Exclusivity, embodied in the Piedmont Driving Club, which had a large overlapping membership with the Art Association, was everything in Atlanta. The boomtown was still suffering from the century-old inferiority complex vis-à-vis the “Yankee” metropolises occasioned by General Sherman’s having burned it to the ground. Atlanta didn’t have anything like the Metropolitan Museum or the Metropolitan Opera, but it did have a Gone with the Wind gracious mystique, it had the global colossus of Coca-Cola, and it had a huge amount of new money that wanted to burnish itself with an “artistic” patina. It was a perfect target for Air France, and in teaming up with an Art Association grand dame named Anne Merritt, Paul Dossans hit the Dixie bull’s-eye.
In return for a free first-class ticket, Dossans got Merritt, the wife of a Harvard-trained fertilizer broker, to fill up his plane with 120 of her society friends. Merritt was already a world traveler, though doing so from pre-707 Atlanta was a major pain, requiring numerous stopovers and basically twenty-four hours to reach Europe. That the new jet could do it in eight, with only one stop at New York’s Idlewild, was a technological marvel, a magic carpet that Merritt couldn’t wait to experience. As someone who loved to go places, she knew it would change her life.
Many of the women Anne Merritt recruited for the trip were Jackie Kennedy wannabes, her Yankee-ness notwithstanding. Few American women, north or south, east or west, had failed to be captivated by Jackie’s accompanying JFK on a state visit to France, and the rest of Europe, in June 1961. The trip was extensively televised, and everyone was riveted. From the minute Jackie descended the gangway from the new 707 that had become Air Force One, and rode into Paris in her pillbox hat in a gleaming Simca cabriolet, it was clear that she had stolen the show from her husband. JFK admitted as much in his famous self-deprecatory introductory quote to the French, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” General de Gaulle was so taken by Jackie’s Miss Porter’s–perfect French and her grasp of the culture that at the Élysée Palace, he gushed, “She knows more French history than any Frenchwoman!”
In light of such glorious flattery, Jackie was unable to resist the siren call of French couture. Pressured by her husband to “dress American,” she had brought with her a gown by Oleg Cassini, the fashion designer big brother of gossip lord Igor. However, while preparing for the grand ball at Versailles’s Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors), Jackie was emboldened by a speed-laced “vitamin” injection from the family’s Dr. Feelgood, the New York physician Max Jacobson, who traveled everywhere with the Kennedys, dispensing medicinal fixes the way George Jacobs dispensed culinary fixes for Frank Sinatra. Suddenly, recalling the De Gaulle encomium, Jackie decided she had to play to the local audience, as well as to her French Bouvier bloodlines. Accordingly, she switched to her backup rhinestone-studded white satin gown by Hubert de Givenchy. When she rose at Versailles in Givenchy splendor to sing the French national anthem, it was the most rousing performance “La Marseillaise” had gotten since it stole the show in Casablanca.
That Givenchy moment stuck in the mind of the Atlanta belles, who were easy marks for Anne Merritt. Some of her friends had, like Jackie, gone to Vassar. More had attended Agnes Scott, the Vassar of the South, outside of Atlanta. Even if they hadn’t done their junior year in Paris, a year that made Jackie obsessed with all things French and fine, the ladies of Atlanta saw themselves as culturati. After all, they were the Art Association. Jackie spoke to them. Their good-old-boy husbands, a lot of whom were “rambling wrecks” from Georgia Tech or ex–big men on campuses like Charlottesville and Chapel Hill, may have preferred to stay home and play golf at Piedmont. However, they took a cue from President Kennedy and accepted the conjugal imperative. Merritt filled the charter in short order. Besides, the package—which the Art Association named “Trip to the Louvre”—was a good deal. Dossans, his airline, and American Express had come up with a bargain price for the monthlong tour, which included London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lucerne, Venice, Florence, Rome, and their own special visit to Versailles, for a rock-bottom $895. Normal first-class fare alone would have been $1,100.
For the independent travelers, who eschewed anything packaged and were confident to rely on that Bible of upper-bourgeois independent voyaging, Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe, Dossans offered the Atlantans an air-only price of $388, compared to the $632 economy fare of the day. The independents would still get the inside track at the Louvre and Versailles, meeting up with their fellow Atlantans at the end of the trip for a Paris blowout. Arthur Frommer’s Europe on 5 Dollars a Day may have been infra dig for the Atlantans. But Fielding, basically Europe on 50 Dollars a Day, spoke the language of ritzy Peachtree Street. At $5 a day, the trip would have cost under $600, including airfare. That would have been beyond the dreams of the average American, whose median annual income in 1962 was $6,000. At the deluxe level of $50 a day, the monthlong trip would have cost $2,000. Coca-Cola executives were earning upward of $25,000 a year, as were the doctors and lawyers of Peachtree Street. At the top, then, these prices, for the trip of a lifetime (even factoring in inflation), were well within reach. Any way one went, travel then was a great deal, compared to the bank-breaker it would become. It paid to be a pioneer, a jet-setter even without one’s name in the columns.
Temple Fielding, the most trusted man in travel, the Walter Cronkite of tourism, was a highly acerbic exception to the gush-and-fawn corps of travel writers who tended to subsist on airline and hotel freebies. He was no fan of Air France. He renamed it “Air Chance,” justifying his anxieties by his observation that “on every flight I’ve taken with this line, at least one tray of champagne or still wine or cognac has gone up to the cockpit.” A chauvinistic American advocate of our “don’t drink and drive” ethos, Fielding wrote how he had approached Air France head honcho Max Hymans to discuss why French pilots were free to booze it up aloft while Americans were required to abstain from even a mug of beer within twelve hours prior to takeoff. Hymans’s arrogant retort was basically that French pilots don’t get drunk.
“He assured me that because the French pilot has grown up with wine,” Fielding reported, “ ‘a little wine’ [the quotation marks were a piqued Fielding’s] won’t hurt him during the flight.” This sent Fielding into one of his high dudgeons: “If Air France sincerely believes that the reflexes of their crews, after a glass or two of brandy or wine, are sufficiently razor-sharp to cope with instantaneous emergencies aloft, that’s their affair … I regret that it’s not the line for me.” The Atlantans may have been put off by Fielding’s warning, but they weren’t about to change their plans. The price was right, and the champagne-drenched French mystique, so heavily promoted in Air France’s “le bon voyage” advertising campaign, served to overcome any Fielding-induced trepidation.
The white, blue-striped Air France 707, named Château d’Amboise (the line’s 707s were all named after Loire châteaux) with 20 passengers in first class and 102 others in “tourist,” left Atlanta’s brand-new terminal on May 8, 1962. The plane’s name was pure Marie Antoinette, but the plane itself was pure Buck Rogers, endlessly long and sleek and a major step into the future from the boxier prop planes that had preceded it. The 707s were under three years old and still a novelty, though the local carrier Delta had recently begun flying the 707’s rival, the Douglas DC-8, on the Atlanta–New York route, so many of the Art Association group had already enjoyed the unique and overwhelmingly modern jet experience.
Everyone dressed for the occasion, the men in their Southern preppy best, blue blazers, ties, and straw boaters; the women in Jackie-esque pillbox hats, silk dresses, high heels, and because these were Southern belles, white gloves. All plane trips then were special events, this overseas departure even more so. Almost all the women were wearing corsages, farewell gifts from the large crowd of well-wishers who, in an age before security checks, streamed out to the tarmac and toured the 707 before takeoff.
Finally, friends and family retreated to the sides of the runw
ay to watch the flying Château commence its mighty roar and takeoff to Idlewild. The flight would take an hour and a half, a seeming split second in those days when most Southerners went to Manhattan via overnight Pullman on the Atlantic Coast Line. The all-French stewardess staff served a picnic lunch of pâté et salade, and lots of Moët & Chandon champagne, splendeur en l’air, to be sure. The supposedly brief New York pit stop turned out to be a five-hour delay due to mechanical problems. Not wanting to spoil the multicourse gourmet French meal they knew was coming on the transatlantic leg, the Georgians trooped into the Idlewild bars and bided their time, hour upon hour, over peanuts and cocktails. By nine P.M., the Château had been repaired. The ladies slithered out of their girdles, kicked off their heels, and settled in for the flight and the night. Few could sleep. The 707’s launch campaign had stressed how “vibration-free” the jet experience was, eliminating the grind of the propellers, and how the new plane flew five miles “above the weather.” The Boeing people never mentioned turbulence, and the choppy spring jet stream kept most of the Georgians nervously awake throughout the seven-hour journey.
PARDON OUR FRENCH. A 1962 Air France promotion that fused French hospitality with American technology to entice tourists like those on the ill-fated Atlanta Art Association charter. (photo credit 1.2)
Morning in Paris was more than worth the nocturnal bumps. The weather was cool by Atlanta standards, in the midfifties, but the spring flowers were in bloom, and the sights were magical. Whether they took the tour or not, all the Art Association guests were treated to a complimentary night at the Hôtel du Louvre, across from the vast palace museum. Those lodgings could be had for around five dollars a night, and the more fastidious travelers could note that Temple Fielding didn’t even include the hotel in his guide. Such silence was not golden in a writer who cautioned his readers that the hotels he didn’t mention were “pretty grim,” and who trashed Sinatra’s—and Hollywood’s—favorite, the George V, thus:
… the connecting doors between some of the bedrooms are so thin that even private personal activities carry through them like paper; some of the staff, too, couldn’t seem to care less about answering that buzzer … I think that the George V is a very poor value for the money ($25 for a double)—but if you like the limelight and if you’re happy in a frenzied, F-sharp atmosphere, you’ll probably enjoy every minute of your stay in this hub of the restless American abroad.
Fielding was snide about the Jet Set’s go-to abode in Paris without actually using the appellation “Jet Set.” Fielding had his own words for the crowd, describing the grand hotel as “the French home away from home for the less self-conscious members of Broadway, Hollywood, Miami Beach and Main Street café society, most of them seeking lights, action and music in giddy determination.” As for less than grand places like the Hôtel du Louvre, which catered to package tours, Fielding had the most withering disdain:
Hoteliers in this city seem to spend their money on the ground floor, not in the bedrooms; upstairs you’ll often find peeling paint, frayed carpets, screamingly lurid French wallpaper and toilet facilities that are so chummy, cozy and nonchalant that you’ll either turn pale in horror or burst out laughing.
The group had no time to dwell on the shortcomings of their lodgings. They were whisked off by an American Express guide to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory, and the group’s favorite, Whistler’s Mother. Then they were herded onto a tour bus to see Paris by Night and dine in what their trip brochure described as a “typical popular restaurant.” The usual go-to of American Express was Au Mouton de Panurge, an urban kitsch farmhouse on the right bank near the Opéra, complete with wench-waitresses in medieval costumes and live sheep grazing about. The restaurant, inspired by Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, had been around since the thirties and was testimony to French intellectualism; even the tourist traps had literary antecedents. This one rubbed its customers’ faces in it. The restaurant was named for a Rabelaisian sheep who followed other sheep off a cliff without regard to the disastrous consequences. Sort of like tourists flocking to a bad restaurant because lots of other tourists were there. Fielding described the ambience as “startlingly pornographic,” with phallic-shaped rolls and escargots served in replicas of chamber pots. He hated the food, which cost a steep $10 a head. Even worse were the boisterous and non-French clientele. There were “so many Americans,” Fielding wrote, “I could shut my eyes and swear that I was back in Howard Johnson’s.”
After the first night, the tour left for the English Channel boat train to London, while the independents checked out of the Louvre and in to Fielding-approved caravanserais, where they followed the Fielding program of restaurants, nightclubs, and shops (he barely mentioned museums) designed for his tourists to feel vastly superior to un-Fielding tourists. Fielding gave his readers the names of the owners of these places, the concierges and maître d’s, and insisted the readers drop them like crazy. Royal treatment would be assured.
Fielding’s number one Paris gourmet pick was the Tour d’Argent, which had been founded by the proprietor of the George V, André Terrail, one of the giants of French hospitality and the favorite of tout Hollywood. His son, Claude, the current patron of the Tour, had become part of filmland’s inner circle by having been the lover of Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, then marrying the daughter of movie mogul Jack Warner. It was the one restaurant in Paris that could lure Sinatra away from Campbell’s, and similarly, it was able to lure American tourists, such as the Georgians, away from their steaks and Scotch. For under $10, including fine wine, it was easy to be seduced by the Tour, especially if you could see Sinatra, or Audrey Hepburn, or Gary Cooper, or Jackie herself, across the dining room, silhouetted against the restaurant’s iconic vista of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame. Small wonder the Fielding Guide became a must for the well-off traveler and, updated annually, sold in the millions.
However they traveled, organized or independent, all the Atlantans had a wonderful month of May. Some of those who didn’t take the tour had done the highlights before and now went as far afield as Greece, Egypt, and Israel. They all reassembled in Paris on May 30, loaded to the gills with treasures from across the Continent. Their common concern was how to circumvent the low $100-per-person customs exemption. Some spent their remaining four days in the City of Light at the post offices, dividing their spoils into many packages with low declarations, and shipping them to a lot of varied addresses, to beat the duty.
Otherwise, they took Paris by storm, eating, drinking, shopping, but always putting culture first. They went back to the Louvre and savored a perfect full day at Versailles, made more memorable by the presence of a large troupe of thespians dressed in Louis XIV regalia, shooting a film called Angélique and the King. The actors and actresses of this French costume epic, starring Michèle Mercier and Jean Rochefort, posed with the Atlantans throughout the palace. What photos they had to show the folks back at home.
Finally, it was time to go. June 3, 1962, was a glorious Sunday, cloudless blue skies, a brilliant sun. It was a perfect day to fly. But it was also a perfect day for Paris. A lot of Georgians hated to leave, hated to go back to hush puppies and Cokes after croissants and café au lait. How, indeed, were you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, or even the new Lenox Square Mall, the grandest shopping center in America, after they’d seen Paree? They took one last glance at the Eiffel Tower and wistfully filed into the American Express coaches that transported the group, past Notre Dame, past the Île Saint-Louis, past the Tour d’Argent, out to the gleaming modern American-style terminal at Orly Airport to board their return chartered 707. This one was named the Château de Sully and was designated Air France Flight 007. Dr. No, the first of the James Bond series films, would not debut until October of that year in England, the following year in America. But several of the men in the group were fans of the Ian Fleming books, inspired perhaps by big fan John F. Kennedy, and in light of their recent transcontinental derring-dos, they may have made
some hay of the jet’s secret agent–sounding appellation.
Paul Dossans had flown over from Atlanta just to make sure the trip ended well, and was flying back with the Art Association. The goodwill and word of mouth his brainstorm promised to generate was enormous, guaranteeing Air France a special place in the heart of haute Atlanta and hopefully giving it a big leg up against rivals Pan Am and TWA. One of the group’s couples, who had three young children, insisted on traveling on separate jets. The wife was on the charter; the husband had booked a later Pan Am flight to New York, where he would switch to Delta and fly home. Dossans tried to talk him out of it. But the husband was too superstitious to change his plans.
The captain, thirty-nine-year-old Roland Hoche, personally welcomed each of the Atlantans onto his gleaming Château, which was only two years old. Dedicated to charter-only service, the Château de Sully had logged only five thousand flight hours, mostly carrying tour groups like this one across the Atlantic. There were seven French flight attendants, two in first and five in tourist. Hoche announced that the estimated flight time to New York would be a speedy seven and a half hours. There were no major headwinds expected. The stewardesses poured the champagne, and the Atlantans took one last look at the green French countryside. But it wasn’t adieu. It was à bientôt. Everyone couldn’t wait to come back. How could they not? It was cheap. It was fast. It was easy. It was Europe.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 2