Flying with the gods

           

          So she’s not guilty after all.  Continental Airlines has a film that’s supposed to show she was on fire before she ran over that titanium strip.  The French court didn’t believe it and I don’t want to believe it either.   She was so beautiful.  Yes, she was ridiculously expensive, high maintenance and profligate with fuel. I didn't care.  I was in love with her.

                    

                        The Ford of Europe account was in ruins at JWT the world’s largest ad agency.  After much agony and chopping of heads and fees, Ford had allowed JWT to keep the account but they weren’t relaxed or happy.  Ford was the largest account in Europe and JWT needed a creative director to run "the creative side of things."  It was a terrible job with a life expectancy of a few months.  Maybe weeks.  It was a wonderful job, combat on the front lines.  France, Italy, Germany, Spain a total of thirteen countries to keep happy at the same time.  Tremendous responsibility, no authority. Based in London, day trips to Rome. If somebody powerful wasn’t pissed off at you, you weren’t doing your job. Would I fly to London for an interview?  On the Concorde?

                      The plane was ego with wings.  It took off with a thunder that shook the earth but not you.  You were sunk into soft, deep maroon leather.  Dom Perignon champagne in a crystal flute, caviar in a little silver dish, dinner on the way.  To be served at 2,200 MPH.

She rose in an arc, cruised up the coast and then in a display of power that seemed impossible for such a small plane, accelerated like a 4th of July rocket until the sky was black overhead the earth curved like a green and blue and white ball below and the big mach meter at the head of the cabin read Mach 2.2.  The sonic boom was long gone, trailing miles behind us.  Inside we were an intimate little club of wonderfully bright and happy souls, telling stories, making friends. 

                    She was so small inside, only 88 seats,  the flight attendants had to crouch a little as they served and soothed, pampered and smiled.  Isn’t this fun.  Aren’t we lucky.  Oh yes, yes, yes.  Just a little more, please.  No, I'll keep the glass.

           The flight, with its long glide down over Ireland and Wales into London’s Heathrow was over way too soon.  I gathered up my luggage got a cab and headed for London, demoted now to another jet- lagged working stiff..  But for a while, I had flown up among the gods.  I would flew her again and again (OK twice again), but that first flight is the one I remember.

Oh, Joke, Joke, Joke

           A large square room in London,  tall steel framed windows at one end,  a desk at each corner.  
         Llewellyn Thomas, kewpie doll face, tight blond curls, wide eye’d innocence his usual look, the one he’d inherited from his father, Dylan Thomas.  That look meant he’d just thought of something wickedly funny. Llewellyn was in one corner. 

Dylan Thomas with Llewellyn on his left. Dylan's mother, Florence, wife Caitlin, daughter Aeron and other son Coln in front.

           Assia Wevill, green eyes, sexy in a dark, zoftig, smokey way, like she knew so much more than you, you would have no idea what was happening before it was over.  She was a poet, having an affair with (later Britain's poet laureate) Ted Hughes and pregnant with his child when Hughes wife, the great poet Sylvia Plath, killed herself.  The New Yorker would publish two of Assia's poems in the week after she killed herself, as Sylvia Plath had killed herself, with her head in her gas oven.

Assia in 1965

              Tom Rayfield, freshly down from Cambridge in another corner.  Tom was very bright and very shy.  It took some practice before you could separate his mumbles into words.
              And me fresh off the boat, in the back corner against the wall. They all assumed I knew nothing and they were right.
             I was in JWT’s London office because I’d done an ad at JWT NY for a bank that ran in The New Yorker.  The bank’s chairman was also the chairman of Y&R.  His wife read the ad and said, "you should hire this guy." So Y&R offered me, with two years experience, twice what I was making. JWT offered me a job in London for half my salary.  So I said yes and  Karen and I got married, took a 6 week honeymoon in Europe, and came back to New York to sail for London on The SS France.  
            The conversation in that room was faster, sharper, and wittier than anything I’d heard before.  Full of references I did not know.  They’d burst into laughter and I’d have no idea why.  It was a month before I spoke.
              "What? What" Tom Rayfield said.  "It spoke, it spoke.  What’d you say," he demanded.
              I repeated what I’d said.
              “Oh, Tom said.  “Joke. Joke.  Joke.”
               Twenty five years later, I was on my way to the airport in Portugal when I read the news that JWT had been sold and had lost the Ford account.  I was, by then, in the Hapsburg panoply of advertising titles, International VP and Creative Director on Europe's largest account, Ford.  Soon, obviously, to be unemployed.  And it was Tom who gave me a list of a dozen things I might do.  One of them was to become the Dick Francis of motor racing.  Which I did.   

Throw Mamma From the Plane An Escort.

Dry Mud Lake, Southern California 1985. The Client is on the right.  

               The Bad News, we told Ford of Europe, is we want to fly 6 European Ford Escorts from Europe to California.  The Good News is that we'll bring 3 of them back.
                The "New" European Ford Escort had a new front spoiler.  Like a slightly altered chin. Otherwise it was last year's car.  Never mind, we had to introduce the little car in Europe. 
                 So we said if we don't have any news, let's make news.  "Let's throw it out of a plane, and drive the new one out of the hole in the ground."  Ford agreed and we flew from soggy London to Dry Mud Lake in Southern California.  
                A C-3 cargo plane rose over the mountains and floated in for a landing.  After it touched down, turned around and shut off its engine the desert was quiet.  Then something.  A helicopter.  No, wait, helicopters. And planes. Within minutes we were surrounded by the DEA, FBI, US Narcotics agents, The County Sheriff, California Highway patrol.  Wall to wall sunglasses with guns drawn.  They thought they'd caught a big shipment of coke, marijuana, something big, gone wrong. 
              They made the C-3 lower the cargo ramp and climbed into the plane, slipping and sliding on the ramp's rollers.  After a while, slipping and sliding, they were tumbling back to solid ground.  Nope, no drugs.  We explained we were going to throw Escorts out the back of the plane.

The front loader behind the client dug the hole for the "new"
Ford Escort to climb out of. Art Director John Vanderpump to my left.
(click on image to enlarge)

  Which we did.