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

by Stadiem, William

  The gentleman’s business of selling bonds to family and friends in the morning on Wall Street and then playing golf in the afternoon at the Apawamis Club in Westchester bored Trippe to death. His only fun was flying and doing stunts in a leaky used seaplane on weekends over Long Island Sound. He endured banking until 1923, when he quit and announced that he was going into the aviation business. Flying was the Internet of its time, and the Roaring Twenties couldn’t have been a more propitious era to find venture capital for a futuristic start-up, particularly for a man with Trippe’s Yale connections to high finance.

  He began on the cheap, using the Yale Club’s address at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue for the nonexistent office of “J. Terry Trippe” (in those pre–Pan Am days he left out the Juan). When he eventually played the J-card to court the Latino market, Time, for one, with a typical white man’s burden bias, called him on the carpet, noting that the only thing Latin about him was his “swarthy skin.” What he didn’t leave out were his old school ties. The New Haven Mafia provided him enough capital to buy some outdated navy planes and start Long Island Airways. Trippe’s first company was basically a 1920s version of the Hampton Jitney, ferrying Gatsby-esque thrill-seekers to weekend parties, or sometimes just on romantic sightseeing dates flying around the Statue of Liberty. Trippe took on multiple roles, from president to pilot to mechanic. Effort didn’t count. The venture failed.

  Trippe was saved by the U.S. Post Office, which was about to open up its new airmail service to private bidders. What Trippe focused on was the potentially extremely lucrative Boston–New York corridor. To that end, Trippe hied himself to Sonny Whitney and William Rockefeller, yet another Yalie flying aficionado. They gave Trippe the backing he needed to float a $300,000 stock offering in Trippe’s new company, Colonial Air Transport, which The New York Times described in 1925 as “the first definite adventure of important financial men into the field of commercial aviation.” Until Trippe came along, most airlines were the creations of romantic but impractical ex–flying aces. Wall Street scorned these characters as “birdmen.”

  Trippe was only a closet birdman. When he called on money, he was a bottom-line Yale man. Yale ties financed Trippe in the air, just as they had financed Luce and Haddon on the ground. While Trippe might not have made Cholly Knickerbocker, the Times article was the way he wanted to see his name in print. Oddly enough, he should have made Cholly for the courtship of his future blue-chip bride, which began around this time. The lady was Elizabeth Stettinius, the daughter of the great Morgan banker Edward Stettinius.

  Again, capitalizing on college connections proved to be Juan Trippe’s genius (and a great advertisement for an Ivy education). He met Elizabeth, a top debutante of the social season, through her brother Edward Jr., at the New York St. Anthony Hall alumni club. Edward had been a Delta Psi at the University of Virginia, a state where his mother was one of the FFVs (First Families of Virginia). His best friend there was his cousin David K. E. Bruce, who soon would marry the daughter of Andrew Mellon. The cousins both reached the pinnacle of American public service, Bruce as ambassador to France, Germany, and England; Stettinius as secretary of state, after heading U.S. Steel. Juan met Elizabeth at the Stettinius estate in Locust Valley. What won his heart was her power drive on the links at the Piping Rock Club. He wanted to marry her at first swing, but her family balked at giving their blessing until Juan Trippe proved that he could support a family.

  Trippe quickly ascended to that challenge. Although the Boston mail route turned out to be much less lucrative than he had imagined, Trippe sold Colonial and began looking south and thinking internationally. He took his proceeds and went down to Cuba with John Hambleton, a rich Harvard friend from his intercollegiate flying days, to lobby the Cuban president Machado for the about-to-open Havana–Key West airmail route. Hambleton was from Baltimore, from a much tonier Maryland clan than Trippe, and that pedigree, plus his decorations as a World War I ace, put the often tongue-tied, malapropping Trippe in awe of the smoothly eloquent Harvard man. It was Hambleton who in 1927 muscled together a new, much bigger consortium of Ivy heirs and Wall Street wizards to create their newest venture, Aviation Corporation of America, which would win the Havana route and soon set off for South America and become Pan American Airways. Trippe was just about the only man in the group without deep family pockets. Accordingly, he did almost all the work. He was the tycoons’ hired hand.

  Trippe was more than grateful to have the opportunity. When on October 28, 1927, his first “floatplane,” La Nina, landed in the Havana harbor and unloaded its first load of 772 pounds of mail to a waiting boat, Trippe was there to telegraph Betty Stettinius, whom her parents had sent off to Paris to make her forget the loser Juan Trippe. The simple cable read, “First flight successful.” But the message was clear. Juan Trippe had arrived. They married the next year, at a blowout for eight hundred guests at the Stettinius Locust Valley barony, after which they sailed to Europe on the S.S. Rotterdam, for London, Paris, and for Trippe, the highlight of all, the Berlin Air Show.

  Meanwhile, John Hambleton pulled off the first publicity coup of Pan Am’s young life. He bagged Charles Lindbergh to sign—in return for what became a fortune in Pan Am stock—an exclusive contract as the new airline’s technical adviser. Nothing could instill confidence in flying like America’s greatest hero, whom Trippe and Hambleton called “Slim.” Still only twenty-seven at the time, Lindbergh was the pinnacle of trust, the ultimate seal of approval. Fifty thousand people turned out in Miami in February 1929 to watch Lindbergh, with Hambleton as his copilot, take off on the inaugural mail flight to the Canal Zone.

  Hambleton was almost as charismatic as Lindy. At the outset of their venture, Trippe was languishing in his shadow as Pan Am’s number two, running the office while Hambleton flew around the country, making deals. En route to Miami from New York on a small private plane, Hambleton broke one of his personal rules of never surrendering the controls of a plane to any pilot less skilled than Lindbergh or himself: Hambleton asked this so-honored pilot to make a brief stop in Wilmington, North Carolina, where his pregnant wife was visiting her family. It was a perfect day, as clear and sunny and springlike as the one that saw the doom decades later of the Château de Sully. Coming in for a landing, the plane simply fell three hundred feet from the sky, instantly crushing to death both Hambleton and his pilot. No cause was ever determined, though the speculation was that the little plane had hit an air pocket and was swept downward. It was a terrible loss for Juan Trippe. At the same time, it put all the responsibility for Pan Am solely in his court. Forced to step out of Hambleton’s long shadow, Trippe had no choice but to overcome his natural reticence and his fear that being “pushy” was anathema to being a gentleman. The airline was his to make, and make it he did.

  Trippe, who loathed publicity, was immediately pressed by Pan Am’s investors to take a high profile. Given the airline’s new focus on South America, its ad agency, New York’s Doremus & Co., pressed “J. Terry Trippe” to trade on the “Juan.” Trippe demurred. He hated the name, he told the agency. Ever since he was a boy, no one knew how to pronounce it. People called him “Wang.” He preferred Trippy, his golfing moniker. He even preferred “Mummy.” But Doremus had their way. “Juan” came out of mothballs, and a mythology about his Venezuelan ancestor was manufactured by the agency.

  This was how the Trippe juggernaut began. It never stopped, as he quickly propelled Pan Am to world domination. Although he staffed the executive ranks of his airline with fellow Yalies, Pan Am was still a one-man show. Notwithstanding his hail-fellow-well-met, slightly bumbling demeanor, Trippe, who smoked cheap drugstore cigars and came to vastly prefer golf to travel, was totally in control, spinning his air web less on the fly than from his fifty-eighth-floor office in the Chrysler Building. He may have been even more secretive than Howard Hughes. He had to be. Such were the rigors and intrigues of the prewar thirties.

  Trippe outmaneuvered the Germans at the height of Nazi machinations in
the South American air wars. He sneaked through the great walls of Chinese xenophobia toward foreign airlines by buying a controlling interest in China’s leading carrier. He pitted Yankee ingenuity against British imperialism in taking control of the routes across the Atlantic. And he did it all single-handedly, without intervention from the State Department, despite his endless connections in the capital. Furthermore, no one other than Trippe and Pan Am had any interest in traversing the globe in the middle of the Depression. Accomplishing privately what surely would have gotten bogged down in the game of nations, Trippe, a diplomatic corps unto himself, was viewed by Washington as its Great White Hope to win the international air race.

  DON JUAN. Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan Am, in 1927. The emperor of the air. (photo credit 3.1)

  After distinguished service lending its fleet of planes to the war effort around the world during World War II, Juan Trippe, always a visionary, began preparations for entering and, naturally, dominating the impending jet age. Trippe was always on the cutting edge, but sometimes that edge cut the wrong way. A case in point was the Boeing 314, a massive, elegant, long-range “flying boat” that could whiz around the world and land on water when there were no airports to receive it. This became the legendary Pan Am Clipper, whose one-class system was first class, pure luxury, all the way. He introduced it in 1939, bad timing for a passenger plane to span a world about to explode.

  The seats were convertible into beds, thirty-six of them, for the journeys, slow by jet standards, at 188 miles per hour. It took over a day to fly from New York to Southampton, England. There were intermediate stops in New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Iceland, and Ireland. It took six days to fly from San Francisco to Hong Kong. To graciously pass the time, there were dressing rooms, a cocktail lounge, and a dining area for six-course meals, pioneered by Trippe, catered by top chefs recruited from grand hotels, and served on silver by white-coated stewards.

  Transatlantic round-trip in 1939 cost $675, the equivalent of a future Concorde ticket. This was strictly a super-rich man’s adventure, a conveyance for top-shelf Yale types. Still, Trippe wasn’t dependent on putting fancy derrieres into fancy seats. Most of Pan Am’s profits came from the government, from carrying the U.S. mail around the world. The Clippers, and their bon ton passengers, were what gave Pan Am its mystique but made many normal Americans see red. In addition to the incongruity of selling champagne fantasy when the reality was still bread lines, there was the even harsher reality of World War II.

  After Pearl Harbor, the Clippers stopped commercial flights and were enlisted into military service, most famously transporting President Roosevelt to the Casablanca Conference. Winston Churchill was a huge fan of the flyboats. Nothing, not the Super Chief train, not the Normandie ship, could match their futuristic glamour. Unfortunately for seaplane devotee Trippe, the war saw not only the construction of countless airports but also the development of the Douglas DC-4 and the Lockheed Constellation, planes that were safer and easier to fly than the Boeing 314s. These “landplanes” made the seaplanes obsolete and cost Boeing a fortune in wasted development and production capacity devoted to Trippe’s folly.

  No folly could derail Juan Trippe from his godlike goal of ruling the skies. If landplanes must replace seaplanes, so be it. Pan Am bought the latest landplanes. It was number one or nothing. Even before the end of the war, Trippe foresaw the coming competition for his overseas routes from Howard Hughes’s rising giant TWA. He wanted to stop it before it was fully risen. Pan Am had the prewar monopoly on America’s foreign routes, the better to compete with the nationalized foreign carriers. Trippe saw Pan Am as America’s “chosen instrument.”

  But Franklin Roosevelt, for all his aristocracy, was devoted to free trade and a policy called “open skies” that would end Trippe’s “chosen” status. Once again, Trippe turned to Yale for a rescue, in the person of Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Trippe’s fellow Bonesman Henry. Clare Boothe Luce added a new phrase to the language when she attacked FDR’s open-skies policy as “globaloney.” Notwithstanding the advocacy and wit of both Luces, on the floor of Congress and in the pages of Time, Roosevelt held the line on free competition, and not only TWA but also American Airlines began flying the North Atlantic after 1945. Pan Am remained the leader.

  Despite Trippe’s failure with his 314 and his turning to Douglas and Lockheed for postwar planes, Boeing could never turn its back on Pan Am. And it wasn’t because Boeing founder William Boeing was a Yale man, like Juan Trippe. Just as Trippe was beginning his ascent, Boeing was bailing out of the namesake company he had built. Boeing was the son of a millionaire German mining engineer/lumber baron from Detroit. Young William had left Yale and moved to Washington State to expand his father’s barony on the Olympic peninsula. Before Yale, he had Anglicized his name from Wilhelm Boing.

  Like Trippe, Boing/Boeing had been mesmerized by the early flying machines and decided that, as the boy who had everything, he wanted to build his own. He created not only Boeing Aircraft but also a passenger service with his Boeing planes that was the core of what would evolve into United Airlines. For all his energy, Boeing got caught in the sights of Franklin Roosevelt’s trustbusters, led by future justice Hugo Black, who concluded that he had gone way beyond entrepreneurship to monopoly. The courts sundered Boeing’s holdings into three great entities: Boeing, United Airlines (both based in Washington State), and Hartford-headquartered United Aircraft, which included engine colossus Pratt & Whitney and Sikorsky Helicopters. The pre-ruling Boeing certainly looked like a monopoly, notwithstanding the noble capitalist intent of its founder. Boeing left aviation for good and devoted the rest of his life to thoroughbred horse breeding. He died in 1956, shortly after his former company had shaken the world with its successful test flights of the 707.

  Boeing, once its founder’s one-man show, similar to that of Boeing’s chief rival, Douglas Aircraft, now became faceless and totally corporate: similar, minus the Ivy, to the high-leverage, low-visibility financiers behind the Pan Am cult of Juan Trippe. Boeing was run largely by local engineers of Scandinavian descent, mostly trained at the University of Washington. Its head man was Philip Gustav Johnson, who, as Time described, “did his best to take the romance out of aviation.”

  An engineer who was the brains behind Boeing’s wartime cash cow B-29 Superfortress, Johnson had a stroke and died at forty-nine while visiting Boeing’s Wichita plant. He may have been unknown to Cholly Knickerbocker, but he was beloved by the assembly lines. His shoes seemed impossible to fill, especially given his demise at the end of the war, which meant the end of the huge demand for Boeing’s specialty military machines. In addition to the loss of Johnson, 38,000 Boeing workers had already been laid off. The future now was passenger transport, and after the 314 Clipper fiasco, Boeing had gotten out of the passenger business. All of a sudden, peace was a bad thing. The manufacturer of America’s most decorated wartime plane, the Flying Fortress, was finding itself besieged, in what looked like the start of Boeing’s Alamo.

  The man called in to save the day was a seemingly even more faceless character than Johnson. This was William M. Allen, a partner in the Seattle law firm that was Boeing’s counsel. An evocation of Ichabod Crane, the tall, balding, archconservative Republican Allen was a dry man in many senses. He was born in Lolo, Montana, the son of a mining engineer and a suffragette-prohibitionist who took great pride in having closed three saloons and built one church in her hometown. Allen graduated from Montana State University, where he did so well that he married the daughter of the governor of Montana and went on to Harvard Law School for his LL.B. Harvard wasn’t so easy. Allen got middling grades and was not recruited by Wall Street’s white-shoe firms, the ones shuffling the papers behind Juan Trippe’s financings. Humbled, Allen came back west, to the “big town” of Seattle and Boeing’s big law firm there.

  Having risen to become Boeing’s legal brains, Allen balked when the firm offered him its presidency. You don’t need a lawyer at the contro
ls, he demurred; you need an engineer. But Boeing persisted, and because his wife had just died of cancer, Allen took on the challenge in order to distract himself from the loss. His first effort nearly sent him back to the law. The long-range B-377 Stratocruiser, Boeing’s commercial version of the B-29 big bomber, was a big bomb. The massive double-decker, with its lounge and berths, harked back to the luxuries of that earlier bomb, Trippe’s B-314. But it was more expensive to operate than its now-entrenched Douglas and Lockheed competitors. Only Howard Hughes and Juan Trippe showed interest, but Hughes had money troubles, and Trippe was having second thoughts about selling airborne luxury in the midst of postwar austerity. Boeing was thus able to unload only a paltry fifty-five of the Stratocruisers. Luckily, Allen was able to recoup his R&D costs by reconfiguring the plane as a tanker version, which he sold to the military in great numbers.

  ROLE MODEL. William Allen, president of Boeing. Along with Trippe, the most powerful man in American aviation. (photo credit 3.2)

  The numbers were so good that Allen was emboldened to unleash his inner gambler and develop the radical idea of a jet tanker to refuel the new B-47 jets of the Strategic Air Command. Allen’s big roll of the dice was to develop a passenger prototype of the B-47 jet as well, and in that, he was egged on by Juan Trippe, whose attitude was “If you bet your house, I’ll bet mine.” But Allen had been ready to roll ever since 1950, when he had taken his first ride in one of his jet B-47s to the Boeing Wichita plant, then switched to a DC-6 prop to a business meeting in Chicago. He found the prop plane impossibly slow. It was a case of when you’re a jet, you’re a jet all the way. It was love at first flight.