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

by Stadiem, William

  “ON THE WAY THE PAPER BAG WAS ON MY KNEE / MAN, I HAD A DREADFUL flight.” “Back in the USSR,” the Beatles’ 1968 “Communist” parody of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” was musical proof that the Fab Four were anything but chauvinist apologists for their long-struggling national airline, which barely had more charm than Aeroflot. If Juan Trippe listened to the Beatles, he would have been amused by their song. Without listening, he was delighted by what was then the publicity coup of the year, when the Beatles selected Pan Am over BOAC to fly to New York in February 1964 to make their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, a five-song set that shook the world.

  Thus was launched the so-called British Invasion of pop culture: in music, with the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks and many more who overturned the whole Top 40 sound; in fashion, with Mary Quant’s miniskirt; in modeling, with Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey calling the shots; and in nightlife, with Annabel’s mixing peerage and steerage in a radical new way. Overnight, that Ed Sullivan night, the postwar miasma of England, which had always seemed so foggyish and fogeyish, was pierced by the sunlight of the new baby boom generation, finally old enough to book Juan Trippe’s tourist fares. England was impossibly glamorous and happening and foreign, yet so close. The 707 could take them there in under six hours, far less than a hard day’s night.

  A HARD DAY’S FLIGHT. The Beatles board a Pan Am 707 for their first visit to America and The Ed Sullivan Show, 1964. (photo credit 10.1)

  The Beatles were an even bigger “coup” for Juan Trippe than Winston Churchill had been in 1961 when the Old Lion chose Pan Am to fly him to New York. Fail Britannia! Churchill’s defection to a Yank carrier was almost as sad a day for England as the Battle of Yorktown. What an entourage he took with him on the 707 Clipper Fair Wind: his doctor, two nurses, his personal secretary, and an inspector from Scotland Yard. The airborne feast Trippe had Maxim’s lay out for the most famous of all Englishmen was something out of Tom Jones: prosciutto, salmon, caviar, terrapin soup, lobster thermidor, Dover sole, Himalayan partridge with wild rice, prime rib, Stilton, tarte Maxim. Trippe insisted the 707 stock some extras especially for Churchill, such as Colman’s dry mustard, spicy horseradish, Tiptree jam, and crumpets, plus eight bottles of Lafite Rothschild ’52, a fifth of Bisquit cognac, another fifth of Rémy Martin, a bottle of Greek ouzo (a taste acquired from his new friend Onassis), and a box of Romeo y Julieta cigars. No skies were ever this friendly again.

  The Beatles were infinitely less demanding. Innocents abroad, they were thrilled just to be on a 707. Their days of Stilton and cigars were ahead of them. American youth was badly in need of heroes. The all-powerful baby boom generation, coming of teen age, had a huge obsession deficit to fill. Their “king” Elvis Presley had abdicated following being drafted into the army, then had been sucked into the Hollywood maw, making unwatchable movies. Just three months before, in November, their new king John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. The Beatles and their fellow young Brits couldn’t have emerged at a better time from the gloom of England to dispel the gloom of America and fill the lacunae of icons. However, the one Brit icon who did more for Juan Trippe and the other Skycoons of the jet age wasn’t a young Brit at all. He was a throwback to Churchill, whom Trippe had bowed before and cosseted as the great connoisseur. He wasn’t Carnaby Street; he was Savile Row, Pall Mall, Buckingham Palace, Blenheim, Eton. If God couldn’t save the queen, this man would do it. Somebody had to do it. Postwar Britain had lagged far behind France in a slough of despond, of rationing and deprivation. Its glamour was in its history, its imperial past, on which the sun was rapidly setting.

  The savior here was a true Brit of the old school, a stereotype that Temple Fielding would have embraced and would have extolled. He was a man after Temple Fielding’s heart. If Temple Fielding had written novels, he might have created him. This Brit, the rugged face who launched a thousand jets and a million Guidesters, was James Bond. Starting in 1962 with Dr. No, the James Bond film series rolled out one blockbuster after another, year after year, and every movie ticket was a potential airline ticket. The films were, in essence, supertravelogues, with sex, suspense, violence, gadgets, and the most conspicuous consumption ever put on screen. Double oh seven, all by his cunning self, got more people wanting to visit England than Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. The shot of the Pan Am 707 roaring in to a perfect landing in Dr. No was a masterful piece of product placement that could have been engineered by Juan Trippe, even though it wasn’t. It was just part of the zeitgeist; Trippe’s airline had entered the subconscious as a shorthand for elegant escapism. The image was saying, “James Bond has arrived—by jet, by Jove, by Pan Am.”

  Although it was the films that were James Bond’s gift that kept on giving to the travel industry, the sleek, slick hyper-kinetic image of the Jet Set spy all started with the word. The author who created James Bond was very much a British version of Temple Fielding. Ian Fleming was a highborn spy, an epicure, a womanizer, and a true and literate wit. He loved good martinis, shaken, not stirred; he loved bad ladies of the evening, the morning, whenever he could get them. He lived in an island compound in Jamaica, just as Fielding lived in his island compound in Majorca. They dined at the same gourmet restaurants, slept in the same luxury hotels. Ian Fleming would have loved to be a travel writer, a rich travel writer like Temple Fielding. But Fleming’s older brother had beaten him to it. Peter Fleming was the top travel writer in England. And there weren’t any other openings. So Ian Fleming, late in his game of life, went the novelist route and succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Temple Fielding used the facts to make people want to travel, to see the world, the world at its best. Ian Fleming did the same job, but he did it with fantasy.

  Ian Fleming was born in 1908, five years before Temple Fielding and even higher on the social scale, in the heart of Mayfair, London’s poshest precinct. His father was a member of Parliament for Henley, home of the Regatta, and an heir to a Scottish banking fortune. The father, a major and a hero of the Great War, was killed by Germans on the Western Front in 1917. His huge estate was so tied up in trusts that Ian was tantalized but never got an inheritance. Even before he became a writer, for whom penury is a frequent occupational hazard, he was obsessed with money and would remain so for his entire life. Never a good student, Ian flunked out of Eton and went to Sandhurst, which he left in a cloud of shame after contracting gonorrhea.

  ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE. Sean Connery as James Bond, in a Dr. No publicity shot with distaff co-stars Eunice Gayson, Zena Marshall, and Ursula Andress, 1962. (photo credit 10.2)

  Ian was perpetually in the shadow of his golden-boy brother, Peter, a star at Eton and Oxford, a celebrated adventure author (One’s Company), the husband of movie star Celia Johnson (Brief Encounter), and a World War II hero and OBE winner. Peter had Bond’s brand of “right stuff,” which Ian, inspired by Peter’s exploits, could only fabricate on the page. Ian was also inspired by such pre-Bondian bon vivant Brit-lit lone-wolf characters as Bulldog Drummond and Simon Templar, also known as “The Saint,” because of his initials. Templar was the creation of the writer Leslie Charteris, who had the same last name as Fleming’s wife, Ann Charteris. They weren’t related. Leslie Charteris was a half-British, half-Singaporean Chinese named Charles Yin who chose his pseudonym because of its elegant ring. Roger Moore, who would later play James Bond, made his name by playing the Saint on British television in the early sixties.

  Leslie Charteris would make Simon Templar a household name, the James Bond of the 1930s. He had moved to Hollywood, where the dashing George Sanders, future husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor after Conrad Hilton, would be the star of a series of Saint films. Meanwhile, Ian Fleming was dawdling through life, failing as a Reuters foreign correspondent and forced to take boring financial jobs, first in a bank, then a brokerage, which he despised. Even during World War II, when he went to work for British Naval Intelligence, he was stuck behind a desk in Whitehall while brothe
r Peter was in the field, doing his derring-do in Norway, Greece, and Southeast Asia, and Temple Fielding was liberating the Balkans. In short, Ian Fleming was much more Walter Mitty than James Bond.

  The only place where he was a firsthand, first-rank swashbuckler was in the bedroom. A confirmed bachelor, he carved out a specialty in sadomasochism. That was his bond, as it were, with Ann Charteris, whom he met at Le Touquet at the swimming pool of the Royal Picardy Hotel, owned by the father of Claude Terrail, proprietor of Fleming’s favorite Paris restaurant. The Picardy’s avant-garde wave-making machine was the kind of high-tech gimmick that would inspire Ian’s Bondian gadgetitis. Married to Lord O’Neill, from one of the realm’s oldest clans, Ann may have been high-class, but as Elvis sang, that was just a lie. She liked it down and dirty and painful. She and Ian embarked on a long and bloody affair. She liked being whipped, tied up, flayed with bulrushes. As with James Bond, cruelty was the aphrodisiac.

  When Lord O’Neill was killed during the war in North Africa, Ann wanted to marry Ian, taking the ache to the altar. But Ian, not the marrying kind, turned her down. Instead, Ann married Lord Rothermere, the press baron who owned the Daily Mail. Conjugality notwithstanding, both Ann and Ian remained addicted to their pain game. Playing a James Bond lothario, Ian followed Ann and her press lord around the world, staying in all the Fielding-choice hotels and arranging secret assignations under Rothermere’s nose. The danger was almost as exciting as the hurt. Eventually, the lord got wise. Ann became pregnant with a child the lord knew was not his. He settled a fortune to be rid of Ann in 1951. That fortune was an even bigger aphrodisiac to Ian than the bulrushes. At last he could become a writer. At age forty-four in 1952, the playboy finally took the vows. Armed with Ann’s money, he also took the plunge to realize his fantasy of becoming a writer.

  Fleming’s one big overseas wartime trip had been to a naval conference in Jamaica. Instantly hooked on the tropical paradise, he had bought some cheap property in 1945 and built a house called Goldeneye, after the code name of one of his sabotage operations based in Gibraltar. Unlike Fielding’s Majorca compound, Goldeneye was anything but plush. It had no hot running water, no glass panes in the windows, no air-conditioning. Conrad Hilton would have had it condemned. But the British in Jamaica were hardy types who didn’t need American luxuries. Ian Fleming quickly joined Noël Coward as one of the island’s two leading hosts. After the war, not yet married, the always cash-strapped Fleming had to take another boring desk job, this one on the business end of the newspaper chain that owned the London Sunday Times. The post’s main allure was that it allowed Fleming a long holiday in Jamaica two months a year, January and February. In those months Goldeneye became an “A” social destination.

  Once Fleming married heiress Rothermere, he was able to quit his day job, and the “A” became an “A Plus.” Errol Flynn was a regular guest, as were Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, the Wrightsmans, the Paleys, the Kennedys, all the people Igor Cassini was writing about in Cholly Knickerbocker. Amid all the partying, Fleming somehow found two months to knock out his first James Bond book, Casino Royale. He had a hard time getting it published and did so only because Peter Fleming leaned on his own house, Jonathan Cape, to do his brother a favor. The book came out in 1953; it surprised its publisher and everyone else by taking off. Dreary Britain was ripe for Fleming’s revisionist fantasy that the country was a power in the world, that it still mattered. It was also ready for the sex and the travel. It was pure wish fulfillment, plus a kick in the groin. Thus began the series.

  From the beginning, Fleming had his eye on Hollywood, leaning on every American who drank his shaken martinis at Goldeneye to lead him to some influential movie producer who could put James Bond up on the big screen. Hollywood was typically, totally unimpressed. The only screen that had any interest was the small screen of television, then an outcast medium and hardly what Fleming was aspiring to. In 1954, William Paley, who liked to vacation in Jamaica at the Round Hill resort in Montego Bay, had his CBS give Fleming a very unprincely $1,000 fee to adapt Casino Royale for a one-hour episode of its series Climax! Fleming’s dreams of Cary Grant embodying James Bond evaporated into the reality of B-actor Barry Nelson playing an Americanized cardsharp “Jimmy” Bond. The villain, Le Chiffre, was played by Peter Lorre, who had to sell a reluctant Nelson, who never read the book, on doing the show.

  Putting aside his celluloid dreams, Fleming kept writing, one new book every year, if only to distract himself from his meal-ticket wife and howling new son. After their first baby was stillborn, Ann had tried again and succeeded, though she needed a cesarean to deliver the boy, Caspar. Following the surgery, her body was seriously scarred, which turned off her fastidious spouse. Apparently, the only blemishes that could arouse him were the ones he inflicted. Now that Ann was a mother, the sex and the violence petered out.

  Writing all day, punctuated by endless martinis and an eighty-cigarette-a-day addiction, Ian began having affairs—lots of them. His favorite new mistress was Blanche Blackwell, the reigning queen of the island, who was said to be the inspiration for Pussy Galore in 1959’s Goldfinger. Born Blanche Lindo, the darkly mysterious beauty came from a long line of Portuguese Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition for the Caribbean and great riches as colonial merchant-planters. Ian would later arrange a Dr. No production assistant job for Blanche’s son, Chris Blackwell, who later in the sixties would discover Bob Marley and become a great reggae-rock impresario.

  All through the fifties, the books kept coming. They also kept getting nastier. Fleming’s S&M avocation was increasingly dominating his new vocation. One English reviewer in the high-toned New Statesman denounced Dr. No when it was published in 1958 with the headline “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism.” The reviewer elaborated on those three elements that were “all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult.” Because the reviewer was English and inculcated with the prejudices of empire, he may not have noticed a fourth damnable “-ism,” racism. Fleming and Fielding were blood brothers of the stereotype. Almost all of Fleming’s villains and heavies were sinister Asians, neo-Nazis, or fanatic Communists. The white man’s burden was heavy indeed for James Bond, but its heft was what created the suspense.

  All of the above apparently appealed to Hugh Hefner, who in 1959 began serializing the Bond novels in his magazine. Hefner would later describe a Bond movie as “Playboy with a Gun.” Fleming also appealed to John F. Kennedy, through whom Fleming got the biggest boost of his career, one that finally propelled him to his own ultimate fantasy, the silver screen of Hollywood. In March 1961, Life published a big article entitled “The President’s Voracious Reading Habits.”

  The article concluded with an Igor Cassini–style list of JFK’s ten favorite books. The president preferred nonfiction biographies, of Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun. But there were two thrillers on the list, John Buchan’s Montrose and Fleming’s From Russia with Love, ranking ninth, ahead of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Signet, which published Fleming in paperback, took the Life plug to the bank, creating an ad campaign that featured a solitary light on in a nocturnal White House. The grammatically clunky caption was “You can bet on it he’s reading one of these Ian Fleming thrillers.” Fleming, instantly recognizable with his trademark cigarette holder and bow tie, became an unexpected celebrity, a face of Britain that Americans began to recognize.

  Kennedy had met Fleming in Washington soon after he became president. JFK’s interest in Cuba and the Caribbean was bottomless, and who was better placed to fill him in on Caribbean intrigues than Britain’s man in Jamaica, Ian Fleming. The same obsession with tropical Communism that would soon lead JFK to dispatch Igor Cassini to try to broker an entente with Trujillo had the president hanging on Fleming’s every word, most of which were slurred by gin and, in the cold light of day, never would have made it into hi
s next novel. The author pitched JFK some crazy Bondian schemes, such as emasculating Castro by cutting off his beard, and dropping millions of dollar bills onto Cuba to drive the people wild with capitalism. Then again, not long afterward, the CIA actually tried to assassinate Castro with exploding cigars, so the agency’s truth was stranger than Fleming’s fiction, if not inspired by it.

  The Life piece got Fleming invited back to the White House. But he was about as unimpressed by Washington as Hollywood had been by him. He didn’t care about the White House. He’d done that. He wanted Hollywood, more than ever. And now he got his chance. Before Life, the Bond books had sold well but not spectacularly. Overnight, they began selling in the millions. And overnight, Hollywood was ready to make a Bond movie. Well, not actually Hollywood itself.

  The moguls in Los Angeles still had their doubts. Bond was too English, too Etonian, they thought, for American audiences to relate to. To them English meant effete, snobby, witty: in short, David Niven in Around the World in 80 Days. David Niven was great, but they couldn’t feature him killing people. Cary Grant wasn’t the killer type, either. George Sanders was too old. The bottom line was that the moguls couldn’t see John Wayne as James Bond. That was the kind of star they were looking for. Picking up on Fleming’s unvarnished penchant for S&M, the moguls also thought the Fleming books were too kinky for American viewers.

  So it would take two American producers living in exile in London to take a relatively recherché British series of books and turn it into the biggest blockbuster series of movies that America, and the world, had ever seen. At first blush, these men were completely alien to the Coward-Fleming Jamaica-London axis that was the heady stuff from which Igor Cassini concocted the Jet Set. The two exiled Hollywood wannabe moguls, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, respectively a Montreal Jew and a New York Italian, were much more the stuff of Expresso Bongo, a 1958 musical about desperate entertainment hustlers in London’s Soho red light/showbiz quarter.