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

by Stadiem, William

  Almost as a counterpoint to the Maas screed, the February issue of Esquire, which was on-stand in January simultaneously with the Post, featured a huge laudatory profile entitled “The Brothers Cassini: Oleg and Igor: The Clothes and the Column; Making the Best of Nearly All Possible Worlds.” The author was Brock Brower, a recent Rhodes Scholar and one of the rising stars of the Tom Wolfe–led New Journalism. Brower made the brothers look like the coolest guys on earth. He was blasé about Igor’s secret mission to Trujillo. “It very closely resembled diplomacy,” Brower wrote, “and wasn’t that Count Cassini’s old family trade? Wasn’t that Ghighi’s original ambition?” Brower gave Igor the floor to explain himself, which he did: “Trujillo has such a reputation for having paid everybody that anybody who ever went there was supposedly paid off. I was not among the lucky ones.” Again, it was a denial that Igor never believed would come back to haunt him.

  Esquire was much more likely to be read by John Kennedy’s New Frontier brain trust of government lieutenants than the unhip Saturday Evening Post. That had to be what Igor was praying for, that the good Esquire word would get back to Washington and influence Bobby Kennedy to call off his Justice Department attack dogs. Igor knew those dogs were on the hunt because no sooner had Maas’s piece come out than Charles Wrightsman began giving him and Charlene the silent treatment and stopped inviting them to his Palm Beach events, often attended by Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Joe Kennedy had been Igor’s main champion. But with Joe totally incapacitated by his December 1961 stroke, Igor didn’t have an in-house Kennedy to plead his case. In that same cruel December, he had also lost his greatest adviser of all, his mother, to a heart attack at age seventy-nine. He was in extended mourning and very much at sea. “Maman” would have known exactly how to finesse this Dominican embarrassment.

  With the two huge profiles on the country’s newsstands, Igor Cassini became prime gossip overnight. A month later, at the end of February, he became front-page news. As it turned out, even in the White House, the Post trumped Esquire. Square beat hip, Norman Rockwell beat George Lois. Bobby Kennedy, purer than ever and intolerant of his brother’s predilection for guys and dolls, for Hollywood and Vegas and Hoboken, was pushed over the edge by Maas’s story. RFK formally declared war on the Jet Set when he got a Washington grand jury to indict Igor on four counts, including conspiracy with Englander, of violating the 1938 Foreign Agent Law. Igor faced a possible fine of $40,000 and, far worse, twenty years in prison if found guilty.

  Igor quickly got on the phone and retained Louis Nizer, the country’s top gun. Nizer was the author of My Life in Court, the bestselling lawyer memoir of all time. Nobody could beat Louis Nizer. So nobody could beat Igor Cassini. Or could they? Nizer quickly brought Igor to court in Washington and had him plead not guilty on all counts. Igor repeatedly insisted he had never been an actual agent for the Dominican Republic, certainly not under the law as written. But per the indictment, his companies had been paid over $200,000 by someone and would have made over $300,000 more had the Trujillos remained in power and honored their commitments. That was a huge fortune, and not just to Saturday Evening Post readers. It looked rotten, as rotten as Eddie Gilbert’s self-help “borrowing” of the $2 million from his company. Looks aside, expert insiders felt it was a weak case under a weak law. It was a long way from an indictment to a conviction, and nobody had a bigger wall of defense than Igor with Nizer as his mouthpiece, with Wrightsman, Dulles, even JFK, as his presumed allies, and with the government itself involved in dispatching him on his diplomatic mission to Trujillo in 1961.

  Nizer went directly to cut a deal with RFK and his deputy attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach. With all the problems in the country and the world, from civil rights to Vietnam wrongs, why are you pursuing such a Mickey Mouse case? Nizer pressed them. Katzenbach tried to placate him with logic, that Justice needed a test case under the foreign lobbyists’ registration act, but Bobby cut to the chase. “Ghighi has not come clean with me,” he snapped to Nizer. “Your client is a son-of-a-bitch blackmailer.” It was then that Nizer realized Igor’s phones were being tapped. During one conversation with Nizer, Igor had lashed out at Bobby by threatening to use the power of Cholly against him. “That self-righteous bastard,” Igor had fulminated. “I know the redhead he’s sleeping with.”

  Igor was convinced that Oleg’s lines were being tapped as well. Despite Igor’s troubles, Oleg was still a Kennedy darling. That tight-knit clan couldn’t seem to grasp that the Cassini brothers were even tighter than they were. The Kennedy sisters—Pat Lawford, Eunice Shriver, Jean Smith—were foolishly indiscreet about Bobby’s vendetta against Igor. “Bobby’s going to put him in jail,” they’d joke with Oleg about how fire-and-brimstone Puritan their Catholic brother had become. Ever protective Oleg would immediately call from Hyannisport, Palm Beach, the White House, wherever he was, and blurt out the news to Igor, begging him to throw himself on Bobby’s mercy. What mercy? Igor would laugh. He was one stubborn, proud Russian count who made it a point to stand up for his honor, even if he knew that the law was on Bobby’s side.

  Igor determined that he would subscribe to the John Paul Jones school of “I have not yet begun to fight.” First, however, he went to Hearst and did the gentlemanly thing of offering to resign his Cholly Knickerbocker column. As he put it in his memoirs, “For a social arbiter, part of whose job was to reveal the peccadilloes of the privileged, to be caught with my own pants down was death.” He counted on the Hearsts to refuse his offer in a gentlemanly fashion and give him a vote of confidence. He had eighteen years of service, fifty syndicated papers, twenty million readers. He was like blood with the Hearsts. He assumed they would stand by him forever. His assumptions were pure hubris. The Hearsts granted him an indefinite leave of absence with no writing and no pay. Igor fingered Randolph Hearst as the one who did him in. The father of future terrorist-fugitive Patty Hearst treated the indictment as if it were a conviction. His employer’s cautious response was the handwriting on the wall.

  The finger, pointed at Igor, writ even larger at Martial, where the clients began resigning in droves. Igor’s indictment was the opposite of the public relations they had signed on for, especially with the mounting broadsides against his endless conflicts of interest. Only Gianni Agnelli stayed the course. Igor also stepped down as president of Le Club. Overnight, the social arbiter became untouchable. One day at La Caravelle, the Kennedy canteen in Manhattan, Igor was having a power lunch with another aristo-PR man, Count Rudi Crespi. They couldn’t believe the way the beautiful people, yesterday their dearest friends, were crossing the room to avoid them. Then they looked behind them. At an adjacent banquette was the Duchess of Argyll, whose kinky sexual escapades, emerging in her divorce, would give the Profumo Scandal a run for its money as Britain’s Disgrace of the Year in 1963. Igor blamed his being avoided on the proximity of the duchess, though in time he was able to clear a room all by himself.

  Petty treachery turned to grave tragedy in April, when Igor’s fall hit home. Charlene, now thirty-five, had been depressed long before Bobby Kennedy turned on her husband. That her father had put Igor on his “no fly” social zone following the Post article had only added to her sense of desperation, a sense that ran in her family. Her mother, Irene, had drunk herself to death, deeply depressed because C. B. Wrightsman gave her barely a penny despite being worth a fortune; everything went to his new Jayne. Igor had to support “Big” Irene, and he was the one who had to break down her door to discover her dead body. C.B. had disinherited older daughter “Little Irene” and was not much more generous with her sister, Charlene. He had recently upped her monthly “allowance” from $500 to $1,000, hardly heiress money.

  The Jet Set Cassinis were running on empty, prompting Charlene on March 31, 1963, to write a Dear John letter to her former suitor and close friend and neighbor. “Dear Mr. President,” she began, questioning whether the chief fully realized “the repercussions of Ghighi’s indictment. Brushing aside the personal emb
arrassment it has caused our family—it has completely ruined us financially … just at a moment when there are staggering lawyer’s bills to meet. My father hasn’t made a gesture to help us, and if it were not for Oli who lent money, Ghighi couldn’t have even afforded a lawyer … I tell you this simply because this alone should satisfy Bobby who seems to be hell-bent in punishing Ghighi … My husband is not an arch-criminal, and whatever mistakes he may have made they don’t warrant the … ‘full treatment.’ ” Charlene told Jack, as she referred to him later in her plea, that if he thought it would work, she herself would go and see Bobby.

  Charlene never received a response, formal or informal, that April: for her, the cruelest month of her life. To begin with, on April 6, her dear friend and glamorous ski instructor from Sugarbush, Peter Estin, was found dead from an overdose of vodka and sleeping pills in his room at the posh Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue. The Prague-born Estin, who had degrees from Dartmouth and Harvard and had taught skiing in Chile, seemingly had everything to live for as the booming Vermont resort’s director of skiing. The same age as Charlene, he had been with her at Sugarbush when she broke her leg several seasons before. Charlene, great at golf, horses, the slopes, treated the leg cavalierly, dancing on her crutches. The leg never healed correctly. In 1962, changing a lightbulb on a stool, as in a Polish joke, she fell and broke her nose. She also suffered a concussion and began taking painkillers and sleeping pills for severe headaches.

  Those headaches prevented her from attending Peter Estin’s Boston funeral, as well as that of Burt Rupp, an old boyfriend and the husband of a Chrysler heiress who, a few months before, had taken his own life with the same vodka-pill combination. C. B. Wrightsman had seen his daughter (but not Igor) a few days before and, not liking what he saw, insisted she check in to a clinic. Charlene was insulted, and Igor backed her up, letting her simply cool out at their Fifth Avenue apartment (he still worked in his Sixty-first Street townhouse) while he flew to Boston on the plane of George Skakel, Ethel Kennedy’s brother, to attend the Estin rites. Even with Bobby threatening to destroy his life, Igor was like family to the Kennedys and their satellites—a bad brother, perhaps, but family nonetheless.

  On April 8, Igor returned from Boston and tried to get Charlene out of the apartment to go to an Academy Awards party for Charlie Allen, the head of Allen & Company, the investment house behind Columbia Pictures. Charlene begged off, preferring to enjoy Hollywood vicariously by watching the Oscars on television. So Igor left Charlene with her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Marina, and their nine-year-old son Alex’s Polish nanny, assuming she was in good hands, to watch Columbia’s Lawrence of Arabia dominate the proceedings.

  No sooner had Igor left for the Allen fete than Charlene asked Marina to pick up a prescription for her down Madison at Zitomer’s pharmacy, druggist to the rich and famous. The prescription was for Tuinal, a powerful barbiturate. Once Marina returned, Charlene left her and the nanny. While Gregory Peck gave his acceptance speech for To Kill a Mockingbird, Charlene went into the master bathroom, swallowed all thirty of the pills, and never woke again. Igor arrived home in black tie just as an ambulance was rushing his wife to Lenox Hill Hospital, where her stomach was pumped and other emergency measures were taken. To no avail.

  Society Suicide. It would have been the perfect thing for Igor to cover in wrenching detail were it not about himself, and if he had somewhere to write. But he didn’t. He was that most alienated of creatures, a columnist without a column. Charlene’s funeral at the Frank Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison, undertaker to the East Side elite, was sparsely attended, in great contrast to the overflowing ceremony for Igor’s mother at the Russian Orthodox church a little over a year before. Of Charlene’s family, only sister Irene showed up. C.B. and Jayne attended a mass for her, then jetted back to Palm Beach.

  Oleg was there. Oleg was always there, plus a few odd Russian aristocrat/fellow PR men like Serge Obolensky, who represented Conrad Hilton, and Vava Adlerberg, who had taken over Igor’s account for Harry Winston. When Charlene’s will was read, the estate of the daughter of one of the richest men in America amounted to a paltry $100,000, not counting some jewelry, which she bequeathed to her sister. Igor got the rest, including sole responsibility for Alex. He had joint custody of Marina with her mother, Darrah.

  Igor had nothing left but to fight, to win back his honor and, more important to this eminently practical man, his career. Accordingly, he shipped Marina off to prep school at Oldfields, her mother’s alma mater, and took little Alex out of Buckley and flew him to enroll as a boarder at the Ecole Nouvelle in Lausanne, near Igor’s own childhood playing fields. He rented out the Fifth Avenue apartment, took his two dogs and his tennis racket, and crashed at Oleg’s new palace near Gramercy Park, which had been assembled stone by stone from its original Dutch Renaissance incarnation by a Wells Fargo heir. There were suits of armor, stuffed animals, and equestrian collectibles everywhere. It wasn’t New York. It was Europe. And the Old World was precisely what Igor needed, to get away from the constant and ruthless hounding of a very modern press whose style he helped create, and of a government that he’d recently had dreams of serving in high style. How indeed the mighty had fallen.

  Igor was retrenching because he was planning on waging a Hundred Years’ War, if need be, with Louis Nizer, against the despot who was Bobby Kennedy. His biggest problem was that he couldn’t afford a hundred-day war. Louis Nizer’s rates were the highest in the land, and he didn’t do criminal cases on contingency. Igor’s hope was that Oleg would continue to foot his legal bills. Unfortunately, Oleg, thanks to his inside track with the Kennedys, knew precisely how much Bobby wanted his brother’s scalp. Nizer had outlined a long, complex, and expensive technical defense that he convinced Igor would carry the day. Oleg was terrified of Bobby’s passionate vendetta. No legal technicalities, he believed, would withstand the wrath of RFK.

  Jack Kennedy had mentioned to Oleg that Bobby might settle for a nolo contendere plea. It wasn’t an admission of guilt, but it wasn’t not guilty, not by a long shot. Jack told Oleg it might satisfy Bobby’s need to inflict shame on Igor. Igor didn’t like the idea of trusting Bobby not to send him away for twenty years. Nizer went to see JFK at the White House, where the president gave Nizer “my word” that Igor “wouldn’t be punished.” Armed with the JFK off-the-record guarantee, on October 8, a little over a month before the assassination in Dallas, both Igor and Paul Englander pleaded nolo contendere to the government’s charges.

  On January 9, 1964, JFK was gone but his promise was kept. Igor was fined $10,000 and placed on six months’ probation. Englander got the same sentence. The real guilty verdict had come back in late October 1963 from the Hearst Corporation after the nolo plea. Igor’s suspension was declared over. He was formally fired, his place taken over by a busty, sassy Texan named Aileen Mehle, whose “Suzy” column in the New York Mirror had long been nipping unsuccessfully at Cholly Knickerbocker’s heels. A countess Mehle was not. Subtle she was not. She was from El Paso, Conrad Hilton’s tombstone territory. Her idea of fun was to start a feud with Hilton’s Zsa Zsa by cattily nicknaming her Miss Chicken Paprika of 1914.

  The timing was uncanny. Just as the brash, uncultured Texan Lyndon Johnson was replacing the suave John Kennedy in the White House, a similarly brash, uncultured Texan was replacing the suave count Igor Cassini in the House of Hearst. It seemed there were barbarians at all the gates. Suzy wasn’t exactly Arthur Frommer to Cassini’s Temple Fielding, because she was covering the same ritzy beat that Cassini had. But she was tourist class, not deluxe. Although she tracked the Jet Set, she was a complete outsider, nose pressed up against the crystal, sneaking a peek through the first-class curtain. There would never be another genuine article like Igor Cassini.

  It was rotten luck that Eddie Gilbert was also saddled with his own legal nightmare. Igor knew Eddie, always the gambler, would have backed him whatever the odds. But Igor, himself a gambler, was betting on Eddie’s resurr
ection. He better come back, Igor declared to himself. There were lots of things they could do together. Igor still had Le Club, and he still wanted to franchise it. And he had an idea, a big idea, for a magazine called Status. Columns were so fifties. Look at Esquire. Look at Playboy. Magazines were hot. Status would be the hottest. Igor was only forty-seven. He had the ultimate Rolodex.

  The Rolodex cards, however, were changing, and faster than Igor realized. The crashes of Eddie Gilbert and Igor Cassini were even more damaging to the Jet Set than the cluster of 707 crashes was to the jet. Here were two of the standard-bearers of the new supercharged world of glamour, and both were terribly tarnished. The veil of the Jet Set had been lifted, and what was behind it was a darkness the public never expected. It wasn’t that these emperors had no clothes; they had dirty clothes. And their falls from grace were nearly simultaneous with the death of President Kennedy, the ultimate symbol of the Jet Set.

  The bloodstains on Jackie Kennedy’s pink Chanel suit in Dallas said it all; that it was a Chanel suit and not an Oleg Cassini suit said something as well. The order was changing. The fantasy of the perfect upper class had been exploded. Camelot had been destroyed. A new medievalism of violence, discord, and civil unrest seemed to be descending. America’s postwar boom, which had evolved from Eisenhower wholesomeness to Kennedy sophistication, was about to be upended by another war, in Vietnam. Still, leisure remained a fact of life, and people needed to escape, now more than ever. But the tone was different, and the fliers were different. Just as Frommer was beginning to compete with Fielding, the Jet Set of the rich was about to face a showdown with the jet set of the masses. Juan Trippe understood this more than anyone else. A month after Igor’s sentencing, he and Boeing began to develop plans for a new mass jet that would become the 747.