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

by Stadiem, William

  Mona, a poor Louisville girl who made very, very good, immortalized in song by Cole Porter and in art by Salvador Dalí, was a role model for the former Jayne Larkin, the L.A. shopgirl second wife (they wed in 1944) of the polo-playing Wrightsman, who controlled Standard Oil of Kansas. Wrightsman was a second-generation tycoon, an Okie who had been transformed by his taste of Ivy as a student at Exeter and Columbia, desperate to be accepted by society. The ultraconservative Wrightsmans saw Igor Cassini, with his all-validating Cholly column, as just the man for them to know. Igor played it to the hilt, calling Mr. Wrightsman “C.B.,” as in DeMille.

  When Igor was on his honeymoon with Darrah in Montego Bay, the Wrightsmans invited them to prolong the ecstasy in Palm Beach. It was then and there that the Wrightsmans’ chubby, moody, solitary teenage daughter (from Charles’s first marriage), Charlene, developed a mad crush on Igor, who, she said later, was the only man who had ever paid any attention to her, her father included. The Wrightsmans were surely distracted by the escapades of C.B.’s oldest daughter, Irene, who had been disinherited after eloping with the Australian sportsman-lothario Freddie McEvoy. “Suicide Freddie,” as he was known, was a bobsled champion who had married several other heiresses, was the best friend of Errol Flynn, and raced Ferraris with Porfirio Rubirosa. The Wrightsmans, suffice it to say, were beside themselves.

  They were even more beside themselves when Charlene, at seventeen in 1947, having finished finishing school at Foxcroft and dropping out of snooty Finch College, eloped with the Viennese B-actor Helmut Dantine. Dantine had played one of the young lovers trying to get exit visas in Casablanca, but despite his dashing looks, he ended up typecast as a Hollywood Nazi. That was ironic, given that both of his parents were anti-Hitlerians who died in a concentration camp. Helmut and Charlene had one son and divorced in 1950, Dantine going on to yet another heiress.

  In 1952, in the endless society game of musical beds that filled the Cholly column, Igor lost his beloved Darrah to George Emmanuel, the indispensible consigliere of one of his column mainstays, Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos. It all took place that summer on the Côte d’Azur, where the Cassinis were freeloading at the Carlton, owned by the father of yet another column fixture, dashing British corporate raider Jimmy Goldsmith. In a cross between Holmesian whodunit and French farce, Igor at first suspected he was being cuckolded by one of two überplayboys: either Porfirio Rubirosa, whom he considered a dear friend; or Muslim billionaire-prince Aly Khan, another putative buddy who had just split from Rita Hayworth. But his friends proved true blue, and Igor was completely blindsided by the Greek connection.

  In no time flat, Igor rebounded with marriage number three, to none other than his former young idolator, Charlene Wrightsman Dantine, who had shed her baby fat and become a darkly chic beauty in the mode of Jackie Kennedy. Before Charlene and Dantine split, the couple would double-date with Igor and Darrah at El Morocco and take ski holidays together. Marveling at Igor in action, Charlene rekindled her teenage crush, and proximity fanned the flames. But Igor was getting almost as close to Charlene’s stepmother as to Charlene. It was a case of all in the family, very cozy, if not incestuous. Jackie Kennedy herself had taken Jayne Wrightsman as her role model in decorating and in fashion. Although Jackie had no need to social-climb, Jayne proved such a brilliant society mountaineer that even the patrician Jackie was deeply impressed. Armed with her husband’s fortune, Jayne proved to have marvelous taste. Jayne had followed Mona Williams’s inspiration to eradicate all traces of her Flint, Michigan, roots to become the grandest of all Palm Beach grande dames. A Europhile, Jayne adored Igor, who could educate her in the ways of both the beau monde and the ancien régime.

  C. B. Wrightsman had been hanging out in Hollywood at the end of World War II, attending parties and chasing starlets. However, he had been getting too much sun on the Oklahoma oilfields, the Long Island polo fields, the Malibu beaches. He developed a virulent squamous-cell cancer on his lip. Wrightsman, suddenly feeling very mortal, decided he needed a new wife to take care of him. Jayne Larkin was in the right place at the right time.

  When Charlene Wrightsman wanted to marry Igor, C.B. quickly gave his blessing. How did Igor pass his tough muster? In Wrightsman’s worldview, columnists ranked way ahead of thespians like Flynn and Dantine. Cholly Knickerbocker could convey the ultimate gift of fame, or at least notoriety. What could an actor give but celluloid thrills? Furthermore, Cassini was a count. That title sealed the deal with C.B. Igor and Charlene married in 1952 and settled down to be one of the future Jet Set “A” couples. Igor had a daughter by Darrah named Marina. Charlene had a son by Helmut Dantine, Dana. The Cassinis raised them together, in Manhattan, in Palm Beach, in Hollywood, in Capri, anywhere on earth they wanted to go. Marrying a genuine heiress gave Igor Cassini “salon-cred,” even more than his title or his exotic international heritage. He had hit the fiscal-social jackpot, practicing what he preached.

  The Cholly column was a validation, and Igor’s alliance with the Wrightsmans gave his validity even more heft and depth. The family was becoming the prime benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the key route to social power in New York. Charles’s lawyer was Allen Dulles, of the preeminent firm Sullivan & Cromwell, the lawyers for the Panama Canal, I. G. Farben of the Third Reich, and the most august bankers of Wall Street. Allen Dulles, Eisenhower’s head of the CIA, and his brother John Foster, Ike’s secretary of state, gave Igor access to the entire global power elite, from De Gaulle of France to the shah of Iran, whose beautiful but sullen East German–born wife, Soraya, was bored to death with everything but Igor’s tales of Hollywood. Other fixtures at the Wrightsmans who Igor kept amused were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  The dowdy, split-level, suburban pre-jet Eisenhower era was a golden age for Cassini in particular and for glamour in general, because the “beautiful people,” the Cholly people, were a tight little band who stood in dramatic relief to the gray-flannel-suited nine-to-five postwar masses. Igor saw himself as the ringmaster of a cozy circus of playboys, tycoons, and adventuresses that was small enough to fit if not into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, definitely into the Wrightsmans’ Palm Beach backyard. The public lapped it up. By the dawn of the jet age, Igor had twenty million readers, not to mention a television show, Igor Cassini’s Million Dollar Showcase, which reached millions more.

  And who were Igor’s beautiful people before that term, coined as a synonym for the Jet Set, entered the lexicon? Just look at Igor’s ten best-dressed women list (like all great gossips, he used lists as his oxygen) for 1960. He presented them all as Mrs. Big, in her husband’s name, rather than her own. Such was the sexism of the soon-to-be-changing times. Mrs. John F. Kennedy, of course, on the eve of her husband’s inauguration. Mrs. Gianni Agnelli. Mrs. Stavros Niarchos. Mrs. Henry Ford. Mrs. William Paley. These were the usual suspects.

  Less usual were: Mrs. Walter Moreira Salles, wife of the Brazilian billionaire banker and ambassador to Washington, and a close Cassini friend who often hosted him in Rio. Countess Rodolfo Crespi, another Rio connection, the American ex-supermodel (Consuelo O’Connor) wife of a Brazilian-Italian society publicist who fed Igor an endless plethora of column items. Vicomtesse Édouard de Ribes, a Paris aristocrat and Igor’s chief French connection. Mrs. Charles Engelhard, the wife of the precious-metals king, co-owner of the De Beers diamond and precious metals consortium, who was Ian Fleming’s inspiration for Auric Goldfinger and major host of Igor from Bernardsville to Johannesburg. Mrs. Edward Gilbert, the wife of the fiscal genius described by Igor as the “Boy Wonder of Wall Street,” who was Christian Dior’s number one client in America.

  Here were the best-dressed men: England’s Prince Phillip. Italy’s Gianni Agnelli. Hollywood’s Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Diplomacy’s Angier Biddle Duke. Stud-dom’s Porfirio Rubirosa. Those were the famous. The more recherché were: Serge Obolensky, a fellow Russian aristocrat and prominent PR man who represented such blue-chip clients as Harry Winston and Hilton Hotels.
Phillips Turnbull, president of Madison Avenue clothier Rogers Peet. Christopher Dunphy, JFK’s favorite golfing companion. Walter Shirley, Long Island real estate developer. And Oleg Cassini, that’s who. Family pride was a good excuse for a plug.

  HOLLYWOOD ROYALTY. Grace Kelly, before she was a princess, and designer Oleg Cassini, who was always a count, during their torrid romance, 1954. (photo credit 2.2)

  It should be noted that Gilbert, Agnelli, Salles, Obolensky, Turnbull, and Shirley were all clients of Cassini’s new (founded 1955) Madison Avenue public relations firm. The firm, named Martial (after his and Oleg’s children, Marina, Tina, and Alex), was as high-profile as the rest of Igor’s public-consumption high life. The notions of conflict of interest, or journalistic integrity, didn’t seem to apply to gossip columnists. This was one former ink-stained wretch who had been transformed into a man in the gray flannel suit, custom-tailored for Igor at Rogers Peet. After all his years scrambling as a journalist, Igor adored the stability, the wealth, the power, and the respect of being a businessman, a Big Businessman. He viewed Martial as not only his cash cow but also his Trojan horse, which he hoped to ride into the Kennedy White House.

  These wild ambitions would explode in Igor’s face in what would be one of the seminal scandals of the sixties. But not now. As the jets began flying and world travel began to explode, Igor was riding high, as high as a new 707. Despite all of Igor’s self-serving self-aggrandizement, his public, and it was a huge public, enjoyed his antics far too much to dream of censuring him, much less not reading him. Americans simply couldn’t imagine living without Igor, for no other columnist could give them the same vicarious thrills that he did. Besides, for all his elitism and arrogance, the public liked Igor.

  In contrast to Robin Leach, to come two decades later on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Igor wasn’t a poseur or a sycophant; he could just as easily lampoon his subjects as sing their praises. Most important, he came across as his readers’ friend and confidant. He was the one and only count most Americans would probably ever think they knew, and he was taking them inside his otherwise forbidden world. Igor Cassini was both the chronicler of the Jet Set and its perfect role model and, at the same time, a tipster and buddy to the ordinary man and woman. He spoke Monte Carlo; he also spoke to Mayberry. “Le Jet Set, c’est moi,” echoing Louis XIV, might well have been the motto of this brilliant showman and surprisingly inclusive host of the party that was the jet age.

  Like Igor, the entire Eisenhower era was obsessed with big business. While Igor and his column may have provided the software for the jet age, the publicity, the hype, the myth that got the public hooked on going places, the hardware was the plane, and that was the big feat that transformed the world. None of Igor’s sizzle would have mattered were it not for the steak that was the jet plane itself. And the jet was, first and foremost, one of the great Wall Street power plays of all time, a tour de force of all-American capitalistic brains and brawn. Big business was what put the jets in the air, the jets that enabled Igor Cassini and his Jet Set, and his millions of vicarious-thrill-seeking readers, to live it up on the ground.

  IT IS IRONIC THAT OF THE MIGHTY MOGULS BEHIND THE LAUNCH OF THE BOEING 707 and the Douglas DC-8, only maybe two or three of them ever appeared in Igor Cassini’s Cholly Knickerbocker column. And not often. They might be on the cover of Fortune or Time or the front page of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or on the television on Huntley-Brinkley. But as far as the social columns were concerned, this genuine jet set didn’t warrant coverage. They weren’t “fun” enough to be in Igor’s world because they were too busy changing the real world.

  The literal Jet Set comprised a tiny lot, beyond exclusivity: They were the corporate heads of the big American airlines and the airplane manufacturers. Call them the Skycoons. But just because they weren’t in the gossip columns didn’t mean they weren’t colorful. Quite the contrary. These men were the folk heroes of capitalism. They were nothing like the fungible and interchangeable corporate suits who run the airlines today. The Skycoons didn’t waste their time climbing corporate ladders. They created their companies out of blood, sweat, and propellers, and people climbed to reach them.

  At the pinnacle of the aviation pyramid was Pan Am’s Juan Trippe, the Yale preppy who built the colossus of the skies. Then there was TWA’s Howard Hughes, the richest and most mysterious of all the air tycoons. American Airlines’s prexy C. R. Smith was the opposite of Hughes. Both were Texans, but Smith, a CPA, was as grounded and bottom-line as Hughes was mercurial and madly brilliant. United Airlines’s Pat Patterson grew up on a Hawaiian sugar plantation and got seasick every time he had to sail to the mainland. Cutting his corporate teeth as a Wells Fargo banker, he was obsessed with flying and, like his rival Smith, with keeping his airline flying above the red ink. Far more swashbuckling were Eastern’s Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace and Congressional Medal of Honor winner; Delta’s C. E. Woolman, who worked his way up as a cotton-field crop duster; and Continental’s Bob Six, a Waldo Pepper–ish California stunt pilot who became so obsessed with Broadway that he married Ethel Merman.

  Those were the heads of the airlines. Equally important were the two chief jet-maker rivals. Douglas’s Donald Douglas was an Annapolis- and MIT-trained engineer whose boyhood inspiration to reach for the stars came from seeing Wilbur Wright fly. His adversary was Boeing’s William Allen, a Harvard Law School–trained Montana cowboy who had a river-boat gambler’s passion for risk. In leaving out these legends because they didn’t hang out at the Stork Club or didn’t seem “upperclawss,” Igor Cassini simply didn’t know what he was missing. Furthermore, these tycoons were, in effect, working for him. If Woodrow Wilson’s mission had been to make the world safe for democracy, the mission of the Skycoons was to make the world safe for jetocracy.

  The jet age’s greatest missionary was undoubtedly Juan Trippe, the founder and chairman of its greatest airline, Pan Am. He was the one airman who was genuinely Old Guard, “listable” for Ward McAllister or Maury Paul, but way too much a relic of the quadrilles in the Astor Ballroom rather than the fox-trots of El Morocco to tickle the fancy of a Cholly addict. Conversely, Igor would have given a Fabergé egg—a whole henhouse of them—to have landed Pan Am as his public relations client. That would have been one of Madison Avenue’s super-“gets.” But Juan Trippe was beyond mortal celebrity.

  Because the foundations of the Pan Am empire were laid in its pioneering routes to Cuba and then to South America, people often assumed that because of his first name, Juan Trippe was some sort of Latin fusion plutocrat. Not really. Juan Trippe was as American as the apple pie he relished in the refectory of the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he was prepared for Yale and to follow his WASP father to his banking firm on Wall Street. The only border Juan had any connection south of was the Mason-Dixon Line, for his name came not from Ferdinand and Isabella but from his mother’s beloved half sister, Juanita Terry, a Maryland blue blood who died young, speaking neither Spanish nor Portuguese.

  Whatever the facts, the name alone made Juan seem more dashing than he first appeared. At Hill, he was so reserved that his classmates nicknamed him “the Mummy.” At Yale, he was vastly overshadowed by such glittering schoolmates as Time cofounders Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and Cornelius Vanderbilt (“Sonny”) Whitney, who would go on to finance Gone with the Wind and The Searchers. Trippe was a protonerd, enrolling in the university’s Sheffield Scientific School to study unglamorous industrial engineering. He was tapped for Delta Psi, or St. Anthony’s Hall, one of the lesser fraternities. Six feet and stocky, he did make guard on a weak football team that lost all its annual contests with Harvard and Princeton. Trippe clearly did not seem like secret-society Skull and Bones material.

  Yet as a senior, he was tapped, along with Luce, Hadden, and Whitney. What changed things for the solid, stolid Trippe was World War I and the airplane. Trippe had always been fascinated by flying. As a ten-year-old he built a mo
del plane, powered by rubber bands, that he flew in Central Park. That year his father took him to the Statue of Liberty to watch an air race between Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss. The boy was hooked. In 1917 he took a leave from Yale to enter the Naval Reserve Force Flying Corps. He won his wings, but the war ended too soon for him to fulfill his fantasy of going “over there.”

  Instead, in 1919, he returned to New Haven, with new confidence derived from his naval spit and polish, if not combat decorations. He began writing for the Yale Graphic, the campus magazine. His first article, totally prescient, was about the future of the navy, flying giant seaplanes across the Atlantic. He soon rose to become the Graphic’s editor in chief, but most important, he helped found the Yale Aero Club, serving as secretary behind two returning World War I aces. He copiloted a plane that won a major race against eleven other colleges. While other Ivy boys in this Fitzgeraldian era were content to get their thrills in Stutz Bearcats, Trippe was clearly destined for a (literally) higher calling.

  Trippe made a great name at Yale. He also made some great contacts. Many of his future investors in Pan Am were classmates. These were fellow Aero Club members Sonny Whitney and his cousin Bill Vanderbilt. There were his rich Delta Psi brothers, Alan Scaife, who would marry into the Pittsburgh Mellons; Tom Symington, a railway heir; and Theodore Weicker, a Squibb pharmaceutical scion. All wanted to fly. Vital as well was Trippe’s buddy from the Graphic, Sam Pryor, who would become his number two at Pan Am. Alumni power brokers like Averell Harriman also proved true (Yale) blue to Trippe’s aspirations. These school connections were valuable beyond any Ivy Leaguer’s wildest dreams.

  However, Trippe’s dreams turned into nightmares when his father suddenly died at forty-seven of a supposedly tropical disease, typhoid fever, in East Hampton, during the summer of Trippe’s twenty-first birthday. The enormous debts he left soon bankrupted his financial firm. Trippe’s mother had to scrape and sacrifice to enable Juan to finish his senior year at Yale. When he did graduate in 1922, the fantasy of flight was foremost in his mind, but the burden of supporting his mother was squarely on his shoulders. Reality grounded the flyboy, who was hired by another Yale alumnus to become a bond salesman at the esteemed Boston–New York firm of Lee, Higginson & Co.