The Gambler

by William C. Rempel

  The timing was a happy coincidence for both of them. It turned out that Pancho, like Kirk, was in financial difficulties. The farm wasn’t self-sufficient. Fortunately for the Happy Bottom’s bottom line, there were other would-be young aviators with cash to pay for flight training. And extra farmhands like Kirk helped keep dairy costs down.

  After morning chores, ground school was a short drive to Antelope Valley Junior College. Flight instruction was in the afternoon. And evenings were story times. Pancho regaled her cadets with tales of barnstorming, air derbies, and stunt flying—spiced with accounts of Hollywood parties and her work for filmmaker Howard Hughes. On the weekends, Kirk hitched a ride back to Los Angeles to see his family and talk planes with O’Flaherty. His friend drove him back to the Happy Bottom on Sunday nights.

  For entertainment they sometimes stopped in to the newest nightspot in Hollywood, a dance club called the Palladium on Sunset Boulevard. That’s where Kirk met a dark-haired beauty with a cinematic smile from Nebraska. She was a dental assistant named Hilda Schmidt. Everyone called her Peggy. She lived in Lincoln Heights, one of Kirk’s old neighborhoods on the east side of town. She had a warm but quiet demeanor and, like Kirk, a sense of style in her dress. Peggy was an instant hit with the Kerkorian clan. Most important, sister Rose approved: “She was so pretty . . . a really good lady.” But the couple’s romance still had to fit in between Kirk’s flight lessons and extended stays at the Happy Bottom.

  Kirk came out of Pancho’s flight academy barely six months after plunging into intense pilot training and physically rigorous farm chores. Kirk’s sister, for one, was confident of his new aviation skills but highly skeptical that he’d learned much about dairy operations. “Kirk don’t know how to milk a cow!” she insisted. But he turned out to be a top student where it counted most. When he left the academy, Kirk had already qualified for a commercial pilot’s license. And he already had a job offer.

  Nearly two years of war in Europe had created a huge demand for trained pilots. And despite official U.S. neutrality, the American military was rapidly preparing for what seemed its inevitable future role in the fighting. Kirk was needed immediately by a civilian defense contractor in the Salinas Valley to teach aviation cadets for the U.S. Army Air Force. In the rush to fill that job, no one at the company had bothered to ask about gaps in Kirk’s formal education. He could fly. He could teach. He was hired.

  He reported to King City, a small farm town with few lodging choices. Flight instructors had to rent rooms in the homes of local residents. Their mission was to fast-track national preparedness for war in the air. Paul Blackman and Kirk were fellow instructors and roommates. They considered it a matter of personal pride to get their cadets through training. “The need was great, the pressure was great, and we did all that we could possibly do,” Blackman recalled.

  But for Kirk, still wrapped up in the romance of flying, a significant downside to the job was flunking unfit young aviators. He hated that almost as much as he hated making speeches to his students. He avoided the speeches, but his low tolerance for mistakes and recklessness made him a demanding instructor. He often repeated the mantra of Dick Lentine, his first trainer: “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots—but there are no old, bold pilots.”

  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor intensified pressure on pilot training. It also had a sobering effect on Kirk’s personal life. He made time for a return to Los Angeles where he proposed to Peggy. They were wed at Trinity Lutheran Church on January 24, 1942. He signed their license with his formal name, “Kerkor.” Nish was his best man. The newlyweds returned to the King City area and their first home together in nearby Greenfield.

  Kirk was also starting to weigh his career options. Some of his friends and fellow instructors were moving on to fly multiengine transport planes for the government. Canada was looking for American civilians to ferry freshly built warplanes to Great Britain. Kirk also considered enlisting. As a flight instructor and defense contractor, Kirk was exempt from the draft but he was also confined to light planes, basic training aircraft like the PT-17 Stearman. It was a biplane, a favorite of crop dusters, with a cruising speed of ninety-five miles per hour. In an emergency, it could land between the goalposts on a football field. It was, to an ambitious aviator, like riding a bike with training wheels. The single-wing PT-19 Fairchild was only slightly faster. Kirk was eager for bigger challenges. He was also conflicted—drawn to playing a more direct role in the war but comfortable in his new life with Peggy.

  He was still in the Salinas Valley in the summer of 1942 when Kirk’s pilot-training skills earned him a major promotion—to flight commander for the Morton Air Academy, a defense contractor operating in the Southern California desert. He would be issued an officer’s rank in the U.S. Army Air Force Training Command but retain his civilian status. Lieutenant Kirk Kerkorian and his bride reported to Blythe. Compared to the lush vegetable-growing region around King City, Blythe more closely resembled a bleak lunar plain—except where the Colorado River cut a swath of green along the California-Arizona border.

  Kirk was troubled to learn that Executive Officer Roger Pryor, a Hollywood actor and bandleader, expected him to address his first class of flight cadets with a brief welcoming speech. He nearly panicked. Surely the actor was better suited for public speaking, he suggested. But Pryor insisted that Kirk had to step up and speak. There is no record of what Kirk had to say, but his remarks reportedly were short of sixty seconds. And the awkward moment would long rank among Kirk’s most uncomfortable recollections.

  As it turned out, Morton Air Academy was one of the flight schools young Kirk had contacted when first shopping for pilot lessons. He was rejected for lack of a high school diploma. Now, because of proven piloting skills and valuable training experience, he was employed less than three years later by that very same academy . . . and in a senior management capacity.

  Kirk was fully qualified by skill and experience for the academy position, but he was sometimes haunted by fear that his academic shortcomings might be found out. He asked a friend of a friend of a Los Angeles school official for a measure of bureaucratic insurance. It arrived in the form of a letter saying, to whom it may concern, Mr. Kerkorian was a graduate of Metropolitan High School in Los Angeles. It went unquestioned into Kirk’s permanent record.

  His pals in the old League of Nations would have been proud. And though Kirk continued to feel self-conscious about his poor education, in Blythe at that time he mostly felt liberated from the fear that it might come back to haunt him—or even knock him out of the sky.

  It wasn’t long before Kirk was chafing over his limited role in the war effort. He was twenty-five years old, and the world was blowing up. But he was going to work every morning in far-flung Blythe. It was the cadets he was training who would get to fly the skies over exotic places and perform heroic duty, living lives that Kirk could only dream about. He was tired of being a distant spectator, and he was losing his enthusiasm for teaching instead of doing. He wanted to fly the biggest and fastest planes. He wanted in on the action. He wanted to see the world, but he’d never even been out of California.

  As an aviator, he had no shortage of other options. He was offered a captain’s commission in the U.S. Army Air Force, but that was more of the same—flight-training work. And joining the military had serious drawbacks. He told Rose that he was reluctant to give up his civilian status.

  The army could order him here, there, or anywhere. It didn’t appeal to Kirk’s independent nature. He wanted to call his own shots. “I’d like to think for myself,” he told his sister. Besides, he had heard the call of the North. The Royal Air Force Ferry Command needed contract pilots to fly new warplanes across the North Atlantic for the astonishing sum of $1,000 a month. Rose knew he was sold even before he added, “And I’ll still be a civilian.”

  Kirk was confident he could qualify. He met all the preliminary requirements: a commercial pilot’s license, more than enough recorded flight
hours . . . and that high school diploma.

  In the spring of 1943 Kirk and Peggy pulled out of Blythe and headed for Montreal’s Dorval Field. It was an exciting time for both of them. They moved into a redbrick apartment in the Mount Royal neighborhood. Kirk found the Ferry Command operations an exhilarating beehive of activity and the variety of aircraft awaiting delivery a pilot’s dream. He was thrown in with a gifted and colorful assortment of bush pilots, old-time barnstormers, stunt flyers, and commercial airline crews.8

  Demand for more pilots paralleled a growing war demand for more planes delivered faster. A steady stream of ferry crew casualties also fed demand for fresh recruits. The roster of dead and missing flight crews was well on its way to exceeding five hundred when Kirk came to town.

  His class of replacements would fill a gap left by one devastating crash in February of a four-engine B-24 Liberator. It was shuttling several crews back from Scotland when it encountered monster headwinds and ran out of fuel. It was ten miles short of the Gander airfield in easternmost Newfoundland when it crashed. Nineteen fliers died.

  Flying the North Atlantic was something very new in those early war years. Commercial airlines didn’t do it. It was widely considered unflyable. Only aviation pioneers had dared challenge the treacherous weather and unforgiving terrain. Charles Lindbergh had made his famous flight to Paris only fifteen years before Kirk moved to Montreal. And Lindbergh spent months preparing for his crossing. Once Kirk was cleared for the ferry service, he would be expected to make two crossings every month in all sorts of weather with planes so fresh off the assembly lines that each transatlantic crossing would double as its test flight.

  Ground school placed a heavy emphasis on navigation, meteorology, and North Atlantic geography. Then came the Link trainer for simulated crises—like lost engines, those monster headwinds, icing conditions, fog, storms, anything unexpected. Learning on the job over the North Atlantic was inevitable to some extent . . . but it wasn’t recommended.

  Kirk had to go under a hood and demonstrate that he could fly blind, by instruments only, maintaining a course within five degrees of straight and within an altitude variation of no more than a hundred feet. He had to account for the effects of wind on speed, course, and fuel consumption. And he had to navigate in clouds or by night and without benefit of a radio.

  Any graduate of the RAF training program who moved directly into command of an aircraft did so on the basis of performance—after demonstrating skill and accuracy in calculating, navigating, and flying. Out of his class of nearly a hundred, Kirk was one of only three immediately awarded the RAF captain’s insignia. He liked the way it looked on his RAF uniform. The civilian pilots all wore RAF uniforms, as Kirk would recall, “in case you were shot down in enemy territory, they wouldn’t shoot ya.”

  Kirk’s first flight was the twin-engine Lockheed Hudson he had trained on at Dorval Field. It was pure adventure—once he remembered to trim his flaps for the extra fuel load. He seemed amazed to find himself in such an exotic place. The kid from Weedpatch who’d never been out of California was steering a course through the clouds to Prestwick, Scotland!

  It was a long flight, made longer by a series of refueling stops along the way. He chose a route from Montreal to Gander, then to Greenland and Iceland, before a 750-mile final leg over open ocean to Scotland’s west coast. His first landing at Greenland’s Bluie West One airfield fit in his memory somewhere between a thrill and a chill.

  The only approach was up a narrow fjord with the remains of a sunken freighter serving as a directional indicator. Shooting the wave tops between black rock walls, there was no margin for error. But there were seldom any margins for error in the Ferry Command.

  One night in a snow squall, Kirk was lifting off out of Gander when he encountered severe turbulence just beyond the end of the runway. The fuel-laden bomber began to sink. It took all his strength and both hands to hold it steady. Snow-flocked trees flashed by perilously close to the ship’s belly. He was squinting into the harsh reflection of his headlights in the snow, half-blinded but afraid to let go and reach for the light switch. It may have been a couple of minutes—it seemed like forever—before he could pull up his landing gear and snap off the lights. It was, to that time, his most harrowing moment in the sky. But icing lurked as the biggest villain waiting in the skies.

  It seemed that everyone working the North Atlantic routes eventually had his struggles with ice building up on wing and flap surfaces. It could alter aerodynamics enough to turn a beautiful flying machine into something more like a rock. Ice forced Kirk into emergency landings at least twice, once over Quebec9 and again at Reykjavik after heavy icing on that final leg to Prestwick forced him to turn around.

  Icing was a killer that left few clues. It was considered the most likely culprit in dozens of unsolved ferry aircraft disappearances. Incident reports10 had haunting similarities:

  “8 Dec 42: Lost out of Gander . . .”

  “6 Dec 43: Lost out of Goose Bay . . .”

  “7 Mar 44: Lost out of Reykjavik . . .”

  These and others like them accounted for losses without a trace—no debris, no bodies, no flight recordings, no explanations.

  And icing wasn’t the only killer. Did the crew get lost . . . run out of fuel . . . encounter a violent storm . . . have some sort of mechanical failure? Kirk had “two very dear friends who disappeared completely” on Mosquito deliveries. He tried not to dwell on the risks or his very private concerns that “these were a lot of strange bombers and some weren’t reliable.”

  He would still be shaking his head about those strange planes and strange routes decades later. “It was like a grab bag. Get this airplane or that airplane. Go here; go there. No questions asked, just get it there.”11

  Despite the casualty rate, crew camaraderie was great. Most RAF contract fliers were Americans and Canadians, but there were also Australians, Poles, and Czechs. It was as if Kirk had joined another “League of Nations.” The stakes were higher in this neighborhood, but once again Kirk and his daring young pals were sharing risk—more than enough to keep things interesting.

  Some days he could hardly believe his good fortune. He was part of an elite unit that was steadily changing the balance of power in the war. He was commanding some of the biggest, hottest, most powerful planes in the air. And day after day he was flying the “unflyable” North Atlantic.12 Kirk Kerkorian was having the time of his life.

  3

  Bet of a Lifetime

  Early June 1944

  Lost Somewhere Over Scotland

  All good cheer and eager anticipation had evaporated from the tense cockpit of Kirk’s fighter-bomber. In the eternity of hours since losing the critical boost of that seventy-five-mile-per-hour tailwind, his attention had been fixed on coaxing every extra minute and extra mile out of the precious remains of a dwindling fuel supply.

  A chill breeze buffeted the cabin through the open floor hatch. He had ordered his navigator to make the first jump. It was going to be a tight squeeze for each man and his parachute to slip cleanly through that small manhole. Clearly, the DH-98 Mosquito was not designed for easy midair evacuations. But it also wasn’t supposed to run out of gas over the North Atlantic.

  “No! Please . . .” pleaded the voice next to him.

  Kirk turned to notice for the first time that his Canadian navigator was in tears, his wide, wet eyes begging for an alternate command, a better solution.

  “We’ll die when we hit the water down there,” the young man’s voice quavered.

  The deep inlet water of the Firth of Clyde was notoriously cold. If rescue took longer than fifteen minutes, the navigator was probably right. But the twin engines could choke and quit at any second. Kirk was steering a slow wide circle over thick clouds concealing what he hoped was at least close to the Scottish shore.

  “Gee, let’s take one pass. Just one,” implored the navigator.1

  A blind descent through overcast with a very low ceiling was haza
rdous enough. If the engines died within a few hundred feet of ground, a safe parachute jump could be impossible. Still, the fear-stricken navigator was giving his captain permission to take that chance—to roll the dice for both of them.

  Kirk took the bet.

  In the dull light of dusk, the fighter-bomber nosed over into a gradual descent. Kirk was poised to pull back and climb in an instant if the engines stopped, to recover as much altitude as possible before bailing out. At least they might have a chance to parachute onto some patch of unseen dry land.

  The Mosquito slipped into the fluffy overcast, then into an ever tighter and darker cocoon of mist and fog. Kirk watched his instruments, maintaining a shallow angle of descent, feeling his way deeper into dimness, listening for the slightest engine misfire, until suddenly—black water appeared through the bottom of the clouds. The Firth of Clyde! And then, in the near distance, the familiar lights of Prestwick.

  Kirk knew his way from there. He soared across the shoreline, trimmed his flaps for landing, and lined up on the centerline of a runway he’d never been happier to see. His touchdown was perfect.

  In the cockpit, neither man spoke as the plane rolled down the runway. Kirk realized only then that his legs were shaking so badly that he couldn’t work the brake. He couldn’t operate the rudder. There was nothing he could do but sit there, waiting for a massive surge of adrenaline to flood through his body. The Mosquito rolled until gravity brought it to a stop in darkness near a grassy field at the end of the runway. There, pilot and navigator remained for about ten minutes.