“Never look back,” Kirk liked to counsel.9 But in the end, he reflected on what mattered most in his life. It was neither his successes nor his disappointments. It was the thrill of the risk.
“Life is a big craps game,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s all been fun.”10
What follows is an account of that great craps game, the life of Kirk Kerkorian.
I
The Making of a Man
“Necessity is the mother of taking chances.”
—Mark Twain
1
Gambling on the Wind
Early June 1944
Riding the Hurricane Express
Skies over the North Atlantic were mostly clear when the unarmed twin-engine DH-98 Mosquito climbed out of Goose Bay, another factory-fresh fighter-bomber on its way to help the British repel Hitler’s war machine.1 The pilot, an American civilian employed by the Royal Air Force Ferry Command, banked out over the Labrador Sea and powered his agile aircraft toward a rendezvous with “the hurricane express”—a fierce but friendly tailwind blasting out of Canada at nearly seventy-five miles per hour. RAF meteorologists called it “the Iceland Wave.” By whatever name, the rushing wind stream promised a faster-than-normal ocean crossing, possibly even another world record, since the captain was taking a rather daring direct route to Prestwick.2
Under normal circumstances, the Mosquito’s limited range made such a plan suicidal. A straight line to the coast of Scotland was about twenty-two hundred miles—nearly a thousand miles beyond the plane’s maximum fuel range. Even with a temporarily installed two-hundred-gallon gas tank lashed to the floor of its empty bomb bay, this fighter-bomber would need a hefty tailwind to avoid ditching hundreds of miles short of land.
Young Captain Kirk Kerkorian was feeling lucky. A month earlier he rode that same air current and shattered the existing nine-hour speed record for an Atlantic crossing by nearly two hours. It was exhilarating, the way winning big at poker was exhilarating. He liked it—the thrill of victory, the rush of adrenaline, the payoff. For a quiet, seemingly mild-mannered guy, Kirk was surprisingly comfortable with risk. At least that’s what his poker face suggested.
His first claim to a speed record was very brief, however. Another Mosquito pilot departing Goose Bay at the same time had used slightly different altitudes and course variations that got him to Scotland twenty-three minutes ahead of Kirk. To RAF Wing Commander John D. Wooldridge3 went the honors and the headlines for crossing in six hours and forty-six minutes.
Now, back for his second consecutive Mosquito ferry run, Kirk found the supercharged wind stream still roaring eastward. And despite Ferry Command admonitions against pursuit of speed records,4 he knew conditions were right to try again. Besides, it was the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday. What a great present to give himself.
His new calculations for the direct route to Prestwick were promising. If the tailwinds held up, he figured, he would have plenty of fuel left over when he reached the Scottish coast. It was a gamble—but a sound bet, based on math and experience. Kirk put his chips on the shortcut. The gambler went all in.
Ferry Command pilots were a competitive bunch, none more so than Kerkor (Kirk) Kerkorian, youngest son of an immigrant fruit peddler from Los Angeles. His skills as a flier had already overcome substantial educational shortcomings. He was an eighth-grade dropout. He used fake high school documents to get into an elite RAF training class in Montreal. Once admitted, he was a standout among the international aviators in his class.
During his first few months ferrying planes across the Atlantic, Kirk assumed the commander’s seat in a variety of makes and models—from the Lockheed Hudson that everyone trained on to the newer Martin Marauder B-26 and the Mitchell B-25 from North American Aviation.
Kirk’s first takeoff on a transatlantic flight came with his first serious scare. It originated at Dorval Field in Montreal. He was already rolling down the runway when he realized that his twin-engine Hudson didn’t feel right. Of course, it had a spare gas tank in its belly that wasn’t there on routine training flights. But Kirk also hadn’t set his flaps for the extra weight. At rotation speed when he expected to take flight, his tail still didn’t have lift enough to get off the ground. He reached for his trim tab, adjusting quickly as the Hudson lumbered toward grass at the end of the runway. Liftoff came much later than it should have—but not too late. The Hudson5 soared off safely toward the Canadian coast, and Kirk would never make that mistake with his flap settings ever again. The most effective education of a rookie Ferry Command captain—unforgiving real-life experience—had begun.
For this latest ferry transit, Kirk’s Toronto-made de Havilland 98 Mosquito would require all the skill and experience he could cram into its snug little cockpit. The “Mossie,” as the Brits called it, was the newest set of wings in the British air fleet. It had earned mixed reviews. The plane was notoriously delicate in bad weather and suffered the highest per capita crash rate among the various planes flown by the Ferry Command. Any measurable ice buildup on its high-speed, high-performance wings risked catastrophic stalls. Pilots, in moments of dark humor, groused that it couldn’t handle ice enough to chill a decent martini, shaken or stirred.
Some veteran Ferry Command pilots turned down or otherwise avoided assignments to fly the Mosquito. Not Kirk. He loved it—the speed, maneuverability, its climb rate. He considered it the hottest plane in the fleet.
And it was by far the fastest plane in the European theater, capable of speeds approaching four hundred miles per hour. No Luftwaffe aircraft could catch it. And it could intercept the fastest German buzz bombs—the V-1 rockets just starting to rain down on London. It could fly at high altitudes, beyond the reach of antiaircraft guns, up to twenty thousand feet. And it could be mass-produced without depleting already short supplies of metals. Like a canoe, the airplane was built primarily of wood, its fuselage constructed with a double-birch plywood skin over a balsa and spruce frame.
To fliers like Kirk it was “the Wooden Wonder.” He never bothered to do the math that also made it the most dangerous plane in the ferry fleet. During one spate of winter months, only one out of four Mosquitos made it. A crew had better odds playing Russian roulette.
More than two hours into his second spring gamble with a direct run to Prestwick, Kirk’s confidence had been rewarded. Good weather and a hearty tailwind had him and his navigator crewmate on track for a sub-seven-hour crossing. They figured to land before dark, avoiding a more hazardous nighttime approach in a plane with few navigational aids.
The view outside was nothing but sky and an endless white-capped sea, not much to talk about. There were occasional course adjustments and then the navigator’s midcourse notice of the “equal time point”—more commonly known outside aviation as the point of no return. It wasn’t far beyond that critical marker when the navigator first detected the waning booster wind. The Canadian kid, at least five years Kirk’s junior, repeated a series of locational fixes before confirming his ominous discovery: the hurricane express had stopped.
Kirk reacted immediately, throttling back the engines and adjusting the Mosquito’s prop pitch for maximum fuel efficiency. There would be no speed record this day. The new priority was reaching dry land before the gas tanks went dry. The plane slowed to what seemed like a crawl. Hours ticked by. Kirk switched to reserve fuel supplies. Their forecast arrival time came and went. They were still hundreds of miles out, over water so cold they wouldn’t last twenty minutes if they had to bail out now. Daylight was fading fast and a low, thick overcast spread below them.
Finally, they were in radio range of Prestwick. But the news was dismal. The overcast was deep and the ceiling dangerously low. It was unlikely to lift anytime soon. From the air above that thick gray blanket of clouds, land and sea were indistinguishable. There was no way to glimpse the Firth of Clyde, spot the coastal towns, or locate a welcoming runway. In darkness and fog, attempting to land was a fool’s wager
. But the fuel gauge was pinned at empty. The Mosquito’s engines could stop at any moment.
Kirk kicked open the jettison hatch on the cockpit floor. Bailing out was a terrible choice . . . but his only choice.
2
The Kid from Weedpatch
Five Years Earlier
Alhambra, California
It was nearly noon, a midweek workday in the fall of 1939. The two-man crew from the Andrews Heating Company was taking a break from installing ventilating gas wall heaters. Crew chief Ted O’Flaherty, a twenty-five-year-old navy veteran from Louisiana with an obsession for flying, liked to use his lunch hour to squeeze in flight lessons or a few practice takeoffs and landings at the old Western Air Express field in the San Gabriel Valley.1
His twenty-two-year-old assistant, Kirk Kerkorian, always seemed uninterested, hanging back, watching from the ground as he ate his sandwiches brought from home. But after months of gentle prodding and cajoling, Kirk had finally agreed to ride along. He would even pay half of the plane rental—a dollar for a quick sample flight.
Ted was feeling downright evangelical. He loved sharing the wonders of flying. He also liked to preach the promise of aviation’s future. Rapidly developing commercial airlines, some pioneering transcontinental service, were eager for qualified pilots—a career offering more adventure and much better pay than the forty-five cents an hour Kirk took home. And it didn’t involve wrangling 270-pound wall furnaces.
The Andrews Heating truck pulled through the airfield gates and stopped across the tarmac from two bright yellow Piper J-3 Cubs. The boxy, single-wing plane was the Model T of the sky. Ted’s flight instructor, Dick Lentine, was waiting. Ted paid him the dollar, signed the form on his clipboard, and motioned for Kirk to climb into the back of the two-seater. Ted took the controls. Lentine spun the single nose-mounted propeller as Kirk tried to work his first seat belt. The motor fired up, and the little yellow plane kicked up a spray of sand and grit wheeling around toward the runway.
Weight distribution was of no consideration on this flight. Kirk weighed barely half as much as the wall furnaces he installed. For a scrawny kid, he had turned out to be much stronger than Ted expected. Wiry . . . determined . . . hardworking. And he didn’t talk too much, either. Ted liked him.
It was a clear day and Ted wasn’t going to waste a precious minute. He turned into the wind, found the center of the runway, and accelerated hard.
In the back, Kirk’s senses were instantly assaulted by the deafening scream and forceful lurch of the Piper’s fifty-horsepower engine. He had barely gathered a breath before they reached speeds matched only by childhood memories on the back roads of Bakersfield in his father’s snazzy Stutz Bearcat.
But if Kirk was unnerved by the noise, the power, the speed, or—seconds later—the altitude, he didn’t show it. His big grin said it all. Kirk was smitten. It was love at first takeoff—a passionate until-death-do-us-part kind of love. Suddenly, his entire future was banking sharply in a new direction.
Until that takeoff over the rooftops of Alhambra, Kirk had been focused on quite a different career path—professional boxing. Moving heavy wall heaters served as an extension of weight training in a gym. His big dream had been getting his name on the marquee of a title bout: “Rifle Right Kerkorian,” fighting for a world championship in the ultimate international arena—New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
It was an especially audacious ambition even though Kirk had been very successful as an amateur welterweight. His own trainer, who agreed that Kirk had the heart of a champion, warned him not to go pro. His lean and slender frame wasn’t built for the pounding of a professional fight. Kirk bristled at the notion that he might be too fragile. But his older brother had been forced from the ring with cognitive issues and slurred speech. The damage was blamed on a string of poundings Nish absorbed in more than a hundred bouts from San Francisco to San Diego.
Flying may have rescued Kirk from a similar fate.
Born Kerkor Kerkorian in Fresno, California, on June 6, 1917, he was the youngest of four children in a close-knit Armenian immigrant family. His grandfather Kasper was the trailblazer, moving halfway around the globe in his midsixties, an age when most farmers are slowing down, not starting over. That was in 1890. A collapsing Ottoman Empire was devolving into violence and especially harsh treatment for Armenian Christians. Life in the agricultural heartland of the American West sounded like a better option.
Kasper’s youngest son, Ahron, followed him through New York’s immigrant portal at Ellis Island more than a decade later. The teenager reached California penniless but full of grand plans and big ambitions, expecting to become a millionaire. He was a natural-born entrepreneur. He finagled the use of a horse-drawn wagon to launch his first business—fruit distribution. Ahron bought citrus from rural ranches and hauled it to towns for sale up and down the San Joaquin Valley.
He called himself Harry, but his swarthy good looks and a ferocious mustache prompted customers and friends to call him “Pancho”—as in Pancho Villa, the legendary Mexican bandit-revolutionary. Fruit-hauling profits soon allowed him to bring over the girlfriend he left behind in Armenia. Ahron and Lily became a family of five with Art, Rose, and Nish. And by the time Kerkor joined the clan, Ahron had already made and lost a few small fortunes.
Remarkably, Ahron achieved impressive business successes despite the fact he could neither read nor write. He was illiterate in English and Armenian. His handshake was his contract, but when he had to sign a formal document, his signature was an “X.” But he was a whiz at numbers . . . and a fearless opportunist.
During World War I, Ahron started buying up vineyards to take advantage of surging civilian and military demand for raisins. The lowly sun-dried grape became a wartime staple—inexpensive, easily shipped and stored, and resistant to spoilage. The best raisins came from the green seedless Thompson grapes grown throughout the valley.
By Armistice Day, Ahron was the raisin baron of the San Joaquin. His holdings, about a thousand acres on ten ranches, had a gross value of nearly a million dollars. Most, however, were heavily leveraged with mortgage or crop loans. Behind the scenes, he was juggling debt to stave off financial ruin. Still, by all appearances, the dashing Ahron in his jaunty Stutz Bearcat convertible seemed the picture of immigrant success.
Eventually, Ahron’s numbers wizardry and debt juggling weren’t enough. Market fluctuations played havoc with his cash flow. His debt load became unbearable as the national economy soured. And piece by piece his million-dollar property portfolio was picked apart by creditors. The recession of 1921–22 finally wiped him out.
Ahron still hoped to hang on to the prized family farm, a 120-acre spread known as the Captain Fuller Ranch in a place south of Bakersfield called Weedpatch. Here, a Kerkorian family farm empire could rise again. Ahron had borrowed heavily to develop a vineyard on the land, but he really hoped to strike oil. He knew it was there—black gold, Texas tea. Every morning the ranch pump house delivered petroleum-perfumed water that made its first few gallons undrinkable and unsuitable even for washing. Oil engineers from San Francisco tried to discourage Ahron’s dream. There was no oil under his land, they assured him. Ahron borrowed more money for a watermelon crop.
Finally, a rising tower of debt threatened to collapse on the Kerkorian family farm. Ahron put his “X” on an official title transfer document trying to shift ownership of the Captain Fuller Ranch to four-year-old Kerkor. County officials and lien holders ignored the ploy. Creditors filed suit, going so far as to name the boy as an accomplice of his father’s attempted fraud.
Two constables showed up one day while Ahron was eighty miles away on business in Los Angeles. The ranch and its crops had been attached for nonpayment of a loan and the officers were there to supervise an unannounced creditors’ auction—beginning with fifteen tons of harvested watermelons. Lily sent her boys running to a neighbor’s house to call Ahron at his hotel in the city.
The auction had ended bu
t buyers still mingled waiting for trucks to haul away their watermelons when in the distance a dust plume rose above a dirt road. It was headed toward the ranch house. As it neared, the source of that brown cloud became clear: it was Ahron’s speeding Stutz Bearcat.
At the house Ahron braked to a stop and dispatched eldest son Art to saddle his horse. The father rushed inside and emerged moments later, a Colt revolver tucked in his belt. He mounted up and rode slowly but directly toward the small gathering of auction customers. Before anyone could react, he drew his gun on the armed constables. They froze. Some in the group immediately took off running. Ahron marched the others at gunpoint toward his property line marked by an irrigation canal. He ordered them to swim for the other side.
Ahron’s cold fury was as obvious as the muzzle of his Colt, but one of the businessmen in the group railed against the inconvenience and indignity of splashing across a fifteen-foot canal. He was threatening severe legal consequences when Ahron reached down from the saddle to grab a long-handled hoe. Suddenly, he was “Pancho Villa” Kerkorian, flailing the hoe wildly, nearly severing the recalcitrant man’s ear. Everyone promptly plunged into the water. Ahron was later arrested for assault. It was not, however, the last ride of Pancho Villa Kerkorian.
Standard Oil Company sent a collector from San Francisco to serve a writ of attachment on the farm for an unpaid loan.2 Ahron didn’t much like creditors in the first place, but he also harbored suspicions that the big oil boys hadn’t been honest with him about the drilling potential on his land. Something snapped when William Breitinger showed up on Ahron’s property with that unwelcome writ. He ordered the man off his land. To emphasize the point, Ahron fired up his old 1916 Lincoln and started chasing Mr. Breitinger around the ranch. And when the car bogged down in a sandy patch, Pancho Villa jumped out, grabbed a grape stake, and chased the bill collector on foot.
The Gambler Page 2