The long U.S. love affair with Mallorca, from Grace Kelly to Tom Hanks

In 1809 there wasn't any tourism of note, let alone wine tourism. An American interest in travelling to Mallorca was matched by the general indifference of the well-heeled European travellers of the nineteenth century, who perceived little to take their fancy and make worthy a steamboat journey from a Mediterranean port. Austria's Archduke Louis Salvador was to provide appeal to an intelligentsia in the later years of the century, but a specific American presence was barely noticeable.

Right towards the end of the century, 1898, it might have become evident. Might have, but rumour, panic and misinformation had led to a totally incorrect conclusion. The US and Spain were at war, but the Mediterranean wasn't the theatre. It was the French press that really started it all off, and so after the Spanish Caribbean Squadron was destroyed at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in July 1898, Mallorca (Palma especially) was prepared for an invasion. Mallorca and the Balearics were under military command. The invasion never happened. It was never going to happen.

In a more peaceful manner, one appropriate for the 'Island of Calm', as Catalan painter and writer Santiago Rusiñol dubbed Mallorca, it was a painter who started to open American eyes to the island's possibilities. That was William Edwards Cook, who moved to Europe from the US in 1903. Aged 22, he was to fall in with a circle of fellow Americans and those of a bohemian outlook regardless of nationality. Rusiñol was one; American writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were others. Paris was where Cook met Stein. It was he who recommended Mallorca to Stein, just as she was to later recommend the island to Robert Graves.

Stein and Toklas arrived in the winter of 1915. They were forgetting the war a little; the first edition of Rusiñol's 'L'Illa de la Calma' was published the year before the start of the war. Might 1915 be said to have marked a genuine start to US tourism in Mallorca? Anecdotally maybe, but more officially attempts had begun three years previously. In 1912, the Fomento del Turismo de Mallorca (the Mallorca Tourist Board) sent promotion leaflets to the States; the board had been founded at the end of 1905.

Of greater significance were contacts in early 1920 with the Frank Tourist Co. of New York and with Burton Holmes. From Chicago, Holmes pretty much invented the 'travelogue'. He gave presentations and lectures, using slides and moving pictures. A representative from Holmes' company travelled to Mallorca and gathered information and images that were taken back to the US and formed the basis of his presentations about the island. The history of the Fomento del Turismo de Mallorca (author, Antoni Vives Reus) states that "these initiatives can be considered to have been a clear precedent for future tourism promotion in that country (the US)".

An informative article about US tourists (or travellers) in Mallorca in the twentieth century is by Dr. Eduard Moyà of the University of the Balearic Islands. I only came across this article for the first time a few days ago, and it confirms some research I have done over the years into US tourism in Mallorca - for example the influence of the bohemian crowd in the early decades of the twentieth century and the at-times less-than-wonderful reputation that American tourists tended to have in years prior to the Civil War. Its title is 'American Travelers in Mallorca in the Twentieth Century: The Hard Work of the Nothing-To-Do's' and was published in 'Revista de Filología', January 2019.

Dr. Moyà's angle is a literary one as opposed to tourism per se. He draws attention to a 1925 article from 'The New York Times' which described Mallorca as "the haunt of literary folk and artists". Writers and painters came to Mallorca, and it was writers and painters who came to promote Mallorca. The fact that some of them were American (or British like Graves) clearly helped with a US audience; and Robert Graves and American writer Laura Riding were of course a couple for some years until they parted in 1939.

Apart from the peace and quiet and agreeable climate, those who came to Mallorca in the first decades of the last century found a very inexpensive place. Moyà notes that the "cheap cost of Mallorcan living, paired with Stein's favorable recommendations, spread like wildfire amongst the Paris expats and bohemians". He quotes Robert Graves from 1965: "All sorts of holidaymakers came to Mallorca: painters, professors of literature, dipsomaniacs, pianists, perverts, priests, geologists, Buddhists, runaway couples, vegetarians, Seventh Day Adventists, but especially painters."

So, cheapness was a big attraction, and this was to certainly still be the case once Spain and Europe were recovering from wars. As Moyà points out, there were two reasons why an American beatnik poet, Robert Creeley, established himself on the island and founded the 'Black Mountain Review' in the mid-50s - it was cheaper to live and it offered the possibility of cheap printing.

It wasn't the case that the American traveller of the 1920s and 1930s was short of cash. Quite the contrary. It was an American wealth plus an American brashness that caused concern among island people and the British, who along with the French had first truly discovered Mallorca as a holiday destination.

The El Terreno neighbourhood of Palma, where Stein, Toklas and Cook all stayed and which the bohemians had colonised, was a place that scandalised a conservative Mallorca. American journalist Percy Waxman wrote about "naked savages" in El Terreno. In parts of the island, the peace could be shattered by loud Americans in motor cars; the British still preferred the horse and cart. There was at one point a diplomatic incident after drunk Americans disobeyed and attacked Guardia Civil officers in Palma. The British distanced themselves from the Americans. Somehow those who were arrested came to avoid prison sentences.

By contrast, Waxman was able to report that in the Puerto Pollensa of 1933 there was a New York playwright and a Hollywood screenwriter. The painters had colonised Puerto Pollensa, as they had Deya and Soller, but the scandals tended to be confined to the capital. Except for one. Waxman would have known another American journalist, Theodore Pratt. He and his wife moved to Puerto Pollensa in 1932. The following year an infamous article was published in 'American Mercury'. Its title was 'Paradise Enjoys a Boom'. Mallorca was experiencing a tourism boom for the first time, and the Americans were part of it. But Ted Pratt was no Burton Holmes. There was more he seemingly disliked than liked, and he said so in an article in July 1933. Nothing might have come off this, had it not been for the fact that the local Spanish newspaper, 'Ultima Hora', got hold of a translated copy. Pratt was run out of Puerto Pollensa and ultimately run off Mallorca.

A Mallorcan celebrity association had started before the Civil War and was to really take off in the 1950s ahead of what was to be the mass tourism boom from the 1960s. Mallorca was Hollywood - Grace Kelly whose 1956 honeymoon with Prince Rainier was in Mallorca; Ava Gardner, a friend of Robert Graves; Errol Flynn and Patrice Wymore (Flynn's drinking was somewhat notorious); Gary Cooper, whose taxi driver took him from the Hotel Formentor to one of the island's finest and quietest beaches in 1952 - Magalluf.

But there were other interests. In 1952, an American ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax, travelled to Mallorca, having been commissioned by Colombia Records for a folk music project. "This cursed Franco government will not go away," Lomax was to observe, but he also saw a bay of Palma, "full of beautiful sailboats". "At the docks, people seemed happy to see new people arrive. This is a fantastic land. Heat during the day. The sea close by. Figs, oranges, plums, pears. Old and simple houses. The nicest people I have ever met."

In October 1957, William Junior Bryant established the headquarters of the Fundación Bryant (Bryant Foundation) in Alcudia. Partly for the excavations of the Pollentia Roman site, the foundation - through the involvement of Americans - made Pollentia something of a benchmark for international archaeology. The headquarters, Can Domenech, housed the Centro Arqueologico Hispano-Americano. Scholarships were given to Spanish and American students. For any serious researcher of Roman archaeology, Alcudia was the place to be.

Against the background of the September 1953 Pact of Madrid, the US sought to break Spain's isolation. The regime had by then come to realise that there was a future in tourism, but it took developments like the pact to truly push Spain in that direction and to therefore facilitate a whole new style of promotion. In the 1950s, Temple Fielding's travel guides opened American eyes to Mallorca and to Spain. He and his wife lived in Formentor for some years. A street in Puerto Pollensa is named after him. Fielding was to prove to be a key figure.

And then there were the historical ties. In 1963, the mayor of Los Angeles, Sam Yorty, was on the island for the Ferias y Fiestas de Primavera Palma de Mallorca - the Spring Fairs and Fiestas. Also in attendance was Manuel Fraga, the tourism minister. He was keen to sell Mallorca (and Spain) to Americans whose spending power greatly exceeded that of what was a nascent but core British tourist market. In order to get the message across, Fraga needed the right Americans to assist with the selling. Yorty, who had once backed the Republican cause in Spain against Franco, had ditched the Democrats, become a US Republican and a passionate anti-Communist who regularly criticised the Civil Rights Movement and railed against feminism. He was right for Fraga.

Ostensibly, Yorty was in Palma because the fairs featured the 250th anniversary celebrations of the birth of Fray Juniper Serra, the Franciscan missionary from Petra who established the missions in California. Serra was clearly an important historical figure but the impression formed of what took place in 1963 was that the friar was a mere hook for economic rather than traditional purposes. Fraga, minister for information as well, would have made sure of this, Palma Town Hall having emphasised that the celebrations had attracted "relevant personalities" from California. There was one very relevant and very useful personality - Samuel W. Yorty.

In that same year, the Majorca Daily Bulletin, a recent new arrival on sale at island newsstands, included a regular feature listing the names of holidaymakers in Mallorca. Some, anyway. And what was striking was just how many were from the USA. They came from Maryland, Chicago, Baltimore, California, Miami Beach, St. Lewis (sic). There were Mr. and Mrs. James Ettelson, Philadelphia; Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Williams, Orlando; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bach, New YoPrk. Yes, unfortunately, a capital P appeared where a capital P should not have appeared.

In 1972, a news report in Mallorca referred to the fact that the presence of American tourists was becoming ever more apparent. In reinforcing this impression, it was announced that TWA had scheduled twenty charter flights from different airports to fly to Palma. These were twenty flights for February alone.

This was the heyday of American tourism in Mallorca. But when did it come to an end? It had nothing to do with TWA eventually going to the wall, but the decline would have started because of the oil crisis and then been hastened thanks to the increasing availability of Caribbean and Mexican resorts. Why fly all the way to Mallorca when there was somewhere else closer to home?

It's hard to put a number on how many American tourists there were in the early '70s. But it clearly wasn't insignificant. By 2018, the whole of the Balearics attracted some 70,000 American visitors, around 0.4% of all tourists. The United Airlines direct summer service from Newark is making an important difference, though just as important is the general exposure Mallorca has had in the mainstream US media and on social media. The celebrities are different to those of the 1950s, but be they (for example) Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, Bruce Springsteen, Morgan Freeman or Michael Jordan, they all pack a promotional punch. And one or two will enjoy a particularly fine Mallorcan wine. Thomas Jefferson did.