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

by Stadiem, William

  The most powerful and sustained headwind that the 747 would face was the economic downturn that followed the Eisenhower-Kennedy postwar boom. This slump is known to economists as the “Secular Bear Market, 1966–1982.” It wasn’t that the stock market actually crashed, like it did in 1929; it just went sideways, which, to investors, was nowhere. Over that sixteen-year period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost a grand total of 1.18 percent. But to investors like the burgeoning ranks of mutual fund owners, who had savored returns of 30 to 40 percent a year in the Kennedy bull market, these were the times that tried Americans’ souls and certainly did not encourage them to buy the latest Fielding Guide and plan a European blowout.

  The Dow continually flirted with the magic number of 1,000, but that number was the world’s biggest tease. Every time the market made an upward move, something terrible in geopolitics would hurl it back to earth—Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the Kent State murders, the invasion of Cambodia, Watergate, the Arab oil crisis. Even when America pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, the Dow went up to 1,004, but it couldn’t stay there. The new Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, did not live up to the popular hope that he would be a Kennedy with a Dixie drawl. Instead, he was done in by stagflation, that reverse speedball (a slowball) of stagnation and inflation, highlighted by low growth, high unemployment, and high inflation.

  Pity the poor 747 and pity the poor Skycoons. Aside from the high-profile hijacking and destruction of the Pan Am 747 in Cairo in 1970’s Black September, Palestinian guerrillas were the least of the jumbo jet’s jumbo problems. The biggest were the Pratt & Whitney jet engines, which, in the plane’s first few years of service, broke down so many times, in potentially fatally inconvenient locations like midocean, that a massive three-way lawsuit among Pan Am, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney (with airline suing plane maker suing engine maker) was averted only by the most delicate corporate diplomacy and quietly vast settlement amounts. Pan Am’s Juan Trippe officially retired in 1968, the same year Boeing’s Bill Allen stepped down as Boeing’s president. The two Skycoons kicked themselves upstairs and became the chairmen of their respective boards, at an appropriately Olympian remove from the impending fray. That both leaders got out of the chief-executive line of fire before the planes entered service and the troubles began spoke volumes to plane watchers: The Big Boys knew something no one else did.

  With the captains abandoning ship, the replacement crew did their best to put on a brave face. Even though the twenty-five 747s Trippe had originally ordered from Boeing seemed like the height of unfounded optimism, his successor Najeeb Halaby stuck with the program. Halaby’s bullishness on the 747 was unshakable. In 1970, he exercised an option for eight more of the behemoths, even in the face of cabins with pathetic handfuls of passengers. In 1971, Pan Am posted a staggering loss of $50 million, and its annual report dropped the brave face and admitted that the next year’s picture was unlikely to be much brighter. At one point in 1971, Halaby even considered the drastic step of grounding the airline’s entire fleet of 747s, it being cheaper to warehouse them than fly them.

  The step was aborted, but in 1972, so was Halaby. With the company’s $300 million–plus loss and its debts approaching $1 billion, Halaby was replaced by World War II hero Brigadier General William Seawell, who was also a Harvard Law School graduate skilled in navigating the shoals of bankruptcy on which Pan Am was about to run aground. By 1977, after 30 percent cuts to its workforce and a 25 percent reduction of its routes, plus lots of fancy fiscal footwork, Pan Am avoided extinction and turned its first profit, small though it was, in years.

  The good news didn’t last long. Seawell knew Pan Am’s glory days as the international Jet Set airline were as over as the Jet Set itself. Juan Trippe had already divined this in the late sixties; his bright idea had been to take normal people to Europe. Seawell’s idea now was to take them to Florida. The Jimmy Carter brainstorm, the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act—which renounced the traditional conception of the business as a public utility in favor of a free-market “open skies” approach—liberated Pan Am from its once vaunted foreign-routes-only status, an exclusivity that had become an albatross. Pan Am now could have national routes; it could become, at long last, an American airline. So, greedily eyeing its New York–Miami service, Seawell bought National Airlines. To get it, he defeated Eastern Airlines in a heated bidding war. The former general was ready to hang up his wings on a high note.

  It was not to be. The corporate cultures of the two companies did not jell; Pan Am snobbishly looked down on National as a “backwoods” regional carrier. Nor did National’s American routes “feed” passengers to Pan Am’s international flights the way Seawell had hoped. The losses began to mount. Seawell was forced to sell off the Pan Am Building to Metropolitan Life and unload its InterContinental Hotels chain, along with its half-ownership of the Dassault Falcon Jet Corporation, which manufactured the Ferrari of private jets.

  No sooner had Seawell stepped down in 1981 than Pan Am ended its fabled round-the-world service, then began selling off all its international routes. In December 1991, the unthinkable occurred: Pan Am went out of business. Its final flight was that of the Clipper Goodwill, a Boeing 727 from Barbados to Miami, one of the airline’s earliest Caribbean runs that Juan Trippe had used as a springboard to conquer the world. Now Juan Trippe was gone, and so was his world.

  In his place was Freddie Laker. And a very different place it was. Laker, a British swashbuckling entrepreneur born in Canterbury in 1922, had spent his whole business life in the bargain-basement aviation business. A pilot in World War II, he then sold surplus planes in the postwar era before starting to fly supplies into Berlin in 1948 to circumvent the Soviet blockade. In 1966, seeing the same budget market that Arthur Frommer did, Laker started his own charter airline, Laker Airways, with two used turboprops he bought for a song from BOAC. By 1972, he was doing so well, and Pan Am and company were doing so badly, that he launched his famous Skytrain, no-reservations service between London and New York. The ticket price was under $100 each way. Laker was able to go cut-rate because his was a British company unfettered by American price controls. His vast success was a key factor in Jimmy Carter’s deregulating the crumbling industry.

  Skytrain was an idea whose time had truly come, and Laker became Sir Freddie in 1978, knighted by the queen for his service to Britain and to the sub–Jet Set mass public. At last, after all the failures of the De Havilland jets and of British aviation to compete with America in general, England had its own folk hero of the skies. But Laker turned out to have Icarus within him. His fatal flaw was that of eschewing the bug-plagued 747 and choosing for his fleet the new Douglas DC-10, a trijet plane that seated 300, somewhere between the 707 and the 747, and seemed just the right size to meet the recession-terrorist-reduced demand for international travel. Lockheed had its own rival in this category, the L-1011, while Boeing stubbornly stuck to its guns with the 747.

  If Laker had known how successful he would be, he would have realized he could have filled the 747s with no problem. But for once, he sold himself short. In May 1979, after a spectacular American Airlines disaster in Chicago, the entire fleet of DC-10s was grounded worldwide. This tragedy, which killed 273 people and was the culmination of a skein of fatal DC-10 accidents that had started in 1974 with the crash in Paris of a brand-new Turkish Airlines jet, created the stigma that the plane was “unsafe.”

  All the testing and recertification by the Federal Aviation Administration couldn’t erase the stain on the plane’s reputation. Meanwhile, unleashed by the 1978 deregulation act, the American airlines began cutting their own prices to match Sir Freddie’s, as did most of the European carriers. Why fly a “discount” airline, as Sir Freddie’s was sneered at, when you could fly Pan Am or TWA or Air France for the same price? Laker cried foul. He also cried conspiracy, and he took his rivals to court in the largest aviation antitrust case of all time. The case was eventually settled, but t
he damage was done. Skytrain went bankrupt in 1982, a year after Juan Trippe succumbed to a stroke at eighty-two. Since his retirement from Pan Am, Trippe had spent the entire time enjoying himself, game fishing in the Bahamas and playing golf in Greenwich. He had nothing left to prove. He had done it all.

  Trippe’s great partner in the skies, Bill Allen, a sport fisherman himself, had a much harder time of his golden years. He developed Alzheimer’s disease and wasted away, dying in 1985 at eighty-five. But he was conscious enough to see his 747 vindicated. It took about five years, but by the midseventies, the 747’s engine kinks had been ironed out, and airports around the world had completed facilities that would accommodate the jumbo. As the competing widebodies, the DC-10 and the L-1011, began to show their fatal flaws, the 747 proved to be the safest aircraft ever created.

  When Reagan took office in 1981 and the long recession finally ended, Carter’s deregulation had made flying so cheap that the public began buying tickets in the droves that would get Freddie Laker rich and titled. Consequently, the 747s began to fill up, and they became the mainstay of long-distance travel around the world. Ironically, Pan Am, once the international leader, could no longer compete on price, only on class and image, and those were Jet Set qualities that spelled nothing but vanished grandeur and eventual extinction. When Boeing unveiled the 747, it was expected to become obsolete after 400 of them were sold. Instead, it just keeps on flying. By 2013, over 1,500 of the planes had been manufactured, compared to 1,000 707s. But the 707 is a museum item now, while the 747 is still very much up in the air. The leviathan is no longer a monster; it is the hero of the skies.

  Although the 747 managed to rise from the dead, the remarkable resurrection of the big jet did not extend to the Jet Set. The Reagan money era definitely got lots of people back on the planes, but the new generation of first-class fliers had less in common, style-wise, with James Bond than with some of his super-rich villains, Auric Goldfinger in particular. The Reagan years were all about flash and bling, the White House as Dynasty on Pennsylvania Avenue, with the Hollywood Kitchen Cabinet setting the tone, and the brash tycoon Walter Annenberg at the Court of St. James’s, much to the dismay of snobby Albion. Afterward, the Clinton/Bush Wall Street free-for-all created a new jet set of Gulf-streams for often uncouth and uncultured Masters of the Universe who sneered at first class as infra dig.

  The problem for the Jet Set was that, at least as it was conceived by Igor Cassini, it was simply too aristocratic for an increasingly democratic and meritocratic world. Cassini not only conceptualized the Jet Set; he basically embodied it, as a European, titled, cultured, and ultimately monied aristo-playboy. Igor and Oleg Cassini and their friends were precisely the kind of beautiful people Juan Trippe’s 707 ticket buyers wanted to travel to meet and, in their dreams, to be. America’s evolving upper class had always needed an offshore role model, particularly in the post–Civil War robber-baron era, when America’s great fortunes were made and became the capitalist fantasy of a tabloid-reading mass public. That model was the European, preferably British, aristocrat, who, for all of America’s brief history, had set the standards of style and etiquette—first for the self-styled grandees on the gracious plantations of Dixie, then for the Old Guard in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, afterward for the more permeable Café Society of the Jazz Age to the Eisenhower fifties, and finally, for the new Jet Set.

  Nobody played the all-American plutocrat-as-aristocrat game better than the Kennedys; hence JFK’s perfectly Jet Set presidency and the permanent void of glamour that followed it. When movie stars entered Café Society, they behaved like aristocrats. Or perhaps, given the power of movies, aristocrats behaved like them, viz Gary Cooper, William Powell, Cary Grant, David Niven, Bing Crosby, and many more, who all embodied the smooth-as-silk old-boy ethos. Even Frank Sinatra, for all his Mafia associations and occasional thuggery, aspired to the “class” that corresponded to his elegant singing.

  And then came Elvis. The 707 and DC-8 were launched simultaneously with the emergence of a youth culture that changed the world as much as the jets did. These new kids didn’t care about being smooth anymore. They wanted to be cool. Hence the rise of a new idol class of anti-stars—Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman—sprouting from subversive seeds planted in the fifties by James Dean and Marlon Brando. Even Ian Fleming’s effete James Bond was roughened up and turned into a film icon by the tough and tattooed Sean Connery. The English upper class who had been aped socially by an insecure America ever since our Revolution was put aside at last. Still, the Brits were being aped; only now it was the newly hip English lower-class model that was copied, syncopated to the Mersey beat.

  After the sixties, the only Jet Set–y actor left in America seemed to be George Hamilton, and he was regarded as far less a character than a caricature. Most important to this sea change of role models was the post-Elvis rise of musicians into gods of rock, pop, and soul. Aside from the brief early confusion of Mick Jagger over whether he wanted to be Lord Snowdon or Chuck Berry, there were no aristocratic traditions anywhere in these emerging legends’ DNA. Even when the Beatles and the Stones and the rest of the rockocracy bought stately homes, they lived like hippie squatters, hardly to these manors born.

  The generational contempt for materialism, the ubiquity of drugs, and the embrace of the 1967 San Francisco Summer of Love–inspired New Bohemia didn’t exactly result in making poverty chic, but rather, elegance passé, the stuff of out-of-it parents. Yet the baby boomers wanted to go to Europe as much as the Fielding-toting old folks did, albeit for different reasons, like getting high on the Acropolis or walking stoned through the Louvre or just grooving on Carnaby Street and waiting in the hour-long lines at the Hard Rock Café. Yet thanks to the giant jets and the lower and lower airfares and the budget guidance of Arthur Frommer, the boomers, unlike previous generations, could afford to turn Europe into their own playground, and they did. Slim Aarons might not have taken their photos for Holiday, nor were they likely to be seated in prime tables by Claude Terrail, but they still had high times.

  In the contest for the hearts and minds of American travelers between Temple Fielding and Arthur Frommer, mass overwhelmed class. Although Frommer never made the cover of Time, and existed more as a brand name than as a Fielding-esque oracle and personality, that Time cover might well have been Fielding’s bad-luck charm. The rich still traveled, and they still bought his annual Guide, but the middle class found its travel aspirations trending downward toward Frommer rather than upward toward Fielding. It was a sign of Fielding’s desperation that in 1978 he broke down, swallowed his loathing for landmarks and museums, and published Fielding’s Sightseeing Guide to Europe.

  Guidesters could not live by foie gras alone, Fielding was forced to admit. He suffered the dietary consequences. After a massive heart attack and two major surgeries that left him unable to make his annual sybaritic rounds, he sold his book company to William Morrow in 1983 and died three months later at his home in Majorca. He was sixty-nine. Arthur Frommer, on the other hand, was still traveling in his eighties, though his company, with individual guides to much of the world, was sold to Google in 2012 for a reported $25 million. For him, living cheaply was obviously the best revenge.

  Conrad Hilton, that avatar of the American way of travel, died peacefully at ninety-one in 1979. A devout Catholic to the end, he not only stayed with his faith but returned to his southwestern roots, after decades of living in Beverly Hills, to be buried in a Catholic cemetery in Dallas. He left a huge estate but only $500,000 to each of his surviving sons (Nick died at forty-two in 1969, of alcoholism) and a devastating mere $10,000 to Francesca, his daughter by Zsa Zsa Gabor, Conrad’s undying hatred for whom was the motivation for Francesca’s testamentary shortfall. The bulk of the fortune went to the Conrad Hilton Foundation, dedicated to Catholic charities and “the alleviation of human suffering worldwide.” The foundation has a special mission to improve water safety around the globe, an echo from the grave of Conrad’s
obsession with running ice water in all his lodgings.

  Hilton’s alter ego, Claude Terrail, the avatar of ancien régime European playboyism, basically died kissing heiresses on both cheeks at the Tour d’Argent in 2006. He was eighty-eight. The Tour had lost two of its Michelin stars over the years but never its cachet as the ultimate French dining experience. Despite a diagnosis of macular degeneration, Terrail played polo until he could no longer see, and even after he had lost his vision, he insisted on being led around by two of his captains to welcome every single table, continuing his nightly tour of the Tour that he had conducted for over fifty years. His son, André, named after Claude’s innkeeping impresario father and armed with an American-textbook education in hospitality from Babson College’s MBA program, has stepped into his father’s custom shoes. The Jet Set may have passed on, but its grandsons and granddaughters, wanting to get some sense of what it was all about, keep the Tour booked months in advance.

  And the other Lotharios of yesteryear? Victor Lownes, Playboy’s man in England, is in his eighties, living in a stately home as an unlikely paragon of marital domesticity: He has remained married to 1973’s Playmate of the Year Marilyn Cole since 1984. His business union with Hugh Hefner was less blessed. In 1981, Lownes was the highest-paid executive in England. He earned his keep by making a fortune for Playboy casinos around the world. But when Lownes was called on the carpet by British gaming authorities for alleged irregularities, Hefner threw his main man under the London bus and summarily fired his longtime friend and colleague. The investigation cleared Lownes, who got the last several laughs, first by watching Playboy’s $30 million profit turn into a $50 million loss the year after he was canned, and then by besting Hef for the affections of Cole, who smoothly transitioned from centerfold to journalist.