by Sid Luft
The Duesenberg had been the most expensive American car built, and many movie stars wanted to drive this particular automobile. Clark Gable owned one; so did Gary Cooper. Eventually Georgie Stoll, the musical director, bought Clark’s and brought it to us. We gave it a new interior of English luggage leather and created a khaki paint color for the exterior. The car has been preserved and remains part of a private collection.
Sooner or later, everyone in town visited Custom Motors. Prince Alexis Mdivani, Barbara Hutton’s husband, tragically died in an auto crash in Spain. He willed his fancy Mercedes-Benz roadster to his brother David. It was a custom-built Mercedes by Figoni & Falaschi, a rare model. David asked me to sell the car because he needed cash. I sold it to someone in the Texas Hunt family for an appropriate amount of money.
A colorful character came into the shop one afternoon wearing a trench coat and a pulled-down fedora like Spencer Tracy. He introduced me to a distributor of Cadillacs in Indiana who turned out to be Jewish. Feldstein was a rare bird, as few Jews were granted automobile distributorships in those restrictive days. I flew to South Bend to meet with Feldstein, a jolly, heavyset man with a big Santa Claus belly. From then on I was able to order directly from him. And there was no import tax—it was legal to carry on this kind of business.
My specialty became redesigning these Cadillacs. A roadrunner would deliver them to us. We’d remove the grille, reshape it to look ultramodern. Then we’d drop the entire top section of the car about six inches, recut the windows to make the car look very sleek. I’d sell them for $1,800, lower than the dealer’s price.
I sold one of my Cadillac specials to Tony Cornero from the Rex. He was a tough guy, short and stocky. He dressed in a dark suit and tie and a wide-brimmed gray felt hat. He looked like a mug Eddie Robinson might portray. Pointed collars, big diamond ring, and cigar—central casting. Tony’s girlfriend noticed one of the cars dramatically lit in the show window and had to have one. She too was a stereotype: a mobster’s gal, bleach blonde, big breasts, a short chorus girl in five-inch heels. The day Tony and friend were to pick up their car I had put a piece of metal through the hood, and the car buckled under the weight of the lead in it. Frantically we worked at straightening out the buckle, quickly closed up the grille, and put the wooden skirts on the back of the very fancy looking modern car just in time for Cornero to pick it up.
I switched to LaSalles because they were cheaper, with the same engine as the Cadillac. We photographed the cars in front of mansions and then displayed the pictures. That and word of mouth was the extent of my advertising.
Sadly for Cornero, he got indicted. Apparently the girlfriend’s car was still in his name; he sold it to Billy Wilkerson when he went off to jail.
11
HOLLYWOOD WAS LIVING UP to all my great expectations. I got word that Columbia was looking for an unknown to play the lead in the film version of Clifford Odets’s hit play Golden Boy. On a lark, overcome by the phrase “movie star/pilot” as a means for history to describe me, I sent glossies of myself over to the studio. Of course, I was never called. It was to be William Holden’s big break. I didn’t think of acting as a serious career; in any case, flying was my central interest.
Bud and Doug Ornstein’s flying school at Clover Field at the Santa Monica airport was a haven for me. Bud was my first instructor there. I earned my private license with him. He’d married Mary Pickford’s niece; Mary’s husband Buddy Rogers flew there on weekends, so I was never very far away from show business.
Since World War I, I’d heard that Germany would never rise again as a military power. Now the commercial pilots were sure we were headed toward war. Everything began to feel impermanent. I wouldn’t be hanging on to Custom Motors for much longer. I played all the harder at night. I’d frequent the clubs—the Cinegrill and Chasen’s. Dave Chasen was a warm person who drew clients to his moderately priced restaurant with excellent American food. It was a small place with a steam room in the rear. The guys in the steam room would be Humphrey Bogart and Billy Grady, people who ate there every night. It was a home away from home: the steam was basically for personal friends of Dave. During the war when I became a test pilot at Douglas Aircraft, I frequented another steam room in the Crosby Building on Sunset Boulevard. It took down the stress. I’d run into film directors like Jimmy Wong Howe, Lewis Milestone. It was a mix of industry people and two or three test pilots trying to relax.
I’d see Errol Flynn around some of the gyms and clubs I favored. In those days, I’d run into him several times a week at the Beverly Hills Athletic Club. I understood Errol wished to enlist but he had a bad heart, “a hole in his pump,” so he was unable to fight. Since he knew he had a defective heart, his lifestyle was rather reckless. I thought he was dashing. I certainly bought his act, and liked him very much. Errol was popular—he was invited to all the parties. I admired his attitude toward his limitations: a physical man who could not really be an athlete. Decades later, documents and books were released pointing to Flynn as a fascist sympathizer, aiding and abetting German spies, using his celebrity status to gain certain government favors so he could help close Nazi ties. It’s very difficult for me to think of Errol in this context.
I saw A-20 bombers flying out of Clover Field. Bombers with red, white, and blue circles stamped on the bulkhead were marked for delivery to France. Later on, the same aircraft were delivered to Russia stamped with a red star. I’d watch military aircraft running in and out of the field all the time.
In the beginning, it was fun and games, being able to hang out with the commercial pilots at Norms on Olympic Boulevard, where we’d gather to drink beer and talk. We wore leather jackets, goggles, and the famous aviator scarf, which was used to protect against the cold. Women seemed to love the uniform. For me it was an out-and-out ego trip. “Here comes Sid Luft. You know he’s a pilot.” Hollywood was a town filled with specialists in glamour, and I seemed to be developing my own rather different style.
Periodically, the old World War I photos from my childhood sunporch would flash through my mind: the ominous spiked helmets, the big bayonets. I remembered my youthful vow never to get caught up in a marching war. As I wandered around Yorkville in New York, the American Nazis displaying their swastikas frightened the hell out of me. Hadn’t I been to Europe and met lovely people forced to flee their native country because of the Nazis? The idea of being crushed by a hostile power was despicable. I’d grown up listening to my parents’ stories of their escape from tyranny. It was unsettling to hear why Mother came to this country—the descriptions of life during the Russian pogroms were still vivid. Yet she’d been proud of her Russian heritage, as I was presently proud of my American identity. Father, too, left Austria because life had been precarious. I couldn’t see why a guy should have his head blown off because he was not in the right place at the right time. I was going to make every effort to be in the right place, and that was not going to be on the ground. So I auctioned off Custom Motors. Eleanor had long since been paid back for her investment, and now there was a hefty profit to share. I immediately concentrated on piling up flying time.
In 1938 I bought a Monocoupe airplane in Burbank for $1,500. I financed it through the Bank of America. The Monocoupe was yellow with bluebirds on the fuselage, orange wings, and a black tail. Lindbergh had one exactly like it, later displayed at the Lindbergh museum in St. Louis.
One of my flight instructors, an actor, was going with a very attractive widow who was the mother of the singer Margaret Whiting. The Whitings lived in a lovely house in Bel Air with a great swimming pool. Mrs. Whiting enjoyed having kids around, and there was always a mix of her friends and the younger generation. I began hanging out there, and I met the woman who became my first wife, Marylou Simpson, a local debutante who also aspired to be an actress. Her mother, Gussie, didn’t exactly approve of me, and Eleanor and her mother tried to talk me out of that relationship. But Marylou and I began to go steady, and my intimate relationship with Eleanor faded as
a result.
Around this time I had my driver’s license revoked. I had raced a friend, Tommy Lee, from the veteran’s home in Westwood. It was around three in the morning; I was driving a hopped-up Cadillac, and Tommy was in a small Duesenberg sports car that could drive like the wind. We whipped through Beverly Hills at about a hundred miles an hour. There was nobody on the streets at that hour but the police. I spent a few days in jail and found a lawyer with the wonderful name of Judge Hazzard. He took $500 and the courts took another $500. My license was revoked for six months, so I had to hire a driver. The man was a few years older than me and he called me “boss.” He was from Oklahoma and looked like a variation on Li’l Abner, with a thin face and hair falling over his forehead. He was the personification of the pejorative term “Okie,” but he was lovable, and an excellent driver even if he never got beyond the second grade. I wasn’t permitted to drive a car, but I could still fly an airplane.
It was 1939 and Lindbergh had flown to Germany, met with Göring, and returned to the United States to relate to President Roosevelt the might of the German Luftwaffe. My hero was rapidly falling in my eyes. His isolationist views didn’t make sense to me—unless he wanted Hitler to win. I had a lot of anger, because I thought I saw through Lindbergh’s machinations. The isolationists were running the country, and Roosevelt would wait until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor to declare war on Japan, by which time Hitler was all over Europe. We didn’t know about the death camps as yet. I was outraged at the super-Americanism proliferating around the country. What did it mean: was it simply patriotism, or was it a cover up for prejudice of all shapes and varieties?
Meanwhile, Marylou confessed she was in love with me. I was considering marriage, but I wanted to be certain. I remembered Peggy Mitchell, a little girl from home who would be all grown up by now. I was curious to see how she’d matured. I had some wild oats to sow in any case and decided to fly my Monocoupe east to see Peggy in Bronxville and my childhood friends the Leos in Armour Villa Park. I thought I’d make a dramatic return to the old hometown, arriving in my own airplane. I arranged for Johnny Leo to meet me at Armonk.
I kept in mind the Mitchells’ serene, rose-colored house a block away from Sarah Lawrence College and the sweet little girl who could be waiting there for me. Peggy had been a beautiful girl, wonderfully Irish, with black hair and blue eyes. Marylou was spoiled, an only child, high strung. I was crazy about her, but I got to thinking Peggy might be more suitable for me.
The flight across the country was insane. I was to encounter one harrowing episode after another. I traveled with a mechanic from Clover Field who wanted to hitch a ride to Des Moines, Iowa. I hadn’t been trained sufficiently in instrument flying, and we took off in lousy weather; we were soon forced down in Socorro, New Mexico. I’d been flying along the railroad tracks, which we called flying the steel beam, and I couldn’t find an airport; we were running out of gas. I was not experienced enough to read the quadrants—dash, dot, dot, dash. I’d been flying six hundred feet above the ground, and it was around three in the afternoon. We put down in a field, where we happened to find a mobile motion picture unit traveling to an army base to show movies, and they sold us some gas. We were really happy to see them, and they were kind folk. They told us there was a small airport about fifty miles away. In order to get airborne, I had to unload as much weight as possible, so I had to leave my passenger with the traveling picture show. We took out his luggage and tools and made arrangements to meet in town. I had to keep my compass on a certain heading for what seemed like twenty hours instead of twenty minutes through the ominous mountains. It was pitch black and I was flying through a valley with a quarter tank of gas left. The Monocoupe was able to fly a maximum of nine thousand feet with a light load of fuel. The plateau around New Mexico averages seven thousand feet and the peaks go up to thirteen thousand feet. I had to needle my way through these mountains. Finally I spotted some dots on an airstrip and worked the radio for landing instructions. I had no night flying experience. I was floating up there, making turns, waiting for a response. Nothing was coming in. I decided to go for it and brought the aircraft down to the ground in darkness. I made a circle, and there was a tiny white house with an old pump in front of it. I was soaking wet from fear. The wind was up now and blowing, so much so that I thought the airplane was going to tip over. I was looking for a way to tie it down. It was cold as hell. Two lights appeared. “Ho ho, son, I’m the airport manager.” To me he was Santa Claus. “Thank Christ I heard you up there, son.” So we tied the airplane down. He told me I had landed on an auxiliary airfield that the army used for maneuvers. The actual army base was several hundred miles away. I asked him for the nearest gas pump and the man replied, “Pie Town, and one at Datil.”
“Where are we?”
“Right in the middle.” I thought, that’s the truth! We drove into town in the man’s truck, where I located my pal and promptly got incredibly drunk. We took off at eight o’clock in the morning with a full tank of gas and hangovers.
The next mishap led us to a Midwest cornfield. I brought the airplane down in a bumpy landing. The force of it knocked the air scope loose from its two bolts. My passenger didn’t have any tools to drill out the two bolts. We managed to repair the airplane, but I decided not to take off. In the morning we got up early and saw that we could take off easily enough if we knocked down some of the fences. We were busy pulling the poles out when a gruff-voiced farmer with a big shotgun aimed squarely at me said, “Who the hell do you think you are?”
I answered fast: “I’m from the United States government. We must remove this plane.”
“You’re tearin’ down my fence.”
“We’ll repair it. Just give me the bill.” I offered him my license, adding, “The government will pay.” Then he bought it. He allowed us to tear the entire fence down. About ten miles down the road we found the airport and gassed up. I flew directly to Des Moines, where I dropped off my bemused, good sport passenger. I stayed long enough to have a romance with a girl he introduced to me. She was the daughter of the man who owned the Packard auto agency. I just loved Packards.
I was on my way to Pittsburgh from Des Moines with just five hundred miles’ worth of fuel capacity, so I had to refuel somewhere along the way. Flying at five thousand feet, I hit a bluish-gray sheet. I could barely see, so I dipped the airplane into it thinking, I can go through this. Suddenly I was turned upside down and I felt like a meat-chopper had me. I thought I was going to be spat out. North looked like certain death, so I quickly turned south. Luft, I asked myself, what the fuck are you doing now?
I wound up following the White River into St. Louis, where I was able to land. It was a hot, humid night and hundreds of people were out at the airport. Apparently the airport was the place to hang out on hot nights. I had the illusion of Lindbergh coming in on a wing and a prayer. The weather cleared, but I spent the night there.
The next day I figured I’d look for the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, which is located in Pittsburgh. When I reached the Monongahela, I was low on fuel and once again looking for a place to land. The hills around Pennsylvania and the Continental Divide are known as the “graveyard” to pilots, nothing but one rolling hill after another. I spotted a field and people waving at me. I made three passes around the field, throttled back, and yelled “Pittsburgh” into space as I fast glided. I was completely cuckoo. The fuel indicator was nearly zero, but I made a nice landing in that field. It was a lovely, big farm, and the family was very nice to me. There was a voluptuous young girl, brothers, mother, and father, and they were talking over breakfast about Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president. After breakfast the next morning, they cleared the cows, and I took off with Mexican ethyl taken out of a tractor. I was the nutty pilot. My experience had been aerobatics, short trial solos, but no cross country. I was showing off, and so far, I’d had just enough luck not to get killed.
I finally cracked up in a tre
e. I was flying the steel beam, and I never did get up enough flying speed and stalled right into the tree. I climbed out, but the tail was stuck in the ground with the engine about ten feet in the air. I had made it across the Continental Divide only to crash into a tree! Some local boys pulled me out unharmed. We dismantled the entire airplane: the motor, the instruments (which were costly), the bank indicator, the compass, and the fuel gauge. My Monocoupe was wrecked beyond saving. Now I had to get from Pittsburgh to Bronxville for my rendezvous with Peggy. I hitched a ride in a little pickup truck with all my salvage. We arrived at Armonk in the late afternoon. I sold the parts for about the same amount of money I’d originally paid for the Monocoupe. I was able to buy a Dart, a low-wing aircraft, on the spot for the flight back west. It had not been a very impressive return to home turf.
Before I contacted Peggy or Johnny Leo, I called Marylou. Her mother, Gussie, came on the line and told me Marylou was hysterical. Somehow she’d heard about one of my crashes. I thought, She really does care for me.
In New York, Johnny and I took a nostalgic tour of our old haunts. I romanced Peggy at the Waldorf Astoria, where I was staying, and we had a good time. Peggy had grown up, but I could see she wasn’t the girl for me. I found myself looking forward to getting back to Los Angeles to see Marylou.
The return flight to California in the Dart was a piece of cake in comparison to my barnstorming antics going east.
12
IT WAS COMING TOWARD the end of 1939 and the Canadians were looking to enlist pilots. To this end they opened a recruitment office in Los Angeles. I thought, prepare yourself, baby, because the world is really going to war now. I was determined to be a qualified pilot even though I hadn’t packed in the proper amount of time.
