As an habitué of Number One, leaving Igor at home to stew, the countess got involved with a drug-addicted young count, Bino Cicogna, from one of the noblest Venetian families and already a rising producer of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. When Cicogna was accused of being the Colombians’ man in Rome, he fled (like Eddie Gilbert) to Rio, but without an Igor to rehabilitate his reputation, he committed suicide there, or was murdered. In either case, his body was found in a Rio favela with his head in the oven. Once the new Countess Cassini managed to evade conspiracy charges, she got a quickie divorce in—of all places—the Dominican Republic and married the Greek.
With his endless stories to tell, Igor, back in Manhattan, decided that if he couldn’t write a column, he would tell all in a book. In 1977, Putnam published his memoir, I’d Do It All Over Again. A big problem with the book was that Igor, for all his unmatched adventures, hadn’t written in years. In the early sixties, when he was off playing diplomat and PR man, he had hired a young Liz Smith to ghostwrite his Cholly Knickerbocker column. Now Igor hired Jeanne Molli, the right hand/secretary of his friends Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, as his coauthor. The book, while written in the first person, felt secondhand, with many punches pulled, much less revealing and sensational than Igor’s column in its prime. It didn’t sell well and turned out to be a disappointment to Putnam.
In 1983, Igor tried again, this time all by himself, in a roman à clef called Pay the Price, with his antihero Ash Young a thinly veiled version of Igor’s now despised father-in-law Charles Wrightsman, a very much alive and fit eighty-two at the time. Anticipating Igor’s dropping the G(ossip)-bomb that would destroy society, or what was left of it, the survivors of the Jet Set were quaking in their banquettes at La Caravelle. They were still reeling from Truman Capote’s own G-bomb, his notorious “La Côte Basque 1965” short story that Esquire had published in December 1976. That billet-doux had supposedly driven social lioness Ann Woodward to take her own life, and had subsequently ruined Capote’s. Everyone knew that Igor Cassini knew far, far more, and far more firsthand, than Capote, and that his life was already ruined, so he had nothing to lose. Plus, Igor was even naughtier than Capote, and he had always been fearless. The Jet Set universe went on high alert for a suicide bomber.
The big reveal people feared was that, given his betrayal by Bobby Kennedy, Igor might open the Pandora’s box of the two Kennedy assassinations. From his earliest days in America, the FDR-baiting Igor had been the bedfellow of the Republican elite. For all his neighborly friendship with the Kennedys in Palm Beach, Igor’s father-in-law Wrightsman was an Oklahoma right-winger who regarded JFK and RFK as not far short of Communists. And wasn’t it CIA chief Allen Dulles who had sent Igor to the Dominican Republic and his subsequent personal disaster? There was a whole school of thought that a CIA-Dulles right-wing cabal had targeted JFK.
Furthermore, both Igor and Oleg were close friends with their fellow White Russian aristocrat George de Mohrenschildt, the globetrotting Dallas-based petroleum engineer (and suspected secret agent) who had become Lee Harvey Oswald’s mentor in the year before JFK was killed. De Morenschildt was a Jet Setter in the mode of Tom Corbally. He knew everything about everybody, but nobody knew much about him. He was great friends with the Bouviers; as a young girl, Jackie had known him as “Uncle George.” In Texas, he was a friend of the Bush family, through the oil business, or the CIA, or both. However, once he appeared as a key witness for the Warren Commission, de Morenschildt began to worry that he was “the man who knew too much” and that as Oswald’s perceived “handler” in Dallas, he was subject to elimination by the same forces who eliminated the Kennedys. His 1977 death by a shotgun blast to the head on a visit to Florida was ruled a suicide, but that would be more grist for Igor Cassini’s conspiracy mill.
Alas, Pay the Price turned out to be all whimper and no bang. Perhaps because the all-powerful C. B. Wrightsman was still alive and ornery and very likely to bring a massive libel suit, not one of the major publishers in Manhattan would take Igor’s novel. Igor had to settle for it to be released—without any of the fanfare or publicity expected of the ultimate PR man—as a paperback original by Zebra Books. And although people like Onassis, the shah, Dulles, and Sam Giancana put in vaguely disguised appearances in undisguised Jet Set locales across the globe, from Le Club to La Tour d’Argent, the Kennedys did not. Perhaps they were edited out. The book that was printed had no shocking hints, much less revelations. The man who did become the next Cholly Knickerbocker would not become the next Truman Capote.
If Igor could no longer set the world on fire as a writer, he sought to console himself with his other great skill, playboy-lover. He had not lost the knack. At sixty-eight, he fell in love and got married, for the fifth time, to an eighteen-year-old supermodel, Brenda Mitchell, the Oil of Olay girl from Atlanta. For Igor it was an exercise in à la recherche du temps perdu, bringing back his days with Emilio Pucci at the University of Georgia, where he had spent some of his happiest times teaching tennis and developed his fatal attraction for Southern belles.
After his two publishing flops in New York, Igor decided to try Europe again, taking Brenda and their two young sons, Nicholas and Dimitri, to increasingly Arabesque Marbella, where Sean Connery, who lived there for the golf, was the boys’ virtual godfather. But once again, the marriage failed, and the wife brought the kids home to raise in Atlanta. Still, the Sean Connery influence had its effects. Nicholas Cassini became an all-American golfer at the University of Georgia and at one point America’s highest-rated amateur. Dimitri, also a Georgia graduate and a golf star there, went into real estate, managing the Four Seasons time-share conversion of the Palazzo Tornabuoni in Florence, where Igor’s mother had run a dress shop in their flight from Russia.
Igor went back to New York, where he basically lived with, and through, Oleg, who was again rich enough to support them both. Igor partied hard until the end. When he fell and broke his hip in the icy winter of 2002, he decided his time had come. He told friends that he wanted to “go out like a Roman,” presumably on his shield, with honor. He stopped eating and made his exit, for the first time in his long life, without fanfare. He was eighty-six, or maybe more, as Igor Cassini never wanted to be pinned down about his age, or by it.
The equally ageless Oleg lasted four more years, until 2006. He couldn’t bear a life without his brother, though in his own 1987 autobiography, In My Own Fashion, ghosted by political writer Joe Klein (the future “Anonymous” of Primary Colors), he mentioned Igor on only twenty-eight of the book’s nearly four hundred breathlessly name-dropping pages, and not a word about Igor’s legal troubles with Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department or the suicide of Igor’s wife. That was Oleg: discreet when need be. Oleg had an image to maintain to the very end, and a key part of that image was being Jackie Kennedy’s Main Man. That image had made him rich, the first designer brand name, with an estate valued at over $50 million. If James Bond had a license to kill, Oleg Cassini had a license for everything else, from men’s shirts and bath towels to luggage, perfume, car interiors, and even nail polish.
Oleg’s discretion, a genetic component of his family’s long diplomatic tradition, extended to his personal life. His mystique relied on the public perception of him as an unrivaled Jet Set playboy, a man for all seasons and a man for all women. Single since the late forties and his Gene Tierney days, he enabled his wannabe-playboy male clientele to live vicariously through his conquests, as chronicled by Igor in his column, and enabled his wannabe-Jackie female clientele to project their fantasies of having Oleg themselves. If they couldn’t have the man, they could at least have his perfume or maybe his soap. Just as he played tennis and rode horses into his nineties, he remained publicly one of the prime bachelors in the world of celebrity. In reality, however, Oleg had been secretly married to his chief personal assistant, Marianne Nestor, since 1971. Nestor did not receive a single mention in Oleg’s autobiography.
After Oleg died at ninety-two, of a su
dden aneurysm at his Long Island horse farm, Marianne Nestor emerged, like a secret panelist on a game show, and unveiled her marriage certificate and Oleg’s will, which left her the great bulk of his estate. It was a classic case of “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Breaking over three decades of silence, Nestor certainly flaunted it, to the fury of Oleg’s second daughter, Christina, from his marriage to Gene Tierney. Christina got a paltry $1 million. Her elder sister, Daria, retarded since birth and institutionalized, got $500,000. Then fifty-eight, Christina, who had dated George W. Bush at Andover and in Texas in her own gilded youth, had grown up into a divorcée who lived in Paris, but in a far from Cassini-like style. She had four children and cancer, needed the money, and felt blindsided. The story went to Vanity Fair and the case went to the New York courts, which overturned the will and gave Christina a quarter of Oleg’s assets, or $13 million. Marianne Nestor sued her attorneys for malpractice and Vanity Fair for defamation, and the beat goes on. The Jet Set, ostensibly about the highest style of the twentieth century, in the bitter end reverted to the lowest common denominator.
Jet Set RIP. The Rolling Stones’s 1966 song “Flight 505” was its prescient epitaph. It is the story of a man who decides to change his life by taking a jet trip. “505” was the number of the BOAC 707 service from London to New York that the Stones had flown for their first American concert tour. In the song, just as the narrator is settling in to alcoholic airborne luxury, “feeling like a king with the whole world at my feet,” something goes terribly wrong. The final refrain is “they put the plane down in the sea, end of Flight Number 505.”
As much as high technology, that lowest common denominator of money was key to both the rise and fall of the Jet Set. The same filthy lucre that tarnished Oleg Cassini’s legacy of courtly and studly elegance was the driving force that created the fantasy of the Jet Set to begin with. When Juan Trippe launched his 707s in 1958, Europe was the grand bargain of the twentieth century. The continent was still recovering from World War II and was priced accordingly. What a lure it was, this fabulous package of the Old World and the new jets. Culture, glamour, history, fabulous food, glorious sex were only six hours from New York and at a cost the middle class could afford.
No more. With the possible exception of health care, nothing has inflated like the tariff of European travel. That $30 feast for two at Tour d’Argent in 1965 today costs $500; the $25 room at Claridge’s costs $1,000. First-class round-trip airfare, then around $1,000, today would be $15,000. Furthermore, the costs far down the luxury pyramid have risen at rates nearly as shocking as those at the top. The very idea of Europe on 5 Dollars a Day seems preposterous, out of this world.
Given the obsessive desire of the Old World to replicate the new, Europe has vastly changed and Americanized itself. The monuments and the art are still there, but travelers have to hack their way through jungles of mediocre modernity to try to savor the continent’s ancient charms. However Europe has changed, getting there has changed even more. The planes are no faster than they were fifty years ago, but the flying experience, regardless of class, has devolved from the journey of a lifetime to a Dantean descent into aviation hell. If F. Scott Fitzgerald were alive, he surely would say that the main way in which the rich are different is that they don’t fly commercial.
Blame it on Wall Street. Blame it on Silicon Valley. Blame it on Hollywood. Blame it on the National Basketball Association. Blame it on Riyadh and Dubai. But look at the record. The sports hero of 1965, quarterback Joe Namath, earned $142,000. In 2005, Tiger Woods earned $87 million. In 1965, the president of General Motors earned $3.9 million. In 2012, hedge funder Ray Dalio earned $3 billion. There are more super-rich than ever before, and the gap between them and the rest of the population is an unbridgeable grand canyon of envy.
The classic haunts of the Jet Set are now basically off-limits to all but the 1 percent and the corporate tycoons on expense accounts who are so busy doing deals that they use the rooms at Claridge’s mostly as luggage drops. In fact, the new Gulfstream set mostly avoids London and Paris except for business. For leisure, they prefer private islands or private villas and exotic destinations in the Indian Ocean or Great Barrier Reef, far from the relative hoi polloi crossing the Atlantic first class on United or British Airways.
As long as there is money, privilege, and fame, there will always be new iterations of a free-spending, high-flying, effortlessly mobile superclass. But somehow these new elites get further and further distanced from “real people” both by where they go and by the amount of money required to be one of them. During the era of the 707 and the DC-8, the wealth gap was much narrower, and the influence of the Jet Set on the general population accordingly greater. In the sixties, seemingly everyone aspired to fly off to an adventure in Europe. Now the closest most people will get to the intensely private lifestyles of the rich and famous is to watch them on tabloid television shows.
In the end, the Jet Set was a pure fantasy, as evanescent as the bubbles of the fine champagne that fueled its tantalizing idyll. But this fantasy had an enormous power in unleashing the genie of aspiration that affected the hopes and self-image of two major generations, the Eisenhower suburbanites and the baby boomers alike. Forget “Flight 505.” With Sinatra crooning “Come Fly with Me” as its theme song, the Jet Set seduced a nation, and a world, into a wanderlust that no obstacles of cost, fear, or inconvenience will ever be able to quell. As long as we can dream, we’ll always have Pan Am.
Acknowledgments
A world of thanks to all those around the world who have contributed to this book: The Boeing Company, Alexandra de Borchgrave, Mel Brooks, Leslie Caron, Daniel Cohen, Howie Cohen, Roger Choukroun, Renee Corbally, Tad Dowd, Francesca Drommi, Eddie Gilbert, Olivia de Havilland, Louise Duncan, Joanne and Jerry Dryansky, Ralph Elder, Dodge Fielding, Frank Filerino, Karen Mason Fitzgerald, Nandu Hinds, Barbara Warner Howard, Patricia Geoghegan, Gisele Galante, Virginie Guyonnet, Chilla Heuser, Isabelle and Marc Hotimsky, Priyanka Krishnan, Stephane Lambert, Kenneth Jay Lane, Jim Lowenstein, Jose Luna, Musée Air France, Pan Am Historical Foundation, Dr. Ivo Pitanguy, Marie-France Pochna, Michael Pochna, Rupert Prior, Eduardo Rabel, Eric Rayman, Annie Reiner, Carl Reiner, Rex USA, Victoria and Jack Risko, Dana Ruspoli, Tony Scotti, Adam Shaw, Penn Sicre, Jean Signoret, Jacques Silberstein, Nadia Stancioff, Mimi Strong, Gay Talese, André Terrail, Taki Theodoracopulos, Charles Trueheart, Sylvie Vartan, Dimitri Villard, Freck Vreeland, George Weidenfeld, Sandy Whitelaw, Ron Winston.
Special thanks to my agent, Dan Strone, an epicure in the grand Jet Set tradition, who believed in this project, with both his heart and his stomach; to his assistant Kseniya Zaslavskaya, a maestro at securing photographic permissions; and to my editor, Susanna Porter, who had a wonderful ability to keep this high-flying book grounded enough to cast its spell on both armchair dreamers who are still down on the farm as well as glittering globetrotters who’ve seen Par-ee and everything else.
Photo Credits
itr 1.1 The Pan Am Historical Foundation
itr 1.2 Association Musée Air France
1.1 REX USA/Sendtoppo/Rex
1.2 Association Musée Air France
2.1 Courtesy of Frank Filerino
2.2 REX USA/Everett Collection
3.1 REX USA/Courtesy Everett Collection
3.2 Copyright © Boeing
3.3 REX USA/CSU Archives/Everett Collection
4.1 REX USA
4.2 Copyright © Boeing
4.3 REX USA/Moviestore Collection/Rex
5.1 The Pan Am Historical Foundation
5.2 Courtesy of Louis Romeu
6.1 Courtesy of La Tour d’Argent
7.1 REX USA/SNAP/Rex
7.2 REX USA/Associated Newspapers/Rex
8.1 Courtesy of Frank Filerino
9.1 Photo by Cornell Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
10.1 REX USA
10.2 REX USA/Everett Collection
10.3 REX USA
11.1 REX USA/Moviestore Collection/Rex
11.2 REX USA/John Hodder/Associated Newspapers/Rex
11.3 REX USA/Associated Newspapers/Rex
12.1 The Pan Am Historical Foundation
12.2 Wells, Rich, and Greene
12.3 REX USA/CSU Archives/Everett Collection
12.4 REX USA/Ann Ward/Daily Mail
12.5 Courtesy of Renee Corbally
13.1 Copyright © Boeing
13.2 REX USA
14.1 REX USA/Denis Cameron
14.2 REX USA/CROLLALANZA
14.3 REX USA/Moviestore Collection/Rex
Selected Bibliography
Abrams, Ann Uhry. Explosion at Orly. Atlanta: Avion Press, 2002.
Altschul, Selig, and Marilyn Bender. The Chosen Instrument. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.
Amory, Cleveland. The Last Resorts. New York: Harper, 1952.
Amory, Cleveland. Who Killed Society? New York: Harper, 1960.
Bailey, David. Birth of the Cool. New York: Viking Studio, 1999.
Bain, Donald. Coffee, Tea or Me? New York: Bartholomew House, 1967.
Barrow, Andrew. Gossip. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983.
Beebe, Lucius. The Big Spenders. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.
Bender, Marilyn. The Beautiful People. New York: Coward McCann. 1967.
Blond, Anthony. Jew Made in England. London: Timewell Press, 2004.
Bolton, Whitney. The Silver Spade. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954.
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image. New York: Atheneum, 1961.
Bosworth, Patricia. Jane Fonda. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 38