Coffee, Tea or Me? (2 page)

One day during a three-year stint with American Airlines as exec in charge of public relations for the three New York metro airports, I received a call from Ed Brown, an editor at Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The first book in my writing career,
The Racing Flag,
a history of stock car racing, had been ghosted for Brown. He told me that Chet Huntley’s producer (Remember
The Huntley-Brinkley Report
on NBC?) had introduced him to two former Eastern Airline stewardesses, who had funny stories to tell. Was I interested in working with them?

I met with the two young ladies at Toots Shor’s watering hole in midtown Manhattan. They did have some funny stories, but hardly enough to sustain a book. I knew I’d have to use my own airline experiences—and imagination—to get the job done.

I wrote a proposal for an untitled memoir of two airline stewardesses, which sat with Brown for a month. Simultaneously, I’d found my first agent who pitched the project to Sam Post, then editor-in-chief at Bartholomew House, a hardcover start-up at MacFadden-Bartell, a large magazine publishing company. Post bought, and the project was taken away from Brown and Pocket Books.

The title
Coffee, Tea or Me?
came to me halfway through the writing of the book after hearing someone recite the old airline joke. Bingo! Boffo! How could it miss?

Well, it didn’t miss. The hardcover was published to considerable fanfare on November 21, 1967. A savvy, fast-talking publicity pro, Anita Helen Brooks, was brought on board to hype it, and she booked my two former stewardesses, using the names I’d chosen for them, Rachel Jones and Trudy Baker, on dozens of radio and TV talk shows around the country and for myriad print interviews. The book took off like an SST and showed up on many bestseller lists, including the hallowed one at
The New York Times.
For the most part, reviews were good, some even calling the book “a comedy classic,” and “a wickedly funny spoof of the airline industry and its stewardesses.”

Alan Barnard of Bantam Books put up $75,000 for paperback rights, and Hollywood came a-calling. One after another, major film studios optioned the property, only to allow their options to lapse, which opened the door for the next option to be taken. (Eventually, CBS made a TV movie based loosely on the book, starring Karen Valentine and John Davidson. As bad a film as it was, it became one of the highest-rated made-for-TV movies in history.)

The most intriguing performing rights proposal came from Broadway legends Anita Loos and Julie Stein. They thought it would make a wonderful musical comedy and offered to option it for that purpose. But the Hollywood money up front was a lot bigger and too enticing to ignore. If I have any regrets about the intoxicating days of
Coffee, Tea or Me?
it was turning down the chance to see it emblazoned on a Broadway marquee. But it’s never too late. It would still make a great retro-musical.

Bantam’s paperback edition was even more successful; at one point there were more than 3 million copies in print. Aprons, coffee mugs, and hats with COFFEE, TEA OR ME? on them sold briskly in stores across America, and readers in a dozen foreign countries read the book in their native languages. We were flying high in the friendly skies.

Another publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, wanting in on the action, signed me to write three sequels:
The Coffee Tea or Me Girls’ ’Round-the-World Diary,
published in 1969;
The Coffee Tea or Me Girls Lay It on the Line
in 1972; and
The Coffee Tea or Me Girls Get Away from It All
in 1974.

Eventually, Rachel, Trudy, and I moved on with our separate lives. Since
Coffee, Tea or Me?
I’ve written another eighty-plus books, including my recently published autobiography,
Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume: Writing for a Living,
in which I tell the entire story of
Coffee, Tea or Me?
along with other tales of the writing life.

Coffee, Tea or Me?
became a pleasant memory, just as those sanguine days of air travel faded into today’s decidedly less pleasant experience, marked by cramped seats, shoe bombers, long security lines, chaotic hubs, brown-bag meals (if you’re lucky), and unfathomable fare structures.

The
Coffee, Tea or Me?
era was over.

Until . . . my agent of thirty-five years, Ted Chichak, received a call in late 2002 from Stephen Morrison, a bright young editor at Penguin. Was
Coffee, Tea or Me?
available for reissue? It was and it wasn’t. Shortly before that call, I’d committed the book to publisher and longtime friend Lyle Stuart, who intended to bring out a new edition in 2003. Eventually, all parties concerned, including a magnanimous and gracious Stuart, decided that Penguin was the right house to publish a fresh edition of
Coffee, Tea or Me?
—the edition you’re now reading. It’s my hope that it will bring back fond memories of a gentler time in air travel, or introduce a new generation of air travelers to the way flying used to be.

A final word to today’s flight attendants, once known as stewardesses. Thanks for being on the front lines of air travel security, putting up with air rage, sloppily dressed passengers hauling steamer trunks aboard to put in the overhead bins, complainers, whiners, drunks, dunderheads who consider security measures a personal affront, and, most important, terrorists whose goal is to bring down the planes on which you serve. You have my undying gratitude for the tough job you do so admirably, and for allowing me to have had fun writing about an earlier era in air travel, and your role in it.

 

Rachel and I think alike. That’s both a blessing and a curse.

You’d never know it by looking at us. Rachel is a tall, rangy blonde with a wide-open face, brown eyes, and a breezy personality. She’s a go-getter, the one in the crowd who’s always ready with the prod for action.

I’m a couple of inches shorter than Rachel. My eyes are black, my hair a dark brown, and I was first in line at the dimple factory. I also smile a lot, even when the news is bad.

We met at stewardess school, roomed together, and immediately felt that rare and wonderful rapport that lights up when two people get along beautifully. We fly together, live together, hold each other’s hands through blighted romances, tell each other of newfound loves, laugh together at today’s mad, mod world, and, from time to time, get in trouble together.

In many ways, all stewardesses have a common bond. Rachel and I were both from small towns and anxious to take a fling at the big, bad world. That’s true of most girls flying today.

Stewardessing is the ideal job for girls looking to travel and see other places, make many new and varied friends, feel at home in hundreds of strange cities, and get paid for these things to boot.

Yes, it is true that a stewardess is a built-in baby-sitter, flying waitress, and congenial hostess, no matter what troubles befall her. The troubles can be endless: a mixup on meals, a shortage of liquor, engine difficulties, other mechanical quirks, male pinchers, female whiners, vomiting children, two-timing stewardesses who steal your man, and, once in a while, a plane that takes a good friend to a fiery death.

But we accept all this. The bitter with the sweet, and there’s so much that is sweet about being an airline stewardess.

Our lives are different. Airline crews are a close group of people. We work together. We live together. Airline crews stay at the same hotels and layovers. But that doesn’t mean it’s sex, sex, sex all the time. It can be if you want it that way, and some do. We all like a little of it. But most of us are also discreet about our private lives, which simply puts us in a class with almost every other young girl tasting life and what it can offer.

One last defensive word before we spring you loose on
Coffee, Tea or Me?
A stewardess is a girl. She wears a uniform and works at thirty-thousand feet. But above all she is a girl, female and subject to all the whims and desires of all females.

One of our desires is that you know more about us, our lives, loves, and laughter. That’s why we put together our similar minds and wrote this book. Smoking is permitted, and seat belts are at your discretion.

Welcome!

It rained very hard the day we made our first flight as stewardesses. We should have recognized it as an omen of things to come. At the time, it just seemed wet. We should have realized that our first flight couldn’t be like anyone else’s first flight.

Our brand-new, custom-tailored, form-fitting, wrinkle-proof, Paris-inspired uniforms became soaked in the dash from our apartment house lobby in the east Seventies of Manhattan to the cab at the corner. The doorman, a portly fellow known for his red face and his ever-present brown paper bag, had taken over twenty minutes to get us that cab, which cut drastically into the hour we’d allowed ourselves to reach Kennedy Airport.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Rachel muttered loudly as she settled in the far corner of the backseat and surveyed her light blue skirt, now blotched dark blue. “Damn!”

“You goils ain’t gonna be flyin’ today.” Our cabdriver was Maxwell Solomon, Hack Number 30756M.

We looked at each other briefly before crowing back at Mr. Solomon in unison. “Why?”

“You kiddin’? You wouldn’t get me up in no airplane in this here weather. No, sir. Not me.”

We told him we’d checked with operations before leaving and they’d told us flights were departing, although incoming flights had been canceled. We told him a big airliner never takes off unless everything is very safe and sure. We told him the weather was only local, probably, and that once you’re off the ground, you fly far above the rain and wind.

“No, sir, not me. Anybody flies in this here weather is nuts or sick or somethin’.”

We
were
sick. It started right then and there and never left us for the rest of the day. Mr. Solomon was right. Mr. Solomon also asked us for our telephone numbers because he’d kind of heard stewardesses were a real fun-loving bunch of girls and he knew a great place in Coney Island where there was this sensational rock-and-roll band.

“Whatta ya say, goils? I’ll take the botha ya, only later, like, well, you know, like later onea ya can split and go home.”

The natural inclination to tell him off was tempered by memories of recent lectures at stewardess school where we were told (a) everyone is a potential customer of the airline and (b) courtesy always pays off in sound public relations and future revenue.

“Drop dead,” Rachel said with a smile.

“OK, goils, just askin’. Can’t blame a guy for that. Right? Especially not witha coupla stews.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth, winked at us in the rearview mirror, and drove a little faster. The large overhead sign indicating one mile to Kennedy Airport passed at 12:01 P.M. We were already late reporting in for our first flight.

We paid the big tab, tipped small, smiled graciously, and entered our terminal at JFK through the pneumatic doors. Inside the lobby was a mob of people milling around the ticket counters. Valiantly dragging our blue suitcases and handbags, we stumbled through the door leading to Flight Operations. There were as many people in ops as in the lobby. Or maybe it just seemed as many because of the solid wall of blue uniforms. We dropped our luggage and were heading for the sign-in book at Crew Scheduling when a female voice stopped us in our tracks.

“Rachel! Trudy!” There was no doubt about that voice. We turned to see the flashing white teeth, flaming red hair, and remarkable upthrust bosom of Betty O’Riley, better known to her class-mates at stewardess college as Betty Big Boobs. Betty bounced and jiggled over to us, her smile as programmed and precise as a roadway neon sign. Suddenly she frowned and pouted her lips. “Y’all look so scared and lost, honeys.”