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

by Stadiem, William

  In 1944, before its commercial debut, Hughes flew the Constellation across the country in under seven hours, for a new record. He had just bought TWA, and like Trippe, he knew the value of publicity. This speedcapade got him the cover of Life. The Constellation would become Eisenhower’s first Air Force One and would win Hughes the Congressional Gold Medal for distinguished service to American aviation. Hughes was too busy designing brassieres for Jane Russell, and other Hollywood diversions, to be bothered to go to Washington for the ceremony. Insulted, the White House sent him the medal by ground mail.

  TWA, before Hughes bought it, had stood for Transcontinental & Western Airlines. Its founder, Jack Frye, had been a Hollywood stunt pilot, a member of an aerial troupe called the Thirteen Black Cats. He then started an air service shuttling movie stars and their mistresses to secret desert hideaways, a clandestine operation that appealed to the undercover lover Hughes. Hughes bought in to Frye’s company and, wanting to out-Trippe Pan Am in the postwar period, renamed it Trans World Airlines and began competing for a big slice of Pan Am’s foreign pie. Hughes fired Frye in 1947. He would hire and fire four more TWA chief executives in the next decade, contributing to Wall Street’s anxiety over the company’s stability.

  Trippe was privately horrified by Hughes, not so much for his “amoral” lifestyle as for his very real competitive threat. Hughes wanted the world, the whole world, as much as Trippe did. The proprietary Trippe thought he already owned it and that Hughes’s desires were simply out of line. Acting on this theory, Trippe leaned on one of his old Ivy boys in Washington to put Howard Hughes in his place. Trippe’s chosen instrument here was Republican senator Owen Brewster of Maine, a Mayflower descendant and Harvard Law graduate who had been elected governor in 1924 with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, which operated as openly and brazenly in nativist Maine as it did in Dixie.

  An archenemy of Roosevelt and the New Deal and an archadmirer of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Brewster was Trippe’s main Washington apologist, the senator who carried the ball for the argument that Pan Am was America’s “chosen instrument” in international air competition. The idea here was that one airline, and only one, backed by America’s full faith and credit, could compete with the nationalized foreign carriers, backed by their countries’ massive resources. Hughes might divide the Yank effort, whereby the foreigners might conquer. Attack dog Brewster was unleashed on Hughes. Trippe had convinced Brewster that the richest man in America was actually un-American.

  Brewster was the chairman of the Aviation Committee of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1947, he held Senate hearings investigating Hughes’s receipt of a fortune in defense funds for fiascos like the failed giant transport, the Spruce Goose, which flew only once. Hughes, according to Brewster, had cheated the American government for upward of $40 million. However, what Brewster, publicly described by high-placed critics as Trippe’s “stooge” and “errand boy,” was actually angling for was to use the hearings as a cudgel to force Hughes to sell TWA to Trippe and ensure Pan Am’s perpetual dominance.

  On the eve of the hearings, with Hughes hoping to forestall them, Trippe and Hughes did meet—top-secretly, of course—for the only time in their parallel lives. Maybe, Hughes thought, he might just buy Pan Am. The summit conference was held in Palm Springs, near where Hughes had rented a compound for the occasion in the high desert. Trippe was alone, per Hughes’s rules, while Hughes was accompanied by his notorious right hand Noah Dietrich. Trippe was not there to sell, only buy, and at bazaar prices.

  Trippe made Hughes what the aviator regarded as an insulting buyout offer, and only for TWA’s international routes, which was all Trippe ever wanted. Hughes, deeply ashamed that he had wasted a second talking with Trippe, and more paranoid than before that these futile talks would leak, insisted on flying the Pan Am chief personally to the Mexican border, where Trippe was to instruct his own pilot and plane to meet them. Trippe was lucky that Hughes didn’t push him out over the Mojave Desert.

  The Brewster hearings thus began. They were to Howard Hughes what the McCarthy hearings were to the Hollywood Ten: a witch hunt. But at this point, before he really went off the deep end, Hughes was still a cool daredevil air hero, not some brainy socialist with a typewriter. The public was on his side. So was Congress. A Brewster-backed bill that would have forced a merger of all American international carriers (others beside TWA were stirring to fly the seas) into a Pan Am–dominated “community company” drew screams of un-American-ness, of stifling the essence of capitalism, which was competition. Not only did both houses overwhelmingly reject the measure, but Hughes pulled himself out of his paralytic funk to wreak revenge on Owen Brewster.

  When Hughes took his seat before Brewster’s Senate committee, he seemed to be channeling James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Hughes took a heartland Texan’s aw-shucks attitude toward his success and a no-way response to charges of ripping off the country, his country. “I worked pretty hard for what money I have, and I didn’t make it from airplanes,” Hughes said. “In my transactions with the government, I have made no profit whatsoever.” Hughes basically accused Brewster of trying to blackmail him, revealing the senator’s offer to call off these hearings if he “merged” TWA into Pan Am on the terms and under the thumb of Juan Trippe. Furthermore, Hughes cited, chapter and verse, very specific occasions of Brewster’s accepting Pan Am’s free tickets and other largesse, including his being a virtual boarder at Washington’s “Casa Trippe,” Pan Am’s palatial D.C. lobbying headquarters on F Street.

  With a patently untrue eye-popping declaration, “Juan Trippe is a man not interested in making money,” Owen Brewster basically wrote his own epitaph. But Hughes insisted on dancing on Brewster’s political grave. When Brewster ran for reelection in 1952, Hughes threw all his immense resources behind the governor of Maine, Frederick Payne, convincing him to challenge Brewster in the Republican primary. The Payne campaign tarred Brewster with the Klan, with McCarthy, with his shakedown of Hughes. It was a rare defeat for an incumbent senator in a primary, but Payne pulled it off. Without Hughes, six years later, Payne lost to Edmund Muskie. The dethroned Brewster devoted the rest of his life to Christian Science, while Hughes devoted the rest of the fifties to going mano a mano with Juan Trippe in their battle for dominance of the international skies.

  Hughes almost pulled it off. He was a great judge of talent, and not just the distaff celluloid variety. In his powerful aviation technology firm Hughes Aircraft, he raided Detroit’s Ford Motors to hire its management wizard Tex Thornton, who put Hughes on the cutting edge of missile defense and made him billions more. However, Hughes’s eccentricities got in the way of profits. When he insisted on the firm building its new research center next to his desert compound and starlet retreat in Las Vegas rather than on its Culver City, California, campus, an era of bad feelings began, which ended with Thornton’s exit and even more nervous agitation in fiscal circles.

  Once Wall Street decided Hughes must go, TWA’s jet future was frozen. His hands tied with legal tape, Howard Hughes couldn’t go to war with Trippe or anyone else. His reign over TWA was over, though he would not be given the final court-sanctioned boot until 1961. Meanwhile, Juan Trippe reigned supreme as Zeus of the Air, launching his first New York–to–Paris 707 right on schedule in 1958. Few Atlantic journeys ever received so much publicity, except perhaps those of Lindbergh and the Titanic.

  Technically, Trippe wasn’t first, but in the colloquialism attributed to Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, Trippe was “firstest with the mostest.” Firstest with the leastest was perennial also-ran Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, who already wore the “first Atlantic jet” crown and had developed a new and improved—and supposedly safer—version of the Comet, the Comet IV, which made its first scheduled commercial flight between London and New York on October 4, beating Pan Am “across the pond,” as the Brits would say. Alas, what might have been a cause for celebration turned out to be a cold supper of humble pie whe
n a major strike by British transport workers shut down London’s Heathrow Airport for weeks and stole all De Havilland’s thunder. What good is a safe plane if it can’t take off? The unkindest of all cuts came late in the year when BOAC threw in the Brit-pride towel and placed a huge 707 order with Boeing.

  On October 16, Trippe presided over a grand ceremony at Hangar 10 of Washington National Airport, where First Lady Mamie Eisenhower christened Trippe’s first 707, the Clipper America, with a bottle of, not champagne, God forbid, but water blended from each of the seven seas. Trippe, in his address, noted proudly that Mamie was the fourth White House dowager to launch a Clipper, a tradition that had included Lou Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, and First Daughter Margaret Truman.

  Trippe’s encomium to his creation was eloquent. The 707, he said, “speaks for the clearest and simplest characteristics of all things American. It is swift. It is large. It is efficient. It is imaginative.” What he didn’t mention was that it was about to get even swifter. Boeing’s Bill Allen had relented at last and agreed to refit the bulk of the Pan Am 707 order with Fred Rentschler’s more powerful J-75s. Trippe couldn’t resist counting his goodies, the “2,300,000 citizen-travelers crossing the Atlantic” that year, and boasting that this jet alone, not to mention his coming third-of-a-billion-dollar fleet of forty-nine more “will carry across the Atlantic, each and every year, as many passengers as a ship as large as the Queen Mary.” The air messiah saw the 707 was a great bird of peace, the great jet hope:

  How can it fail to smash and shatter the petty provincialism and narrow nationalism … making of this world a tragic mosaic of hostility and hate? How can this fabulous new force in the sky fail to serve the hope of the world and the peace of the world?

  No oration before an Eisenhower crowd could be without a major dig at the Soviet Union, and a plug for Pan Am as more than just a flying money machine, but, most important, as a bulwark against Communism:

  Aeroflot, the Soviet Civil Airline, has expanded, during the last two years, into sixteen new countries … Aeroflot, this direct agent of the Soviet Government, assures a form of communist economic penetration wherever it reaches. It is thus the stern labor of Americans—freely striving, in a free economy—to match the initiative and the resources so massively commandeered by the Soviet state … In this sense, this new Clipper America is more than a technical triumph for civilian convenience. It is a test of America’s capacity to work for its own survival.

  Once out of Eisenhower earshot, however, civilian convenience morphed into a Madison Avenue–slaked consumer fantasy that became the theme of the 707 rollout. Trippe’s objective was to make a trip to Europe an American birthright, and the 707 America’s new dream machine. He wanted to be Henry Ford of the Air. Before the official first commercial flight two weeks hence, Trippe himself flew on the Clipper America from Baltimore to Brussels with thirty of the country’s most influential journalists and editors, then packed the Clipper with more than a hundred lesser pressmen for a bon vivant’s whirlwind tour of France, just to show them how seductive this new lifestyle was going to be.

  It was champagne and caviar all the way for the Yank reporters. They arrived at Le Bourget Airport early in the morning and took a catnap at their deluxe Champs-Élysées hotel before hitting les grands boulevards. The night brought them to the Lido, the greatest of all the Paris nightclubs, with its topless Bluebelles. There was no rest whatsoever for the Clipper America. No sooner had it deposited the American journalists at Le Bourget than it packed in a full load of European journalists to fly to New York for a little tit for tat. While the Americans were beginning their champagne journey, the Euros, billeted at the Waldorf Astoria, were drinking Jack Daniel’s and eating Omaha steaks at Pen and Pencil. No Lido for them but, rather, the Overseas Press Club, the Stock Exchange, the United Nations, and the Circle Line.

  Back in France the next morning, the American press group was taken to Épernay, in Champagne, for a liquid lunch at the Taittinger vineyards, followed by a bit of social redemption touring the Cathedral at Reims, then more decadence at the châteaux of two more legendary bubbly producers, Veuve Clicquot and Charles Heidsieck. Juan Trippe obviously had concluded that the way to the heart of the press was through its liver. Returning to Paris, the group was taken to the government palais at the Quai d’Orsay. There the journalists met with the French foreign minister Couve de Murville for aperitifs before still more champagne and a lavish dinner on a chartered yacht that plied the Seine. Next morning, the hungover press was flown home to the reality of their typewriters and the looming deadline that was the quid pro quo for the gratis revelry. Like ships in the night at Idlewild, the Yanks passed their European counterparts, who were trekking to the comforts of the homeward-bound 707 that never slept.

  The “official” maiden voyage of the Clipper America on October 28 came as something of an anticlimax. It was bad enough that it first had to stop to refuel in Gander, Newfoundland. Then a thick fall fog over France further delayed the 707 by ninety-five minutes, making the jet seem not all that much faster than TWA’s Super-Constellations, which made the journey in eleven hours. Howard Hughes, if he was conscious, was probably gloating that the only big names on the Clipper were the actress Greer Garson and the foot magnate Dr. William Scholl. His TWA was still “Airline of the Stars,” jet or no jet.

  Juan Trippe began referring to Pan Am not as the self-aggrandizing “chosen instrument” but as the humble “instrument of the people.” Trippe didn’t need Hollywood. He had what he needed, Washington and Wall Street. Now all he had to do was to fill the seats of his fifty 707s. Juan Trippe didn’t care about stars. He cared about tourists. The people who would become the Jet Set were already going to Europe. They were already in place, in the right place, in Paris, Rome, St. Moritz, Saint-Tropez. Juan Trippe’s challenge, and that of his competitors, was not so much to convey the rich and famous but to use the image of the rich and famous to create their own jet set, a jet set of real people, a jet set of citizen-travelers.

  JUAN TRIPPE’S CAMPAIGN TO DEMOCRATIZE THE JET SET WAS EVIDENT FROM PAN Am’s very first commercial flight on October 28, 1958. He bestilled his public relations minions from making too much of having on board the Oscar-winning Greer Garson. Trippe regarded her as English, as opposed to American, and didn’t see her as that newsworthy a “get.” The flight’s only other celebrity, Dr. Scholl, the man whose bunion pads and corn plasters adorned the aching feet of countless tourists, might have made for amusing copy. However, Trippe decided to forgo it, allowing Scholl and the other far less known tycoons in first class, which Pan Am called “deluxe,” to enjoy their low visibility. Instead, he put the emphasis on the back cabin, the big one, and focused on the rank-and-file citizen-travelers, who, he hoped, would inspire a whole new generation of jet fliers.

  No one on that first flight got more coverage, including her picture in Look, than Billie Miller, a New York secretary who had managed to travel the world on her annual two-week vacations. “I believe there should be aboard an ordinary workaday person,” she described herself, “the sort that in these wonderful travel days is being seen more frequently on the international flights.” Music to Trippe’s ears. Then there were the Noble Hopkinses and their four young children from Garrettsville, Ohio, who won the trip in a contest sponsored by Kellogg’s cornflakes. Mr. Hopkins was a school bus driver. None of them had ever been on a train, much less a plane. It was proof that Pan Am made anything possible.

  FLY ME. Early Pan Am 707 ad, 1960. Eschewing clever copy, the airline relied on the new 707 and the vaunted Pan Am logo to speak for themselves. (photo credit 5.1)

  William Eck, of Arlington, Virginia, was the first person to reserve a flight on the 707, the first day Pan Am announced it, three years before in 1955. His alacrity provided a note of caution about planning too far in advance: Mr. Eck missed the flight because he had died. But Pan Am made sure his widow was on board. Other featured voyagers were seventeen-year-old Karl Johansen, from Valhalla,
New York, who had saved $2,000 for the trip by working at odd jobs since he was twelve, without telling his parents. He stayed in Europe two days and flew back, so as not to miss high school. The most jet-agey passenger was Mrs. Clive Runnels, from tycoons-only Hobe Sound, Florida, an I-Like-Ike, deluxe-cabin, dowager member of the Republican National Finance Committee who never got off the Clipper, setting a record as the first commercial passenger to take the maiden flight in both directions.

  Most of the rest of the passengers on the Clipper America tended to be either old flyboys who had been aboard Pan Am’s premier transatlantic flight twenty years before, twenty-six endless hours to Lisbon, or frequent fliers who loved going to Europe and loved even more the idea of getting there twice as fast. They were “tourists,” but not the grotesque polyester-leisure-suited hordes unleashed by Trippe when he introduced truly mass tourism with his behemoth 747 in 1971. Trippe’s 1958 tourists may have been a cut below St. Anthony’s Hall, but they were squarely in the upper middle class. The ticket prices said it all. Deluxe was $1,010 round-trip, economy $490 (the same as for the prop planes, so as to promote the new jet), but still a perquisite of the prosperous. The only way a bus driver was going to get to Europe was to win a cornflakes contest. The future 747 tidal wave was mass tourism at much lower prices ($200 round-trip), which reflected the economy of scale. At its inception, the 707 was elite no matter where you sat.

  Taking a page from Woody Guthrie, Juan Trippe’s theme song for the 707 could have been “This Plane Is Your Plane.” This plane was made for you and me, that was the message. And what if you bought the message and you bought a ticket? Then what? It was estimated that about 20 percent of all travelers to Europe went in a group. There were those American Express tours, and Thomas Cook tours, and all kinds of package tours to Europe, similar to the ill-fated one of the Atlanta Art Association. But to the majority of Americans, tours were somehow un-American, at least in terms of American enterprise, ingenuity, and exploration. We were the land of Lewis and Clark, of Daniel Boone. A package tour, to many, was one big Donner Party, an insult to free will and a disaster waiting to happen. The adventure was being on your own. Yet it never hurt to have a guidebook just to get your bearings.