Wallflower at the Orgy (17 page)

This premise occasionally runs away with itself. Even in Washington, D.C., writes Beth Bryant in
Washington, D.C., on $5 a Day
, “it is far more delightful to stay in a grand, old
reconverted townhouse … to share the TV lounge with FBI trainees, Supreme Court law clerks, and a female group of French social workers—than to spend $20 for a swank room in a 16th Street hotel where you meet no one but fellow American tourists.” In fact, people who travel with $5-a-Day books have considerably less chance of meeting the natives than of meeting other people traveling with $5-a-Day books, all of them swearing by Arthur Frommer, saying they go to bed with him, and dying to compare costs to see who is saving more doing what.

Travel on $5 a day, a sum that includes room and board, can be accomplished by following Frommer’s “rules of the game.” Never, for example, take a room with a bath. Don’t be put off by hotels without impressive façades and lobbies. Never patronize a restaurant without a menu in its window. Don’t go to Washington while the cherry trees are in bloom, Israel during Passover, or Radio City Music Hall at night, when the rates go up. The cafeteria is king. And if the resulting trip bears some resemblance to the one Bean Blossom Township High School’s graduating class took to New York in Lillian Ross’s “The Yellow Bus,” well, that’s how it has to be in the wonderful world of budget travel. “My readers do not go for a gourmet experience,” says Frommer.

My own experience, shared by many, is that budget travel is not a matter of choice, only of necessity. I like ice-cube machines in my hotel, gourmet experiences twice a day, please, and I have no desire whatsoever to sit in a TV lounge with an FBI trainee. But I have traveled with $5-a-Day books and find them utterly indispensable. Their bread-and-butter details—on public transportation, cultural events, hotels and restaurants—are unequaled, essential for all but the least cost-conscious
travelers. More important, the books have convinced thousands of Americans who probably would never otherwise have traveled abroad that it is possible to do so on a severely limited budget.

They have also made it possible for several hundred of them to pursue a free-lance writing career of a sort. The $5-a-Day books now contain long sections of reader suggestions culled from reader mail and rewarded with a copy of a $5-a-Day book; many of them are useful; many are terrifyingly ingenious. “When we leave on our trip,” writes Martin Jansson of Bowie, Maryland, “our suitcases are bulging with clothes, but many of them are garments to be worn just once more before discarding. This saves laundering, lightens the load progressively and gains space for purchases abroad. Our only problem resulting from this practice has been with cabin stewards, who … neatly pile the discarded clothes beside the berth. This necessitates a trip topside to throw them over the rail.” The suggestions give the books a sort of tacky charm, something like Sidney Skolsky’s column when just anyone was allowed to submit his Oscar picks.

If the books are indispensable, they are by no means perfect. The writing, with few exceptions, is humorless, uninteresting and given to rhetorical questions and exclamation points. (“What do the Dutch eat for lunch?” writes Frommer. “Well, most of them eat a second breakfast!”) The books are also quite uneven, ranging from the excellent—Europe, England, Japan, Mexico, Greece, New York—to inadequate—South America, the Caribbean. Frommer emphatically denies the most frequent criticism of the books: that restaurants and hotels raise their prices as soon as they are mentioned. What happened more often, he says, is that
they earn so much money as a result of being listed that they make improvements and become higher-quality establishments.

The books, particularly
Europe
, are remarkably up-to-date, an achievement Frommer credits to KLM, Royal Dutch Airways, which sponsors the book and receives in return its symbol on the book cover and a subsequent identification with budget travel. Unfortunately, Frommer has repaid KLM unwisely and too well: he fails to mention Icelandic Airlines, the only low-cost way to fly noncharter to Europe, and his enthusiasm for Amsterdam can only be looked upon with suspicion.

The surprising thing about surprising Amsterdam, it turns out, is that Frommer devotes more space to it than to any other European city. In addition, he insists that the city is the ideal gateway—arrival and departure point—for a European trip. Is it, as he claims, because the auto rentals are so low? Because of the sincere, warm way the Dutch speak English? Because of the taxfree shopping available at its airport? To use Frommer’s style and punctuation: I doubt it!

These faults are regrettable in books that not only are otherwise incorruptible but also can easily afford to go un-subsidized, particularly by companies with such direct interest in the product. The food tasters for the
Guide Michelin
are not, after all, testing tire treads. One hopes Arthur Frommer will stop pinching his own pennies—by taking aid from KLM—so that others may better pinch theirs.

There are those in the publishing world who say that the whole thing would have happened much sooner had it not been for
Life
magazine and its attack on poor Bridey Murphy in 1956. There are others—more disposed toward theories of occult causation—who believe that the spirit world just couldn’t exert sufficient power over the publishing world until a few years ago. Still others—practical types—explain it as the book-buying public’s response to the increasing complexity of modern living.

Whatever the reasons for it—and it remains for the sociologists to supply them—American publishers have discovered of late that there is a great deal of money to be made in convincing readers that the fault is not in themselves but in their stars. Books on parapsychology, mysticism, and the
subjects that seem to follow inexorably from them—yoga, ESP, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, astrology, witches, mediums, ghosts, Atlantis, psychokinesis, prophecy, and, most of all, reincarnation—are flourishing. At least three paperback publishers—New American Library, Paperback Library, and Sherbourne Press—have begun series exclusively devoted to books on the occult;
Paperbound Books in Print
lists 203 titles under the category, “Parapsychology and the Supernatural.” In hard cover, industry sources estimate that there are four times as many books on the subject now being printed as there were five years ago, though exact figures are virtually impossible to come by. The most recent parapsychological best seller, Jess Stearn’s
The Search for the Girl with the Blue Eyes
, has sold forty-six thousand copies.

In these books, terms like “karma” and “odic force” appear, without any explanation or definition, as if they were in everyday use. The names of Jesus Christ, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur Conan Doyle, Keats, Yeats, Jung, Einstein, and Jackie Gleason (who once told Hedda Hopper that he was at times precognitive) are taken, sometimes in vain, as examples of famous men who were true believers. Respected writers who used to feel compelled to pretend skepticism when writing about the occult now confess to living with ghosts, speaking to dead relatives through mediums, and participating in automatic writing.

“The public interest has been way ahead of the publishers’ response,” said Lee Barker, executive editor of Doubleday and Company. “People in general want to read about these things. After all, there’s the possibility of discovering the meaning of life. We can’t get enough good books on the subject.”

Doubleday, which published
The Search for Bridey Murphy
and
The Power of Prayer on Plants
, to name just two
parapsychological classics, is probably the most active hardcover publisher currently in this field. The fact that it cannot get enough good books on the subject has not prevented it, or other publishers, from printing what they think the market will bear. Books on parapsychology, Barker admits, are sadly inferior to most science fiction; indeed, they are also sadly inferior to most books written on gardening, pet care, and UFOs. It is almost incredible that so many authors could take such a fascinating subject and make it as boring as they do. Reading these books is a little like eating pressed duck: all the juice has been drained out of something that one knows was once meaty and succulent.

Generally speaking, there are two types of books written on parapsychology: those by psychics and those by journalists. The former, usually written with the assistance of a ghost writer (the term takes on new meaning here), are modest tables of how the author got his gift, how he resisted it for several years, and how he ultimately came to use it to help mankind without thought of personal profit. A recent example of the genre is
The Reluctant Prophet
(Doubleday), a book about a young man named Daniel Logan who became a big-time psychic as a result of his appearance on the David Susskind Show, where he predicted the 1967 summer riots, the end of the Northeast water shortage, and Elizabeth Taylor’s 1966 Academy Award.

The second group, by far the more successful, are written by reporters/outsiders impressed by evidence they have uncovered or experienced themselves. What they have experienced, incidentally, has often been the result of contact with a stock company of psychical figures, which includes prophets Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon (who predicted President Kennedy’s assassination), mediums Eileen Garrett
and Arthur Ford (who figured in Bishop Pike’s famous séance), and psychometrist Peter Hurkos. The most prominent authors in the outsider category are Ruth Montgomery and Jess Stearn. Miss Montgomery, the Hearst columnist who claimed to be without psychical talent when she wrote the 1965 best seller,
A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeane Dixon
(William Morrow and Company), now admits that she has been up to her neck in occult experiences for years and believes in reincarnation. Her forthcoming book,
Here and Hereafter
(Coward-McCann) is dedicated to her sister Margaret, with whom, Miss Montgomery writes, “I have trod many other happy paths in ages past.”

Stearn, who is said to have lost his pot belly through yoga, is a former journalist whose early books were about various sexual persuasions and who moved into parapsychology about five years ago. Stearn’s current book,
The Search for the Girl with the Blue Eyes
(Doubleday), is a second-rate Bridey Murphy adventure about an uninteresting small-town Canadian girl who turned out under hypnosis to be the reincarnation of another uninteresting small-town Canadian girl. Its publication has been advertised with a splash campaign in national magazines (“Left to right: Joanne MacIver, Susan Ganier, Jess Stearn” reads the caption under a picture of just two persons.) Its forty-six-thousand-copy sale would be respectable in any season, but it is small compared with Stearn’s
Edgar Cayce—The Sleeping Prophet
(Doubleday), which sold 123,000 copies, spent thirty weeks on the best-seller list last year, and spawned a dozen paperback reprints and knockoffs on Cayce. (According to Stearn, the title
The Sleeping Prophet
came directly from Cayce, who communicated it from the spirit world to a New York medium named Bathsheba Asko-with.)

Among the Cayce books now on the stands are several by Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn, the director of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), a Virginia Beach, Virginia, organization devoted to carrying on the work of Edgar Cayce. This is not an altogether easy task, since Cayce has been dead for twenty-three years and no one with his astonishing psychical gifts has come forth to replace him. Nevertheless, the ARE bobbles along on waves of interest in Cayce (one being the result of a chapter in
Bridey Murphy
), and this very week is offering a seven-day program of study of Reincarnation and Karma, featuring a lecture on Presenting Reincarnation to Children, for twenty-six dollars, including meals.

Edgar Cayce, parapsychology’s sleeping prophet, was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877. An unassuming man, Cayce (pronounced KAY-see) reached only the fifth grade of school at the age of fifteen, when he dropped out. He was humble, devout, and thoroughly mystified by the powers he began to display in his twenties, when it became clear that he could, in trance, diagnose the illnesses of patients he had never met, prescribe cures involving drugs he had never heard of, and use anatomical expressions he could not pronounce in a non-trance state. During his life, Cayce eked out a living as a photographer and supplemented his income with the modest sums he got for his diagnoses. He died in 1945.

Cayce’s cures, now bound in a little black book and available for twenty-five dollars from the ARE, are a strange combination of medicine, folk medicine, and osteopathy, delivered in a convoluted, almost incomprehensible style of
speech. (This, for example, is Edgar Cayce supposedly predicting the Great Depression: “Better that a few points were missed here and there, even in a spectacular rise or fall, than to be worrying where the end would be. Forget not the warning here.”) Cayce’s record as a diagnostician is well documented: his secretary made three copies of each reading he gave, and many of the people who wrote him for help are alive to tell the tale.