Kirk finally wheeled the Mosquito toward an area reserved for Ferry Command arrivals. He was almost parked when his engines sputtered, coughed, and stopped. The gambler with the most confounding poker face in the Ferry Command was ashen.
Prestwick was usually a quiet place for pilots killing time awaiting transportation back to Canada. An old hotel run by Miss Gray provided the lodging. Deluxe rooms had mattresses on the floor. In a crunch, overbookings were assigned to more primitive quarters in “the annex”—a converted produce cellar.2 All-night craps games were common, as was poker. Kirk loved the camaraderie but confessed that it “ended during our poker games.”
When he checked in with Ferry Command after his harrowing arrival that night, it was clear that Kirk was in no shape to operate heavy equipment, count cards, or make wagers. His superiors diagnosed him with a case of “flight fatigue” and prescribed a dose of R & R—a few days of rest and relaxation in London.
The Germans had been knocked back on their heels the week before by the massive allied invasion of the Normandy coast on D-Day. Under the circumstances it seemed that the defense of Western democracy could afford to give Kirk a few days off.
He reached London on Friday, June 16, 1944, just in time to join Londoners watching the skies and running for cover at the terrorizing sounds of incoming German V-1 rockets—what the Brits called “doodlebugs” or “buzz bombs.” The rocket barrage, as many as a hundred per hour, came at all times of day or night and in weather foul or fair. London had to endure it. But Kirk headed back to Canada for another ferry assignment and, with any luck, a couple of nights with Peggy.
Back in Montreal, Peggy had the wives and girlfriends of Kirk’s fellow fliers as companions. It was a lonely existence compounded by constant anxiety. Heart-wrenching news of lost planes and crews doubled as “good news” when she learned it wasn’t Kirk. She wanted a baby. They were trying.
Meanwhile, the war was turning for the Allies. The ice-sensitive, limited-range Mosquito fighter-bombers that Kirk and company were flying across the Atlantic turned out to be well worth the extra risk. They were highly effective at intercepting and destroying German rockets. Of the thirty-three warplanes that he ferried over, eight of them were the buzz-bomb-killing Mosquitos that so many ferry pilots preferred to avoid.
Kirk’s stint as a contract pilot lasted more than two years, through the end of war in Europe. In that time, he qualified to fly seven different planes and accumulated thousands of hours of flight time, thousands of dollars in savings, and untold tales of adventure on five different continents.
He dropped by the Sphinx on a stop in Cairo, hitched a ride on a camel, and once, on a lark, faked a minor mechanical problem in Morocco so he could drive into nearby Casablanca. He had just seen the movie that would remain among his favorites for a lifetime. He went to town hoping he might find a gin joint like “Rick’s Café Americaine.”
He pulled off a successful landing in the middle of the night without runway lights at Basra. He found a speck of land in the Atlantic called Ascension, a mountain landing strip in the middle of the ocean so tiny yet so critical to refueling that he called it “a little spooky.” And he managed to dodge malaria in the fever capital of West Africa, a place known to his British colleagues as “White Man’s Grave.”
Crews making plane deliveries to British bases in North Africa used a southern route across the Atlantic through the Gold Coast colonial capital of Accra or nearby Takoradi (in what is now Ghana). Often those trips involved long layovers, especially for returning crews forced to wait for limited westbound shuttles back to Montreal and New York. Downtime was especially well suited for poker. And poker had become Kirk’s game—a collateral benefit of his RAF tour.
In Takoradi, the cards came out early and play often ran into the wee hours. Kirk would have been among the diehards playing deep into the night, except for the sunset invasions of mosquitos—the swarming bugs, not the “wooden wonders.” In West Africa, arrival of those mosquitos meant the odds of malarial fever had shot up.
No matter how Kirk’s luck had been running, when the sun went down, so did he. Before bug bites could start dealing out malaria, he had crawled into the safety of his mosquito net. And he was never stricken.
His buddies figured he was lucky. Maybe so, but Kirk also tried to keep the odds stacked in his favor. While fellow pilots were sometimes unprepared and risked losing fingers and toes to frostbite on those long, cold shuttles back to Canada, Kirk always traveled with extra socks and warm gloves.3
Like most of the Ferry Command flight crews, Kirk hated that return trip. The B-24 Liberator was a heavy bomber. It wasn’t outfitted for passengers, who typically had to sit for more than twelve hours on the bomb bay floor, an uncomfortable space that was neither pressurized nor heated.
Kirk wasn’t sure what was worse—the cold, the butt-numbing accommodations, sucking on oxygen tubes at high altitudes, or the sheer tedium of the marathon flights. But he agreed with the standing joke of fellow pilots that they were paid the big bucks not for taking planes across the Atlantic, but for enduring the rides home.
In October 1944 Kirk and an extralarge contingent of fliers got the chance to ride home aboard the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. They sailed out of Gourock, Scotland, and landed six days later in New York Harbor. It was anything but luxury.4
The Queen Mary’s decks and passageways were clogged with hospital beds and badly wounded soldiers. This was the war that ferry pilots seldom faced from their cockpits in the clouds. Kirk roamed the grand liner encountering “so many cases of kids hurt, without arms or legs.” That crossing and another like it on the SS Ile de France left lasting impressions: “It made me feel how lucky I was.”
With the war’s end in sight by spring of 1945, the aviators of the RAF Ferry Command were increasingly aware that the end was also near for the extraordinary adventure they had all shared—for the most exciting two years that Kirk, for one, could ever have imagined.
Besides providing an enormous boost to the war effort, in particular Britain’s domination of the air, another far-reaching contribution by the Ferry Command was the opening of new air routes for commercial aviation. The so-called polar route was tamed, and years ahead of its time, thanks to the pioneering experiences of intrepid wartime aviators—Kirk Kerkorian among them.
In the end, many of the Ferry Command pilots looked for ways to stick together after the war. Some shared dreams of starting their own airline. They would need seed money for such a venture.
Kirk, like several of his buddies, reached into his pocket to ante up a starter fund. The price to get into this game: one thousand dollars each.
4
Scraps, Craps, and John Wayne
Summer 1945
Montebello, California
A civilian job in postwar Southern California figured to be a letdown for Kirk. What could possibly replace the adrenaline rush of repeated flights into the war zone over a treacherous North Atlantic?
He returned to Los Angeles knowing only that he wanted to fly and that he had to be his own boss. In a matter of days, he set up a pilot training school at Vail Field in Montebello, a small oil town just east of the city. He was a teacher again, specializing in helping licensed pilots obtain instrument ratings as required by commercial airlines.
The booming aviation business needed large numbers of instrument-rated commercial pilots, so Kirk’s flight school roster was quickly filled. Within weeks the business was turning a reliable profit. But there was no excitement, no adrenaline rush. The teacher was bored with teaching.
Vail Field already was a busy place. The former home of Western Air Express in the 1920s, when it flew the U.S. mail between Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, was now attracting so many charter plane operators that air traffic was getting congested. Kirk decided to get in on the charter business, too.1
Late in the summer of 1945 he stopped in to visit the branch manager of a Bank of America on Whittier Boulevard, not f
ar from the airfield. Kirk convinced Walter Sharp to finance his purchase of a twin-engine Cessna, a surplus U.S. Army Air Force UC-78 five-seater. Besides launching him in the air charter business, the new relationship with a banker was—as Rick says in Kirk’s favorite movie of that era—“the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
One of Kirk’s first charter customers was a Los Angeles scrap metal entrepreneur with a gambling habit. Jerry Williams operated a recycling yard about five miles from the airport and wanted regular lifts over the mountains to a budding gaming resort in the desert 250 miles east called Las Vegas.
The town of about eighty-five hundred was a collection of saloons and gambling joints before the war, but it was already starting to boom. The two newest and biggest hotel-casino operations in town—the El Rancho and the Last Frontier—had opened just outside city limits on a stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard soon to be known as the Strip. The local action included dancing girls and sexy lounge acts. Liberace was in town trying out his New York nightclub act. But most important: gambling was open and legal.
Craps, poker, blackjack, roulette—it was all there, all day and all night. Williams was a regular, hiring Kirk and his Cessna for weekly flights to the gaming center. Kirk was enthralled by the action. “I was just overwhelmed by the excitement of the little town.” The adrenaline rush was back in his life.
Kirk and Williams would become good friends and regular gambling buddies. On one of their Vegas visits they emerged from a casino shortly before dawn after a particularly difficult night at the tables. They had only five dollars between them. Williams figured it was enough to cover breakfast. Kirk figured it was worth one more visit to the craps table. “What good’s five dollars going to do?” he lamented, heading back to the gaming floor. When Kirk returned, they went off to breakfast with $700.
Good luck or bad, Williams kept hiring Kirk’s charter service, sometimes two or three times a week. He was, said Kirk, “an extremely good businessman. I won’t say he was a terrible gambler, because everyone loses. But he did gamble an awful lot.”
Another early charter customer was John Wayne. The actor wanted Kirk and his plane to take him around the Arizona desert as he scouted locations for his next movie, Angel and the Badman. It was to be Wayne’s first time in the dual roles of actor and producer.
Their four-day tour of canyons, buttes, and mesas included dodging desert thunderheads across Monument Valley and among the red rock formations outside Sedona. Kirk repeatedly touched down in the dirt of improvised landing strips. Each night they pitched tents and slept on the ground. For Kirk, it was a grand adventure. He was camping with John Wayne!
“He was such a nice man. I wanted to stay in touch with him, but I always was shy about going back and meeting celebrities.”
The charter business in those days was very good. Gamblers and couples in a hurry for Nevada’s quickie weddings dominated customer traffic. And Las Vegas was poised for the boom. More hotels and casinos were on the drawing boards or under construction. Kirk’s operation was too small. He sold off his flight school and planes, paid off his Bank of America loans, and pocketed a healthy profit that he intended to parlay into something bigger.
Kirk still wanted his own airline—his own fleet of planes, his own company. He watched pilots from the Pacific war zone combine forces to launch a cargo service named after their volunteer fighter unit, the Flying Tigers. A similar dream shared by his fellow RAF Ferry Command pilots never got off the ground. But Kirk was still dreaming.
One way to build capital fast was in the surplus military plane market. The versatile twin-engine C-47 “Gooney Bird,” better known to civilians as the DC-3, was in especially big demand among new and expanding freight haulers from Alaska to South America. Fleets of planes coated in olive drab paint were parked all over Hawaii, stranded at war’s end by a fuel range limiting them to island hopping or a maximum of five hundred miles.
Kirk had a plan. He bought seven of the planes stranded in Hawaii—each worth at least double its purchase price if he could get it to the U.S. mainland. And doubled again for any plane he ferried all the way down to Rio de Janeiro. He was figuring on profits that in 2018 dollars ranged from about $90,000 to $250,000 per plane. Kirk was back in the ferrying business, this time as a broker of scrapped and surplus planes—gambling on the used aircraft market and his own ability to fly just about anything with wings.
Now the only thing he had to do was get those short-range planes from Honolulu to San Francisco—across twenty-four hundred miles of ocean.
5
On a Wing and a Spare Tank
Fall 1946
Honolulu, Hawaii
Kirk had paid $12,000 for the first C-47 he intended to fly to the mainland. He had more than one customer already waiting. In fact, he had likely customers lined up from Hollywood to Rio to buy just about all his surplus planes, sight unseen. And this one was a sight, with more than its share of dents and scuffs and that tired military drab paint job. But like the teenager who restored used cars, Kirk figured he could always give it a good steam cleaning and a fresh set of “newer” wheels. Far more critical was expanding the Gooney Bird’s fuel range.
All those flights out of Montreal and Goose Bay in short-range Mosquito fighter-bombers had taught Kirk a few tricks . . . and useful precautions. He rigged this first plane with extra fuel tanks that were lashed to racks installed behind the cockpit.
After calculating and recalculating his expected flight time to California, taking into account possible variations in winds forecast over the Pacific, Kirk personally monitored the fuel-loading process as if his life depended on it.
It would be a very long flight, about fifteen hours. A late-night takeoff from Honolulu would put him in the vicinity of Mills Field in San Francisco by sunset the following evening. By Kirk’s mathematical reckoning he had fuel enough to circle a fogged-in Frisco for two hours or to easily reach an alternative airport farther inland. He was leaving no chance of repeating that close call over Scotland.
Taking off from Oahu well after midnight, Kirk was accompanied in the cockpit by radioman and navigator Eugene Bergeron. Two pilot friends who would be Kirk’s backup crew for future flights were riding along. Eight hours later tedium and stiff muscles were spreading. The steady drone of the twin engines was hypnotic.
Kirk’s friends were asleep in back. Bergeron had dozed off in the next seat. The pilot himself was feeling drowsy as well. He flicked the autopilot switch and felt control of the plane slip from his hands. He stretched and shifted into a more comfortable position. At ten thousand feet over the Pacific and another seven hours to the Golden Gate, Kirk was going to sit back and relax. And then, he dozed off, too.
It was the quiet that woke him. Both engines had shut down. The Gooney Bird had become an unintended glider.1
Kirk lunged for the autopilot switch, restoring manual control as he struggled to understand what was happening. Was there a fuel leak? There should have been considerably more fuel in that now-empty spare tank. Did he miscalculate?
But first things first—could Kirk save the plane?
He adjusted flaps and trim to slow the plane’s descent. They had already dropped nearly a thousand feet. And the weather was deteriorating. They were in and out of rain clouds, buffeted by light to moderate turbulence. Kirk steered away from the worst of it. They descended in eerie silence through eight thousand feet.
A now wide-awake radioman was tapping out a message in Morse code. They were out of range for any voice communication. And there was no certainty that anyone on land or sea would pick up the coded signal. Still, Bergeron broadcast the plane’s global coordinates and repeated his urgent message in dots and dashes:
“Engines out. Going down. Going down.”
It was around noon on the California coast when the SOS signal was received at Hamilton Field, an army air base and weather station on San Pablo Bay just east of San Francisco. The weather crew promptly alerted the U.S. Coast Guard and waited
, hoping for another message. Nothing.
There was no point in dispatching rescue vessels. The C-47 descending through those rainsqualls with two dead engines was about seven hundred miles away. It could take days for ships from the coast to reach a crash site that far out.
By early afternoon radio news bulletins were on the air broadcasting details of the SOS as it had been reported to the Coast Guard. The plane and its captain were identified. Some of those news flashes were airing 350 miles farther south in Los Angeles where Kirk’s friends and family were among the shocked listeners.
“Aviators facing death in the sea . . . a mayday signal . . . then silence.”
At the Kerkorian family home, Kirk’s brother Nish heard it first. He told his wife, Flo, but kept the news secret from parents Ahron and Lily. When sister Rose walked into the tense household, she demanded that Nish tell her what was wrong. He finally took her aside.
“Kirk’s plane went into the drink,” he said.
Rose was puzzled. She wasn’t sure what he meant. But the couple’s grave expressions gave it away. Rose felt cold all over.
Ahron sensed the dread as well and insisted on answers. Nish explained the situation. The old man collapsed into a chair and fainted. He had to be revived but only to wait. All agreed to keep the reports secret from Kirk’s mother, Lily.
Ted O’Flaherty, the friend and former furnace installer who introduced Kirk to flying, was at Los Angeles Airport when a fellow pilot asked, “Have you heard what happened to Kerkorian?” He rushed to his car radio to listen for news updates.
And gambling buddy Jerry Williams drove out to the Kerkorian home to wait with Kirk’s family. As the afternoon dragged on, the wait on the ground seemed more and more desperate.
Back in the C-47 Kirk had been racing time and gravity with a methodical air that masked the urgency. He had switched over to another spare fuel tank and was following procedures to reduce air in the fuel lines. Switching tanks in flight with engines running was routine. But having a tank run dry, it was almost certain that air had been pumped into the fuel lines along with the last drops of gas. An air lock could prevent or catastrophically delay a restart.
The Gambler Page 5