The skirt of the Pan Am uniform hung an inch below Karen’s (and every other stewardess’s) knees. The long white blouse fit snugly around her waist and tucked into the skirt so that even when she reached into the compartments above, it would not pull out of the waistband. The jacket, introduced in 1965, was boxier than the Don Loper–designed 1959 uniform; Pan Am called it the “easy” look.
Each stewardess was measured at training so that the pale blue worsted-wool suit fit her body perfectly. Its tailored shoulders imitated the lines of executive suits on Madison Avenue. Blue pillbox hats with white piping pulled the jacket and shirt together. In Paris a century earlier, the writer George Sand had traded her heels for men’s boots and written that in such solid, freeing shoes, “it seemed to me that I could go round the world.” The Pan Am uniform made many of the women feel equally capable.
Several years before Karen arrived at training in Miami, the sixty-odd stewardesses who worked on Pan Am’s military charters, flying GIs from Vietnam battlefields for five-day R&R stints, had felt intimidated by the soldiers’ eyes on their uniformed bodies as they crewed their first flights. Young men with identical haircuts sat three by three in rows stretching all the way to the back of the plane. They wore identical military green shirts. Hundreds of eyes tracked each stewardess’s movements. The older DC-6 propeller planes had been relegated to these shorter flights, and as the women walked down the aisle—all economy seats, a single long cabin with the roaring propellers on either side—the number of men looking at them sped their heartbeats.
At some point, after two flights or five, the men’s eyes began not to frighten but embolden Clare Christiansen and the other stewardesses who had volunteered to staff these new shuttle services. The men looked at them like they were movie stars. Some women enjoyed this newfound sense of their own glamour. Others did not enjoy the feeling but appreciated that here, beauty could be useful. Clad in an authoritative uniform, beauty conferred control.
A stewardess had to have control over her cabin so she could keep her passengers safe from the many things that could go wrong on any of Pan Am’s international flights. Around the world, airplanes skimmed over and sometimes into violent conflicts on the ground. In Nigeria, a coup and countercoup in 1966 had launched a civil war. Six years after the nation’s independence, tensions over who would rule a sovereign Nigeria sparked along the lines of divisions cultivated by former British colonizers. Power struggles escalated until massacres took place at airports and train stations, in streets and homes.
Throughout West and Central Africa, other countries used seizing civil aircraft as a vehicle for “hard diplomacy”—a foreign minister marched off a KLM plane at gunpoint in the Ivory Coast, a government-orchestrated hijacking of a plane on which a Congolese rebel leader was traveling to Spain. Still, there was no modification to Pan Am’s flight routes across West Africa through Abidjan and Lagos. The stewardesses were trusted to keep passengers bound for the next destination aboard the plane when it stopped on the tarmac to load more people.
Locations across Southeast Asia also posed varied dangers. In Indonesia, a brutally anti-Communist ruler was in the process of killing up to a million Indonesians. The violence was indiscriminate and unpredictable. Pilots told stewardesses not to stand too near the door when American diplomats exited the planes in Jakarta. In Vietnam, the airspace, one pilot coolly told a reporter in 1966, remained “the only place I know of where a passenger can sit back sipping a martini and watch an air strike going on below.” An ex-navy pilot saw more enemy fire flying R&R shuttles than he had in his two years in the military.
The men on their way to the war in Vietnam did not appreciate the below-the-knee cornflower-blue worsted wool on Clare or any of the other women who crewed the Hong Kong R&R service. Tall, statuesque Clare had modeled. One of her crewmates, Pamela Borgfeldt, had been a Miss USA 1964 semifinalist; she had clear blue eyes and a slightly crooked smile. On other airlines, stewardesses wore less clothing. Braniff sent its stewardesses into the air wearing yellow coats; after two outfit changes, the women concluded flight service in leopard-print leotards with a sheer overlay. In Braniff advertisements, a model languidly unzipped layer after layer of costumes in what the airline called the “Air Strip.” On Western, stewardesses served dinner in pajamas. American Airlines introduced uniforms of minidresses and fishnet stockings in the spring of 1967, but polls revealed that passengers across all demographics expressed distaste for the fishnets. Executives swapped them for neutral stockings but kept the dress length short despite the fact that some passengers—women of all ages and middle-aged men—objected to that choice too.
Only young men, the demographic that had always approved wholeheartedly of the short skirts on American, sat on Pan Am’s flights to Vietnam. But Pan Am kept its stewardesses’ skirts longer. One group of GIs circulated a petition to alter the situation. A soldier mailed it to the Pan Am Building on Park Avenue in New York. “If we are going to fight for American womanhood,” the petition read, “we would like to see more of it.”
Across all airlines, executives had agreed with these GIs on the importance of a stewardess’s appearance and availability. Vetting began in hiring. “Attractive appearance will be foremost in importance,” read a 1963 American Airlines supervisor handbook, the sentence underlined for emphasis and elaborated on in excruciating detail: “We can sometimes pretend a person is attractive, if we admire them for some other reason. [Hiring such people] should be avoided.” Round faces, close-set eyes, scars, and moles were undesirable. Pan Am’s “philosophy and techniques of stewardess selection” focused on physical appeal plus personality, education, language skill, and hip size, since a stewardess’s hips moved at a passenger’s eye level. Supervisors in charge of hiring assessed granular details of physical appearance, limning the factual and the subjective in cool commentary: “Needs to have teeth fixed. Model-cold, passive . . . Pretty smile, no personality. Dumpy—head small for body . . . Theatrical, too much eyebrow. Pretty eyes, no girdle.”
Youth and marital status were monitored by rules that allowed for dismissal at a woman’s thirty-second or thirty-fifth birthday, depending on the airline, or upon her marriage. A married woman, management feared, would miss work too often, gain weight, or have a husband who often called to complain of her absence. Besides, a sufficiently nurturing and attentive woman would not abandon a husband at home. Marriage signaled a woman’s investment in the traditional values that institution implied. In the mid-1960s, the average U.S. airline stewardess worked for 32.4 months. “If that figure ever got up to thirty-five months, I’d know we’re getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not getting married,” said a personnel manager at United in 1965.
To the airlines, a stewardess’s eventual marriage was as important as her temporary singledom. It made her retirement either likely or inevitable, leaving an opening for someone younger and unattached; she would accrue no pension and require minimal insurance expenditure. And as fare regulation continued, stewardesses’ availability and attractiveness provided an essential lure for a largely male flying clientele, especially for airlines with no other venue by which to project the full glamour of the jet age. Pan Am had stylish hotels frequented by international royalty—by the mid-1960s, its InterContinental hotel brand was the second-largest international hotel chain—and celebrities like Barbara Parkins and the Beatles posed for paparazzi alongside its jets. The airline retained the right to terminate a stewardess after she had been married for six months, though its managers rarely exercised the option, since enough women quit on their own to render the few openly married stewardesses acceptable. Other airlines relied nearly entirely on stewardesses to set their brands apart.
For decades stewardesses had tried to disentangle their work in flight from their unmarried status. “We don’t fly for love,” one stewardess said in a 1938 Popular Aviation article. The fact that a third of her cohort quit each year to marry “does not mean that all of us sit on a perch in the sky waiting for Dan Cupid to soar by and take a pot shot at us.” She and her colleagues worked as “sincerely and efficiently” as “regular businesswomen.”
Slight shifts in women’s roles and moments of permissiveness had come and gone in the past—the New Woman of the turn of the century, the flappers of the 1920s—but by the early 1960s, the American perspective on women’s sex lives had begun to undergo an irrevocable change. “Sex is neutral, like money. It’s the way you use it that counts,” one woman told journalist Gloria Steinem for a 1962 Esquire article. Another echoed the voices of those who believed that “people who have no share in the consequences should have no share in the decision.” A new birth control pill had been approved in 1960, though it was still legally limited to use by married women. A poll of college students revealed that nearly everyone agreed that sex, for men or women, was “something you have to decide for yourself.”
Stewardesses—young, beautiful, single women in great numbers with access to movement around varied geographies—were now, often unintentionally, in the thick of the culture wars.
A rising chorus of celluloid stewardesses suggested that love—or at least sex—formed an essential part of the job’s opportunities. Playboy featured its first stewardess centerfold in 1957, interspersing photos of the “brown-eyed beauty” from Dayton in white panties with images of her in uniform, a version of the X-ray vision plenty of airline customers imagined when they boarded planes. By the early 1960s, sexy, servile stewardesses were a feature of the pop-culture landscape in books and plays all written by men. A British novel, Girl on a Wing, depicted a group of stewardesses hunting wealthy husbands. A French play, Boeing-Boeing, sold out in London’s West End. Both were soon bought by major Hollywood studios. In Boeing-Boeing, Tony Curtis plays a man with bubbly rotating girlfriends who fly for Lufthansa, British Airways, and Air France. The film based on Girl on a Wing, Come Fly with Me, used the advertising tagline “Three airline hostesses with the mostess’ of fun in mind!”
Around no single group of people did so much anxiety about new sexual mores cohere more easily. The book Coffee, Tea, or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses came to encompass the overarching societal perspective on airline stewardesses; it flew off shelves from the moment of its 1967 publication. After a month and a half, it went into a second printing and the film rights were sold. Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones—not the real names of the Eastern Airlines stewardesses who spoke as the book’s authors even though they had not, in fact, written the book—spoke on radio shows throughout the autumn.
In reality, Coffee, Tea, or Me? was not a memoir but a novel authored by a young PR executive at American Airlines. After meeting two stewardesses one night at Toots Shor’s Restaurant in Manhattan, one of whom he characterized as a “blowsy blonde who knew every four letter word,” he realized that he could write a book embellishing the anecdotes they told him. He saw the stewardesses twice; they told him about their training, the apartments they shared, the men who sought stewardesses as trophy dates, and the men they pursued. The book outlined work culture and airline terminology as well as the sexual and romantic habits of different nationalities and professions—Englishmen and engineers, Danes and doctors. And though many current stewardesses rankled at the book’s terms—the apartments they shared were “stew zoos” complete with “stew bums,” men who slept with various compliant stewardesses at once—the former stewardesses who promoted the book charmed the journalists who interviewed them, male and female alike. “The way she describes them, her six years as a stew sound more like she was the self-appointed mistress of ceremonies of a sky-high vaudeville act,” a Chicago Tribune columnist wrote of Rachel Jones. “Fun was compulsory.” Soon Coffee, Tea, or Me? became a fixture on paperback-bestseller lists. In 1968 alone, members of the American reading public purchased 1.25 million copies.
Airlines picked up where pop culture left off. The industry saw no reason not to capitalize on male fantasy, which saw stewardesses as a new sort of woman in uniform, sexually empowered but a little buttoned up, with evident investment in male comfort and pleasure. The most louche advertisements and uniforms often came from smaller, domestic carriers—international airlines had their respectability around the world to consider. A miniskirt would not read the same in New Delhi as it did in London, New York, and Paris. Still, the tone of a 1965 Continental advertising campaign became the norm. The advertisement featured an image of a pencil-skirted rear end leaning away from the viewer. Text alongside the photo read, “Our first run movies are so interesting we hope you’re not missing the other attractions aboard.”