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

by Stadiem, William

  Maury Paul died at the height of his power in 1942, at fifty-two, of a heart ailment. Into the breach stepped Elsa Maxwell, who was quickly syndicated in twenty papers and given her own radio show, Party Line. Her high-water mark occurred in October 1944, when she gave the party of the year in Hollywood, “Free France,” to celebrate the liberation of Paris. Renting a mansion in Beverly Hills, she assembled 130 stars; it was the first time most of them had donned evening clothes since Pearl Harbor. It was a classic melding of society, Hollywood, and the higher arts. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein played accordion while Danny Kaye played bass and Elsa dominated the piano. Barbara Hutton and Cary Grant, just divorced, were there, separate but equal, Grant dancing with Anita Colby, the highest-paid model of her generation.

  Barbara Hutton, again the most eligible woman in the country, hoofed with Igor Cassini’s brother, Oleg. Igor was still off at war as an army sergeant in Paris (where else?). A rising gossip columnist in Washington, D.C., Igor had been tapped by Hearst in 1943 to replace Maury Paul as the new Cholly Knickerbocker, assuming he got back in one piece and not in a box. Oleg was then a struggling designer who had hit the showbiz jackpot by marrying movie star Gene Tierney (Laura), who, that magic Maxwell night, was busy socializing with Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner and the Charles Boyers. Both Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra performed—for free. Elsa Maxwell never paid anyone but herself. Maxwell admitted that while this fete was her “pièce de résistance,” she tantalized the world by promising that her next one would be atop the Acropolis. She kept that promise, and kept the public panting for more.

  Elsa Maxwell’s best friend in Beverly Hills and the woman who footed the bills for most of Maxwell’s parties was Countess Dorothy di Frasso, who was without question the most proto–Jet Set woman on earth. Her life was so dizzyingly mobile that it seemed the 707 had been designed specifically for her. Like Jane Campbell, Dorothy Caldwell Taylor was a Jersey girl who dreamed of living overseas. Unlike Jane Campbell, she was an heiress-socialite, having inherited $12 million from her leather-tycoon father. Her brother was the youngest governor of the New York Stock Exchange. She quickly took the money and ran abroad. Entranced by the new romance of aviation, Dorothy chose as her first husband a pioneer British pilot, Claude Grahame-White, famous for making the first night flight from London to Manchester and the first flight over the White House on a barnstorming visit to Washington in 1910. He was also an RAF hero in World War I, the English answer to the German Red Baron.

  When the aviation marriage crashed and burned, Dorothy, wanting to remain in Europe, went the royal route, marrying in 1923 the Italian count Carlo di Frasso, thirty years her senior. They lived north of Rome in Renaissance splendor at the Villa Madama, which was designed by Raphael. The “madama” for whom the villa was named was Margaret of Austria, the bastard daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor who was engaged at age five and married at ten to Alessandro de’ Medici, himself the illegitimate son of a pope and an African servant. When Alessandro was assassinated in his twenties, Margaret, then fifteen, remarried the thirteen-year-old Ottavio Farnese, the Duke of Parma. Who ever said that the sexual revolution had to wait for the Jet Set?

  Dorothy di Frasso was as liberated as they came. She and the count had a fairly open marriage, and she used the villa as an aphrodisiac, luring in the likes of Gary Cooper and Cary Grant for long-term torrid affairs. But the love of her life was the gangster Benjamin (“Never call me ‘Bugsy’ ”) Siegel, whom she had met in Hollywood and invited to Rome to visit the Villa Madama in 1938. There were two other houseguests, on a visit to Mussolini: Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda; and Hermann Göring, who headed the Luftwaffe and was Hitler’s designated successor. Siegel, who was well aware of Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism, was set to kill both men right there at the Villa Madama. If he had, World War II might never have happened. But Dorothy had a soft spot for Göring, who had been a World War I flying ace like her ex-husband. And she had a softer spot for her husband, who tolerated her endless indiscretions and whom she was certain Mussolini would blame and kill for whatever Siegel did to his Axis partners. So she talked Siegel back to bed and out of war.

  Dorothy died at sixty-eight in 1954, right after spending a wild New Year’s holiday with Marlene Dietrich in Las Vegas at the El Rancho Hotel. Siegel, who was shot to death in Beverly Hills in 1947, had taught Dorothy to love the desert oasis he built. Accompanied by actor Clifton Webb, she took the Union Pacific’s Los Angeles Limited back to L.A. She was found dead in her roomette wearing $250,000 worth of jewelry and a mink coat, with an empty bottle of nitroglycerin pills by her side. She had been felled by a heart attack.

  The countess’s death naturally got major play in the Cholly Knickerbocker column, whose new Cholly, Igor Cassini, had made the world all but forget his predecessor Maury Paul. Cassini, who did dote on his adored mother and her every word, nonetheless did not live with her, like his predecessor did with his. Igor was a stud, a real stud, yet one with brains and wit. He was a genuinely titled European royal playboy–bon vivant, the scion of a distinguished line of diplomats. For probably the first time in the history of gossip, the columnist was what he was writing about. Furthermore, this one actually set the agenda that his subjects followed. He was the real deal. Yet he got no respect. Because of the absurdities of his predecessors—the pomposity of McAllister, the effeminacy of Paul, the avarice of Maxwell, Cassini became the whipping boy of the serious press. His investiture in November 1945 as Cholly, at the jealousy-stirring age of thirty, was duly noted in the then-august Time, but oh so snidely.

  EAGER IGOR was the headline. “Anything can happen in America,” Time wrote. “Less than ten years ago, slight, pompadoured little Igor Loiewski-Cassini landed in the U.S. with only $10, a hint of a titled past, and a lean and hungry look. By last week, at 30, as the new Cholly Knickerbocker … he had reached the peak in his particular field.” Asked about his standards for his new position, Igor told Time he planned to concentrate on what he called the “International Smart Set.” Trying to show the world he was no Paulian stuffed shirt, Igor declared, “I think it is very important not to develop a pot belly.” Then he mused on being home from war, “Peace, it’s wonderful! What a change from the muddy boots, the shivering cold, the caked blood …” The article closed with Igor’s exuberant forecast, “We’re in for an era of mad spending and fun-making.”

  Igor’s first column in The New York Journal-American was his declaration of independence from the perfumed ghost of Maury Paul. Instead of aiming his poison pen at the Old Guard in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, the new Cholly expanded his purview to include, as he enumerated in his first column, “dispossessed dukes and diplomats, broken down eighteen carat European aristocrats and upcoming foreign phonies, bored businessmen dragged out of their offices by their fun-loving, socially ambitious wives, to say nothing of long-haired artists, writers, actors, cover girls with perfectly painted faces and impeccable legs, eager ‘Souz-Americanos’ with pockets full of pesetas and an eye for pretty girls, and people whose only social introduction is that they can buy themselves a ringside table.” Add the 707 to the mix, and a decade or so later, you would have the Jet Set.

  Even then, after his Jet Set had taken off and Cassini had become more powerful than Paul and Maxwell combined—and nearly as ubiquitous in the media as the syndicated gossip columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, who had an audience of over fifty million worldwide—he still continued to get no respect. That Elsa Maxwell did not mention his name once in her 1954 memoir, RSVP, can be written off to their rivalry. But the preeminent social historian Cleveland Amory’s Siberianization of Igor to one brief mention in his weighty 1962 tome Who Killed Society? was a commentary on the virulent column envy Igor Cassini engendered. Amory’s thesis was that “Society” had been elbowed out by what he called “Publi-ciety,” in which celebrity ruled and the ultimate validation was getting one’s name in the paper or, even better, on television. Amory wa
s clearly nostalgic for the Old Guard. By making Igor Cassini virtually unmentionable, Amory was trying to give the upstart the worst dose of his own medicine: anonymity. That Igor could engender such a reaction was testimony to his remarkable influence as a celebrity-maker in an age when fame was becoming the ultimate reward.

  Just who was this intrepid future pilot of the Jet Set? Or, as the Old Guard viewed him, the terrorist hijacker of the Good Ship Society? He was born Igor Aleksandrovich Loiewski Cassini in Sebastopol, in the Crimea, sometime around 1916 (he was never specific), on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution that would transform his diplomatic family into international nomads, the precursors of what became known derisively as Eurotrash. In fact, much like Countess Dorothy di Frasso and other fellow travelers, they were “Jet Set” decades before the 707 was a figment of Pan Am founder Juan Trippe’s soaring imagination.

  Igor’s mastery of networking was genetic, inherited from his mother, Marguerite. A Russian countess whose father had been the tsar’s minister to Peking and then to Washington, fluent in six languages, Marguerite became the instant toast of the embassy circuit. Her best friends were the future Alice Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter; Helen Hay, daughter of Secretary of State John Hay, who would marry tycoon and über-philanthropist Payne Whitney; and Cissy Patterson, heiress to the Medill-McCormick Chicago newspaper dynasty. Patterson would give Igor Cassini his first newspaper job, as a favor to “Maman.”

  Countess Cassini followed her father to his newest post in Madrid, then decamped to Paris to study voice. There was a lot of Café Society in Old Guard Marguerite, who embraced Paris and married significantly below her station. The lucky man was also royalty, albeit Polish royalty. He was Count Alexander Loiewski, a spoiled clotheshorse and bon vivant whose father—a lawyer who made his living finding lost heirs of large unclaimed inheritances—shot himself when a make-or-break case fell through. The young count worked in low-level diplomatic posts that took him to the Crimea, after which the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution put him out of business.

  The Loiewskis, hocking a Fabergé cross and other imperial trinkets, escaped to Montreux, Switzerland, then to Florence, where Marguerite ran a boutique on the Via Tornabuoni, the Fifth Avenue of Florence. Oleg and Ghighi, as Igor was called (hard G’s as opposed to the soft ones of Colette’s Gigi), were educated at a school run by Jesuit friars, with the goal of their becoming Florentine gentlemen. It was a big challenge, as the two young counts (they each inherited their father’s title at birth) were known as “the little Cossacks” in a city where every chauffeur seemed to have a Russian title. While Oleg was tall and thin and Ghighi much smaller, both boys became great skiers, horseback riders, tennis players, and ballroom dancers, as well as piano players, skills that would come in handy in their social conquest of America. In the summer, the family went to Forte dei Marmi, the Tuscan version of the Hamptons, where the boys’ beachmates included Gianni Agnelli and Emilio Pucci.

  Even as children, the Cassini boys, goaded by their ultra-ambitious mother, were all about contacts and networking. To ensure that the boys were perfectly equipped to network at the very top, the countess hired as their tutors a former officer in the Russian Imperial Guards and a displaced Georgian prince, to give the boys a spit and polish that even the toniest American prep schools, like Groton and St. Paul’s, could never touch. In his memoir, Igor fondly recalled his teachers and reduced their lessons into six basis precepts: “1. Never speak to grown-ups until they speak to you. 2. Know how to bow correctly. 3. Remember to kiss the hands of married ladies. 4. Know how to use which fork for what. 5. Wear white gloves when dancing with royal princesses. 6. Never lie and never show any fear.”

  The schooling finished, the countess dispatched Oleg to Rome to study fashion design, in hopes that they would have a business together one day. Meanwhile, Igor, who lacked Oleg’s visual sense, was whistling Dixie. Having spent a few desultory months in Paris studying international law, always with the idea of becoming a diplomat, Igor decided the Old World was for old people like his parents. America had become his goal, especially after he was smitten with a Richmond, Virginia, belle who had the quintessentially Southern name of Archer Coke. Miss Coke was going to an international finishing school in Florence called Miss May’s. Igor dropped the law. Arming himself with his father’s tuxedo and Charvet formal shirts and his mother’s high-society friends’ calling cards, he finagled a free passage to New York in 1933 on a cargo ship owned by a family contact. The countess gave him the grand allowance of two dollars a day for several months. It was the Depression. He was lucky as hell to be traveling at all.

  Igor was as entranced by Richmond as he had been by Archer Coke, who was now at home on the deb circuit. Even before the novel came out in 1936, he loved the whole Gone with the Wind ambience, the Cokes’ Tara-like columned residence, the liveried black retainers, the mint juleps, the fragrance of the magnolias. Sadly for Igor, Archer Coke was much less taken with him in Richmond than she had seemed to be in Florence. At one cotillion, when he was supposed to be waltzing, Igor decided to show off with a wild and crazy Cossack dance, kicking his legs out from a squatting position. All Archer could see was red. Which was worse, Igor’s lack of decorum or the big holes in the soles of his shoes? Archer sent the Russian packing to Yankeeland, where he found the cheapest lodgings in New York at Columbia University’s International House and set out to network with his mother’s important friends.

  Again disaster. No one called him back, no Whitneys, no Roosevelts, no one. Igor’s salvation came from an Italian, his beach-boy friend Emilio Pucci, who, also entranced with all things antebellum, had enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens on an exchange program. Pucci told Igor to jump the first train from Penn Station to Georgia. There was an opening for a tennis coach at the university, and Igor could play. Thus Igor came to Athens and, in a match that his future depended on, managed to defeat the college champion and got the job. He also ending up tutoring, along with backhand, Italian and French.

  Pucci and Cassini couldn’t have been happier at Harvard, which couldn’t match the weather or the women, not to mention the Southern hospitality. The Italian boys were lionized on campus as the experts in the emerging European fascism. The governor of Georgia, Eugene Talmadge, was a big fan of the seemingly crackerjack efficiency expert Mussolini, and the tidbit that Igor’s brother was designing dresses for Il Duce’s daughter helped make Igor big man on campus. His Southern exposure also made him big man in Rome when he went back to Italy in 1934 to visit his family. Oleg, the family fashion plate, was wowed by Igor’s new Joe College style: camel coats, porkpie hats, white bucks, and gray flannels. Plus, Igor could do the fox-trot and the dip. Igor brought Oleg a copy of the single “Moon Over Miami,” which Oleg couldn’t stop playing. Now Oleg wanted his turn in America.

  At a tennis tournament in Venice, Oleg found an American sponsor, a newspaperman named Victor Ridder. Ridder published the German Zeitung in New York; it would become the nucleus of the Knight-Ridder print colossus. Declaring he had friends at Saks Fifth Avenue, Ridder promised Oleg a job in the rag trade. Igor got Oleg the American uniform of a gray flannel suit and a porkpie hat. That, his dinner jacket, and his tennis racket, Igor assured him, were all he would need. In 1936 the brothers set out together to make their mark in the Brave New World. Assuming that mark would be made quickly, the parents—armed with visas gotten for them by one of Marguerite’s old beaux who had become the French ambassador to Italy—planned their arrival for the next year.

  Ridder couldn’t get Oleg in to Saks, but he did get him a post as a very junior designer for Jo Copeland, a major manufacturer on Seventh Avenue, who quickly fired him. Igor’s own term at Georgia had come to an end, and the two brothers found cold-water digs over a smelly delicatessen on far West Fifty-first Street for fifty cents a day. The two Eurogourmets subsisted on hot dogs at Nedick’s, a chain they dubbed “La Salle Orange.” Igor, like Oleg, needed a job. He still had fantasies of becoming a dip
lomat, but his reality was hawking cold cream door-to-door.

  Nonetheless, Igor was indefatigable. He was already a young master at mobilizing royal contacts. He soon connected with another Italian count, who was trying to introduce the bidet to Park Avenue. His new friend failed, because the device was viewed by Puritans as impure, but not before introducing Igor to the Italo-American Tammany power broker, Generoso Pope. Pope was the owner-publisher of Il Progresso, the largest Italian newspaper in the country, and a pivotal supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. Pope was also a big Mussolini fan, but so were lots of Americans when Il Duce was doing nothing more sinister than making the trains run on time. Pope’s son, Generoso Jr., would go on to found The National Enquirer.

  Thus, early on, the Cassini boys were knee-deep in newsprint’s upper reaches. Igor was literally covered in newsprint. He had thought Mr. Pope was going to make him a reporter. Instead, Pope made him a night-shift proofreader at $30 a week. Igor supplemented that with an even lower-paying day job at the Italian Tourist Office as a ticket clerk. Meanwhile, Oleg, who couldn’t find anything that paid, simply played a lot of tennis, as well as Ping-Pong, becoming a local champion. The boys certainly weren’t in the best shape to receive their parents, who arrived in 1937 and settled in gloomy walk-up digs in the predominantly German Yorkville, the most unfashionable precinct of the Upper East Side.

  To support his parents in the style to which they once were accustomed, Igor sold a bust of Nicolas II, which the tsar himself had given to his grandfather, to the antique emporium A La Vieille Russie for $500. Much of that money the brothers squandered on outings to the Stork Club, just to remind themselves why they had decided to come to New York in the first place. At the same time, while father Cassini moped around the flat in Yorkville, making borscht and pierogis on his hot plate, the countess took to riding the escalators at Macy’s, up and down, up and down, hours at a time.