the seeds of their own obsolescence. Financially, that pleases Frommer, since it helps sell succeeding editions; editorially, it causes him agonies. Each spring, deadlines tumble like tenpins as he labors heroically to keep his Europe book current. It is scheduled to appear early in April; last year it arrived late in May. Once Frommer slept at the company where Europe is printed, revising even as the presses were rolling. "Air fares were changing, the French franc was being devalued," he recalls. "It was the most frightening time of my life."
Trading on the trust that his books created, Frommer began organizing his own $5-a-Day tours in 1962. Some travel agents, to whom Europe meant Claridge's and the Crillon, took one look at the paltry commissions he was promising (50 cents per tourist per day) and complained that he was wrecking their business. "They were horrified," says Frommer. "There were agencies from which I was physically ejected." By contrast, budget travel is now where the action is, and a jubilant Frommer is reaping the dividends. This winter Arthur Frommer Inc. will operate as many as seven overseas flights a week—more than some international airlines—to London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Curacao, Aruba and the Canary Islands.
Though a few of Frommer's tours use the lodgings he recommends in his budget guides, he also books hundreds of rooms at radical off-season discounts in some of Europe's most elegant hotels. Using the same block-purchasing leverage, Frommer offers the popular London Show Tour package, including four theater tickets and seven nights in a good hotel, for only $70 plus air fare. "You can go into a theater in London on a slow night during the winter, and a third of the audience will be ours," he observes. "It's a terrible development, but there are theater people who ask us whether we will buy tickets to a play before they will decide to produce it."
Now living in a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park with Hope and their 11-year-old daughter, Pauline, Frommer usually arrives at his cluttered downtown headquarters around 9 a.m. and promptly checks the mail. He scans the telex messages that rattle in from overseas and makes two or three transatlantic calls before his day is an hour old. "I get curious about what's going on over there," he explains. "We have a gigantic phone bill." Conferring with travel agents and tour operators around the U.S. and dashing off to meetings with airline officials, he pauses only for lunch at his desk. "I'm trying to reduce," admits the plumpish 5'9" tourmaster cheerfully, "so I have cottage cheese and fruit salad more often than not."
Frommer talks vaguely of slowing down but can barely pry himself away. "I guess the major difference between me and everyone else at the office is that when I finish the day, I go home for a second one," he says. "From January through March, I go through a form of purdah. That's when I'm writing my book, and I have to lock myself in the den and work. But almost every night I'm writing something—marketing material for our tour programs, all our ads. Then I go into the office on Saturday and write a weekly mailing to 8,000 travel agents."
Though recession, and the decline of the dollar, threw overseas travel into a tailspin in the early '70s, Frommer foresees a rebirth of the boom of the '60s. But are there any true bargains left in Europe? "Spain, Italy, Greece, even Mediterranean France if you stay away from Cannes and the glamor spots, are still the best buys," counsels Frommer. "But people who want a truly exciting, remarkable vacation should go quickly, right now, to Portugal, because the country is virtually empty of tourists. Other Europeans are apprehensive about the political situation, and it's possible to go to fabulous resorts on the Algarve and practically name your own price."
It is in the area of international air fares, however, that Frommer sees a revolution aborning. Relaxed federal regulations, he predicts, could send prices plummeting. "Next year, if we get the new air-fare-only Advanced Booking Charter, we'll be charging $279 round trip to London in the peak season," Frommer forecasts. "Now the least expensive excursion round trip at peak season is $527. And when we can operate jumbo jets on a regular basis, London can eventually come down to $249. If you fill the seats, you can cut back the cost. And no matter what the destination is, as long as you can offer a price so low the public gasps, you can operate a charter there."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
