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

by Stadiem, William

  Two years later, in 1955, Hilton was doing the same Varsoviana, this time at the Istanbul Hilton, the first of his global hotels to have been built from scratch, his preferred approach. Hilton was lured to the Bosphorus by a lavish financing venture between the Turkish government and the Marshall Plan that provided a sultan’s ransom to Hilton to erect and manage a monument to himself. The Castellana Hilton had been a dry run that convinced Hilton the more American his hotels could be from the ground up, the better. Although he made something of a show of employing local architects and craftsmen, these efforts were akin to Ivy League colleges’ efforts at “geographical distribution”; they were tokens that revealed Hilton’s lack of esteem. Bearing a rather déjà vu resemblance to Conrad’s 1953 Beverly Hilton, the Istanbul Hilton was a glaring symbol of American architectural imperialism and a harbinger of all the Hiltons to come. Yes, there were the acres of wall-to-wall carpets made by the famous weavers of Konya, but to have imported American synthetic rugs to the land of the magic carpet would have been beyond the beyond. That the Turkish carpets were cheaper probably made the decision for bottom-line Hilton.

  Aside from the flooring, the boxy eleven-story white concrete slab of uniform modernity was as fifties American as a suburban split-level. On a verdant site that formerly was the Armenian cemetery near the contemporary business hub of Taksim Square, there were American-style green lawns that created a very country-club feel. Glimpses of the swimming pool and tennis courts tantalized with American leisure, not Oriental culture. The entry pavilion was a shopping mall dominated by the glass-walled offices of Pan Am and American Express. A traveling Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz might not be in Kansas anymore, but she would be hard-pressed to know she was in Istanbul. Praised by critics as reminiscent of Le Corbusier, this Hilton was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, the principal of the esteemed firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, responsible for such fifties masterpieces as Park Avenue’s Lever House. There was a Turkish architect as well, but he was a deeply silent partner.

  Only inside the hotel and in the more expensive rooms did a traveler realize he was at a mystical crossroads of history. The view of the Bosphorus and the opposite, exotic shore of Asia was the thing. But the exotica was safely distanced behind a capitalist curtain of air-conditioning and coffee-shop burgers and milkshakes and antiseptic imported Danish-modern furniture that was the same in every room.

  Those cookie-cutter guest rooms, sixteen by twenty feet, were equipped with telephones and radios (Turkey didn’t have television yet) and could have been the inspiration for the Leave It to Beaver set. In one continental touch that invariably stymied American visitors, the marble bathrooms were all equipped with bidets. The more salient feature of the bathrooms were the three sink spigots that would become the trademark (and the curse) of Conrad Hilton: one for hot water, one for cold water, and one for ice water, an ingenious invention credited to E. M. Statler, whose chain Hilton would acquire the following year, making Conrad’s company the biggest hospitality concern on earth.

  The ice water was the item that got Europe’s goat, the “let them eat cake” symbol, though the continent was divided on whether to trash it or gulp it. That same year, the Terminus Hotel in Dijon, France, made an homage to Hilton by installing a system where red and chilled white vin de Bourgogne were piped into guest rooms. It was both an advertising gimmick and a French slap in Hilton’s face. Drink wine, not water, was the message.

  Hilton was oblivious to it. The Istanbul Hilton was a major event, and the third-world Turks, obviously needier than the French, welcomed the American presence of Conrad Hilton the way the Philippines welcomed General MacArthur when he made good on his promise, “I shall return.” For the kickoff, Hilton had arrived in Istanbul with 113 celebrities on two chartered Douglas DC-6s, this time from Pan Am, which had the lobby concession at the hotel. Repeats from Madrid included Jinx Falkenburg and Leo Carrillo. New Hiltonites included Carol Channing, Irene Dunne, Merle Oberon, Sonja Henie, and ex-girlfriend Ann Miller.

  The mayor of Istanbul gave Conrad Hilton the key to the city, and the festivities, worthy of a MacArthurian conquering hero, began. In place of bullfighting, there were whirling dervishes, military parades, cruises on the Bosphorus, private tours of the Topkapi Palace, which would be the centerpiece of the Jules Dassin–directed 1967 Topkapi, a wanderlust-inducing thriller about a jewel heist that was filmed in part on the palatial grounds of the Istanbul Hilton, where the protagonists planned their caper. The hotel’s modern image against an ancient setting, its invocation of Jet Set wealth against third-world poverty, was the publicity gift that would keep on giving. In the first year after the hotel’s opening, Turkish tourism shot up 60 percent, and much of the credit went to Hilton and his ballyhoo.

  The Turkish and coming European embrace of Hilton wasn’t about Conrad’s money. The Marshall Plan was pretty much a bait-and-switch operation where American millions for European hotels were concerned. What the Europeans ended up getting was not the money but Conrad Hilton, who took their money in return for his unique American genius. In Madrid, in Istanbul, in Athens, in Paris, in London, and everywhere he planted the Hilton flag, the local investors put up all the money to build the hotels. For a huge piece of the profits, usually a third, Hilton would lend his name and his management. Thus the Euros were not working for the Yankee dollar; Hilton was working for the Euro dollar, making out like a Texas bandit, a Pretty Boy Conrad, who was not only looting the treasuries of the continent but turning the Old World into a simulacrum of midcentury America: Scarsdale on the Bosphorus, or the Seine, or the Thames. The outrage was that, with Hilton, as with McDonald’s decades later, Europe wasn’t Europe anymore.

  In the Cold War, the Istanbul Hilton (and each Hilton to come) was as much a political statement as an architectural one. Hiltons weren’t merely places to sleep. More important, they were a kind of NORAD with rooms, a seductive line of defense against totalitarianism. As Hilton told the crowd in his Istanbul inaugural address:

  We view our international hotel ties as a firsthand laboratory where men of Turkey … may inspect America and its ways at their leisure … We mean these hotels, too, as a challenge … to the way of life preached by the Communist world. Each hotel spells out friendship between nations, which is an alien word in the vocabulary of the Iron Curtain. The Marxian philosophy with its politically convenient dialectic has a way of reducing friends to slaves. To help fight that kind of thinking and that kind of living we are setting up our hotels of Hilton International across the world.

  The ebbing of the Hilton tidal wave that seemed as if it would deluge the world began at what may have been its high-water mark and moment of greatest overreach, in 1958, the same year as the triumphal debut of the 707. That period saw the dual openings of the Habana Hilton, just as Castro was threatening to take over the island, and the Berlin Hilton, just as Khrushchev was threatening to cut off the divided city from the West.

  In keeping with Conrad Hilton’s policy of “déjà vu all over again,” the Habana Hilton, a 30-story, 550-room, $44 million extravaganza, was designed by modernist Welton Becket, the architect of the Beverly Hilton, as well as the Capitol Records turntable-shaped tower in Hollywood. It was muscled into existence by dictator Fulgencio Batista and funded by the rich pension fund of the Cuban Catering Workers’ Union. With its Trader Vic’s, its casino, supper club, and wall-to-wall showgirls, it was a perfect symbol of capitalist excess and a sitting duck for Fidel Castro, whose revolutionary agents had been responsible for a series of killings, kidnappings, and bombings that the Hilton-Batista publicity machine had managed to play down as a low-risk universal urban vacation hazard.

  The threats of sabotage did necessitate the presence of more than a hundred armed policemen creating a cordon sanitaire around the skyscraper, jutting upward like the sorest of thumbs above Havana’s colonial elegance. The state of siege scared away most of Hilton’s Hollywood regulars, but Hilton was undeterred, arriving with his latest romantic inte
rest, the Peruvian Gladys Zender, who had been crowned 1957’s Miss Universe at the Long Beach Hilton’s grand ballroom. The eighteen-year-old was the first Latina to win the crown and was considered the perfect date for the Cuban festivities. Conrad’s celebration was short-lived. After seizing power in early 1959, Castro made the Hilton his personal headquarters before nationalizing it, closing its emblem-of-evil casino, and renaming it the Hotel Habana Libre. How the mighty had fallen.

  Echoing his new man in Havana, Nikita Khrushchev was making similar bellicose promises of “we will bury you” that November when Hilton chartered two more Pan Am planes to ferry his stars to the grand opening of the more intimate (14 stories, 350 rooms, $6.5 million) Berlin Hilton, still another modern blockhouse, overlooking the city’s famed zoo. Just two weeks before the kickoff, Khrushchev had issued his “Berlin Ultimatum,” giving the Allies six months to remove all troops from West Berlin. Conrad Hilton’s Wild West response to the Eastern threat was “if Berlin did not already have a Hilton, I would have to start building one now.”

  The junket got off to an inauspicious start when the Pan Am Clipper bearing Hilton and his special guest, the wife of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, developed engine troubles over Nova Scotia and had to return to Idlewild. The defective plane was a turboprop DC-7, not a 707. If it had been the latter, the bad press would have been greatly magnified. But Juan Trippe didn’t have enough jets yet to give one to his biggest booster, even though Trippe and Hilton had worked out a cooperative advertising campaign cross-pollinating the jet and the blockhouse: “Introducing Germany’s Newest Hotel … Designed for the Jet Age.” The ads made the point that Hilton’s Berlin blockbuster was as “up to the minute” as Trippe’s jet spaceship.

  While Trippe’s cousin by marriage über-diplomat David Bruce, now ambassador to Germany, was front and center at the gala, Trippe and Hilton never became close. Was it because Trippe wanted to out-Hilton Hilton with his own chain of InterContinental Hotels? Was there an undercurrent of competition beneath their shared anti-Communism? Or was it because Hilton’s shoot-from-the-hip western candor was so alien to Trippe’s closed and clubby Ivy style? If Conrad Hilton had only realized his mother’s plan for him to go to Dartmouth, the two titans might have been best friends forever.

  Side by side with Ambassador Bruce at the Hilton was the charismatic Berlin mayor (and future German chancellor) Willy Brandt. The opening came during Berlin’s traditional winter ball season, a remnant of a decadent imperial past that Conrad Hilton resurrected just to shove it in Khrushchev’s peasant maw. All the guests were required to dress in medieval pageant costumes as knights and maidens of the realm. The supermodern ballroom was decorated like a fairy-tale castle, with a few Hiltonian touches, such as a coat-of-arms pennant bearing the logo “Trink Coca-Cola.” Unlike the quick demise of the Habana Hilton, the Berlin Hilton successfully called Khrushchev’s bluff and fulfilled Conrad’s mission to “show the countries most exposed to communism the other side of the coin.”

  Temple Fielding, the grand arbiter of success in this regard, ranked the Berlin Hilton the top hotel in the city, a worthy successor to the prewar laurel worn by the Hotel Adlon, next to the Brandenburg Gate. “Despite our lack of enthusiasm for one or two other Hiltons abroad, here is the hotel for any discriminating visitor to this city,” Fielding gushed. He also recommended Guidesters hie themselves to the Hilton roof and its El Panorama supper club “with dinner-dancing every night, a tropical bar, and a historically significant view—the bright lights of the Free City in one direction and the gloom of darkened East Berlin in the other.”

  Conrad Hilton liked to say that each of his foreign hotels was “a little America.” A little Beverly Hills would have been more to the point. Just as Claude Terrail gave gourmets a slightly Disneyfied version of haute cuisine, Conrad Hilton was providing his own Disneyfied version of haute hospitality. If an American wanted to experience Europe in the most luxurious, least challenging, and most sanitized fashion, his best approach would be to eat at the Tour and sleep at the Hilton. The two ostensible rivals were in truth opposite sides of the same coin, the Yankee silver dollar.

  The Guidester would have to wait until 1965, when the Paris Hilton finally opened, to kill the two great birds in the same great city. He could warm to the task by enjoying the Hilton experience in Berlin in 1958, in Amsterdam in 1962, and in Athens and Rome and London in the HH (Hilton Hotels) banner year of 1963, by which point the Vietnam situation had so antagonized the world toward America that the ice water had taken on a different kind of chill, and Hilton was becoming a dirty word, connoting fat-cat imperialism and warmongering. By the same token, the phrase “Jet Set” was beginning to lose its soaring mystique and was taking on unexpected negative connotations of its own.

  IGOR CASSINI WAS TORN BETWEEN MADISON AVENUE AND PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE. By 1961, the one avenue where he was not interested in traveling was his long-trodden beat as the most powerful social columnist in America. He was sick of lapdogging around to Conrad Hilton’s grand openings and promoting his ice water, sick of chronicling the celebrities who were eating Claude Terrail’s duck, sick of being the reflector of other people’s glory, sick of being a lot less rich than the people he was writing about. Igor was happily married now to Charlene Wrightsman. They had a new son to raise. Igor was feeling the pressure of being a family man, of having a serious career.

  And well he should. Charlene was one of the most attractive, most eligible girls in the world, a supercatch that Igor, little Igor, had landed. He had to live up to this trophy, and he was trying hard to be a good husband and a good father, not only to his new boy, Alex, but to Charlene’s first son, Dana, and to his daughter by Darrah, Marina. Amazingly, for all the action in his life, Igor seemed to be embracing stability. The allures notwithstanding, being Cholly Knickerbocker somehow lacked the gravity that Igor was craving. Madison Avenue, on the other hand, had the weight, and it had the gold. Martial, the public relations agency founded by Igor and Oleg in 1955, had just kept on growing.

  With John F. Kennedy in the White House and Igor having secured for his ex-Hollywood costumer brother the “by appointment to her majesty” plum as Jackie’s official dress designer, Oleg Cassini had managed to become Martial’s own client, up there in a stellar roster of accounts that included Harry Winston, Lanvin, Gianni Agnelli and his family’s Fiat, and the national tourist boards of both Brazil and Mexico. Igor Cassini found himself in the position to consider chucking the column and becoming the man in the gray flannel suit.

  Gray flannel, however, was too subdued and understated for Igor Cassini, who was dressed to the hilt by Park Avenue’s A. Sulka, also a Martial client. That was where the Pennsylvania Avenue alternative came into play. Rather than being the social tool that he currently was, writing as Cholly Knickerbocker, or the corporate tool that Martial was enabling him to become, the Kennedy ascension stirred him to reconsider his original lifetime ambition: to be a diplomat in the grand tradition of his noble Russian grandfather, the tsar’s ambassador to Venice, to Beijing, to Washington. Power politics were his bloodline. He read with envy the prestige D.C. columns, Joe Alsop’s “Matter of Fact,” Drew Pearson’s “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” That was print diplomacy. That was what a Cassini should be doing, not recounting Conrad Hilton’s numbingly standardized routine of doing the Texas two-step at the Cairo Hilton.

  Igor Cassini’s in-laws, the Wrightsmans, lived next door to the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach. Aside from his aversion to touch football, Igor was practically family with the Irish dynasty. Igor got girls for Joe Kennedy. He chased girls with Jack Kennedy. He had made Jackie Kennedy famous, the first pressman ever to notice her, anointing her as “Deb of the Year.” No one who hadn’t been to Harvard with JFK could have had better access. Igor wanted to take advantage of it, wanted to serve his adopted country. He was swept up in the anti-Communist fervor of the times, just as much as Conrad Hilton and Juan Trippe. Or even more. His aristocratic Russian
family had been dispossessed by the Communists. He had more than ideology, more than patriotism. He had a grudge. He was just waiting for the right moment.

  Wanting to escape the gilded straitjacket of being Cholly Knickerbocker’s ghost—or negre, the demeaning French term for ghostwriter—Igor Cassini found his golden opportunity through one of his favorite subjects and best friends, Porfirio Rubirosa, the legendary, small (five-eight), but fearless Dominican polo-playing lothario who had married both of the world’s reigning heiresses, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton. Even before the Boeing 707 took to the skies, Rubirosa had become the globe-trotting role model for all aspiring Jet Setters. Other than the Kennedys, no subject provided Cassini with more column inches, appropriate for a man whose own immense “column” (of reputedly over a dozen inches) occasioned the renaming, by haughty restaurant maîtres d’hotel, of the poivrier, or pepper mill, the “Rubirosa.”