Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  Copyright © 2014 by William Stadiem

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-345-53695-2

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53697-6

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: Jim Tierney

  Jacket images: © PF-(sdasm2)/Alamy (stewardesses), © Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy (Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra), Ezra Stoller/©Esto (jet and airport)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  ONE The Flying Châteaux

  TWO Set Designer

  THREE Skycoons

  FOUR Jet Wars

  FIVE The Profiler

  SIX Heavenly Host

  SEVEN As American as Ice Water

  EIGHT Blind Ambitions

  NINE Flight Risks

  TEN 007 and the 707

  ELEVEN Swinging London

  TWELVE Coffee, Tea, or Me?

  THIRTEEN The Tripping Point

  FOURTEEN The Last Playboys

  FIFTEEN Final Destinations

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Selected Bibliography

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  THE PASSENGER JET WAS, AND STILL IS, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD, A world whose other wonders the jet made accessible. Along with the personal computer, it ranks as the greatest technological innovation of the second half of the twentieth century. The computer turned your lowly desk into a cross between Harvard and Hollywood. The jet turned you into an adventurer. It freed you from the shackles of that desk and set you free to roam the world, to become a Lindbergh, an Earhart, a James Bond, and, if you had enough money and time, a jet-setter.

  On October 26, 1958, Pan Am made history when it launched the Boeing 707 on its first commercial flight from New York’s Idlewild Airport to Paris’s Le Bourget. The plane, called the Clipper America, had just been christened a week before in Washington, D.C., by first lady Mamie Eisenhower, and it was as different from its airborne antecedents as Jackie Kennedy soon would be from Mamie, as Jack from Ike. Before the 707, the king of the skies and the way to Europe was President Eisenhower’s own Air Force One (before the appellation), the Lockheed Constellation. Ike had two of these “Connies,” named Columbine II and Columbine III.

  The Connie, developed by the eccentric billionaire aviator/mogul Howard Hughes for his airline, TWA, with the same zeal for design that he had lavished on Jane Russell’s brassiere in The Outlaw (a movie that he produced), was instantly recognizable for its curvy dolphin-shaped fuselage, its four huge, brutal propellers, and its trident tail, which looked like a gladiatorial weapon from Spartacus. At its maximum speed of 376 miles per hour, it seemed incredibly big and fast, able to transport sixty-six passengers from New York to Europe in a mere fourteen hours. Before the Connie, the trip had taken more than twenty-one hours, with stops in Gander, Reykjavík, and Shannon before reaching the Old World.

  The 707 made the Connie look like the proverbial “ninety-seven-pound weakling” so famous in the advertising of the age. With its four grand Pratt & Whitney jet pods, the 707 cut the transatlantic time to a good night’s sleep of seven hours. Not only did the jet take half the time, at over 600 miles per hour, it also doubled the load, to 120 passengers. The sleek, shimmering silver rocket-bomber-shaped craft weighed 100,000 pounds more than the Connie and was 30 percent longer, at 144 feet, but it was exceptionally light on its toes, flying “above the weather” at 40,000 feet, compared to the Connie’s ceiling of 25,000. Gone was the bone-rattling propeller vibration; gone was the stomach-churning turbulence. Now Pan Am’s first-class passengers could savor the gourmet meals of foie gras and lobster thermidor and Mouton Rothschild catered by Maxim’s of Paris without recourse to the airsick bags. Pan Am was taking haute cuisine as high as it could go.

  DREAM MACHINE. The first version of the Boeing 707, which started crossing the Atlantic in 1958. (photo credit itr 1.1)

  The world of 1958 was in the Space Age, and the 707 was in every sense a futuristic spacecraft, Tomorrowland today. The subdued lighting, the ventilation, the individual controls, the Eames-like modernist seats, the relative silence, all instantly belied the 707’s whimsical motif of hot-air balloons decorating the panels that separated deluxe from economy. “Tourist,” Pan Am had decided, was a dirty word, and first class meant that there was a second. No one wanted to be second, not at Pan Am, which made a fetish and a legend out of always being first. Every traveler was to be treated as an explorer. They were all Phileas Foggs, and the 707 was their beautiful balloon.

  Suffice it to say that a trip on the new 707 was a special event. The pilots were straight out of central casting, John Waynes who could rise to any occasion, not that “occasions” were expected ever to befall this miracle of technology. The stewardesses were sexistly stunning, pure Coffee, Tea or Me? avian goddesses, yet there was no hauteur, just a crisp, omnicompetent cheeriness befitting your favorite schoolteacher. The passengers felt impelled to dress the part, coats and ties for the men, suits and pearls and heels for the women. It was a sky party, and you were honored to be on the guest list.

  Furthermore, the price was right: $909 round-trip deluxe, $489 economy, the same fares as on the now-snailish Connie. Those prices, which would go down the more jets went up, were definitely doable for the American middle class, who in 1958 could buy a snazzy Chevrolet Impala for $2,700 and a home for a national median price of $12,750. Even at $10 a day, which was twice the price on which Arthur Frommer would make his name and fame, a three-week European adventure of a lifetime would cost under $1,000. That may have been the deal of the century.

  Within two years of Pan Am’s inaugural flight, virtually all the world’s major airlines would make the big switch from props to jets. Pan Am quickly expanded its initial service to Paris to include daily nonstops from New York to the other capitals of the grand tour, London and Rome. In early 1959 Air France began flying the 707 across the Atlantic, while TWA and American Airlines began jetting coast-to-coast in under five hours, compared to the Connie’s endless eight. Also in 1959, Boeing’s rival Douglas Aircraft introduced its own jet, the DC-8, which was so similar to the 707 that it was instantly relegated to “copycat” status, despite becoming the jet of choice for such giants as United, Swissair, KLM, and Japan Air Lines.

  By 1960 BOAC (the forerunner of British Airways), Lufthansa, Air India, and Qantas had all jumped on the 707 bandwagon, giving the Boeing product a synonymy with jet travel that Douglas could never equal. Whichever plane they took, travelers were the beneficiaries of a newly accessible world. In 1958, 500,000 American tourists visited Europe. A decade of jets later, the figure had gone up to 2,000,000, an increase of 400 percent. The growth rate was so enormous that it rendered the 707 obsoletely small in record time and led to the development of the leviathan 747.

  THE WORLD ON SALE. An early Air France jet ad. The prices for globe-trotting were too low to stay home. (photo credit itr 1.2)

  The Jet Set of this book is not merely the boldfaced names who populated the slopes of Gstaad, the topless beaches of Saint-Tropez, the tables of Maxim’s, the dance floor of Regine’s, and, of c
ourse, the gossip columns of the world. These people were traveling to all the right places long before the 707 was on the drawing board. They didn’t need the jets. But the jets needed them, as the shock troops of fantasy, the stuff of dreams—and of ticket sales. Call them the uppercase Jet Set. The lowercase jet set were all the real people in the back of the plane. They might not have made the columns, but they were having the time of their lives. And they fueled the big, big business of aviation. This “real” jet set put the planes in the sky.

  There was one further dichotomy in the concept of the Jet Set, upper- and lowercase. That was the division between the Jet, which was business, and the Set, which was social. The emperors of the air, and the airlines, and the aerospace companies, were among the most powerful men on the planet, but they were high-leverage, low-visibility. You didn’t see them in Saint-Tropez. You didn’t read about them in the columns. Without them, there would be no jet, and hence no set. Yet the world could not live on jet fuel alone. Fantasy was essential to the combustion that would create a new generation of travelers, as global mobility, in one amazing decade, became a new but integral part of the American Dream.

  THE POSTER BOY FOR THE JET SET HAD A BIG SECRET. FRANK SINATRA WAS AFRAID of flying. His 1958 album Come Fly with Me had become the soundtrack for the new jet age that had kicked off that same year in October with Pan Am’s 707 service between New York and Paris. Yet Sinatra wouldn’t be caught dead on Pan Am or TWA or even Air France, no matter how good the meals, catered by La Tour d’Argent, were supposed to be. “Dead” was the operative word for Sinatra, that most distrustful of all superstars. He simply didn’t believe the airlines were careful enough. That was why he had his own plane, a big dual-prop Martin 404 called, in those days before political correctness, El Dago. Before the advent of the jets, the Martin was state-of-the art, air-conditioned, pressurized, and customized for his hard-drinking Rat Pack show-business buddies, with a piano and a central bar almost as long as the one at Chasen’s. Hollywood felt at home here in the air, though for the nervous Sinatra, the El Dago bar was a necessity rather than a status symbol.

  Aside from insisting on war-hero private pilots, Sinatra obsessively had his valet, ex–navy man George Jacobs, spend even more time checking weather reports and communicating with all the airports on their prospective routes to make sure there would be no nasty surprises than Jacobs did in arranging starlet assignations for his master. Sinatra once threw a fit when Jacobs arranged a post-dinner screening of the classic airline near-disaster film, The High and the Mighty, notwithstanding John Wayne’s saving the day—and the plane. And he confided in Jacobs that he had a recurring nightmare inspired by The Glenn Miller Story, wherein the big bandleader disappeared over the foggy Channel on a flight from England to Paris. Moreover, Sinatra was still haunted by having bailed out, at the last second, of a 1958 cross-country flight with Around the World in 80 Days impresario and Elizabeth Taylor husband Mike Todd on his plane The Lucky Liz, which went down in a fireball in a New Mexico cornfield.

  Such high anxiety was not the stuff of American legends, especially that of the swaggering, carefree, ring-a-ding variety that Sinatra apotheosized. He knew he had to get with the program, the jet program. After all, he was supposed to be the program. Accordingly, in 1962, when the ocean liners were still carrying more passengers across the Atlantic than the new jets, Sinatra did more than anyone thus far to emblazon the jet fantasy in the still-sedentary imagination of America. His high-profile grand gesture was chartering his own 707 for a three-month round-the-world tour to benefit children’s charities in the countries he would visit. He would fly from L.A. to Tokyo, to Hong Kong, then across the globe to Israel, Greece, Italy, France, England, a swinging, speedy update of the grand tour for the Sputnik era.

  What the world didn’t realize was that, for all his ostensible altruism, Sinatra’s charity began at home. The new commercial jets may have needed passengers, but Sinatra needed something, too: a makeover of a Mafia image occasioned by his guilt-by-association relationship with Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. While Giancana may have been instrumental in stealing Illinois, and the presidency, for John F. Kennedy in 1960, it was a debt that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was intent on wiping from the ledger, even if that meant obliterating the playboy friendship between Sinatra and his brother. Bobby was so down on Sinatra, who had reconstructed his Palm Springs compound to become JFK’s own Western White House, that he pressured his brother into rejecting the Sinatra hospitality and bunking instead chez Bing Crosby, Sinatra’s archrival and an even archer Republican.

  Humiliated, Sinatra, at the advice of his master-strategist lawyer, Mickey Rudin, decided to get out of Dodge—all the way out to Tokyo, as far as a 707 would take him. His entourage wasn’t comprised of the usual Jet Set suspects, ultramobile international legends like Onassis, Agnelli, Rubirosa, or even Jacqueline Kennedy herself, whose high-profile Francophilia was proving to be a greater gesture of Franco-American comity than the Statue of Liberty. No, instead of the global nomads, Sinatra filled his 707 with his regiment of musicians and his best local buddies. The latter included his favorite Beverly Hills restaurateur, “Prince” Mike Romanoff, everyone’s favorite charlatan, on whom Sinatra counted to get him the best tables on earth; his personal banker, Al Hart, head of Beverly Hills’s City National and the man who financed Sinatra’s comeback film, From Here to Eternity, to pay the freight; his songwriter and sexmeister Jimmy Van Heusen, himself an accomplished pilot, to get the girls; and legendary New York Giants baseball manager Leo “The Lip” Durocher, to provide all-American ballpark ballast amid the anticipated dislocations and alienations of the long foreign journey.

  While not exactly the Ugly American, Sinatra provided plenty of his own homegrown ballast. For all his previous international performances and global exposure, Sinatra had almost no interest in foreign cultures, except for the women. He couldn’t have cared less about the Louvre or Versailles, classic architecture or haute cuisine. In fact, he had George Jacobs stock the 707 with a three-month supply of his favorite snack, Campbell’s franks and beans, which he would devour cold, straight from the tin. This was soul food, Hoboken-style. God forbid Sinatra would have to ingest sushi or chop suey or foie gras or, even on his ostensible home turf, spaghetti alla vongole. Even in Italy, the star invariably rejected the alta cucina grand-hotel fare of Rome’s Excelsior and Milan’s Principe di Savoia. Instead, he insisted that Jacobs, an accomplished navy cook whom Sinatra’s mother Dolly had taught to “do” bridge-and-tunnel red-gravy transplant-paisan food, prepare his Jersey favorites in the kitchen of his suite.

  Sinatra left for Tokyo in April 1962, perfect for cherry-blossom time. His tour instantly generated massive worldwide news coverage, just as lawyer Rudin had promised. Every day the still-powerful syndicated gossip columns, led by Hearst’s “Cholly Knickerbocker,” the nom de plume of the worldly and genuine Russian count Igor Cassini, featured breathlessly glamorous dispatches on Sinatra’s mix of good deeds and high life, visiting a Buddhist monastery on Mount Fuji, endowing a youth center on the Sea of Galilee, cruising the Mediterranean on Onassian yachts, serenading his High Society costar Princess Grace at a series of “Chinchilla and Diamonds” concert benefits at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo designed to soak high rollers for the benefit of poor kids.

  Sinatra had El Dago flown over to Europe to replace the 707 for short intercontinental hops, though in a nod to his quest to sanitize his escutcheon, it had been renamed the Christina, after his younger daughter. He posed with blind children in Greece and crippled children in Italy and orphans in England. He sang everywhere, from the Mikado Theater in Tokyo, to the Parthenon in Athens, to the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, to the Royal Festival Hall in London. He was feted by everyone from the emperor of Japan to Princess Grace to Princess Margaret (whom he tried, unsuccessfully, to bed) to General de Gaulle, who got over being not invited by Prince Rainier to the Monaco gala and decorated Sinatra as a chevalier of the Order of Public Hea
lth, an ironic honor given the unsalubrious post-concert orgies being carried on in the entertainer’s imperial suite at the Hotel George V. The fantasy trip of a lifetime, Sinatra’s “one man, one world” extravaganza underscored, as nothing before it, the jet-age miracle of making the planet seem, if not small, then certainly accessible.

  COME FLY WITH ME. Frank Sinatra at London’s Heathrow Airport in 1961. More than any other entertainer, Sinatra embodied and popularized jet travel. (photo credit 1.1)

  The Sinatra coverage was proving an inspiration to another group of travelers who were planning their own trip-of-a-lifetime spring adventure to Europe, an odyssey that would be as long on culture as Sinatra’s would be short. The Atlanta Art Association, which constituted the art- and music-loving elite of the capital of the Peach State and the symbol of a South that was rising again, was chartering an Air France 707 to take its members on a very grand tour of the Old World for the month of May. Just as the Sinatra world tour would become the most-reported-on celebrity superjunket of the sixties, the Atlanta art excursion would become the most-reported-on tour of “real people,” although for entirely different reasons, as will be seen.

  Sinatra was fantasy, Atlanta reality. Both captured the public imagination. The Art Association trip would be featured on the cover of Life as a paradigm of how the new jets were opening up the Old World to America’s burgeoning middle class, and how travel was becoming both an affordable luxury and, for Americans in the Camelot era that prized sophistication, a cultural necessity. The Atlanta tour thus provides valuable insight into how Americans traveled at the dawn of the jet age and the joy it brought them. Sadly, the main reason it made Life was death, for the tour, realizing Sinatra’s darkest fears, became the greatest disaster in aviation history.

  In 1960, following its own assemblage of a jet fleet to compete with Pan Am and TWA in the war for the Atlantic, Air France had established a sales office in Atlanta. Its local manager was a suave and dashing Frenchman named Paul Dossans, who proved enormously attractive to the local country-club set who were Air France’s target clientele. Dossans started small, donating a free jet round-trip ticket to Paris to the Art Association’s 1960 charity auction. The prize turned out to be such a hit that Dossans decided next to go for not one seat but the whole plane. He joined forces with the local American Express office to assemble a tour and charter package exclusively for the Art Association.