Paris to Cape Town, October 2019.
On humiliation, tolerance, and the Times, in three chapters.
Here's the story
Of a writer, shady
Who embarrassed herself, and three very lovely girls
A travel writer, an influencer
–and her mother
Halfway around the world.
1. Marcia Brady
I was back in Paris for the second time in two weeks.
I sold a story to Architectural Digest about a fancy new social club in the 9th. Only one problem, so did Marcia Brady.
I only knew Marcia, a Parisian lifestyle writer, by Instagram and reputation. We’d written for the same titles, traveled with the same people, but never sold the same story to the same magazine before. She messaged me to ask what was up.
She filed her story to a different editor in another section ten months prior but the magazine never published it. Now she was spooked, and so was the club’s publicist, suspicious that Marcia had somehow played her now that I’ve promised the same coverage.
Some good news for once, I made inquiries and AD really was going to run two stories on the club. Everybody was getting paid, a relief and cause for celebration. So we made plans to meet before I left town.
We had missed each other a few times already. We were booked on the same dream trip to Bhutan last December, but I fell ill at the last minute, a wrench in a monthlong Bhutan-Mumbai-Goa-Singapore-Shanghai-London-Paris run of stories I spent weeks lining up.
(That Bhutan trip was my first class ticket across the Pacific, but the vaccinations for India took a toll and I was grounded until the son of a fugitive Chinese crime lord stepped in. He just launched a menswear line and agreed to fly me as far as Hong Kong instead of back home to New York if I hopped on a private jet to Amangiri for a chill last minute getaway to the Utah dessert. It was a no-brainer, and an easy $500 from Garage.)
My time in Paris was running out and I knew I had no easy way back before the end of the year. The rain hadn’t let up all week, beating down across the fourteen balconies of my comped suite atop the Intercontinental. It was a perfect day to do nothing at all, but in addition to the club story, I returned to Paris for my side hustle, a nascent streetwear line called Catholic Aesthetics, I sent to production after a lucky run of high dollar print features.
A few weeks earlier, while on a press trip to drink champagne at Palais de Tokyo, I stumbled across Librarie 1909, an arty erotic bookstore that opened on the Canal Saint-Martin just downhill from the only hotel in Paris I can afford on my own dime.
1909 opened with a tee shirt collab with Sort, a fetish zine out of London I follow on Instagram. For once I didn’t just want to write about thing cool place I found, I wanted to be a part of it, and I found the nerve to ask. I popped in to meet 1909’s owner on that trip, and decided to return with a few pieces from my own label, hoping she’d sell them. It was now or never.
I couldn’t afford drinks with Marcia anyway, and I’d never forgive myself for hauling all those clothes, the real reason for this trip, back to New York. So I blamed the rain, canceled plans, and crossed Paris with a few tees and hoodies, reintroducing myself before the shop closed. The owner was game and I felt amazing. It’s one thing to sell someone else’s story, another to sell your own.
The next morning, I canceled a hasty last ditch coffee with Marcia and woke up early to ride the Metro to Charles De Gaulle. I was only flown one-way to Paris, so I had no choice but to fly home to New York via South Africa.
Marcia would be there in spirit. Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking about her.
2. Jan Brady.
Jan Brady would not let up. It was a weeklong group trip spanning a dairy farm in Pretoria, a celebrity haunt in Johannesburg, and a golf resort nowhere near Cape Town, hosted by the subsidiary of a subsidiary of a major hotel group. Jan was representing The New York Times’ Travel section.
The trip was front-loaded with small humiliations. Upon arrival we were rigorously instructed in how to eat scones as if the lunch they capped did nothing to prove our ability to raise hand to mouth. The next day a milkshake party prefaced a long afternoon assembling, painting, and racing toy wooden boats. One writer was attacked by scone-fiending amputee monkeys, and now every trip back to her room was PTSD, reliving the time she was attacked at a monkey temple in India. All of this, every waking moment, was documented by a rotation of photographers the hotels hired, capturing our tired eyes and unwashed bodies from every angle, without explanation.
Meanwhile Jan Brady was having the time of her life. She’d been blackballed by the Travel section before the trip, someone had ratted her out, but she remained a workhorse at the Styles section so she was a get. That meant a certain level of deference from our hosts, like the time a T Magazine freelancer rewrote the itinerary for a press trip to Mexico–restaurants, hotels–in return for a single mention of a certain tequila.
Jan would only participate in the toy boat race once she knew the prize. The same at early morning bird watching bingo. The same late one night around a bonfire at the dairy, unable to enjoy the spoils of a day-long ice cream making competition. Now, after a week of restraint in Irene and Marble Arch, now at our final group lunch, a whale watching trip to Hermanus where we were for once allowed to order our own food, we’d witness the greatest humiliation of all.
Jan asked me why I missed that press trip to Bhutan last year. If she was there she must know Marcia! I told her how we almost met up in Paris.
“She was boy crazy and wouldn’t stop talking about her period,” Jan said. “It was disgusting.”
3. Cindy Brady.
Cindy Brady was the only professional influencer on the trip. Cindy was hired to create social content for the hotel group. She looked the youngest among us, not helped by the fact she was accompanied by her mother, Mrs. Brady. They kept to themselves as much as they could to avoid the tension caused by the stereotypes of her profession. So come that final lunch no one knew Cindy was actually in her 30s, that she was an Iraqi refugee, a former registered nurse, a divorcee, and the founder of a massive online travel community. Everyone mistook Mrs. Brady as a chaperone, not a +1. There was a child among us, but it wasn’t Cindy.
“You shouldn’t gossip about people who aren’t here,” Cindy chided Jan.
A soft defense of Marcia’s menstruation was all it took for Jan to lose her mind. Jan turned red and demanded to know how many trips Cindy had been on. Jan told Cindy this is not how grown-ups behave. Jan couldn’t just suck up the oysters and cheeseburgers, ocean spray and whale songs. This was one more game without a prize she had to win.
Time froze as Jan insulted Cindy in front of her mother, in front of all of us sitting in awkward silence nursing beers and Coca-Colas, a reprieve from so much raw milk. No one knew what to say. One writer was already cowed, accosted in the SAA lounge in Johannesburg after she posted a photo of Jan on her Instagram Stories.
Next, Jan began speaking to Mrs. Brady about her daughter’s manners like Cindy wasn’t even there. Mrs. Brady tried to change the subject. Cindy tried to change the subject. Jan just changed her approach. She attempted to charm Cindy into naming her influencer agency, to get her in trouble with them, and when Cindy didn’t bite, Jan exploded all over again.
Cindy and Mrs. Brady were rightfully upset. They were about to leave, to take the car back to the hotel and pack. A few of us played musical chairs to separate Cindy and contain Jan, all while our oblivious hosts dined at the far end of the table. Soon after, we left to explore the shore town while Jan stayed behind to tell our hosts how Cindy disrespected the exalted Times writer.
Later that evening Jan entertained the dinner table by repeatedly asking the GM if he would give her a job.
I saw Jan one last time after that, in the Concorde Room at Heathrow, before returning to the States. I was flying home in business, Jan was in first class. I caught her at the transfer desk and piggybacked on her better lounge access so I could take a hot shower and score a free champagne breakfast. I’m a diplomat but no fool.
And when I got home I did something I’ve never done before. I emailed the hotel publicist who arranged our trip but wasn’t there herself:
Please, I hope all of you join together and apologize to Cindy and her mother for Jan’s abhorrent behavior. It was absolutely grotesque and I was mortified. I’m so grateful they didn’t leave, and was able to convince X and Y to switch seats with them at the final lunch. As I told Z later that day, I like to think if we weren’t so far from home, the team would have taken action and removed Jan early from the trip.
A month later, a viral Twitter prompt sparked a discussion among freelancers.
A well respected veteran Times editor jumped in the conversation with a sympathetic ear. Afterward, she got in my DMs and, fuck it, I told her about Jan.
We all have to hustle, to cobble a living wage, one $500 paycheck on the back of a $10,000 trip at a time, and even now I can’t bring myself to publicly shame Jan. She has to eat. We all do, now more than ever. But there’s no reason to disrespect another human being the way Jan disrespected Cindy and Mrs. Brady, to insult the person in front of her because she challenged Jan for insulting Marcia 6000 miles away. And there’s no reason for a publication to defend that behavior.
The editor promised to take action.
That was back in December. Jan’s had nineteen bylines in the paper since then, the most recent two weeks ago. So if you’re new to freelancing and worried that getting caught taking trips for the Times will bring your lifestyle journalism career to a premature end, believe me, there’s nothing to worry about. Not only can you be hateful and completely lacking in self-awareness, you don’t even have to be an effective reporter.
Before we boarded, I told Jan how I found the most stressful part of freelancing for the Times was having to fact-check my own work. The constant fear of making a mistake, being one and done. I recalled a story about an LA nightclub owner who was drunk, drugged, then disappeared, in the course of a three-day interview for T, eager to say anything to impress, and the problems that caused.
I asked Jan if she’s ever had one of those italicized corrections appended to any of her stories.
“Oh, all the time!”
Press Trip is a weekly newsletter about travel journalism written by Adam Robb. You can support Press Trip by sharing it, and shopping Catholic Aesthetics.