Around the world, six hundred million people watched Neil Armstrong, “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins land on the moon live on television. Soon newspaper front pages in every country would carry the same images: the pocked surface of the moon, the white peaks of lunar mountains, the men’s faces above the wide circular necks of their suits.
On an airplane somewhere over the Pacific on July 20, 1969, the stewardess had just served dinner when the pilot announced to his plane full of U.S. Marines on their way to Vietnam that Neil Armstrong had taken his first step on the moon’s surface. The stewardess prepared, in the silence immediately after the announcement, for a bright, loud cheer. Instead the quiet stretched.
An older man set his food on the floor, folded up his tray table, and stood up.
“‘O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,’” he began.
One by one the others set their food on the floor and stood, all 164 of them. As the minutes ticked by, the men stood and sang. They went through all the patriotic songs they knew and ended with the Marine hymn: “‘From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli . . . In the snow of far-off northern lands and in sunny tropic scenes, you will find us always on the job, the United States Marines.’”
When the stewardess walked down the aisle she saw the tears on the men’s faces. They were heading to someplace they had probably never heard of, she thought, to die for a confusing, likely doomed cause, and still, they had stood up to sing about America. She thought the purity of the moment set against the backdrop of the war the men would soon enter would never leave her.
Karen sat cross-legged on the floor of her New York apartment. Today, she was the only one home. The afternoon sun flared through the windows onto the dingy walls. Tears streaked her cheeks as she watched the grainy images of the moon on TV. It was the same moon she had gazed at as a teenager on the cliffs of Santa Barbara, eager for experience, the moon that had pointed her toward Asia, the moon that represented all the places she had already seen and those she had not. “There’s such a lot of world to see,” the Johnny Mercer song went. Now uniforms hung in her closet, a vinyl bag with the Pan Am globe below them. Karen could bid flights to anywhere now, any city Pan Am serviced, anywhere on the globe above which Aldrin and Armstrong stood.
In Rome, Lynne and a friend planned to head to the American Academy for its television. Soon after she woke up on July 21—her birthday—Lynne knew that the astronauts had already made it, but she dressed and climbed aboard a bus to go to the American Academy anyway. The two women walked into the academy’s library to the three televisions showing the rebroadcast. Lynne thought the news might be dubbed in English but it was florid Italian that rang out from the recordings. Lynne, surrounded by old, rare books, listened to the Italian narration of the American astronauts’ buoyant jumps across the moon’s surface, and wept.
Tori had flown in from Tokyo that morning and wanted to watch Armstrong’s first steps, but the man was taking forever to exit the capsule. She fell asleep on the couch, then was jolted awake by the scratchy sound of the astronaut’s voice coming from far above the sky where she had just been flying. Her eyes closed again; she woke up again. Come on, she thought, get on it—get astral! In her apartment the gold shag carpeting and avocado-green appliances gleamed in the noon light. Waiting for an event so surreal and so exciting, while drifting between waking and sleep—the moment was like a dream.
This dreamlike version of reality held up a strikingly accurate mirror to Tori’s life. Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins had ridden to the moon in a capsule whose instrumentation appeared familiar to any observant stewardess. The ship used the same basic principles of propulsion that sent Tori into the air every few days of every month of every year. Her job, too, broke her away from earth’s gravitational pull.
Over the course of two years of flying now, she’d had many such experiences that once might have struck her as surreal. Once, Tori had sat in a rented bus in Nairobi National Park, watching the sunrise around a watering hole, still wearing the dress she had put on to go dancing hours earlier at the Equator Club. The Nairobi nightclub required black tie on Saturday nights but never turned the more casually dressed stewardesses away. A rented bus had picked the women up outside as the party wound down and driven them the four miles out of the city and into the park. Tori had forgotten her camera. She watched antelope, a zebra or two, and monkeys. She impressed the image upon her memory: the negative-space silhouette of the animals in the rising light, the dark outline around the water, the long, low plain farther back. Acacia trees shot up and then out with wispy branches. Thick grasses on the ground feathered the horizon line. As the day brightened, the women were driven out of the park on gray roads that sliced through the brush like any country road anywhere, except that here monkeys might be spied knuckling their way alongside their van.
Another time, Tori had been scheduled for Flight 281 to San Juan, but at Kennedy she was told to wait for the next flight, so she sat and read in the airport until her new plane arrived. Once she was on board, the pilot called her into the cockpit to tell her what he’d heard over the radio. Flight 281 had flown toward Havana. “Lucky you,” he had said. Unlucky, Tori thought. I wish I’d been there. Skyjackings were still mostly regarded as an amusing novelty. Magazines published cheeky tourist guides to Havana, like one titled “What to Do When the Hijacker Comes.” “It was great,” said pro golfer Barbara Romack of a diverted flight. “I got more publicity out of this than when I won the Women’s Open.” A skyjacker on Flight 281 had given .32-caliber bullets to passengers as souvenirs. Tori had always wanted to visit Cuba.
On yet a different one of Tori’s flights, across Africa to Johannesburg this time, emergency vehicles had raced across the tarmac toward her plane as soon as it landed. Ground crew attached stairs to the plane and Tori heard a man outside question the purser through the opening door. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Didn’t you get the cable in Kinshasa?” The flight engineer emerged and walked down the stairs with the ground crew. Tori and the rest of the stewardesses continued their work. Tori learned later that bullets had penetrated the plane millimeters away from the steering wires. Nigeria was engaged in a civil war with newly seceded Biafra, and the Nigerian army stationed at the end of the runway in Lagos had fired at her plane as it lifted off. Airplanes represented Biafra’s primary link to the outside world. Planes from Iberia, TAP Air Portugal, and Air France were covered in fresh coats of paint and given false tail numbers, and a ragtag group of Israeli restaurant owners and retired U.S. Air Force pilots flew food and arms to the starving refugees in Biafra. Nigerian radar-guided antiaircraft fire christened planes with dozens of bullet holes as they chased the same route as the commercial Pan Am flight from Lisbon to Lagos. Many flights did not make it past the Nigerian artillery. Still, Pan Am made no changes to that route.
Airport authorities in Lagos had sent a cable to Kinshasa, but Tori’s plane had landed and just as quickly left. In Johannesburg, Tori walked across the tarmac, boarded the crew bus, and was taken to the hotel, all actions she had performed, at this point, hundreds of times before. She heard about the incident only after she and the rest of the crew were safe from its consequences. As she learned what happened, she stayed calm. She stood safe on the ground. Still, she thought, maybe her time flying frequent Africa routes should end.
Enough time flying recalibrated a person’s concept of excitement and danger. For a certain sort of woman, the repetitive thought, applied to repeated murky situations—Maybe this is a bad idea—created an unlikely sense of security. In public, the people Tori had begun to refer to as the “Pan Am family”—the pilots and stewardesses, station managers, and public relations agents in various ports of call—maintained an attitude of safety-minded responsibility. One of Pan Am’s popular guidebooks, compiled of surveys from the wives of employees and expatriates around the world, told readers not to swim off the coast of Liberia. “Strong currents make boating and swimming too hazardous to be much fun,” read the entry on Monrovia. Yet few of the Pan Am women Tori knew considered anything hazardous enough to ruin their fun. One stewardess had almost lost an arm waterskiing on a moonless night in Monrovia when the boat’s driver had not seen her fall. Another, a former stewardess married to a Firestone employee and making a home in Liberia, became so good at waterskiing off her dock that she barely got wet anymore. Tori herself had almost drowned swimming on that ecstatic first night there. She was fine.
Tori would do nearly anything once. Her competitive streak aligned with her opinionated nature. And she never knew when a particular crew would next be in a particular place. Routes changed rapidly outside of Europe and North America. Expanding markets for Pan Am flights and political volatility around the globe meant that a route might shift in days or weeks, removing a destination from a map entirely. Amid the rotations of crews, each group of pilots, engineers, and stewardesses created its own fleeting chemistry. The individuals of each group crafted their own balance between responsibility and audacity. These were the sort of people who arrived on time or early but rarely said no to a dare. An airplane was no place for anyone too reckless. But at the same time, the world around which it flew was no place for anyone too fearful. Crews worked together and then split apart and reassembled with the easy sociability of camp friends.
In New York, Tori’s living situation settled. Her roommate’s sister, who had lived with them while her husband was deployed, moved out. So did the one flaky roommate. Now only four stewardesses shared the apartment, meaning that there was a bed for every woman—not that they were often at the apartment together. In New York Tori went on dinner dates with men she met through friends of her European friends or with the younger pilots just out of service in Vietnam; she had platonic dates with an affluent, older gentleman she’d met through the woman she’d au paired for in Paris. She preferred talking to dancing, and the formality of dating appealed to her. A dinner date could be romantic or casual, a one-off or a frequent meeting. Tori was picky, and women in New York did not go out to dinners together. Dating the right man offered one-on-one conversation and the chance to be out and about in the city.
If Tori had arrived in New York even five years earlier, she might have lived in one of the city’s many women’s hotels, where young women’s parents allowed them to stay because there, as Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar, “men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.” Now apartments shared by single women fizzed with new autonomy amid a historic loosening. Respectable, middle-class Americans were no longer as invested in a woman’s virginity as they had been a generation earlier. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown had published Sex and the Single Girl, arguing that sex could be enjoyed by unmarried women. “Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere,” as Brown’s favorite saying went. The nation’s first topless bar had opened in San Francisco in 1964. Pan Am’s stewardesses had already spent considerable time in cities where topless bars were not unique. Many knew how to party hard. In the crew’s party room at the Monrovia hotel, the outline of one stewardess’s naked body appeared on the wallpaper. She had drenched herself in red wine and made a print of her own form among the bottle labels and hand-drawn cartoons decorating the wall. The image remained a feature of the room long after the stewardess had continued on.
Tori’s brief romance with the English accountant in Monrovia had ended when she stopped bidding Africa routes after her flight to Johannesburg. Now Tori flew to the Caribbean or flew round-the-worlds to London or Karachi. In New York she was taken for cocktails and dinners to Le Club, to the former speakeasy 21, to La Grenouille. The men she dated wanted to impress her, though she never had a say in where they ate. Whichever roommate had a date brought back a doggie bag to save whoever else was home from another night of spaghetti. The roommates had non–Pan Am dishware now too. Tori had bought a full tea set, roses on white china.
Tori hoped to volunteer with the United Nations in her time off. Dozens of new skyscrapers had appeared not far from the UN headquarters in midtown, where stone and brick town houses and aristocratic mansions had been reduced to piles of rubble and then replaced by new glass-and-steel offices. As a volunteer, Tori knew she would not immediately be interpreting for foreign dignitaries in one of these buildings. At first she stuffed envelopes at the Biltmore Hotel, two twenty-six-story towers across from the Grand Central terminal with the Pan Am skyscraper looming above. Tori had sat in a windowless room of the hotel folding paper leaflets for one program or another. A fine place to begin, but Tori sniffed when she understood that her job for the foreseeable future would involve envelopes.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had recently found in favor of the female State Department Africa specialist Alison Palmer, the woman who had requested promotions for nearly a decade. A 1969 memo recommended that “Miss Palmer’s personnel file be documented to show that her career has been affected by prejudice against women officers—this documentation can best be done by placing a copy of this memorandum in her file.” The memo was not placed in her file. Instead, Palmer received a letter. “Your career prospects could be damaged by inclusion of this reference in your file to this grievance procedure,” it read.
Women in the State Department still had to retire upon marriage; the performance evaluation of male officers still included a section on the behavior of their wives. Among thirteen task forces recently set up to evaluate changes to the State Department’s rules, none considered the role of women. A working group of eleven women held public meetings and soon grew to include two hundred members. “Just what do you women want?” the undersecretary of state asked them. Alison Palmer had still not received a promotion, and now she demanded an outside investigation into her case.
Tori finished the shifts she had volunteered for with the United Nations and declined further assignments at the Biltmore. She walked into the Pan Am Building instead. The first time she sought information on the company’s pension plan, she was too young to begin one, but at age twenty-four she could start to save for her eventual retirement from the airline. She no longer thought that a shift to another career would come soon.
Tori had accrued enough seniority to take a thirty-day vacation, her first extended time off. With her 90 percent discount for passenger flights for her family and her employee rate at InterContinental hotels, she brought her mother on a vacation to Thailand. The Siam InterContinental, among the hotel group’s newest, was decorated with gold-shot Thai textiles and motifs inside a starkly modern frame. Sitting at its blue pool at the center of the grounds, surrounded by a lush spray of palm trees, Tori attracted attention from a wide range of suitors, though she credited the attention to her beautiful blond mother.
Now, as a result of flirtations begun around the Siam InterContinental pool, three marriage proposals floated toward Tori. One of the men had been a joker, but two stayed in touch. The Texan businessman fell off as Tori’s interest in him waned; the other, a Western Airlines pilot, stuck. She had a month of trips through Los Angeles, where he lived. They went to dinners at a piano bar in an old boat in Playa del Rey. He came to see her in New York, where they visited the Empire State Building and the Russian Tea Room. They vacationed together in Alaska when he had a short-term assignment in Anchorage. He kept a Cessna in LA and promised Tori trips to Cabo, which did not excite her—she felt more comfortable with four engines. After six months they decided to get married in Norway the following April, when they both had time off.
Tori was ready to be serious but she was not entirely comfortable with a marriage untested by daily life. She wanted to ask for a transfer to Pan Am’s new Los Angeles base. If Pan Am refused to send her, she concluded, she and her fiancé would rethink the April wedding date.
Barely three months had passed when trouble emerged between them. Her transfer request had been granted, and she was set to move to LA. She and her pilot disagreed on minor points of their life together—like two kids versus three—but Tori thought they agreed on the broad strokes. They would wait two years for children and in the meantime enjoy the perks and flexibilities of crewing on an airline. Maybe she would fly in the Cessna and watch the Pacific Ocean scrolling up toward the dry mountains of the California coast on the way to Mexico.
But the pilot wanted Tori to get a ground position, a nine-to-five with the airline. Tori did not understand. Her nearly three years of seniority would transfer after a few months in LA. She had made purser the previous year; now she earned the highest paycheck available for a stewardess. She bid her own routes, made her own timetables, directed crews of four and then, on the 747, nine women as they attended to the needs of hundreds of passengers across vast oceans. On a geopolitical level, Pan Am was often a chosen instrument for the national interest, but in Tori’s life it was the instrument of her own freedom. With that kind of ownership over her own time and schedule, she thought, she and the pilot could plan their work lives in tandem and together take advantage of the opportunities their jobs offered them.
The sixties had begun with a near-absolute norm for a woman of Tori’s age: marriage. The age of women at marriage was young, the divorce rate low. Even if some of the numbers indicated fissures—separation was not such an anomaly—to most women, a good husband seemed the collective goal, marriage the only end point. But as the decade wound down, increasing numbers of households reported single women at their helms. The age of the women who walked down the aisles of churches and married in city halls rose. So did divorce rates, doubling the approximately 380,000 divorces granted annually between 1955 and 1960 to over 700,000 in 1970 and up to one million in 1975. The change happened in the United States and around the world; twenty-something-year-old women demanding, reassessing, and asserting themselves in ways that would drive the shift in countries with vastly different social, political, and religious contexts. In the United Kingdom, Poland, Uruguay, the USSR, Mexico, and Tori’s native Norway, the divorce rate went up and up through the seventies. In another decade, 1.2 million couples would divorce in the United States.
The pilot did not trust Tori on layovers in Paris and Beirut, Hong Kong and Bangkok, she learned. A week before Tori’s planned move to LA, her disagreement with him became a matter of commitment and control. Hello, Tori thought—if there’s no trust, there’s no basis for anything. What was he doing on his layovers?