In 1953, the French icon Colette wrote a love letter to Paris.
Her reflection endures today in the book “Holiday: The Best Travel Magazine That Ever Was” (Rizzoli, 270 pp., $85), by Pamela Fiori.
Holiday began publishing global-travel features just as the world was emerging from World War II. The name itself was optimistic (much more airy than vacation), a mood reflected in pages that were lively, literary and highly visual. Even the hardcover, inside the book jacket, is a resort-evocative Lilly Pulitzer-pink.
In Holiday, there were bikinis, wicker cafe chairs and sailboats with their spinnakers ballooning, flying with the wind, as if a metaphor for the post-war era.
And there’s plenty of Wasp culture. A 1954 photo, for example, depicts formally attired Glyndebourne Festival operagoers standing on the lawn of an estate outside London. As the cutline noted, they arrived a full hour early in their evening clothes “to take late afternoon tea, to discuss Wagner and Verdi, to stroll beside the herbaceous borders and to admire the fine cows and century-old trees.”
But the magazine’s diverse itinerary also took readers from Cuba to Iowa to Zanzibar.
The pages were also about places of the mind, Fiori notes. Those elements now make for an engaging book that combines travel and media history.
Fiori, who began her publishing career at the magazine in 1968, traces Holiday from its inception to its decline. Her look back at the onetime monthly (1946-1977) is rich in images by famed photographers and illustrators of the mid-20th century. The camera cadre included Slim Aarons, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Burt Glinn, Bruce Davidson and Arnold Newman.
Some had covered World War II and were relieved to focus on scenes of gaiety, society and leisure. The world seemed open again to discovery and frivolity.
“Most of the [French] Riviera closed down during the war, except for Monte Carlo’s Casino,” read a 1948 Holiday report from Cannes. “But the last two seasons have been almost normal.”
The accompanying photo depicted a crowd having drinks in the midday sun at the Carlton Hotel Bar. (The hotel and bar, which was featured in Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief,” still treats guests to sea views.)
Capa, “considered the greatest, most fearless combat photographer of all time,” Fiori says, penned a decidedly light piece for the magazine on the French summer season in Deauville and Biarritz.
“Normandy is the summer capital of Paris,” he wrote. “The Deauville season runs from July 15 to the third week of August. Then the polo players, the pretty girls, the playboys and the maharajahs are off on the second leg of their journey; they take the road south and journey 500 miles to catch the season in Biarritz.”
There is ample coverage of pretty people and their playgrounds. Several featured spots still welcome guests, such as the Hotel Miramare in Positano, Italy, and the Marbella Club in Spain.
An Aarons photo captures the very sun-tanned actress and model Marisa Berenson, who is pictured in Capri, Italy, with fellow model Alberta Tiburzi. We see other international fixtures: Bridget Bardot; Sir Run Run Shaw, the Hong Kong entertainment mogul, beside his Rolls-Royce; and C.Z. Guest, (actress, best-dressed list regular, horsewoman, socialite), in Palm Beach, Fla.
Esteemed authors were dispatched to sites around the world. Bylines included E.B. White, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Alistair Cooke, Jack Kerouac and Joan Didion.
American writer John A. Williams described his experiences touring the United States as an African American. Santha Rama Rau addressed misconceptions of India (the entire country is not hot). Iowa was the subject of Paul Engle, who noted, “Its single greatest force is dirt — fat dirt. … The land rises and falls, not flat, not broken into steep hills, but always tilting its fertile face to the sun.”
V.S. Pritchett, the British writer, called Portugal the land of tiles, writing, “The houses, the churches, the banks, the cafes are tiled inside and often outside, too, and the tiles echo so that one or two men in a room sound like a crowd in a bathroom.”
Fiori included White’s essay on New York, a city he described as a place where one can be alone in the throng — quite relevant today as the stricken city hunkers down.
“Better than most dense communities,” White wrote, “it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”
Cooke, the journalist and broadcaster known to many as the distinguished former host of PBS’S “Masterpiece Theatre,” said his favorite day’s drive anywhere in the United States was east from Spokane, Wash., to Missoula, Mont.
He added, “If I had to choose one of all the natural phenomena of America to see before I died, it would be Bryce Canyon” in Utah.
Holiday issues featured bold illustrations by top graphic artists. Their work was as wonderfully mid-century as a Danish-modern chair. Names included George Giusti, Ronald Searle and Edward Gorey. Samuel Maitin’s very modern “California Without Cliches” illustration covered a 1965 issue that included an essay on Sacramento by Didion.
“It is hard to find California now,” Didion wrote, “unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised.”
Among the illustrators whose work appeared on the pages of Holiday was Ludwig Bemelmans, known to many from his “Madeline” books and whose framed work is still displayed on the walls of Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle in New York.
Also featured is noted caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, whose drawings expressed a lightheartedness with characters full of life. Hirschfeld and humorist writer S.J. Perelman made a round-the-world trip for Holiday that produced the dispatch “Westward Ha! Or Around the World in 80 Cliches.”
Unlike journeys, which mostly have a well-defined beginning and end, Holiday faded off, struggling to remain relevant.
Lifestyle magazines reflect the era. And with their eye-catching covers and exuberant cover lines, they are eternally optimistic.
In 2014, Franck Durand relaunched the Holiday magazine title. It’s published twice a year. In the book’s afterword, he writes that despite “worrying international events,” the new Holiday “chooses to observe reality with an attitude of amused elegance and hedonism, which runs counter to today’s trends.”
Post-pandemic, travelers will once again venture out, much as the original magazine chronicled in the mid-1940s. Until that time, Fiori’s book provides an aperitif, of sorts, whetting readers’ desire for using their passports again, after the viral war.
Powers is a Detroit-based freelance writer. Her website is rebeccapowers.com.
