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

by Stadiem, William

  Not one to be deterred, Trippe decided that if he could not bring the plane to the engines, he would bring the engines to the plane. He went directly to Hartford, Connecticut, headquarters of Pratt & Whitney, to visit the company’s chairman, Frederick Rentschler, a deity of airline technology in the same pantheon as Trippe. The two aging gods had a heart-to-heart. Trippe was fifty-six at the time, Rentschler sixty-six. Both had legacy on their minds. Rentschler was cut in the same patrician mold as Yale man Trippe, except that Rentschler had gone to Princeton. He was of privileged Germanic stock transplanted to the Midwest, similar to that of Wilhelm Boing, and just as rich. A plutocrat version of the Ohio German Edward Reichenbacher, who started his career as a car mechanic, Rentschler came from a dynasty, based in Hamilton, Ohio, that owned one of the first major automobile companies, Republic Motors. It was also a family of superachievers. Frederick’s brother, Gordon, another Princetonian, went on to Wall Street to chair First National City Bank, the forerunner of Citicorp. A third Princeton man, George Rentschler, became the president of the mighty Baldwin Locomotive Company, overseeing the end of the railway era as his brother opened the one of flight.

  POWER ELITE. Frederick Rentschler (left), founder of Pratt & Whitney airplane engine manufacturer with Boeing founder, William Boeing, 1920s. (photo credit 4.2)

  Tall, blond, patrician, and Aryan, the sportsman Frederick Rentschler was central casting for the Red Baron. But underneath that Übermensch façade was a nerdy science whiz kid. Working at his father’s auto plant as a machinist after Princeton, Rentschler went to war and served in Europe as an army captain. Afterward, like every young man of his generation obsessed with flight, he went to work at Wright Aviation (in name only; the brothers were long gone), where he designed the first air-cooled engine. Everyone thought he was crazy, believing that only water-cooled engines could fly planes. It took him five years, but eventually, the navy got with the Rentschler program and agreed to buy the motor. That purchase led to Rentschler’s founding Pratt & Whitney in 1925. The engine became known as the Wasp and proved to be one of the seminal innovations of aviation.

  When Rentschler decided to go beyond naval planes and convinced Bill Boeing to use the Wasp on his passenger craft, this led to their firms’ combination into United Air Lines. It also led to the ire of Franklin Roosevelt and Hugo Black, whose commission calculated that Rentschler had made a profit of $21 million on an investment of under $300. Rentschler fought back, on the grounds of good old Yankee ingenuity. He had built the better mousetrap. Why shouldn’t he reap the rewards? But one of his imperious, monopolistic comments backfired: “The air between the coasts is not big enough to be divided.” Rentschler’s eye-popping success created front-page headlines in the Depression.

  The United/Boeing trust was busted under the Air Mail Act of 1934, forbidding the combine of airplane manufacturers and passenger airline fliers. Rentschler had to be content with Pratt & Whitney, where he made still another seminal move in creating a huge helicopter market with Igor Sikorsky. During World War II, Rentschler’s Wasp engines powered America’s great warplanes, the Hellcats and Thunderbolts, the Liberator bombers, the Skymaster transports. The war could not have been won without him, nor could the Cold War that followed. Rentschler’s horsepower was the force behind the new Boeing Stratofortresses that were the backbone of the Strategic Air Command. Rentschler was not a speechmaker, but when he spoke, the world listened. “There is no such thing as a second best air force,” he said. “There is the best, or nothing.”

  Both Trippe and Rentschler had graced the cover of Time, Trippe dubbed “Clipper Skipper,” Rentschler “Mr. Horsepower.” Now each cover boy exhorted the other to outdo himself. The J-75 was Trippe’s dream engine. He tried to convince Rentschler that this engine could be even more seminal than the Wasp. Rentschler was cautious. A key part of his legacy was safety. The J-75 was still being tested in giant wind tunnels, in cold and heat, rain and sleet. Furthermore, the engine was intended first for military, not passenger planes. Rentschler didn’t want any commercial passenger blood on his hands or his legacy.

  Now Trippe came at Rentschler with a whole new approach. In late fall 1955, Trippe invited him down to New York to lunch at the Cloud Club, a triplex membership dining hall on the sixty-eighth floor of the Chrysler Building. Although the Chrysler was classic deco, the bar of the Cloud Club was classic Princeton-Yale, very baronial Olde English. Both men felt right at home drinking there, steeped in the nostalgia for their Ivy glory days.

  But their business days were more glorious, and over lunch upstairs, Trippe pitched Rentschler that, for them, the best was yet to come. The setting of this pitch, the main dining room a floor above the bar, was pure Fred and Ginger, totally futuristic, with soaring granite columns and etched glass sconces. There was a cloud mural on the high ceiling and a vast mural of Manhattan on the north wall. The Cloud, as it was known, also boasted a humidor, a barbershop, a stock ticker, and for relief, the biggest men’s room in Manhattan. It was business lunch only, and suffice it to say, women were not welcome.

  But it was the perfect spot for Trippe to outline his own New Deal. Trippe offered to buy $40 million of J-75 engines, 120 in total, enough to power thirty jets, whether they be Douglas’s or Boeing’s. This totally upended the way planes were made. The frame always came first. Trippe didn’t care. That was the old way, and that was why there were so many anemic planes that couldn’t fly as fast as they should. Trippe was laying down a bet, a huge bet, that he could get someone, i.e., Rentschler, to turn the process upside down; and that he could get someone else, that someone being either Donald Douglas or Bill Allen, to build him a plane for Fred Rentschler’s superengines.

  Maybe it was the Cloud Club, or maybe Trippe had just worn him down. Rentschler finally said yes. Trippe wouldn’t get his engines until 1959, but get them he would. It was the last big decision Rentschler would ever make. In April 1956, he died unexpectedly at his winter home in Boca Raton, Florida. It turned out that he had been concealing a serious illness for several years, something that the all-knowing Trippe may or may not have known. Not that Trippe should have felt guilty about hounding Rentschler to his grave; Trippe would have expected the same treatment had their positions been reversed. Men were only the messengers. The airplane was the message. The airplane always came first.

  Once Trippe had Rentschler’s word on the engines, he went back to Seattle to see Allen with his fait accompli. Allen, however, refused to be moved. His 707 was even more accompli. He simply wasn’t going to change it. Back, then, to Santa Monica. This time Trippe didn’t need a Cloud Club to close the deal. The engine commitment and huge check would suffice. On the spot, Trippe told Douglas he would buy twenty-five of his DC-8s, equipped with the J-75s. But it wasn’t exclusive.

  Trippe had to be fastest, but he also had to be first. Consequently, he could not afford to turn his back on Bill Allen, even if Allen had turned his back on Trippe. And so he gave Allen the consolation prize of an order for twenty of the slower 707s. That way he was certain to be the first American carrier to fly the big jet, and to reap the attendant publicity whirlwind of being number one in a 1958 launch. If Trippe preferred the Douglas planes when they arrived the next year, he planned to unload the Boeing planes on his foreign competitors, or even the American Big Four. He assumed he was going to bull the market and force everyone to ditch the turboprops and get on his jet bandwagon. He knew the plane would speak for itself. Res ipsa loquitur.

  The one bandwagon Trippe did get rolling was that of Donald Douglas. Soon after Trippe announced his buy, Pat Patterson of United topped him with an order of thirty DC-8s, equipped with the weaker J-57 engines with which both the DC-8 and the 707 were originally conceived. Because United wasn’t flying across oceans, Patterson wasn’t concerned about the extra range the J-75s would give his plane. The reason he preferred the DC-8 to the 707 was because it was bigger—by six seats. Eastern soon followed suit, with a big Douglas order.

 
Now American’s C. R. Smith was in a corner. The train was leaving the station (or the plane the airport), and he hadn’t bought a ticket. He liked being bigger, but he liked being first (domestically) even more. Not wanting to seem like a United copycat, Smith went to Bill Allen with his own gambit: I’ll buy your 707 if you make it four inches wider. That would make it one inch larger than the DC-8. Like football, jets were a game of inches. Those four inches would enable the 707 to go from its present three-two economy-seat configuration to six abreast, three by three. Although Allen wouldn’t budge for Trippe, he changed his no-changes tune and jumped for Smith, giving him a new plane with those extra inches. Smith made it worth his while by ordering thirty 707s, which were designated “Astrojets.”

  Boeing’s new willingness to customize its 707 held great allure in the foreign market, where geographic peculiarities held sway. Qantas, which needed smaller jets for inter-Australian flights and bigger ones for its European and American routes, was Boeing’s first overseas account, soon followed by Air France. However, Bill Allen’s biggest bragging rights came when the Eisenhower White House ordered three 707s to become the first jet Air Force Ones. Eisenhower may have been spurred on by jet envy. Much had been made about Russia’s premier Nikita Khrushchev being the first world leader to fly a jet. That the jet was the Tupolev 104, which would have an even dicier safety record than Britain’s de Havilland Comet, was beside the point. As with Sputnik, Russia did it first. As Juan Trippe knew, first was best. Bragging rights were all-important in the tech race. Consequently, Eisenhower joined the jet landslide and contributed to its inevitability. As for Douglas and Boeing, the jet race began as a near-dead heat. A tally of orders at the close of 1956 showed Boeing had 141 to Douglas’s 123. In the end, Boeing’s first did prove to be best. Douglas was never able to catch up, and the 707, not the DC-8, became the poster plane for the new jet age.

  Amid all the jet jockeying among the Skycoons, something very big was missing. The elephant in the room was not in the room. In this tiny ultra-elite club of pioneers battling for control of the skies during the key developmental decade in the history of aviation, where, oh where, was the mad scientist, the pilot of pilots of the group who should have been the pacesetter in this race of the titans? Howard Hughes was arguably the fastest rich man on earth and undoubtedly the most eccentric. Where was he? And where was Hughes’s TWA, the only American airline capable of supplanting Pan Am as the colossus of the skies? TWA was “bi”—that is, it had a huge international presence—that made Trippe fear it, and a huge domestic presence that made the rest of the Big Four fear it as well. Because of Hughes, who was not only an aeronautical genius but also a movie mogul, playboy, and billionaire industrialist/philanthropist, TWA was capable of generating more publicity, more headlines, than all its rivals combined.

  Hughes was so outrageous that he could have been a figment of Igor Cassini’s imagination. Who cared what Juan Trippe was doing in the Cloud Club when the public’s interest could be piqued by what Hughes was doing in the clouds with everyone from Jean Harlow to Katharine Hepburn? Because of Hughes’s huge Hollywood presence, TWA was known as the “Airline of the Stars,” and it had a lock on the glamour/celebrity factor that sold papers and tickets as well. The Ivy Skycoons, like Trippe and Rentschler, had the pedigree but not the filigree. They weren’t social at all, not enough for Cholly Knickerbocker and certainly not for Hedda and Louella. Legends like Rickenbacker, or big bosses like Smith and Patterson, were all too rough-hewn to be part of any “set.” Most significant, they were all working far too hard to have time to socialize in a major way that would have generated column interest. But Hughes, the ultimate antisocialite, was pure column catnip. Plus, he loved to fly, and fly faster than anyone else. So where is he in this saga?

  Hughes was actually trying to live up to all the expectations that he would be the Lenin of the jet revolution. As usual, he had his own way. Rather than get caught in the Trippe-provoked contest between Boeing and Douglas, Hughes’s solution was “neither.” Instead, in 1956, he approached a third manufacturer, the San Diego–based Convair, a division of the mighty conglomerate General Dynamics, most famous for its Atlas missiles, and placed his chips, $400 million worth, ordering sixty-three Convair 880s. A few seats smaller than the 707 and the DC-8, the Convair had speed, a top of 615 miles per hour. That would make it the world’s fastest jet, for the world’s fastest man. The plane fit Hughes’s self-image.

  What it didn’t fit were the expectations of Hughes’s Wall Street financiers. Despite possessing seemingly all the riches on earth, even Howard Hughes was at the mercy of the moneymen. Just as Juan Trippe was funding his jet venture through the grand insurance companies, so was Hughes. The seemingly slowest, most deliberate men on earth, the actuarial types who ran Metropolitan Life, the Prudential, and the Equitable, were the fiscal horsepower behind the most mercurial.

  Putting this insurance financing together were three grand investment banking houses: Dillon, Read; Lehman Brothers; and Lazard Frères. These were Juan Trippe people, Cloud Club men, who had no patience for the endless and unfathomable shenanigans of Howard Hughes. No sooner had Hughes made his offer to Convair than the insurers and the bankers made up their mind: TWA could stay; Howard Hughes had to go. They wanted a new boss at the airline. Otherwise, TWA would be grounded for the jet age’s inaugural ball, and missing that party meant the end of the game. What followed was a multiyear, coast-versus-coast battle royal between the most vicious attack-dog lawyers of Hollywood and Wall Street.

  THE AVIATOR. Howard Hughes—Hollywood tycoon, record-breaking pilot, and founder of TWA—in his saner days, 1936. (photo credit 4.3)

  If the fiduciaries thought Hughes was crazy in the late fifties, they had no idea of the sideshow his life would become. No one in America had ever squandered more promise. Born in 1905 in Humble, Texas, Hughes was the fortunate son of the inventor of the most crucial tool in the oil boom that would create so many of the country’s greatest fortunes. That “drill bit,” the cutting device central to digging the holes from whence oil might gush, became the key to a fortune bigger than those of the oil wildcatters who did the drilling. The heir to Hughes Tool Company was a born scientist. At eleven, he invented the first radio transmitter in Houston. The next year, he created a motorized bicycle. At fourteen, he flew his first plane. In the two years before he was nineteen, in 1924, both his parents died, leaving him as Texas’s prime poor little rich boy.

  Hughes immediately dropped out of the Rice Institute, the MIT of the South-Southwest, and married the “boss’s daughter,” Ella Botts Rice, an heiress whose family had endowed the school. Baker Botts was Houston’s leading law firm. Although Hughes could rule Texas, he wasn’t interested. He took Ella straight to his fantasy destination, Hollywood. There he discovered he wasn’t interested in Ella, either. They divorced in 1929. At six-three and lankily, darkly handsome, Hughes didn’t need a Gary Cooper to play him; he looked like a star himself. But the loner was content with, actually intent on, remaining offscreen. Shortly after the split with Ella, the second film that Hughes produced, the silent comedy Two Arabian Knights, won the first Oscar for best director.

  Hughes’s classic was 1930’s Hell’s Angels, at $3.8 million of his inheritance, the most expensive, yet one of the best, films of its time. Starring a teenage Jean Harlow, whom Hughes discovered, as the love interest of competing World War I flying aces, Hell’s was considered the first big action film. Hughes himself directed and flew in the flying sequences, still considered among the most thrilling ever put on screen. The film was a blockbuster and secured Hughes’s place at Hollywood’s high table. He followed this with another classic, Scarface, though he got more press from his romances than his filmmaking.

  One of his most high-profile obsessions was with the Oscar-winning sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine. The first cousin of the sisters’ Tokyo-based patent-lawyer father was Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, a sane English take on Howard Hughes. De Havilland
had begun his career as a car mechanic before starting the company that produced the unmatched Mosquito fighter plane, before his legend was marred by his ill-fated Comet jet. However, in the thirties, when Hughes was pursuing his cousins, the name was air magic. Some might read a skyborne component into Hughes’s quest for the two stars, but the aphrodisiac here, as with Katharine Hepburn, was more likely celebrity than aviation.

  Yet even more than for his women, Howard Hughes was famous for his planes and his own high-altitude achievements. In 1937, he flew coast-to-coast, Los Angeles to Newark nonstop, in his self-designed H-1 racer in a mere seven and a half hours. The next year he circumnavigated the globe, stopping in exotic places like Moscow, Omsk, and Yakutsk, in under four days. He worked closely with Lockheed in designing the Constellation, the powerful four-propeller carrier with the distinctive three-fin tail that became the most popular plane to take across the Atlantic from its 1945 debut until the advent of the jets in the late fifties. It was the flagship of TWA’s deluxe New York–Paris “champagne” flight, as well as Pan Am’s workhorse for its round-the-world service.