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

by Stadiem, William

  The James Bondsmen Broccoli and Saltzman had their own competition, not over a woman but over Bond. After coproducing nine Bonds, the pair split in 1975. The artier of the two, Saltzman—never wanting to be defined by Bond alone—early on in the partnership branched out into other ventures, purchasing the Technicolor company, blowing two fortunes on Toomorrow, a flop sci-fi musical starring Olivia Newton-John, and Nijinsky, a flop biopic starring Alan Bates, and blowing a third on the development of still another sci-fi effort, The Micronauts, which would have starred Gregory Peck as a shrinking man had it not died in development. Then his wife developed cancer, and an overextended Saltzman had no choice but to sell his half of Bond to his partner. He died brokenhearted in Paris at seventy-eight in 1994.

  Cubby Broccoli was more than delighted to stick to James Bond and be defined by the most successful film franchise of all time. He died, happy and with an Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Film Academy and a star on Hollywood Boulevard, at eighty-seven in 1996. The only thing missing in his storied career was Sean Connery at his funeral at Forest Lawn. The other Bonds were all there, but Connery, the Bond of Bonds, never wanted to be typecast by the role that made him—and helped set the tone of the Jet Set.

  Another Thalberg recipient, the great London-based Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel, had predeceased the Bondsmen in 1986, at eighty-four. He was a playboy to the end, expiring on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, in a suite at the super-posh La Samanna resort. Other guests there at the time included Richard Avedon, Mary Tyler Moore, and Peter Ustinov, not to mention a gaggle of New York and London socialites, all of whom clamored for Spiegel to join them on what would have been his last supper. However, like his pal Greta Garbo, who traveled on his yacht, he said he wanted to be alone. Spiegel may have died, but the rumors never did. Sam Spiegel, as those who knew him would attest, never liked to be alone. With him when he died were said to be two, and possibly four, of Madame Claude’s finest filles de joie airlifted to the tropics. If true, Spiegel went out in the style to which he had been long accustomed.

  Spiegel’s fellow Madame Claude confidant and London neighbor Tom Corbally, the man at the heart of the Profumo Affair, stayed in the heart of glamorous darkness until his own exit, in 2004 in New York at age eighty-three. He was the key man of the powerful corporate detective agency Kroll Associates. On the fringe of one scandal after another involving the Jet Set’s less stylish fat-cat corporate successors, the private-jet set, Corbally, the Teflon spy, went to his grave unscathed. Corbally’s two prime British mates and conduits to the deep-pocketed Euro merchant class, gambling king John Aspinall and nightlife king Mark Birley, both died deposed from their respective thrones, Aspinall at seventy-four in 2000, Birley at seventy-seven in 2007.

  Just before Birley died, he sold Annabel’s and his other superexclusive clubs in London, the last redoubt of the survivors of the Jet Set, for $150 million to Richard Caring, a Hong Kong garment billionaire who has moved into the hospitality business. Caring’s conversion came when he purchased England’s tony Wentworth Golf Club, which is to the sport what Wimbledon is to tennis, and saw how much he enjoyed improving the facilities, especially the kitchen. Caring is an unusual collector. Instead of paintings or sculpture or exotic cars, he collects Jet Set clubs and restaurants, both old and new, from Annabel’s to Le Caprice to the burgeoning Soho House chain. He doesn’t do it for love. He does it for money, selling nostalgic status, somewhat like the Orient-Express train and hotel empire. In many ways, he has become the Colonel Sanders of exclusivity.

  Richard Caring can be seen as a contemporary incarnation of a Jet Setter. As such, he is part of a new club of global bon vivants who would include fellow Englishman Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airways, who is seriously investing to take the Jet Set model to its outer limits in outer space; designer Ralph Lauren, who has turned the world into preppies; movie star George Clooney, with his Cary Grant aura, his Lake Como villa, and his serial goddess girlfriends; Sean Combs, who is globalizing rap the way Lauren has globalized prep; and Paul Allen, with his vast yacht Octopus and his vaster philanthropies, a James Bond character with a generous heart.

  Richard Caring’s background is certainly international enough. He is the son of an Italian-American GI, Lou Caringi, whose father was an immigrant factory worker at Bethlehem Steel. Caringi stayed in London after World War II and married a local Jewish nurse who had cared for his war wounds. Caringi anglicized his name and moved to the Scarsdalian Jewish suburb of Finchley, in North London. A golf star at the posh school Millfield, Richard Caring, a classic baby boomer born in 1948, dropped out and joined his father in the rag trade, in which he had made a small fortune manufacturing deep-discount miniskirts in the Mary Quant swinging sixties.

  Richard Caring’s great discovery was outsourcing dress manufacturing to Hong Kong, which, given the endless number of fittings needed by English colonials to correctly duplicate a Western suit or dress, previously had never been trusted to get fashion right. But Caring mastered the art and science of standardization, providing much of the affordably priced stock of Marks & Spencer, and has now applied it to hospitality. He has assembled, in addition to the Birley collection, the Caprice, the Ivy, J. Sheekey’s, and seemingly most of the rest of London’s most vaunted dining spots, all of whose menus are distressingly similar, franchised and standardized poshery for rich but often clueless merchant bankers. Claude Terrail would not have approved, but Conrad Hilton would have loved it.

  The one original Jet Setter whom Richard Caring most evokes is Eddie Gilbert, that outsider whose desperation to be “in” ultimately put him behind bars. Caring married a model and commutes between homes in Hong Kong and Marbella in a private jet. He sails on a 200-foot yacht. He has a stately home in Somerset and a mansion in London (with ballroom and cinema) that is known as “the Versailles of Hampstead.” He gives stupendous parties, particularly one at the tsarist-era Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg whose $12 million cost went for ferrying an army of 450 guests, topped by Bill Clinton, on private jets to Russia. Caring enlisted Elton John and Bob Geldof to entertain the rich and famous, who admittedly were dunned $7,500 each for Caring’s pet children’s charity as part of the pleasure of their company, making the event turn a profit.

  That profit motive is the key difference between Gilbert and Caring, and between the old Jet Set and the new Gulfstream generation. Gilbert’s motivation to be rich was a means to be accepted, while Caring’s ambitions, like those of many of his contemporary tycoon cohorts, are primarily financial. Whether making miniskirts in Hong Kong or making martinis at Annabel’s, Caring is a brilliant businessman who never runs at a loss. The result is a bottom line–conscious standardization, wherein a meal at Annabel’s can be identical to one at Mark’s Club, or to one at the Ivy. This Hiltonization of luxury is as anathema today to purists raised on the Jet Set cult of personality and eccentricity-driven hospitality, costs be damned, as it was to Europe’s establishment when Conrad Hilton invaded the continent with his hotel chain. Nonetheless, the bottom line seems more important to Richard Caring than a listing in Burke’s Peerage or a membership of his own at a St. James’s men’s club like White’s or Boodle’s. In his glory days, Hilton felt just the same way.

  Perhaps “society,” be it Astor-ian or Trippe-ian, is simply dead. So, without social lionhood as a goal, what else can Caring aspire to other than wealth and the toys it can buy? Or perhaps the social pinnacle in England, as entrenched as its class system still is, is a much tougher nut to crack than anything in America, so Caring’s attitude may be “why bother to try?” If he lived in New York, where what constitutes “high society” seems to correlate with high net worth and a concomitant propensity to make vast charitable contributions, Caring surely could donate his way onto Gotham’s most prestigious boards, like those of the Metropolitan Museum or the Metropolitan Opera, or even get a library or two renamed after him.

  In England, the path to social prominence is littered
with the bear traps of ancient snobbery. For Caring’s bold self-making in the ever-scorned rag trade and for “stealing” their institutions, the upper crust of England despise and ridicule him as beyond nouveau with a hauteur that only the English upper crust can muster. Tatler ran a caricature of Caring as James Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, stroking a white cat. Then again, the Cassini brothers were also sneered at by British nobility, who cast doubts on the authenticity of the Cassinis’ Russian royal pedigree. Displaced Russian counts were a ruble a dozen. It says something about the state of things that Mark Birley’s son, Robin—an Old Etonian, of course—has opened a chain of low-cost sandwich shops for the “people,” while new-money Caring has taken over Robin’s ostensible birthright in Annabel’s, the asylum of the elite.

  Surely Caring would be thrilled to welcome Eddie Gilbert back to Annabel’s, if he has not already done so; and surely Gilbert would admire Caring as a fellow arriviste who bought his clubs just as Eddie built Le Club. The close friend of John Aspinall and Mark Birley, Gilbert—who was much more interested in playing the social game than Caring—was an original Annabel’s member. His disco days seemed over when, in 1967, after dragging out the legal process for five years following his flight to Rio, he finally pleaded guilty to three of the twelve New York State counts against him involving the grand larceny of $2 million from his family hardwood company, E. L. Bruce; he faced thirty years in prison. He also pleaded guilty to three more of the fifteen federal charges stemming from the escapade, facing an additional seventeen years.

  Despite mobilizing a Who’s Who of the nation’s criminal bar, a dream team of lawyers, New York gave him six years, the feds four more. He was taken first to do his state time at Ossining, famous as Sing Sing, and the setting for James Cagney’s classic Angels with Dirty Faces. One of his first visitors there was the true-blue blue blood John Aspinall, who jetted over from London. Gilbert’s good behavior was so good that he was released from Sing Sing after only sixteen months and then moved up to the relatively cushy federal penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut. After eight months of his sentence, he was released in 1969 to a waiting Cadillac limousine and his loyal Pan Am stewardess and now wife, Turid Holtan, whom he had married just before his sentencing.

  To say there are no second acts in American life would have been to grossly underestimate Eddie Gilbert. Like a boomerang, Gilbert resumed his offshore partying, now in Marbella, which had become the headquarters for a new generation of wild and high-rolling sybarites spawned by the seventies oil crises and led by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. This largely Middle Eastern neo-version of the Jet Set might be dubbed the Pet Set, “pet” being short for “petroleum.” To fund his revels, Gilbert went straight back to Wall Street and began to make a new fortune to recoup the one he had lost. In the process, he once more ran afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged him in 1977 with manipulating the stock of the Conrac Corporation, a manufacturer of electronic instruments. Thus began another endless legal process, during which Turid, having endured enough trials, divorced Eddie in 1979.

  During the divorce process, Eddie, who was jetting back and forth to the West Coast on a prospective movie deal with Martin Bregman, the producer of Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, met another beauty, a successful soap-opera actress, in the TWA first-class cabin. The movie investment was a disaster. Eddie had expected to be making a film with Bregman’s client Al Pacino. Instead, he got Sean Connery. But not as James Bond. The film, The Next Man, was Connery’s unsuccessful attempt to escape from the Bond tuxedo, which he found to be a straitjacket. On their first date, Eddie took the actress to Le Club, even though the Cassinis no longer co-owned it. They were soon married, in Eddie’s Jet Set tradition, at the chic Habitation Leclerc in Haiti and began breeding Arabian stallions on a horse farm in Goshen, New York.

  To his many glamorous incarnations, Eddie had added film producer and gentleman farmer before he was forced to resume that of gentleman crook. In 1981, there was another day of reckoning when Eddie Gilbert was convicted by a federal jury on all thirty-four of the government’s charges of stock fraud. He was sentenced to concurrent terms on the charges, which totaled four years; after losing an appeal, he began serving in Allenwood, a “country-club” federal prison in Pennsylvania, a white-collar paradise compared to his previous lodgings at Sing Sing and Danbury.

  After more good behavior, Eddie was released two years later in 1983, only to find himself divorced and back in federal court in 1989 for violating his long probation by making money giving financial advice. He was found guilty, but this time there was no prison, just six months of consecutive weekends in a Brooklyn halfway house. For once, Eddie Gilbert realized that Wall Street was a dangerous addiction. Not so, sex. At sixty-eight he got married a fourth time, to a model who was a cousin of Al Gore, moved to Santa Fe, and proceeded to become a multimillionaire once again, this time in commercial real estate. In his nineties, the ungroundable Jet Setter was still wheeling and dealing.

  Roger Vadim, the Jet Set’s most famously conjugal playboy, was one filmmaker without a happy ending. He had followed Jane Fonda to Hollywood but, once they divorced in 1973, was unable to follow her success. His last cinematic gasp was a 1988 remake of the film that had made him famous, And God Created Woman, with Rebecca De Mornay trying to channel Brigitte Bardot. The film was a flop. Vadim did marry one more star, Marie-Christine Barrault, and had returned to his Jet Set cradle of Saint-Tropez when he died in 2000 at seventy-two.

  Bernie Cornfeld, who went to Los Angeles around the same time as Vadim to recoup the fortunes that he lost in Europe, like Vadim never regained his Midas touch. He embraced the Hollywood scene, giving legendary parties at his Grayhall mansion and becoming the boyfriend of the notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. He also decided to go the Hollywood longevity route. Forswearing his beloved pastrami sandwiches, all other red meat, and alcohol, he became a health nut. It didn’t work. In 1995, he died of a stroke at sixty-seven.

  Jet Set men may come and go, but, like the nine-lived Eddie Gilbert, the handful of Jet Set women seem to go on forever. In England, Mary Quant in her eighties is nearly Twiggy-thin enough to wear one of her classic miniskirts, if not her hot pants. She sold her company to a Japanese conglomerate in 2000, which has two hundred Mary Quant outlets in Japan alone. She still holds forth on Britain’s glory days of fashion, when she broke all the French rules and hired “streety” girls to model her outrageous fashions in the equally outrageous legs-astride pose she called the “wet knicker stance.” Despite her marriage to the aristocratic Alexander Plunket Greene, who died in 1991, Quant never forgot her Welsh coal-mining roots; her clothes did as much to shake up, if not tear down, the British class system as the Beatles’ music. “I love vulgarity,” she has famously declared. “Good taste is death, vulgarity is life.”

  Across the Channel, Régine, eighty-four, who made her name and fame catering to the aristocracy rather than defying it, is still revered as the Queen of the Night. Although her once vast overseas empire of art deco clubs is down to one—the Régine’s of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan—the latest Paris relocation of Régine’s, just behind the Champs-Élysées, is still dancing until dawn. When Régine, who sold out years ago but remains a consultant, drops by to sing and dance, the frenzied waters part. Crediting her vibrant longevity to her very un-French lifelong abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, she remains one of France’s iconic celebrities, the Maurice Chevalier of the jet age.

  In her eighties, Mary Wells Lawrence no longer rules Madison Avenue. She spends most of her year sailing on her yacht in the Caribbean. A one-woman rebuttal to the despair of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, Lawrence remains a beacon to desperate housewives everywhere, notwithstanding some feminist ire raised at the way her campaigns put sex into flying. Her autobiography A Big Life, which she published in 2002 following the death of her husband, Harding Lawrence, is nothing but truth in advertising. It recounts her great campaigns until s
he sold Wells, Rich, Greene to the French agency BDDP. Lacking the founder’s touch, the new company let the accounts all drift away. Wells, Rich, Greene ceased to exist in 1998. The book also openly discusses her brave campaigns against cancer. Unlike her agency, Mary Wells Lawrence is a survivor.

  And then there were, or are, the Cassini brothers, the two lead engines of the Jet Set, its chronicler and its designer and its chief role models, whose likes we will not see again, even if Richard Caring were to come to New York and try to recycle Le Club. After Oleg’s misadventures with Bernie Cornfeld in relocating to Italy and becoming the pre-Armani Armani, Igor, who had been at his own loose ends all over Europe, forgave his brother the seduction by Cornfeld, and together, they came back to New York in the midseventies.

  While in Europe, Igor seemed to have repudiated all the conventions of class and taste befitting an Old World count or a smooth Jet Set playboy. Instead, he embraced an alternate-universe adolescence that flaunted all the rules, just as the hippies were doing in America. Igor had taken a fourth wife, an oft-topless photographed German-Sicilian sex-kitten starlet named Gianni Lou Muller, who milked being Countess Cassini for all the scandal it was worth. Although he no longer wrote the columns, Igor was the subject—and laughingstock—of them. Only eighteen when they wed, Muller was nicknamed by the European tabloids “Countess Culo” for her posterior endowment, flaunted on the most exclusive beaches of the Mediterranean. After she very publicly cuckolded Igor with a struggling Greek actor close to her age, she became entwined in one of the early-seventies drug scandals that was paraded as proof that the Jet Set was bankrupt and la dolce vita had turned sour. This one centered around Number One, Rome’s answer to Le Club, which was more like Studio 54 to come, with even more cocaine consumed on the premises. It was known as Medellín on the Via Veneto.