Arrival

IT IS FEBRUARY 2020, and I am driving from Lugano to St. Moritz, replicating the exact route I drove with my parents sixty-four years ago. Instead of sitting perched without seatbelt on my red wooden stool with the white prancing bunnies, placed between my father and my brother, I am behind the wheel of a BMW 7-Series. Instead of struggling with Anthony’s stack of maps and then misfolding them, a woman with an upper-class British accent is telling me robotically when to make a left, when to merge right. I am not singing tunes from a 1954 English musical; I am listening to Freddie Mercury’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But the scenery remains the same, albeit whiter in February than in July. Lake Como is still there, to the right, and as I climb higher through the Julier Pass, the peaks are as grand as they always were.

Six weeks earlier, on December 31, 2019, I turned seventy. It had been a week of surprise family arrivals from Israel, Australia, and South Africa, orchestrated entirely without my knowledge by my wife, Noa. People who love me congregated at our house in the village of Haworth, New Jersey, with, at its height, eleven people sleeping and consuming three riotous, delicious meals a day. A ten-foot-tall Christmas tree sparkled and was surrounded by an obscene number of gifts. For eight nights, Chanukah candles were lit and songs sung. The extravaganza climaxed on New Year’s Eve, with a birthday party in my honor. The theme was the Roaring Twenties, with forty guests dressed appropriately, including my niece Elinor sporting a headband and an eau-de-nil velvet flapper dress sewn with hundreds of shiny beads, a hand-me-down of my mother’s from 1927, stored for decades in wads of tissue paper but still eminently wearable. We danced the Charleston, we sang karaoke, and by 4 a.m. we had consumed an array of elegant foods and cases of art deco Corbet Champagne.

What we didn’t know as we reveled that New Year’s Eve was that on that very same day, officials of the health commission in the city of Wuhan were reporting a burgeoning number of cases of a devastating influenza-like illness. As January and February progressed, reports of the disease’s spread became more and more troubling. While I traveled through Switzerland, people were already using hand sanitizer by the gallon, but I assumed that this disease wouldn’t be much more devastasting than the SARS that had caused Noa’s and my 2003 honeymoon to be switched from Vietnam to Tenerife. How very wrong I was.

Reveling in nostalgia can be glorious. But it can sometimes be maudlin, and even pretty pointless. Yes, it would be nice to be able to press rewind and be six again, and even nicer to know what one knows at seventy. And yes, of course, it would be nice to be driving with my parents. But I am sure the drive from Lugano to St. Moritz is easier now, with dozens of tunnels easing the endless hairpin bends. And a 2019 BMW (coincidentally my father’s initials—Bernard Max Weill) is a lot zippier than a 1954 Vauxhall Velox.

I hear constantly about the Golden Age of Travel, as if it is some long-lost phenomenon. And yes, crossing the Atlantic in first class on the Aubusson- and Lalique-clad Normandie was undoubtedly fabulous. But was it more fabulous than flying first class on Emirates to an enchanting $2,000-a-night overwater resort in the Maldives?

Yes, I would have loved to have been alive in 1936 and sufficiently moneyed to fly on a spanking new KLM DC-3 from Amsterdam to Batavia (it’s called Jakarta today). The one-way fare was 1,300 Dutch guilders, equivalent to a fantastic $12,700 in 2020. The journey comprised a week of hops from one desert or jungle outpost to the next, sleeping in the crisp linen sheets of the airline-fostered guesthouses along the route, and re-embarking in the morning for another day of bumpy unpressurized flight. But would it have been “goldener” than flying the Concorde from London to New York? It’s all a matter of perspective. Rose-colored glasses are just that: rose-colored glasses. As Carlotta Campion declares in the rewritten 1987 London production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies, “The good old days? They were never that good. They were merely old.”

In the twenty-first century, I’ve thumbed through the guest book at Mnemba Island resort in Zanzibar and read Mick Jagger’s comment that his lips were so sunburned that he “couldn’t get no satisfaction.” I’ve watched Donatella Versace swimming topless and then being massaged and hair-brushed by the pool at Marrakech’s La Mamounia. I’ve watched Prince and Princess Michael of Kent scarfing down spaghetti alle vongole at the Regina Isabella in Ischia, the very same hotel to which Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton escaped to embark upon their affair during the filming of Cleopatra. The retired maître d’ who was then the pool boy once told me their fighting was so raucous and violent that Signora Taylor once threw all Signor Burton’s clothes from the balcony of their suite into the swimming pool. So can one really say that the golden age of travel is behind us?

Then there are the efforts of the travel nostalgists to re-create that which is no more. In 1930, when Air France, Imperial Airways, and KLM had been blazing wobbly trails around Europe and connecting their capitals to their colonies, one could take a plane from Paris to Istanbul. It was comparatively fast, but the expense was daunting, the discomfort of flying below or through the clouds made air sickness and splashed drinks de rigeur, and all in all it wasn’t terribly safe. Far more alluring was the chic and style of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, with its—for a train—comparative speed, its staff intent on pampering. Its navy-blue-and-gold Wagons-Lits train carriages were outfitted with sleeping compartments done up in velvet, inlaid marquetry, and the crispest linen on Earth. The dining car was all Lalique panels, white damask, crystal, and delicious cuisine. The passengers ranged from businessmen to dowager duchesses, and Agatha Christie had a field day with her now epic tale of a dozen of them serial-stabbing the killer of the faux Lindbergh baby.

In 1982 the Orient Express was reborn and became an overnight success. Europe was scoured in search of the original discarded and dilapidated railway cars (including the Brighton Belle that had so seduced me as a child), and tens of millions of dollars were invested in restoring them to their Roaring Twenties gorgeousness. Thousands of people ride it annually, dressing up for evenings of 1920s glamour, but they’re taking the ride to engage in the show, not actually to reach anywhere fast.

And so it is with the North Atlantic. On a good day, London is six hours from New York. On a really good day, it can be as little as five. Nowadays, sailing the Atlantic has became all about pretense, a theatrical anachronism obligating passengers to imagine it is 1930 aboard the Ile de France and that the jumbo jet roaring above is a clap of thunder.

Of course, everybody aboard today’s Queen Mary 2 is making the trip for the joy of being at sea for a week, with an array of activities from deck sports to lectures to theater to movies to spa treatments to dressing for captain’s dinners. Some of the passengers aboard are veteran cruisers for whom a week without the bother of trundling around intervening points of call is elating. There are those who don those metaphorical rose-colored glasses and make believe it’s 1935 or 1955 and this is “the only way to cross.” They lie on deck chairs swathed in dark-blue blankets, gazing at the horizon as the giant liner mows through the swells. At dusk they repair to their stateroom, dress to the nines, plant themselves in the bar in the vain fantasy of spotting Cole Porter or the Duchess of Windsor and hearing the band playing Rodgers and Hart. And the loveliness of the illusion almost works—until they return to their balconied stateroom (the great transatlantic liners of yore never had balconies). The room is cozy and well lit, and the bed is invitingly turned down, a nightgown or pajamas waiting eagerly. But . . . but . . . but there, on the wall, a flat-screen TV connects them to CNN. And emails and WhatsApp messages are rolling in to their devices. And suddenly it’s not 1925 or 1955. The ship is not steaming through an unreachable void that presumes a sense of calm and disconnection from the reality of dry land. Because the latest news or the inescapable leap to share the day’s highlights on Instagram shatters the illusion that it’s 1930. One is no longer “at sea.” One is “online.”

The truth is that the actual characteristics of traveling were always fabulous. Or they were middling, or they were vile. And they still are. I just was lucky or strange enough to be someone who was and remains enthralled by it all. I watch Downton Abbey and see the family arrive in Yorkshire on that beautiful maroon train and yes, like all of us, I think how romantic it was, as they tote their leather suitcases and are met by a liveried chauffeur and jump into a Rolls-Royce. But that very same train wasn’t “romantic” in third class, any more than it’s “romantic” today to fly on Ryanair from London’s woebegone Standsted Airport to Krakow or on Spirit Airlines from Newark to Fort Lauderdale. Except, of course, if you’re obsessed, comme moi, with every facet of traveling, grand or not . . . it’s still phenomenal. The backpacker staying in hostels and tramping through the Andes can be in as much ecstasy as the Vuitton-toting jetsetters flying first class on Singapore Airlines to reach the latest Aman resort.

It’s all about attitude. It is truly extraordinary and beyond comprehension that my mother’s voyages from Australia to England in 1912 and 1918 each took six weeks—with all its leisure and grace and lack of jet lag—when the same journey can be achieved now in twenty-two hours. And if those twenty-two hours are spent in the front of the plane, it will be all champagne and flat beds and wonder. But if they are spent back in economy, it’s pretty damned grim; as grim, indeed, as those ocean voyages would have been in third class or, heaven forbid, in steerage. Except, of course, in the Roaring Twenties there were always those first classers who slipped away from the dullness of the card room and crept down staircases to third class to snort cocaine and dance the Charleston with the flappers.

In the opening scene of Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 play Boys in the Band, the multi-cashmere-sweatered Michael tells his friend Donald about his travels in search of love or sex, and he says, “Well, I’m here to tell you that the only place in all those miles—the only place I’ve ever been happy was on the goddamn plane.” At the age of nineteen, when I first saw the play in London, that line resonated so much that I was jolted by empathy. And to this day, there are times when I just don’t want a flight to end.

In the spring of 2019, I lay under a goose-down duvet in my flat-bed seat in business class on China Eastern Airlines en route from Shanghai to New York. The cubicle was snug, arranged in such a way that I was facing the plane walls as I slept. I woke from a deep gin-and-Klonopin-induced nap to discover that only four of the flight’s fifteen hours were left. And I was actually disappointed. As much as I wanted to get home to my family, I wanted to stay here. I wanted to remain stashed away in my cozy little compartment disconnected from the Earth, disconnected from the complications of life, disconnected from reality. I was as sheltered, tucked up in my travel cocoon, as I had been forty-six years earlier in my cozy wood-paneled first-class cabin on the Canberra, as it slammed through the January waves to bring me to New York.

One hundred and six countries, 4.5 million air miles, 9,200 flying hours (one year and eighteen days of my life), a dozen oceangoing transatlantic crossings and cruises, scores of trains, a dozen safaris, 1,200 hotels, and hundreds of Michelin-starred meals later, there is ample evidence of my obsession. Since the age of fourteen, I had kept logbooks of every flight I ever flew—airline, aircraft, distance, hours. In 2002 my soon-to-be second wife, Noa, secretly arranged for a website to be constructed whereby all these and future flights would be recorded, enabling me, with a click of the mouse, to tell how many hundred thousand miles I have flown in a Boeing 707, or how many times I have flown Air France. Appropriately its URL is www.geoffreyweilltraveladdict.com—but it is password protected and only I (and probably the Mossad) can access it. I sit at my computer like some crazed robber of a priceless Goya painting that only I can admire. And then there are complex Excel sheets recording every country I have visited. And another listing every hotel I have ever stayed in—and when and in what room. My older son, Benjamin, had his own logbook too, and now my younger children, Zoë and Liam, have their own travel Excel sheets, which I scrupulously maintain and update—although they possibly will never care.

My first marriage, to my cousin Terry, on to whom I had glommed like a limpet at the age of ten, lasted for twenty-five years, the last ten of which were miserable for us both, and for our son, Benjamin, who was sixteen when we divorced. Those ten years saw a collapse of a marriage that was held together mostly by our cousinhood, by our dependence on each other, a marriage made untenable by our individual needs to seek solace elsewhere. I had not intended to remarry—indeed I expected my life to be very different. But when my deep friendship with Israeli-born Noa turned into a furtive postprandial kiss on the neck, then dating, then love, then living together, it seemed the inevitable thing to do—and eighteen years on, Benjamin has a half sister, Zoë Ann, born in 2006, and a half brother, Liam Hugo, born three days before Christmas 2008. What is it with me, I wonder, that has seen me have a succession of girlfriends and two wives with pansexual names? Michelle, Leslie, Terry, Noa. It could just be coincidence. Or not.

My family, 2019 (l to r): Me; son Liam; daughter-in-law, Courtney; son Benjamin; daughter, Zoë; my wife, Noa. (Author collection)

After Terry’s and my utterly fraught-free division of furniture, paintings, assorted kitchenware, tchotchkes, and books (I kept the posters), it was on September 1, 2001, that I moved to a new Manhattan apartment building in gentrifying Hells’ Kitchen at 54th Street and Tenth Avenue. The apartment had two bedrooms—assuring one for Benjamin, who spent one week with Terry, one with me—and on an eighth-floor setback, it had a 1,000-square-foot terrace facing south and east, with views of the towers and lights of Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. From the master bedroom and the living room, one could see the Queen Elizabeth 2 docked in the Hudson when it was in town, and I could stroll down and peer lovingly at its giant prow after its arrival was announced by its deafening horn.

Ten days later, New York, America, and the world changed drastically, and my apartment’s view of the Twin Towers was no more. I had planned a housewarming party for Sunday night, September 16, the first night of Rosh Hashana—the Jewish New Year. I decided to keep the party happening as it could only help, I thought, to lift everyone’s spirits in the wake of the trauma of five days earlier, from which we all remained benumbed. On Saturday morning, one of my friends, New York Post’s celebrity columnist Cindy Adams, called me.

“Damn,” she said. “I forgot I was meant to have dinner with Liza tonight!”

“So bring her along,” I said. And she did. Liza Minnelli was due to appear on NBC’s Today show the following morning, to sing “New York, New York” live from the field at Yankee Stadium, a sequence designed to underscore New Yorkers’ determination not to be cowed by the tragedy that had befallen the city six days earlier.

Guests started to arrive, including my friends David and Brian, and their Jack Russell terrier, one of those dogs that is totally sweet but highly excitable and prone to jumping up and down with friendship or enthusiasm. Others arrived. Drinks were poured. There was plentiful alcohol and delicious food laid out in the living room and on the terrace that overlooked a floodlit, crippled New York. The doorbell rang, I answered, and there was Cindy, clutching her Yorkshire terrier, Jazzy, and Liza Minnelli, looking lovely yet sans makeup, and somehow shy. They entered, handed over gifts, and Cindy put Jazzy down on the floor. Jazzy took one look at the Jack Russell, yapped, and immediately darted to my living room’s new sisal carpet to eject a torrent of diarrhea deep into its weave. After I laughed and Cindy picked Jazzy up, the next thing I spied was Liza, kneeling on the carpet with a spray bottle of Fantastik and brushes and sponges, scrubbing furiously at the sisal. I told her how sweet it was of her to do it, but “please get up” and have fun. Which she did.

Cindy and I had become fast friends in 1999 when she alerted the Israel consulate that she wanted to be in Israel for the turn of the millennium and we met at La Goulue to discuss the arrangements. Over lunch, we became instantly besotted with each other, sharing a kind of eclectic and absurd humor that besets us to this day. After the Jazzy poop incident, Cindy whispered to me that because of Liza’s performance early tomorrow morning, she shouldn’t have alcohol. So I concocted exotic teetotal cocktails complete with pineapple wedges, straws, and paper umbrellas, which Liza took outside to the terrace and dumped into a plant, and then poured herself tumblers of vodka. We performed all the appropriate Rosh Hashana ceremonies: lighting candles, eating challah with raisins, dipping apple in honey—and soon after discovering that I had not yet unpacked sufficient Liza Minnelli CDs to be played, Jazzy, Cindy, and a sweating and wobbly Liza made their exit.

The next morning, I woke at seven to watch Liza perform “New York, New York” alone in the vastness of Yankee Stadium. The sweats and the wobbles of the night before had vanished. The face and the hair were perfect. I watched a superstar perform the haunting tribute to our damaged but undaunted city with total verve and class and brilliance, and tears rolled down my cheeks.

From my office on the twenty-second floor of an exquisite landmarked art deco skyscraper in lower Manhattan, I can gaze at the Hudson River where the Canberra had unloaded me to take up my position at the Thomas Cook office on Fifth Avenue. In 2019, after decades of acquisitions and mergers, Thomas Cook—the world’s first travel agency and, for more than a century, its most prestigious—collapsed into bankruptcy. Hundreds of thousands of passengers of its eponymous Thomas Cook airline were stranded across six continents. Hotels worldwide were owed millions of dollars, pounds, and euros. It was an appalling ending to the grand era of the Cook’s Tour.

After my eight years with Thomas Cook and a further eight with the Israel Tourist Office, I was offered a whopping salary increase to become International Director of the American Jewish Congress. In the early 1960s, the “AJCongress” had opened a travel department to operate tours to Israel. The effort was led by the charismatic Betty Weir Alderson, who charged around America whipping up tens of thousands of bookings to Israel. Long before the United Jewish Appeal, the Jewish Federations, individual synagogues, and Birthright brought America’s Jews to admire the Promised Land, it was Alderson who single-handledly built the concept of American Jewish group travel to Israel. With the success of the Israel tours, Alderson widened the program to include tours to Europe and Asia and Morocco—with each tour a brief glimpse of Jewish life overseas—and it was one of those groups that Terry and I had befriended in 1980 at the pool of Marrakech’s La Mamounia. It was the largest Jewish tour program in the world; with some seven thousand travelers in 1985, it funded the organization’s political and legal work in defense of Israel and for civil rights and the separation of church and state in America.

By the summer of 1984, Alderson was ready to move on, and I was hired to replace her. A year later, an Italian cruise ship, Achille Lauro, was hijacked during a Mediterranean cruise by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front. A wheelchair-bound American cruise passenger by the name of Leon Klinghoffer was shot, killed, and thrown overboard for no other reason than he was Jewish. By 1986, with more terrorist attacks in Israel and in Europe, whizzing around the continent on a tour bus reserved for Jewish Americans began to seem less than appealing. In 1987, during the first intifada, an American woman was injured in the face when a stone was thrown at her American Jewish Congress tour bus. The program continued, with fewer thousands continuing to travel, and so it was that while continuing to run the declining tour program, I came to open my own public relations company specializing in travel, tourism, and hotels.

I was very lucky. After I left the Israel Tourist Office in 1984, it had churned unhappily through two PR managers and three PR firms in eleven years. In 1995 my former boss, Uzi Michaeli, a man of gruff prickly-on-the-outside-and-sweet-on-the-inside Israeliness, called me and told me that they wanted me back. He explained they couldn’t afford to hire me, but if I were to open my own company, Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, North America, would be my first client. And so it was. An acquaintance, Janet Kaplan Rodgers, came to work with me. She had lived in Jerusalem in the 1970s and, with the Canadian Judy Stacey Goldman, had written the charming Underground Jerusalem Guide and Underground Tel Aviv Guide (books parenthetically published by my brother) and which made these cities seem charming decades before anyone really believed they were. In a tiny corner of the American Jewish Congress mansion on East 84th Street, Geoffrey Weill Associates was opened on June 1, 1995. The very grand mansion, with its ballroom and sweeping circular staircase, was the former home of Ogden Reid, a scion of the family that owned and published the New York Herald Tribune. In 1959 President Eisenhower appointed Reid U.S. ambassador to Israel. Despite its conversion into offices, many of which were unkempt and hideous, the grandeur somehow remained.

Uzi Michaeli was more than a friend—he was also wise. He told me never to rely on just one client. And so I went about acquiring others. I determined that I wanted to avoid being classified as the “Jewish travel PR firm,” and so I approached two potential clients who, were they to hire me, would relieve me of that classification. One was the German National Tourist Office, whose director I knew. And the second was La Mamounia in Marrakech. I figured that working with Germans and Arabs would free me of my yellow star. They both hired me. The deed was done.

Twenty-five years later, the company had grown from Janet and me to a staff of fifteen, and from three clients to close to thirty. I never wanted it to be a massive corporation—I had learned from my experience at Thomas Cook that promotion to management was boring, when what I wanted to do was plan people’s vacations. And so it is to this day. I don’t want to spend my days overseeing accounts and dealing with personnel problems—I want to gush about hotels. And I want to travel endlessly and repeatedly. And, incidentally, some twenty of those trips have been to six continents with Cindy Adams, trips that are a magical blend of touring, eating gargantually, and, mostly, spent in paroxysms of preposterous mirth so frenetic that once, at Johannesburg Airport, we were laughing so uncontrollably and for so long and over something so utterly ludicrous that our traveling companions—Judge Judy and her husband, Jerry—quietly tiptoed into the distance to avoid embarrassment.

In 2004 I detached the company from the American Jewish Congress and we moved to a cavernous loft in the once grubby Flatiron District. By 2017 the still grubby neighborhood had become chic and the rent was doubled: hence our move to Lower Manhattan, where the office is admittedly glamorous, spacious enough for fifteen of us to persuade the media of the glories of our clients . . . mostly some of the world’s finest hotels. It is not your average office space. The walls are Majorelle Blue, a color produced in 1931 by painter Jacques Majorelle for the walls and buildings within his gardens in Marrakech, later bought, expanded, and glorified by the brilliant and tormented Yves Saint Laurent. I had brought a small can of the paint from Morocco, and after many tries at paint emporia in New York, it was a paint store in Englewood, New Jersey, of all places, that succeeded in reproducing gallons of it.

At Kronenhalle in Zurich, my favorite restaurant in all the world, 2020. (Author collection)

Vintage belabeled suitcases are topped by a circular glass tabletop, around which, on most days, the staff eat lunch. The walls are decorated with perhaps 35 percent of my collection of vintage travel posters. Eighty-year-old cabin trunks—complete with hanging rails and drawers for shoes and lingerie—act as stands for art and storage for stationery. There are travel memorabilia everywhere: An original metal sign pointing the way to the Golden Arrow train from London’s Victoria Station (Aunt Flo would have loved it). Ashtrays and assorted china from hotels around the world. Moderne airplane models. Vast tomes about travel. Yards of ancient Michelin guides. The entry is a giant wall mural of an airport departure board.

Every time I walk into my office, it’s as if I am being given a shot of travel cocaine. It is the ideal aerie for someone whose lifelong obsession has always been to be all abroad.