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

by Stadiem, William

  Eventually, Bunny and Bert got married and moved to New York, leading the same kind of conventional fifties gray-flannel-coupled urban existence that had driven Chicago adman Victor Lownes out of the arms of his wife and into the arms of Hugh Hefner. Like Lownes, Bunny Wells was soon champing at the Eisenhower bit. While her husband climbed the corporate ladder, getting a top job as art director of Ogilvy & Mather, she took a drudge job in the ad department of Macy’s, then managed to score a lowly position in the emerging television department of the huge agency McCann Erickson, in Rockefeller Center, whose motto was “Truth Well Told.” Even though the couple’s joint income enabled them to live high on the hog on Sutton Place, the best place in Bunny’s mind was no place in America. She divorced Bert Wells and took a slow boat to Europe, hoping to get an advertising job there.

  The agencies in Europe then were too small to take on foreign talent. After a year abroad, Bunny Wells mouseburgered up once again, coming home and remarrying Wells and adopting two children, reaffirming her faith in an American Dream that had already bored her out of the country. She also took another job, this one at the hottest shop on Madison Avenue, Doyle Dane Bernbach. If McCann’s motto was “Truth Well Told,” Doyle Dane’s should have been “The Awful Truth.” In the sixties, Doyle Dane would become famous for bringing irony into a wasteland of earnestness with its “Think Small” Volkswagen and “We Try Harder” Avis campaigns. In 1959, when Wells was starting there as a copywriter and the 707s had just started flying, the firm landed the account of the French tourism authority, which wanted to inspire people to visit the French provinces and not just Paris. Paris was enough for Madison Avenue, who saw no virtues in the countryside that they couldn’t find better on the left bank. In those days, Provence and the Loire Valley weren’t considered magic; they were considered the deep sticks. Every other big agency turned France down, and every copywriter at Doyle Dane found excuses to avoid the job. So Bunny Wells, whom Bill Bernbach insisted on upgrading to the more serious Mary, got it by default. If Wells couldn’t work in France, she could work on France. She was thrilled by the challenge.

  Treating herself to an extended research trip from the Ardennes to the Dordogne, Mary Wells asked famed photographer Elliott Erwitt to create a shot of a Frenchman riding his bicycle on a tree-lined road, his tiny son and a huge baguette perched on the jump seat behind him. The ad turned out to be iconic and had the effect of sending thousands of American tourists exploring the paradise beyond Paris. It also made Mary Wells’s name. In a business where clients play musical agencies, switching every few seasons, Doyle Dane kept the France account for a full decade, from 1959 to 1969.

  This was basically the entire term of the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, who had been terribly concerned about the Hiltonization of French tourism. By luring the travelers away from the Paris Hilton to the country inns and converted châteaux of the beautiful provinces, Mary Wells was re-Frenching the tourist experience and thereby playing to De Gaulle’s objectives. Doyle Dane’s long campaign became known as “hip Gaullism.” It included such ads as one of traditionally costumed Breton women with the warning “Five years from now it won’t be the same,” scaring travelers into “getting it while they can.” Another ad addressed America’s fear of French rudeness by painting a smiley face on a map of the country with the caption “There’s a big smile on the face of France.”

  There was an even bigger smile on the face of Mary Wells when she left employeehood at Doyle Dane in 1964 to become a principal at Jack Tinker Associates, where she made waves with the famous Alka-Seltzer ad “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is” and then got the Braniff account that made her the undisputed Queen of Madison Avenue. Her first connection to what would revolutionize the way airlines sold themselves came in 1964, when two characters came into her office straight out of central casting, one looking like a cowboy and another looking like a movie star. Central casting turned out to be Continental Airlines. The cowboy turned out to be Continental’s chairman, Bob Six, the movie star his corporate president, Harding Lawrence. Taking a page from the Juan Trippe “first is best” playbook, Six had made Los Angeles–based Continental the first airline to order the Concorde, the Anglo-French supersonic craft that promised to revolutionize flying even more than the 707 had. The plane was barely a glimmer in its makers’ eyes and wouldn’t be operating for nearly a decade. But Six wanted bragging rights, and he was looking for an agency to help.

  Continental Airlines, best known for its Chicago–Los Angeles route, was a maverick American carrier whose plan for the Concorde was to create a unique and expensive Jet Set corridor between the West Coast and Hawaii. Because Continental wanted to cater to the Los Angeles celebrities who could now vacation in a newly accessible Hawaii, the Pacific-bound Concorde was conceived as “the movie-star route.” Continental’s kingpin, Bob Six, was a colorful, gun-toting, boot-wearing, horse-riding cowboy who was even more starstruck than Conrad Hilton. There must have been something in the southwestern desert that spawned the careers of both men and gave them a genetic susceptibility to show business. Or maybe it was just opposites attracting. Six was the best friend of John Wayne. He had married Ethel Merman after her Broadway triumph in Annie Get Your Gun convinced him she was a gal after his own heart. Merman may have gotten a man with a gun, but she couldn’t keep him. Six divorced her and moved on to Audrey Meadows, Jackie Gleason’s long-suffering spouse on television’s The Honeymooners. Her sister Jayne was the wife of urbane television host Steve Allen.

  Bob Six, who was six-six, was in reality even less of a cowboy than Hilton. His father was one of America’s first plastic surgeons, his mother from a prominent California pioneer family. They lived in Sacramento. The family, with paternal Dutch roots, had one of America’s largest collections of Rembrandts. Just as Hilton was prepped for Dartmouth, Six, who was born in 1907, was prepped for Annapolis. But no school could contain the massive Six, who, inspired by Charles Lindbergh, flew biplanes and started his own California air-sightseeing service. When that failed, he shipped off on a tramp steamer to Shanghai for two years, flying planes for the Chinese national airline. In the thirties, he returned to California and linked up with Jack Frye’s TWA, which Howard Hughes would take over and vastly expand. In 1934, Six bought an El Paso–to–Pueblo, Colorado, puddle-jumping airline and built it into Continental, a rising colossus that was using the Concorde purchases as a dramatic public relations ploy.

  Harding Lawrence, by far the handsomest man in American business, was a silver fox who was made for not just the cover of Fortune but Esquire as well. Born in 1920 in Drumwright, Oklahoma, Harding Luther Lawrence grew up in a fundamentalist family that moved to the relative prosperity of East Texas, where his father taught school and was a circuit-riding preacher. Lawrence was studying to become a lawyer when his plans were upended by World War II. Having been a wartime flight instructor, he joined a regional airline in Houston and worked his way through the system until he had become Bob Six’s right hand at Continental. Lawrence was the perfect fifties family man, with a wife and three children, the oldest son oddly named State Rights, reflecting his father’s Dixiecratic conservatism. That perfection was shattered the moment Lawrence laid eyes on Mary Wells. The erstwhile mouseburger was wearing her new success to very sexy effect, in sixties minis that showed off her million-dollar legs the same way Six and Lawrence planned to show off their billion-dollar Concorde. Their meeting also ended Mary Wells’s attempt to renew her own married idyll with her husband. Wells and Lawrence both divorced their spouses and would become Big Business’s “fun couple,” marrying in 1967.

  AIR FORCE. Madison Avenue advertising czarina Mary Wells and her husband, Braniff Airlines chief Harding Lawrence, with a model of an Alexander Calder–decorated jet, early 1970s. (photo credit 12.2)

  Lawrence had quickly left Six with his drawing-board “imaginary” Concorde to become president of Braniff, a Dallas regional airline that had been taken over in 1965 by Troy Post,
a Texas corporate raider. Lawrence took Wells, his new love/ad guru, along for the ride they were planning for Braniff, now rebranded as Braniff International, from Texas backwater to intercontinental glamour. So confident was Wells in Lawrence’s future success that she left Jack Tinker, lured away her cleverest associates, and started Wells, Rich, Greene, which immediately was hailed by the financial press as the “new” Doyle Dane Bernbach. So confident was Lawrence in Wells’s abilities that he gave her untried new agency the Braniff account, worth over $6 million in annual billings. In one fell swoop, Wells was a “made” woman, though feminists might have caviled that she was more of an old-fashioned girl. In any event, she became a famous woman. Because of her looks, her style, her sex appeal, and her unconcealed romance with superstud Lawrence, Mary Wells, corporate “hotness” personified, was walking product placement. She was now able to utilize all the acting skills she had learned from Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse to seduce some of the nation’s top corporate clients to her new firm.

  Sexual politics aside, Mary Wells’s work was what mattered, and that work was as radical a change from what had been happening with airline advertising as the new Brit rock of the Beatles and Rolling Stones was from the old Tin Pan Alley pop of Frankie Avalon and Fabian. All the excitement for the new jets had been in the air, not on the air, nor on the page. For all the fantasy, the travel, the space technology, Madison Avenue had been woefully short on poetic license until Mary Wells made the scene. The Pan Am ads, created by the behemoth J. Walter Thompson, were as corporate and unimaginative as the establishment tycoons with whom Juan Trippe lunched at the Cloud Club.

  “You can meet them in London tonight,” trumpeted one of the Thompson ads, depicting a stiffly dressed country-club couple fine-dining on starched linen with Big Ben looming in the distance. But maybe you didn’t want to meet them; maybe you wanted to meet Mick Jagger. However, no one had thought of that yet. Most of the Pan Am ads just showed the big 707 soaring over the clouds and the ocean below. “Now you can fly the world famous Pan Am Jet Clippers across the Pacific and to South America as well as to 9 cities in Europe.” Dullsville. The plane, J. Walter Thompson figured, was the money shot. Who needed anything else?

  In 1961, Bob Six spiced things up a bit with his suggestive double-entendre Continental campaign, “The proud bird with the golden tail,” which later devolved into “We move our tail for you.” Mary Wells went way beyond that. While she was still at Jack Tinker, she came up with her first big Braniff ad, “The End of the Plain Plane.” But this wasn’t mere idle chatter, mere Mad Ave puffery. It signaled a total overhaul of the airline. Harding Lawrence was putting his money where Mary Wells’s mouth was. After taking a fact-finding grand tour of all the airports in North and South America served by Braniff, with its Latin slant, Wells issued her own Warren Commission–style report on the sorry state of airline aesthetics. She described the universal color scheme as “greige” and likened airports to prisoner-of-war camps. Planes, she found, were stuck in a military mind-set, comfort- and beauty-wise.

  In retaliation, she had Braniff paint all its planes a rainbow of brilliant colors, from red to yellow to green to turquoise, which made them as exotic as flying saucers. She hired Alexander Girard, a Santa Fe–based Italian-born designer who had won kudos for his vibrant Spanish restaurant La Fonda del Sol in the Time & Life Building on Sixth Avenue, to redesign the interiors of Braniff’s planes, first-class lounges, and dinnerware. Then she hired Italian count Emilio Pucci, another color master and the best childhood friend of Igor Cassini, to create new uniforms for the stewardesses, whom she upgraded to the British usage “air hostesses.” Pucci’s uniforms were the basis of Wells’s next campaign, “The Air Strip,” which in one sense was a big tease. Pucci had also designed tiny bikinis, which the stewardesses modeled in magazines but never wore on the planes.

  Businessmen, thinking they were going to be joining the mile-high club, or at least get a live burlesque show aloft, suddenly began inventing excuses to fly down to South America. The most they got was a flash of betighted thigh. Still, the fix was in, and America’s sexist corporate pigs made Braniff “their” airline. The tagline of one popular commercial was a purring voice asking, “Does your wife know you’re flying with us?” Soon the Braniff hostesses were being referred to as “Pucci Galores.”

  If the “Air Strip” campaign created a universe of airborne sex maniacs, another Wells campaign created one of flying shoplifters. This television commercial showed a cute little old lady stuffing all of Girard’s silverware, dishes, blankets, and pillows into an infinitely expandable carry sack. The ad ended with the little old lady driving an airport tractor hauling the brilliantly colored 707 behind her home to God knows where. The announcer’s tag was “We’re glad you like us, but please, let’s not get carried away.”

  And then there was the classic “If you got it, flaunt it” series, which paired very, very odd couples of celebrities, seat by seat, strangers on a plane: Andy Warhol and Sonny Liston; Salvador Dalí and Whitey Ford; Mickey Spillane and Marianne Moore. The line was a lift from the 1968 hit The Producers, but homages to pop culture were Mary Wells’s forte. Jet-commuting between Lawrence’s Dallas headquarters and Wells’s Manhattan headquarters, as well as their ranch in Arizona, their Cliffside home in Acapulco, and their villa on the French Riviera, the Lawrences were the only jet business couple who actually lived like the Jet Set. If Igor Cassini had kept his column, he would have made book on them. Notwithstanding their lack of prestige college degrees, they otherwise were precisely his kind of people.

  If Igor’s brother, Oleg, was considered the fashion designer of the Jet Set by virtue of his exclusive relationship to Jackie Kennedy, once she left the White House in 1963, a new talent emerged from the pop ferment in England who rightfully could be considered the premier designer of the entire jet age. As a woman, she was another of the era’s handful of heroines, but like Mary Wells Lawrence, she achieved her heroism by arguably selling out her gender, turning the once staid working girls of all continents into the hottest sex objects the new world had ever seen. The woman was Mary Quant, and her invention was the miniskirt. Wells had come from the cynical world of advertising; Quant came from the even more jaded one of fashion. The real question was whether the mini was an act of revolution or one of enslavement.

  Mary Quant was never a mouseburger. Although she didn’t come from any privilege whatsoever (her parents were Welsh schoolteachers), she was a born (1928) artist and a born eccentric who had the great luck to link up at sixteen with the love of her life, who also was a born eccentric, yet also born to privilege and to the Mark Birleyish connections that grease the path of social mobility in England more than almost anywhere else. It’s good to be the queen, and it’s also good to know the queen. Mary Quant met her kinky Galahad at Goldsmiths’ College, London’s answer to the Rhode Island School of Design. He was Alexander Plunket Greene, an aristo-bohemian cousin of Bertrand Russell and the great-grandson of composer Hubert Parry (“Jerusalem”). His father’s best friend from Oxford was Evelyn Waugh.

  Young Alexander Plunket Greene, APG to everyone, was never interested in Oxford, only in art. His public school was Bryanston, a sort of pre-hippie Eton, which fed him into Goldsmiths’, which fed him into Chelsea, which was London’s cutting edge in the fifties. Greene was a six-two jazz-trumpet-playing fusion of Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney before they came on the scene. He dressed in his mother’s silk pajamas and in raccoon coats. The minute he spied Mary Quant at Goldsmiths’, he was smitten by her chic and by her legs, long perfect legs like those of Mary Wells. Quant flaunted them in super-short skirts and tights that were inspired by her love of ballet. The style was radical indeed for a postwar, tightly rationed gray London still dominated by frumpy women and gents with bowler hats and furled umbrellas. Quant was model-willowy and had her hair bobbed by a young East End stylist named Vidal Sassoon. She was an overnight fashion plate.

  Just as Mary Wells
and Harding Lawrence became the hot couple of American corporate life, APG and Mary Quant became the hot couple of the rudimentary English fashion scene, cool Britannia long before the fact. They moved in together, which was totally avant-garde. APG bragged how he coiffed Mary’s pubic hair into the shape of a heart, then sent naked pictures of him and Mary to all their friends, nudity as tonsorial art. In 1955, they opened their boutique Bazaar on the Kings Road, with cool clothes Quant designed on the ground floor, and cool food APG cooked in the basement. Both the clothes and the food were revelations to a London inured to a grim Blitz mentality. Princess Grace and Prince Rainier were spotted dining there on a trip to London shortly after they were married. Le tout London, from the Oliviers to the Churchills to the Krays, followed in their wake. And that was before the music started.

  Bazaar was bizarre. That was its great allure in a stratified stiff-upper-lip nation that prized resigned conventionality and tolerated eccentricity only in its upper class. APG was a classic upper-class eccentric, and he was the lure to all his fellow nobs and swells. Debutantes flocked to Bazaar to shop and to work as salesgirls. Their presence was all the validation the enterprise needed, akin to a By Appointment to Her Majesty seal of approval. Among Bazaar’s foreign clients were Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, and Leslie Caron, while rising photographers like David Bailey would hang around Bazaar to pull “birds.” The most famous models of the Jet Set, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, were closely identified with Bazaar, while the Stones’s first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, worked for the APGs as a messenger boy before changing the course of rock. One of Quant’s best friends was John Lennon, who bought his trademark black leather cap from Bazaar and whose stage fright she helped to conquer.

  Huge publicity followed in the stars’ and aristocrats’ wake. Yet the designs Mary Quant was creating were anything but upper-crust. Instead, they were bubbling up from the street, if not from the Underground. Bazaar was a perfect balance of snob and Mob. Quant wasn’t anti-fat; she just expected people who wore her clothes to be thin. Most people in England were thin of necessity. There wasn’t enough food, and certainly not enough good food, in postwar England to allow people to get fat. Quant often said she had never seen a fat person before her first trip to the United States, where she would license her brand for untold millions. To her, it didn’t matter whether the required angularity came from being poor and hungry or being rich and chic or being tyrannized by fashion magazines. Mary Quant would grow rich, though never fat, off thin women.