Also leaving us this week, also at the age of 95, was Charles Dumont. Most famous for writing the Edith Piat hit “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” Dumont was a singer as well, interpreting his songs with a gruff, lilting gracefulness. (“C’etait le temps, souvenez-vous/le temps des grives aux loups.”) Now he joins those two other Charles’s – Aznavour and Trenet – in the French chanson afterworld.
Arthur Frommer died yesterday at the age of 95. Best-known at the author of Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, and founder of the Frommer travel guides, he was also the only person who ever called me out of the blue to offer me a job.
It was in the late ’90s. I had met Arthur once, when he spoke at the Barnes & Noble in Plantation to talk about his new magazine Budget Travel. I ended up writing a column about the evening, in which I said: “What Dr. Spock was to child rearing in the ’50s, and Masters and Johnson were to sex, Arthur Frommer was to travel.” Shortly after, a travel writer at the LA Times, who heard him speak in Los Angeles, told me Arthur used that line in his introduction.
So one afternoon, while I was sitting at my desk in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom, the phone rang and Arthur was on the other end. He said that he was stepping down as editor of Budget Travel and wanted to know if I would be interested in the job. Everything about the offer was appealing – editor of a glossy travel magazine in the media capital of America – except the nature of the publication. As its name suggests, Budget Travel was a practical magazine of tips and information, far from the evocative travel writing that I loved and, surprisingly, was allowed to do at the Sun-Sentinel. I told Arthur I’d think about it – Hania was intrigued by the idea of living in New York – but I eventually decided to stay in the provinces, putting out the kind of travel publication that gave me joy.
I think I made the right decision. After The Best American Travel Writing anthology debuted in 2000, the Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared in the first nine editions. Its last appearance came in 2008, the year I got laid off.
My favorite films from the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, which concluded yesterday, were Black Dog (China) and Junks & Dolls (Iran). Dissimilar in many ways, they both depict people finding purpose, and connection, in inhospitable settings.
The movie last night was a French comedy, Robot T-0, in which a single mother obtains a personal robot. The robot cautions the woman about her heavy consumption of carbohydrates but says nothing about her smoking.
Tuesday morning I dropped my car at the garage and walked with my book to the nearby café. The book, A Sunny Place for Shady People by Ryan Murdock, is about Malta. I left it on an outside table and went inside to order.
“How’s that book you’re reading?” a young man asked me.
I told him it was very good, written by a Canadian who spent four years on the island.
“I noticed the title,” the man said. “You know, that’s been said about this place.”
I told him that “a sunny place for shady people” was, originally, Somerset Maugham’s description of the French Riviera. He nodded as if that – or at least the author’s name – rang a bell.
I took my iced tea outside and noticed that the man at the neighboring table was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls.
It’s day six of the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival and I’ve seen seven films – most of them entertaining, two of them excellent. I thought that having to see a film every day – sometimes two – would get to be a chore, but the experience has been quite the opposite. When I don’t have a movie to go to I feel at a loss.