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

by Stadiem, William

  The Playboy Club finally opened in June 1966, at the height of “Swinging London.” On only his second trip to Europe, Hefner was greeted by an entourage of thirty-two Bunnies at Heathrow waving American flags, which incited a protest from the American embassy that Old Glory was being sexualized as well as commercialized. Again more headlines for Lownes. Opening-night guests were a Jet Set Who’s Who, including Rex Harrison, Roman Polanski, Ringo Starr, Tony Curtis, Rudolf Nuryev, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Lee Radziwill, and a bunch of British royals led by the Marquis of Tavistock, one of the few blue bloods who still had millions to gamble away.

  When Sean Connery showed up a few months later, Victor Lownes knew he had hit the jackpot as London’s premier host. Lownes couldn’t get enough of England. He would later go mano a mano with his boss, Hefner, over the affections of an English goddess named Marilyn Cole who would be the magazine’s first “full frontal” Playmate. Before that, Lownes would make his own full-frontal assault on the British Establishment, the Ian Fleming crowd, when he decided to take over the Clermont Club, London’s ne plus ultra gambling den. Playboy was flash; Clermont was class, all the way to Windsor Castle. The showdown brought into high relief the dramatic contrast between the new American aspirational jet set, who could admit an ambitious bourgeois gentilhomme like Victor Lownes, and the crusty, stratified, exclusionary European Jet Set, who would rather fall on their ancient swords than admit a promising newcomer. It was the Old World versus the New, Bond before Connery versus Bond after Connery, fighting it out for the occupancy of the dance floor of Annabel’s.

  The two old boys taken on by the new kid on Park Lane were John Aspinall and Mark Birley, proprietors, respectively, of the gaming club and the dancing club that comprised the two-headed hydra of intimidating snobbism in the center of London’s garden of aristocracy, Berkeley Square. The snobbier of the two, Birley encapsulated the conflicts of the jet age through an exchange he had with a BOAC air hostess. He was seated in first class, of course, smoking a Havana cigar. The hostess asked if he would mind putting it out, because the smell was wafting back into the plane and disturbing the denizens of economy. He politely refused, noting that if he weren’t complaining about the smell “back there”—as he referred to the section that dare not speak its name—why should “they” complain about the smell “up here.”

  Aspinall was by far the more eccentric of these two arbiters of exclusivity. A child of empire, John Victor Aspinall was born in the midst of his mother’s social climb in 1926 in India, where his putative father was a doctor in the British colonial army. He later learned that he and the good doctor had no biological link. His mother had been trading up, having an affair with a general, and John was the result. After divorcing the doctor, Mrs. Aspinall was sailing back to England when she met a shipmate who happened to be a baronet, Sir George Osborne. She soon married him, and John was to the manor adopted. His stepfather sent him to Rugby, from which he was expelled, and then to Jesus College, Oxford, where he boasted that he never attended a single lecture and from which he dropped out, skipping exams to go to the races at Ascot.

  MAMA SAID. Nightclub impresario John Aspinall goes to London court with his mother on illegal gambling charges, 1958. (photo credit 11.3)

  From an early age, the stylish blond Peter O’Toole–ish John Aspinall loved to gamble, and he soon turned his hobby into his profession. This was the fifties, before the Gaming Act made gambling legal. But Aspinall knew how the British upper classes loved games of chance, and he became the Nathan Detroit of Debrett’s, running the biggest floating crap game in London. In Aspinall’s case, the craps were replaced by “chemmy,” Brit for baccarat chemin de fer, which happened to be the favorite game of Ian Fleming and his alter ego, James Bond. The entire plot of Casino Royale centers around a game of chemmy between Bond and SMERSH villain Le Chiffre.

  Some say the addiction known as “le vice Anglais” refers to a schoolboy S&M fantasy of being disciplinarily whipped; others say it is gambling. Aspinall managed to combine the two, renting hotel rooms for his upper-class acquaintances to squander their fortunes before Inland Revenue could take them away. He got his original guest list from a friend he met at the track, Bernard van Cutsem, who was the queen’s racehorse trainer. Van Cutsem knew all the aristocrats, and he knew their weaknesses, which he shared with Aspinall. That knowledge came to be power. Summoning his guests to his peripatetic gambling tables with engraved invitations from Smythson’s of Bond Street, Aspinall knew precisely how to cater to upper-class needs. Like Sam Spiegel in his Hollywood “Boys’ Town,” Aspinall always provided the finest champagne and provisions from Fortnum & Mason, often served by delectable tarts who were there to accommodate the gamblers in any way possible.

  Big money changed hands, and a lot of it went into the hands of Aspinall. At one of his enchanted evenings, Lord Derby was said to have lost 300,000 pounds, a major fortune in those postwar depressed times. Aspinall took the money to pursue his other grand passion, wild animals. He was less passionate about women, though he did take several wives, starting in 1956 with top model Jane Hastings. They moved to a fine home on Eaton Square, where Aspinall transformed the gardens into his own little game preserve for a young tiger, two Himalayan bears, and a rhesus monkey. In 1957, Aspinall bought a Palladian mansion near Canterbury, called Howletts, where he created his own large and free-range zoo. Cages were anathema to him, for both his wildlife and his wild life.

  In the next year, one of Aspinall’s chemmy games was busted. His spirited defense led to the passage of the 1960 Gaming Act, which all of England knew as “Aspinall’s Law.” This new legislation, which spurred the English gold rush in casinos, led to his renovating one of London’s grandest Georgian houses into the Clermont Club, at 44 Berkeley Square. Not everyone in Aspinall’s orbit was an aristocrat. Gambling was a Mob sport, and “Aspers,” as his friends called him, of necessity had to deal with such British gangsters as the Kray twins and their mentor, Billy Hill, a Jack the Ripper–inspired killer who left his trademark “V” carved into the faces of his (V)ictims. Hill was reputed to have formed an unholy alliance with Aspinall to create specially marked packs of cards that a plant at the table could read and help fleece the swells out of millions, a portion of the loot going to the shakedown specialist Hill.

  Among the first wave of the early-sixties fleecees of the Clermont were five dukes, five marquesses, twenty earls, and two cabinet ministers. New York’s Eddie Gilbert conveniently helped finance the enterprise, just as he had financed Igor Cassini’s Le Club, which in turn inspired Aspinall to create a version of Le Club in the Clermont’s unused basement. That was when Aspinall turned to his pal Mark Birley, who was at loose ends and needed something to do. The imposing six-foot-five bespoke-suited Marcus Lecky Oswald Hornby Birley, who even had his socks custom-tailored, was almost the same age as Aspinall but much more effete.

  Mark Birley came by his aestheticism as naturally as Aspinall had come by his social climbing; his father, Sir Oswald Birley, was one of England’s premier portrait painters. Everyone from Winston Churchill on down had sat for him. Birley’s Irish mother was also an artist, as well as an eccentric who created gourmet dishes like lobster thermidor to feed to her flowers. Mark’s sister, Maxime, crossed the Channel as a young woman to model and design couture for Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris and to marry into the aristocratic de la Falaise clan. Maxime’s brother-in-law had been the third husband of Gloria Swanson. Mark Birley thus grew up with that classic pre–Jet Set mix of artists, stars, tycoons, and aristocrats.

  After leaving Oxford, Birley had tried his hand at American commerce, working as an adman at the London office of J. Walter Thompson, and French luxury, opening an Hermès boutique in the Burlington Arcade. He found both experiences too foreign for his hard-core Englishness. Birley’s chief asset was his unequaled social network, through his own family, through his education at Eton and one year at Oxford (like Aspinall, he quit), and through his marriage to Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest
-Stewart, the daughter of the Eighth Marquess of Londonderry, whose famous palace, Londonderry House on Park Lane, was demolished to make way for the London Hilton and its imitators, other American modern, totally un-English lodgings, on that prime location. Birley decided to name his new nightclub, below the Clermont, after his wife and consecrate it as a proudly British refuge against Hiltonism and Playboyism and all the other vices américains.

  While the Clermont’s key backer was Eddie Gilbert, the money behind Annabel’s was that of Birley’s dear friend the fiscal buccaneer Jimmy Goldsmith, who swept Annabel Birley onto the dance floor on opening night and into a flagrant affair that would cuckold Mark Birley for the world to see. If Birley lost his wife to Goldsmith, he nearly lost his son Robin to John Aspinall when one of Aspinall’s beloved tigers mauled the boy beyond recognition and permanently disfigured the handsome heir. And the whole Clermont-Annabel’s set was implicated in the unsolved mystery of one of the charter members, Lord Lucan, who disappeared after killing his maid, mistaking her for his cheating wife. Both Aspinall and Birley were suspected of helping him hide in Africa, though nothing was ever proved.

  Annabel’s annual membership fee was the same five guineas as that of the Playboy Clubs, but for that equivalent of fourteen dollars, instead of getting a tacky Vegas filled with pneumatic Bunnies and wall-to-wall Sinatra, the Annabel’s member got an English country house filled with posh and porcelain debutantes twisting (but never shouting) to the Beatles. While the typical Playboy Club member (unless he was a star) probably could not pass Mark Birley’s fierce scrutiny and get into Annabel’s, most of the Playboy people couldn’t have been any more disturbed by that exclusion than they were about sitting “back there” in Juan Trippe’s 707s.

  By 1972, Aspinall was in financial trouble. He was forced into a fire sale. For a little over half a million pounds, Playboy, spearheaded by Victor Lownes, acquired the Clermont Club, that most English of trophies. The Broccolization of Bond, James Bond, was finally complete.

  JAMES BOND WAS, IN FEMINIST-SPEAK, A MALE CHAUVINIST PIG, BUT IT TOOK QUITE a while—until the late sixties, in fact—for that appellation to speak its name. Until then, Bond was, pure and simple, the male role model for the Jet Setter. For all its glamour, the advent of the jet age gave American women a lot to be angry about. The notion of the Jet Set was invented by and populated with a cadre of high-flying Bondian playboys who, in the view of early feminists, were wallowing in a sexist pigsty. The opening up of Europe exposed traveling American men to a continent of pliable women far beyond their previously chaste marriage-oriented fantasies of Eisenhower-era prom queens. As per the folklore of the times, European women were the Asians of the sixties, docile, obedient, adoring. The myth was easy to sell, and the dollar’s rate of exchange proved to be a remarkable aphrodisiac. Furthermore, if a voyager’s irresistible Yankee masculinity somehow failed to spark an offshore romance, he always had the fallback of turning to Temple Fielding’s “nightlife” section.

  That Fielding-reader wives were not grievously offended by the author’s pay-to-play suggestions was a sign of the misogynistic times. Betty Friedan’s heretical The Feminine Mystique, which called into question such suburban-housewife docility and bad-boy toleration, was not published until 1963, five years after the new jets had been enabling American men to sate their satyriasis in the compliant Old World. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was not founded until 1966. Before that, the only thing even resembling a feminist manifesto to which women could turn was a translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex, which was banned by the Vatican and sold a minute fraction of the copies of Fielding’s annual Guide or any of the Bond series.

  Although the early jet age seems like a stone age for women’s liberation, the seeds of change were being planted in this period by a number of jet-setting influential international woman innovators: the advertising whirlwind Mary Wells Lawrence, the iconoclastic designer Mary Quant, the nightclub impresario Régine. These were the pre-feminists, businesswomen all, who were making big marks in the men’s world they lived in. Although they were all, in varying degrees, dependent upon men and played to often offensive male fantasies in order to accomplish their ambitions in the testosterone jungle, their vast successes were a warning shot across the bow of male dominion, a harbinger of the change that was coming sooner than the playboys of the Jet Set might have guessed.

  FLY GIRLS. Pan Am’s stewardess training class, Miami, 1968. (photo credit 12.1)

  However, the prevailing stereotype before Betty Friedan’s tome hit the stands was that, sexually, jet-age Europe was a satisfaction-guaranteed sure thing, a continent of conquests. Every American could be his own James Bond. On the other hand, not every American woman could be, nor wanted to be, a Pussy Galore. The concept was as anathematic to one gender as it was fantastic to the other, setting the stage for what would become in the seventies a violent feminist backlash. Never had women been more objectified. And no women of the era were considered more covetable sex objects than jet airline stewardesses, who were basically Hefnerian Bunnies and Playmates with wings, centerfold creatures who had ascended, quite literally, to a higher plane. One of the biggest bestsellers of the Jet Set era was 1967’s Coffee, Tea or Me?, a concocted erotic memoir of two swinging stewardesses that was actually written by a man, Donald Bain, whose day job was as a publicist for Pan Am. Although no airline was specified, the book was unmatched product placement for all of them.

  In the category of Jet Set entertainment, Coffee was the direct descendant of the French farce Boeing-Boeing, a play by Marc Camoletti, which premiered in Paris in December 1960, soon after Air France inaugurated its 707 service across the Atlantic. The comedy is the story of a playboy juggling three air-hostess mistresses, whose life gets terribly complicated when the new jets cut the ladies’ flying times in half and double the playboy’s troubles. This was one concept that lost nothing in translation. A version opened in London’s West End in 1962 and played for seven years, giving the perennial No Sex Please, We’re British a run for its money. In 1965, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis did a movie version, which was a hit for Paramount, albeit not in the stratosphere of the James Bond films, where the suspense seemed to add a je ne sais quoi to the sex, and the sexism.

  The one woman whom most feminists would nominate as the rare heroine of the jet age was an adwoman who nonetheless trafficked in the same sexual stereotypes as the men who ruled the times. This was Mary Wells Lawrence, whose most famous of many famous advertisements, for both print and television, was Braniff’s “The Air Strip.” Here, as the jet flew south from the frigidity of the New York winter to the tropical steam heat of South America, a chorus line of nubile air hostesses performed an ecdysiastic removal of their multilayered Pucci uniforms, from a heavy coat and boots down to a miniskirt and heels. The seduction wasn’t subliminal; it was in your face. That was advertising, turning a client’s product into an object of desire. Somehow the sex that sold airline tickets seemed sexier when it was concocted by a woman, especially a sexy woman like Mrs. Lawrence, who may have confounded women’s libbers by having married the boss at Braniff who gave her the account that she was playing so sexy with.

  The Pussy Galore of Madison Avenue started out as a little fraidycat in small-town Ohio. Or, in the word of Helen Gurley Brown—another adwoman (before running Cosmopolitan) and putative heroine of the jet age who won the career game playing by male rules—Mary Wells Lawrence had been a “mouseburger.” The Brown appellation signified a plain Jane who wasn’t Bunny or Playmate or stewardess material. The best strategy for a mouseburger was the time-honored one of trying to find a Mr. Right to take care of her. What Cosmo added to the mix was advice on how this housekitten could erotically objectify herself into a sexual tigress and land an even righter Mr. Right. This was not the stuff of feminism.

  Lawrence was born Mary Georgene Berg in 1928 in steelville Youngstown, Ohio, of the same heartland German stock that produced fellow Ohio airline mogu
ls Eddie Rickenbacker and Frederick Rentschler. Her father was a traveling salesman of furniture; her mother was a buyer for a local department store. Teen Mary, whom everyone called Bunny, got her first taste of freedom and the sophistication for which she would become synonymous when her mother got her involved as a child actress in the Youngstown Playhouse. Her desire to act led to her escaping Youngstown’s blast furnaces for the bohemia of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen to study under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.

  Mary Wells Lawrence later credited her year of learning Method acting as an invaluable boot camp for Madison Avenue, where every campaign was akin to mounting a Broadway show. However, Meisner didn’t think she was ready for Broadway and sent her back to the Midwest, where she enrolled in the theater department of Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. Bunny Berg was cute, blond, and collegiate, but hardly a bombshell. So she did the mouseburger thing, ensnaring an engagement ring from Bert Wells, a handsome big man on campus headed for a big industrial design career. If she couldn’t make it in New York on her own, she would ride there on his coattails. To build a nest egg for their eventual move to Manhattan, the mouseburger dropped out of Carnegie Tech and moved back to the family home in Youngstown, taking a lowly job writing ad copy for the department store where her mother worked. Her assignment was promoting sales in the store’s bargain basement.