The Sully got off to a late start because several of the group lost track of time making last-minute purchases in the duty-free stores. Dossans combed Orly and rounded up the dilatory shopaholics and herded them to the jet. The stewardesses cosseted travelers with International Herald Tribunes and fine chocolates, made sure they were belted in, and recited safety instructions that no one was listening to. Then Hoche pulled back from the terminal and took the Sully to Runway 26 for takeoff. The Georgians had a number of friends at Orly saying goodbye, who watched the Sully start to accelerate. While the roar was mighty and the speed was lightning, the plane seemed to be taking too long to rise into the air. Finally, it did lift off, but only a few feet.
Then the Sully, hurtling toward the end of the runway, tried to stop. The reverse thrust and screeching brakes, sounding like a thousand banshees, were unable to stop the 140-ton craft. The runway ended and the Sully hurtled into a green field in the adjacent hamlet of Villeneuve-le-Roi. There it careened wildly. Upended, one of the wings hit the ground, and the plane began breaking apart. When the jet engines hit the earth, there were several massive explosions as the twenty thousand gallons of jet fuel ignited.
The Sully went up in what looked like a nuclear blast that disintegrated most of what was left of it. The thick black smoke was a miasma blotting out the bright sun. It was springtime, but it looked like autumn, when the fields were burned. One house nearby caught fire. But the residents were away. Miraculously, no one in the village, many of whom were enjoying Sunday picnics in the countryside following a parade honoring the 1944 liberation of French prisoners of war, was harmed. The Villeneuvians were inured to the noise of Orly. But they had never seen a crash, not like this. No one had. The failure of the Sully was the worst single-plane disaster in the history of aviation to that day.
One hundred thirty people perished. Only the two stewardesses and one steward, sitting at the tail of the plane, survived, having been hurled from the wreckage before the explosions. Everyone else was obliterated, the French crew, the Georgians, and Paul Dossans, who had striven so mightily to make everything on the “Trip to the Louvre” be perfection. Atlanta had not been so devastated since Sherman’s March. The city was in shock, too dazed to mourn. Its progressive Kennedy-esque, newly elected mayor Ivan Allen dropped everything to fly via New York to Paris and help identify the bodies, if such a task were possible. Many of the dead were his good friends.
Despite the tragedy, Allen was not one to blame Air France. In fact, he took the New York–to–Paris Air France flight, on which the captain invited him, his deputy mayor, and his press secretary to spend an hour in the cockpit and see the marvel of technology firsthand. The horror was brought home at Orly when French authorities, led by an emissary of President de Gaulle, gave Mayor Allen and company a tour of the wreckage, the Sully’s intact tail section standing sentinel over the still-smoldering carnage. The bodies may have been burned beyond recognition, but a lot of the inanimate objects remained. Allen spotted a necktie he had given one of the passengers as a Christmas gift. He recognized mink stoles, party dresses, necklaces the women had worn to dances at the Piedmont Driving Club. He saw labels from Atlanta’s top stores. But he couldn’t see his friends.
The darkest commentary on the dark day came from sunny Los Angeles, where Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X literally jumped for joy at the tragic news. “I got a wire from God today,” he exulted to his audience, “well, all right, somebody came and told me that he had really answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But thanks to God, or Jehovah, or Allah, we will continue to pray, and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.” Malcolm X was denounced by Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty as a “fiend,” which only added fuel to the fire and succeeded in getting X the front-page recognition he had been seeking. The Atlantan Martin Luther King, Jr., was appalled. Reverend King had been working hand in hand with Mayor Allen, a born-again integrationist, to change the ways of Atlanta. This was not his method.
Frank Sinatra was in London when the crash occurred. He had flown there from Rome in El Dago (now Christina) to stay at the Savoy and do a benefit command performance for Princess Margaret at the Royal Festival Hall. At the Hall, he did a thirty-song set, culminating in “Come Fly with Me.” And then he flew off to Paris, to the George V, to prepare for shows at the Olympia Music Hall and at the Lido, flanked by the super-cabaret’s Bluebells, Paris’s topless answer to Radio City Music Hall’s Rockettes. The first Lido show was June 4, one day after the Sunday crash, and it is notable that “Come Fly with Me,” Sinatra’s standard closer, had been dropped from the playlist. Sinatra concluded his performance with “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
It had been a terrible period for the 707, which had gone for its first two years without a crash. The bad luck started in February 1961, when a Sabena 707 en route to Brussels from New York crashed on landing at Brussels, killing seventy-two, including the entire American figure-skating team, traveling to the world championships in Prague. In March 1962, an automatic-pilot defect caused American Airlines Flight 1, from New York to Los Angeles, to crash into Jamaica Bay on takeoff, killing several major tycoons, including hotel magnate Arnold Kirkeby and oil magnate W. Alton Jones, a close friend of President Eisenhower. A $10,000 bill was found in Jones’s wallet. Sinatra had even more doubts about flying commercial after that one.
On May 22, 1962, when Sinatra was performing in Rome, Continental Airlines Flight 11, going from Chicago to Kansas City, exploded over Centerville, Iowa, killing all forty-five people aboard. At first it was suspected that the plane had been downed by heavy thunderstorms. However, an investigation led to the discovery of sabotage. One of the passengers had bought $300,000 of insurance right before the flight. He had also purchased six sticks of dynamite for twenty-nine cents apiece. He jerry-rigged a bomb and planted it in the 707’s rear lavatory. The bomb worked. So did the plot, which became the basis of Arthur Hailey’s 1968 bestseller Airport.
And now, less than two weeks later, the Château de Sully became the fourth ill-fated 707. Once Atlantans recovered enough, people began speculating. Some articulated the Temple Fielding “Air Chance” notion that the crew members were drinking before takeoff. But the predominant hypothesis was that the Art Association voyagers were victims of their own acquisitiveness. Because the Sully was a private charter, baggage weight restrictions may have been honored in the breach. Despite enduring the long lines at the Paris post offices to minimize customs duties, the Atlantans may have been carrying back so many antiques, paintings, and clothes that, combined with the heavy fuel load to make it across the Atlantic, and the full capacity, the Sully could have been a victim of its own weight. The Art Association may have literally “shopped till they dropped,” a ghastly possibility.
It wasn’t until 1965 that the seemingly endless investigation of the Sully crash was concluded. In February of that year, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) issued its long-awaited report. The lawyers for the decedents’ families were already in a legal war with Air France, hiding behind the shield of the pre–World War II Warsaw Convention, which capped any family’s recovery at $8,291. This added up to under $1 million for the whole plane. The plaintiffs’ lawyers were seeking upward of $20 million. The ICAO’s report was curtains for Air France, which was blamed for both pilot error and mechanical failure (of something called the trim tabs, before the name was commandeered by a vitamin company). The litigation dragged on for several more years until, after the death of the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, his successors quietly settled with Air France for around $5 million, or about $85,000 per family. It was the largest settlement in history for a single airplane crash, but to the victims’ families, it seemed like peanuts.
The government of France, knowing it had gotten a great deal, tried to make it up to Atlanta by donating a Rodin sculpture to become the ce
nterpiece of the city’s new Municipal Arts Center, opened in 1968 as a memorial to the Art Association victims. The statue was called L’Ombre, or The Shade. In his presentation, the French ambassador described the Rodin as “a reconciliation of death and destiny.” Atlantans, famed for their courtesy and Southern hospitality, accepted the goodwill gesture and refrained from blaming France or its airline. The premier exhibit of the new High Art Museum was a tribute called “The Taste of Paris,” featuring three centuries of art loaned by French museums. The “Trip to the Louvre” would never be forgotten.
As for Frank Sinatra, the ultimate Jet Setter kept on jetting, albeit privately and nervously. He stayed off Air France. He stayed off Pan Am. If he needed a 707, he would charter it and do it “his way.” In 1964, he signed a contract with the Learjet Corporation to buy one of their first-generation private jets. Lear congratulated Sinatra on purchasing “the world’s finest business machine.” By 1964 Sinatra, nearing fifty, was chairman of Reprise, his own record label; he also oversaw his film company, his huge real estate holdings, and a major investment in a missile parts manufacturer. Sinatra was now a Big Businessman, and a Learjet, the ultimate corporate tool, was as natural a component of his portfolio as his cellar full of Jack Daniel’s. He tastefully named the Lear the Christina II. The Hoboken swagger had been replaced by a Wall Street stride.
Not that the Rat Pack party days were completely behind him. He used the Lear—which seated only six and had no bar—mostly to shuttle his pals between Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Las Vegas. For the long hauls and the concert tours, he still chartered the big 707s. But he loved showing off the Lear as the party favor for a Hollywood that had everything. He flew a wide-eyed Mia Farrow on it to Palm Springs for their first date, and to the Côte d’Azur for their 1966 honeymoon. He snowed Michael Caine, when Caine was dating Sinatra’s daughter Nancy, by Lear-ing him to Vegas, just the two guys, heart-to-heart, to make sure Caine’s intentions were honorable. Sinatra assumed that the truth would be spoken at 30,000 feet. Sinatra lent the Lear to Sammy Davis, Jr., and Marlon Brando to fly to Mississippi to join Martin Luther King, Jr., on a freedom march. He lent it to Elvis Presley, whom he once despised as vulgar but came to embrace, for the King and Priscilla Beaulieu to fly from Palm Springs to Las Vegas to get hitched by a justice of the peace. He lent it to the Beatles. And in 1967, having been instrumental in making the Learjet the millionaire’s favorite status symbol, he sold it, trading up to the new Gulfstream GII, which did have room for a bar, though not as big as El Dago’s. By now the chairman was drinking less. In 1972, he bought his very own 707, one originally built for Australia’s Qantas.
In January 1977, the ultimate irony befell Sinatra. He was about to fly his entourage on his current jet from Palm Springs to his opening night at Caesar’s Palace. But his beloved mother, Dolly, visiting from New Jersey, couldn’t stand Sinatra’s new wife, Barbara Marx, and refused to fly with her. So Sinatra simply chartered Dolly her own Learjet for the twenty-minute flight to Las Vegas. The plane was overflowing with a cornucopia of luxury food and amenities, as if destined for Paris.
It was one of those rare winter days when it was cloudy in Palm Springs. The pilot, who had flown the short route countless times, was undeterred. But, like the pilot of the Château de Sully, this pilot was in error. The clouds became a blinding blizzard, and the Lear crashed into the massive Mount San Gorgonio, instantly killing Dolly, her friend, and the Lear’s crew.
The pallbearers at Dolly Sinatra’s funeral included Frank’s old flying buddies Jimmy Van Heusen, Leo Durocher, and Dean Martin. Frank was so traumatized by the loss that he reembraced his long-lost Catholicism and forced his wife, Barbara, to convert. But no religion could restore his shaken faith in private jet aviation, or his faith in himself as always being in control, that his way was the safe way. He could never believe that the anxieties he’d fought so hard could come true, that a Sinatra could die in a plane crash. “She was a woman who flew maybe five times a year,” he mumbled incredulously to the press. “I could understand if it happened to me …”
But that tragedy was decades away. At the dawn of the jet age, the utter glamour and flash of Sinatra’s own historic “Come Fly with Me” spring tour ultimately proved to be an effective counterweight to make the world forget the disaster of the Atlanta “Trip to the Louvre.” It transformed 1962 from what could have been an annus horribilis into what Sinatra would deem “a very good year,” emblazoning the concept of the Jet Set in the public consciousness and inculcating a national belief in another famous Sinatra lyric, “Fairy tales can come true, they can happen to you.” Nevertheless, there was a nightmare of fiery destruction lurking in the wings, the specter that the magic carpet of jet travel could unravel. It was the genius of the airlines, the myth-making machinery, and the power of positive thinking, that the Jet Set, and not fear of flying, took a pole position in the sixties’ version of the American Dream.
THERE WAS NO CHICKEN/EGG CONUNDRUM IN THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE PHRASE “Jet Set.” First came the Set, then came the Jet. The Set was all about people, in the sixties called “the beautiful people,” an elite of fine visage and deep pockets and great networks the “regular people” thought had it made, because the Set were in all the right places, at all the right times, always together, always looking fantastic. They had always been around, but now they got around a lot more and a lot faster. The Jet was all about technology, a great scientific leap forward that enabled the Set to live even higher and larger at a pace and a scope theretofore unimaginable. But more important than propelling the Set to suddenly convenient exotic places for its conspicuous consumption, the jet propelled the mass public into a whole new level of aspiration. In the process, the Jet Set became far more than the sum of its celebrities.
The Jet Set proved to be a fantasy of great distance and glamorous surroundings and memorable company that was totally within reach. This wasn’t some Depression reverie where people from the apple lines went to watch Astaire and Rogers do the Continental in art deco splendor. This was a new reality where anyone could be Flying Down to Rio, could become an American in Paris, could have a Roman Holiday. At its core, the Jet Set was a brilliantly inadvertent joint venture of celebrity, technology, and media, whose confluence ended up transforming not only all three elements but the entire society as well.
ADVANCE MAN. Igor Cassini, the columnist who coined the phrase “Jet Set,” with his jet-settiest friends John and Jacqueline Kennedy, 1962. (photo credit 2.1)
So first the Set. In its sixties heyday, the jet set (lowercase) was defined by Webster’s as “an international social group of wealthy individuals who frequent fashionable resorts.” Note that the definition does not mention the conveyance at all. While credit for the first early-sixties coinage of the phrase unofficially went to Igor Cassini, “jet set” was first used in 1951 in Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. While the first military jet was flown in 1942, and jets were frequently used to fight the Korean War, extreme speed and extreme luxury had not previously been paired to connote extreme glamour. It took a while for glamour to catch up.
The Examiner’s context was one of beachgoing, and it referred to altitude, not to class. “You’re strictly jet set if you stake your claim in the dunes … Never descend to ocean level except for a quick dunk.” Later, in 1956, while the passenger jet was still a gleam in Boeing’s eye, The New York Times reported the term—for the first time in a social context, albeit far from high (altitude or class) society—in an article about rebellious Communist teenagers when such rebellion was still high-risk. “The term was originated by a young member of a foreign embassy staff in Moscow and refers to the Soviet youth who are attracted to things foreign.”
Before that maiden Pan Am flight to Paris in October 1958, the nucleus of the in-crowd who would become associated with the Boeing 707 and the nipping-at-its heels Douglas DC-8 was already formed in the public consciousness, in the pages of Life and Look, in the gossip columns, on television. Basica
lly, these were superrich people with money who got around, people like Joseph Kennedy of the U.S., Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos of Greece, Gianni Agnelli of Italy, Aly Khan of France, “Baby” Pignatari of Brazil, all of whom lived the lives that got the press by traveling, not on planes, but on superluxurious yachts.
You didn’t necessarily have to be rich to be in this pre–jet set, the “yacht lot,” but you needed special qualities that gave you unique access to the tycoons’ floating palaces. Frank Sinatra was in the mix because he was the coolest singer/swinger in the world; Porfirio Rubirosa because the Dominican diplomat/polo-playing stud had married both of the two richest heiresses of the era, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton. But Cary Grant, who was the coolest movie star and had preceded Rubirosa down the aisle with Hutton, was not, because of his obsessive desire for privacy.
Women, for the most part, were in the yacht lot only as decorative appurtenances, unless like Duke or Hutton, they could afford the yachts themselves. Olivia de Havilland and her sister, Joan Fontaine, whose family were the eponymous British jet manufacturers, should have been in this pre–jet set by double virtue of their pedigree and multi-Oscar movie stardom. But they weren’t interested in the high life, whether in the sky or in the sea lanes. The most pre–jet set person of all was Howard Hughes, who owned two sets of magic initials, RKO and TWA, a studio and an airline, but he was too paranoid to do anything beyond a party of two, and eventually, two would become a crowd. No set for him.
The Rothschilds were too exclusive to join any set but their own. Notwithstanding those high-profile gallivants the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, English aristocrats, shooting in the moors, tended to be out of the mix, though the consummate Englishman Winston Churchill was an enthusiastic fixture on the Onassis yacht, in one of the unlikeliest friendships of the fifties. And no one was more pre–jet set than mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, who shot glamorous films all over Europe, living like an unholy Roman emperor in the process. The Wahoo, Nebraska, naïf, who broke in to Hollywood writing scripts for Rin Tin Tin, was living proof that when it came to defining an aristocracy in the fifties, bloodlines could be offset by lines at the box office.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 3