This is in the nature of a very brief report on Mexico.
For that traveling category that fares by land, there are available the international trains running from St. Louis by the Missouri Pacific Railroad with through cars from New York via the Pennsylvania and New York Central, and the traveler's own motorcar.
The overland trip by train is entirely agreeable, albeit slow: three full days and four full nights between New York City and Mexico City, with all types of room accommodations available and excellent diner service provided on the portion of the trip handled by the Missouri Pacific and the National Railroads of Mexico, although as much cannot be said for the diner service out of New York on either the Pennsy or the Central. The food served on diners after crossing the border is, in fact, provided by the Missouri Pacific and supervision is by a Mopac steward, but the staff of waiters is changed to Mexicans of an extremely agreeable and obliging order, and Mexican dishes make a somewhat timid appearance on the menu. Considering that the journey through Mexico from Laredo to Mexico City is not a particularly attractive one whether by road or by rail, there is a great deal to be said for the solid, comfortable progress by Pullman with its opportunity to loaf and sleep. The catch is that most people will want their cars once they have got into Central Mexico.
Perhaps the overland trip by highway is possessed of an added attraction because, when traveling this way, the multiple attractions of Mexico burst suddenly and most gratifyingly upon the consciousness of the traveler. Almost in an instant the tourist becomes aware of the friendliness, courtesy, and other dramatically un-American aspects of foreign travel, and of the contrast between the squalid tourist attractions and rancid commercial hotels of East Texas and the spacious, comfortable and magnificently managed tourist hotels of Monterrey which he first encounters south of the border.
It so happened that the last stopping place of this department in its southward progress through Texas was a boom town called Corpus Christi, much in vogue with the haut monde of Texas oil riggers' wives, where the unpaved streets, hub-deep in red mud, boast more one-way signs and preposterous traffic regulations than can be found in all Manhattan, and where, in the resort's most monstrous hotel, whose architecture might conceivably have been appropriate in Detroit, a clerk allowed he might consider taking reservations for eight weeks from that time, but for tonight—how absurd!
In Monterrey, the Gran Hotel Ancina was also, at the moment, full to the guards, but a well-mannered clerk regretted the circumstance extremely, refrained from making cracks about how long it would be before the management would condescend to treat a cash customer in the manner of Corpus Christi, and asked if he might be permitted to call some other hotels in the interest of getting us lodged. A room at the Colonial was forthcoming instanter, strictly on a luxury basis with open fireplace, steam heat, French windows, and glassed-in shower, prices plainly posted on the wall at ＄3 a day double, American money. And the clerk at the Colonial seemed very glad to have guests.
This sort of reception, not only by contrast, but in all its other implications, is typical of everything the traveler encounters everywhere in Mexico. No tourist ever need fear being caught without some reasonable sort of accommodations, no matter how full a town may be, as the busiest hotel will go to enormous pains to see that he is put up elsewhere. The arts of public hospitality, of hotel conduct, restaurant management, and all the details of traveler satisfaction in Mexico are so far in advance of their equivalent in the United States as to make the average tourist accommodation north of the Rio Grande seem by comparison right out of the dreariest times of the war years and what passed as “the national emergency.”
For the authentic or feed-box dope on anything connected with the more de luxe aspects of travel and tourist life in fashionable Mexico, the one perhaps irrefutable source of reliable information is A. C. Blumenthal, lessor of Mexico City's celebrated Reforma Hotel, proprietor of Ciro's equally well-touted night club, and definitely the head man among the glitter set of expatriates, film celebrities, and expensive folk who make a not too reluctant practice of sitting down to dinner at eleven-thirty in the evening and taking off their boiled shirts about the time the banks open in the morning.
Besides the Reforma, a hotel of vast international implications and strictly American plumbing which occupies in Mexican affairs almost precisely the position once occupied by the Ritz in Paris, Blumey is proprietor of the vast Reforma-Casablanca at Acapulco and is at the moment busily engaged in starting a string of Longchamps restaurants featuring Yankee chow and an approximation, somewhat bewildering to all concerned in its functioning, of Yankee service. He is also building a staggering addition to the original structure of the Reforma itself, a wing which will feature two presidential suites and will nearly double the existing and available luxury hotel accommodations in Mexico City.
Whatever may be the source of his claim to a not inconsiderable position and authority, Blumey, according to his own and everybody else's authority as well as the factual evidence at hand, enjoys a very firm “in” indeed with the Mexican government, a hierarchy normally about as appreciative of foreign enterprise as, say, the Kremlin is. Perhaps the explanation is that, instead of undertaking to exploit Mexico's natural economic resources, Blumey's businesses constitute the main single attraction for luxury tourists south of the border and that, while he is an unparalleled expert at inducing the scatterbrained Mexicanos to participate in a functioning undertaking, he is by no means so avaricious or highbinding as he is customarily portrayed in the press of the United States. The “hundred-dollar lunches” at Ciro's, mention of which seems to fascinate New York and Hollywood columnists and paragraphers, are purely and simply a figment of the newspaper imagination. The house lunch is a flat ＄2.50 in American money and is the only lunch served there, or almost exactly the cost of a single portion of hors d'oeuvres at the Colony, Jack and Charlie's, or Mike Romanoff's. The very elaborate house dinner at Ciro's is a flat ＄4 American, without drinks.
In point of actual fact the entire legend of Mexican expensiveness is completely spurious and probably had its origins in the inflated reports of returned travelers about their own fancy way of life away from home where nobody could check on them. The cost of truly de luxe hotel and restaurant accommodations in the principal tourist centers of Mexico is about a half to two-thirds what it is in the United States, if one excepts such exorbitantly priced items as imported wine and tobacco, and ordinary food and comfortable lodging such as the average vacationist might be accustomed to at home, is about one-third the price of its equivalent in the United States.
Blumey's enormous success as a hotelier and restaurateur has arrived from his provision for Americans in Mexico of a great many things for which they are quite free to admit they hone and hanker: corned beef hash, ice water, oneday laundry service, twin beds, French vanilla ice cream, American cigarettes, and a sort of comic opera version of English-speaking telephone service at a great deal less than the equivalent properties would cost in Baltimore or Boston and at only a fraction of what they nick the customers in New York or Beverly Hills.
Eating at Longchamps is entertainment as well as food, as Blumey's messages to his patrons, printed on the backs of the menus, are a sort of Billy Rose column in themselves, and the Americanisms of the eager beagles behind the counter are hilarious. Blumey's “Hamburgueasas” flown in from Kansas City, his hot dogs, also flown in from Sharaf's in Boston, his electric-Silex-brewed coffee, and similar items are the wonder of the town and while the American tourists are hoisting hodsful of stingers in Tony's Bar next door, the youth and chivalry of Mexico are going out of their happy Latin minds in puddles of hot fudge sundae and banana splits. It is all very mad indeed.
Champagne, it must be reported, is prohibitively priced in Mexico by reason of the Federal tax on imported wine, and there isn't a decent cigar to be discovered south of the Rio Grande. The “Puros” available at cigar counters can be used as exterminator, and the most mediocre Havana stogie comes to about eighty cents American. Nor are Mexican barkeeps all that can be desired conversationally. Beyond an understanding of the word Martini, few speak a word of English, and a few old-time, Irish-New York barmen ought to command fancy salaries.
To return to Blumey, who is a sort of pint-sized synthesis of Ernie Byfield and Dave Chasen, the Reforma's head man is of the belief that tourist trade in Mexico is in its barest infancy despite the circumstance that travelers spent something in excess of ＄100,000,000 American there last year. He complains that previous administrations have never approached adequate appropriations for the advertising and promotion of tourist attractions, but expects the Alemán administration to remedy this almost immediately and in something resembling the grand manner. While Blumey is the last man in the world to belittle the little-frequented aspects of the Mexican countryside, the cathedrals, antiquities, and historic shrines, his own particular field of endeavor is confined to big-time luxe with pour le sport overtones of air travel, deep-sea fishing, and name bands. People, he believes, are generally gregarious, and travelers away from home cleave to each other's company with almost animal ferocity. They admire, he has discovered, to talk about getting off the beaten track and visiting little fishing villages where no Yankees have ever penetrated before, but in fact they will flock to the starlit roof of the Reforma-Casablanca at Acapulco in thousands to dance to Broadway music provided by a strictly Fifty-second Street swing band. Tourists, Blumey thinks quite incidentally, are rude, patronizing, and overbearing and, if he were a Mexican, he would cut their throats from ear to ear jointly and severally. As it is, they provide a living for him and he manages to put up with them.
Humorously enough in a large employer of Mexican labor, Blumey has never in twenty years learned to keep up with all the holidays that are so enthusiastically observed in Mexico, and his waiters, barkeeps, bookkeepers, and such now and then pull what he calls a “sneak fiesta” on him, leaving his projects understaffed and himself close to hysteria.
The pleasures, beauties, and various humors of any trip to Mexico are, even in the bounds of individual experience, far too multitudinous to bear repetition, but this department will not forget the item on a restaurant menu at Jalapa with its translation: “Ham Spanish, With Style”; nor the new and shiny motorcycle parked, for reasons of property preservation on the part of its proud owner, directly adjacent to the reception desk in the lobby of the Hotel Iturbide in Monterrey; nor the drug store in the same town which maintained a band of strolling musicians for the pleasure of its patrons, a touch which lent a melancholy grandeur to the purchase of tooth paste and shaving soap; nor the street urchins who shout “goodbye” under the impression this is a hilariously friendly salutation; nor the misery with which Mexicans of all classes seem to endure wet weather, as though its existence were a direct negation of God; nor the full eight-course dinners any working man can be seen cooking in the streets of any city in as many little earthenware pots over a charcoal fire during siesta; nor the penny fireworks the picnickers explode throughout the countryside wherever a banana tree offers its shade, simply to celebrate the only Sunday in the week; nor the bordertown liquor merchants who get the potential customer mildly pie-eyed on samples, a custom that should be universally encouraged; nor the delusion common to Americans on their first trip that English is universally spoken and that they need no Spanish at all.
And the farrago of his souvenirs will include the multitude of the gardenias, even as advertised, at Fortin de las Flores; the elaborate and hilarious cocktail parties at the American Embassy whenever the arrival of a distinguished national gave the staff the opportunity; the diamonds, summer sables, and off-the-face hats at the bull fights on Sundays, fit to give Valentina Schlee the vapors; the beers on the terrace of the tavern across the Plaza in Taxco while the moon mounted incredibly between the staggeringly baroque spires of the cathedral; the fantastic supper parties given by Dolores Del Rio at her suburban villa beginning at two o'clock in the morning with the dinner-jacketed guests overflowing through the French windows into the courtyards with its trees that were old when the Spanish first came; reading Billy Rose in the Mexico City Herald at breakfast and feeling that the Diamond Horseshoe on Forty-sixth Street was very far away; the immemorial patterns of the “China Road” and its ageless stone culverts, leading down through the tropics to Acapulco; the stars, each equatorial one of them as big as a Cartier silver cake dish, just above the tips of the fiddlers' bows in the roof café of the Reforma-Casablanca with the band playing “Night of Love.”