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

by Stadiem, William

  Waiting in the wings was Roger Vadim. He had met Jane once before, in 1958. She had just left Vassar and come to France in a desultory effort to become an artist, a female Gene Kelly in An American in Paris. Because she had better connections than any other American art student in the city, she spent much more of her time on the Régine’s/Tour d’Argent circuit than at the École des Beaux-Arts. One night at Maxim’s, on a date with actor Christian Marquand, she met Vadim, at the height of his Bardot Svengalihood.

  Jane was impressed. Vadim was not. He sent his friend and amorous rival Marquand a note making fun of Jane’s fat ankles, a note that Jane found and read when Marquand went table-hopping. Jane’s ankles were, forgive the expression, the Achilles’ heel of her beauty, her one bodily feature that wasn’t perfect and that she couldn’t change. Vadim had hit the G-spot of her insecurity. Was that his genius with women? Vadim’s misogynistic cruelty proved to be an aphrodisiac that would simmer for years, until they met again, in 1962. Then it boiled over into Europe’s most celebrated affair.

  By the time of Klute, the honeymoon with Vadim was over, though they would not divorce until 1973. Thanks in part to Vadim’s sexism and in part to the times, Jane had become radicalized and would abandon Maxim’s for Hanoi. Until she did, she and Vadim were the Jet Set’s prime power couple, dividing their time between Malibu and St. Moritz, Paris and Saint-Tropez, with Jane experiencing a schizophrenic career that was half Hollywood ingenue and half Euro sex goddess. On the American side were wholesome confections like Barefoot in the Park; on the continental side were X-rated romps like The Game Is Over, which could have been retitled as “Bareassed in the Parc Monceau.”

  And then there was Barbarella, shot in Rome in the last gasp of the Dolce Vita, before that sweet life turned sour with the Red Brigade’s kidnappings and bombings. The Vadims’ Roman lifestyle was basically Malibu on the Via Appia Antica, their villa a crash pad of druggie Hollywood hippies like Jane’s brother, Peter, and his Easy Rider (and Dr. Strangelove) screenwriter Terry Southern, who wrote the Barbarella script with Vadim. Not even Southern could save this porno comic book of a film, which many cultists have subsequently embraced as way ahead of its time—by forty years. Luckily for Jane, her Hollywood attempt to atone by “getting serious” in the 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? got her an Oscar nomination and broke Vadim’s Euro curse.

  If Vadim could have gotten work in America, he surely would have turned Jane into a Hollywood sex goddess before she did it for herself in Klute, but nobody here would hire him, symbolic of this country’s growing disenchantment with Europe in the late sixties. This was a terrible sign for the new 747s, which needed all the European enchantment Mary Wells Lawrence and Madison Avenue could possibly muster. Alas, all those babes in Pucci minis had lost their mystique, replaced as sex symbols by tie-dyed slum goddesses. The glamour that was the Jet Set had become passé, almost Nixonian. Chic wasn’t chic anymore. After Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love, radical was the new chic. The Jet Set lost its groove, if it ever had one. Easy Rider made the American South the hip destination; nothing in Provence or Tuscany seemed nearly as exotic. Juan Trippe’s high-speed jet travel was no longer cool. The trips that mattered were Timothy Leary’s.

  Perhaps the saddest of all commentaries on the Jet Set and the most vivid symbol of its decline was the mésalliance between Oleg Cassini and Bernie Cornfeld. The Russian count and the Brooklyn socialist were the odd couple of the decade, the ties that bound being funny money and fading elegance. By the end of the sixties, Oleg Cassini, in his midfifties, was a man alone. His post as “Secretary of Style” in the Kennedy cabinet was long gone, as was his top client. When Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis in 1968, the pretense and patriotism of using an “American” designer had gone by the wayside. There was no need for Jackie to get Oleg to do Givenchy for her. Givenchy could do it himself, and Ari would pay.

  Losing Jackie wasn’t half as bad as losing Igor. Igor had thought the trials over his Dominican misadventures would end with the nolo contendere plea. He was vastly overoptimistic, for his next menace after the Justice Department was the Internal Revenue Service, who ultimately assessed Igor for nearly three quarters of a million dollars in tax evasion. Meanwhile, he kept partying as if the Jet Set would last forever. He got involved with a Playboy centerfold named Connie Mason, another Virginia belle like the one who had gotten him tarred and feathered as a young gossip columnist, which was nothing compared to what Bobby Kennedy had done to him. He turned Mason into a Ford model and then a horror-movie star before she dumped Igor to wed a powerful Hollywood lawyer.

  Igor also started his own magazine, called Status. He dubbed it “the magazine for the restless,” but despite a prestigious list of contributors that included Graham Greene, Salvador Dalí, James Baldwin, Art Buchwald, and Gloria Steinem, the most restless people involved in the venture were its investors. Status closed shop in under three years, in 1968. All the while Igor was bunking with Oleg, in the latter’s Renaissance townhouse off Gramercy Park. But the brothers’ bromance ended in a brutal fistfight at La Côte Basque, site of the Truman Capote spill-all Esquire story that ended his own romance with the swans of the Jet Set. The altercation was over Igor’s detestation of Oleg’s fatal attraction to Bernie Cornfeld, the pied piper of mutual funds and a man who made the Cassinis’ formerly favorite funny financier, Eddie Gilbert—still fighting his way through the courts for his defalcations—look like a pillar of fiscal rectitude.

  The tiny, plump, red-bearded Cornfeld resembled a lapsed Hasidic rabbi decked out in Cardin and Hermès. He was the visual antithesis of the sleek, perfect Oleg Cassini. Cornfeld’s legendary pitch line in recruiting his mutual fund salesmen was “Do you sincerely want to be rich?” He obviously used it on Oleg Cassini, and it worked. Oleg sincerely believed Bernie would make him the global king of fashion that he always dreamed of being and, had JFK not been assassinated, he might have become on his own. Igor did not believe anything Bernie promised. He knew a con man when he saw one, even if it was every time he looked in the mirror. He wanted to save his brother, but Oleg was one of many thousands who could not resist Bernie’s unique call of the wild.

  Like the Cassinis and so many of the leaders of the Jet Set, Bernie Cornfeld was born on the run—in his case, in Istanbul in 1927, to a Romanian father who was an early film producer and a Russian mother, a nurse. Bernie’s lifelong interest in show business was thus genetic; he would turn high finance into show business, which was the key to his success. His parents had met in Vienna and then together immigrated once more, to Providence and then to Brooklyn in the early thirties, in the depths of the Depression. Bernie, who loved being a Boy Scout, overcame a severe stutter and joined the merchant marine to travel the world. In 1948, he entered Brooklyn College and eventually made it through Columbia’s School of Social Work. Bernie was both a social worker and a socialist, becoming an active member of the Trotskyite Socialist Youth League. The young idealist soon found that if he wanted to redistribute the wealth of the world, politics were not the answer. He would have to do it himself.

  Bernie became a mutual fund salesman on Wall Street, and in spite of his former stutter, he was immediately good at it. He was passionate, not at helping the rich get richer but at helping average people make money. However, as much as Bernie liked selling funds in New York, the magic of postwar Europe that had beckoned Temple Fielding beckoned him as well. He had a half brother who’d become a vice president in 20th Century Fox’s Paris office, in the years when studio head Darryl Zanuck was basically living in the George V and ruling Fox by long-distance phone. In 1955, Bernie Cornfeld, with a few hundred dollars, took a Pan Am flight to Paris that would change his life and high finance as well.

  Bernie quickly discovered that there were two main constituencies of the approximately 700,000 Americans in pre-jet Europe, a major segment of the more than three million Americans then living abroad. One was the “exiles,” neo–Lost Generation types, educated
, bohemian, people like Bernie himself who wanted something more out of life than Eisenhower suburbia. The second, much larger group (more than 600,000) was made up of the American servicemen and their families, there to fight the Cold War. This latter group would have done anything to be back in Eisenhower suburbia, but Uncle Sam wouldn’t let them go. These soldiers stayed close to the bases. Bernie didn’t see many of them at the Café Flore or Les Deux Magots. It was Bernie’s genius to put these two groups together by turning the usually unemployed but ever hungry educated exiles into mutual fund salesmen to peddle Wall Street products to the homesick servicemen. To the joint benefit of the salesmen and Bernie’s own fortune, the pitch was that once the soldiers got home, they would be able to afford that slice of the suburbia of their dreams.

  Bernie bought a used Simca, found a cheap apartment in the monied 16th arrondissement, and started taking out ads in the Herald Tribune offering ambitious Yanks the chance to make the then-princely sum of over $10,000 a year selling mutual funds. The requirements? Sales ability, hustle, and, rare in an ad for salespeople, “a sense of humor.” Funny money was, from the beginning, what Bernie Cornfeld was all about. He found a lot of wannabe writers, artists, and musicians, gave them a five-day crash course in finance, and then sent them out to make their fortunes, so they could trade up from saucisson to foie gras.

  Off the record, Bernie promised all his recruits that he would make them millionaires. By 1962, he was keeping his word. He had moved his company, called Investors Overseas Services, to Calvinist Geneva, in the land of a thousand banks. He had been pretty much run out of Paris by Charles de Gaulle, who was as suspicious of American mutual funds as he was of Conrad Hilton’s running ice water, even though IOS wasn’t selling to French citizens, only expat Americans. De Gaulle basically tried to kill Bernie by regulating him to death. Now that Bernie had become fluent in French and Francophile in his tastes, by reorganizing in nearby Geneva, he could have his gâteau and eat it, too.

  By 1962, IOS had expanded way beyond GIs, with 20,000 clients in over sixty countries. Bernie charmed Wall Street’s Jack Dreyfus into letting him be the exclusive overseas agent for the prestigious Dreyfus Fund, then created his own “Fund of Funds,” a blend of numerous other stock vehicles. He called his sales force his “piece corps,” referring to his piece of the industry, but also to his growing harem of aspiring models, actresses, and assorted gold diggers who flocked to his thirteenth-century French château, just across the Swiss border, complete with moat and drawbridge, and his Lake Geneva villa that had been built for Josephine by Napoléon.

  Bernie became known as the Hugh Hefner of Europe. In fact, Hefner became one of super-bachelor Bernie’s best friends, along with Tony Curtis and George Hamilton. The socialist social worker was the most ambitious man in finance since Eddie Gilbert fled to Brazil. He claimed, however, that what he was doing was social work. “We find people before they’re destitute,” he said, “and do something about it.” What he did was generate excellent returns of over 20 percent a year for his customers, but vastly more for his salesmen, many of whom became sincerely rich, with châteaux of their own. But Bernie never forgot where he came from, flying in planeloads of New York delicatessen fare from the Stage Deli on Seventh Avenue, hot dogs from Nathan’s of Coney Island, and frozen Sara Lee cheesecake.

  Aside from his Brooklyn diet, no socialist ever lived so grandly and capitalistically. Bernie had a Chinese houseboy, two Great Danes, ten saddle horses, and never fewer than a dozen big blondes in tow—a living Helmut Newton album. Pure Jet Set, he had a helicopter, a Convair turboprop, and a Dassault Falcon private jet, which took him between his European properties and his suite at New York’s Carlyle, just a few floors away from the Kennedy pied-à-terre. It was in New York that he met Oleg Cassini, at Le Club, through its manager, Bobby Friedman, who was the city’s only rival to Hollywood producer Robert Evans in the who-knows-the-most-models sweepstakes. Oleg without Jackie, business-wise, was very much like Antony without Cleopatra. Notwithstanding his White House profile, American memories were short, and the styles, like the times, were changing, influenced by the rise of Brit-rock, Carnaby Street, and the hippie movement. Even Oleg had started dressing like Jimi Hendrix.

  It was time to go back to Europe, Bernie convinced Oleg. Bernie’s idea was to turn Oleg into the first Giorgio Armani, long before Armani ever hit the scene. Forget Paris, Bernie said. Rome was wide open; plus, there was no chauvinistic De Gaulle to block their path and no Danny the Red to shut down their factories—not yet, at least. Oleg would become the first great Roman couturier, the Christian Dior of the Dolce Vita. He would be much bigger than Igor’s University of Georgia classmate Emilio Pucci. Pucci dressed Braniff air hostesses; Oleg dressed first ladies. Bernie, the master of the pitch, convinced Oleg that the new House of Cassini would be a sure thing. Headquarters would be in the Palazzo Ruspoli, one of Rome’s grandest edifices, at the end of the Via Condotti, which had just been acquired by one of Bernie’s partners, a shady millionaire Italian manufacturer named Roberto Memmo. Memmo’s factories employed six thousand Italian artisans who would make all the clothes.

  Alas, just at the moment of truth, when the deal was nearly done, Bernie and Oleg were done in by the same plunging American economy and crashing Wall Street that would do in Juan Trippe and his 747. In 1970, Bernie was thrown out of IOS by all the salesmen whom he had made rich, replaced by the scoundrel adventure capitalist Robert Vesco, who himself would soon take the money and run to Costa Rica. Bernie would spend a year in a Swiss jail until he got the financial fraud charges against him dropped. Then he moved to Los Angeles, to be near Hefner and his new Playboy Mansion.

  Poor Oleg, with nowhere to go in Rome, tried Milan, to no avail. Never saying die, he made his next move into creating a line of Native American print dresses. As a boy, he was always fascinated by Indians, and now he would try a second childhood. When that failed, he decided to return to New York. To that end, he threw himself on the lavish mercy of Imelda Marcos, who, as the patron saint of distressed playboys, would later come to the aid and comfort of George Hamilton, who had sold his Beverly Hills estate, Grayhall, to Bernie Cornfeld. The Jet Set may have been sputtering, but, ties still binding, they sputtered together.

  Hef and Bernie, with their nonstop cocaine-and-champagne-fueled topless pool parties in their neighboring palaces, were making a joint and valiant attempt to rescue both Playboy, the brand, and playboy, the lifestyle, from irrelevance and looming extinction. They seemed to be trying to prove that even if Europe had become passé, playboydom itself had no borders. Alas, all their revelries were for a lost cause. Playboys were riding off into the sunset, and not the Pacific beaches at the end of Sunset Boulevard. Some, like the Cassinis, were fading away. Others had crashed and burned. In 1960, Prince Aly Khan died when he totaled his new Lancia in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. In 1965, near the very same deadly curve, Porfirio Rubirosa perished when he totaled his new Ferrari. Khan had just gotten engaged; Rubirosa had gotten married. Their playboy heydays were well behind them even before Juan Trippe’s 707s took to the skies.

  That other postwar icon of male prerogative, Gianni Agnelli, had married a Neapolitan princess back in 1953, long before Café Society sped itself up and transformed into the Jet Set. The royal marriage didn’t exactly take Agnelli off the market; he had a famous three-year affair with bombshell Anita Ekberg at the height of her La Dolce Vita fame, as well as a hotly rumored one with Jackie Kennedy at the height of her Camelot hegemony. But the “King of Italy,” as the auto tycoon was known, had left his playboy image behind with his youth. His famous romance with Pamela Digby Churchill began back in 1948, when he was twenty-seven and before she moved on to Hayward and Harriman. But that affair was less about sex than status. Bedding Winston Churchill’s former daughter-in-law was of inestimable value to young Agnelli in expunging the shameful stain of his country’s wartime defeat. The adult Agnelli was known far more for his vast corporate power and his high sty
le than for his wild oats.

  Even the ultimate flyboy Frank Sinatra, who turned fifty in 1965, when fifty was old, took himself off the party market when he married twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow in 1966. That union may have seemed like a merger of the Jet Set and Flower Power. Instead, it was living proof of a generation gap that could never be bridged, a twain that could never meet. The tabloid fantasy marriage between the ultimate Swinger and the ultimate Hippie was a front-page disaster that lasted under two years.

  Farrow’s rejection of Sinatra mirrored the baby boomers’ rejection of their parents’ male-supremacist, martini-fueled, conspicuous-consumption, gray-flannel culture, a culture that had spawned the Jet Set. What really was the playboy but the Eisenhower husband unchained? By the time Pan Am’s 747 made its maiden commercial flight in 1970, Europe, which had provided the glamorous and sophisticated context for the rise of the playboy mystique, was rapidly losing its Old World gloss and floss, and the playboys themselves were either down for the count or knocked out of the ring altogether. And without the playboys fueling the image and the dream, no amount of Pratt & Whitney horsepower could keep the Jet Set aloft.

  THE ADVENT OF THE 747 MARKED THE END OF THE JET SET AS A SOCIOLOGICAL phenomenon that had been the quintessence of its time and was now out of time. The 747 itself, on the other hand, was a technological phenomenon that was ahead of its time, way ahead, by a decade. Until the times, Ronald Reagan flush times, caught up with the 747 and made it the most successful plane in history, it seemed that very same jumbo jet was going to be history’s biggest flop, that the wings of man had been clipped by the scissors of economics and slashed by the daggers of terrorism.