Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  Introduction

  Lynn—The Now Girl

  Tracy—The Damn Good Kid

  Shirl—The Lesbian in the Sky

  Lauren—The Swinger

  Rona—The Freak-Out

  Bambi—The Old Maid

  Gillian—The Hooker

  Kim—The Autograph Hound

  About the Author

  Excerpt: Come Fly With Us

  Sex and The Stewardess

  John Warren Wells

  Lawrence Block

  * * *

  copyright © 1969, 2012, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Introduction

  Perhaps the most compelling indication of the impact of technological advance in twentieth-century America is not the replacement of the horse by the automobile, of the bookkeeper by the computer, or of the church supper by the nude party. Much as these three changes seem to encompass societal change itself. I would submit that they are secondary to another replacement: that of the farmer’s daughter by the stewardess.

  Because as surely as God made little green apples, salesmen made farmers’ daughters in half the unprinted jokes circulating in America a few decades ago. Whatever her role in fact, the farmer’s daughter was forever cast as the embodiment of what the American male hoped the American female might be—naïve and yet knowledgeable, young, unspoiled, and at once both horny and hygienic.

  It is this role which the present-day airline hostess has largely taken over. She is every man’s dream mistress, pleasant and poised, neatly groomed and becomingly coiffed, cool under stress, always smiling, and—because she is booked on another flight tomorrow morning—as conveniently disposable as an air-sickness bag.

  The myths which have grown up around the stewardess almost cancel one another out. She is a virgin, a nymphomaniac, a lesbian, the private property of the captain, a pro hooker, or what you will. She is (a) forbidden to date passengers, (b) encouraged to date VIP passengers, (c) anxious to get married or (d) none of the above. She is the girl next door. She is the furthest thing in the world from the girl next door. She can be had in the jump seat, the lavatory, the airport lounge, and Macy’s window. She does, she doesn’t, she will, she won’t, she likes it, she hates it.

  And so on.

  The truth, of course, is a combination of all of this and a little more beside. The first observation we can make about stewardesses is an echo of Lincoln’s remark about the common man and Custer’s observation about Indians. God did make a lot of common men, and there sure were a lot of Indians there, and the same thing goes for stews. There are a whole lot of airplanes up there, a fact one appreciates keenly when stuck in a holding pattern over Kennedy for two hours. A whole lot of airplanes, and stewardesses on every last one of them.

  Beyond this confirmation of the obvious, is there much truth in the overall myth? Is the stewardess more active sexually than the average girl? Is she as fast as the jet she flies in?

  The answer is a highly qualified yes. To be sure, the average stew has more sexual contact with a larger number of shorter-term acquaintances than the average non-stew. But this in and of itself is hardly remarkable, for she is also on balance considerably more attractive, more outgoing, in contact with more men, exposed to more emotional stress, propositioned more frequently, away from home base more often, and in countless other respects more inclined to swing loose sexually.

  In another sense, too, she embodies many of the qualities of the farmer’s daughter of a simpler day. Like that mythic young lady, like nurses and career girls and all those sundry categories the mention of which bring a wink to the Rotarian’s eye, the stew is a creature who has become what she is out of a certain amount of discontent with what she was. The most outstanding thing about the farmer’s daughter was that she damned well wanted to get off the farm and out where the action was. Similarly, the stewardess is a girl who has escaped the farm—or the small town, or the provincial city, or whatever environment she grew up in and ultimately came to regard as stifling. She had sufficient perception and sense of personal worth to want something more for herself than marriage to the boy next door, and she had the drive to break with a generally comfortable existence and strike out very much on her own.

  Typically, the stew is a middle-class Midwestern girl who cannot buy the home-town version of the American dream but who, at the same time, is not in rebellion against basic middle-class home-town values. Her profession is the most specifically temporary career in existence. Most airlines retire stews automatically at thirty years of age, and most stews are grounded by marriage long before that desperate birthday. The stewardess enrolls in her profession with the certain foreknowledge that, after just a couple of years in the sky, she will either marry a passenger or return to the boy next door.

  Her orientation, then, is toward the present rather than the future. And any number of features of her job reinforce this orientation. The constant change of scene, of companions—indeed, the whole mood of change, of going through life constantly resetting one’s watch to coincide with local time zones, all engenders a state of mind in which yesterday and tomorrow are less easily grasped and today is more significant. Then too, the implicit danger of air travel helps fix the stew’s attention upon the present moment. Despite the fact that airplanes are statistically safer than bicycles, despite the fact that crewing on commercial airliners is not really a high-risk occupation, the one thing that everyone certainly knows about planes is that, occasionally, they come down like snow.

  This is a point on which no one cares to dwell. Most stews would rather talk about something else, and so would I. To all readers who picked up this volume to read on a plane, let me tender my apologies, and my assurance that I intend to mention this periodic propensity of heavier-than-air craft as little as possible. Still, it must be said that all stews do live with the constant knowledge that now and then something goes wrong, and most of them sooner or later know someone who has gone down with the ship. It should hardly come as a surprise that girls who live under this sort of Damocletian sword are not inclined to make a fetish of chastity.

  • • •

  Sex and the Stewardess indeed!

  Researching this book, I must admit, was something of an embarrassment. One of the first things I learned was that I’m writing a book about stews and would like to interview you is as common an in-flight pitch as You ought to be in pitchurs. I found out, in fact, that it was generally easier to do things in reverse: to date a stew first and bring up the book later on. This is nice work if you can get it, and the sort of thing that makes me glad not only that I’m a writer but also that I write about human behavior rather than, say, farm machinery or data processing.

  In the course of things, I became rather closely acquainted with a good number of remarkable young ladies. At the same time, I came to appreciate the impossibility of producing a book which can sum up the sexual nature of the airline stewardess. The average stew, like the average Anyone Else, does not exist. I met no average stews. I did meet any number of Individuals, and some of their stories are presented in the pages which follow.

  Before I met these girls, I had a tendency to regard stews as plastic people, as fundamentally artificial as the potted plants in airport lounges. The permanent smile, the automatic friendly word—this sort of thing can be off-putting until one realizes that it is all essential to the efficient performance of a demanding and important job. I have not only gotten away from this original misconception entirely, but
I have come to regard the stewardess with something very like devotion.

  In a sense, I think the airline hostess is rather like Southern California in that she is the very quintessence of Now. I have felt for some time that how one feels about Southern California is a part of how one feels about the twentieth century; it is what the rest of the country, indeed the rest of the world, is trying mightily to become, and one cannot praise or condemn it without bearing this in mind.

  Much the same may be said for the stew. She is American womanhood in microcosm, the liberated, with-it, involved girl of the present day. She has all of the best qualities of today; woman in abundance, and whatever attributes she shows which we might call flaws are qualities inherent in our culture.

  The parallel could be extended too far, of course. All things being equal, I would much rather live with a stewardess than in Los Angeles. But I do not think any of us should rush to condemn the free ways of either.

  • • •

  The case histories which follow are those of specific individual girls whom it was my pleasure to interview. Their names and all other names have been deliberately changed. The names of their airlines have been omitted, and data concerning various cities and schedules and whatever has been either changed or deleted to such a point that no one should bother attempting to identify any of the persons involved. Such an undertaking would be witless and wholly unrealistic. With this one reservation, the material which follows is presented as I received it, rendered largely in the words of the stews themselves, frequently in interview form.

  To the stews who made this book possible, and indeed to all their fellows in the sky, this book is most respectfully and affectionately dedicated. May they all have happy landings forevermore.

  Lynn—The Now Girl

  Lynn is a slender girl of medium height with lustrous brown hair, quick brown eyes, and a low-pitched, almost husky voice. She has been flying for two and a half years and often remarks that she will go on flying until she is grounded. At other times, though, she will talk of marriage as something that might happen to her at any moment. Lynn does not plan in the usual sense of the term. Her involvement is very much with present time, not because of a pathological incapacity to conceive of the future as real (a common aspect of the sociopathic personality) but because she feels strongly that life can be more enjoyable and effective lived in this fashion.

  I found her extremely pleasant to be with and surprisingly difficult to interview, not because she was reluctant to discuss personal matters—quite the contrary—but because she tended to wander off on conversational tangents. She was particularly good at small talk. Most stews are; they have to be adept at prattling inoffensively with total strangers. In Lynn’s case, a facility with lightweight conversation made conversation on a deeper plane nearly impossible. An observation would remind her of a joke, a trivial anecdote, and the point of it all would get lost in the shuffle. This might have been disconcerting had she not been such very pleasant company.

  Lynn grew up in a town in central Illinois where her parents still live. Her father is a moderately successful dealer in home furnishings. Both parents are active in community affairs. A younger brother attends the state university. An older brother has joined the family business. “It all sounds very dull, I’m sure,” she said at one point. And, in another conversation, “They don’t have interesting lives, do they? When I visit, you know, it’s always good to be home and I love them, I’ve always felt very close with them. And whenever things get mean and blue I’ll think that I belong there. But I really don’t and I know it. I can’t stand for things to be dull. I visit them at home and I want to cry for them, for what they’re missing. Of course I guess they want what they have and wouldn’t be comfortable having otherwise, but God, one year after the other and it’s all the same, isn’t it?”

  • • •

  LYNN: I don’t think I really thought much about sex before I got to stewardess school. Oh, that sounds just super, doesn’t it? The airline would be thrilled to hear me say that. What I mean is that I didn’t think about sex as a part of a stew. I went steady the last year and a half in senior high. Did I tell you I was a cheerleader? Isn’t that just too typical? My steady was on the basketball team. He made all-county. He was certainly tall . . .

  JWW: You had sex with him?

  LYNN: That was about the only thing we did have, actually. There wasn’t anything to do or any place to go, the same places to drink or dance and the same movie theaters. And the same people all the time. We had about, oh, fifteen months of Everything But.

  JWW: Everything but intercourse?

  LYNN: Well, I thought so at the time. Everything covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it? I’ve learned a few things I didn’t know about then.

  JWW: I’ll bet you have.

  LYNN: Well, I’ve had some crazy teachers . . . What we did, oh, not to get physical, but we would neck up a storm and then handle each other until the rains came. Handle with care. This was what most couples used to do. About two months before graduation we started going all the way. The traditional thing was to wait until the senior prom but we rushed the season a little. Oh, when I remember! In his father’s car. Not even the back seat. The front seat of a car. My God.

  He’s married now. I could have stayed around there and not broken up with him and I might be married to him right now. I could have had that if I wanted it. He’s a veterinarian and he’s making a lot of money. He isn’t stupid. I may have made him sound stupid before, but he really isn’t. I could have had that and by now I would have a few kids and we would go to Chicago once a year. “Look, Lynn, a bus! Whoopee!”

  JWW: You say you didn’t think of sex before stew school.

  LYNN: Oh, right. See, I guess I was very naïve about this. I had absolutely no idea that stewardesses were supposed to have a reputation. All the jokes about sitting on the pilots’ laps—I had heard about that, there was the scandal in the papers then, and I was such an idiot I didn’t even think that what they were talking about was sexual. I thought it was a matter of kidding around, a little necking or something. I thought of the whole business of being a stewardess, I thought of it as completely asexual, like flying nuns—not like that goopy television program, this was before that program, but asexual like nuns . . .

  JWW: Didn’t you think about meeting men?

  LYNN: Oh, of course. We all do, you know. It’s really impossible not to because one of the things the recruiters kept throwing at us was that we would be likely to get married within two years. I didn’t mean that I wasn’t up to my ears in romantic ideas about the job. I imagined myself falling madly in love with some pilot or some passenger . . . What I didn’t think about at all was the fast sex, which is really not so much sex as it is a part of the whole fast way of living. Of being a fast person.

  JWW: Do you think of yourself as a fast person?

  LYNN: There’s no question about it, is there? I mean, I am. I don’t mean the word the way a Sunday school teacher might. It usually has a dirty sound to it, and I don’t feel dirty. I felt worlds dirtier with my high school steady whether we were doing Everything But or Everything Too, and that wasn’t fast at all, you know. That was perfectly acceptable so long as you did it in private and no one knew about it. But it certainly wasn’t fast. It was slow enough to put a person to sleep.

  What I mean by fast is getting a fix on things in a hurry. The plane lands and you don’t have to say, Christ, here I am in Los Angeles and I just left Chicago and I have to get my head used to being in California because of jet lag, so I think I’ll go someplace for a cup of hot chocolate and a nap. Instead of that you can say, Well, this is L.A., now let’s find out where to go and what to do and then just do it.

  And it’s exactly the same thing with people, with relationships. I can get to know someone in a hurry. You, for instance, I can talk to you this way and tell you things and actually how long have we known each other? See? People who don’t work this way have to feel each oth
er out forever and you just don’t function that way and enjoy life as a stew. You can’t. There really isn’t time. It’s always new people, and if you can’t size them up fast and relate to them fast you don’t enjoy them at all.

  JWW: And the same thing goes for sex?

  LYNN: I’ve found it that way. Now I certainly don’t mean that what works for me works for everybody, or that all stews are fast sexually. You must know that’s not true at all. There are girls who don’t seem to do much of anything, and there are girls who have to be in love, and there are all sorts of girls with all sorts of hang-ups.

  For me, sex is a part of life. Life is having fun and sex is a way of having fun and part of a fun evening. I think—oh, you don’t want a murky speech on Lynn’s philosophy of life.

  JWW: Go ahead.

  LYNN: Well, I think being happy is better than being sad and having fun is better than sitting on your fanny and counting your fingers like Little Girl Blue. Women always say they like a good cry. Well, I’m funny, I don’t. I like laughing and fun. As far as I’m concerned there’s no such thing as a good cry. I don’t understand why people take sex and tie it to other things. It was always tied to marriage. Maybe that made some sense when sex meant having babies. But now when it doesn’t have to, people still tie it up—if not to marriage, then to love.

  I know girls who dearly love to screw but who insist that you have to love the man. You have to be in love. You have to want him forever in order to want him for half an hour.

  JWW: Can you enjoy sexual relations with a total stranger?

  LYNN: I don’t know.

  JWW: How’s that?

  LYNN: I’ve never tried.

  JWW: But—

  LYNN: I always know the guy, John. I may know him briefly and I may not see him again afterward, but that doesn’t change the fact that I know him at the time.

  JWW: I see.

  LYNN: In fact my roomie insists that I only have sex with men I love. She just says that I have a very low love threshold. That I fall in love over dinner.