Pan Am’s revenues in 1968 had been almost 20 percent less than the year before, and 1969 was worse: $12.7 million in losses in the first six months of the year. As the 747s hit the tarmac, the importance of their success loomed. In January of 1970, Mrs. Nixon had christened the first operational jet with a spray of colored water, but at the ceremony neither she nor CEO Najeeb Halaby could then figure out how to make the gold lever of the hose turn off the flood. In the 1970s, annual losses reached $48 million.
Pan Am had launched a twenty-million-dollar advertising campaign in ninety-seven countries and thirty-two languages. America alone could not fill its 747s, as Juan Trippe had argued to President Johnson, but the wider world could. Pan Am’s ability to meet the increased load demands of bigger planes would depend on convincing passengers outside its home country to fly Pan Am rather than a national airline like Air India or KLM.
Neither the United States nor the wider world cooperated. Pan Am had hired hundreds of new stewardesses and its marketing department was drumming up new business, but its new planes had arrived as a mild economic recession began in the United States, as oil prices rose, and as maintenance and labor costs spiked. Under eight-foot-high ceilings, empty seats stretched back in rows. Revenue projections for the early seventies looked dim.
Among the airline’s 81,430 miles of routes, new competition crowded the most profitable. Some routes were sheer losses on the corporate balance sheet. Flights to Moscow and Pago Pago and Saigon were undertaken for diplomacy, for the national interest, to demonstrate the sense of showmanship in which training manuals instructed the classes of stewardesses who still left Miami eager to see the world. But the airline was “locked in a shrinking box, with the top, bottom, and sides all closing in at once,” Najeeb Halaby had said as he took the reins of the company. Pan Am no longer had a protective relationship with the U.S. government, but it now had increased competition, regulated fares, and ever-rising costs.
Moscow flights had never been cost-effective, but a vague trendiness had built around them in the years since the route began. Visits to the city were, as one journalist wrote, “Not the sort of travel designed to lure tourists primarily interested in surfaces (walls, paintings, anonymous faces, and so on) . . . [but] designed for those concerned with what lies beneath the surface (the people behind the walls, the thoughts and feelings behind the faces).” The New York Times published a travel feature on tourism in Moscow laying out an itinerary of sightseeing, opera, and toying with the state security teams—“try James Bond tricks like placing a book a certain way in a suitcase for your own amusement.”
In the briefing before Hazel Bowie’s first flight to Moscow, the crew supervisor had told her that the Soviet stewardesses she would meet on a flight crewed jointly by Pan Am and Aeroflot were not permitted to talk to the Pan Am employees. The cordiality of the Soviet stewardesses would not extend past professionalism; Hazel should not expect an invitation to anyone’s home during her three days on the ground in Moscow. All Aeroflot stewardesses had been recruited from the Komsomol, the youth Communist Party wing, and trained by the KGB, Hazel learned. For the privilege of foreign travel and foreign money, they were required to stay in groups of three on non-Soviet soil.
Few Pan Am stewardesses had any proficiency in Russian or wanted to fly Moscow routes—so few that the airline offered a monthlong language program in the city in 1971. Some thirty stewardesses signed on. Some took the courses seriously, attending their three hours of daily classes and the group excursions every afternoon, while others skipped out entirely. They preferred attractions in the city streets, taking in bread lines, cathedral spires, and faux-baroque subway stations. They washed pierogi down with vodka at unadorned restaurants. One stewardess bought a samovar at an antique shop and convinced a Marine at the American embassy to keep it until the trip’s end, when she could smuggle it out of the country. Another woman had thrown a trench coat over her clothes for a day of sightseeing and had to stare down the drunkard who shouted at her in a crowded street that she was a spy.
On the ground the stewardesses were immediately—and, for many, intensely—aware of surveillance. They observed the woman sitting at the end of each hall at the state tourism agency’s national hotel, taking notes. They asked one another if they too had woken up in the middle of the night, bleary, wondering if the flashbulb going off was a dream. They measured the distance between the door and the interior wall of a hotel room and the distance in the hallway between hotel-room doors and discovered three feet of unaccounted-for space, wide enough for a person to sit inside, watching. They told stewardesses new to the route not to criticize the Soviet Union in the hotel rooms or complain about the paltry food or the sandpaper-like towels or the bare bulbs in the ceilings. At first they went out in groups; as time passed and some grew more comfortable, they began to venture out into the city on their own.
After a while, they made up their own “James Bond tricks.” One of these was “Shake the KGB.” The women would go into the metro, take it one stop, get out of the car, shuffle along the platform under an arched and opulent ceiling, then dash into the next subway car. The men tailing them were rarely easy to shake, but the women had fun in the trying. The old woman at the hotel who noted their movements could be tricked too. After lunch one day, at 1:30 on the dot, half a dozen stewardesses walked out of their rooms and traded places. Five minutes later, they switched rooms again. They did it again five minutes later. One stewardess saw the woman frantically scribbling. She approached her, laughing. We were joking, she tried to tell her with words and hand gestures.
On nearly empty flights, stewardesses spoke to American diplomats, elderly women who had not seen their families in years, and, once, Mike Wallace on his way to research a 60 Minutes segment. The only Westerners the stewardesses saw with frequency were journalists and diplomats. No one knew what, if any, actual danger the Soviet Union posed to a crew of young women on their way to or in Moscow. A nervous stewardess might hand a list of the flight crew’s names with a bottle of champagne to a U.S. embassy staffer, “just in case anything happens.” Some women stayed in uniform for the duration of their three-day layovers for the protection they felt a Pan Am uniform conferred. Others made sure to toss their company coats on top of their off-duty outfits.
Hazel began to fly soon after her graduation from Mankato State. Though she had applied to work on three airlines, she interviewed only with Pan Am, the first to respond and grant her an interview. She arrived in the morning, and short Hazel considered her odds against tall, gorgeous women of seemingly every nationality. The Pan Am representative told her to return in the afternoon. Though her mother had put up a fight—she had refused to take Hazel to the airport when she left for training in Miami—Hazel knew this was what she wanted. It was not only airlines seeking Black American crews; Hazel saw advertisements for all sorts of companies in new compliance with the EEOC’s hiring mandates. As she flew to Miami, completed training, moved to New York, and embarked on her first flights, Hazel knew that she was participating in something larger than her own goals.
At first, every location she flew to dazzled her with its sheer distance, literal and metaphorical, from Minnesota. Caribbean out-and-backs, the occasional flight through South America, a London or a Paris. Unintimidated by the cold and having recently purchased an enormous paperback of A History of Russia, she saw Moscow listed as an option and bid the route.
It felt to Hazel, as she walked along the broad avenues of the city on her first trip to the USSR, that the Soviets had never seen anyone quite like her. In the United States, people knew she was a Black American; on a flight in a foreign country or in a customs line somewhere other than New York, she was seen as anything but. With her thin eyebrows and defined cheekbones, dark eyes that drooped slightly down at their outer edges—a dramatic face that Hazel made more dramatic with makeup—she was sometimes taken for a dark Southeast Asian. Other Black American stewardesses reported similar perceptions. In Iran a Black stewardess had to convince a military guard that she was an American, not a dark-skinned Iranian. Women were taken for Caribbean or complimented on their fluent English. Passengers asked where a stewardess was from—“My husband thinks you’re from Jamaica, but I bet you’re from Trinidad.” When the stewardess answered, “Philadelphia,” the passengers did not hide their disappointment. Some nonwhite stewardesses felt they were of interest to white American passengers only if they could be compartmentalized as exotic. Some wore their hair in tidy Afros puffed under their derby hats—hair short enough that the hat did not look clownish, long enough to highlight its natural texture—as a gesture of solidarity and a declaration of identity. Let me make it clear who I am, one new stewardess thought as she went to the hairdresser in Miami halfway through training.
“Who sat in this seat before me?” a white passenger might ask as he boarded a plane in Africa or South America. In the early days, as diversity across airlines began to rise, some stewardesses made sure that if two women of color worked a single flight, they split cabins so that any racist passenger would be served by a demurely smiling nonwhite stewardess. If you’ve got a problem, you’ve still got a problem, one woman thought. Others noticed that certain coworkers positioned themselves to room with one another on layovers, leaving a Black woman in an odd-numbered crew with her own room. As if she had been dying to have a roommate in a luxury hotel in the first place, that stewardess thought.
Many Black stewardesses wanted to fly to Africa to experience the feeling of being in a complete majority. Flying around the world, standing out wherever she was—for her skin, clothes, bearing, or a combination of all three—one stewardess said, “allowed me to be bold, be beautiful everywhere.” Skin color meant different things in different places. On one of her first trips to Puerto Rico, when Hazel checked into a San Juan hotel, the clerk—a dark-skinned Black woman—began to speak to Hazel in Spanish, and Hazel felt the collision of both of their assumptions. Her own skin color made the clerk assume she was Puerto Rican; to Hazel, the dark-skinned clerk should have been speaking English.
In Moscow, Hazel noted all different kinds of people drifting among the mostly white Soviets. People looked Asian or Mediterranean. Small waves of Africans and African-Americans had immigrated to the USSR in the 1930s and again in the late 1950s, when Cold War propaganda questioned the United States’ claim of world leadership at the same time that the nation brutally repressed minorities. African students from Soviet-allied nations had come to Moscow to study in the late 1950s. Some had stayed. Now, in the early 1970s, Hazel occasionally saw Black Cuban medical students in the city.
Hazel’s skin color set her apart, but so did her clothing. While other Pan Am stewardesses liked to wear their uniforms in Moscow, Hazel preferred to wear her gabardine coat over her own clothing. So many women walking down the street in the same clothing felt, to her, as if she had enlisted in the military. People looked at her on the streets anyway. She was nearly always the only Black woman around—and certainly the only Black woman who wore a green and yellow leather skirt with cowboy boots, who preferred vibrant dresses, and who did not leave a hotel room in any country without either bloodred or wine-hued lipstick on.
After looking at lacquer boxes one afternoon, oohing and aahing with a crewmate who spoke some Russian, Hazel’s friend told her how the women around them had dissected Hazel’s appearance, her green cowboy boots, her green eye makeup—green was her favorite color—and her skin color. On a later trip, she and a coworker had been walking on the street one summer night in the ten o’clock dusk, and the coworker joked that the way everyone looked at Hazel, it seemed as if they wanted to kidnap her. Russian eyes ate up every inch of Hazel.
“If you think someone has been in your hotel room, going through your bags, you’re right—they have,” the other stewardesses told Hazel before her first trip to Moscow. And indeed, her makeup moved around her bathroom counter. She would come back to her room to find her skirts folded in her suitcase differently. As she walked around Moscow and observed the women in their black, gray, and brown clothes, Hazel could not begrudge the housekeepers their curiosity concerning an American’s clothing and cosmetics.
And she liked Moscow. Even when there seemed to be nothing to do, Hazel found something. She waited in line with the Soviet women to go into a new cosmetics store on Red Square, a thick snake of people stretching along three blocks. She saw the sights, including St. Basil’s Cathedral with its elegant frescoes, ornate ironwork, spinning tops, and gold domes glinting in the summer sun or faintly glowing in a dull winter twilight. In the rest of the city, men with long coats and straight backs waved cars along avenues slick with rain or snow. Extravagant old buildings stood alongside newer, unadorned blocks of flats so wide you had to stand in front of them and swivel your head left to right a full 180 degrees to take them in fully.
That afternoon, outside the new cosmetics store, women waiting in line on the street around Hazel mirrored their city. They wore dull clothing—every shade of blah, Hazel thought—and pulled scarves over their faces in the winter; Hazel had heard that the KGB could read lips. But she saw that the women wore immaculate haircuts and carefully composed makeup. Soviet women were portrayed in the West as dowdy, stolid as they worked beside men. A decade earlier, an American Airlines stewardess had won a trip around the world, including an unusual stop in the USSR, which then very rarely offered Americans visas. She had written a series of articles for the Chicago Daily Tribune: “American Girl Introduces Russian Girl to Lipstick.” In 1959, Yves Saint Laurent had premiered Dior’s “New Look” in Moscow; Western photographers had followed the willowy French models in bright reds and greens through the gracious central greenhouse arcade of GUM, the famous department store on Red Square. Their cameras snapped the models’ wide circular hats and defined red lips meant as a contrast to the drab kerchiefs of Russian women, who looked on with curiosity, confusion, and perhaps disdain or pity for such objectification. Hazel observed more complexity in how Soviet women presented themselves. She always trusted her own experiences over what other people said she should expect. Moscow was no different.
She requested more Soviet trips. There was no place like Moscow. On one flight, a passenger invited her to see the Bolshoi Ballet. The experience was impressive in every way, from the Grecian columns of the famed Bolshoi Theater facing the park—across the flat greenery of Theater Square, the Pan Am sign glowed in the bay window of the airline’s office at the grand Hotel Metropol—to the extraordinary dancers on the stage. It was music she would never play in her own house, but the dancing was superb, the women of the corps spinning across the stage in precise unison behind the prima ballerina.
On another flight, Hazel served martinis to two Americans on their way to scout for circus acts. “Come along,” they said. “We’ll give you tickets.”
Hazel walked into a big, empty barn of a building, watching the men on high wires, the tigers roaring, bears juggling, and animated clowns. In 1919 Lenin had nationalized the circus; it was, in every way, the people’s entertainment. Its acrobats acted out Russian folk legends and parables with their feats of daring and grace. Tiger trainers used batons, not bullwhips. By the second half of the century, acrobatic training was so rigorous that a woman tossed across open air in a trapeze performance would have had her choice between performing in the Bolshoi or the circus.
Moscow dwarfed the human scale with the width of its avenues, the massive columns on the façades of the important buildings, the metal sculptures of important men standing twice as tall as their natural height. Moscow was a city of bronze busts: Vladimir Lenin, writer Alexander Pushkin, and Iron Feliks, the founder of the Soviet secret police. On a street corner one day, Hazel found herself standing in front of a bust of Pushkin. She examined Pushkin’s expressive mouth and wild hair. Hazel thought, It can’t be. But what Hazel intuited was true. “His family came from Africa way back,” another stewardess, a Russian speaker, told Hazel. Even in Moscow, Hazel thought, she found Black people.
Americans had begun to travel to the Soviet Union by now, but few were as beguiled by Moscow as Hazel. Celebrated war correspondent Martha Gellhorn visited Moscow the same year as Hazel’s first trip. Also the same year—1972—President Nixon and the First Lady visited the USSR and China. The presidential trip was a once-unbelievable reversal; American troops remained in Vietnam, fighting by proxy with these same world powers.
After six days, Gellhorn could not wait to leave. Boiling hot, hungry, bored, dry—she had found so much less chilled vodka than she hoped—Gellhorn had been uncomfortably intimidated by the police state, an unusual emotion for a war correspondent visiting a city at peace. “When the flight was called, I was first aboard the British Airways plane. A cool correctly smiling English stewardess stood by the door. I said, ‘I’m so glad to see you, you’ll never know how glad I am to see you,’” she wrote. Also: “I overcame a desire to kiss the carpet which was technically British soil and sank back into air conditioning and iced drinks, served with a smile, and read avidly the little booklet that lists all the junky things you can buy on our splendid capitalist airplanes.”
Hazel bought lacquer boxes in Moscow to bring home and scarves for herself and for her mother. At GUM, the floors were so old she thought she saw puffs of dust rising from the floorboards where she stepped and motes floating through the four-story arcade. She noted the filigreed iron railings on the second floor and the well-heeled women lining up at glass counters. They asked to touch hats and books, lipsticks and scarves—everything was kept behind the counter; there was no unmediated access to these precious goods. The women walked out with packages wrapped in paper and crisscrossed with twine. Gellhorn had purchased thick and ugly upholstery fabric at GUM to fill her suitcase going home; she’d packed little more than gifts on her way in and feared the implications of an empty suitcase to the KGB on her way out.
Hazel learned to bring her own food on Moscow flights so that she would not have to rely on the available chicken, borscht, and canned vegetables at restaurants. Even hotel restaurants served little. The Metropol’s restaurant was “a Russian peasant’s dream of capitalist splendors—immense candelabra, oversized lights, heavy furniture,” one correspondent had written in the 1930s. But its menu was an ideal that could not be reached under current circumstances. The Pan Am Moscow station chief’s wife, who waited in line with Soviet housewives for limited quantities of meat, served pointedly small portions to the foreign businessmen and their wives who came to her dinner parties. Everything was a statement.
But even amid the scarcity, Hazel was engaged by novelty. Where else could she go to a restaurant and sit down to a menu replete with delicacies only to be told that none were available? Though she wanted to ask what they did have for her to eat rather than choosing from a fictional menu, she learned that waitstaff disliked skipping the ritual of menu consultation. Hazel ordered item by item, pantomiming desire for something she knew she would not receive. In New York she packed hard-boiled eggs, cold chicken, a can or two of tuna fish, maybe mayonnaise, a gallon of water.
To Hazel, the value of Moscow was its total difference from Rome or New York or Minnesota. Moscow was a place where nothing on the menu was actually available. A place where malls looked like greenhouses, where women lined up for lipstick. A place where fun and food were subversive statements—nowhere else did Hazel see this so openly.
The Aeroflot stewardesses gave Hazel recipe cards. If she wanted to learn to make piroshki or goulash in her New York apartment, she could follow their directions. After years of flying Moscows, Hazel would regret that she had never seen how any Russian lived. The Aeroflot stewardesses were, as advertised, never intimate. But her initial briefing had been incorrect—they did not appear fundamentally limited by the rules they faced. In the recipe cards, Hazel recognized an attempt at what connection was open to them.