Everyone who passed through was, as Trippe intended, appropriately astounded at the Napoleonic scale of his ambitions.
* * *
—
AS AMERICA’S MOST glamorous airline, Pan American made sure to look the part. Trippe instituted a rigorous selection process to find only the best cabin crew. They were expected to be “alert and good-looking youngsters” exemplifying the virtues he demanded of a Pan American STEWARD—“Service, Tact, Efficiency, Wisdom, Ability, Responsibility, Dependability”—and were required to speak three languages and have experience working in upmarket hotels and ocean liners.
Unlike U.S. domestic airlines, which had already begun hiring women trained as nurses, Pan American, like Zeppelin, remained stoutly all-male. After training in what would later be called the “Gable Routine”—in this exercise, stewards had to serve an imaginary high-maintenance Hollywood celebrity while looking after the other passengers and supervising the mailbags—they were taught basic seamanship skills. Supremely confident and outfitted in smart uniforms of black trousers and white waist-length jackets over boiled white shirts and black ties, Pan American’s cadre of stewards would become famed throughout the globe.
Trippe, who took only a small salary, owned fully a quarter of the company. So, yes, one might say that he, a newly minted millionaire, was now gainfully employed—fully satisfying the demands of Betty’s family. She was summoned home from her gilded Parisian exile and the wedding date was set. The ceremony on June 16, 1928, annoyingly, took place in the midst of yet another Pan American expansion, and the honeymoon was necessarily a brief one to the Catskills so that Trippe could get back to work.4
He did have a lot to do. Over the next two years, Pan American won every single one of the foreign air-mail contracts the Post Office put up for bid. Asked by an inquiring colleague how he had achieved this remarkable record, Trippe “just smile[d] his most guileless smile and shrug[ged] his shoulders.”5 As well he might. Nothing happened by happy accident during Pan American’s conquest of the continent.
From each South and Central American government Trippe demanded a lengthy list of concessions in return for international air service. Trippe’s men carried Pan American’s fearsome “Form B” in their briefcases, laying out his terms: twenty-five-year exclusive landing rights, customs and immigration privileges for his passengers and cargo, immunity from local taxation on his new airports and aircraft, and the right to carry mail to the United States.
Any complaints by existing local airlines about Pan American’s muscling in would be assuaged in due course by cooperating with, co-opting, crushing, or buying them.
When potential resistance was too strong, Trippe always made a deal, his assumption being that he would be able to force out his partner later on. The giant conglomerate W. R. Grace & Co., for instance, had been operating in Peru for seventy-five years, but its roots also ran deep in Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The company “owned practically everything on the west coast,” a Trippe field agent reported—including, no doubt, the politicians.
For obvious reasons, Grace could make life difficult for Trippe, who urgently wanted landing rights in Peru so that he could drive toward Chile. So he set up Pan American–Grace Airways (PANAGRA), split equally between the two concerns but really run by Trippe. Within weeks, PANAGRA was awarded the lucrative new route FAM-9, Panama-Santiago. Another major piece—some 4,500 miles—of Trippe’s planned western trunk line had fallen into place and ACA stock reached a new high in New York.6
If cooperation failed, co-optation was the fallback. Colombia was a particularly hard nut to crack, thanks to a German-owned airline already operating there: Sociedad Colombo–Alemana de Transportes Aéreos (SCADTA). Its boss, Peter Paul von Bauer, a courtly Austrian noble, was popular among Colombians and put up a fierce fight, but he was running out of money. Trippe made his offer: Work with us and get rich or die poor. For $1.142 million, half in bearer certificates (making it impossible to ascertain the identity of the owners) and the other in cash, the co-opted Bauer secretly handed over 84.4 percent of the company to Trippe and agreed to vote his remaining shares in Pan American’s favor at board meetings.7
Sometimes, crushing the foe was the only option, as happened when a new airline, the New York, Rio, Buenos Aires Line (NYRBA), appeared. Its president was the juttingly jawed Ralph O’Neill, a man whose bravery was second to none (he’d won the Distinguished Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre as a fighter pilot in the war) but whose volcanic temper was ill suited to combating the likes of Trippe. The latter regarded O’Neill as someone “who thought that [he] would like to run an international airline. But [he] didn’t really know what it was all about.”
Thanks to Trippe’s fix-it men, important shipments of NYRBA equipment vanished en route, construction work moved at a snail’s pace, and usually efficient local officials repeatedly forgot to approve the necessary permits. By the time Trippe got through with O’Neill, NYRBA had blown through millions of dollars and had just $16,000 in the bank.8
Cooperating with Grace had brought a windfall, co-opting SCADTA had removed a nettlesome problem, and crushing NYRBA had been delightfully satisfying, but sometimes it was just easier to purchase an airline impertinently standing in the way, as happened with Compañia Mexicana de Aviación.
It was owned by George Rihl, a former Philadelphia banker with something of a checkered past. His right-hand man was Erwin Balluder, of German background and born in the Virgin Islands in 1893. They were the kind of colorful rogues with flexible morals ideally suited to the rough-and-tumble world of South American aviation.
Rihl and Balluder had made sure to bribe the Mexican postmaster into giving Compañia Mexicana the exclusive right to fly mail through the country, which meant that Trippe couldn’t push them aside. For once, Trippe would have to pay over the odds. The pair made a killing: Their flyspeck of an airline, really a couple of ramshackle planes, was sold for $150,000 in Pan American stock. Trippe judged the transaction to be well worth the trouble, mostly because he was so impressed at Rihl and Balluder’s cojones that he hired them as Pan American vice presidents, though their real job was to work as his dirty-tricks specialists.9
Trippe’s methods were not usually outright illegal, but they certainly carried with them a whiff of the dark arts. He frowned on blatant bribery because, as John MacGregor, one of Trippe’s leading fixers, wisely advised, “when you pay out graft, there’s always a kick-back to it afterwards.” Instead, the approved technique of greasing a local politician was to adapt Form B to include certain “donations” to his favored party newspaper or granting him free travel forever.10
But when push came to shove, cash was king, and Rihl and Balluder were the kings of cash. Balluder’s specialty was to target the “people who knew people in the government”: brothers-in-law of generals, the son of a major industrialist, former senior officials, and the like, sensing in them a refreshing willingness to exploit their influence in exchange for a payout.
As for George Rihl, he was even more cynical. During a stop to Guatemala City, he told a shocked Arthur Geissler, the U.S. envoy to the country, that “money will finally decide whether [we] will be permitted to fly in Guatemala.” Indeed, the very purpose of his visit was to bribe the minister of the interior. To which poor, honest Geissler replied, “You seem to think that all public officials are either crooks or fools.” “No, not all of them. Not quite all of them,” chuckled Rihl, amused that Geissler was quite this naive.
A few days later, the minister of the interior announced that he was welcoming Pan American to Guatemala.11
* * *
—
TRIPPE ALWAYS KEPT himself aloof from such goings-on, preferring to conquer South America from his desk in New York. He never even bothered to learn Spanish, seeing in it a shameful reminder of his family background. Only after much pressure from his ace publicity man, William Van Dusen, who co
uld scarcely believe that Trippe would not use such an obvious way to curry favor with Latinos, was he persuaded to sign letters (written by a Hispanophone secretary) with the detested “Juan.”12
Trippe’s ulterior motive for steering clear of his own dominions was that he could not afford to be seen by the scrupulously clean Lindbergh as being anything but aboveboard. Lindbergh, as Pan American’s technical adviser at $10,000 a year (plus stock options worth $150,000) and the greatest advertisement for the airline one could imagine, knew nothing about the skulduggery involving his friend’s conquistadors.
In the early fall of 1929, Trippe at last deigned to visit South America when Lindbergh mounted a tour there. Trippe brought along Betty; Lindbergh, his new wife, Anne. Trippe had told Lindbergh the tour was an opportunity to promote the cause of aviation and the beneficence of American business, but it more accurately marked Trippe’s coronation as emperor—even if this emperor preferred to stay discreetly in the background to let the Sun King bask in all the adulation.
Lindbergh piloted the whole way as Trippe, invariably dressed in a scorchingly bright white suit, conducted business by radio in the cabin. The publicist Van Dusen, who later recalled that at Pan American “sometimes we had to invent” myths to obscure “truth and the absolutes,” made sure reporters were given upbeat releases several times a day on their progress. Most of the resulting stories focused on the human-interest angle—Anne writing letters while airborne, Betty keeping a diary, Lindbergh flying alongside brilliantly colored tropical birds and flamingos—to generate huge interest in the voyage while Trippe got on with the real work.
At every stop, they were mobbed by well-wishers, garlanded with flowers, paraded through flag-draped streets accompanied by brass bands. Every night they attended dinners and dances in their honor. And every night, Trippe made time to meet State Department officials, Pan American agents, and presidents in palaces filled with copies of Louis XIV furniture who were waited on by servants costumed in tailcoats, brass buttons, knee breeches, and white gloves. And every night, a new deal was struck.
Over the course of three weeks, the quartet covered nine thousand miles, zigzagging their way through Pan American’s vast, sprawling dominions. It wasn’t, however, all business. Even the fastidious Trippe, who liked flying but hated traveling—he always brought his own linen sheets—was persuaded to let his hair down. Trippe, who treated people as interests, had few friends, but Lindbergh was an exception. One night, much to the amusement of Betty and Anne, the two of them got into a pillow fight. It was the first time their wives had seen Trippe and Lindbergh, two men of rigid emotional control, acting so boyishly. “The Trippes have been such fun, and wear so well,” wrote Anne. “I think they’re remarkable. The more I see of them, the more I think it.”13
Trippe could afford to relax. He had accomplished something extraordinary, something, in terms of explosive growth, not only unprecedented in the history of aviation, and perhaps even the history of business, but unrepeatable.
At Christmas of 1927, Pan American had been a company flying a single ninety-mile route; two Yuletides later, its route network had risen to 15,575 miles; and by mid-1930, to 23,075 miles. By way of comparison, the entire U.S. domestic air network, serviced by dozens of airlines, amounted to 30,045 miles.
By the time he was thirty years old, Trippe the Great ruled an empire vaster than Pizarro, Cortés, or Columbus could ever have conceived. He oversaw an enterprise that encompassed twenty-nine countries, connected 83 percent of the South American population, employed 1,200 people, operated seventy-one airports on two continents, and owned forty-four multiengine aircraft that flew on so precise a schedule that you could, it was said, set your watch by them.14
Pan American planners forged an “air trail” between Buenos Aires and Santiago over the Andean wall, a place where winds could buffet an airplane so suddenly it shot from 13,000 feet to 22,000 feet in minutes, ice formed on the wings, pilots were blinded by snow, and each passenger nursed an oxygen bottle just in case.15
Trippe’s men built airports in places deep in the interior once reachable only by riverboat, oxcart, or pack animal. His managers—many, incongruously, Yalies—braved poison arrows and crocodile-infested swamps and the green hell of deadly jungle to find promising locations, they called upon scout planes to drop bags of flour to mark in splotched white puffs where work crews coming by canoe or on burro would clear foliage, and they hired local tribesmen to haul five-gallon cans of fuel over peaks and through valleys.16
And the result of the blood and the sweat, the tears and the malaria? A letter that had taken six weeks to travel the eight hundred miles between, say, Lima and Iquitos, a jungle-bound city at the headwaters of the Amazon, now took thirty-six hours, and a passenger in Barranquilla wishing to visit Bogotá, who used to spend up to a month aboard a boat negotiating the treacherous river, could fly there in nineteen hours. Small wonder that an admiring journalist, astounded at the wonders wrought by Trippe, could only remark, “The Midas touch of the airplane is transforming everything it meets to gold.”17
But Trippe had no intention of stopping at El Dorado.
While Trippe’s idea of a first-rate Christmas party for his staff was to order in ham sandwiches and bottles of Prohibition-approved Coca-Cola, for the 1928 bash he had a surprise in store—two-week bonuses for everyone—and an announcement to make. Never a natural toastmaster, Trippe perched himself on the edge of a desk and gazed out the window, haltingly speaking of his plans for Pan American in the coming years: “We will be going across the Atlantic and after that, across the Pacific. We are going around the world.”18
35. The Emissary
HUGO ECKENER HAD had exactly the same idea. Two very different men with identical ambitions, one as implacable as the other in the pursuit of victory, meant a coming struggle for the mastery of the air.
Eckener mastered the trick of wearing a public mask—that of the avuncular, backslapping Zeppelin captain—to disguise a native cunning. In private or among a crew, though, he was much sharper and grouchier than Trippe: Heaven help you if you made a careless or unthinking mistake. Yet his men adored him, for his loyalty to the loyal was unshakable.
Eckener always made the Zeppelin project about himself. He and the airship were one and the same, its successes were his successes, and without him it could not survive. There was an air of gruff arrogance about him, but deservedly so: Nobody knew more than he about mastering the technical challenges of the weather, managing operations, planning voyages, and driving an airship.
The secretive, withdrawn Trippe, however, kept to the shadows, was hardly seen outside his private office, never piloted his own airplanes, and carefully came across as much less important than he was in order to disarm potential foes. When someone needed to be fired, the task was invariably delegated to an underling—Trippe hated to be seen as the bad guy. Lashings of charm and dollops of amiability covered his guile, and he tried to turn enemies into friends by offering them gifts and tokens.
Eckener took things personally that to Trippe were just business; Eckener bore grudges, Trippe had interests. Whereas Eckener told you bluntly if he disliked you, with Trippe you would never know where you stood until the moment you were ruthlessly dispensed with. Veterans of dealing with the Pan American chieftain learned to look out for the tells that he was up to something. His occasional stutter was a dead giveaway: “When Juan Trippe stumbles for words,” advised one, “you have to watch out; he becomes more deadly than a seven-headed hydra.”
Their strategies reflected their characters. Eckener favored frontal assaults by risking everything on mounting a spectacular feat to win the battle. Trippe preferred to stay on the flanks, covering his rear and advancing cautiously, step by step, to play for position.
How they worked was of a piece. Eckener spent little time in his office, which was in any case more of a study—book-lined, cigar-fugged, leather-armcha
ired—where, said a friend, “he’d talk with you for a few seconds, look you up and down with those all-seeing eyes of his, and know right away what you were thinking and what you really wanted of him.” That of Trippe, on the other hand, contained only a giant globe festooned with red threads on which he would obsessively plot potential routes, as well as, oddly, two desks. The first was a regular flat table where he discussed various matters with visitors; the other, to the side, was a specially made rolltop desk that he locked whenever he left the room or someone entered. Secretive to a fault, he worked for hours at the rolltop, lost in his own world. When colleagues came to him to ask about some routine matter, he answered them brusquely, then turned back to his crystal-gazing. If they persisted, they received no reply, almost as if he had never heard them. Perhaps he hadn’t.
Outside the office, Trippe, impeccably dressed in conservative suits, white shirts, and dark ties, his hair invariably parted and neat, camouflaged himself by vanishing into the background, but it was impossible to miss Eckener, bordering on six feet tall with a massive, deeply furrowed face, goateed chin, and severely crew-cutted hair, whose corpulence went undisguised by his cheap, wide-pinstriped suits. The jackets, often an odd shade of light blue, always seemed short and bulging, as if he were squeezing himself into them, and the trousers were covered in a dusting of old cigar ash that wafted in his wake.
Unlike Eckener, whose booming north German voice with its verdammts and scheisses could be heard from one end of a hangar to the other, Trippe let others do the talking for him. Eckener threw out quotes from Schiller, Goethe, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain interspersed with analogies to Greek myths and Roman history to make his points, while in Trippe’s home there were neither books on the shelves nor pictures on the wall, lest any visitors, of whom there were few, succeed in deducing his true interests from his literary or artistic tastes.
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