NEVER MIND what else it is—exhausting, demanding, nerve-wracking, sleep-robbing—traveling on business is sexy. Only a girl who hasn’t done any business traveling (or one who has done too much) could argue the point. Of course, all the weary traveler needs to do to get souped-up again is stay home for a while. She usually wants back in again—or rather out again.
Traveling on business gives you a much better chance to meet men than traveling for pleasure—or staying home. If you’ve exhausted the supply of men in your town, a business trip gives you a whack at a whole new batch. And instead of piling into the coach flight at midnight as you do on a vacation to save money and add a day to your trip, you may very well pile into a first-class daytime flight where all the well-manicured men are. What a sight—row after row of Brooks-Brothered, Rogers-Peeted creatures sitting there just like salamanders waiting to be pounced on. On many a first-class daytime flight you’ll find you’re the only girl. (Don’t fret if your company has decided to save millions by traveling the travelers tourist this year. Some of the mens companies may have decided the same thing and they’ll all be back in tourist with you.)
Whether you’re on the plane getting there or already in the town, your female attractiveness is enhanced by your having a business mission. A girl with appointments to keep and places to go and who doesn’t seem needy is exciting. Once in town with business to transact, you can operate, prowl, chat with and check out the men far better than when you’re standing in a line at the museum with thirty other lonelies. If it happens that no men show up on your trip—and I never went on a business trip that turned out that way—you weren’t in town looking for men anyway. Of course you weren’t. You were there to introduce a new miracle fabric, recruit employees or put on a fashion show.
Some of the best travel is with men from your own company as an equal. It’s simply being let out of school. With your own built-in pals you can wind up in all-night poker games, a hundred-meter race across the hotel swimming pool, or on a lovely twilight drive over the Arizona desert to buy booze across the border.
Business travel has other pluses for a working girl.
You get yanked out of yourself! First you have to get your clothes and your shape into shape. Then you have to talk and sound your best when you get there. Sometimes positively horrible challenges await you and you have to speak up and cope. On foreign ground—Dallas, Detroit, Denver, Danbury—very likely you’ll feel inspired to do some daring things you wouldn’t dream of doing at home. Anything that puts you at your dynamic best, no matter how much it scares you, is good.
Travel is great for “older” women. Nobody can treat you like a granny if you’re hostessing a cocktail party in your hotel room.
Wherever you travel you’re going to see some places you haven’t seen before. Breathing Hard, Nebraska, may not be Paris, but it’s different from home.
You’re going to talk to some new people. Cabdrivers in New York and salesgirls in Atlanta are experiences all to themselves. You may need an interpreter, but they’re worth meeting. No doubt about it, travel gooses up a girl’s social life and gives her something to talk about when she gets home.
A company trip often gets you in sudden easy reach of a glamour spot. You live in Seatde. They’ve sent you to Miami. For just a few dollars of your own you can pop on over to Nassau.
A company trip is also a wonderful way to nest-egg a little money if you’re willing to go it thriftily. One girl I know has introduced a Jaguar into her life that way. If you prefer to use the last penny of your travel-allotment to travel in elegant-lady style, nobody’s knocking that either.
So, how in the world do we get you traveled? As a secretary your sole travel adventures may be confined to fixing other people up with tickets. (My boss at the ad agency was an Admiral with American, an Ambassador with TWA and a member of United’s Hundred Thousand Mile Club; for five years I practically never got off the phone, either confirming or canceling a reservation.)
Some executive secretaries get to travel with their bosses, of course. Since a man isn’t usually allowed to claim his wife’s trip as a business deduction but may claim his secretary’s, I suppose it seems wasteful to him not to bring along somebody. How much a man really needs his secretary on a trip is doubtful, considering that there’s always the hotel stenographer or one of the girls in the company he’s visiting who can take letters.
Let’s face it, if a girl gets taken at all, it may be for purposes other than work. In order to have the benefits of travel, it’s understandable that some travel-hungry girls deliberately give the impression that what they won’t do at home, they might do in Cincinnati. Right? Then all that remains is to work out an escape route in Cincinnati.
A friend of mine using the Cincinnati System practically got lumbered in her compartment before they were even close to Cincinnati (Detroit in her case). The excuse she’d trumped up for going on the trip was that she would help her boss work on an important speech as they traveled. She probably implied she would cooperate in other matters too. Here, in her own words, is what happened:
“Mr. O. and I were in his closed-door compartment, which measured roughly six feet by six feet. The train was still standing in the station, for God’s sake, when he began to talk about anything but the speech. Then the minute the train started to move—as a matter of fact, the middle cars were still in the station—Mr. O. leapt from his seat, covered the one-step distance between us, grabbed my hand and pressed it to his body. On the Sabbath mind you!
“Where to go? Sideways? No room. Backwards? No room. Forward? That would have been a mistake. Straight up? I just wished I could. Naturally I’d been chased through apartments and offices before and gotten away handily, but space was definitely Mr. O.’s ally. I guess we wrestled side by side, or standing torso to torso, for about twenty minutes. However we moved we were Siamese twins. I finally gave him one mighty push that landed him back on his feet. I pulled the small table between us, leaned on it and said, ‘Mr. O., the next time we take a trip, you are going to leave your seething passions in the suitcase until we get the work finished.’“
She says she escaped in Detroit after the speech was delivered, and I’m not one to use a he-detector on a friend.
The Cincinnati System may get you out of the office with your boss, and hopefully you’ll think of some means to escape your eventual fate—assuming you want to escape it—when you’ve set down in the distant city. Being asked to travel without a boss because the company needs you is the ideal situation, however. Then you can choose whom you want to love in travel, or if you want to love only the travel itself. Believe me, this traveling as a Somebody for a company and having neat little stacks of company money stashed in your neat little lizard bag is one of the silkiest fringe benefits. It’s well worth working yourself out of the secretarial ranks to do.
I don’t know when or how your first travel assignment will come. Sometimes it exists and you get chosen. Other times you have to help it along a bit. “Wouldn’t it be smart to send little me off to cover that convention?” you say. Or, “I’m going to be in Chicago next week anyway visiting my sister. Would you like me just to run on up to Minneapolis to see what they’re doing at the trade fair?”
I got out of town several times “owning” a borrowed Rolleiflex. The agency was doing before-and-after ads for a reducing equipment client and I volunteered to dart thither and hither to St. Louis, Georgetown or Bicycle, Montana, to take exploratory pictures. If the subject looked promising, a real photographer was assigned to the story. It was great fun—even in Bicycle, Montana.
I just hope you’ll keep your eyes and ears open and your imagination working and that you’ll keep plotting ways to get yourself included in this travel thing. Let me now give you travel tips for the time when you bring off this coup I
Be pleased about the assignment but not too pleased ... on the outside. If you take off like a moon rocket on the news that you’ve been assigned, the company may get the idea you’re too giddy to represent them or that you expect to have entirely too much fun. Others will be jealous too and may try to go in your place next time.
You’re delighted to have been given this responsibility, eager to be of help, but it’s going to be hard work, not to mention the inconvenience of having to travel at this particular time.
Don’t cheat on time—come back to the office the minute you get home. Don’t take an extra half-day to get started. The travel itself is larceny enough.
If your company has any overseas dealings, keep your passport up to date. It can take several days to get it reinstated after expiration and you don’t want to muff a sudden chance to go abroad.
Everybody’s been brainwashed about having beautiful luggage to show off. The trouble is that last year’s beautiful luggage is this year’s beat-up bunch of boxes—it all gets banged around pretty badly regardless of its distinctive lineage. Even if the luggage isn’t too mercilessly beaten, it’s still last year’s, and breathtaking new fashions in luggage come out almost oftener than breathtaking new fashions in clothes. I’d rather splurge on clothes. I’ve been using that common-as-grass black and red plaid stuff for years—carryall, hatbox, duffle bag, overnighter. It all matches but is ridiculously inexpensive and I never worry about what some careless baggage-loader might be doing to its precious skin. It’s good, too, to be able to plunk yourself down on a trusty old make-up case to read for ten minutes while you’re stuck at the field gate waiting to load. You’d think twice about bearing down on a case that cost forty-five dollars and was plush red velvet.
I think a pretty good plan is to retire one or two pieces of old luggage at a time and buy a glamorous new piece that blends in with your remainders. A friend tells me she started out with Mark Cross luggage fifteen years ago, now battered but distinctive. She recently added a mustard velour train-case to it and a fold-over garment bag complete with carefully defaced stickers, which she picked up from the Salvation Army Thrift Shop for two dollars.
Some girls like to carry a beautiful little brief case when they travel, possibly as a badge of success. These are chic all right, but I find I haven’t enough arms to handle a brief case, a king-size purse, a couple of coats, a make-up case for feet-resting in flight and probably a book. You can always tell the man next to you that you’re a success.
There is the take-everything-you-own-and-hang-the-excess-bag-gage-charges, the somebody-might-ask-you-to-the-opera-and-you’d-need-a-ball-gown school of business traveler. There are also the three-knits-and-one-change-of-underwear girls who feel that if you can’t show up at it in one of your knits, it isn’t worth going to.
I’m in between. You have to leave something at home no matter how insecure you feel without it. Nevertheless, it’s nonsense not to take a silken number to the clime they’ve assured you will be frigid and a couple of woolly numbers to the place they’ve guaranteed you will be steaming. I can’t count the times the one garment I threw in at the last moment on the chance there might be a cold snap was the thing I huddled in for a week.
If your travels will take you to several cities with a brief stop in each, settle for one or two beautiful outfits that you wear continuously. Even if you’re staying in one city for a week, it’s better to be seen often in an expensive, utterly right costume than to change daily into marginal things. The plan seems to be basic with traveling gown-shop buyers who could stock up with trunks full of beautiful clothes.
Don’t be too stingy, though. My well-business-traveled friend Ann says a girl shouldn’t even take a crosstown bus without a minimal resort wardrobe. Bermuda is close to New York, Hawaii is close to San Francisco, and you never know when you’ll get to toot down there. Play it according to the probabilities, however.
As for how you want to look in the city you’re visiting, I think you want to blend in with the best-dressed people who live there—unless the whole crowd is hopelessly dull. Other “experts” don’t agree. They say, “Just be you wherever you go and you’ll be adorable.” I think New York girls running around Los Angeles on the loveliest day of the year in their impossibly chic gray-flannel suits and stacked heels look a little like bankers who don’t know how to come off it. Conversely, Los Angeles girls hitting New York in January in their beige silk shantung dresses and beige silk shantung shoes are like butterflies in the deep freeze. It’s generally true that you can wear the same important city clothes in any large eastern, midwestern or northwestern city. You can wear the same lighter, gayer, less serious frocks in any southwestern or southeastern city. Sometimes you can wear some of each in the other clime.
A wig I couldn’t live without, could you? At least you’ll need a hat or two which covers up every speck of your hair for travel—in case you don’t get shampooed for six days.
Wool travels marvelously. You never see a wrinkled coat on a lamb or billy goat, and wool is so breathing and alive. (I sound like a wool ad.) If there’s a stray crease, hang the garment outside the shower with the hot water turned on full blast. Don’t let anything fall in the tub.
A taffeta half-slip is a must for knits.
Drip-dries are not for me when it comes to business travel. (I think they never should have escaped from the underwear field, if you want my opinion.) You need a posher look than little-or-no-iron to come on like Somebody at your meeting, and you don’t want to spend your entire time dabbling things out anyway. Unless it’s Europe, I think stockings, lingerie and gloves are about the only things that should wind up in the basin.
It’s all right to borrow clothes for a trip. Most girls are delighted to lend greatcoats, jewelry, hats. These items rarely wear out but just go out of style. Try not to lose whatever you’ve borrowed. The donor might actually prefer to claim the insurance, but you can’t be sure.
Carry a travel iron. Do the pressing on the hotel floor on top of a towel. Even if you can charge all the cleaning and pressing to your hotel bill, you may not have time to wait for the garment’s return.
Pack alone. With a best friend gabbing at you, you’ll get to that picking-things-up, walking-them-across-the-room-and-putting-them-down-again-without-getting-them-into-a-bag stage sooner. You’ll also be looking high and low for the shoes or hairbrush you’re carrying in your arms.
Some travel-guiders recommend making lists of items to check off. You can forget to put things on a list as easily as you can forget to put them in your head. After you’ve traveled a bit, you rarely forget anything you meant to take. Certain items you keep ready to go all the time anyway—one or two plastic make-up kits which contain night creams, hand-lotion, facial cleanser, liquid detergent (all in plastic bottles), deodorant, manicuring equipment, wash cloth, safety pins (big ones, too, for hanging up skirts) needles and several colors of thread, tweezer, razor and blades, plus any cosmetics you can afford to keep duplicates of for travel. I like paper packets of bubble bath. Bath water just looks absolutely naked to me unless it’s full of fragrant, sudsy bubbles as well as a girl. Whatever helps you feel luxurious while you roam should be included.
Weigh your luggage on the bathroom scale to know whether you’re way over or way under (fat chance!) the luggage allowance. A nasty surprise at weighing-in time can cloud your trip.
Trains are no problem. If they can get the luggage up into your space, you’re allowed to carry it and at no extra cost. I know a girl who took a St. Bernard with her in a compartment. The conductor, viewing the beast on the station platform, said, “Lady, that animal ain’t going no place with us—only pets that can be picked up and carried are allowed on the train.” Madelyn’s beau picked Tessie up in his arms—all hundred and fifty pounds of her—and got her up the steps before he had his coronary.
Planes are something else again. There’s that pesky weight business. I’ve got plenty on my conscience and not the least is having put everything heavy for years—pressing iron, camera, walking shoes—into a make-up case and then hiding the make-up case behind a post. After checking in, I would saunter to the post, pick up the case and tote it onto the plane unweighed. Last year I ran into a little trouble. Some ticket checker with eyes in the side of her head let me get all checked in, then said sweedy, “And now, Mrs. Brown, would you like to get your make-up bag and weigh it in?” I got the bag, of course, mumbling that I weighed only a hundred and nine pounds and felt perhaps I was entided to a few pounds since most travelers started at about one-sixty and went on up. Miss Beagle-eyes said that I and I alone could be responsible for the plane’s flopping down in flight when I failed to declare luggage. Naturally I had to get a new system.
This is it: Whatever is heavy that you don’t wish weighed in just put in a paper sack instead of into your luggage. I don’t care how suspicious or disreputable a paper sack looks—even if it’s big enough to contain a mummy—they never weigh it in. (You’d better make that two paper sacks, one inside the other, to keep the bottom from dropping out.)
You are also allowed to carry coats and dresses over your arm unweighed-in. If you’re overweight a few pounds, according to the bathroom scale, grab some things out of your bag, preferably mentionables, and carry them in a plastic bag over your arm to the plane. What with the paper sacks containing bottles, cameras and shoes, a few garments over your arm, your regular purse and coat, you may have to be led on the plane like a blind llama—but you re legitimate. At least, I think you are.
The airline will encourage you to carry your wig box with you. Don’t do it. It’s too big to put under your seat, and once you get it on the plane, the hostess will tell you there’s no space for it. The wig may wind up sitting in your seat while you stand all the way to Oklahoma City.
I never buy insurance before a flight. You’re safer up there than in your own kitchen (you know that, don’t you?), and insurance companies have simply made a good thing out of people being cowards about flying.
If seat reservations are made as you check in, there certainly isn’t much chance of picking out the likeliest, dearest man to sit next to. In first-class it doesn’t matter too much anyway. The section is so small you can usually manage to get acquainted with anyone there who interests you.
In tourist, most people try for the window seats. This seems shortsighted to me. On the aisle seat you have a whack at the two people, men hopefully, seated next to you, also those in the same row across the aisle and the ones in the row ahead and the row behind. Surely one out of this crowd will be of interest. When you sit on the aisle, a man sauntering down to chat with the hostess can be waylaid. You can drop your magazine or splatter your coffee in his approach pattern so that at least he’ll have to slow down. Anyway, sitting on the aisle makes it so much easier to get up and move about without climbing over people. If you’re stuck in the middle seat, possibly there’ll be a man on either side. Cheer up!
I checked the last time I was on a Boeing 707 Super-Jet and found rows five, nine and eleven had more leg space in front of them. That was true of all six seats across—A, B, C, D, E, F. Maybe it was that plane only. Anyway, if you’re going to go around worrying about leg room, you could miss out on some of the men.
If there are no reserved seats, you’ll sit next to a man if you can. Of course you will! You didn’t move heaven and earth to come on this trip only to be seated next to a female creature with sandwiches and children. Females, sandwiches and children are all lovely in their place, but that place isn’t next to you in an airplane. For this reason I recommend not being the first one on the plane. Let the others get seated so you, like little Miss Muffet’s spider, can pop down next to somebody promising instead of being a sitting duck for unwantables. If you happen to draw a clinker (it could be a man), you can read madly or feign sleep. And if somebody next to you reads madly or feigns sleep forever . . . well, you must have chosen the wrong perfume.
Let’s talk about your travel costume. You want to look sexy and chic. You want to feel comfortable and relaxed. These two conditions seem mutually incompatible but they aren’t. The comfort starts in leaving off your girdle. I don’t care if you sleep in one, you can skip it for your plane ride. Comfort also comes in wearing clothes that are not fragile and in which you can squirm about.
Men passengers deserve a glamorous you. One girl I know thinks a suit proper for departures and arrivals but slips it off in the ladies’ room of the plane to reveal underneath a scrumptious Pucci dress. My own travel costume is a black Italian silk Walter Bass suit, not new (because clothes take too much of a beating in travel) but good to begin with, so its stays smart. The blouse of the suit is sleeveless black Alex jersey with a low, draped cowl neck—utterly décolleté but again chic, because Mr. Bass wouldn’t have it any other way. If I do say so myself, this little outfit seems to have an electrifying effect on men. The suit is severe and snooty—but off comes the jacket and there’s that mad, mad blouse. A black lace bra, not too new (to insure comfort), completes the destruction.
I usually wear stockings and garter belt to the plane—along with those other things—and take them off once aboard if it’s a long flight, putting them back on near my destination. Some girls like to wear little fold-up flat slippers while they travel.
To feel personally air-borne, I generally take off all my jewelry in flight and slip it in my purse—pearls, bracelets, even wristwatch. If you do this sitting next to an attractive man, it has ever so faintly a strip-tease connotation. Very effective.
If you’re chilly midway, don’t send for your coat. A coat is uncomfortable and bulky. Huddle under an airplane blanket—they are usually blue and becoming. And imagine looking as though you were in bed. Travel really does have it!
It does pay to be quite beautifully made-up for travel. Nothing uncomfortable about that, because lipstick doesn’t weigh much. Smell like heaven of course. Don’t wear your wig. You can’t lean back without worrying about its welfare.
How do you get acquainted with the man next door? I assume you are now aloft, landing gear tucked under the plane, feet tucked under you, and you are reclining against the pillows you have stashed all around you. I always put one at the small of my back, one under my head and sometimes one under my feet. This is grabby. If everybody glommed onto three pillows, there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Lots of people don’t care for even one pillow, however, and there’s hardly ever a shortage. If it’s a night flight and you’re dead for sleep, you can make yourself feel almost cloud-borne with all the pillows supporting you.
The man beside you? Ah yes! There’s no real problem striking up a conversation with him. He’s there and can’t get away from you, at least during seat-belt times anyway. If you want him to get in touch with you first, however, I suggest reading a copy of Sports Illustrated from the moment you sit down. Don’t think you’re going to get the conversation away from trotting races and intercollegiate track meets for a good hour, however.
Taking out a cigarette but being unable to find a match is a sure conversation opener, although I must concede it’s a bit primitive. If you don’t smoke and he continues to keep his nose buried in a book or magazine, the thing to do is read along over his shoulder. He’ll look up finally to see what in the name of heaven you’re doing. If he doesn’t look up and is reading, say The Hat on the Bed, it’s easy to say, “Isn’t it wonderful how John O’Hara just keeps turning out first-rate stories? Has he done it again?” If you can’t make head or tail out of what he’s reading you can say, after picking up a word or two, “Just what are cathode rays anyway?” Even if you don’t understand a word of the explanation, the ice is broken and your conversation can drift to other things.
If he isn’t reading but is staring into space and seems self-conscious and uneasy, I’ve found a simple, “What are you going to Pittsburgh for?” gets the introductions over with. You’d think a man might consider you pretty nosy for demanding an explanation of his actions, but usually everybody going anywhere is scared, excited, proud, happy or bored and wants to talk about it. Once he gets started, it may take some plain butting-in to get to tell why you re going to Pittsburgh.
Some girls feel that props make them more intriguing. I know one who favors a camera. She makes quite a thing of taking pictures up and down the aisle (which she never develops because naturally she doesn’t use film). Small, high-powered field glasses are popular among other passengers. Another friend always carries a screwdriver in her purse and makes it a point to try to take something apart in flight—cigarette lighter, sunglasses or whatever. She says you don’t really have to do anything with a screwdriver. Just the fact that you carry it is enough.
My friend Ann proclaims that, without any question, the best travel accessory in the world is embroidery. Men just go all to pieces over a girl who embroiders. She has been cross-stitching some beige linen luncheon napkins in flight for about a year. Cross-stitch, she says, doesn’t require any great skill and is a guaranteed man-melter. Don’t knit, she warns. Something about clacking knitting needles strikes fear in the heart of a man. Also he can’t quite figure out whether what you’re making is supposed to be Argyles or booties and he’s embarrassed to ask. The fingers that wield the Tiffany thimble must be flawlessly manicured of course. And don’t try making anything as big as a quilt on the theory that size is impressive. Few men want to be taken off the plane in a sea of lint.
I think every man deserves at least a trial run at conversation. I had completely written off the man next to me one night and was feigning deep sleep when he woke me up, the oaf. Rage lit up my beady little eyes. If the window had been open on his side, I’d have helped him out. This joker had on gum-sole shoes, blue and purple socks, a Scotch-plaid tie speared with his high school class pin, leather belt trimmed in turquoise and a patterned gray suit. (Yes, I’m the observant type.) I couldn’t believe it either, except that I saw it. Well, once awake, I learned more about America’s space program than I’ve ever been able to understand and assimilate since. He was a scientific genius and a marvelous man. You never know.
The stories you tell about yourself to your new-found friend should be more or less true. You’re apt to run into him again and when you’re with your father, who is not Count von Hohenzollern but a perfecdy fine, though untided, garage mechanic. A business assignment is fine to talk about because being a career girl immediately categorizes you as smart, respectable, hip, self-supporting and possibly susceptible to a dinner invitation. Speaking of eating, I must caution you right here about your table manners. A girl nest-egging her company travel funds sometimes skips several meals in a row. Regardless of the fact that this may be your first solid food of the week, a man seeing you wolf down a cupcake in one swallow gets nervous. Chew slowly.
If the man sitting next to you doesn’t ask for a date (and you want him to), be sure you’ve managed to mention where you’ll be staying and perhaps working. See if you can smoke him out too. An exchange of business cards is a good way.
Perhaps he has a rented car waiting for him at the airport and will ask to give you a lift into town. If it’s daylight and you like him, why not? Hertz or Avis knows who he is. Anybody who has a car and driver I’d say is worth taking a chance on. Even if he’s a gangster, he’s probably so far up the ladder that he’s harmless—in your case.
If you think giving your phone number to perfect—or imperfect—strangers and riding off to town with them is pretty reckless, I can only say I’ve talked to some lovely girls who could kick themselves for being suspicious, stand-offish and impossible to know on a trip. Having withered the man to a December maple leaf by refusing ever to be gotten in touch with again, they realized they’d probably lost a prince. One girl even asked me to say in my newspaper column that she’d made a mistake about a man on a flight from Ottawa to Toronto, and if the man were reading this to please get in touch through the column. How about that?
I don’t say every man you meet in flight is worth knowing or even talking to, but I do know these can be a lovely, romantic two or three hours—little you suspended with a mysterious stranger in space, quite as close as buttercup sepals and nothing to do but visit. It certainly beats cocktail parties. (Though what doesn’t?)
Once you get over the antique notion that all really beloved girls are met at airplanes, you’ll travel better. Boarding school girls are. Full-fledged business women are not. It’s heartless to drag your friends all those dozens of miles out to the airport. And what are you going to do with them if the man you’ve met should be someone you’d like to have drive you into town?
Now on to the baggage wait. It’s easy to identify your own luggage as it comes down from the conveyor belt if you paste two or three inches of brightly colored freezer tape around the corners of each bag. The tape can be purchased at the hardware store. A foreign consul I know adds green crepe paper tassels to his luggage handles for identification, but they get rather messy when it rains.
Most luggage is ice cold when it comes off the plane. You have to resist the impulse to take it in your arms and warm it up. Or maybe that’s just my idiosyncrasy. A lot of this book is, you know.
We can’t just let this baggage-wait time go to waste, can we? Suppose there was a dreamboat on the plane you couldn’t get to because he was way up front. Saunter around and come to rest near him. Muster the courage and say “Amazing how fast they get the baggage down nowadays, isn’t it?” Or, “They seem to be taking forever,” whichever is more appropriate. If you can think of something a bit more original, good for youl
If your baggage has been lost temporarily (hardly anybody’s luggage is lost forever), this can be a blessing—it really can. During the initial crisis, three men will come over to tell you the same thing happened to them and offer advice.
Helplessness, though a bit incompatible with the kind of girl a company would send traveling, is a great travel “accessory.” You cant get a fifty-dollar bill changed, the packages are too heavy and keep slipping out of your arms, you don’t know west from south here in Wichita—or where to get a cab. The baggage-claim area isn’t a bad place to douse a bit of this helplessness about. You may find yourself sharing a cab into town with a helper. Cab rides and limousine rides aren’t as sexy as the plane or train ride—the suspended-in-space spell is broken—but they aren’t bad.
It seems to me one of life’s delicious little experiences is to be a reasonably young woman, say under eighty, fragrantly perfumed, smartly dressed, nicely heeled (with company funds), checking into the Ambassador East or the Beverly Wilshire or any other first-rate hotel in the world with company business to transact. If that isn’t a sexy setup I am simply not a girl.
The hotels that rate four stars for women traveling on business are the old, more elegant hotels in a city. Next come the shiny, cold, modern new ones and, finally, motor hotels. I’d stay in a motor hotel only if it’s headquarters for the convention or sales meeting you’re attending. And has a pool.
Even old hotels often have two kinds of rooms now—standard “bedrooms” or the studio room with beds that slide under overhangs and look like couches. If you’re going to entertain, the studio room is better. Sitting on a twin bed sipping your martini while he sits in the room’s one chair is just a trifle too suggestive for openers.
Write ahead for reservations and get a confirmation back in writing. One friend tells me she always orders a three-fifty or five-dollar arrangement of white flowers for her room at the time she reserves it. This generally assures fruit from the manager, and, she says, adds an extra flourish to the service. You also have a fresh white flower to wear every day.
If it’s too late to write before you leave home, wire—and ask for a confirming wire collect. If it’s too late to wire, telephone—even if from the airport before you leave home or after you arrive. Never, never walk into a hotel cold.
The reason you need to have a confirmation in writing in your hand is that if you don’t have it, you may find yourself out on the street with no room at the inn. If the hotel sees its own letter, someone will usually hustle around and find you a room.
If you know you are arriving after midnight, be sure to “guarantee” the room. This means they check you in the night before and you pay for the full night’s lodging although you may not show up until four A.M. Scrupulously cancel reservations you don’t use.
If the hotel has guaranteed one kind or price room and tries to palm off another, be firm. An eggshell-willed girl is popular and enchanting in many of life’s situations—but not in a hotel. If they can push you around and intimidate you, they seem to like you less all the time you’re being put out by their mistakes more. I arrived at a ritzy New York hotel one frosty morning maddened for sleep and ready to pile into bed in my guaranteed room. It was six-thirty A.M. and I’d traveled all night. The room wasn’t ready, they said, but would be in about an hour. I set up a howl to be heard above the lions in Central Park across the street. “We’ll put you in another room temporarily,” they said. “And move you later in the day.” More howling. I wanted to go to sleep that minute I said, to sleep for eight hours straight and not be shuffled about later in the day.
The only space they had available was a dear little suite. There they put me and there I stayed for the whole trip—at the cost of my reserved room. Their mistake for not having my room ready when I’d guaranteed it. They had to pay.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t be as sharp as that with anybody, but I’ve found hotels are pretty cool customers and you have to cool-customer them right back.
If you’re susceptible to noise, ask for a room away from the elevator and ask for it while you’re right at the desk. Elevators clank up and down all night and people are always laughing it up and saying farewell outside them. A friend of mine brings along a little kit to disconnect the noisy air conditioners in hotels and on trains—but I suppose you can be too fussy.
However haughty you were with the front desk, you can forget it with the rest of the staff—switchboard girls, elevator boys, bellboys, maid. At least that’s my code, schizophrenic as it sounds!
A housekeeper can be your best friend. She will rustle you extra coat hangers, a needle and thread, a second blanket, an ironing board. She’ll set you adrift in towels, stitch you up if you’re ripping, provide a heating pad if you’re dying. Obviously you can’t be a very good friend to somebody you’re going to steal blind, so you have to decide early in the game that you aren’t going to take her towels.
If you don’t wish to be wakened early, hang the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob before you go to bed. It works. Otherwise the maids will be doing what is called “just checking” but which sounds like just breaking in (with four hammers) at dawn. (They have a certain number of rooms to make up every day and have to start somewhere.)
Occasionally you get into a hotel that is so noisy you think they are trying to drive you out of your skull. I remember one like that in Venice. It sounded as though all the armor in all the museums in sunny Italy was being hurled down the elevator shaft—at six in the morning. They were cleaning the rust from the pipes that week.
Sometimes they are building a wing onto the hotel—or building a skyscraper across the street. There’s nothing much you can do about these acts of architecture, but acts of television or revelry next door you can call down and complain about.
Switchboard girls are usually nice, except in certain big city hotels where they’re wretched and mean. It doesn’t do a bit of good to get haughty, however, because then the service dries up completely—and so does your message flow. When they get you a wrong number, better say “We got a wrong number,” not “You seem to have goofed; I said Plaza five.” If you pick up the phone and get nothing but blank silence for fifteen minutes, I think “Was that operator delivered of her baby all right?” is preferable to pure, mouth-foaming, uncontrollable if justifiable rage.
I love the life in a hotel . . . the right to be babied . . . the right to complain . . . the right to privacy . . . the right to men you don’t have the right to at home. Believe it or not, we’re almost up to them. Just two other tiny departments first.
Hotel managements say they don’t worry unduly about towels. It’s those bedspreads, blankets, rugs, lamps, dishes, ice buckets, radios, light bulbs and wastebaskets that give them bad moments. Even dignified businessmen who chairman the city’s biggest charity drives have been known to pop one of those thirsty terry hotel bathrobes into their luggage before leaving town.
I must confess I took towels for years—never more than one per hotel and never from a room that cost less than ten dollars, to be sure. (Even thieves have their principles.) Nevertheless, this added up to quite a few towels. And what do I have to show for it today? A motley collection of scraps of terry that are ravelly and threadbare (towels are seldom new when you get them) with somebody else’s name across the bottom.
It’s not worth the black blob on your conscience. I’ve found that when you quit stealing towels you enjoy your visit more. You can be real friends with the maid, stop holding your breath when the bellboy touches the clasp on your bag, and look the cashier straight in the eye when you check out. You can also unpack in the presence of family and friends.
If you must take a little something (sometimes a thief can’t just quit cold but has to taper off), there’s soap, stationery, shoe-polish rags and Kleenex. Those the hotel doesn’t miss very much.
While we’re on the subject of who owes what to whom, there’s the scratchy problem of tipping. It’s hard to know what to give, because nobody will tell you. I’ve been trying to find out for years.
In one hotel I just came right out and asked one of the maids what she’d consider a proper tip for cleaning the room. Before my eyes she began to look very peculiar and started backing out of the room, muttering, “I’m sure I wouldn’t know, ma’am ... I mean it’s whatever a body feels like giving . . . imagine asking . . .” Pretty soon I was alone with her mop, bucket and ammonia.
I also telephoned the public relations department of a famous hotel to ask if they’d put me in touch with someone who could give definitive information about tipping. I could hear the evasion waves jumping right through the phone before the girl even answered me. “I really don’t know if we could supply that information,” she said. “I’ll have to call you back.”
Good thing I didn’t turn down any dinner invitations waiting for the call.
Deciding to try the tippers instead of the tipped, I next conducted a small private poll among three well-traveled businessmen and five women who also travel on business. I came up with eight different recommendations. After multiplying by nineteen, dividing by five and having four martinis, these are my tipping recommendations for the business woman who is somewhat less affluent than Helena Rubinstein but somewhat more than the Girl Scout mistress taking the girls off to the National Jamboree.
Porters at air or train terminal—twenty-five cents per bag. If you have five bags, two of which are very light (like a wig box), you might get away with a dollar for the whole bunch. If you have only one bag and it’s hefty, fifty cents would be more appropriate than twenty-five.
Terminal bus that takes you into town—No tip for the driver even though he stows your luggage away and gets it out.
Taxis—Twenty-five cents for every dollar spent if you have no luggage. Add an extra quarter or so if you’re luggaged and the driver helps.
Doorman at hotel—Twenty-five cents if he takes one bag into the lobby, fifty cents if he takes two, one dollar if you have a lot of things.
Bellboy (taking luggage to or from room)—Twenty-five cents a bag for several bags. Possibly you can get away with one dollar for five bags. Never give less than fifty cents even if he carries only one suitcase. If two boys and multiple pieces of luggage are involved, they would get from one fifty to two dollars between them.
Maids at hotel—Fifty cents per night for two or three nights’ lodging. Three dollars for the week.
Deliveries from desk—Twenty-five cents for flowers, telegrams, letters. Fifty cents for heavier things.
Room service, food or beverage—Fifteen to thirty per cent of the check! (I don’t like this any better than you do.)
Restaurants—Fifteen per cent of the check for waiter. One or two dollars for the captain in a fancy restaurant. One or two dollars for the maître d’ if he seated you approximately where you wanted to be or honored your reservation promptly while others waited.
Doormen who get you cabs—Fifteen or twenty-five cents; more if it’s snowing.
Yes, tipping is expensive and yes, the whole thing has probably gotten way out of hand—but bacon was once fifteen cents a pound. Are you going to pretend you can still buy it at that price? Tipping simply costs what it costs.
If you undertip or don’t tip, it will come back to haunt you. I know. Remember, you aren’t outwitting the hotel—you’re outwitting the workers, most of whom are nice family people with mortgages and pets. Occasionally a famous maître d’ is rumored to have been able to buy a mansion in the millionaires’ section of town on customers’ largess. More often he’s scraping to pay for bridgework or somebody’s college education just like the rest of us. I’m not even sure there’s such a thing as overtipping if you can afford it, when you consider that you’ve made someone happy.
To make travel tipping less of a strain, I suggest carrying two or three dollars in change and several single dollar bills.
Meanwhile back at the libido, where are the men?
Hopefully you’ll meet some in the course of the business day who will take an interest in you. Possibly you have an old beau or two stashed away in this particular city and you can call them up. Perhaps you’re armed with telephone numbers of friends of friends. (Don’t hesitate to badger and scramble for this intelligence if it promises men. I wouldn’t fool around with anybody’s sister’s college roommate’s cousin who’s a lovely girl just like you are, however.)
The thing about traveling on business is that, with just the flimsiest excuse, a girl can call up men she used to work with, won a Charleston contest with or never laid eyes on, and nobody is embarrassed. “Doris wanted you to know her azalea finally dropped dead,” is a perfecdy acceptable message. See what develops. To an old beau you want to see you merely say, “I’d like to see you while I’m here.” You don’t have to be so subtle as at home.
It’s quite all right to suggest to one of the friends of friends you don’t know (a man) that he stop by your hotel for a drink. Anything below the third floor of the establishment is actually pretty businesslike. Natives often love having an excuse to drop by the city’s best hotel. Sign the check like a good girl.
You may have dear old nonromantic friends to look up, too. Often it’s better not to tell them you’re coming until you see how the romantic situation is developing or not developing. Most people are happy to fit themselves into your schedule.
A little thing like your work could get in the way of your visiting anybody, however sexed. These are the misfortunes of war—and business. Don’t forget that being successful is what got you traveled and you mustn’t blow it all in a few ill-chosen nights on the town.
If you do have free time, one excellent plan for collecting, sorting and consolidating men in a travel-town is to give a small cocktail party in your hotel room. Have this right at the end of the first working day. Ask the people you’re doing business with and any of the assorted old and new menfolk just mentioned. I guess you could let in a girl or two, maybe.
At the party you’ll have a chance to get better acquainted with the work-people and to look over the strangers to see whether you want to invest an evening. The hotel will do the catering if you like. Food can be anything from simple canapes to a rather impressive nut-crusted cheeseball with crackers. They’ll send a bartender and liquor and charge by the drink. Don’t worry, they keep track.
If you want to keep the party to the absolute minimum cost, buy your own liquor from the store, also modest hors d’oeuvres. Order ice and glasses from the hotel. Perhaps you’ll want them to send up a large pot of coffee, too. If one or two of the guests are clients, prospects, or the people you are doing business with, your firm should pick up the tab. Isn’t it heaven?
Suppose you didn’t meet anyone on the plane, your business has produced absolutely nothing promising, you didn’t sit next to a dreamboat at the concert alone last night, and you don’t know a soul in the city to look up. I’d be willing to let you be discouraged—except for one thing. There’s always the hotel. Usually there are some very interesting and interested men there. I was present at one of these chance encounters which developed into marriage.
When I was traveling with Miss Universe, Sweden’s Hillevi Rom-bin, on a Catalina Swimsuit promotion one year, I picked up a darling man in the elevator of the St. Francis in San Francisco. “Picked up” sounds so naughty. What he said was, “Didn’t I see you check in earlier downstairs? You were wearing a navy blue suit.” I said, “Yes, I’m sure that was I.” He said, “Why don’t we have a drink in the bar?” I said, “Marvelous, I’m expecting the girl I’m traveling with to be down in a few minutes. I’ll just call up and tell her to join us.”
I called up old Hillevi and said, “Hillevi, dear, I’m in the bar. Please don’t hurry. We have all the time in the world.” Hillevi, who could be slower than Dodger Stadium traffic when she was getting to a business appointment, was down the stairs in four minutes. Psychic or something. That was the last look my new acquaintance ever gave me. Hillevi and my date were married within the year. They now live in a hotel of their own in Florida.
Maybe the thing to do is not pick up a hotel man. I don’t think that’s the moral, however. The moral is not to travel with Miss Universe, unless you happen to be even more beautiful than she is. I still say there are good, sweet, susceptible men in hotels.
And now, here are some Hotel Plans to put into operation if you dare.
Plan 1. At lunch, cocktail, or dinner time, wander down to the banquet section. Having your own party to go to takes the heart-pounding scares out of the situation, but whatever you do or don’t, walk into the room that seems to have the most men. Five of them will say, “Well, hello there!” One sensible one will probably add, “Yours is down the hall in the Sierra Room.” You can say, “Oh, yes . . . please forgive me,” then go on to your own party or back to the lobby. Later, when one of the men from the party sees you in the hotel, he’ll be free to ask, “Did you ever get to the right room?” (No, but you certainly used the right plan.)
Plan 2. A dream walking lives two doors away on your floor. Wait until you know he is in his room, then put on your hat and coat, grab your purse, march right down to his room and ram your key in his door. He will come out irritated and sputtering “What’s going on here?” Compare his room number with the key in your hand and say, “Oh, good heavens, how stupid of me.” Then get ready to be asked if you’ve had dinner.
Plan 3. Sort through your phone messages. Pick one that clearly contains your name and room number. When the man is out, slip the message under his door. He’s only two doors away, remember. Perhaps he won’t return the message via the operator but will bring it over.
The bar is always there, but I’d rather present myself to the Salvation Army for a handout than pick up a man in a bar. It just isn’t the way to start a great friendship. You’re another needy character—not the smart, pretty career girl they sent to town to knock everybody dead.
When you start getting acquainted with strange men in hotels, no matter what sort of building you’re in, you could get whacked over the head, of course. But this can happen to you in your own home town if you have no sense about whom to take up with.
A few weeks ago I was walking home on Madison Avenue and a man started walking beside me. “Like anything you saw?” he asked. I’d been looking at valentines in a card-shop window. “Yes, quite a few,” I said. My friend continued to walk with me and we chatted until I said I really must say good-bye, that I was hurrying home to get dinner for a hungry husband.
He was extremely good-looking, well-dressed, tall, thirty-eightish, intelligent . . . and a nut. I’m sure of it. Him I think a girl could wind up strangled by if she played her cards right ... or at least shaken down for some money. How do I know? Well, he was just “funny.” Use your sixth sense. When in doubt, unload the man.
A few weeks prior to that I was getting into an elevator at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in Cleveland when a man stopped me and said, “Please let me buy you a drink.” (By now it should be clear to you that your author is maybe the third or fourth most popular woman in the world.) “I can t,” I said. I had the same hungry husband on my hands and this time he was upstairs. (I really am a good girl.)
My intuition tells me the “elevator man” was okay. How do I know that? I don’t for sure, but by the time a woman is twenty-five years old, I think she has an intuitive feeling about who is A-okay or A-nof-okay after she’s chatted with a man for ten minutes. Many other tycoonesses, I’m sure, have found men in hotels who are good, safe and kind, traveling on business just as they are.
Naturally you stay out of a brand new friend’s hotel room. Naturally you keep him out of yours. Certainly you learn a good deal about him over a drink before you commit yourself to anything further, even a second drink. The man should have a business card (although I don’t rule out the possibility he might have lifted it off a still warm body). You get his by offering yours, or by asking where you might get in touch with him during the day, or simply by saying, “Could I have your card in case I need to call you?” Whatever business his card says he’s in, he should know a great deal about it.
Suppose there are no men, and I mean none. You can’t scare up anybody, and furthermore you haven’t seen a thing you’d even care about scaring.
Being in a city you’ve never been in before is an experience regardless of how few people you know there. (After a few visits you probably will know some people.) I can remember being all alone in Philadelphia on a rainy Sunday morning and striking out to see Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell and Betsy Ross’s house. Pretty exciting to a girl who’d never seen the historical East before. I mean that. A date with history can be just as fascinating as a date with a man. (Well, almost.) A feathery breeze caressing you as you splash about the pool of the Arizona Biltmore is still caressing even if you’re alone. I personally think it’s great to curl up in a strange bed—alone—with a sack of stale gumdrops (my favorite) and a Daphne du Maurier novel. If you were home you’d have to be changing shelf paper or something else sensible.
It may be you’ll have the incredible luck to arrive in New York City during a World Series. If you’re a baseball fan—and if the Yankees won the pennant—you’ll love it. If you aren’t a fan, you’ll think everybody has gone off his rocker. To protect yourself from cabdrivers, I suggest this system:
Driver (As you get into cab): What’s the score, lady?
You: I want to go to Lord and Taylor, please.
Driver: Yeah, but what’s the score?
You (Innocently): Score?
Driver: Yeah, the score, the score!
You: Oh, you mean the store? It’s Lord and Taylor, on Thirty-eighth and Fifth. You’re a new driver, aren’t you? Do you like New York?
Driver: I’m talking about the game, lady.
You: Oh, are we playing a game?
Driver (Very upset by now): The ball game, Lady!
You: I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t understand. I didn’t bring any balls with me . . .
Driver (Can’t believe his ears): You mean you don’t know about the Ball Game?
You (Sweet and apologetic): No, I’m sorry, I just wanted to go shopping.
At this point the driver will usually drive you to your destination like a greased rocket-ship. He may not even wait to be paid after he’s dumped you out.
Another driver might have a radio with him. In this case he won’t ask the questions, but you will need earplugs.
We haven’t discussed yet whether you are going to make a profit on this trip. That depends on your desires . . . and whether or not your company has made profit-participation possible.
Some girls prefer to live it up on a trip. They enjoy “overtipping,” ordering eight-dollar breakfasts and traveling about town by limousine. More power and God Bless.
Others prefer to live frugally and keep the change. The only trouble with the latter system is that companies sometimes make it awfully tough for you to get your hands on the dough. They’ll cheerfully pay for plane tickets, hotel bills, car rental and a reasonable sum for tips, but they screech to a grinding halt over cash expenditures (for which you naturally haven’t a receipt in the world). If your company is that perverse, there’s nothing to do but live it up like a pasha. A girl doesn’t want to miss out entirely on the economic benefits of travel. One girl I know got so disgusted when she couldn’t even earmark ten dollars for the fox muff she had in mind that she had her hair done three times in one week in the hotel beauty salon.
One thing is certain. Until you get to be a rich-skin, you’ll always live at least as well traveling as you do at home, and probably better. Even if you’re frugal, certain travel benefits, such as maid service, room service, privacy, and somebody to take messages, can not be converted into cash (thank heaven). You’ve nothing to do but relax and enjoy them.
Happily, some companies make it possible for you to nest-egg year in, year out. Not every girl can be induced to stay out on the road six months of the year, so a company rewards her with a little company-approved graft. You may only be out for a few days, but here’s how to nest-egg, if you want to, with reasonable integrity. I’ve given up on this kind of graft myself, and not merely because I no longer need the money. I don’t think it’s worth it in the long run. But as you will be able to judge from my expertise, an innocent I am not!
Most companies, except the Army, feel that an employee is en-tided to live comfortably away from home. The basic plan is not to live poshly but to say you did and then pocket the difference. This is only possible by not running up a big hotel bill and by making your outside expenses the big item (your own alleged outside expenses). Some girls run up the hotel bill and ask for large outside expenses. They don’t get sent out next time. You can’t have it both ways. You’ll only get your sizeable, mostly mythical outside expenses met if the hotel bill reads like an austerity plan.
Start by reserving a modest room ... in a good hotel, however, or you won’t meet the right men in the elevator as you’ve been promised. Very important.
To “save” your company further money (which saving they will never realize because it will accrue to you in added outside expenses—surely I’ve got through by now), be sure to tell the desk if you’re checking out late. (Checkout time at the hotel is noon, your plane doesn’t leave until four. Tell the hotel you’ll need the room until two-thirty.) Usually they’ll let you stay without charging you. Again, the company’s thoughtful little girl has saved the firm’s paying a night’s lodging—and justified another expenditure for herself on the outside.
You may like having a cocktail in your room. Drinks sent up from the bar are expensive when you add room service and tips. Much cheaper to buy a botde and make your own. One girl I know brings two or three miniature bottles of booze from the plane. If she’s used up her quota there, she wheedles other passengers out of theirs. (One more get-acquainted ruse, and obviously only an alcoholic would object.) Okay, you’ve “saved” the company a few more hotel bucks.
Making phone calls away from the room can accrue savings—they are usually fifteen or twenty cents apiece from your bedside. Perhaps you can make them free in an office you’re going to.
Along with keeping your hotel bill low, on a nest-egg trip you might cheerfully have agreed to travel tourist instead of first-class. Only do that if you’re sure you can make it up in this other way.
We are not out to make the company richer—unless it’s your company or you’re a big stockholder.
Very well, now let’s talk about those “outside expenses” you’re going to run up.
Most companies assume you eat three meals a day—fat hefty ones—and give their approval. I suppose they think company bodies work harder well fed, but I’ve yet to see even a man eat at home the way he says he ate in Minneapolis.
Procedure: Even if you haven’t eaten breakfast since you were six, your company will pay. (You’ll need this money to get your tummy repaved someday.) Perhaps you can nibble some of the fruit a benevolent hotel management left in your room. If, in their minds, an eight-dollar room doesn’t quite justify fruit, your scrambled eggs and coffee at a lunch counter down the street will be only about eighty-five cents. You will charge your company three-eighty-five for the breakfast you didn’t eat at the hotel.
Lunch is cottage cheese. On the expense account you turn in it will read three-seventy-four. Dinner is something that a lovely man is going to take you to. It could be the lovely man you re supposed to take to dinner because he’s a client. But oh no, he won’t let you pay. On your expense account, dinner is fisted as five-forty—or ten-eighty if you’re presumed to have taken him. (It’s a little dangerous saying you took somebody you didn’t take, but I think you should know all the possibilities.) There, you’ve already nest-egged at least the price of a new pair of shoes, and you’re working on the matching handbag.
Other minor savings will come in transportation. You take the airport limousine into town instead of the cab and save three dollars. The three dollars should be yours. (You’ll list a mythical cab fare, of course.) If you walk about town or take the local bus, more savings, though again you write down that you were cabbing.
If you’re planning to nest-feather further by undertipping, I’m against it. As for refusing help at all and doing it yourself, that’s your prerogative if you’re a big strong girl and have the nerve. I can still see the pretty Olympic diving star I traveled with on another Catalina promotion battling a Cornhusker Hotel bellboy to the floor to keep possession of her suitcase. “Does he think I’m a damned invalid or something?” she complained.
Push-them-yourself carts are becoming more prevalent in plane and train terminals. Why not use one? Naturally you charge the company (listed under tips) for the work you did yourself.
It’s fine to have your travel wardrobe pressed and cleaned at the hotel. Some people I know bring everything they own and have it all freshly done up to take home. It seems to me excess baggage charges would eat up the profits. Anyway, that’s going too far. Fair is fair.
Whatever plan you’re on, it isn’t easy to cash checks in a hotel unless you have one of their credit cards. If you travel often enough, it would be worth while getting one from Hilton, Sheraton and other major chains, or use a Diner’s Club card. If you don’t have a card, better start cashing your check a day before you need the money. An assistant manager will have to check on you, and he may be out of the hotel for a day.
Diner’s Club, Carte Blanche, Air Travel and telephone credit cards are all good to have.
Whether you prefer the Get-Rich-Slow-Nest-Egg plan or the Live-It-Up-There’s-No-Tomorrow travel plan, I know you’re going to have a ball.
You’ve been a fine little traveler, my dear—drinking in the city, gathering up the men, raking in the money. And before we leave the tender subject of money to delve deeper into the world of Office Sex, let’s look at some of the other possible fringe benefits you might be able to carry off.
As you can see from its tide, the following chapter is a very practical one.