imagined Larry Darrell from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge quite possibly ordering a Pernod here or up the street at Le Dôme or La Coupole. Even though I’d tried to read Maugham’s book several times and failed, if I’d watched the movie The Razor’s Edge on TV once, I watched it a thousand times. That film was one of the most important inspirations for my international adventure.
Jake in The Sun Also Rises was a correspondent for The New York Herald in Paris. His life, in the movie version, looked wonderful. Paris looked wonderful. As I watched him on his Paris streets, I started to envision myself there also. My vision, how I pictured myself, was very different from a lot of other young travelers coming to Europe at this time. I didn’t see myself as a hippie. I wanted to be the Tyrone Power of 1970.
I imagined myself always in suits. My Parisian friends would be also dressed to the nines. My acquaintances would probably be successful creatives in art, words and fashion. I would work for a prestigious ad agency. I’d create great ads. I’d probably be around beautiful French models so often that I would get to know most of them and date some. If you wanted to find me, you’d check Paris’s best restaurants, cafes or nightclubs. I would have a great apartment with views of the Seine and the Île de la Cité. I saw myself at sunset, as Notre Dame was bathed in a mystical yellow and orange glow, sipping a glass of perfectly balanced Cabernet as I opened my gold-stamped cigarette case with one hand and paused for a moment to decide whether to pick a Marlboro or one of the French Gauloise, for I always kept both on hand.
But Jake didn’t only know Paris. He traveled often. Most importantly, he traveled to Spain. I wondered about Spain. Yes, Paris had to be my first stop, but I didn’t know any French, while I did know some Spanish. I wondered, was Spain very different from France and especially Paris? Jake was so carefree, in control of himself and his city. He had fun wherever he went, whatever he did. I didn’t know if I would ever find out about Spain; I was just finding out about Paris, and the more I delved into the city, the way of life and the history, I realized that what I wanted to learn might take me not days or weeks but frankly (and I worried about this) years and years.
Larry Darrell’s Paris was different. His Paris was more serious. As the 1960s were ending, many felt an impulse to look back and analyze what different movements had accomplished and what more needed to be done.
The youth of the world was a group moving and flowing, not in one direction but many at the same time. During my college days, I witnessed the unrest of the nation that seemed to have had its start on college campuses around the country. Many of the firsts were at the University of California at Berkeley, student demonstrations that soon would hit directly or indirectly many colleges and universities from coast to coast. My campus activity was peaceful, but many were not. The end of the 60s not only flashed protests over the airwaves nationwide and internationally but also inundated us with almost daily news about the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, and fashion being turned upside-down by the mini-skirt. Drugs were an ever-increasing topic of conversation, with LSD especially fascinating. The world was seeing once and for all that the Civil Rights Movement was not going to go away. Rock music was exploding and piggybacking on all the subjects in the news. The young all over the world were being affected by the experiences of those who lived through Woodstock, those who changed Haight-Ashbury—the hippie world was now global.
Many people were saying many things, but one brilliant line hit the nail on the proverbial head when Dylan sang, “The times they are a changing.” As 1970 opened, many young people from various parts of the world began traveling, especially to Europe and parts east, to find themselves. Most were coming to loaf, to find cheap drugs and to avoid responsibility. I knew who I was and what I wanted. My plan was all laid out. It was good, and it was going to happen. I was different. After college and after a year of working in a nationally known graphic design studio in Chicago, I decided I knew most of what I had to learn about advertising/design–and about life. Quite an accomplishment to think so, let alone believe it, at that point. I was just twenty-one years of age.
Nothing was happening in Chicago, and I needed adventure. As seemed to happen often with me, I was sitting in a bar late one night with Steve Stroud, a Theta Chi Fraternity brother, fellow artist and good friend, and an idea was hatched. Our plan was to get jobs in advertising on the Champs-Élysées and have great adventures. Shortly thereafter, we quit our jobs, bought one-way tickets to Paris and were ready to go when Steve was drafted. It was only a couple of weeks before our travel date. I didn’t want to go at that point, but Steve never wavered. He said, “You have to live the dream for both of us; I might never make it back.” He put his money where his mouth was, drove me to New York and put me on an Icelandic flight departing JFK.
The flight was both eventful and uneventful. We were packed like sardines in, it seemed, one of Icelandic’s oldest jet props. It felt like we were flying in slow motion. The noise was deafening, and of course, I was anxious and antsy with the anticipation of shortly stepping foot on foreign soil for the first time. But the drudgery of the flight was broken by the announcement upon landing that there were problems with the aircraft. Apparently, our scheduled stop in Iceland—because the jet-prop couldn’t carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Atlantic—was very lucky because somewhere over the deep blue sea all kinds of lights were going off in the cockpit…we needed to land, and quickly. Our short-planned layover lasted over twenty-four hours, with us passengers permitted to only walk around the airport.
I kept imagining what Europe would be like: would I be able to talk to anyone, would anyone understand me, how would I get to Paris from Luxembourg, would I be able to deal with French francs? What type of job would I obtain? So, when a fellow passenger, Doug Richmond, who was about my age and from New York, seemed to be interested in and curious about my plans to get a job in advertising and start a new life, I took the opportunity to explore why he was traveling. Doug was what I thought of as a New York type—not very tall, longish dark hair, bold and kind of mouthy. He had attitude and was worldlier than I was. As the day and night passed, and finally the flight continued, he decided he had to see if I could really get a job. He was just bumming and was intrigued. It seemed luck was with me again; my new acquaintance had taken French for many years in school, so we would be able to communicate. As he took care of one of my biggest concerns, I also took care of one of his. He was worried about finding an affordable place to stay. As Steve Stroud and I spent a couple of days in NYC before my flight, we had happened to start a casual conversation with a guy at the Museum of Modern Art. It so happens he had just returned from traveling himself, and he had a lead on a great small cheap hotel in Paris. He wrote the info down on a matchbook cover, and I put it in my pocket. But as we all know, luck can go both ways. As I talked to more people on the plane who lived in Europe and particularly Paris, the prospects for getting a job were not looking promising. A hard-to-get-your-hands-on work permit was apparently going to be a problem.
Our flight eventually landed, and Doug and I collected our heavy and way too many bags and found a night bus to Paris. It was 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. when we exited the Paris bus station. There was no one around and no taxis or any other type of transportation. We didn’t know the exact address of our destination, The Hotel Namur, but it wasn’t far from the intersection of the Luxembourg Gardens and St. Michel. Unfortunately, we were a block or so away from the Louvre and nowhere close to our destination. After crossing the Seine, always looking for non-existent taxis, and walking for literally four hours in pouring rain, we gave up on finding the Hotel Namur and talked our way into a seedy little place that didn’t even have a name but was dry.
It’d been a couple of days, and unbelievably it was still raining. We did eventually find the Hotel Namur, which was great and cheap. Unfortunately, the couple of local government offices I visited to find out about the process of getting a job were complete dead ends. It could take up to six months to get a work permit. I encountered a good number of smiles and giggles when I admitted I really didn’t know any French. What did I expect? But I was twenty-one and naïve.
It just wasn’t fair. I’d flown all this way just to be snickered at, laughed at and
