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

by Stadiem, William

  Sam Spiegel, who was in his age-defying sixties in the youth-obsessed sixties, had an energy unconstrained by generation. He was the prototype of the Boeing Jet Setter. Born in Poland, he had lived everywhere, was at home everywhere, Vienna, Jerusalem, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Hollywood. He was fluent in six languages. His yacht, the Malahne, was an even hotter invite than the rival pleasure crafts of Onassis and Niarchos. Because Spiegel was truly Hollywood’s last tycoon, he hosted the biggest stars of all, who were catnip to the biggest aristocrats and the biggest politicians. The Malahne was a floating Igor Cassini column.

  For all the glory of his films, his friends, his homes on Park Avenue, in London, and on the Riviera, his impressionist art collection, his globetrotting epicurianism worthy of both Fielding and Fleming, Sam Spiegel was nonetheless affectionately known as the greatest con man in a business of con men. If Sam Spiegel was born to be Jet Set, it was because he was basically born on the run. He had started life in Galicia, a part of Poland that was something of a fertile crescent for Hollywood moguls. Mayer, Goldwyn, Fox, Zukor, and the Warner brothers all came from the same province, one that had a terrible reputation for its conniving peasants, a reputation that Spiegel always tried to avoid, claiming he was born in elegant Vienna. By his late teens, he had fled Galicia for that city of the waltz, then went on to Palestine as part of a Zionist youth movement. There he found and married a rich girl, had a child, and after five years, in the wake of some shady business dealings, completely abandoned them and fled to America.

  AQABA! Uber-producer Sam Spiegel (right) on the Lawrence of Arabia set in Jordan with director David Lean, 1962. (photo credit 11.1)

  Once Spiegel arrived in San Francisco, things quickly got shadier. Pretending to be an Egyptian government agent scouting royal investment opportunities, Spiegel was arrested by federal agents on charges of immigration fraud. He was convicted and spent nine months in a San Francisco jail. When he got out in 1930, he was deported. He ended up in Berlin at the height of its decadent Blue Angel period. There he finagled a job working as a publicist for the German releases of Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios. His first big project, All Quiet on the Western Front, bombed—literally. The Nazi brownshirts ignited explosives at the theater, with shouts of “Judenfilm.” Universal pulled all its product from Germany, and Spiegel was out of one more job.

  Undaunted, he made his way to London, stopping in Paris to stay—most likely on the house—at André Terrail’s George V, where he made movie connections with Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton. In London, Spiegel got a room at the Mount Royal Hotel, near Marble Arch, where he made one of his greatest contacts, with a just-starting young film editor named David Lean. Spiegel was jailed three times in Britain for assorted frauds and eventually deported to France, which in turn deported him to Mexico for trying to cheat the casino at Deauville. Slithering across the porous border at Tijuana, Sam Spiegel, who, as a multiple deportee, was persona non grata in the United States, changed his name to S. P. Eagle and found his way to Hollywood, where he knew he belonged.

  Intent on becoming a Hollywood producer, Spiegel arrived in Los Angeles in 1939 as part of the huge wave of European creative émigrés, a fleeing, incredibly brilliant Art Set that included Billy Wilder, Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, and Bertolt Brecht. Spiegel’s chief apologist was the superagent of the day, Paul Kohner, himself an earlier German émigré who was married to Lupita Tovar, a south-of-the-border Katharine Hepburn whom Spiegel had befriended during his exile in Mexico City. But even Kohner got sick of the complaints he was getting over Spiegel’s endless bounced checks. Spiegel somehow connived to rent a fancy home in Beverly Hills that was known as “Boys’ Town” for its all-night gin rummy games and hot and cold running hookers. A dedicated enthusiast for what would be a hallmark of the Jet Set male set—hiring expensive prostitutes—Spiegel once told Harold Pinter, “The secret of happiness is whores.” Billy Wilder often fantasized about a magic mattress that, apres l’amour, would fold up into a card table and make the woman disappear. Why did the Jet Set become such a hive of misogny? Because to the Set’s male players, women were nothing more than decorative pawns in a game of kings. Until Jackie Kennedy took charge of its culture and Mary Wells Lawrence started writing its airplane ads, women were viewed as either fashion objects on Igor Cassini’s best-dressed lists, sex objects on Temple Fielding’s best-brothel lists, or wealth objects on Town & Country’s most eligible lists.

  Spiegel’s uncanny ability to track down Hollywood’s most beautiful starlet-harlots gave him a reputation that was a badge of honor in a business of Bad Boys. It led to a friendship with Paul Kohner’s rival power agent, Charles Feldman, who helped Spiegel mount his first American production, Tales of Manhattan, released in 1942. Tales was about a set of tails, a bespoke tuxedo that brought severe misfortune to all who wore it. It brought great fortune to Spiegel, though, because it was an anthology film that allowed him, with Feldman’s aid, to assemble a huge cast of stars—Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Charles Boyer, Edward G. Robinson, W. C. Fields, and many more—to whom Spiegel endeared himself.

  By giving short and profitable work to half the town, Spiegel instantly made himself a job creator and part of the showbiz inner circle. Even though it took him four more years to get his next project off the ground, he began giving legendary New Year’s Eve parties for all the stars he was meeting, fetes that were the everybody-goes-there precursor of the superexclusive Swifty Lazar and Vanity Fair Oscar parties decades hence. True to form, Spiegel often stiffed the catering companies, though there was always another starstruck aspirant who would fall for his star bait. Meanwhile, the starlets kept on coming, some to be discovered, some to earn some pin money, such as a very young Marilyn Monroe, who became one of Spiegel’s top drawing cards.

  In 1951, Spiegel turned fifty and, at an age when most producers were either finished or famous, he had his first smash, with The African Queen. Queen was a pure Jet Set movie, pre-jet, filmed on location in Africa with the headline cast of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, the headline director John Huston, and the headline screenwriter Peter Viertel, who had lost his last wife, supermodel Bettina, to Aly Khan and was now married to Deborah Kerr. Producer Spiegel was too terrified of the snakes and bugs to spend time on location; he kept track of things by long-distance phone from Europe’s casinos. Once the Oscars started coming, the Immigration and Naturalization Service forgave him his past transgressions, and S. P. Eagle became the Sam Spiegel, the mysterious man of movies. The next year, the success of Queen spawned another African pre–Jet Set epic, Mogambo, starring Clark Gable, Grace Kelly, and Ava Gardner, not to mention an offscreen Frank Sinatra, who, armed with Harry Winston jewels, chased Gardner to Africa to try to put their marriage back on track and keep her out of the clutches of Gable. The public was riveted by these African romances, which did more for inciting lust and wanderlust than any issue of National Geographic.

  By the time Saltzman and Broccoli had managed to get Dr. No off the ground and still could not get a good table at Mirabelle unless Ian Fleming took them there, Spiegel was wallowing in so much Lawrence of Arabia Oscar gold that Fleming’s grandly rapacious villain Auric Goldfinger would have been wild with envy. Hugh Hefner would have been wild with envy over Spiegel’s sex life. The producer was on his third marriage. When he had begun to make a name for himself, his first wife had emerged from Israel and tracked him to Beverly Hills, where she nailed him for child support. His second wife, a twenty-year-old six-foot-tall Texas model-starlet, slashed all of his bespoke Savile Row suits and his Picasso paintings when he divorced her. Next up was another gorgeous model, this one from Virginia, with whom he enjoyed an open marriage, he with his entourage of call girls, she with her entourage of married tycoons, including William Paley and Jock Whitney. Tit for tat, Spiegel would also make plays for the wives of famous men, such as mesdames Henry Fonda, Harold Pinter, Aga Khan. When his wife ran off with Omar Sharif, Spiegel would at
tempt the same with Anouk Aimée. The name-dropping was as deafening as the smashed dishes.

  The sixties may have been the decade of sexual revolution, but Sam Spiegel had been revolting since the time of Trotsky and Lenin. His domestic arrangements would have been conventional only by the standards of a Turkish sultan. Hugh Hefner, by comparison, was a homebody. Even though this was the jet age and he would have his own DC-9 by the end of the sixties, “Hef,” as he was known, was a lot like Frank Sinatra in trying to replicate all the comforts of home, in his case the Chicago Playboy Mansion, everywhere he went.

  By the midsixties, Hefner had built a Playboy Club next to the new Hilton on London’s Park Lane, overlooking Hyde Park. The hotel and the club were the twin towers of the era’s American cultural imperialism. Hilton and Playboy were deeply fascinating to the English, who were far more intrigued by sleeping and partying in the New World mode than by doing the same at their twin towers of tradition, Claridge’s (or the Savoy) and Annabel’s. The lines waiting to get into the Hilton’s 007 Bar, a slick Hollywood-American homage to a vanished British colonial muscularity, were longer than those to come a block away at the Hard Rock Café, another landmark of America’s colonization of its former colonizer.

  Neither Hefner nor Hilton before him spent much time at their hot properties. Hilton had good reason to stay out of town. The 30-story, 500-room behemoth London Hilton, which opened in April 1963 as the tallest structure in proudly low-rise historic London, was considered by far the ugliest Hilton in the whole international chain. Its size overshadowed the dome of St. Paul’s, the clock tower of Parliament, and the spires of Westminster Abbey, all visible from the Hilton’s hideous glass-walled rooftop restaurant. It stood out like the sorest of thumbs, casting its modern Yankee shadow over discreet Mayfair. Buckingham Palace was only blocks away. Here was Conrad Hilton, looking down on the queen. Hilton was more than happy to give the credit for the hotel to its English moneybags developer-financier Charles Clore.

  A Spiegelesque self-made early corporate raider and property kingpin, Clore was born poor, Russian, and Jewish. He had fled the pogroms for London, where he had gotten his start in the rag trade. An art collector like Spiegel, Clore had amassed the world’s largest collection of Turners. Like Spiegel, he craved class, and he craved trophies. What better a trophy than one of London’s famous hotels? He tried to buy the Grosvenor House but was rebuffed. Then he tried a hostile takeover of the group that owned the Savoy, Claridge’s, and the Berkeley. The Old Guard was even more hostile to Clore than he was to them. Again his takeover failed. So one nouveau riche turned to another. Clore told Hilton, Give me your name, and I’ll build a hotel with it. It was unclear whom London resented more, Clore or Hilton, the Jew or the cowboy. But Clore was around to take the heat—not that he cared. He was used to being despised by the threatened English upper classes and the bitter lower ones. The Yiddish-speaking philanthropist may have been lampooned as “Santa Clore,” but he was secure knowing that he gave as good as he got.

  In the end, the James Bond movie memorabilia, the Conrad Hilton ice water, and the New York–style skyscraper views conquered all. The “Little America” that had sprouted up on Park Lane turned into a Little Las Vegas two years later with the construction of the equally garish Playboy Club. In the case of Playboy, Hefner didn’t need an English fall guy like Charles Clore to deflect the domestic snobbery. He had his own American fall guy in his number two man, Victor Lownes, paradigm of the wannabe Jet Setter, a man who bought the Igor Cassini myth and gave it a Chicago spin. Reminiscent of Eddie Gilbert minus the crime, Lownes was a spoiled rich boy who wanted to live like James Bond.

  Famous for his definition of a playboy—“someone who is getting more sex than you are”—Victor Lownes probably got more sex in real life than James Bond did in film and fiction. Lownes, born in 1928 in Buffalo to a prominent (if not Charles Clore–ish) building contractor, grew up on a Florida estate with servants and chefs. After accidentally killing a friend with a rifle he didn’t realize was loaded, Lownes was sent off for supposed discipline to the New Mexico Military Institute where Conrad Hilton had briefly stopped on his abortive educational journey to Dartmouth and where Conrad’s playboy-in-the-making son Nicky was one of Lownes’s classmates. The two rich kids hit it off, getting drunk on tequila Nicky smuggled in from his father’s nearby El Paso Hilton.

  BUNNY HOP. Playboy London chief Victor Lownes training British Bunnies, 1965. (photo credit 11.2)

  Despite the booze, Lownes was a top student and went on to the University of Chicago. He got married almost as soon as he matriculated, to a pretty and wealthy, plantation-born Southern girl who had been runner-up in the Miss Arkansas contest. Settling in to a Chicago version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit postwar surburban country-club dream, Lownes took a job as an advertising manager for Dog World magazine. He soon switched to the family business, an alarm company called Silent Watchman. By 1953, only in his midtwenties and without even having read an Ian Fleming novel to give him a role model, Lownes had a midlife crisis and, Sam Spiegel–style, walked away from his wife, his two children, and all convention.

  Lownes rented a loft in downtown Chicago and began hanging around the jazz clubs, where he met Hugh Hefner. Hefner, also fleeing his wife and kids, had just launched Playboy, with its famous Marilyn Monroe calendar nude that called the world’s attention to the fledgling publication. Hefner used the handsome Lownes as a male model in aspirational fashion spreads. In one typical feature, Lownes posed as a corporate executive flying to meetings in his private plane, foreshadowing the private Learjets of the Fortune 500. The two men had so much in common that Hefner, in 1955, convinced Lownes to work for him as Playboy’s promotions director, mobilizing student reps on college campuses and ferrying Playmates around the country to increase circulation and convince advertisers that this was no sleazy porn sheet but the cool, liberal, and liberated voice of a new generation.

  One advertiser that succumbed to his spiel was the Gaslight Clubs, members-only “key” clubs that featured bosomy cocktail waitresses corseted into Gay ’90s costumes. Lownes turned that Gay ’90s corset into the even more constricting and more revealing bunny uniform, and the concept of the Playboy Club was born. Neither Lownes nor Hefner knew anything about food service, but Lownes had a friend who did: Arnie Morton, whose family members were major Chicago restaurateurs. Arnie’s father, Morton C. Morton, had invented the “Mortoni,” a mixture of gin, vermouth, and a pickled onion. Shaken or stirred, the minimalist snob Ian Fleming would not have approved, but to Chicago, the Mortoni was the height of sophistication. Lownes, Morton, and Hefner became partners, and in 1960, the Playboy Club of Chicago opened and became as instant a cultural phenomenon as James Bond would be two years later.

  By 1963, having opened a string of enormously successful Playboy Clubs in America and infected with jet-age wanderlust, Lownes convinced Hefner to let him take the concept overseas. His first two targets were London and Jamaica. Loaded with Playboy development money, Lownes jetted to London and checked in at Conrad Hilton’s brand-new hotel tower in Mayfair, which was either the talk of the town or the shame of the city, depending on who was judging it. Lownes immediately noticed a seven-story Hiltonesque apartment house down Park Lane between the Hilton and the Dorchester. The edifice had a pedigree far grander than that of the derided Hilton. The architect was the Bauhaus master Walter Gropius. Not only one of the great locations in London, it also appealed to Lownes’s modern aesthetic, as had the New York Playboy Club, whose building was designed by Edward Durell Stone.

  What Lownes knew would make the London Playboy Club the cash cow of the Hefner empire was that it was not merely another T&A emporium but rather one of gaming, Lownes’s own Casino Royale. Barely a year after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and nationalized the capitalist-pig casinos that had been controlled by the American Mafia, England, smelling desperately needed foreign exchange, introduced the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act that saw an explosion of 1
,500 legal casinos in England within a few years. Suddenly, all the Meyer Lansky/Sam Giancana–led mobsters whom Igor Cassini had hoped to divert from Cuba to the Dominican Republic seemed to end up in Mayfair. At the Colony Club, for one, movie star George Raft was the celebrity front man for Meyer Lansky, attracting the Hollywood crowd. Victor Lownes coveted that crowd, and he set to work building a better money trap.

  While Lownes began negotiating to acquire the Gropius building and convert it from a block of flats to a Bunny hutch, he left the Hilton and moved into a very stately traditional British home on Montpelier Square, in Knightsbridge, hard by Harrods. There he used the Playboy cachet, which was then enormous, to begin entertaining the rich and famous, visiting and local. Chez Victor was, in effect, the Playboy Mansion–Europe, and the ease of jet travel created a whole new phenomenon of itinerant celebrity. The same stars might be spotted at dinner at Chasen’s one night, at 21 the next, and at a party at Victor Lownes’s on the third. The Beatles and the Stones were there, as were Warren Beatty, Frank Sinatra, Telly Savalas, Laurence Harvey, and Tom Jones, most lured by the catnip of the perfumed and microskirted horde of Playmate and Bunny aspirants. The mood was very “What’s new, pussycat?,” which had become Beatty’s trademark greeting and was the title of a hit movie written by Woody Allen, who was featured in a huge Playboy spread on the film with the topless dancers of Paris’s notorious Crazy Horse Saloon. Allen, too, joined the scene at Lownes’s. “Normal” women were rare, unless one considered Judy Garland a normal woman.

  Victor Lownes reigned as one of the century’s masters of publicity manipulation. He began a massive Bunny hunt across England. When he found his first six, he flew them to the Chicago Playboy Club for training, labeling the group “Bunnies from Britain,” to evoke the patriotic wartime “Bundles for Britain” campaign. Sex sold, and Lownes knew how to walk that high wire over the straits of prurience. He also connived to get the archbishop of Canterbury into the act. Someone had sent the prelate an invitation to join the Playboy Club at a discount rate, and he wrote a letter to the London Times expressing his displeasure at the notion, which meant more front-page publicity for Lownes.