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

Page 31

by Stadiem, William


  On June 5, cornered by Labour leaders who by then had been leaked the revelations of the Corbally luncheon, Profumo had to eat his words and resign his post, ending a brilliant career that most Britons had assumed would culminate at 10 Downing Street, not crash and burn in Tom Corbally’s bachelor pad. The next day Stephen Ward, Corbally’s partner in crime, but not Corbally, was arrested and charged with pandering, living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, and other prostitutes for the last two years. He was refused bail, as a flight risk, and because it was feared he might use his enormous connections to influence witnesses. The court need not have worried. In late July, after Christine, Mandy, and several other admitted working girls testified against him, Ward took an overdose of Nembutal sleeping pills. He was in a coma when the jury returned a guilty verdict, and he died three days later. The king of Jet Set networking was dead. Long live the new king Tom Corbally.

  Christine Keeler herself went to jail for perjury in the subsequent trial of her lover Johnny Edgecombe. When she was released, she had a brief fling as a boldfaced name of Swinging London, dating the likes of Victor Lownes and Warren Beatty before going back to her roots, marrying a day laborer and at last becoming a mother. Mandy Rice-Davies ended her friendship with Christine, moved to Munich in 1964 to become a cabaret singer, and in 1966 married a rich Israeli who set her up in her own disco. Mandy’s quickly became the Régine’s of Tel Aviv.

  Harold Macmillan and the Conservatives went down in a bitter defeat as Harold Wilson’s Labour Party took over in 1964 and paved the way for a new England dominated no longer by the Clermont Set but by Labour types like the Beatles. Lord Astor, whose Cliveden was where the seeds of the aristocracy’s destruction were planted, had a nervous breakdown over losing the curative skills of Stephen Ward. His model wife, Bronwen Pugh, hired a Catholic exorcist to perform a ceremony cleansing Cliveden, and particularly the Ward cottage, of its resident evil. It didn’t work. The exorcist had to return and repeat the ceremony a month later when the cottage’s next tenant, like Ward, committed suicide. Lord Astor died in 1966, after which his widow vacated the estate and leased it to Stanford for its junior-year-abroad program, a Jet Set version of student aid. The stated goal was to promote better Anglo-American understanding. That may have been what Stephen Ward and Tom Corbally thought they were doing, but it never hurt to try, try again.

  By the time Stanford-in-Britain moved in to a presumably exorcised Cliveden, women’s studies had become an important part of the curriculum, there and everywhere else. The scandals of the times showed how far women would have to go before the 1968 Virginia Slims “You’ve come a long way, baby” cigarette campaign would memorialize their dramatic progress. In 1963, most of that progress was ahead of them. Betty Friedan’s bestseller, a wake-up call to complacent women, had been an unspoken rebuke to the Jet Set’s bad boys, the very men Freidan’s readers probably had dreamed of as ideal marriage material.

  Gilbert, Cassini, Profumo, the Kennedys—all these enviable men were shown to have feet of clay that all the Gucci shoes in Florence couldn’t cover up. The mighty had fallen. Nevertheless, Juan Trippe wasn’t worried at all. Even as the Jet Set was being discredited and losing its mystique, Trippe had never believed in relying on the swells in first class for Pan Am’s expansion. No, Trippe was much more interested in those ambitious Virginia Slims women and those kids headed for junior year at Cliveden. The Jet Set may have imploded, but where Juan Trippe was concerned, the sky had no limit. His unbounded optimism and his gambler’s lust for risk proved to be the hubris that brought the Jet Set era to a close and came close to bringing the entire go-go airline industry to a giant fatal crash.

  “BILL ALLEN TOOK OFF HIS COAT A FEW TIMES” WAS HOW JUAN TRIPPE, IN HIS classically understated style, described the five years of Herculean labors from 1965 to 1970 through which he put Allen, the head of Boeing, in creating the 747.

  “It brings sweat to the palms of my hands” was how the equally understated Allen described his reaction to the 747, the biggest plane in commercial aviation history and, for a long while, what seemed to be the biggest disaster, one that threatened to bankrupt the industry.

  The deal was made, as it was so often in those glory days of Old Boyism, on The Wild Goose, the yacht Allen and Trippe leased from John Wayne for their annual Alaskan salmon fishing trip. Each man loved a dare, and the very idea of the 747 was, like the 707 before it, one of the dares of the century, a dare waiting to happen. “If you build it, I’ll buy it,” the Yale man Trippe challenged the Harvard man Allen. “If you’ll buy it, I’ll build it,” Allen replied. And they were off, on one of the most dramatic gambles of all time.

  The 747 came to be known as Trippe’s Folly, a leviathan that would savage the most brilliant reputation in the business of airlines, or even the business of business, rather than becoming its consummation. Actually, for Juan Trippe, the 747 wasn’t intended to be his swan song. Trippe didn’t sing swan songs; he expected to rule the skies forever. For him, the 747 was simply the next step on the journey from the 707 to the SST, or supersonic transport. Trippe’s credo was that bigger was better, but faster was best of all. By 1965, he’d realized that his 707, which had seemed like a rocket at its birth in 1958, was already obsolete, a victim of its own success.

  But what success. The 707 had quickly vanquished the ocean liner, consigning it to the dry docks of history. By 1965, 83 percent of all transatlantic travel was on jets, a dominance that was increasing every year, with the airlines’ phenomenal growth rate of 15 percent and attendant multiplication of stock prices. Airlines were the technology stocks of the early sixties in what was known as the Kennedy bull market, the one that, when it morphed into a bear in 1962, would maul Eddie Gilbert and send him 707ing down to Rio. But if an investor held on to Pan Am or Boeing, the sky was truly the limit. The Trippe-Allen fishing trip was the tipping point of jet travel, and of the social phenomenon of the jet set, which was set to explode from exclusivity into something all-inclusive. Unfortunately, the combination of arrogance, economics, and social change turned this tipping point into a tripping point, one of the greatest stumbles that big business would ever take.

  BIG BUSINESS. William Allen and Juan Trippe board their riskiest joint venture, the massive 747, 1970. (photo credit 13.1)

  As a symbol of Trippe’s overweening self-confidence, he erected the fifty-nine-story Pan Am Building, widely considered the ugliest, most boastful skyscraper in Manhattan. In 1963, at the height of his game, Trippe moved Pan Am out of New York’s most beautiful tower, the Chrysler Building, into fifteen floors of this brutal Walter Gropius–designed blight, which overshadowed the landmarks of Grand Central Station and the graceful New York General Building, and, standing enormously in the center of Park Avenue, ruined the view down Park to lower Manhattan for all time. The building supplied Trippe the superlative he required: the world’s largest commercial space. It also had the biggest mortgage—$70 million—of any commercial property in the city’s history.

  Trippe was of the “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” school long before Mel Brooks ever coined the phrase or Mary Wells Lawrence turned it into a commercial. The Pan Am Building was most of all a giant commercial for Pan Am. Trippe tried to build thirty-foot-tall letters spelling out Pan Am atop the behemoth, but the city bargained him down to fifteen and, in reaction to this advertisement for himself, would soon pass a law prohibiting such logo-mongering atop Gotham’s skyscrapers. Missing his Cloud Club at the Chrysler, Trippe built his own faux-baronial Sky Club on the fifty-seventh floor, but it never quite caught on. That didn’t matter, since Trippe preferred walking across Vanderbilt Avenue to his beloved Yale Club. In the context of the Pan Am Building, the Moby Dick–ish 747 made total sense. Trippe was clearly a “size king”; the Pan Am building was his royal castle, and the 747 would be his royal coach.

  If the 707 had vanquished the ocean liners, it had also vanquished the rival DC-8. And Trippe did it not by being faster
but by being first. Douglas still sold many of its jets, yet would always remain in Boeing’s shadow; it couldn’t wait to create the next generation, so it would never repeat its mistake of following a Boeing lead. Time was getting to be of the essence not only to Donald Douglas but also to Bill Allen, Juan Trippe, and all the other Skycoons. In the 1960s, sixty was not the new forty. Sixty was the final countdown. In 1965, Juan Trippe was sixty-five, Bill Allen sixty-six, Donald Douglas seventy-three, and Frederick Rentschler long dead, having made it only to sixty-eight. Eddie Rickenbacker, seventy-four, had just retired as chairman of Eastern. The emperors of the air were thinking obsessively about their Olympian legacies. Hence they were thinking big, imperial, gargantuan. That was how and why the 747 came to pass.

  The roots of the 747 were military, as was much of American aviation. In 1964, as if anticipating American involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon began a competition for a new monster transport jet, the C-5A, that would be twice as big as any existing aircraft. Washington was looking for a plane that ideally could carry 90 tons of cargo and fly 5,000 miles nonstop at 500 miles per hour. The goal was to achieve the lowest ton-per-mile cost for the longest mileage. The winners of this contest were General Electric for the engines and Lockheed for the aircraft. The big loser was Boeing, and a sore loser at that. Boeing hadn’t had a hit since the 707. As big a hit as it was, in order to keep Wall Street salivating, the company needed another smash, and it had counted on the C-5A to be the one. When it wasn’t, Bill Allen soon began looking for a way to amortize the enormous research costs Boeing had incurred and convert this knowledge into its own supersized new airplane.

  Having lost the U.S. Air Force as a customer, Boeing’s engineers decided to turn their design into a commercial plane, a plane that had Juan Trippe written all over it. Given their triumph together with the 707, Boeing and Trippe were the natural first couple of the skies, and because he loved to be first, Trippe would have been mortally wounded if Boeing had dared to approach anyone else. However, Trippe was thinking way beyond what Boeing was thinking. An enormous subsonic jetliner was the vision among Boeing’s engineers, but speed merchant Trippe was ahead of that. To him, anything subsonic was as antiquated as a Model T. He wanted to go flat out; he wanted supersonic. He wanted it so badly that, in 1963, he had signed an option agreement to buy six Anglo-French Concordes when that plane was little more than the techno-fantasy of Charles de Gaulle.

  Sick of the Americanization of France, of Conrad Hilton’s running ice water, of Pan Am’s economy-class, Frommer-clutching, bad-tipping tourist hordes, De Gaulle was desperate to beat the Americans at something modern. That something was supersonic transport. De Gaulle wanted it as much as Trippe did, enough to team up with the hated British, who also were desperate for something to make the world forget all their De Havilland tragedies and false starts. Here was the one big chance for the Old World to beat the New.

  Juan Trippe was as patriotic as any American. He didn’t want to be a traitor. But he didn’t want to be second, either. He couldn’t have stood to see BOAC or Air France go faster sooner than Pan Am. He may also have been calling America’s bluff. Three days after Trippe signed the option, Najeeb Halaby, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration—who ultimately would succeed Trippe at Pan Am—wrote to President Kennedy with the dire warning that getting beaten by the Concorde and not having a supersonic competitor would cost America 50,000 jobs and $4 billion in lost income, not to mention the humble-pie factor. Furthermore, the Russians were said to be developing their own supersonic, dubbed the “Concordski.” No one in Washington wanted to have another Sputnik situation where America was scooped by the sinister high-tech Communists. Kennedy immediately got with the speed program and announced that America would develop its own SST, as the supersonic transport was called here.

  The competing European and American supersonic planes represented the values and enormous differences of the two rival cultures. The Concord, as it was originally called before De Gaulle insisted on Frenchifying it with the “e,” was a small, expensive, elitist plane, geared to a rich aristocracy or at least a plutocracy, a true Jet Set, the kind of people who danced at Régine’s and Annabel’s and wanted to get to Le Club in record time and keep on dancing. The SST was designed as a big democratic plane, seating more than two hundred, twice as big as the Concorde. It was also much faster, Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, compared to the Concorde’s Mach 2.2 (the fastest 707 flew at Mach .8, or around 600 miles per hour).

  Compared to the European, effete Concorde, the Kennedy SST was going to be a big, macho cowboy plane, one that would appeal to the kick-ass sensibilities of the muscular warmonger elite lampooned in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic was worrying back then about ecology, or sonic booms, or global warming, or noise, or the ozone layer, or the myriad other deleterious effects that these planes might have on the environment. “Green” referred only to the envy the winner of the speed race could inflict upon the loser. In 1964, early in this game, that loser seemed to be the Concorde. When the Profumo scandal drove the Tories from office, the new Labour government announced British withdrawal from the “Concord” project, which they saw as an airborne manifestation of the upper class so discredited by its call-girl shenanigans. Why give the toffs another toy to misbehave in? was the attitude. But within a few months, that attitude reversed. The new Wilson government discovered that its agreement with France to develop the plane had the force of an international treaty. Walking away would provoke a major incident and incur penalty costs far greater than the program itself. England had no choice but to stay the course, a bitter and costly pill.

  It was also a long, endless course. Because the Concorde was projected to take ten years or more before it could begin regular service, the Skycoons of the world all realized they needed another aircraft to meet the seemingly infinitely elastic demand for jet travel. That was when Boeing came up with the 747 and customized it to the megalomania of Juan Trippe. But both Allen and Trippe looked at the 747 as a stopgap measure, a holding plane that would fly until the midseventies, when Boeing’s SST, known as the 2707, hopefully would win the supersonic sweepstakes and become the standard-bearer of a new jet age. The 747, from its inception, was an ungainly workhorse. The 2707, in contrast, was a flight of fancy. It was everyone’s ego trip.

  Nonetheless, the 747 was a major leap beyond the 707. Boeing promised to deliver it to Pan Am by 1969, by which time the ever bullish Trippe had projected that travel demand would have stretched his fleet of 707s beyond capacity. Trippe insisted that it carry double the load of the 707, at least 400 passengers. He even envisioned an all-economy configuration of 500 or more. The Ivy aristocrat was perfectly willing to sell out his class for the greater glory of Pan Am. At one early point, the 747 was going to be a double-decker 660-tourist cattle car, but no engineers could figure out a way to evacuate the craft in case of an emergency, in order to meet FAA rules.

  Tripp wanted the 747 to fly a mile or two higher than the 707, which would further minimize turbulence and allow the Pratt & Whitney–powered plane to go a little faster, maybe fifty miles per hour faster, which would cut the travel time between New York and London by half an hour, to a neat six-hour journey. (The SST would take only half that.) He also came up with his own plans for the 747’s trademark upper bulge, or “hump.”

  Because the 747 was to be used as a cargo plane, too, the cockpit was placed above the nose cone, which could be opened to load freight. The cockpit was in that hump. Trippe wanted to use the space behind it to re-create the luxuries of his original Clipper flying boats, with grandiose staterooms for Skull and Bones and Cloud Club types. On this one rare occasion, Trippe’s underlings convinced him that he was living in the past and a cocktail lounge was a more promotable utilization of the space.

  To build the 747, Boeing built a whole new assembly plant in Everett, thirty miles north of Seattle, which was the largest enclosed space ever construct
ed, large enough to envelop more than forty football fields. The plant itself cost $200 million; 50,000 people would work to create the plane. The total development cost was over $2 billion. Without Juan Trippe’s guaranteed $550 million order for twenty-five 747s, the plane never would have been built. It was high-risk for the high-flying high rollers. Then again, risk was what aviation was all about.

  Trippe and Boeing were playing a billion-dollar game of chicken with the other airlines of the world. Both Douglas and Lockheed were developing their own wide-body jets, bigger than the 707 by half but not twice its size, like the 747. Neither of them was as bullish on the passenger market as Trippe. With Trippe in hand, as the Big Man of the business, the risk taker who had won all the chips with the 707, Boeing’s Allen was ready to call the bluff of the other airlines. Again he bet correctly. The herd mentality prevailed. What was right for Juan Trippe was right for the world. Within months, all the big airlines had jumped on board. TWA ordered twelve 747s, BOAC six, Air France, Lufthansa, and Japan Air Lines three each. Even the domestic carriers didn’t dare avoid going where Juan Trippe did not fear to tread. American, United, and Northwest each ordered three of the jumbos. Bill Allen knew he would recoup his investment.

  Few oracles could have guessed how the world would change from the signing of the 747 contract in 1965 until the plane began flying in 1970. The change was as great as the transition from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson and then to Richard M. Nixon. The joy and exuberance and discovery of travel that had characterized the Kennedy years turned out to be fine champagne that had lost its fizz. Watching LBJ struggle into JFK’s custom shoes to preside over the Great Society was as discomfiting as watching Aileen Mehle as Suzy Knickerbocker struggle into Igor Cassini’s column and report on High Society.

 

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