John Warren Wells

Sex and The Stewardess

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 other 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.

JWW: Think she’s right?

LYNN: I don’t really think so because I’ve known girls that I would say are like that. The expression is that they fall in love at the drop of a pants. They date a man and instantly get carried away with a fantasy of being in love with him and having this magic with him and being his forever and ever. That’s something very different, I think.

JWW: Yes.

LYNN: Maybe I just have to like a man.

JWW: And you fall in like over dinner.

LYNN: Falling in like. Oh, I like that. Oh, super.

Lynn “falls in like” easily. This does not mean that she goes out with or to bed with every man who asks her. No stewardess would have the time, let alone the inclination, to accept all the propositions tossed at her. Lynn likes to have fun, and she accepts dates from those men whom she thinks she will have fun with. Her idea of a good time includes dining well, going to night clubs and parties, and generally living it up. She thus prefers to date men who seem likely to enjoy the same sort of evening. Deep conversations put her off, and at one point she herself suggested that she might be afraid of them, afraid that a deeper probing of her feelings might lead her to some unspecified upsetting discoveries about herself or life or whatever.

Lynn’s ideal date is a first-class passenger, divorced, between thirty-five and fifty. She has no particular moral qualms about dating married men. “If a man wants to cheat on his wife, that’s not a girl’s responsibility,” she said. “If he’s over twenty-one he ought to be able to decide this sort of thing for himself, don’t you think? And if he’s younger I’m not interested.” But she is not often interested in married men anyway, as it happens, “Some girls will tell you that the married ones only care about sex. I don’t think that’s it, exactly. Of course some of them are like that. The very ones, the ones with dirty eyes. The winkers and the fanny-pinchers. The ones who go to great lengths to let you know that they want to screw you, but who most of the time aren’t even serious about asking you out. I guess it’s a virility thing, they want to show off a little. They would be just as much of a drag if they were single.

“But there’s also the kind of married guys who I could have fun with, except that they’re so married they can’t have fun. They’re so busy being guilty, you see. They’ll try to keep me from knowing that they’re married, which I really resent, frankly. Or they won’t want to go anywhere with a date because someone might see them. They take you somewhere because they know they have to, it’s the right thing to do, and then they skulk around and you can sense that they’re nervous about it and that puts you off as well. You would think that a man a thousand miles from home in a strange city could either stay faithful to his wife or, if he’s going to cat around, that he could do it openly and cut loose. Some of them can, but they’re the exceptions.”

Lynn occasionally dates pilots, but doesn’t do this often. Pilots, she said, tend to want their sexual involvements quick and simple and without going anywhere first. Most of them are either married to an ex-stew or having an affair with a current stew or both, all of which makes them less than ideal as far as Lynn is concerned. “Most of the time they want the three B’s — a broad and a bottle and a bed. Some of them just want you so they can cut another notch on their gun, and others hate to sleep alone. A lot of them are great guys and I love them dearly, but I usually have more fun with a passenger. Pilots and other airline types are fun if you have a mob scene, a drunken blast where everybody cuts loose and maybe you wind up in somebody’s bed with a guy and maybe you don’t. but as far as dating pilots regularly, let’s say there are better ways to spend an evening.”

LYNN: One of the things I love about this life is that when things are dull or unpleasant they don’t stay that way for very long. If a captain is nasty or a grouch you’ll be flying with someone else the next day, and by the time you see the grouch again he may be in a better mood. If it’s raining in New York it may be clear in St. Louis. If your home base apartment is a mess — mine always is — you can get away from it and forget it.

So many people just can’t take things as they come. “Oh, New York’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.” Well, that’s nice, dummy, but like who ever asked you? This corporation lawyer took me to an Indian restaurant in San Francisco the other night. Great food, I mean really great food. And the idiot kept going on and on about how he couldn’t handle it as a steady diet. And I thought, I couldn’t stand him as a steady diet, as far as that went, which was why I would date him but not marry him. But only dating the kind of man you would want to marry seems as ridiculous as only eating the same kind of food every day for a lifetime.

JWW: Do you mean that sexual variety is as important as any other sort?

LYNN: Not exactly that. More that there are things you could like for a short time, so why not enjoy them on that basis.

JWW: The interesting thing is that so many men have this attitude toward sex. They want brief hit-and-run affairs with no strings attached.

LYNN: Especially married men.

JWW: Yes, of course.

LYNN: But they can’t understand it when they meet a girl with the same attitude. They absolutely can’t...

Well, here’s an example. A very open, very friendly guy. Late thirties, divorced, his wife is married to somebody else, he misses his kids but not so that he can’t stand it, a very steady heads-up guy. A marketing man with a big manufacturer. Lots of money and status and all of those good things. I had him on a New York-L.A. non-stop and he was very friendly and we hit it off and he asked if he could buy me dinner. Well, fine, why not?

We wound up doubling up with another girl who was dating an advertising guy. We had dinner with them at an intimate French restaurant in Hollywood and then the four of us went to a jazz club. Lots of drinks and bright conversation, plenty of laughs.

We split from the other couple after we left the jazz club. We had done a little hand-holding in the club, none of the knee-grabbing nonsense but enough closeness so that each of us knew that the other one was alive. In the car he kissed me. I’ve always felt that a kiss is a question, and I did like him and he was a nice guy, and I had a feeling for him.

JWW: How do you mean?

LYNN: Not an irresistible hunger. A nice warm feeling. He turned me on in a comfy way. Anyway, I responded to the kiss in a way that answered the question for him, and we went to his hotel and had a couple more drinks and went to bed.

It was good. We... I really hate to talk about it. Doing it is one thing, but I hate post-mortems on lovemaking. Who did what and how and where and what it felt like, I hate talk like that. Some of the girls like that more than the sex itself, I think. They come home and talk your head off. I don’t like to.

JWW: All right.

LYNN: But without getting photographic about it, we had what was a fairly trippy time. I love to get sort of high on sex and just let my body do what it wants to do. When it’s right you turn your mind off completely and just go with your body, and it happened to be right that night and it was kind of super.

It is a lot of the time for me.

But the point is that in the morning he was acting odd. Strange, weird. He wanted to make a date to see me again, he wanted to explain how he would be busy for a while, he — I can’t explain exactly, but his attitude was odd.

At first I thought it was that he had fallen in love with me, which happens once in a while, but that wasn’t it. And then I got it. He was trying to set me down easy because he was afraid I was in love with him. I told him right out, “Look, don’t be silly about this, you don’t have to play games with me. I’m a big girl and I’m not in love with you and thank you for a lovely evening and a good time was had by all. And no strings.”

And he said, “But how could you, you know, do all those things and enjoy it so much without loving me?”

I asked him if he loved me. No, he said. He liked me, he respected me—

But he didn’t love me, right? He agreed he didn’t.

“Well, we were both in that bed,” I said, “and neither of us was tied or drugged, and if you could do it without being in love what makes you think I couldn’t?”

He said, “Women are different.”

JWW: The double standard.

LYNN: I know, but isn’t this too much? I’ve been through the same general situation before, John, but not with it all spelled out. I think, well, to be very frank about it, I think he figured I had to be in love with him because I went down on him. You know, orally?

JWW: Uh.

LYNN: Which I suppose is a very loving act and I suppose I felt something for him at the moment, but the idea that just because I would do that and dig it I would expect him to marry me or some such crap...

Anyway, with this man I made a point of letting him know I wasn’t in love with him because I thought he was really unhappy about it and I wanted to put his mind to rest. Well, all this accomplished was to make him very anxious never to set his eyes on me again.

JWW: Really?

LYNN: Oh, absolutely. He thought I was terrible. Maybe — this is just guessing, but maybe he felt I wasn’t a real conquest, see, because he had seduced me into bed but not into love. Maybe I was playing some very special role in a private drama of his in which he was getting even with his wife for leaving him by taking advantage of me. You probably understand more about how that sort of thing works than I do.

JWW: It could be almost anything.

LYNN: Or he felt I wasn’t feminine. Or that I was cheap. I hate that attitude.

JWW: Being regarded as cheap?

LYNN: Not just that. If people want to think a girl is cheap because she does what she wants when she wants to, then that’s their problem and God help them. I don’t even like the word, to tell you the truth. I think it’s a very stupid expression.

A girl, a stew, will explain that she doesn’t like to ball too many different men because it makes her feel cheap. A girl shouldn’t give herself cheaply — that’s a phrase you hear all the time. Well, what’s the opposite of giving yourself cheaply? Giving yourself expensively, I suppose. You know the old joke — we’ve established what you are, now we have to settle an a price? Cheaply or expensively, if you think of it in those terms you’re a whore.

But what really bothers me is when a girl — not necessarily a stewardess, but any independent girl — when she is just what a man wants her to be and this disappoints him. A guy picks up a stew and prays he’ll be able to take her to bed, and when she goes to bed with him he’s disgusted. Or this marketing guy who was really concerned that I might have fallen in love with him and then despised me because I hadn’t.

I don’t usually brood about it like this. Thinking back got me going on the subject. I generally have other things to think about. And I know that when a man does act like that it’s a reflection of the fact that he has sexual hang-ups of his own.

JWW: And you?

LYNN: Pardon?

JWW: Do you have sexual hang-ups of your own?

LYNN: I have a fetish for writers who ask personal questions.

JWW: No, seriously. Do you ever get to feel, oh, cheap? Immoral?

LYNN: Oh, shit. You too, John?

JWW: No, I never make judgments. I’m asking. To put it this way, you’ve come a long way from the middle of Illinois. Instead of marrying the veterinarian you’ve gone off on your own and had a sex life that would stand Illinois on its ear.

LYNN: Oh, not quite that, I don’t think.

JWW: Really?

LYNN: Maybe you’re right. Not in terms of how often but of how many men. If a wife had intercourse with her husband once a week that would be a low level of sex, wouldn’t it?

JWW: I think it would probably be on the low side statistically, at least in the early years of marriage.

LYNN: Well, you certainly wouldn’t call her a sex pot, at any rate. But if a girl had relations once a week, with a different man each time, but still just once a week, that would mean she would be sleeping with fifty men a year, and I guess that would knock their hats off in Illinois, wouldn’t it? Hell... let’s talk about something else.

JWW: All right.

LYNN: Not really. Do I ever feel immoral? No, I honestly cannot say that I do. I just can’t think of myself as a tramp and I don’t feel that men take advantage of me and I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong in living as I do because no one gets hurt by it. Not even if I have relations with a married man. What a horrible expression that is! Not even if I date a married man, let’s say. It would bother me if a man left his wife because of me, or if I seduced him into cheating. But that never happens. No, I don’t feel immoral.

JWW: Your sex life would have been something very different if you hadn’t become a stewardess, wouldn’t it?

LYNN: That’s pretty obvious. I would have married the guy, or some other guy. And I would have missed out on everything.

JWW: Would you have cheated on your husband, do you think?

LYNN: How do I know? If I married someone like the boy I went steady with, and if I stayed in my home town, very likely not, I suppose. But I suppose I would have wanted to, wouldn’t I? I’m sure I would have spent a lot of time thinking about what I was missing and sex with other men would have been one of those or a part of them, anyway. But I don’t think I would have done anything about it. Of course you can never be sure about something like that. People never know who they’ll meet or what will happen with them. When I think of all the girls I know who become stews and swear they’ll be true to their old boyfriends — either they want to save up for the wedding or the boy is doing two years in the army and they want to spend the time doing something interesting. Of course some of them know all along that they want adventure and romance and meeting men, but others honestly think they’ll be true to old Stanley Steady back home, and the next thing you know they’re burning up the skies and balling anybody who asks. I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

JWW: Have you had many proposals of marriage?

LYNN: Not many. A few. There have been guys I’ve hit it off very well with, and there would be the feeling passing between us that they might propose if they thought I was really interested, but I never have been so I always changed the mood.

JWW: Do you think you’ll be interested someday?

LYNN: When the right one comes along. Oh—

JWW: What?

LYNN: I don’t know... just that I guess maybe that’s something that does bother me, sort of. The idea that maybe I never will meet the right guy at the right time. That I’ll be too hipped on some party or some fun thing that I’ll never quite get around to marrying someone.

JWW: You want to be married.

LYNN: Eventually, yes. I still haven’t stopped loving everything about my job — well, almost everything — but I know that it’s not the kind of work a girl could do forever, even if the airlines would let you stay as long as you wanted. It’s not a career that grows, see. It doesn’t go anywhere. I think every woman really wants to be married and have children. That’s a terrible cliché, I know, but I really believe it’s true. I think biologically that’s what we’re all here for and if we don’t get with it sooner or later we’ll feel empty. My God, listen to the girl go on and on!

But I’m afraid of it, of getting stifled I suppose that’s why it has to keep on being fun and new men and fresh places, and why I find something else to talk about when a man starts getting a long-range look in his eye. I want it but I’m afraid of it. I suppose that’s what you call a hang-up, isn’t it?

JWW: At your age, it’s probably a good defense mechanism.

LYNN: Something I’ll outgrow when the time comes? That’s what I think, too. And in the meantime fun is better than misery and going places is better than staying home, right?

JWW: No doubt about it. When the right time and the right man comes, do you think you’ll miss all this?

LYNN: Miss all the fun? I hope not. That’s not my idea of the best kind of marriage for me, anyway. I’m sure that the man I’ll eventually marry will be a passenger, the kind of man I enjoy dating now. Maybe more serious and deeper, because he would have to be someone I could enjoy not for a night or a week but on a steady basis. But he would be a part of my kind of world.

As far as the sex goes, missing the variety and all, I don’t honestly think I’m hung up on sex. For me it’s a part of life and not something all by itself. This may be a minority opinion, but I consider myself a pretty healthy and sensible girl where sex is concerned.

JWW: I’ll go along with that.

LYNN: As the actress said to the bishop. Oh, I just thought of something. If I’d married the veterinarian I said I might never cheat on him but I was sure I would want to. Well, I have a theory that for some girls, and I think I’m one of them, the fast pace and freedom of being a stew is a way to get a whole lot of things out of your system. I think this is true for girls who go really wild. And I do mean wild, John. I may fit that category by my home town’s standards, but now I’m talking about girls who go for threesomes and orgies and all kinds of really kinky scenes, and I think it may be good for them in the same way.

JWW: You think girls have wild oats, too?

LYNN: I know they do. I think it must have always been so, but especially nowadays when women know that sex is something they can get a kick out of, too.

JWW: So if you were to marry now—

LYNN: Uh-huh. Not right now, not now now, but when the time comes, I think I would be a lot less likely to get itchy feet. Oh, it would happen probably if something was wrong with the marriage, but that’s something else. I know from what passengers and other girls have told me that a lot of men with good marriages start cheating, and they seem to be the ones who married early and didn’t have much sex beforehand. So they had this wild picture in their mind of the special thrills they could get by playing around, and they had to try it even if their marriage was working out fine for them...

Oh, I don’t know. But I do think I’d be much less likely to screw up a marriage after a few years in the air than if I hadn’t had this experience.

JWW: Well, having a variety of premarital experience isn’t exactly the same as being a stewardess, even if the two occasionally overlap. Couldn’t you have played around in the same way without getting your wings?

LYNN: No.

JWW: Some girls do.

LYNN: Plenty of girls do, and even in little towns in Illinois. And those girls are called tramps. People talk about them, people have no respect for them, and the girls themselves can’t maintain any respect for themselves. The town I grew up in may not expect a girl to be a virgin but it can’t tolerate a girl who takes sex casually. You have to be very serious about it.

I personally don’t want to go back where I came from, back to that particular world. But the point is that I could if I wanted to. I’ve led what the people back home would think of as a pretty wicked life these last couple of years, I guess, but the point is that they don’t know about it. I didn’t do it back home, you see. And a lot of the girls I know do want to go back home eventually, and some of them will, and they’ll be able to do it because they sowed their wild oats with strangers and pilots all over the country instead of messing up their own backyard. You don’t want wild oats in your own backyard.

TRACY — The Damn Good Kid

Just a touch of southern New Hampshire remains in Tracy’s speech. She lost some of her accent at a Midwestern university and parted with a little more in stewardess school. A tallish, striking, brown-eyed blonde, long of leg and full of bust, Tracy possesses the healthy and uncomplicated beauty of a Playboy foldout, and has indeed posed for similar spreads in other magazines, if not in Playboy. When I interviewed her she had been flying for almost five years, primarily on a New York-Miami run. I met her not long after her plane had gone to Miami by way of Havana. She seemed quite unaffected by the hijacking, explaining that all of the girls and crew members had expected to be hijacked sooner or later. “We had all the procedures down pat, almost as if we had held rehearsals,” she said. “Nobody panicked. Even the nut with the gun was remarkably calm about the whole thing. It’s the things you don’t expect that rattle you, like an engine deciding to go out or some mechanical malfunctioning or anything like that. We had joked about this in advance and now we joke about it afterward. Of course the airline hates it because they feel it will make people nervous about coming to Florida.”

In a field where good looks are an entrance requirement, Tracy nevertheless is a standout. It is hardly surprising that she receives dinner and bed invitations every time she works a flight. Another girl described Tracy as the sort who would get asked for a date on the subway.

But Tracy never goes out with passengers. She insists that she never even feels tempted.

But she’ll sleep with any pilot who asks her, and she’s in love with every last one of them.

TRACY: Ever since 1951 I knew I would be a stew. As a matter of fact, at first I wanted to be a pilot. Me and Amelia Earhart. But somewhere along the line I lost all desire to actually fly planes and wanted to be a part of things.

That was the year my father began flying jets in Korea. He had been a commercial pilot before then, but it was when he went overseas that I really got caught up in the whole romance of flight. He jockeyed an F-84 and chased MlG’s back to the Yalu River. In 1952 he lost his plane in a dogfight up north. Another pilot was there at the time and wrote my mother a beautiful letter. My father ejected and the Chinese pilot cut him up after the chute opened. I always thought that was the most vicious thing I had ever heard of. But since then I’ve flown with pilots who were over there and they say we did the same thing. I can’t believe my father ever did anything like that.

But of course that’s my whole little scene. Hero worship and an Electra complex and transference. My heart belongs to Daddy — and to anyone else who wears wings.

That’s not just my own amateur analysis, incidentally. I’ve got a professional opinion to back it up. I had a few psychotherapy sessions about a year and a half ago. Very interesting, and they did seem to help me out of a pretty desperate depression, but one thing I found out was that knowing what makes you do things doesn’t change what you do or why you do it. I know a girl in analysis who just keeps going further and further back into her childhood and probing this and contemplating that, all to find out how she got where she is. That seems to me like making a splash landing in the middle of the ocean and sitting around trying to figure out what went wrong with the engines. It might be nice to know, but the first thing to do is get back on dry land.

JWW: How far are you from land now?

TRACY: Me? Oh, close enough for comfort, I guess.

JWW: Meaning?

TRACY: Meaning that most of the time I like being me well enough. I’m very good at my job, and that helps. Whatever a person does, there’s a tremendous satisfaction in knowing that you’re good at it. When it’s a demanding job like this one, that goes double. I’m doing important work and doing it well, I’ve got pretty decent seniority on this line, and all of this is very satisfying.

As far as my personal life goes, love and sex and all those good things, most of the time I’m on a pretty even keel. I am what is known on the flight deck as a Good Kid. In some circles I’ve been promoted to Damn Good Kid. You know what that means?

JWW: I think so.

TRACY: A Good Kid is a stew who will go to bed with a pilot any time he asks her, perform like a thousand-dollar call girl, have the decency to be out of the room before he wakes up, and never expect more from him than an occasional wink and a pat on the bottom. A Damn Good Kid does all of that and also picks out a present for his wife and wires flowers to his mistress.

JWW: And has a sense of humor about it all?

TRACY: That certainly helps. To tell you the truth, I like being a Good Kid. If you’ve got the right emotional outlook for it you can keep your sanity that way.

But the thing is that every once in a while I get involved. I love pilots, all pilots, and that’s fine, it’s perfectly safe. The danger comes when I pick one out and really fall in love with him.

And you know, it happens about once a year and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can even feel it coming on in advance before I even know who it will be. Like a tree responding to a change in season. The sap runs, all right. I start getting moody and wistful, and I cry in movies, and I get rather desperate about sex, and I have trouble coming, and I get frustrated, and, oh, everything. Maybe it’s some deep atavistic thing, maybe it really is seasonal and it stems from some desire to be pregnant, some instinctive thing.

The man I fall for is always impossible. And in every sense of the word. Always married, and sometimes involved with another stew at the same time, or a supervisor or something. And generally an emotional basket case. I don’t know if you know this, but a lot of pilots are very messed up that way. They are without a doubt the greatest guys in the world, and I dig them so much that even the nasty ones seem pretty great to me. But often they are emotional wrecks. The work they do is enormously high pressure, and it can do things to a man. The long-distance flights are especially rough because most of the time there’s nothing to do but sit there waiting for something to go wrong. The guys who work for the little trunk lines at least get to make a lot of takeoffs and landings every day.

And there’s the disorganization of the life. Always moving around, sleeping in hotels every night, bouncing from place to place. It’s the same for stewardesses, of course, but you have to remember that we are far younger and almost entirely single. It’s a different proposition for them. You take a pilot who’s not twenty-five but forty-five, and married, and with a couple of kids that he never sees, and it’s a very different life.

It’s not surprising that some of them reach for a bottle as soon as they put the plane on the ground. Most of them fly sober, and the drinking they do on the ground is their own business...

It took me a long time before I realized why I was attracted to this type of man. Not necessarily the drinker, but the emotional cripple. Of course it all goes back to the Daddy thing and wanting to save a man in trouble, and also not really wanting to marry any man because I really want my father and thus picking men who would never marry me and having affairs that could never work out...

JWW: And these affairs—

TRACY: They are very destructive. Every girl who’s had fifty dollars’ worth of therapy uses that word. Destructive. But it’s the only word that will do. I get completely torn up. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight. I spend twenty-four hours a day being in love. That may sound like fun. It isn’t.

The last time there was this very sweet, very screwed-up guy named Gene. We had flown together, oh, tons of times. No passes ever. He was in his forties, divorced and remarried to an ex-stewardess. She lived in Miami with their two kids, and the first wife lived in New York with their three kids, and here was Gene, flying back and forth between Miami and New York six or seven times a week. Just like an aerial version of Captain’s Paradise except that it wasn’t paradise for him at all. He was having troubles with his second wife and he was starting to have sex with his first wife again, and he’d been called down for a bad landing at JFK, and he was starting to drink so heavily that it showed around his eyes and cheekbones. You know things build up, feeding on each other, and when you have no way to let them out they build up a head of steam, the pressure gets terrible.

Well, this one night we spent forever getting cleared for landing at JFK, and it had been one of those really stinking flights anyway. There was this one shitty little kid who kept puking violently, and even though the flight was perfectly smooth he was so obvious about it that he set half the plane off. I absolutely hate vomit. I don’t suppose there are many people who are exactly in love with it, but I really hate it and I guess I’ll never get used to cleaning it up. It makes me gag, and I’m always worried that I’ll be cleaning a passenger up and then I’ll suddenly vomit all over him. That’s not the way to get elected Stewardess of the Year.

The point is just that it was a depressing flight for everybody and even the landing was bumpy and crummy, and when we were off the plane I looked at Gene and he looked like I felt. I knew what his general scene was although I didn’t have the details. But I looked at him and my heart went out to him. Exactly that. I suddenly knew what that expression means. I told him we were each going to have a thick steak and about a pint of gin and he could tell me all his troubles. And he said something, I forget what, and I said something, and we looked at each other, and that was it for me, I was stuck.

We had the steaks and barely touched them, but we did a hell of a job on the gin. We are in a restaurant at the airport and went from there to the airport motel and had the bellhop bring us a bottle of gin and some ice. For hours all we did was talk. We were so involved with this, pouring ourselves at each other, that we didn’t get around to anything remotely physical for the longest time.

JWW: Did you realize right away that, oh, that this could be the start of something big?

TRACY: I think I even heard the song in my head. Oh, I knew what was happening, John. It had happened before, you see. And they say the one hope of neurotics like me is not that we’ll get over it but that we’ll learn to see things coming and develop defenses. That’s the hope, anyway. I knew what was happening and I even knew it would be pure unvarnished hell before it was over, but even so a part of me sang happy songs about how this time it would work and we would love each other until the end of time. And if I seem to be talking in clichés now that’s not entirely an accident. My kind of love is like that. All of a sudden the most worn-out pop songs have levels of meaning I never knew before. If you’ve been there you know what I mean, and if you haven’t I don’t think I can describe it.

JWW: I know what you mean.

TRACY: And of course the whole night was heaven. It could hardly have been otherwise. We killed the fifth of gin on top of everything else we had been drinking, and we didn’t even feel it. We were so high on each other, on this wild perfect love thing, that the gin couldn’t get anywhere near us.

When we made love it was fantastic. We were both completely in tune with each other. He would touch me just where and when I wanted to be touched, and I would do the same. There was a real sense of the two of us being one person. It was almost as if I was using his hands and mouth and penis to excite myself, as though we had some sort of mutual will that was operating.

The lovemaking lasted forever. His penis was hard as a rock when he got in bed with me and it stayed like that all night long. And I kept coming and coming, I would go into these wild serial orgasms and just go on climaxing forever.

It was so good I was afraid I would die from it.

JWW: And it had never been like this before?

TRACY: At the time I thought not. But looking back, no, it wasn’t new. It is like that for me when that kind of crazy love happens to me.

JWW: Why do you call it crazy?

TRACY: Because that’s what it is. Because it’s impossible, it’s two people pretending that they’re somebody else and that the world is other than it really is. And it doesn’t last, you know. It usually lasts longer for me because I have a feeling that a lot of the perfection of it is happening in my own mind. And another feeling — this will sound a little kooky—

JWW: Go on.

TRACY: Do you... don’t laugh at me, but do you pay any attention to psychic phenomena?

JWW: I’ve done some reading in the field.

TRACY: You keep an open mind?

JWW: I try to. I think the whole field is overrun with lunatics and charlatans, but the same thing goes for psychiatry. I suppose I think there are more things that happen on earth than man can understand.

TRACY: Amen to that.

JWW: But what’s it have to do with love? And with what you do in bed?

TRACY: I’m sort of sorry I brought it up because I’m not sure what I mean...

I think... do something unconsciously when I get in one of these love things. I think it’s very much like a kind of witchcraft. I bewitch the man and I bewitch myself.

JWW: You cast a spell.

TRACY: I’m serious, John.

JWW: I know.

TRACY: I may be wacky, but I’m serious.

JWW: Yes, I understand.

TRACY: Maybe it’s nothing more complicated than that I hypnotize myself to the point where I just make myself exactly what the man wants at that moment. But I almost think it’s spookier than that. There’s a kind of telepathy that goes on. There’s a control. It happens that way in bed, this fantastic control, this incredible capacity for pleasure.

JWW: Do you normally enjoy sex?

TRACY: That’s a hell of a question to ask a bonded and certified Damn Good Kid.

JWW: Do you?

TRACY: Definitely. But—

JWW: Yes?

TRACY: That’s not why I go with the guys. Not because I’m looking for the pleasure. I usually get it, but I go with them because — because they want me to, I suppose.

JWW: Yes, I had that impression.

TRACY: But in the love scenes it’s different. I really think something spooky is going on. Either I’m possessed by a demon or I’m an unconscious witch or I don’t know what. I wonder if I had an ancestor hanged at Salem.

JWW: Maybe you ought to find out.

TRACY: Maybe I’m afraid of the answer...

Tracy speculated at some length upon the possible psychic aspects of her “crazy” love affairs. She advanced a variety of theories, some of which seemed unlikely at best, others of which had a logical pitch to them. While I found all of these quite interesting, they are outside the scope of any study of sex and the stewardess. I might suggest, though, that readers with an interest in this sort of thing might have a look at Brad Steiger’s recently published book, Sex and the Supernatural. (Perhaps Steiger and Tracy can someday collaborate on Sex and the Supernatural Stewardess, for that matter.)

TRACY: At any rate, if I am a witch I’m not very good at it. Not in the long run, because the spell generally lasts a lot longer for me than for the man. I guess I’m an easy girl to get over. Or maybe they have enough sense to realize that the last thing they want to do is marry someone who’s slept with every pilot on the Eastern Seaboard. When the spell wears off the witch is just a Good Kid again, and there’s nothing easier than kissing a Good Kid goodbye.

JWW: There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You said that you seem to go out of your way to pick men with whom any situation would be impossible. Men who are fouled up emotionally to begin with and who are involved in difficult situations. This Gene, for example — he had a wife and a mistress at the time and he needed a third woman like Custer needed more Indians. When a love affair with a guy like that doesn’t lead anywhere, you can blame yourself for being a bad witch. You can’t even pin all the blame to your Damn Good Kid reputation. Hell, you said in the first place that you never get around to falling in love unless the affair is doomed from the start. Right?

TRACY: I don’t suppose I can deny it. You’ve got it all on tape anyway. But what I just said now sums up the way I wind up feeling when I’m left holding the bag or the torch or whatever it is women hold.

JWW: Then what happens?

TRACY: The sun goes down and the moon turns black and I go into a perfectly miserable depression. The only thing that keeps me going through all of this is my work. I’m not kidding. It’s no exaggeration to call my job a lifesaver. The responsibility, the realization that I have to keep moving fast because everybody is depending upon me, this keeps me from going too far down. It makes me function, makes me get up on time and get where I have to go and do what I have to do. Being a stew is a lot like being an actress in certain ways, you know. The old tradition of the show must go on, for instance. And the laughing-on-the-outside-crying-on-the-inside bit. No matter how sick you got last night and how dead you feel this morning, you get on that plane with bright eyes and a flashing smile and make every passenger feel as though he stepped into a happier world. Believe it or not, it becomes so reflexive after a certain amount of time that you can do it no matter how bad you feel, and it actually brings you out of your funk while it lasts.

But off the plane I crash completely. I don’t see anybody. I don’t date. Of course the word is out instantly and the pilots know I want to be alone. Or maybe they just figure I wouldn’t be much fun to be with until I come out of my funk. Whatever it is, they leave me alone, and alone is where I have to be.

Of course I overreact. I swear off men and decide never to date anyone again. Sort of a variation on the flying-nun theme. And I get deep into this self-pity thing, and I stay in my hotel room if I’m on a layover or my apartment if I’m home, and I usually have a bottle with me, and I drink too much. I always go to bed alone, but I never manage to go to bed sober.

JWW: And you never have trouble holding your job through all of this?

TRACY: Never. I make damned sure it doesn’t show in my work. That’s not easy, but I guess I pretty much have it down to a science by now. There’s a mental thing, a mental switch I can throw that gets me through the work day. I really do manage to keep my mood from showing on the plane.

One of the reasons for this, I guess, is that my work is so important to me. I mean really important. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing a girl can do that’s more important or significant than being a good stewardess. Now part of this attitude is just my stew training showing, the way it all sank in deep, and part of it is my whole thing with flying, my father thing, but also I really believe in the importance of my work. I can’t think of anything else I could do that would fulfill me this way, or that I could really take seriously as a way to spend my life.

That sort of mental attitude can get you through a lot of hangovers.

Besides, I do have pretty good recuperative powers. A pilot taught me a long time ago to take a couple of vitamin B-complex capsules before I go to bed if I’ve been drinking. According to him, the worst thing alcohol does is use up the vitamin B in your system. That’s what gives you the hangover, and it’s also why alcoholics have bad livers, because of the lack of vitamin B. So I drop a couple of pills before I go to sleep, and then if I’m foggy the next morning anyway, then I may take something like a Dexamil to get the wool out of my eyes. Even when I still feel rotten, I’m lucky enough that it doesn’t show in my face. Some girls will get dark circles under their eyes the first night they have a few drinks or miss a few hours of sleep. Fortunately, my health is basically good and I never have to worry about this.

JWW: And this is your general reaction pattern after a love affair? Just solitude and drinking?

TRACY: That’s it.

JWW: How long does it last?

TRACY: Forever. At least it seems that way. Oh, I don’t know. After a certain amount of time it gets easier to think about what has happened, and then thinking about it helps me get out of it. I begin to see things more clearly. I begin to realize that what looked like the greatest love affair since Dante and Beatrice was actually nothing that cosmic at all. That Dante was a hung-up pilot with woman trouble and his brains in his crotch and Beatrice was a neurotic stewardess with hot pants and a fetish for self-destructive flyboys. Knowing this doesn’t constitute an instantaneous cure, by the way. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn’t. It all takes time.

But gradually time does the trick and getting drunk loses its charm, and I smile at people off the plane as well as on, and the pilots sense that the Good Kid is back, her wings patched up and her engines functioning, and the passes start again.

And the Good Kid is receptive.

JWW: Just like that?

TRACY: Just about. It’s a very funny feeling, getting back into the swing of things. A very funny feeling. Do you know what it reminds me of? Remember when you were a kid and you used to go to the park and go on the slides? Maybe you didn’t, but I guess every kid did. I remember that I liked this one slide, the really big one. Everything is bigger when you’re small yourself, but this slide was really big, really huge. And I would climb all the way to the top, and on the way up, climbing, I was really terrified. I went on this slide all the time, you understand, but the climb was still never a routine matter for me. It was so high, and God help you if you looked down...

And then finally I would get to the top, and I would just sit there for a moment, you know, looking forward to what was coming and wanting to savor the moment of anticipation. Just waiting up there and tasting the thrill of it in my mind. Did you do anything like that when you were a kid? And then I would push off, finally, I would slide slowly at first, then faster and faster. Of course when I got to the bottom I would have to go through all of that climbing again, but I didn’t think about it on the way down.

With men, when I come out of my depression and get with it again, it’s a lot like that. I get that same feeling of anticipation, and the business of sleeping with pilots just for the hell of it, that’s like the very start of the slide. And then a love affair, a good hopeless no-holds-barred love affair, that’s hitting top speed on the slide, with all the thrills and all. And of course I know that when I get to the bottom the world will fall apart, but I forget it because I don’t want to spoil the thrill.

JWW: Do you ever think about breaking the pattern?

TRACY: Of course. When I’m recovering from a bad affair — and they are all bad in the end — I tell myself I’m never going to have anything to do with men, ever. And I mean it. And when I do get straightened out and start dating again, I’m just as quick to tell myself that I’ll always keep it light and casual and never fall in love again. And I mean it then, too. My intentions are always good. It’s just that things don’t work out the way I plan them.

I could be giving you the wrong picture, though, by dwelling on how rotten it can get. Let’s face it — very few people have a life that’s nothing but lollipops and roses. Life treats most people a little harder than that. And when you do find someone who manages to avoid the occasional spells of blue meanies, someone who misses the depressions, you usually have a person who doesn’t have the good times either.

JWW: The sort of person who lives life on an even keel.

TRACY: Exactly. It’s my opinion that life tends to balance out. If you’re going to have good times, you have to pay for them with bad times. If you are going to have periods of happiness, real elation, you absolutely must expect them to be balanced out by periods of despair.

I’ve been told that this is a very neurotic view of life. That it’s not like this at all, that you can learn to find more genuine happiness in quiet contentment than you can in those wild beautiful thrills of an up mood. People who really think this just don’t know what it’s like to be in love the way I’ve been in love.

JWW: What you call crazy love.

TRACY: Crazy love. Yes.

JWW: No matter how much it hurts you in the long run?

TRACY: In the long run we’re all dead, John. But that’s no reason not to live in the first place, is it?

JWW: You think it amounts to the same thing?

TRACY: Just about. Sometimes I think, you know, Peter Pan. That I’ll grow up some fine day and I won’t be caught up in this cycle any more. That I’ll have outgrown it.

JWW: Do you hope that will happen?

TRACY: Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think the lows are just too great a price to pay for the highs. But other times, oh, it’s completely the reverse. Other times nothing is too great a price to pay, and I think that if I ever do grow up and learn to control myself and my moods, that from then on life will just be flat and lifeless and I won’t have anything to look forward to.

JWW: Seems a little overstated, don’t you think?

TRACY: Maybe. But, you know, Peter Pan. That story does stick in my mind. Remember, if you grow up, then you can’t fly.

JWW: I remember.

TRACY: And that’s very important to me, John. In every sense of the word. To be able to fly. To have wings, and to fly.

SHIRL — The Lesbian in the Sky

While every stewardess is all things to all men, some stews do tend to inspire similar reactions in a majority of their passengers. Men will lust for one girl, admire another, adopt another, befriend still another, depending upon the type of image a girl projects.

Shirl is the one they are most likely to tell jokes to. She carries a distinct aura of sophistication and knowing wit, and the average male passenger is immediately certain that he can joke with her and that she will enjoy it. At the same time, there is something in her attitude which somehow intimidates them — perhaps it is this same air of sophistication — and relatively few of them try to date her. Nor does she get as many physical passes as other girls do. The fanny-pinchers and thigh-patters, men who go through life oblivious to the fact that no stewardess likes to be pawed while serving drinks and checking seatbelts, nevertheless manage to sense that Shirl finds their attentions unwelcome. They joke with her, but they keep their hands to themselves.

The pilots she flies with have learned that she is not interested in them. The small percentage who insist upon physical contact with their girls make Shirl play her part, and she does so in more or less good spirits. Those few pilots are mostly interested in nothing more than token attention, anyway. They may insist on a kiss or pat a breast, but the sexual attention Shirl has to pay to them is hardly more than symbolic.

Shirl is just under medium height, a slender girl with dark brown hair and a round face. Her features are attractive but not striking. She grew up in upstate New York, one of the younger children in a large family. Her family moved around a great deal, and Shirl grew up without any real roots in a community and with a sense of alienation within her own family.

I interviewed Shirl in New York. Her home base at the time was on the West Coast, and she was on an overnight layover at JFK. Another stewardess had suggested I talk to Shirl and had arranged the interview. She was pleasant and communicative from the onset, but became increasingly interested at the thought of a study dealing with the manner in which the stresses of stewardess life tended to influence sexual behavior. She had had many thoughts of her own on the subject and warmed to it at once.

At the time of our talk, Shirl was twenty-three and had been flying for almost four years.

SHIRL: There’s no question but that this life has a tremendous effect on all of us. There are very few girls who would say otherwise. Some do, of course. Some girls insist that they would be exactly the same if they were working behind a counter in a department store or taking dictation in an office or wiping noses and changing diapers. I think they know better but don’t want to admit it. Just as some people try to blame everything about themselves on their situation, others absolutely hate the idea that they’ve been influenced at all by it. They prefer to think that their entire personality was formed from the day they were born and nothing that has happened to them since that day has made the slightest bit of difference to them.

As I said, I think they must know better. It’s so obvious that being a stewardess has an effect upon a girl’s development. Oh, in so many ways. When I think of the girls who went to stew school with me, the girls in my class... I was fairly hip to things at the time, more so than the average girl. I had been around a bit, and also I’ve always been able to give the impression of hipness, of knowing more than I actually do. It’s a technique I learned ages ago, a way of a wink and a knowing look, of nodding at the right times and either smiling or looking serious at the right times. You could be talking with a person in a foreign language — rather he could be talking, and you could nod in the right places and he would never even suspect that you couldn’t understand a single word he was saying. This has actually happened to me...

Other girls, though, most of them in my class struck me as pretty naïve. I don’t mean just sexually, although I would say that girls in stewardess school have less in the way of sexual experience than the average girl of the same age. I certainly don’t have any statistics, but this is definitely the impression I’ve gotten over the years. The majority, very definitely the majority, were virgins.

JWW: Were you?

SHIRL: ’Fraid not. No, as I said, I had been around a bit. Nothing that would qualify me for an all-time tramp award, but I had been slept with a couple of times. In that company, though, I was regarded as pretty knowledgeable. As I said, most of the girls hadn’t done much and didn’t even know very much about the things they hadn’t done.

But this inexperience, this naïveté, was more than just a sexual thing. All things considered, we were a pretty green crew. We didn’t know how to dress or how to put on makeup or how to order a meal in a restaurant or how to talk to a man without stuttering or, oh, so many things.

And in less than a year, in just a couple of months, all of us had changed completely. I don’t think there were many virgins left after a few months. You can’t tell me that so many of those girls would have lost their virginity the same way if they had stayed at home. I’m sure with some of them it was just a question of time, and that they had just been waiting for the opportunity that they found in the life of a stew. But I’m sure too that the general attitude you find in the life and the image that stews have and the stresses and tensions involved, that these played a part. All of us went through some very profound changes, and found ourselves up against new situations and living new lives, and this had a very considerable effect upon us.

In my own case, I would say that being a stewardess has made me what I am today. God, how dramatic! I feel the slightest bit awkward about this, John. Did Fran tell you much about me?

JWW: Just that you would be a good person to talk to.

SHIRL: She didn’t say that I was a lesbian?

JWW: No.

SHIRL: I’m pretty sure she knows. She must know, to have said anything at all about me. I don’t know... of course that’s one standard thing about being gay, that you always have a distorted idea of who knows what. Either you’re convinced that no one has the slightest suspicion about you or else you take it for granted that everyone knows, and actually I guess it’s usually somewhere in the middle. Fran... well, it’s pretty pointless to speculate. Nor am I all that interested. She’s a sweet kid, but not exactly my type...

To return to the point of all this, I don’t know whether or not you could really say that being a stewardess is what made me a lesbian. Obviously there’s more to it than that. It’s not a matter of all stewardesses being turned into lesbians, although I have a feeling that there are a lot more gay girls in the sky than the average person suspects. Very definitely more than the average jerk of a passenger suspects. They think we’re all nymphomaniacs, naturally. All those myths about screwing pilots at thirty thousand feet, balling a different passenger every night. They really believe those myths, you know.

JWW: A lot of stews believe them, too.

SHIRL: Oh, there’s no question about it. A lot of girls live that way. I know it. But it’s not universal, you know. There are girls who have boyfriends and who limit themselves to one guy, and there are girls who, believe it or not, have still got their precious maidenheads intact after God knows how many hours in the air. And, as I said, there are a few of us, maybe even more than a few, who are, well, queer for each other, to use an expression I don’t exactly love.

I never thought this would happen to me, that I would turn out this way. I don’t think about it that often now because it’s how I am now, it’s the way I live, and there’s no point in spending all of your time contemplating your navel and trying to figure out how you got the way you did. All you accomplish that way is to drive yourself nuts. But when I look back, well, I never had any particular interest in girls. I’ve done a lot of reading about lesbianism — everybody who’s gay suddenly becomes hooked on reading about it, you know. And I can’t see any of the standard patterns operating in my case. In fact I think I was growing up with a fairly normal attitude toward men and sex. I enjoyed it, I hadn’t had any bad experiences with it, but at the same time I wasn’t hooked on it to the point of being compulsive or promiscuous or anything. Just a good healthy attitude toward sex, or at least I always thought of it that way...

Shirl went on at some length, describing her early experiences with sex and her attitudes before becoming a stewardess. After completing stew training, she rather quickly fell into the habit of dating passengers and leading a generally swinging existence. These dates did not always wind up in bed, but that was their general pattern.

“It’s virtually impossible to date a man under those circumstances and not go to bed with him,” she said. “That is, it’s impossible unless you simply go out of your way to be a tease. You see, it’s not like normal dating. The guy can’t call you again the next day, and you can’t take time getting to know one another. It simply isn’t in the cards. You both know that you are going to see each other this once and then not see one another again for a long time, if ever. And since sex is the point of all dating, in one way or another, the only way the date can serve its purpose is if the two of you wind up in bed the first night. Some girls say that this speeds things up in a positive way, that it makes you learn to get to know people much more quickly than you would otherwise. I think this is a song-and-dance we like to give ourselves to make a very casual sexual experience take on a bit of a glow. Actually it speeds things up by simplifying them. You learn to be very casual not only about sex as such but about the whole business of relating to people. You learn to develop a fast surface relationship and then you never get beyond that relationship.”

She sensed that her relationships with passengers whom she dated was an extension of the relationship which prevailed on the plane itself. In either case the conversation was essentially superficial, the interacting all on one level, and the roles quite clearly defined — she played the part of a devoted servant who existed to feed a man’s ego, and the role remained essentially unchanged whether she was tightening his seat belt, serving his dinner, plumping his pillow, or servicing him in bed.

“For many girls,” she said, “this is all very exhilarating. When you’re busy kicking off the traces of East Jesus, Kansas, there’s something very exciting about all this. The sense of movement, you know, can be very stimulating. The idea that you are in New York in the morning and Chicago in the afternoon and Los Angeles at night and New Orleans the next day, and so on. And sexually there’s the same sense of movement. One night it’s an advertising man and the next night it’s a professional basketball player and the night after that it’s a businessman, each night a different man in a different city. A girl can get a tremendous sense of freedom this way. She’s not only free from home-town restrictions and parental supervision but she’s free from the limitation of any set situation. There’s the feeling that you never have the chance to go stale because your entire world changes every time that you get on that plane and meet new passengers and a new crew and head for a new scene, and that it changes the same way every time you get into bed with a new man.”

She enjoyed this excitement, this exhilaration, at first. But the enjoyment didn’t last.

“For a while it was very thrilling. I suppose I can understand the thrill a real nymphomaniac gets. One man after the other, and not even knowing their names. Not that I was having sex on anything like that kind of a scale, but I can extend the experience mentally and get some appreciation of what it must be like... and it was exciting, and there was a great sense of freedom. I would only accept a date if a man seemed interesting and appealing, and I wouldn’t invariably go to bed with him. Some girls absolutely take it for granted that they will sleep with anybody they date. They feel the man expects it — which is perfectly true, the bastards always take it for granted — and they also feel that, if they aren’t going to sleep with him, they shouldn’t accept the date in the first place. I always felt that a girl has a right to change her mind, and certainly there are times when a man will seem all right on a plane but will later turn out to be a total shit for one reason or another. I don’t think it’s right to force yourself to have sex with a man out of a sense of duty.

“But after a while, and here again this is what I would guess a nymphomaniac feels eventually, after a while there was just no pleasure in it at all, in this constant emotionless sex. And I couldn’t get past this tremendous sense that I was being used by all these men. That it was sort of an unpaid part of my job, that I was just continuing to service them as I did on the plane.”

In time, Shirl lost all respect for men. “Perhaps it was the setting, the way I met them all. Men really feel liberated the moment they step on a plane, you know. And the first thing that comes out is their sexual yearnings. What a hung-up collection of idiots they are! So many of them act as if they’re on stage. I wonder whether they’re showing off to the stews or to themselves or each other or what. The grabbers are the most obviously disgusting ones, but in a way the really smooth and suave fellows are every bit as bad. Even worse. The grabbers use their hands, and you find a way to put them down, and they keep their hands to themselves, and while they may be disgusting they never get to you. They touch you literally, but on a deeper level they don’t touch you at all. But the really nice guys who pitch you cleverly and wine you and dine you and talk oh so pleasantly to you, all so that they can get you in bed and give you a nice efficient screw and roll over and go to sleep. Oh, they’re the worst. They’re usually married, and they’re always scared you’ll fall in love with them and contemptuous of you if you do and twice as contemptuous of you if you don’t — because how could you be so sluttish as to go to bed with them if you don’t love them? You know, sooner or later they all look alike to you, they all sound the same, they all speak the same words. Sooner or later every man is just the same as all the men who have gone before him. Every penis is identical, an instrument for probing you and piercing you and leaving you without really touching you at all.”

“I found myself losing respect for myself,” she went on. “I think what bothered me the most was the way I was able to go on with this way of life without finding any joy in it. And the way I was going to bed with these men without taking any pleasure in it, and, worse than that, without liking them at all. There’s something pretty grim about that. I felt at times like a dreary dismal whore. And an unpaid one at that.”

How long had she been flying before she began to feel this way?

“That’s hard to say. It happened gradually, you know. I suppose you could say that by the end of the first year of flying I was a confirmed man-hater. I still dated from time to time, but I was beginning to turn down dates more often than not, and I was pretty sick of what went on when I did go out with a fellow.”

And was she aware of lesbian impulses at the time?

“Not at all. I was never really aware of the impulses as such. Everybody has homosexual impulses, you know, whether or not you ever give into them or even consider but most people go through life without ever being consciously aware of this.” She grinned impishly. “A girl takes a set early; she likes fellows, so how could she possibly like girls? Of course everyone on God’s earth is born bisexual. You take a baby and tickle between its legs, and it couldn’t care less whether the tickling is being done by a guy or a gal. All that a wee child knows is that it damn well feels good.

“It takes society, I think, to make people either heterosexual or homosexual. And most people, once they decide which they are, they aren’t inclined to question that decision.”

“That’s less true now than it once was.”

“The sexual revolution and all that? I suppose.”

“Beyond that, the whole stress placed upon sex and the increasing amount of writing and talk on the subject. The average person is apt to spend more time contemplating his own sexuality. And he’s more open to new ideas because he knows everybody else is in the same boat.”

She thought it over, nodded. “I guess so. Guess I’m just a child of my time. But as far as I was concerned, I didn’t figure it all out for myself that I was a lesbian. I got taught.”

“Another girl?”

“Uh-huh. Another stew, actually. I had a few blue moods over the years, oh, and I tried to tell myself that I had been seduced, which I suppose was literally true, and that this girl had corrupted me, which was a lot of crap, if you’ll pardon the expression. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was already pointing hard in that direction. I don’t know how long it would have taken for me to get there under my own power. You can never know about something like that, can you? But I don’t suspect it would have taken too long. I had the inclination.

“And I was sort of, oh, drawing away from men in general. I don’t mean sexually as much as emotionally. There were no men that I really talked to outside of the context of the job. Every man was another passenger, someone to be waited on, someone to be supplied with coffee, tea or milk. And at the same time I was drawing closer and closer to a variety of other girls. You really learn the meaning of friendship in this line of work. Stewardesses become close in about the same way as combat soldiers or any other isolated group, I would guess. We lead a life that is so utterly removed from the ordinary run of things, and we have so many stresses all our own. Other people have their own frames of reference. A home, a fixed point to which they can relate the rest of their lives. We aren’t like them and we don’t have anything comparable. We fly through the air, and it’s not always with the greatest of ease. Sometimes it’s pretty rough, and if you don’t have each other to lean on, it gets close to impossible.

“I had never really had friends before I became a stew. Not really. I was kind of off by myself as a kid, and by the time I did open up socially it was as a teenager and I was in a dating situation, so most of my rapport was with the boys I dated. I didn’t have a really close girlfriend all through high school.

“So this was a big change for me, and I really warmed to this sort of friendship. Looking back on it now I can see how my feelings toward certain girls were sexual in nature although I didn’t realize it at the time.

“For example, I had this one girlfriend whom I would frequently room with on layovers because we often wound up working the same flight. A very sweet, loving girl from Minnesota, a Finnish girl, tall and absolutely gorgeous. She went back home about a year ago and married some husky farmer and gets up every morning to milk the cows, if you can believe it. I’m not sure I can myself. I was invited to the wedding, which was sweet of her. I didn’t go.

“Anyway, Cara was a really sexy kid. She had been holding out on the Minnesota farmer, but when she got her wings she really cut loose and let herself fly. She went out with passengers almost every night, and always went to bed with them, and as often as not she would get involved in some pretty far-out orgy scenes. A couple of times she got taken to nude parties and got herself laid by half a dozen men in the course of the evening, and got into some threesomes and things like that.

“This wasn’t unusual in itself. Face it, a lot of stews get into a lot of crazy scenes. We’re attractive and we’re liberated and men like us. But the unusual thing with Cara is that she liked to talk about it. I think she got as much of a kick out of coming back to the hotel room and telling me about it as she did in doing it.

“I know that I got more of a kick from the talk than the actual sex. We would lie there in our beds and tell each other stories about what we had done and what the men were like and how we enjoyed it, everything. There were times when I would be out with a man and I would go to bed with him and it would be a big nothing for me as far as I was concerned. And I would let my mind wander, the way you’ll do when sex isn’t working out as well as it might, and I would imagine myself back at the room telling Cara all about it.

“The thought of that would actually get me going. I would concentrate on that during the actual sex itself, and the thought would be more exciting than what we were doing in bed. You would think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you? You would think that talking about it would be exciting because it would bring back the mood of the original act. Here I was reversing this completely, which I suppose is about the same as imagining that you are masturbating while you’re having intercourse.”

“Some people do that.”

“They do?” She shook her head. “Well, I can believe it. I can believe almost anything where sex is concerned...

“With Cara, I’ve thought recently that maybe she was just waiting for me to make a pass at her. If she was involved in all those orgies she must have had some experience with women. I’ve never been to those parties myself, but from what I hear every other woman at those things is bisexual and knows it, and the rest of them go along with it for the hell of it, and some nights there’s more girl-girl stuff going on than anything else. So it stands to reason that Cara had had a girl’s face between her legs somewhere along the way, and that she wouldn’t have minded getting something like that going with me.

“But she never mentioned it. Maybe she was worried that it wasn’t my scene, which it wasn’t at the time, at least as far as I knew. Maybe she was afraid of offending me. Maybe she was in the same boat as I was, ready for the gay scene but unaware of the fact. If that’s the case, I don’t suppose she’ll ever learn now. Not up in Minnesota with all those cows.”

JWW: You say your first homosexual experience was with another stewardess?

SHIRL: That’s right. The odd thing, or at least I’ve always thought of it that way, is that it was with a girl I didn’t know too well at the time. If Cara and I had worked ourselves into an affair, or into a little experimentation, that would have seemed natural enough. But I barely knew Margot at all, and it all happened in what the tabloids would call one torrid night. Shall I tell you about it?

JWW: Sure.

SHIRL: Well, let’s see. How to begin? It started with a perfectly terrible flight, for openers. I was on a New York-Milwaukee non-stop. It was I think January and the weather was purely awful. We got off all right in New York — we flew out of JFK — and then everything began going wrong. We lost one engine almost immediately. Now this isn’t as dangerous as it sounds, but just to make things that much more pleasant one of the shithead passengers in the first-class cabin happened to notice the engine was out, and instead of keeping it to himself like a good little boy he had to spread the word around. So we had a nice little silent panic scene; nobody said anything because no one wanted to look like a sissy, but the entire first-class section wore a look of collective terror.

Then we hit bad air all the way over the Great Lakes. If you’re going to fly into bad weather that’s a logical place to do it, but at the time I was personally convinced that the pilot was doing it on purpose. Every once in a blue moon some pilot gets a hair up his ass and bounces the plane through air pockets just for the hell of it. Rough air doesn’t much bother them because they’re used to it and because they can anticipate the bumps. But it’s hell on a stew. We’re walking around serving drinks and dinner, not strapped into a nice comfortable seat. If a pilot has a gripe against a stew, the simplest way for him to settle it is to pop the plane into an air pocket and let her wipe her face off the ceiling. This pilot and I weren’t as close as we might have been, and I was certain he was being cute with the plane.

There were other things. just take it as gospel that it was a terrible flight. The capper was that we couldn’t get down at Milwaukee. There was thick fog really socked in at Mitchell Field and we circled for a full hour waiting for a chance to get in. The pilot would rake the plane down looking for an opening and then control would wave him off and up we would go again. Passengers vomiting right and left, other passengers pulling out rosary beads and praying their heads off — oh, you can imagine the rest. It was grim. After a full hour of this we gave it up as a bad job and went south to O’Hare and made a choppy landing there and packed the poor passengers on a bus to Milwaukee. And throughout all of this I had had this one persistent pain in the ass trying to get a date with me, and handing me a line, and letting his hands wander whenever I got near him, and, oh, it was charming.

JWW: You didn’t date him, I don’t suppose.

SHIRL: God, no. I shipped him off to Milwaukee and then tried to find a place for myself. We were all going to stay over in Chicago, but the problem was finding a place to stay. The inn at the airport was where we normally put up in Chicago but they were filled that night, for a change. The management sifted us in with various other airlines personnel, which was how I wound up rooming with Margot.

I had met her, oh, maybe three or four times before. She wasn’t a beautiful girl by any means. There was something a little too solid about the set of her face and the way she carried her body. She flew for one of the more successful trunk lines and she had been in the air for a long time. I guess she must have been about thirty at the time. Dark hair, dark complexion, very penetrating eyes...

It was pouring in Chicago, so neither of us wanted to go anywhere. We had dinner in the dining room of the inn. She was a perfect listener, and I tucked a couple of drinks under my belt and started talking. I had plenty to talk about, just from that one flight alone. If you can get bad experiences like that out of your system then it’s no strain to go up again the next day. It’s the kids who keep it all inside and never let it out that panic one day and find themselves physically incapable of boarding the plane. But when you learn to let it out before it can build up, then you’re all right.

So I got going, and she kept me talking and fed me more drinks, and by the time we got back to her room — our room — I was feeling the drinks and also feeling very damned close to Margot. Nothing sexual yet, or if there was I wasn’t aware of it. Just an emotional closeness. Also I remember that I respected her enormously. She was quite a bit older than I was and she seemed so poised, so self-possessed, as if she had caught on to some secret of life that was still out of my grasp.

In the room I kept up my talking jag, only now I wasn’t talking about the flight or flights in general but about men and sex and the whole wretched mess that it was.

This must have been what made up Margot’s mind for her, this along with the actual circumstances, which did make it easy for her. But from what I know of her — and I still don’t know very much about her, as it happens — she doesn’t make a practice of seduction. If she did, she wouldn’t still be a stewardess. You can be gay and go on flying, but if you let too many people know about it you’re going to get your wings cropped. And if you make passes at girls who aren’t interested, that’s all, sister.

JWW: So you feel that you invited a pass?

SHIRL: There’s really no question about it. I made it pretty clear to Margot that I had the potential, that I was gay as a jay and was waiting for someone to bring me out. And even if this hadn’t been the case, the sleeping arrangements and my own conversational fix reinforced all of this. Margot had been originally scheduled to occupy the room as a single, and instead of twins there was a double bed for the two of us to share. And meanwhile I was stretched out on the bed in my bra and panties babbling about what this man had wanted to do to me and what I had done with this one and so on, the usual sort of sex talk that I had been having off and on with Cara.

Then Margot got undressed, not stripping down to her underwear but all the way. And I went on talking like a ninny. And she was on the bed, and she offered to help me off with my bra, so I rolled over with my back to her and she unfastened it, and I rolled back and she drew it off, and then I squirmed out of my panties, and I finished another boring anecdote, and this time she didn’t say anything at all.

I turned and looked at her.

She was lying on her side sort of drinking me in with those deep sensitive eyes. And the moment our eyes caught I got the strangest feeling. It went all through me.

You could call it the moment of truth.

I could talk about it all dawning gradually, but I don’t really think it happened that way. I think it came all at once, one brilliant intuitive flash, and I got the complete message that quickly. I knew what she was and I knew what she wanted and I knew I was going to go along with it and I knew it would change my whole life and I knew that I wanted it. Just all at once I knew all of these things. All at once.

She took me in her arms and kissed me. It was the strangest feeling. Girls and women kiss each other all the time, you know, but obviously this was worlds removed from a little peck on the cheek from somebody’s maiden aunt. Her mouth was soft and warm and fresh and, oh, I don’t know. It was all so strange.

I just let her make love to me. I might as well have been a doll. A Chatty Cathy doll who had done all her talking in the early part of the evening... It wasn’t what she did to me that was unusual. I wasn’t exactly a virgin, you know, nor had my experience been limited to the more ordinary ways of getting there. So there was really nothing physical that Margot did to me that I hadn’t had done to me before, by men. Oh, not to mince words, I had been touched and kissed everywhere before, I had been eaten before, and I had liked it before, but this was different.

Partly it was different physically. This was a part of it, I have to admit it. You must have heard it said a few thousand times that no man can perform cunnilingus the way a woman can. That only another woman can really know how to bring delight to a woman’s body. Well one of the reasons everybody says this is that it happens to be the truth. Really. This doesn’t mean that every man is a boor at going down on a girl, or that every dyke is an utter genius in the lips and tongue department, but as a general rule girls can get you places men can’t, and Margot was particularly wonderful at this, and that was part of the reason the whole experience was so perfect.

But more than that, I think, was the simple fact that she was a woman. And that none of my bad feelings for men could get in the way. And that Margot and I had been talking, really talking, and I felt genuinely close to her, and, oh, I don’t know exactly. Maybe a part of it was that I had actually been waiting for months or years for a woman to make love to me, and that now that it was happening I was enjoying it to the hilt.

Afterward, I returned the favor. Did unto her as she had done unto me. I didn’t really know what she would like or anything, but I figured that I would simply do to her what she had done to me, and I guess I had a feeling for it. We were very good together.

Best of all, there was none of that empty feeling that I always had after I made it with a man. Even if I had an orgasm with a man — and I frequently did — I was still sad and empty and, oh, so utterly alone after it was over. With Margot all I felt was close and warm and together.

She talked to me for hours. About what it was like to be gay, and all of the things I would have to know in order to survive as a flying lesbian. She told me the names of some girls who were gay and some who swung both ways. I was surprised to learn that some rather good friends of mine were that way. I had never suspected it, and they had never given me any indication.

After that, I went with men a couple of times. I think most gay girls feel compelled to test themselves from time to time if just to prove to themselves that they really do like it better with other girls. Just a couple of times over the years, though, and it was never good. I think it could have been but my earlier experiences had spoiled it for me, probably forever. Although you can never tell about that. You can really never tell. I’ve known girls who were gay all their lives and who suddenly got married and left the life completely, and whether they did this as a way of retiring to what the world considers a normal life or whether the men really did turn them on, well, that’s something to speculate about, but it does show that people can never be sure what’s coming up next, what changes they’re about to go through. As for me, I would guess that I’m going to stay this way forever, and that’s fine with me, but I have to admit that you can never know for sure.

Like Margot, the girl who initiated her into lesbianism, Shirl has learned to keep her sexual predilections under wraps insofar as her colleagues in the skies are concerned. However, they know she doesn’t date, that she has no interest in men, and she suspects many of them have guessed that she is homosexual.

“But this doesn’t get in the way,” she told me. “There’s a very big difference for most people between being pretty sure of something and having it thrown in your face. There are girls I work with, girls I fly with frequently and often share a room with, and I’m sure they have a pretty good idea that I’m homosexual. But I never make a pass, or even drop a hint in conversation, and thus it never makes it difficult for us to get along well and even to have an open and uncomplicated friendship with no sexual aspect to it on either side.

“You know, people always worry about homosexuals, they worry that we’re all out to seduce them. I frankly have no interest in the seduction of the innocent. I couldn’t be less interested. It’s not just a matter of fear on my part, but that I would absolutely despise myself for forcing myself upon someone who didn’t want me in the first place. Call it insecurity if you want, but it’s the way I am, and I personally feel it’s a good way to be, a healthy way. Oh, I’ll know straight girls who appeal to me tremendously, and for whom I have strong feelings, and I’ll go so far as to think that it would be really groovy if so-and-so were gay, but I’ll also have the balance and perspective to realize that she isn’t and that there’s no point trying to get involved with her. So I may get turned on by a straight girl, but I’ll always manage to turn myself off without any great trouble.”

Her own sexual outlets consist largely of non-stews.

“It’s safer that way. In all respects. I have made it with several gay stews, and it’s good that way, but it can screw you up. Some girls will have these long-term affairs and the worst thing possible is to get involved in something like that. Not that I want casual sex, I had enough of that with men and I want to be able to talk to the person and feel something for her, but when you mix up long-term love together with your job, well, it can get messy. I know three stews with whom I’ll get together now and then. They all have the same general attitude I do and it works out nicely with them. But I wouldn’t want a big emotional scene, and on the other hand I wouldn’t want to get involved with a stew who was just looking for some new thrill to write up in her diary. That type of completely casual experimentation is a lot of fun under the right set of circumstances, but it’s the sort of thing I would rather indulge in with a stranger, a civilian, than with someone in my own line of work. Just a personal preference, perhaps, but I think it makes sense. At least it does for me.

“One thing that you learn, that male and female homosexuals always learn, is how to connect in a strange city. That’s really a tremendous advantage of being gay, you know. It’s so much easier to find sexual partners. Normally if you fly into a city where you don’t know a soul you are pretty much doomed to sleep alone. This is especially true for men unless they want to hire professional companionship. Remember, for the one guy who manages to date and bed a stew, there are maybe fifty who wanted to and couldn’t manage it. But it’s true for straight girls, too. If they get picked up they’re tramps, and if they don’t they sleep alone. While if you’re gay, you just go to a gay bar and meet someone who’s there for the same reason you are, and the two of you are on a perfectly equal footing from the start, and it works out very well, all things considered.

“Admittedly, the bars are inclined to be a bit depressing sometimes. But you only have to use them to get started, to get connected with the right people, or on occasional nights when nothing’s doing or you have the urge for someone new. Generally, though, I’ll know a few gay girls in every city I fly into. I just get off the plane and check into my room and get on the phone, and there will be a party if I want or some company for dinner or almost any sort of scene I might be looking for, with as much or as little love and sex to go with it as I’m in the mood for. It really couldn’t be more convenient, and it fits in neatly with the life of a stewardess, because in the morning I’m on the plane and away to another scene entirely, with warmth on either side and good feelings and no regrets.”

LAUREN — The Swinger

“I think a lot of girls cop out on the whole stewardess scene. You hear them all the time going on about how being a stew has made a whore out of this girl or a tramp out of this one or an emotional wreck out of that one, and I suppose it must happen that way from time to time, but I think, oh, you know, I think it’s a lot like psychoanalysis. It was something somebody on television said about it once, I think it was Johnny Carson. He said it seemed like an expensive way to cop out on your parents. You know, figuring out all the ways that they’re responsible for the fact that you fucked up your own life.”

She drew on a cigarette, blew out smoke, studied the end of the cigarette thoughtfully. “I have a theory that people make their own messes in life. Maybe that’s not something you would go so far as to call a theory. just a way of looking at things, maybe.

“But I believe this. And I also believe, I really do, that for most girls their character and all is pretty well formed by the time they’re in high school. Their moral position and how they are going to think about things and react to things. I know there are what you call late bloomers or late developers, you know, who don’t get started the same time as everybody else. Girls who hide their light under a bushel for years just conforming and living quietly, and then all of a sudden they open up to themselves and start swinging harder than anyone else. But even so I would think that the potential was all there and it would have come out sooner or later and nothing would change it at all.

“Sometimes I think, oh, that it’s all locked up inside us from the moment we’re born. From the moment we’re conceived, even. All locked up within us and waiting to come out. All in the genes, all of it, what we’re going to look like and act like and feel like. And it doesn’t matter how often you get your diaper changed or whether your mother loves you or if you get into the right sorority or anything else, because no matter how it goes it all comes out the same in the end.

“People tell me that this is completely crazy, and I suppose you think so yourself, and maybe you’re right, but I see things this way and it’s honestly the way I look at things and what I believe...

“Now in my own case, if you just looked at the obvious facts you might say, well, Lauren led a fairly quiet life until she became a stewardess, and now, zowie, she’s an all-out swinger. And you might put two and two together and come up with the theory that being a stew was what turned me into a swinger.

“Not true. See, I was like this all the time, all primed and ready to go. It was just a question of time and place. I even let myself go a little in high school, and not just to the point that I wasn’t a virgin by graduation, but that I got into some fairly kinky scenes. But, see, nobody really knew. Not my parents, not the school authorities, and not the majority of the other kids. I was either lucky or I had a pretty good feeling for who would keep it to themselves and who would spread the word around; so, not to get into specifics now, whatever I did in high school it was boss kicks for me and no blot on the old reputation.

“If anything, I would say that I became a stewardess because I wanted to swing. It was more to it than just that, sure. Anything to get out of Chillicothe, like. But other girls would come into it, some of them, with this really holy air about them, as if being a stew was like going into holy orders or becoming an army nurse. You know the attitude. And a very large number were hot to get married. They had heard how the average stew can marry a successful man after a few months in the air, and that was what they were there for...

“Me, I wanted to get creatively laid. To cut loose and really ball. And really, where could you find a better situation? No one really cares what you do. As long as you handle your job properly and don’t let the late hours show in your face, and as long as you don’t disgrace the good name of the airline, nobody really gives a damn. The pilot isn’t your father.

“Also, it’s a great way to meet swingers. In my eyes, people who fly a lot of the time are a world removed from people who stay home. There’s a tremendous difference. People who fly are open to new experiences, new places, new people. They’re sharper and hipper. They’re also generally on the make. All of this I appreciate.

“Not that I’m a walking — flying — nymphomaniac who wants nothing but constant sex sex sex. But I do have to admit that it’s a major interest of mine, and that I like way-out scenes and all of that. To me it’s all part of having an exciting time, and having an exciting time is what I figure I was put on earth to do.

“See?”

Lauren is bright and buoyant and bubbly, with short blonde hair and a pixyish face and figure. Her eyes vary from green to brown. “I guess they change with my moods,” she told me impishly. “They become a very bright green when I have an orgasm. Someone told me this, and you know me, I had to see for myself, right? Typical, right? So it was really crazy. I had this little mirror, and I sprawled out there and held onto the mirror and like stared at myself, and this fellow went down on me. It was really weird. It felt almost scientific, like an experiment. Human Sexual Response. Did you read it? The book? Out of sight, right — with wires attached to everything and all? I felt a little like that. ‘Und now, chentlemen, ve vill determine vezzer or not ziss girl’s eyes change color ven she pops her tube.’ Lauren the Mad Scientist. It was hard to get quite into the mood at first, but one makes sacrifices for science, and this fellow ate me like a starving man, and I got there, I’m happy to say. And they do. My eyes, that is. A very brilliant shade of green.

“You’ll have to see for yourself some time—”

Lauren at twenty-three has been flying for almost three years. While it is generally true that neither the airlines nor one’s colleagues are apt to attempt the role of moral arbiters, and while one would be hard pressed to find a more permissive vocational environment, Lauren is nevertheless regarded by many of those who know her as unusually wild. “I suppose a lot of us do some of the wacky things she does,” one girl told me, “but if we do, we tend to keep them to ourselves. I went to a party that you would have to call an orgy, for example. But I didn’t broadcast the news. Lauren, though, is an utter case. When she goes to an orgy she does everything but show around pictures of herself. She has told me more about some of her experiences than I really care to know.”

“I don’t care who knows,” Lauren has said in return. “I’m, you know, like a long way from Chillicothe. I’ve had it with the don’t-disgrace-your-family bit. That sucks, it really does. Why hide what you do? I’m not ashamed of what I do... look, I’ve read a couple of your books on swingers. I don’t have to tell you. You know what’s happening. Everything’s changing, right? Everybody’s coming alive and opening up. The sexual revolution and all that jazz.

“I mean, the sexual revolution to some girls is an expression to explain to themselves how come they aren’t virgins anymore. To me it’s a lot more than that. I really believe what the Bob Dylan song says. The times they are a-changing, baby. Truth.

“I like to tell the other girls about it when I come back from a really crazy scene. I like to watch their reactions, part uptight but always part excited. I really dig blowing their minds that way. And that’s what it takes to make a revolution, you know. Not doing it and keeping it to yourself. That’s the Victorian scene all over again, with everybody going off in private for his juicy little jollies, and everybody being straight as an arrow on the surface, so that all you would wind up with was guilt. But doing it and talking about it, letting everybody know, that opens things up and opens people up. I don’t mean to say that I’m accomplishing anything all by myself, you know, but my attitude, the way I see it, is that at least I’m doing my thing, and I’m on the right side.”

LAUREN: I don’t know when it all started. In the books the girls always start at the beginning, somewhere deep in the bowels of their childhood, and tell about the first time they fingered themselves or kissed a boy or got laid or how they wanted to ball their fathers. That’s such a massive bring-down, all of that.

JWW: It helps develop a sense of a person, and perhaps shows how one thing leads to another.

LAUREN: If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon skip it.

JWW: All right.

LAUREN: I don’t like all that digging in the past. Maybe that’s part of my thing, that I’ve got something tucked away back there that I don’t want to think about. Well, fine. Solid. If there’s something I don’t want to think about, I would just as soon leave it buried and not think about it.

So as far as how I got the way I am, well, the hell with all that. But as for how I started to swing after I became a stewardess, that’s something else. I’d dig talking about that.

JWW: Fine.

LAUREN: As a matter of fact, I think that would be more interesting to read about anyway, don’t you? And more valuable to the people who read the book. I’m hip that most of the readers, that probably a majority of them, are cats who want something horny to read while they’re beating off. I like to read horny books myself from time to time. But I also read a great many sex books — and this is why I read your books, John — so that I can learn something. A person can learn a lot that way. And it would stand to reason, wouldn’t it, that some of your readers will be girls who are interested in becoming stews, and maybe some of them will be interested for the same reason I was...

I’ll tell you something. When I first got to stew school, I thought, wow, what a total mistake. Because I had always had this picture of stewardesses having this really wild life, really wicked, and here stew school was like entering a convent. I’m serious. No exaggeration, I felt like a Carmelite nun. There was an electrified fence around the place and no men except the decrepit gardener, and honest to God I thought we were going to have to swear an oath of poverty, chastity and obedience.

JWW: Not chastity, but—

LAUREN: Right, I was going to say that. Poverty and obedience are part of the game, all right. But not chastity.

Well, actually it was just as well that there was nothing much to do during training. They really teach you everything all at once, and drinking during the evenings would have been too much, not to talk about anything sexy. There were some girls who would sneak out and meet a boyfriend on the sly, and sneak back in again, and one of them got caught and thrown out of the class just when I had almost made up my mind to try it. So that taught me a lesson, and I stayed with the straight and proper life until I got my wings.

I learned an incredible amount. Part of what I learned was internal and personal. This was the first time I had been away from home, you know, and although I was smack in the middle of a regular beehive full of women, still in all I was away from home and away from people I knew, and in a sense I was alone. When you have a heavy dose of yourself for company you have to learn things about yourself... but that’s pretty heavy to talk about now. Beyond that, you learn so many things in stew training. How to make yourself attractive, how to have a bright personality, how to establish warm feelings with a passenger with just a smile and a friendly word — all of the shit they throw at you in the airlines commercials about how we make it so much of a groove to fly, but really it’s all true, because we are experts at this and we care about it, and that makes a difference.

To understand this, to really get the message, all you would really have to do is take a good long look at the entering members of a stewardess training class. Look them over and talk to them, and then come back when they finish their training and look at them again and talk to them again.

Everybody knows that stewardesses are attractive. I understand they were better-looking some years back, when there were fewer flights and the airlines could really afford to be choosy, but even now the average stew is a very attractive girl, let’s face it. But if you saw what we look like before we become stews, you might be in for a shock. Because if you peel the average stewardess down you come up with a girl who isn’t that much better looking than the average all-American girl.

But we know how to wear clothes and makeup, and our posture is perfect, and we handle our faces well, and smile a lot, and that makes all the difference. Here’s something similar — if you go to New York and walk down Fifth Avenue during lunch hour, you’ll see so many pretty girls, and if you did the same thing in Chillicothe there will be a much lower percentage of girls that you would look twice at. I was going to say Los Angeles along with New York, but that’s another matter because there really are more pretty girls there, what with so many going out to Hollywood. But the point isn’t that girls are prettier in New York, but that they are more sophisticated about dressing attractively and getting their hair styled in a fashionable way and using makeup creatively, while the girls in a small town in the Midwest don’t know how to do this, or don’t take the trouble. And it’s much the same way with stews.

So the point is that stew training was worth it, even if it was a lot like going to jail...

When I got my wings, I got into the center of things in a hurry. I had a deep yearning for something. I knew it was out there but I didn’t know just what it was.

JWW: Do you mean simply that you wanted sex?

LAUREN: No, it was more than that. I sort of sensed that there was a world of excitement that I didn’t really know anything about, and I was impatient to get connected with it. I guess you could say that I anticipated the swinging scene even though I had no real understanding of what it was or what went on there.

At the beginning, I was dating constantly and having a whole lot of sex, and yet, I don’t know, I was vaguely discontented, vaguely, oh, disappointed about the whole thing. I would be on a flight, and I would be having a ball just going through the stewardess role. I dig flying to begin with, and I dig meeting new people, and I was so excited about what I was doing, actually being a stew and doing all the things I had been trained to do. I was like a little kid. Anyway, I would be on a flight, and guys would flirt with me, which I enjoyed from the start, and I learned how to size them up and guess which ones would be fun, and I would take dates. Also I went out with pilots now and then, but I sort of sensed from the beginning that this wasn’t my major scene. I have always had the feeling that it would be a mistake to get involved with someone you have to go to work with the next day or the next week.

So for the most part I dated passengers. I knew the things all stews know — how to tell if a man is married or single by looking not only for the wedding ring but for the white mark that shows he took the ring off. There are a lot of different ways to interpret that white mark, incidentally. First of all, it’s an obvious tip-off that the guy is looking for action. He’s married and he’s trying to hide the fact, so if he appeals to you, there’s no question that you can get something started with him. On the other hand, the man who makes a play for you but leaves his wedding ring on, with him you have the advantage of knowing exactly where you stand. Everything is right out there in the open. He’s saying, Dig, I’m married, and I wouldn’t insult your intelligence or your character by trying to hide the fact, but we’re both grown-up people and we know what we like, so why be sneaky? A man with that attitude is likely to be enjoyable company. It’s funny, really — the guys who take off the wedding rings would probably do better if they left them on...

Of course you can read too much into this. I know a fellow, for example, who had that telltale white mark on his finger, and it turned out that he was married and very straight about it, he never played around as far as I know, but he had been on a diet and lost so much weight that his fingers actually got thinner, and the ring was too big and he had left it at a jeweler’s to have it made smaller. He wasn’t a swinger, he was just a weight-watcher.

JWW: I had something similar. I took my ring off when I was divorced, naturally, and girls would think I was being coy when they noticed the white mark. As a matter of fact, I got a little monomaniacal on the subject and took to holding my left hand in front of a sunlamp.

LAUREN: That’s too much... another thing, and this may seem snobbish, and actually I guess that’s exactly what it is, but one thing you learn before you even set foot on a plane is that you’re better off dating fellows who fly first-class than the fellows in the tourist section. It’s not that they’re more likely to be wealthy. I don’t even know that that’s the case. A lot of rich men just don’t like the idea of paying extra money for first-cabin service. But the ones who do are the ones who believe money is to spend, and that’s the kind of person I’d rather have dinner with, all things considered. On domestic flights, you know, it just doesn’t cost that much extra to fly first class. I know the corporations usually send their men tourist class, but even so if you have any style you just take the tickets the company gets for you and turn them in for first-class, and pay the difference yourself. And if a man won’t do that, well, he generally doesn’t care much about having a really good time, and if that’s so I’d rather not go out with him. Of course this is a generalization, and it’s probably unfair to a lot of swinging guys who travel tourist just as a matter of course without even thinking about it. But, you know, up in the sky you have to make generalizations and snap judgments, and this is one easy way to do it.

But to get back to the subject, I was dating these fellows and having plenty of great dinners and drinking at all the best night clubs and seeing the ceilings of a lot of hotel rooms, and it was fun, believe me, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I felt something was missing.

Now when a lot of girls say this what they mean is that love was missing. The whole scene of fast meetings and going right off to bed and never seeing the guy again, this gets to a lot of girls after a while. You’d be surprised, because some of them are very enthusiastic about it at first, and they’ll give you a whole line about how they’re liberated young ladies and they can really cut loose and swing this way, and after a couple of months of instant sex they find out they’re not so free after all, and they want to be loved for their sweet and beautiful souls and not just for their tits and asses.

Look, I’m inclined to say the words, you know, but you can change it when you write it all up...

With me, it was the opposite. I didn’t want any love scene. That was the last thing I wanted. Maybe someday, and with the right guy, and with God knows how many other qualifications, but in the meantime, like, forget it. I have enough to think about inside of my own head without getting involved with somebody else.

What I wanted was something more thrilling. Well, kicks, really. Sexual kicks. Let’s not beat around the bush — I wanted really swinging times. Something more than just having ordinary sex with one man in the course of a night.

To put it simply, I wanted to get involved in the whole scene of swinging. The parties, the swap groups, the whole trip.

JWW: You knew about the scene?

LAUREN: I did and I didn’t. I had read about it. Some of the books were fairly straight, and then there are other swap books you see around, I’m sure you know the kind I mean, which are obviously phony. Just a device for descriptions of orgies designed to get the reader hot. But even so, I guess all of those books have a germ of truth in them somewhere. So I did have an idea of what was going on, but you know, it was something that happened in books. I might have fantasies about it but at the same time it wasn’t, oh, real for me.

JWW: You liked the idea, but you couldn’t believe those people really existed.

LAUREN: Right. They weren’t real.

Then this one flight, Boston to Denver with a stop at I think Kansas City, there was this very groovy passenger going straight through to Denver, and I got to talking to him. He was the advertising manager of a company in Denver and he had been in New York getting wined and dined by the advertising agency, and now he was on his way home. He was making a nice pitch to me, not too heavy but coming on fairly strong, and he was a very attractive man, tall and handsome and I guess late thirties, and, oh, sexy. My type.

But he was wearing a wedding ring, and although I had nothing against going out with married men, I also realized that, you know, he was going to Denver and Denver was his home base, so it was a cinch I wouldn’t be dating him that trip. Now under those circumstances a lot of guys will try for your phone number and make arrangements to call you when they get to your home base or something like that, but he wasn’t playing it that way. He was talking about my joining him for dinner that night.

So I thought, what the hell, and I looked at him and said, “You know, we could probably have a swinging time together, but do you think your wife would approve?”

“Oh, she’s liberal,” he said.

Now this is a common answer, generally meaning that the wife doesn’t care what the husband does out-of-town, and generally it’s a load of shit anyway. So I said something to the effect that she might want to see him on his first night back in town.

“She will,” he said. “But she likes company. You’ll join us for dinner, and maybe the neighbors will drop over, and we can always dig up an extra man to make it an even six.”

I thought at first he meant he could get an extra man as a date for me. Then he sort of spelled it out and, bright girl that I am, I got the message. Light dawned.

“We’re swingers,” he explained. “You seem like a pretty swinging kid yourself, and you really appeal to me, and I thought maybe you’d like to join us. Why don’t you think it over?”

I didn’t have to think it over. I told him I was game and that was all there was to it.

JWW: How did it go?

LAUREN: Like a dream. Literally like a dream. I checked into my room at the airport inn and then met him in the lounge for a drink. He had called his wife and everything was set. We drove out to his place, a very plush split-level on the hillside with a view that went on for miles. His wife was just a few years older than I was, a redhead with a fantastic body and a very wicked smile. And one of those low voices, she sounded like Lizbeth Scott in those Bogart movies. I’ve always wished I had a voice like that, and instead I’ve got this perky squeaky little voice that I hate.

We had dinner, and then we sat around talking, and we had a few rounds of drinks, and then his wife excused herself and while she was gone he made a pass at me. He took me in his arms and kissed me, and I was excited instantly, and he put his hand under my skirt and played with me and I came almost immediately. I’ve always been able to come quite easily but this was different. The whole scene was turning me on, see. The idea that his wife was in the other room and that she knew what was going on and that she grooved with the whole thing, this made it all very exciting to me.

JWW: You didn’t feel at all inhibited?

LAUREN: I can honestly say that I didn’t. At the very first it was a little awkward going into the house and meeting the wife, but swingers know how to put a person at their ease. Swingers are very much like stewardesses in that respect, as far as that goes. Incidentally, of the swinging wives that I have met, you might be surprised what a high percentage of them are former stews...

But after the first few moments with the two of them, no, there was no inhibition on my part. And certainly none on theirs. You know, they had made this scene before.

JWW: Yes, I would imagine.

LAUREN: So we got out of our clothes, you know, and he played with me some more, and went down on me, and then we screwed on the couch. It was really great. Part of it, of course, was what I already mentioned, the whole excitement of the involvement with his wife and all, but there was also the fact that he was particularly good at making love. This is one really wonderful thing about swingers, incidentally. Both the men and the women are very much better at sex than the ordinary run of people.

JWW: In terms of sexual technique?

LAUREN: Definitely. There is just no question about it. For one thing, they aren’t uptight about sex. They get plenty of it all the time and they don’t have to worry about their ability. Also they make it with a lot of different people and they experiment constantly, and this has to make a big difference. They learn different things and they have, you know, a very open attitude about sex. It’s a big point of honor with them, a source of pride, to be very well versed in sexual technique.

Another thing, and that is that swingers are just more attractive than the average person. Physically attractive. Not because they were born beautiful but because they take the trouble. They exercise and keep fit. Most married women, even the ones who want to go on looking young and beautiful, well, they wear girdles all the time and let their stomach muscles go flat and flabby. Because they only care how they look with clothes on. But swingers are concerned about looking good in the nude. Some of them don’t dress well at all, but you can be sure they undress well, and that’s how they keep score. The men, too, keep attractive. And they keep their nails clean and their breath fresh and bathe frequently — they do all the things that keep them from being in any way offensive. Little things can turn people off, and swingers are very careful not to do anything that will turn anybody off.

JWW: Was that the extent of your first swinging session?

LAUREN: Are you kidding? That was barely the beginning. After we had made it, we were sharing a cigarette, and his wife walked in. She had all her clothes off and it was then that I realized what a really stunning figure she had. She pulled up a chair and sat down next to us, and the three of us were talking casually, and then without a word she began performing fellatio on her husband. This was really startling to me. Not the act, Christ, I had learned to do this years ago, even before I lost my virginity. But the whole situation, the scene. Here I was still lying in his arms, and there was his wife kneeling over him and sucking him off.

It was tremendously exciting to watch. It was really fantastic. At first I watched, and then I had to get into the act, and I started kissing him on the chest and throat and like that, and he fingered me a little and sucked my breasts, and you know, figure it out for yourself, but it was all great.

The couple from down the street came over later on, and we all got tangled up together. They were also very groovy people, very attractive. I never did get back to the hotel room until the next morning. I must have dozed off from time to time but I didn’t get any actual sleep to speak of, not really. The five of us were busy all night. In the morning the guy drove me back to the airport and gave me a couple of Benzedrine pills to get me through the day, because I had a flight coming up and I wanted to be half-way human for it. No problem at all, as it turned out. The bennies did the job and I was bright and bushy-tailed, in addition to being very goddamn well laid.

Oh, believe it! You know all about the swinging scene so I don’t really have to tell you about it, but you can imagine the tangles that can get going when you have three girls and two guys. And I was just so receptive to all of this. I had been reading and fantasizing about it for so long, getting all of these wild ideas in my head, and now it was all there for me and all I had to do was participate, and God, did I ever participate.

I had this tremendous desire to have two men at once. I think every girl must think about this. Don’t you think so?

JWW: Perhaps.

LAUREN: I would think so myself. At this time, for instance, I had learned to enjoy eating a man, and of course I had always enjoyed intercourse. So how could you help wanting to see what it was like to experience both of these things at the same time?

Of course I wanted to, and I tried it that night, and, well, it was great. In fact I liked all of the things I did that night.

All of them...

The only thing that almost stopped me was the woman thing.

JWW: Lesbianism?

LAUREN: Well, you know, I wouldn’t exactly call it lesbianism when two girls get together at a session. Lesbianism or homosexuality or whatever you want to call it, it implies more to me than that. You know what I mean? It’s a whole way of life, the attitudes you form and everything. I have known some lesbians, and they are in a different bag entirely. Whereas on the other hand it’s hard to find a woman involved in swinging to any real extent who doesn’t make the scene with another girl from time to time. Not in private, but at a party.

JWW: Yes, that seems to be true.

LAUREN: So I wouldn’t call it lesbianism. Just a part of swinging. In the same way, there are quite a few guys nowadays who will have sex with other men at a swinging session, and yet you would never think to call any of these guys a fairy, or homosexual in any sense.

JWW: That’s a good deal less common than the other side of the coin, female homosexuality.

LAUREN: It is, but it’s getting more common, I think. Or maybe I’m just moving with a wilder crowd lately, but I think more men are coming out of their shells. Maybe they used to be worried about latent homosexuality, or about other people thinking that they were queer, and now they aren’t worried anymore. I don’t know.

That first night, though, I was hip enough from what I had read to know that lesbian stuff was apt to happen at swinging parties. In fact I found myself thinking about it from the beginning, wondering if it would happen. I had more or less decided that I would try to find a cool way to let them know that it wasn’t my scene. But at the same time I’m sure I had a strong urge to try it.

I said before that I wasn’t at all inhibited. Well, scratch that. I was inhibited about the girl-girl scene. Not enormously uptight about it, but let’s say a little bit inhibited.

JWW: How did it get started?

LAUREN: It got started with me left out of it, as a matter of fact.

JWW: How do you mean?

LAUREN: The two other girls, the wives. We had gone through a sort of five-way scene which was wild, and everybody was sort of cooling off, sipping drinks and sprawled out and talking, and one of the husbands suggested to the redhead that she put on a show with the other wife. And the two women talked back and forth about it. One said she had almost forgotten what the other tasted like, and talk like that. The talk was almost as erotic as the act itself. Then they petted with each other, and finished with a sixty-nine. Their husbands watched but didn’t join in. They watched until both girls got their jollies.

JWW: And you watched as well?

LAUREN: Of course. What else was I going to do? Look at the television set?

JWW: I suppose not.

LAUREN: Afterward my hostess, the redhead, just turned and looked at me. And then they were all looking at me, and I didn’t know what to do or say. It was a very strange moment.

And I just realized that I had to find out what it was like. What it felt like. And you know, it was great. At first I thought that I just wanted to have it done to me, to be eaten by one of them, and then I realized that that was a lot of crap. I actually wanted the complete trip, dig, and we wound up in a three-way tangle, and it was a mindblower. It really was. I hadn’t expected to dig it that much, but I did.

In a sense it was the high point of the evening, because, you know, this was a really far-out thing for me and a scene I hadn’t expected to make, let alone enjoy that much. But really, the whole evening was one big high point.

That evening with the two couples represented the crossing of a sexual Rubicon for Lauren. From that point on, she considered herself a member of the Swinging Generation and conducted her social life accordingly. She developed contacts supplied by the Denver couple, added new contacts of her own, and became increasingly involved in group sexual activities throughout the country.

“For a person who travels,” she explained, “the swinging scene is really ideal. When you spend your life bouncing from one city to another, you honestly don’t have the time to develop long-term relationships. And assuming that what you want is to have sex on the run and enjoy it, well, the problem is that with most people it takes a long time to develop a really good sexual relationship. You have to learn each other’s bodies, you know. You have to get the feel of the whole thing, and this takes time that you just don’t have available when you have to fly to Omaha first thing in the morning.

“But with swingers, there’s this immediate rapport. It starts with rapport on an emotional level. There’s none of this business of feeling each other out conversationally. Swingers don’t have to go through that shit, any more than you have to worry about your wardrobe at a nudist camp. You know, it really amounts to pretty much the same thing, doesn’t it? Swingers are like nudists. They don’t worry about putting clothes on their minds and hiding their desires. Putting clothes on their minds — that sounds almost precious enough to be from a Jim Webb song, but you dig what I mean. There’s this immediate honesty, because you’re all swingers and you all know what you’re there for, so why bother coming on strong with each other?

“But at the same time, even though they don’t try to falsify things, swingers are very intent upon making a good impression. They work hard to put you at your ease and make you feel at home. And all of this makes for a much better scene when you hit a strange city than you would get sitting around some creepy nightclub with some clown who keeps putting his hand on your leg and pretending it’s an accident.

“I don’t want to give you the idea that my entire bag is group sex. I would say that I like that the most not just because I’m kinky but because frankly that’s usually the most fun for all concerned. When there are just two people in a room there are just so many things they can do, and they can only do it for so long before one or both of them gets too tired or too bored or plain worn out. With a group, everybody gets turned on by everybody else and the whole level of excitement is much higher. And lasts much longer. And in a strange way there’s a lot more individual leeway in a group scene. For instance, if a guy and a gal are together, and if he can’t get it up for the moment, it can be a very tense and unhappy scene all around. He feels compelled to do her some good, and she is brought down by the fact that he’s not hard and therefore she figures she must be turning him off, and you know, one thing leads to another and nobody is exactly happy.

“But if the same thing happens at a group thing and it does, incidentally, because anybody is apt to be turned off at any particular moment, you know — well, then, the party goes on around the guy. If he feels like participating he can always go down on somebody or finger somebody and the chances are that no one will even notice that he isn’t physically excited. Or he can just sit around and watch if that’s what he would rather do. You know the saying, whatever turns you on, well, that’s what it’s all about.

“I have a particular advantage as far as swinging is concerned. Well, you could even say it’s an advantage as far as sex in general is concerned, but especially in terms of the swinging scene. And that’s that I’m a girl

“See, extra girls are always in big demand. You know the way it works. The whole scene is up to here with extra guys who want to go to orgies or have parties with couples. I’ve been to parties advertised in the underground newspapers where they will specify that only couples will be admitted, and in the course of the evening maybe fifty dateless guys will try to talk their way in, and it’s an odd thing if one girl shows up unescorted. So an extra girl will always be in demand if only to balance out the extra men who are always available.

“But on top of that, every group would rather have more girls on hand. I’m not exactly sure why this is. Maybe it’s because every man has this dream of himself as the sultan of his own private harem, and wants to have extra women all over the place. Or maybe it’s this big lesbian element in the swinging scene. I suppose that’s possible. Of course I don’t have to tell you that the whole idea of the threesome is very big right now. In the club bulletins, I would say that a quarter to a third of them are just for that purpose — married couples who want an extra girl for a threesome. Sometimes these people are just looking for casual sex and sometimes they really want a permanent three-way living agreement...”

Did she expect to go on living this way indefinitely? Or did she have a different sort of future in mind?

“I would hate to give up swinging. I’m sure I wouldn’t want to do that. But I know I’ll want to get married sooner or later. If I met the right man now, I think I might almost be ready to start wearing a ring.”

What sort of man would she want?

“A swinger,” she answered, without hesitation. “No question about it. I think it would be good to be married because otherwise sooner or later a person winds up lonely. You look at your life after a certain age and if you don’t have memories to share with some other person, it is just an empty life. I haven’t felt this way myself yet, I’m too young, I think. But I have heard people talk, and I can understand what it must be like.

“But if marriage meant turning square, I don’t think I could make it. Not for any length of time. Oh, people talk about love and the way it changes a person, but I don’t know. Maybe some day I’ll understand that kind of love, maybe I’ll believe it, but for the time being I can only say that, like, I don’t believe that kind of love exists. Or that it exists for me.

“See, I know about sex. I know all about sex. Maybe that’s putting it a little heavy, but, oh, I’ve been making the scene for a long time now, and it’s a fairly crazy scene at that, and I know it pretty well. And one thing I don’t know much of anything about is love.

“You know, like what is it? What’s it all about? Dig, John, I would almost like to be very cool about this now, very sophisticated, but you know, what am I trying to prove? I’ll admit it — there’s this thing that people call love and I don’t know what it feels like.

“I’ve never really cared about anybody but myself. Not the way people do when they’re in love...

“So screw it. I mean, I’m a happy kid, I have a good time. Right? I enjoy myself. I know how to swing and I know how to let myself go and have a really good time. I can walk into a party and not know anybody and a couple of hours later I’ve copped every joint in the room and I’ve come all over the place and I don’t know much about love, but like the old joke, I know what I like. Right?

“If I meet a man, and if he’s a nice guy and bright to talk to and comfortable to be with and good in the hay, I mean really he would have to be very damned good in the hay or I would probably be very conscious of what was wrong with his style. But if he was all those things, and I dug him and he dug me, you know, to be with. And if he was a swinger and if we both liked to make the same kind of scenes. And if he made a good enough living so that we could live a decent life, but at the same time he had enough time off so that we could cut loose and swing together.

“Well, if we had all of that going for each other, I don’t guess I would ask too many questions about love. And in that case I’d be glad to give up stewing and all and get married. I would do it. I guess anybody would.”

RONA — The Freak-Out

“I feel sometimes like a character in one of those World War II movies, I don’t know if you know the sort I mean. Those pictures — there was always a cross-section of types. There would be maybe eight or ten soldiers that the movie focused on, and of them there was always one boy from Brooklyn, and one married soldier with pictures of his kid that he had never seen, and he always got killed near the end. And one hillbilly who kept taking off his boots because he wasn’t used to having anything on his feet, and one pink-cheeked kid off a farm, and one hoodlum type who developed a social conscience somewhere around the middle of the fourth reel. And one officer, who was either sleeping with the army nurse or hung up because his wife had left him or tortured by the inhumanity of war. I shouldn’t let myself get going like this. I’m a nut for old movies. The cornier they are the more I like them—

“But if the movie was about stewardesses instead of soldiers, one of the girls would be a tramp and one secretly married and maybe one lesbian and one getting over the boy back home and so on, and there would also be one who was a virgin, and that would be me.

“Except in real life there wouldn’t be a virgin. There aren’t any atheists in foxholes and there aren’t any virgins in stew uniforms.

“I feel like a freak.”

If Rona looked any more wholesome she would be doing Ivory Snow commercials instead of flying the Chicago-St. Louis run on a Midwestern trunk line. A short, vibrant brunette with a tendency toward plumpness which she controls by frantic calorie-counting, she has been a stewardess for a little over two years. She went to stew school immediately after graduating from a large university in her home state. Now, at twenty-four, she still looks very much like the cheerleader she was in both high school and college.

RONA: Sometimes, you know, I wonder if it’s all just an act that I’m putting on. I feel very Peter Pan. You know: If you grow up you can’t fly. I like to fly, but sometimes I wonder if it might not be worth it to grow up.

Especially, well, when I go back home for a visit.

In this life, you know, you lose your points of reference. I suppose the same thing would happen to someone who spent his life in the military, or in a religious order, or anything like that. You get completely away from your home and family and the people you grew up with, and you lose the sense of how your life has grown completely apart from the way theirs have.

But when I do go home for a visit, and when I see the girls I knew in high school — oh, it’s just strange, it really is. My best friend all through high school, she’s married with two children and another on the way, and she and her husband have a house and a station wagon, and, I don’t know, they’re old! Really old. But then if I think about it, I think that it’s me who is young, really.

And nobody looks at it that way, not there. They all think I’m the one who’s been everywhere and done everything.

JWW: Because you’re a stew?

RONA: Right. I’m a stew, and everyone knows the lowdown on stews. That we’re all easy, and that we ball the pilots in the cockpits, and that we’re so mature and hip and sophisticated. Sometimes I almost find myself playing a part with old friends, named-dropping and place-dropping like mad, and while I won’t exactly say anything I’ll do what I can to give the impression that I’ve done certain wild things. That I dated a certain actor and went to bed with him, that I’ve been on wild parties with the jet set. It’s the easiest thing in the world to let people believe the things they wanted to believe about you in the first place, so I don’t actually tell lies, but I might as well. It comes down to the same thing.

JWW: I suppose every stew goes through this to one extent or another. That special confusion that comes from returning to the home environment and encountering old friends who seem to have grown much older than oneself without extending their horizons at all. It does make one wonder just what constitutes maturity, but—

RONA: But it’s different for me, you see. Because I feel like such a child. And not only when I go back home, but all the time, and it’s — oh, I don’t understand myself, I swear I don’t.

This virginity business is crazy. I honestly don’t think it started out as a hang-up, but it turned into one.

JWW: How do you mean?

RONA: Well, you know, you don’t become a virgin. It’s not something that happens to you.

JWW: It’s something that doesn’t happen to you.

RONA: That’s it exactly. Something that doesn’t happen to you. And that’s the whole story, really. It didn’t happen to me. For the longest time it was perfectly natural that it didn’t happen to me. I mean, oh, there was nothing unusual in a girl’s not losing her virginity in my high school. Those who did were in the minority. Some of them did, of course, and it wasn’t unusual for this to happen, especially if they were engaged or going steady, and there were a couple of girls in every class who were fairly promiscuous, but virginity was the general order of the day. I guess things move faster in the big cities, and in Florida and California, and in the plush suburbs and slums and all the fast places you hear about, but I grew up in a good old-fashioned American small town, straight out of a television situation comedy. Everybody was middleclass and white and Protestant and with an English surname. Not quite, but just about...

In college, that was where most girls crossed the bridge. The majority of the freshman class was always composed of virgins, and the majority of the senior class wasn’t. Even so, I don’t believe that it was as impossible for a girl to graduate as a virgin as some people would have you believe. We had the usual campus legend. About the statue?

JWW: If a virgin passed the statue, he would draw his sword?

RONA: Our statue didn’t have a sword. He was supposed to tip his hat if a virgin passed. But virgins were by no means that rare there. It was nice propaganda for guys who wanted to get you to do what everyone else was doing, but there wasn’t much of a factual basis to it. The idea that if you weren’t sleeping with some boy then you must be either a lesbian or a freak or just too ugly to interest anyone, well, that wasn’t true.

JWW: And yet virginity became a hang-up for you?

RONA: I guess it did. Yes, of course it did.

The trouble is figuring out how it happened—

Well, I suppose I can answer that easily enough, really. If I put my mind to it. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to talk about it.

And, as they say on “Laugh-In,” I’ll be a much better person for it...

What happened, essentially, is that during the second half of my freshman year in college I started going out with a boy. Greg was a very sweet, very sensitive guy, a music major, very tall and thin and blond with a sort of haunted look about him. He was a year ahead of me but only a month older. Very brilliant and all, and very good-looking, and I fell pretty hard. I really loved him.

And the two of us had what I thought was the perfect relationship. He always wanted to be with me but he was never remotely possessive or jealous. He was always interested in me and interested in the things I had to say. We would spend hours on end just talking about one thing after another. Most of the boys I had gone out with previously had never really talked to me. In fact I would say that most boys don’t talk to girls, and vice versa. There’s no communication, not in the real sense of the word. Everyone’s too busy trying to make a good impression, and the guys are concentrating too hard on seduction, and the girls on holding out, and, oh, it’s all so damned phony. When I think of teenage sex that’s what I really think of first, the overwhelming phoniness of it all. Girls trying to get the guy to give them a fraternity pin before they put out. Guys hoping the pin will guarantee that the girl will let them go all the way. That whole pretentious artificial routine that they call the dating game in modern America.

I missed all that with Greg. And thought at the time how lucky I was.

We went together for two full years. And in all that time he never tried to seduce me. We would kiss, and even do a little petting, but it really never went any further than that. I’m sure it would have gone further if he had wanted it to. I was very much in love with him, and very impressionable at the time. I suspect I would have gone along with anything that he wanted to do. But I just told myself that he loved and respected me, and that he and I weren’t the average sort of people. That instead of catering to animalistic impulses we could honestly respect one another.

I suppose you know how the story ends.

JWW: I could probably guess.

RONA: Of course. The crazy thing is that I couldn’t. All the time that I was with Greg, I never suspected a thing. When I look back on it now I guess he dropped a million unconscious hints, but I didn’t have the subtlety to pick them up. Besides, I don’t think you sense that sort of thing unless you’re looking for it. You know the saying that it takes one to know one? That’s true I think, but that’s only because it takes another one to be looking for that sort of thing, and you just don’t see it unless you’re looking out for it.

JWW: Then he was homosexual.

RONA: Of course.

There were times afterward when I thought back on it all very bitterly and felt that he had been using me as a front to keep the rest of the school from knowing the truth about him. Of course that wasn’t it at all, and it was uncharitable of me even to think so. When I think back on it now I realize what a horrible time it must have been for Greg himself. He had to keep all of this to himself, you see. It was his secret, his private hell that he had to live with. He was trying to fight this part of himself, this homosexual aspect. I guess he honestly thought that he and I could have a chance together, and that we could make some kind of a life for ourselves.

What hurts is that we probably could have, if we could have brought it out into the open early enough in our relationship. No one is all one thing, you know, and I think we might have had a chance. But instead we evolved into this artificially sexless relationship, and we built secret walls between each other, and he had another life that I never knew about, he would go into the city every once in a while and spend a night at the YMCA, and he would meet some total stranger and they would do things to each other...

There was a scene, of course. Ultimately we were almost getting to the stage of discussing marriage, and we tried to go to bed together, and he was impotent. I thought it was my fault, that I had done something wrong. He suggested — I wish there was a proper way to put this, but there isn’t. He suggested that I take him in my mouth, and I did, and he got hard and had an orgasm all in an instant.

If I hadn’t been such a child! In retrospect, I don’t see anything that objectionable about fellatio. But when it happened, when he ejaculated in my mouth, I was just sick. Literally sick. I retched and threw up all over the place. I couldn’t help it.

And then after that there was a long talk in which everything came out, and we broke up. That did it. We broke up.

JWW: And that one experience turned you off men? That seems an extreme reaction.

RONA: No, it didn’t work that way. I did keep to myself for a while after that, because I was really torn up emotionally, but as a matter of fact one of my first reactions, or you could say one of the first parts of my reaction, was a desire to prove to myself that I was a woman after all. Because whether it was Greg’s fault or not, I naturally had loads of self-doubts and wanted to make sure I was adequate myself. You know the sort of Freudian questions girls ask themselves at that age. I was wondering if maybe there wasn’t something wrong with me, or else why would a homosexual have been attracted to me in the first place? And why would I have been drawn to him? So I wanted to go out and lose my virginity as soon as possible.

JWW: Yes, I would have expected that sort of reaction.

RONA: But it didn’t quite work, damn it.

JWW: Oh?

RONA: I don’t know what it was, exactly. I guess I was a little bit of a social retard, for one thing. Two years of Greg had spoiled me for other boys. I was used to this great rapport, and at the same time I was afraid of sensitivity on a boy’s part because I was afraid it meant he was a homosexual or afraid of sex. And of course the obviously masculine types, the ultra-virile sort, put me off completely. I had built things up in my mind to such a point where I was afraid to go out with them...

I dated, but my social life was nothing too spectacular. I had cut myself off from other boys while I was with Greg. And from girls, too, as far as that goes. When I did begin circulating again, and began having dates, I must have been very awkward with boys. I know for example that I dated a lot of boys who never asked me out a second time. I used to tell myself that it was because I wouldn’t have sex with them, but at our school not that many boys expected anything on a first date. It wasn’t that. I was just a massive drag, that’s all. I got tongue-tied or else I babbled and I was, oh, a drag, that’s the only word for it.

A couple of times I began to get involved sexually with boys, but it never worked. It was a horrible situation because I absolutely couldn’t relax about it. I suppose that must be the best thing of all, if you can just be very relaxed and normal about sex and then it just happens when it’s time. That’s what would have happened with Greg, if he hadn’t been the way he was. Because I had had more than enough time to get to know him and to like him, so there would have been no abrupt leap into sex, you know, a sexual situation, and I think it would have worked out much better.

But as it was, it seemed as though all a boy had to do was touch me and I would freeze. Literally freeze. I used to wonder why they had that expression for not being a sexual dynamo. Why it’s always put in terms of hot and cold, you know, they say a girl is fiery or an iceberg—

JWW: It’s not just colloquial. Frigidity describes temperature, but also describes sexual temperament.

RONA: That’s right, and I always wondered why, and it’s because you really do get cold. It’s a physical coldness that you feel. All tight and cold...

I began to develop into a terrible tease. That honestly wasn’t what I had in mind, either, which made it all the worse. I would go with a boy, and I would honestly be hoping not only that I could respond to him but that we would go all the way. I wouldn’t spell this out because, oh, I just wouldn’t have been comfortable saying to a boy in advance that I wanted him to have intercourse with me. Actually I think any boy would have been turned off by that sort of approach anyway. But I couldn’t have done it because — and this is part of the whole point — because I didn’t have that kind of feeling for these boys, any of them, that sort of rapport.

I would go with them to their place, or in their car, or wherever they would take a girl for the purposes of having sex. My God, but that sounds cut and dried! For the purposes of having sex. You know what I mean — the places kids go to make out. Usually a car. And we would kiss, and it wasn’t exactly exciting but then it wasn’t bad either, and it would even begin to give me a sort of warm feeling. Nothing fiery but kind of warm. And I would think, well, maybe this will do it, maybe I’ll really get involved this time.

But it wouldn’t work that way. Somewhere along the line something would hit a snag and I would just know that I couldn’t go through with it. This happened several times. And then after that I just told myself I had to force myself to grow up, that nobody ever died from sexual intercourse and that even if I did it would be better than living like this. I was dramatizing like mad but that’s what you do when something like that reaches the obsession stage.

JWW: So you tried to go through with it?

RONA: Yes.

JWW: And couldn’t?

RONA: That’s right. I... I forced myself not to fight it. The first time it went that far, I was in this boy’s car, and I was absolutely determined to carry through with it. I had been with him two nights before and had stopped him at the very last moment, which didn’t exactly thrill him. He was frustrated then, and I had to do him with my hand in order to satisfy him. Which wasn’t what he had in mind, but I guess either he had hopes for something more or the hand job — please pardon the way I’m talking — it did something for him, because here it was two nights later and he was back for more. Or maybe he was just a masochist.

JWW: Or maybe he liked the challenge.

RONA: That’s a thought... he kissed me and went through the usual college ritual. Kissing, soul kissing, feel the breast, take off the bra, kiss the breast, hand up the skirt — the approach is so standardized you would think every college sophomore learned it step by precious step in phys ed class.

JWW: They learn it when they pledge fraternities.

RONA: Honestly?

JWW: The same time they learn the secret handclasp.

RONA: Oh, you’re putting me on. I’m a fairly gullible person, as you may have gathered. Where was I?

JWW: In the back seat of the car with his hand up your skirt.

RONA: Good grief! “When last seen, little Nell was in the back seat of a two-door Ford sedan with a boy’s hand up her skirt.” That’s too much.

Seriously, I just told myself, all right, whatever happens, this is it. And I let him get my skirt up and my panties down, and I watched while he got a rubber out of his wallet and put it on him, and then I valiantly kept my lily-white thighs wide apart while he got in position, and then nothing.

JWW: He was impotent?

RONA: No. I was locked up. I used to know the technical term for it—

JWW: Vaginismus, I think.

RONA: That sounds about right. What it meant was that some muscles down there refused to cooperate. The door was locked forever. I absolutely couldn’t relax. He tried, and I tried, and ultimately he came all over me, and that was it for that night.

I could go on, but it was just more of the same. And for a long time. It didn’t have to happen too many more times before I learned to stop trying. I was almost through with college by then anyway, and I virtually forced the whole subject of sex out of my mind. Or out of the front of my mind — that’s probably more like it. Out of the front of my mind and off into the back of my mind where I didn’t have to think about it, but where it could just fester and breed germs.

Unlike the majority of girls I interviewed, Rona had not had ambitions of becoming a stewardess for any length of time before entering stewardess training. Shortly before graduation a recruiter visited the campus, and on a sudden impulse she had an interview and set her sights on becoming a stew.

“I was drifting at the time,” she explained. “I was completely at loose ends. For the longest time I had had vague plans — that I would marry Greg and go whither he goeth and all that. When that fell through I couldn’t make any kind of plans because at the time I was too involved with my own hang-ups and too intent on solving the big problem of losing my virginity. I sort of planned on some extension of what I was doing — grad school, or maybe a job in New York, or any of the usual things girls do when they haven’t caught a husband during four years of college.

“But nothing really appealed to me. The last few months at school were miserable ones. At times I didn’t think I could get through. Not that I was having trouble in my classes — I never had trouble in my classes. But I couldn’t stand it there and I kept having the overwhelming urge to just pack up and get out. It was nothing in particular. In fact it was nothing to do with the school. It was me I wanted to run away from, and it had reached the point where I was afraid I might leave without my diploma just because of this.

“So the thought of grad school, even in some other part of the country, it just seemed to me as though it would be a case of more of the same. A change of scene but no major change in my life. I would still be involved with the academic crowd and the same general pattern of life, and I didn’t want it. And a job, the usual sort of job, it seemed just about as grim. I would still be involved in the same general type of social situation, and if anything it sounded like an emptier life than the one I was leaving.

“So, like a lot of girls who find themselves at completely loose ends, I wanted something utterly different from what I was leaving. If I had been a boy I would have joined the army. In fact I did think of becoming a WAC or something, but then someone told me or I read somewhere that they are all either nymphomaniacs or lesbians, and I certainly wasn’t the first and was terrified of finding out I was the second, so I gave up on that idea. I don’t suppose it’s true — they say the same things about stews, you know — but it scared the hell out of me at the time. Innocent me.

“The stew recruiter came along at the right time. There was never the slightest doubt in my mind. I would be a stew and it would be a brand-new life.”

While she said those last few words with a note of readily discernible sarcasm, Rona did in fact find a very new life in her new career. And she was quick to confirm that it was preferable to her old life.

“I’ve always liked it,” she stated. “From stew school on, I’ve always gotten a tremendous kick out of flying. It’s a great life for a girl, you know. We all of us talk about the enormous pressures, and about the hard work we do and the lousy pay we get, and about the adjustment you have to make when your world shifts every time you get on and off a plane. And we may mean it when we say it, but to get back to those war movies we were talking about earlier, well, the parallel still holds. When stews bitch about the life it’s the same as soldiers griping. We’d hate it if we didn’t have something to bitch about.

“But when it comes right down to it, we wouldn’t want to do anything else. We get married, and we get grounded by the airlines, but how many of us actually ground ourselves? Very few. And on the other hand, look at all the girls who get married in secret so that they can go on flying. There’s no question about it, I don’t think.”

Along with the new pressures which life as a stewardess brought, there was also relief from some old pressures, if in a limited way.

“I thought of it as a fresh start, you know, but there’s no such thing as a completely new start, not when you have to carry the same old mind and body along with you. That takes some of the freshness out of it, doesn’t it?

“But it was different, really it was. For one thing, I did make some excellent relationships with girls for the first time in years. If my life were a novel, of course those relationships would have turned into lesbian affairs and I would next be seen wearing pants in a Greenwich Village bar. Thanks, but not little Rona. As a matter of fact I don’t know a single lesbian, at least not to my knowledge, and I’ve never had anyone make any kind of a pass at me in that way, nor have I ever felt the slightest attraction to any other girl, at least not to my knowledge. If you want to get Freudian I’m sure one can prove all kinds of things, and there was a time when I worried about every last one of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, but those times are long gone now and that’s all.

“But I had friendships. That makes a difference in a person’s life, you know. Good healthy friendships. I had been living within myself so long that I was going crazy — and while I just meant that as an expression, I have a feeling it comes pretty close to the literal truth. I was getting kind of weird as a human being, thinking crazy thoughts, having a tough time functioning from one day to the next. ‘Oh, hurray, a triumph, I’ve managed to get out of bed and put my shoes on. An affirmation of the beauty of life, a gesture at my willingness to participate in it. Oh, joy!’ Believe me, John, toward the end of the college scene I was having all too many days like that, and a real deep-down loneliness had more than a little to do with it. And those days stopped when I became a stew, and never came back. Not that every day is roses and sunshine, but the bads are never as bad as they used to be.”

And sex?

“It’s still a problem. Face it, of course it’s still a problem, or otherwise I wouldn’t still be a virgin. All this time in the air and I would have gotten over that particular hang-up, wouldn’t I?

“But even so, it’s not the hang-up it once was. Or maybe I don’t let it get me down as I once did. I don’t know which you would call it, exactly.

“I go out on dates. I’m not a lunatic about this the way some girls are because to be perfectly honest I have nothing to prove in that direction. Some of these girls, especially the ones who have just gotten their wings, are absolutely convinced that in order to prove to the world that they’re all-out swingers and born stewardesses they have to be out swinging until dawn every goddamned night and drink their weight in booze and party party party all the time. And others, the ones who’ve been in the air long enough to get nervous about still being single, they don’t want to miss a chance at anything that might turn out to be a husband. And I suppose there are other personal hang-ups that make a girl want to swing her heels off. God knows I’ve got problems of my own, so I’m not going to begrudge other kids their problems.

“My problems, though, have let me take dates or leave them alone depending upon whether or not I feel like going out and whether or not a guy seems likely to be good company. And when I make this decision I leave sex strictly out of the picture. To be honest, I have to admit that now and then the ultimate consideration has been my desire for a good steak dinner without having to pay for it. Most of the time, say ninety-eight percent of the time, though, it’s just do I want to see more of this fellow or don’t I. Not because it might lead to something, sex or love or marriage or whatever, but just for the pleasure of his company.

“Whether he’s married or not I don’t particularly care one way or the other. All in all I would say that married men make nicer dates, unless their marriage is too confining and they are fighting back, in which case they come on a little too aggressive. A lot of married men, though, are really only looking for somebody to talk to. I’ve turned guys down sexually one way or another and they have actually told me that the pass was secondary, just part of the game for them, and all they really want is pleasant company. It’s funny — I think a lot of man feel sex is expected from them, the same way girls feel this, and a lot of times a couple will wind up in bed when both of them would be much happier sitting over cups of coffee and telling each other their troubles.”

When a date does lead to sex, Rona finds a way out that won’t disappoint her date or frustrate either of them.

“Every once in a while, every few months, I decided to try for the brass ring. I suppose one of these times I’ll have combined tranquilizers and alcohol in a sufficiently persuasive way so that those muscles down there will forget to go into their act, and then the old virginity will be a thing of the past. Or someday I’ll get mad enough to go to a doctor and find out a way out of the problem. I know it’s psychological, that’s pretty obvious, but there still could be a pill that would cure it. Something like a muscle relaxant, I would think that might do it.

“Meanwhile, I’m in no rush. Except for those rare occasions when I do decide to give it a try, I just go out and see what happens. A surprising amount of the time men don’t make a pass. I don’t honestly know whether this is me, that they sense I’m not interested, or what. Most girls will say that every man they go out with is after them sexually. It’s almost ego-destroying to face the fact, but damn it, this is a problem I don’t have all that often. Most men may make some sort of a pass, or be sort of waiting for an invitation to your apartment if you’re in your home town, but this is often perfunctory on their parts.

“When I do find myself in some sort of sexual situation, I find a way to cool things without having intercourse. There are all sorts of ways.”

Often all that is involved, Rona says, is letting her date know that she does not want to have intercourse with him.

“But sometimes this is awkward. I’ll do this if I’m out with a married man, for example, and I can sense that he’s going through the motions and will be relieved that I don’t expect him to go to bed with me. I told you about that type of situation. Other times I manage to get across the idea that I’m having my period. This will cool some men off completely. I don’t know why, but they don’t even want to neck with a girl at that time of the month. Or maybe they don’t want to start anything that won’t end in intercourse.

“But if I do like the man, and I’m enjoying myself with him, well, there are all sorts of ways to have sex without having intercourse. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about when I say that.

“Well, oh, what’s the deference, I can say anything, I’m past the point of embarrassment now. Isn’t it funny how words are sometimes more embarrassing than facts? But I’m sure you’ve heard all the words in the world by now, haven’t you?

“I guess I’m something of an expert at satisfying men extracoitally. That’s the word, isn’t it? With my hand, or by going through the motions with our clothes on, or with his penis between my legs but not inside of me. Or, well, you know. Orally. After all, old Greg taught me, and it seems silly to fail to put that learning to good use. No, seriously, I don’t like to do that but I’m — God help us one and all, but I was starting to say that I’m beginning to develop a taste for it!

“Seriously, I can do it now without getting sick about it, and I don’t really mind. And one thing that I’ve found out, and this is interesting, and you would maybe understand more about it than I do, John, but it’s that a lot of men actually prefer this to intercourse. The first time I realized this I thought they were homosexual like Greg, and maybe they didn’t know it, but it seems that a large percentage of men are like that. To the point where they’re not remotely disappointed that I won’t have intercourse with them because they would rather that I blow them.

“I used to worry that it wasn’t normal, but that doesn’t bother me anymore. The only thing is that I really have to like a man a great deal to do it. Unless I feel strongly about him I wouldn’t do it at all. I suppose you couldn’t name a more intimate act than that, could you? I don’t know why it is, but taking a man in your mouth in some ways is far more intimate than taking him into your vagina. You wouldn’t think of it that way, but you can understand what I mean, I’m sure.”

Although she may not realize it, Rona is a variety of virgin who is not so rare as she might think in the age of the sexual revolution. While virginity of any sort is rather unusual at her age, and especially so among outgoing girls like stewardesses, the particular adjustment which Rona has made is not at all uncommon among girls a few years younger than herself, especially college students.

Rona and girls like her are, essentially, coital virgins. On the one hand they have maintained technical virginity, whether because of fear of pain or pregnancy or some more profound reason one need not inquire. Their hymens remain intact, their vaginas inviolate.

But at the same time they have participated in sexual relationships which an older generation often regarded as beyond the realm of possibility even within the context of a marital relationship. They practice at an early age, these virgins, sexual techniques which their mothers may never have employed throughout their lives.

In other words, the openness of contemporary sexual standards, the increasingly widespread realization that all roads lead to Rome and that any technique is permissible among consenting adults, has created for a minority of young people a detour around the ancient roadblock of virginity.

To return to Rona, it seems likely that she will before very long find a way to put a technical end to her state of technical virginity. It is certainly evident that her experiences as a stew are developing her personality and opening her up in any number of ways, and one can only hope that she will be opened up sexually to the necessary degree.

“One thing that comforts me,” she said, grinning a bit wickedly. “And that’s the way everything is relative, problems included. From what I understand, after a few years of marriage and a kid or two, my problem will be just the opposite. So which is worse — too loose or too tight?”

As far as I know, Rona was the only virginal stewardess I met; she was certainly the only one I interviewed. Yet this is not to say that she is the only undeflowered stewardess in the skies. While I am certain that girls in her position are very much in the minority, I am equally certain that they very definitely exist.

It is an interesting aspect of our times, I feel, that girls of Rona’s age are apt to keep their virginity a secret. (Only a few of her closest friends, she told me, were aware of her precise sexual status.) It was not too many years ago when girls were more anxious to conceal their sexual experience than their lack thereof. Girls who once feared that their peers would think they were promiscuous tramps are now as concerned that they will be thought frigid and inexperienced.

BAMBI — The Old Maid

“Men are always marrying us. Everyone knows this. It’s a joke, actually, the way the airlines have to keep recruiting and training like mad because they pick such beautiful girls and train them to be such ideal mates that we all marry right away and keep the circle going. You know, you no sooner get to stew school than you’ll be talking about the man you might marry some day and how long you expect to be flying before you find the right guy and quit.

“I was like that. I mean in terms of what I expected from this life, from being a stewardess. As a matter of fact I would go so far as to say that my major reason for becoming a stewardess was to find a good husband. Most of my friends had better reasons than I did. Some of them were just in love with the whole idea of flying. If they had been boys they would have wanted to become pilots, but they weren’t, so being a stewardess seemed like the next best thing to them. Others of us thought it was a glamorous occupation. And with others there was this need to get away from a certain family background or a home town. God knows the average girl has plenty to get away from by the time she’s grown up.

“I would give reasons like these myself, but looking back on it I have to admit that I never really thought about them that much. Now in a way this was sort of realistic on my part. Because if you stop to think about it, the girl who regards this profession as a career is making a big mistake, because in one way it really isn’t a career at all. I mean, there is no place to go from here. There is no room for advancement except that you could perhaps become a stew supervisor, but after all what percentage of stews could ever hope to go on to become a stew supervisor? Actually just a very small percentage of them at best. And outside of that there is really nothing. After maybe ten or fifteen years in the air you are just going to be out of a job with really nothing to show for it. And unlike modeling or athletics where you make a lot of money in your prime years, a stew earns enough to get by on, so when we talk about giving up the best years of our lives, that is honestly just about what it amounts to.

“In my own situation, I had very little chance where I was to make a good marriage. My home town had less than twenty-five hundred people in it. Unless you’ve actually grown up in a place like that I don’t think you can possibly appreciate what it is like. I think small towns like that can be a very good place to live. I think when you’re a small child it’s absolutely wonderful, everybody knowing everybody else and a generally friendly feeling all around, and no pressures on anybody. And once you’re settled in life a small town is also ideal. But in the middle — well, the thing is that it’s a very bad place for a person who is trying to find herself.

“I went to school with kids who were just right for that town and who never had a moment’s doubt one way or the other about who they were or where they were going or what they wanted to get out of life. My best friend all through grade school and high school was a girl like that. She was just absolutely confident about herself. She knew who she was and where she was going. She decided when she was a little girl that she wanted to live on a farm outside of town and that she never wanted to be far away from our town for her whole life, and when we all started dating she began going out with a good steady boy, and she never dated anyone else and neither did he, and sure enough he wanted to work on a farm, and two weeks after high school graduation I went to their wedding.

“When I tell my friends about that girl now, they’ll shake their heads and shudder and talk about how horrible it must be to be trapped that way. Well, it’s not horrible at all, of course. Not for Jennifer, because it’s exactly what she wants and what she has always wanted. It might be a trap for someone else but not for her. Girls have said that some day Jennifer will wake up and realize what she’s been missing. That she’ll realize there’s a whole world out there that she never saw, and she’ll start wondering what it would be like to sleep with other men or go to other towns or all of the rest of it. I don’t think this will happen. Maybe I’m wrong, but I know her, and I think she knows herself pretty well and that she’s got just what she’s always wanted and she’ll be happy with it...

“In a way I’m a lot like Jennifer, but I’m also a great deal different. I wanted to get married, too, and I would ultimately like to live in some out-of-the-way place, I think. Maybe even in the town I grew up in, or if not the same town then in some place a lot like it. I know it’s terribly trite to say that New York is nice to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there, but the reason it’s so trite is that everyone has that reaction to it. In the long run, how can you live someplace like New York? Living, to me, means everything you associate with a small town, the bad as well as the good...

“But if I had never left where I was, I don’t think I would have gotten married, or not to anyone very exciting. I dated during high school, but no sparks flew with the boys I went out with, and it was just... well, it was a lot of nothing as far as I was concerned. There just weren’t many boys to choose from, and in a small town like that, you have to hit the right combination right off the bat or you’re completely out of luck.

“After high school, the time seemed to go by all in a rush. I don’t know exactly how to explain this. It seemed as if time crawled by, all those years until then, with each year pretty much the same as the one before it and everything fairly safe and predictable. And then all at once everything was moving much too fast for me to keep up with. Before I knew what was happening, my friends were either married or engaged and some of them had gone off to college and some of the boys were in the service, and what with one thing and another, it was as if overnight I had changed from another fairly popular high school kid to a girl who was on her way to becoming an old maid. And it wasn’t a case of me doing anything to bring this about. It just happened.

“So when I heard about interviews with representatives of the various airlines, I just jumped at it. What it meant to me, the first and foremost thing in my mind, was that here was a chance to keep life from passing me by. And by that I mean a chance to find a decent man and get married, because my whole outlook and the way I was brought up and all, what a woman was supposed to look forward to was marriage and a family. That was the ideal role for a woman, the only role she could have and feel she was fulfilling herself as a woman, and it was what I wanted for myself. Actually, it never occurred to me that there was any other kind of a life for me to want, that I might have interests in any other direction.

“And here I am, twenty-eight years old with almost eight years in the air behind me, and no closer to getting married than I was when I started. I’m just about old enough to start getting desperate.”

I found it hard to take Bambi’s last statement seriously, although in retrospect there’s no doubting she meant it. While her problem was real enough, it was difficult at first to attach much significance to it. One reason for this, I’m sure, lay in the fact that Bambi herself, in both appearance and personality, was not easily reconciled with the notion of a girl over the hill in her profession and becoming desperate over her failure to have landed a husband.

At twenty-eight, Bambi could readily pass for five or more years younger. Her features, closer to cuteness than to beauty, are always animated in conversation — even when the content of her speech is serious or depressed in nature. There were moments during my interview with her when I had the feeling that I was watching one movie and listening to the sound track of another — i.e., at the very moments when Bambi’s words indicated the most acute depression over her failure to get what she wanted out of life, her flashing smile and bright eyes carried another message entirely. Because of these qualities, and because of her name itself, with its overtones of cuteness or what one might call a “toy” quality, it was hard for me to appreciate Bambi’s difficulty.

As readers of the foregoing few pages may note for themselves, it was also difficult to understand Bambi’s problem because Bambi herself had so much difficulty in articulating it intelligibly. On the one hand her mind is not the sort to grasp a problem logically and present it in an orderly fashion. Furthermore, I suspect that the habit of introspection is not a longstanding one for Bambi. She does not seem to be accustomed to very meticulous analysis of her situation, and thus does not really know what went wrong for her.

Perhaps before we pick up the interview with Bambi once more, it might thus be worthwhile to make some specific observations that might cut through the vagueness of her words. To come directly to the point, Bambi is a girl who aspires first and foremost to marriage. There is no alternative for her, no other manner in which her life could resolve itself which she would not regard as a failure on her part. It was a desire for marriage which led her to become a stewardess in the first place, and it has been this desire which has sustained her in her occupation for the past eight years.

But in spite of her own goal, and in spite of the fact that she is an outgoing and physically attractive young lady in an occupation with extremely high possibilities of marriage, Bambi has remained resolutely single. It is by no means difficult to realize that this is not merely a matter of coincidence. For one reason or another, Bambi has unconsciously striven to remain single. I could advance several theories for this behavior on her part, and I suspect I could do a fairly good job of armchair analysis of her unconscious motives, but I feel this would be largely a waste of time and effort. Bambi interests us, after all, primarily as an example of the way life as a stewardess lends itself to certain behavior patterns. Thus we are less interested here in the why than in the how of her actions.

In this sense, I submit that Bambi’s years as a stewardess have done a great deal to determine the manner in which she has avoided marriage. Another girl with much the same psychological background could easily have remained in her home town, where Bambi had readily achieved a situation in which marriage — or, really, any sort of sexual or emotional involvement — was improbable at best. The small towns of America are replete with women, old and young, who for one reason or another found marriage an undesirable end and drifted easily into the life of an old maid. The heroine of Rachel, Rachel is by no means a rare bird.

But Bambi, convinced consciously that marriage was what she wanted, was unable to take the easy way out. She had done a good job of preparing herself for life as a spinster, to the point where such an existence was well within her grasp by age twenty. An inability to accept on one level what she wanted on another led her to become a stewardess — but her basic insistence on avoiding marriage has kept her single for eight long years and has led her, in all her relationships with men, to defeat her ostensible matrimonial aims.

BAMBI: You know, they say experience is the best teacher, but sometimes I wonder. There are times when I have the feeling that I just never learn a thing from experience. That all my life I just make the same mistakes over and over. You would think I would learn, but I never do. I read somewhere that that’s the definition of a neurotic. That you do the wrong thing even when you should know better. That you’re so messed up in your head that you can’t learn certain things. An aunt and uncle of mine have this child that’s retarded. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but there’s something wrong with his brain and there are things he can’t learn. He can’t understand the idea of any number more than two. He can understand one, and he can understand two, but beyond that his little brain just can’t help him out. And sometimes I wonder if I’m retarded like that, but emotionally.

JWW: You keep making certain mistakes?

BAMBI: Oh, the men I pick to get involved with. You would think I would learn better but I don’t. If a girl wants to get married the one thing she ought to have sense enough to do is not go out with married men. That’s the most basic thing there is, I guess, and it isn’t as though I just learned this the day before yesterday. I guess I’ve always known it, really. But knowing it doesn’t seem to do me any good. For some cockeyed reason married guys are always the ones I’m attracted to and the ones who get interested in me, and when I do go out with someone who’s single it doesn’t lead to anything, and when instead I go out with someone who is as married as can be, that’s the date that leads to an affair.

JWW: Have you been dating married men since you started as a stew?

BAMBI: Just about. That was something everybody always would talk about in stew training school, you know. Whether or not you would date a married man, and how to tell if a man was married or not, and the whole moral question of whether it was right to go out with him or not. See, for most of us, this was something that had never come up before. How could it? You take my case, now nobody in the town I grew up in was going to go out with a married man. It was just impossible. Everybody knew everybody else, and anything like that, it would have to be a matter of sneaking around. Just sex for its own sake. Not dates out in the open, the way you might with a married man in a big city.

JWW: How did you feel at the time? When you discussed it all?

BAMBI: That this was something I would never do.

JWW: For moral reasons?

BAMBI: Partly, but I don’t guess that was the main thing. Mostly I thought it would be a waste of time. A lot of the girls took the attitude that there was nothing immoral about dating a married man if it was his idea to begin with, and why not have a nice fun evening on the town if you felt in the mood. But I didn’t think of dating in the sense of fun. I was pretty cold-blooded about the whole thing, now that I think back on it. It was all a question of finding a husband as far as I was concerned. Almost as if I didn’t have time for fun, or as if I wasn’t interested in fun to begin with...

JWW: But you did begin dating married passengers.

BAMBI: Married passengers and married pilots, too. But it wasn’t a case of changing my mind, not at the beginning. At first it was a matter of me being pretty naïve, and of a couple of guys who took advantage of me.

JWW: How do you mean?

BAMBI: One told me he wasn’t married, and I was stupid enough to believe him. That was the first married man I dated, and I did it without realizing it. The second man, I knew he was married, but he sold me a bill of goods and got me to believe that he was separated from his wife and intended to get a divorce. The oldest line in the world, and I knew at the time that men always say something like that, but he seemed so sincere that I fell for it.

JWW: And with each of these men you became involved in an affair?

BAMBI: Yes.

I’ll tell you what happened. The first man, the one I thought wasn’t married, was a passenger. I had been flying for about two months at the time and I hadn’t really developed any social life to speak of. In the beginning, you know, it’s such a struggle to do your job properly and to keep up with the whole tumult of being a stew and flying all over the place that you don’t really have time to date. I went out with a few passengers but it was really nothing. Some of them were nice and some of them were just fellows on the make, but there was nothing serious in the cards with any of them.

Then on this one flight to Dallas I met a really nice fellow. About thirty-five with dark wavy hair and eyes that went right through a person. Penetrating. I don’t usually get strong feelings one way or another just looking at a person, not as a general rule. With me it’s more a matter of getting to know a man and responding to him gradually. But in this case I just looked at him and felt this strong immediate attraction.

The flight itself was the first time I was ever frightened in the air. I know now that it wasn’t really bad, but I experienced rough flying for the first time and although I managed to keep a lid on it, well, I panicked. I was sure we were going to crash. And I used this man as an escape valve. I latched onto him, and when he made a pitch for me I was glad for the chance to spend time with him and try to forget my worries.

To make a long story short, I went out with him in Dallas. He told me he was a sales representative for an electronics manufacturer in Cincinnati, and that he was single. The first part of this was the truth and the rest wasn’t.

I had never gone out with anyone like him. He was much older than I was, and smooth and polished and poised. He took me to a restaurant and ordered in French. He ordered for me — I thought this was the suavest thing in the world, and I was so dazzled that I never did find out what it was that I was eating. Not that I paid much attention to the food. I was, well, swept off my feet. I had heard that expression but I never before knew what it felt like. And it felt wonderful.

JWW: When did you find out he was married?

BAMBI: Not for two weeks.

JWW: You continued to see him?

BAMBI: Oh, yes. Regularly. I saw him that first night in Dallas, and then I began juggling things so that I could fly into Cincinnati as often as possible, and I also found out where he was going to be traveling and we worked things out so that we could be in the same place at the same time as often as possible.

JWW: All this in two weeks?

BAMBI: No. I started right away, with getting myself booked in and out of Cincinnati, but the rest followed while we were going together, which was a period of a few months. Yes, after I found out he was married.

I was that crazy about him. The first night we went out, I slept with him. That may not sound exactly remarkable, but I was a virgin at the time, strange as it may seem. And dead set on staying a virgin until I found the guy I was going to marry. Corny or not, I was going to save it for my husband. I don’t believe in that anymore, and I frankly think most men would rather marry a girl with some experience, whether they admit it or not. But at the time—

I can tell you what happened. We had this spectacular dinner, and he really made me feel like the most desirable woman on earth, and we both had a lot of wine, and I wasn’t used to it, it went right to my head. And when he took me to his hotel room, well, I can’t say I didn’t know what was happening. I knew. I remember being conscious of the fact that here I was in a man’s hotel room and that this was a compromising situation — those were the words I thought of — and that I was probably going to have sex with this man. I felt as though I had no choice in the matter. That we would do whatever he wanted us to do, the same as he had picked dinner for both of us in the restaurant.

He got me really excited for the first time in my life. I had petted a little in the past but it never got to me the way he did that night. All he had to do was kiss me and I was physically excited, and when he put his hand under my skirt and touched me I got wet immediately. I remember thinking that I ought to be embarrassed, getting so obviously passionate like that. As if he would think I was a whore or something.

I let him do everything...

JWW: How did you find out that he was married?

BAMBI: He told me.

JWW: After you had been having an affair for two weeks?

BAMBI: Yes. At the time he made it seem as if it was very noble and self-sacrificing of him to tell me. As if he hadn’t been purposely deceiving me for two weeks. Later on I realized that he told me so that I wouldn’t expect him to marry me or spend time with me when he didn’t feel like it. A married man, you know, is in a very good position in an affair. He has a beautiful excuse handy at all times — his goddamned wife and kids. He can see you when he wants, fitting you into his schedule and just taking you to bed without any big build-up, because his time isn’t his own, he’s got all of these responsibilities. And you can’t expect him to introduce you to his mother or marry you or any of those things. He’s got that perfect excuse that he’s already married. Listen, it’s such a perfect setup that I’ve known of single fellows who say they’re married just for the convenience of it.

JWW: And you continued to date him?

BAMBI: I was in love with him by then. And I don’t know, I thought he would maybe divorce his wife and marry me.

JWW: Did he say he might?

BAMBI: No, but I had hopes...

Bambi’s hopes, in this and subsequent affairs, had little factual grounding. Her own words to the contrary, it seems fairly well evident that she never expected her affairs with married men to lead to marriage. While certain men might make promises along those lines, she knew better than to believe them and admitted as much.

“There’s nothing easier than for a man to say he’ll get a divorce and nothing harder than for him to do it,” she told me at one point. “Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, there’s no future in going out with them. For example, a man may date a girl and really fall for her. This happens. It’s happened to me. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m always making a fool out of myself and falling in love with guys who are playing me for a sucker. This isn’t the case at all. A lot of the time, I would even say most of the time, the fellows are as much in love with me as I am with them. But even so, being in love with a girl and throwing your wife over for her are two completely different things.

“A man might say that he’ll get a divorce, and he’ll even mean it. Suppose he’s been married for ten or fifteen years and he and his wife don’t really love each other anymore. Maybe he’s gotten into the habit of playing around now and then, which is an easy habit to get into if you travel a lot, and naturally the sort of men you meet on planes are men who travel a lot. And maybe it’s been in the back of his mind to split up with his wife for years.

“But when it comes right down to it, he’s got more than a piece of paper that says he’s married to this woman. He’s got all those years invested, which amounts to a difficult thing to throw away. He’s got, usually, a couple of kids — and that makes it tough. And a divorce will mean paying a fortune in alimony and child support, and that may seem unimportant when he’s in bed with you and it’s all moonlight and roses, but when he looks at his bank statement in the morning it looks different.”

Twice, married men with whom Bambi was sexually involved really seemed on the point of obtaining a divorce for the purpose of marrying Bambi. In both instances she found a way to terminate the relationship.

“This one pilot, a pretty sweet guy, for a while it looked as though we were going to get married. I would have to say that he was the man who came the closest to marrying me. I think I would have to say that.

“As I said, he was a very sweet guy. He was in his early forties. A drinker but not an alcoholic, and always cold sober when he was at the stick. A real pilot’s pilot — he flew to live and lived to fly, that’s the saying. He had been separated from his wife for about three years when the two of us started going together. His two kids lived with her. He was crazy about those kids, and I think he had a soft spot in his heart for her, too, but he couldn’t live with her and had stopped loving her a long time ago. He was a Catholic, though, so divorce was out.

“I knew this when I started to go out with him, although I had hopes. You know how it is — even when something is impossible, you can see ways that it might come true. I would think that maybe his wife would die, or that she would fall in love with another man and she would insist on the divorce, and then after it went through he would marry me. I didn’t really believe any of this, but I would have this kind of thought.

“Well, to make a long story short, my dreams almost came true. He decided he wanted to marry me so much that he would go through with all of the aggravation. He knew she would hold him up for huge alimony and support payments, and give him a hard time on rights, and he knew he would be going against his own religion, and he was still willing to do all of this. I told him to make sure he knew what he was doing. He said he was.”

But her unconscious fear of marriage came into play at this point.

“I began having all of these doubts,” she went on. “I thought, suppose I let this poor guy ruin his whole life and then things don’t work out. Then what? And I asked myself if I really loved him enough to make it work, and it seemed to me that maybe I didn’t. And what with one and another, it all fell through.”

What with one thing and another, all of Bambi’s romances fall through. She is still single after eight years as a stewardess, and she will be out of uniform without catching a man in not too many years.

With considerable skill, she carefully maintains the illusion of being in the market for a husband without putting her resolve to the test. She dates a great deal, but somehow the men she selects are never prime candidates for marriage — or, if they are, she doesn’t hit it off with them very well. And when affairs do start and show a certain amount of promise of turning into something with a future, her life as a stew makes it easy for her to close things off in a hurry. She simply flies off to another town and to another set of circumstances, letting men drop out of her life as easily as they dropped in.

If she had remained in her home town, it is likely that Bambi would still be a virgin, or the closest thing to it. As a stewardess, she has had what many would be apt to consider a relatively active sex life. She seems to have slept with about a dozen men, and while such a total by no means makes her a candidate for the Mamie Stover award, it is rather a far cry from the traditional celibacy of the traditional small-town spinster. And yet at base her life is not so very different by virtue of her having put on a stewardess’s wings. She still avoids marriage and its attendant responsibilities, and she still refuses to admit this evasion to herself. Even as she laments her unmarried state, she does what she can to perpetuate it.

GILLIAN — The Hooker

“I don’t want to say bad things about the airlines,” Gillian insisted. “About being a stew, about the life and the girls who live it. True, they clipped my wings. But by the time that happened I knew it was coming and I have to admit I was asking for it. And if they hadn’t grounded me I would have quit. I was ready for a change of occupation. So I have no bad feelings toward the profession of the airlines. As a matter of fact, some of my best friends are stews. Some of them know what I’m doing nowadays. Some of them don’t, or if they suspect at least they keep it to themselves. So if you’re looking for someone who will spout off with a lot of crap about the moral decay of American stewardesses, forget it.”

I explained that this was not my intention at all. “I want to show what it’s like to be a stew and what stews are like, that’s all.”

“From a sexual standpoint?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Well, I’m really not typical.”

“There’s no such thing as a typical stewardess,” I said. “Or a typical anything, really. I think you have an interesting story to tell. I think it would point up an aspect of the life of the stewardess that might otherwise be neglected.”

“That being a stew is good training for becoming a prostitute?”

“Not that, no. But—”

Gillian stubbed out a cigarette, leaned forward. “Because that’s the obvious interpretation, isn’t it? A girl from Wichita gets herself a pair of wings and the next thing you know she’s a Park Avenue call girl. The moral corruption of commercial aviation made a hooker out of her. Right?”

“No, certainly not.”

“Because if that’s the pitch, like, forget it. I don’t want to cop out that way. I’ve read that sort of thing. How going to a girls’ school turned this girl into a lesbian. How this one became a prostitute because she was a drug addict, and this other one became a drug addict because she was a prostitute, and this other one became a prostitute and a drug addict and a lesbian because her parents loved her little brother more than her. All that crap. I’m no psychiatrist myself, but it seems as though every call girl I know is going to a shrink and you wouldn’t believe the garbage they spout. I don’t know if there’s anything to it or not. To tell you the truth, I don’t honestly care if there’s anything to it or not. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m just not interested. Not in my childhood and not in what life as a stewardess did to me. I was an airline hostess for what, two and a half years, and I wasn’t much good at it, and now I’m a whore, and I’m better as a whore than I was as a stew, and the money’s better, and you meet a nicer class of people, but outside of that I don’t see any connection between the two occupations. It wasn’t the stress and strain of being up in the sky that made me a hooker. I was cut out to be a hooker one way or the other from the time I was old enough to open my legs and say Ah. The airlines can’t take the credit or the blame, whichever way you figure it.”

Gillian is twenty-six. She is one of those too-rare redheads with rich auburn hair and a flawless ivory complexion. She is tall and slender, full in the breast and hips, almost unnaturally narrow in the waist. When I interviewed her she was living on East 63rd Street between Park and Madison Avenues. She had been operating as a call girl for almost four years and, judging by her clothes and her apartment, she was doing extremely well at it.

I originally interviewed Gillian in connection with another book, one dealing exclusively with prostitution and the special sexual techniques which prostitutes employ. As things turned out, I was not to use Gillian’s interview in that book. But when I began developing this present volume, I went back to talk with Gillian again, this time focusing not on the practice of her profession but on the way she drifted to it from her earlier job as a stewardess.

Her own contention, quoted above, was that there was no relationship between the two ways of making a living. I questioned this, suggesting that while one might not have literally led to the other, her approach to one would necessarily relate to her approach to the other. Furthermore, I added, it seemed logical to assume that certain aspects of life as a stew must have prepared her to enter into a profession which she had been schooled to regard as morally and socially reprehensible. After she had given up being defensive, she agreed that this was probably so.

GILLIAN: Of course you’re right about that. I was a very naïve and unsophisticated kid when I left Wichita. Not in a sexual sense, because I had been having the whole catalogue of sex from the time I was fourteen years old. I know that a large percentage of girls come to stew school without much in the way of sexual experience, but believe me, that wasn’t my bag. I started screwing in ninth grade and I was a veteran of gang bangs at a tender age, so I wasn’t one of those stew school virgins by any means.

But although I had had a lot of sexual experience, I was still surprisingly square. This is something a lot of people have trouble understanding. They think that just because an individual is hip in a certain area, she’s hip in other areas as well. I notice this attitude nowadays on the part of so many Johns. They know that I’m a hooker and as a result they take it for granted that I’m hip to drugs and crime, that I know Mafia people, that I’m generally hip to all sorts of scenes. At one time I was insulted that they would think I was involved in these scenes until I realized that they didn’t mean it as an insult, but simply that they thought hipness cut across all these different areas.

When I hit stew school, I was still very much caught up in the whole middle-class value system that I grew up in. I thought, you know, that good little girls went to Heaven. But at the time I didn’t know the other side of it: that bad little girls go to Bergdorf’s. To put it another way, I was breaking all the moral standards, but I was still conscious of them and busy hating myself for what I was doing. The whole guilt thing.

JWW: And being a stewardess broadened your outlook?

GILLIAN: Yes, I would say so. I was still a lot further out in my own personal sexual behavior than the girls I met, but at the same time I was meeting girls whose values were a good deal less rigid than the attitudes I grew up with in Wichita. These girls might not have done the things I had done, but their minds were more open. They believed in premarital sex, for example, while I grew up doing it like crazy but thinking it was sinful.

To put it another way, everyone on earth has a gap between the way they behave and the way they think they ought to behave. Everyone, saint or sinner. With me, this gap had been really huge, and that made me eat my heart out. The people I met in stew school and afterward helped me narrow that gap. Some of them actually had their own private gaps turned the other way around. I knew girls, for example, who believed in premarital sex and all the other aspects of sexual freedom but who hadn’t done anything, and it bothered them that they weren’t living up to their ideals.

JWW: This sort of broadening of standards, and what you could call a narrowing of the gap between normative and existential rules of behavior, I think you might have found this anywhere away from home.

GILLIAN: I don’t think there’s any question about it.

JWW: If you had gone away to college, or if you had moved on your own to New York or Los Angeles—

GILLIAN: I agree with you. I think being a stew may have accentuated all of this, because I’ve found that the whole world of commercial aviation is very fast and very open both at once. By this I mean not only stews and pilots but also the passengers who do a great deal of flying, the commercial travelers and all. The whole scene is one that involves a lot of very fast-moving people. Relationships form in a hurry, both personally and sexually. And along with this general speed, there’s a great deal of honesty.

And there, incidentally, is something that I don’t think stews get enough credit for. I think we’re by and large a very honest group of girls. That’s funny — I said we. Did you notice that?

JWW: Yes.

GILLIAN: As if I still think of myself as one of the gang. That’s interesting, isn’t it? And here I’ve spent a few years as part of a different group of fast but honest girls.

Where was I? Honesty. Right. You know, a lot of people think of stews as basically artificial. As phony people. I’ve heard it said that stewardesses look as though they were molded out of plastic according to some master plan, lacking in individuality and all. And stews will be criticized for being polite to passengers all according to company policy, as if a girl who puts people at their ease and makes them comfortable is a phony for what she’s doing.

But I really think you would have trouble finding a more honest group of girls. Once you get past the automatic in-flight ritual, the average stew is a girl who is more willing than most people to face the truth about herself and to be open and realistic in her personal relationships.

JWW: Yes, I’ll go along with that. Why do you suppose it is?

GILLIAN: Because of the life we lead. I did it again — we. But seriously, I don’t think a stew has time to be phony. Oh, on the one hand it’s very easy to be completely pat and artificial with the sort of people who don’t matter at all — the men you work for a steak dinner on a layover in Omaha and never see again, for instance. A stew knows how to develop a quick and meaningless feeling of rapport with a man like that and be the sort of dinner partner he wants without letting him really reach her at all.

But that’s with the people who don’t matter. With people who do matter, it’s completely different. Then it’s a case of not having time to waste with conventional crap responses. If you meet a guy and really like him, for example, and you know you may never see him again and certainly won’t see him again for a month or more, you’re more or less forced to get to the heart of the matter right away. I don’t mean that you ball him on the first date. That goes without saying, but then so does an office girl who picks up a young executive on a Friday night on First Avenue. Instant Sex is just part of the American routine. But that office girl will be very careful to come on strong with the guy and create the right impression, while a stew will be apt to be honest about it, because why not?

It’s an attitude you develop, I guess. The fact that planes crash doesn’t hurt, either. That old life-and-death business does make a person get to the heart of the matter. I used to think that was just an excuse for a lot of things, because nobody thinks about crashes all the time, but it does influence everyone. The same as the bomb influences the way we all live — we may not think about it often, but it’s always there, and it has to have an effect on us...

I just thought of something really weird.

JWW: What?

GILLIAN: Actually I suppose it’s odd I never thought of it before. But I was thinking just now of the similarity between hookers and stewardesses.

In several ways. What I said about being able to be completely artificial with people who don’t matter, that would be as good a description of the way a call girl is with a John as it is of the way a stew is with a passenger who doesn’t mean anything to her. Learning how to be just what the man expects you to be but without letting him touch you in any real way. You know, if I had been talking about how to get along with a John I might have put it in exactly the same set of words.

JWW: That’s very interesting.

GILLIAN: Isn’t it? And the other part, that we’re more honest with each other and with people who matter to us. I think that holds up, too. Not always, of course, because so many of the girls I know in this business are just absolute phonies in every respect, and so full of neuroses that you can’t get through to them. But even so, we are open and honest some of the time, and for the same kind of a reason. As if the kind of work we do, the lives we live, it’s all so intense and so cut off from the rest of the world that we don’t have any time to be phony and to wear the conventional sort of masks. Do you understand what I’m saying? I never thought of this before, it’s all coming right off the top of my head, and I don’t know if it’s making any sense or not.

JWW: It makes sense.

GILLIAN: But at the same time, I wonder if maybe it isn’t partly just a matter of the kind of person I am and the kind of life I lead. I was a certain kind of person when I was a stew, and I’m basically the same kind of person now, in the life I’m leading now.

JWW: How did you get from one to the other?

GILLIAN: It was easy enough. We talked about this before, didn’t we? The last time I saw you...

What it amounted to was that I sort of found my way into prostitution gradually. I suppose it grew out of my being basically discontented with my life at that point. Not with my career as a stewardess as such, although I was beginning to feel confined in my job and to realize that I wasn’t particularly good at it, either. But the real problem was my own emotional situation at the time. I had been involved in an affair which I had mistaken for love. I can’t blame the man because it was strictly a case of my misreading things. As far as he was concerned it was a handy little affair and I was someone to sleep with when he happened to be in Los Angeles on business. He thought I saw it the same way. I had had that sort of scene with a lot of fellows up to that point, and that was normally all I was looking for, just a good time and a few laughs, so it wasn’t his fault that I happened to pick him to fall in love with. Except that it wasn’t really love except in my own mind—

Well, that whole scene had an unhappy ending, and poor little Gillian wound up with her ego in shreds. I went out one night and tried to get drunk but it didn’t work. Did you ever have that happen? The more I drank the more sober I got. And I’ve never been much of a drinker, no capacity to speak of. I get drunk smelling the cork from a wine bottle, and here I had God knows how much to drink and it didn’t have any effect on me.

JWW: I’ve had that happen. It’s supposed to be medically impossible, but it happens.

GILLIAN: It certainly did that night. I never did get drunk, but I finally went back to my place and went to sleep, and in the morning I had the first real hangover of my life, which seemed so damned unfair. Here I was with the hangover and I hadn’t even had the drunkenness beforehand. I went and stood under the cold shower for an hour and then got to the airport in time for my flight.

The flight was depressing, too. The other stew had had a fight with the co-pilot, and they weren’t speaking, and the whole atmosphere up front was really terrible. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed as though there were more than the usual number of cruddy passengers, fanny-pinchers and wise guys and vomiting children and first-time fliers and all the little petty aggravations. I guess it was just that everything got to me.

I was desperate for a date by the time we landed. I wanted to be wined and dined and sucked and fucked, if you’ll excuse the expression. But I really wanted to lose myself in a happy time followed by some good honest sex. Men like to unwind that way; is it that surprising that a girl wants the same thing for herself?

Well, at first it looked as though no one was going to ask me out. Just to make the day complete. But I struck up a conversation with this one fellow and practically put the words into his mouth for him, and he took me to dinner.

He was a monumental drag. In a sense he was the usual square passenger, the kind with the corny jokes and the pictures of his snot-nosed kids, the typical dummy whom the average stew has to know how to handle, and on an ordinary evening I would have done that, I would have handled him without paying any real attention to him. The same way I would handle the average trick today, making him happy without letting him bring me down. But I was in such a bad mood to begin with that this crud got to me. All through dinner I wanted to tell him, Look, let’s skip this shit, let’s just go straight to bed. Because I could stand screwing him a lot better than I could stand listening to him. But no, he was sure he had to treat me like a lady first, and so we not only had dinner but we also went to some dismal little strip club afterward and watched Miss Saggy Tits of 1943 wiggle her behind. I don’t know why men assume it will put a girl in the mood to watch another girl do a strip. It certainly doesn’t have that effect on me. And this particular show — well, a lesbian would have been turned off by this dancer, believe me. She was really bad. And the comic with the revolting dirty jokes, and the cruds in the audience—

He smuggled me into his hotel room, Mr. Bourgeois Guilt himself, and although I was used to that scene it really sickened me that night. I wasn’t feeling all that good about being me in the first place, and it seemed as though the whole day and night was designed to make me feel cheaper and more inferior.

In the room, well, let’s just say he was a puritan. Do you know what I mean by that? A puritan is a son of a bitch who thinks you’re disgusting if you do what he wants to do, and twice as disgusting if you like it. The mere fact that I had come to his room with him meant that I was beneath contempt, you understand. Therefore he could stop having any regard for me whatsoever.

How shall I put it? Well, I didn’t see it this way at the time, but using hindsight I can sum it up perfectly. He behaved exactly like a John. No money changed hands, but otherwise I might as well have been a paid prostitute.

He touched my body, you know, not to excite me but as if it was just there for his pleasure. He played with me. Like a toy, like a rubber duck in the bathtub, for Christ’s sake. And then he stretched out like King Shit and told me to go down on him. Which is something I had never objected to, but in that room with that guy it became a dirty act to me. An obscene act.

Then we had intercourse, and I guess he had fun, and I know I didn’t. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I had had sex before without enjoying it but never anything like that, wishing it was over, just wishing it was over and done with. Not that he made it last very long, but it seemed long because it was so impersonal and distasteful and, oh, really disgusting.

This was a big turning point for me. Really. I mean, it’s not as though I had been hung up before this on the idea that sex had to be loving and beautiful and holy. I was a kid who had taken on a dozen boys one after the other, remember. If you could possibly imagine what that is like, a line-up, a gang bang. I can’t even explain what it’s like because it’s hard to put my mind back into that groove. It was never good sexually, you know. Anybody who ever tells you that a girl, a teenager, gets a sex kick out of a gang bang, that’s a lot of crap. But there was some emotional kick in it. There really was, at the time. A feeling of, I don’t know, being important and wanted. I’m sure this isn’t exactly news to you. Teenage girls who put out like that are such sick messed kids. I guess I was no exception.

JWW: But this particular night was different. You felt cheap, I imagine, but in a different way.

GILLIAN: That’s right. A completely different way. And you know, when he got his gun, he rolled off me and fell asleep immediately. And there I was, all alone with myself in that room. I was never so completely alone in my life.

I sat up smoking a cigarette and wishing for a drink and feeling sober and tired and old, and something strange happened. It was like drowning. My whole life was passing in front of me, one rotten part after another. Just the bad parts. There was no way to keep from thinking of them. They were just always there in my mind. All I could think of was how cheap I was, how small I was, how worthless. And how I seemed to be on this earth so that men could use me for their own pleasure and give me nothing in return. The whole thing was an absolutely terrible trip.

JWW: I can imagine.

GILLIAN: I have never felt so completely depressed before or since. Never. To think back on that night, I can only say that it’s a miracle I didn’t commit suicide. I would have done it if I had thought of it. It just never occurred to me, for some reason. But I think if it had ever come into my mind I would have gone to that window — I can see the window in my mind now, right alongside the foot of the bed, and I remember it was the twelfth floor so I could have made a job of it. Just a quick little dive out of that window and no more Gillian, and can you imagine that sanctimonious bastard trying to explain that one to the cops and his wife and all the people back home in the Rotary Club?

I almost wish I had done it...

But what I did instead was turn my first trick.

JWW: How soon afterward?

GILLIAN: The same night.

JWW: Really?

GILLIAN: Uh-huh. Well, why not? I felt like a whore, so why not be a whore?

It almost came down to that. I couldn’t stay there with him and I didn’t want to wake him up, so I got dressed and let myself out. I took a cab back to the hotel where I was staying. I was very close to broke, and when I paid the cab I remember thinking that I should have taken a few dollars for cab fare from his wallet. A man will generally give you cab fare in those circumstances, usually five or ten bucks or even a twenty occasionally.

Well, you can probably imagine where my train of thought was leading me. I was thinking that this man would certainly have given me cab fare if he had been awake, but of course I hadn’t wanted to wake him up and ask for it, and I hadn’t even considered helping myself to money while he was sleeping. And I thought that he never would have missed it if I had taken some money, and I thought, oh, about how little money I had and how I was always broke, and how this man had spent I don’t know, fifty dollars at the very least that night, just to take me to bed, and most of that he spent taking me to a show I hated to sit through. It occurred to me that I would have been much better off taking the money directly and skipping the show, and just balling him in return for the money, since I had gotten nothing but grief from it anyway and couldn’t possibly have felt more like a whore.

I went to my room but I couldn’t sleep. It was still early. I went downstairs to the cocktail lounge and had a couple of drinks, and sure enough this fellow hit on me and started buying drinks for me. This was no surprise. A girl by herself always gets her drinks bought for her.

I wound up at a table with this fellow, and the funny thing is he was a pretty decent and hip guy, and if it hadn’t been for my mood I would probably have gone to bed with him and had a reasonably good time out of the whole thing. But you understand how I felt by now. He was just another man who wanted to use me, and he had recognized me for a tramp the minute I walked in the door, and, oh, the usual things were going through my mind. He asked if I wanted to go somewhere for a late bite. I think he suggested a place where they specialized in steaks and had a jazz quartet for entertainment. The reason I mention it is that this was the sort of thing I liked to do on a date, the ideal way as far as I’m concerned to spend some time with a man before going to bed. That’s the whole point, in a way — that this man who was really my first trick was an ideal date and the complete opposite in every way of the pig I had gone out with earlier that evening.

JWW: If you had met him first—

GILLIAN: It would have been a completely different evening. But let’s not get into the convenient trap of saying that if I’d met Mr. Okay Guy first I wouldn’t be hooking today. It might have taken longer but I would have wound up in the same place.

JWW: But you might have come via a different route.

GILLIAN: Right. But all roads lead to — well, not Rome, but wherever the hell am now...

When he asked me out, I started to accept, and then something happened. Now this is funny, because I honestly hadn’t planned my approach. Looking back on it I can see how I was all primed to ask for money, the business with the cab and all the thoughts that had been going through my head, but I had never actually worked up a plan. I was playing things by ear.

But I started to accept, you see, and then I got a long face and sort of lowered my eyes, and he wanted to know what was the matter. And I went into my act. Completely unrehearsed, and the words surprised me as I said them, but they couldn’t have worked out better if I had stayed up nights committing them to memory.

I went into this number about how I was really up against it financially, and how I didn’t need drinks and a steak any more than he needed to buy them for me, but that I was really broke. And I went through this bit about, Look, let’s be honest with one another. I said that I knew that he wanted to go to bed with me, and that I wanted it too, and I would just as soon go now instead of going out and listening to music first. But I also told him that I needed to make some money, and I suggested that he might want to match my honesty and straightforwardness by giving me the money he would have spent on food and drinks and all. I said, “You know, you’d spend money on me and not think twice about it, and you would send me home in a cab, and you might even go overboard and decide to send me flowers or even a gift. Well, not to take the romance out of it, but I could really use the cash.” I invented a reason why I needed money. I don’t remember what it was.

He was completely stunned.

JWW: I can imagine.

GILLIAN: And he bought the whole story. He put two and two together and figured out that I needed cash for an abortion. He gave me a hundred dollars and told me there were no strings attached, none whatsoever. He said he liked me and would enjoy making love to me but that wasn’t part of the deal. If I wanted to do that, fine. If not, the hundred was still mine with no hard feelings.

What a tough little whore I was! You would think I would have found a way to give the dough back and say I was kidding, something like that. But I was all caught up in the role I was playing and all excited at the idea of going through with this, of balling a man for money. I made myself refuse to see him as a decent guy. I didn’t know the words at the time, but what I did, really, was make him a John in my mind.

I took him to my room. I guess the circumstances were so unusual that he found them very exciting. He made love to me in a very sincere and loving way, but as I said he was a John to me and I was as completely turned off as I had been with the other man. In fact it was the same thing again, the whole bit of being into it but not feeling anything and having my mind somewhere a thousand miles away. This complete detachment that I have with tricks, to the point where my body is all involved in pleasing them and they think they’re getting the screwing of their lives and actually I don’t even know they’re alive.

We made it a couple of times, and I dropped off to sleep while he was still there, which was pretty unprofessional. It would have served me right if he took his hundred back and my own money along with it. But as I said, this was Mr. Nice himself. When I woke up there was a second hundred weighted down with the ashtray, and a note with it telling me it wasn’t payment, that it was a loan, that I should use it for whatever I wanted and that someday when I was in the chips I should give the hundred to someone else who was up against it.

I cried, John. I broke down and cried. The one thing I wasn’t ready to handle was that kind of human decency. I just wasn’t ready for it.

I didn’t know anything about him, his name or where he lived or anything. We had never gotten past first names the night before. And something — I guess I knew that I shouldn’t try to see him again, or even think about him if I could avoid it. Because all I would do was build up another love situation in my mind and set myself up for another fall.

So I looked at it cold, you know, and I made myself see it for what it really was, with all of the pretty part cut out. I told myself that it made a beautiful story with the right violins in the background, but that instead of violins all I had in the background was the cruddy guy I’d met earlier in the evening and all the other cruddy guys my life consisted of, and that Mr. Nice would have been a cruddy guy himself except that he was hipped that particular night on the idea of helping a damsel in distress. And after all, it was all a con, and by falling for it he was just a fool, and as for me, well, I was nothing but a whore, which in a sense was all I had been all along, but at least this time I was a whore who had made two hundred dollars in one night’s work, and if you were going to be a whore anyway, which it looked as though I was, then it seemed to me that I might as well make it pay off as well as I could.

During the following several months, Gillian got into the habit of prostituting herself several times a week. She never again used the elaborate story she had used on her first customer, however.

“I thought of it,” she told me, “but it gave me a bad feeling, the whole idea of it. The more I thought about it, the more I had the feeling that he had topped me. That I had set him up for a con, if you know what I mean, and by being such a decent guy about it he had turned the con inside-out so that I was the fool and not him. And I figured, well, if I was going to be a whore I might as well go right out and be one, and none of this crap about being up against it financially and just doing it as an amateur.

“With the general run of men, it was much easier this way. The squares, the puritans. It wasn’t a question of keeping their respect because these were the kind of clods who divided the world into good girls and bad girls, and if I would sleep with them at all, for money or for free, I was a bad girl and not entitled to their respect. So it was simpler all around with them to be a straight out-and-out whore and the hell with keeping up appearances.

“Also, I found I liked it better that way. My own feelings. There was no need to pretend that I dug them as people, or to put on any kind of an act. I didn’t even have to put on an act with myself. It was as though I had found my own level and I knew who I was. On the plane I would be all bright and cheerful and well-scrubbed, the perfect stewardess, the all-American girl, and every day this was more of an impossible act for me. When I was with a John I could be my real self. A whore, in other words.”

How did she select her customers?

“Mostly I would accept a date with someone on the flight. A dinner date. This always seemed to me to be the easiest way. I never let on at the time that I wanted money. Not on the plane because that would have been too dangerous. I was running a big risk anyway, taking money from men who knew my name and what airline I worked for, because there was always the chance that one of them for spite would report me, and that would mean the end of my job. But I wasn’t worried enough about that possibility to be as careful as I might have been.

“I would take a date, being careful to pick the reverse of the type I would normally have picked. Instead of hip, self-confident guys I preferred the creepy types, the types who most reminded me of that one jerk who had made me feel like a whore in the first place. I figured that they were the type who were least accustomed to getting it for free and who would be most willing to pay for it.

“I usually let them buy me dinner. A girl has to eat, right? Then when they were trying to think of someplace to take me after dinner, I would give them my pitch. I would say that I liked to make a little extra money because I couldn’t live on what the airlines paid me, and if they were willing to spend money on me instead of on drinks and a floorshow, we could have a really good time together.”

“And this approach was successful?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding? It literally never missed. I found out a very interesting thing about the average American male: instead of being turned off by the idea of a girl selling herself, he’s actually turned on by it. Maybe it just appeals to his sense of guilt. Maybe he thinks prostitutes are hotter and more passionate than other women, which is a laugh when you realize that prostitutes ninety-nine times out of a hundred are just going through the motions, while with a girl who’s doing it for love there’s at least a chance that she’s getting some fun out of it. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s just that these men are so insecure, so uptight about themselves and their lives and their sexual ability. When it’s all a matter of cash and carry they don’t have to worry about striking out. Also, if they’re married, it doesn’t seem as much like cheating to them. And they don’t have to worry that I’ll fall in love with them, or call them up at the office, or any of the embarrassing things a girl might do if she actually liked them for their stupid selves and not just for their money.

“Listen to me sounding like a psychologist. All I really know is that during this time, while I was still flying as a stew and tricking on the side, I never struck out. Each of these men was a guy who did not have it in mind to go with a prostitute, but when I brought up the subject I did not get turned down. Which must prove something. A few times guys tried to talk me into doing it for free, but then it was mostly a case of their still thinking of me as a stew and not believing I was really hooking. Once they knew where I stood they stopped trying to build up their egos and paid the price.”

And how much was the price?

“I started out by asking for twenty. Then I found out that it was a mistake to set a price. When I didn’t ask, I always got at least twenty and sometimes got more. I don’t think I ever got more than fifty.

“I would say I probably earned a little over a hundred dollars a week this way, on the average.”

“Was the money important to you?”

“God, yes.”

“How?”

She considered this. “It was a tremendous amount of money at the time,” she said finally. “You have to realize that I was earning less than a hundred dollars a week as a stew at that time, and working my tail off for it, and here I was doubling my income by doing something I had been doing anyway, and for free.”

Had she had trouble living on her salary previously? No, she admitted, she had not. Then why was the extra income so important to her?

“Maybe because it made me realize I was worth something,” she suggested. “I remember something that must have happened over and over, sitting on the edge of a bed in some hotel room after a man had made love to me and gone away into the night. Sitting on the edge of the bed with a couple of bills in my hand. And holding onto that money, just holding onto it. As if it was telling me who I was.”

“You think it gave you a sense of identity?”

“Oh, I don’t know. When you put it in those words it sounds so ridiculous. Like something Joyce Brothers would say. And I’m not sure that’s what it was, anyway.

“Partly, well, it was the feeling that I was getting a little of my own back from these men. That they had been taking advantage of me all my life and now I was taking advantage of them. I didn’t know any prostitutes at the time and I didn’t really know anything about prostitution, the terms and all, but when I learned the word trick later on, either to trick a man meaning to screw him for money, or trick as a word to describe an act of sex, or even calling a John a trick, this was a word that made immediate sense to me. Because although I didn’t use the word I thought of it all in just those terms. I was tricking these men. I was giving them absolutely nothing because my mind and body were completely turned off by them and untouched by them, and they were giving me money and not getting anything in return.

“Now from what I’ve learned since, this is the typical prostitute’s attitude. It’s an absolute cliché. This is every hooker’s life trip, and it’s so much a part of the whore scene that even today I get astonished when I meet a girl in the life who has orgasms with Johns, or who doesn’t feel that the whole act with a John is a case of mutual exploitation, with each person trying to take advantage of the other. Not every girl does feel this way, but so many do that it’s a surprise still to meet one who doesn’t.

“There’s one incident that sticks in my mind — it was one of the last tricks I turned before I got grounded by the airlines. I think it was in Baltimore but I’m not that sure of the city, and I had met this man, not on the plane but in the cocktail lounge at the airport. This was actually much safer than picking them up on the plane because you could keep it a secret who you were. In fact I think a pro hooker nowadays could make a good thing out of picking up men at an airport lounge. Everyone would take it for granted that you were a stewardess and no one would make a fuss about you picking men up because it’s accepted for stews to do this, and there are always plenty of men around looking for pickups, and no one would know that you were a pro because no one knows every stew by sight. I know plenty of girls who work the midtown bars when the phone goes dead, and they take a big chance in a lot of ways, and now that I think about it, they would really do much better at the airport...

“I picked this man up, and when he wanted to buy me dinner I suggested we have dinner in my room. I told him we could order everything from room service and have a ball for ourselves. I had never pulled this particular line before but I figured it would get the preliminaries out of the way in a hurry.

“In the room, I gave him the rest of the story. He was tremendously turned on by the whole thing. It seemed he was in town for a convention and this was his one weekend of the year to cut loose and have a good time, and he couldn’t believe how lucky he was.

“We never did order dinner. We went to bed and I earned a fast twenty-five dollars, and the next thing I knew he was on the phone. I thought he was going to call either the airlines or the police, I had no idea which, and I wanted to jump out of bed and run, but how could I do that? It was my room, not his.

“But it turned out he was calling his buddies at the convention hotel downtown. It wasn’t enough for him to go to bed with me — he had to show them how sophisticated he was and what a great operator he was, and he had to set them up with me, too. He told them to pile into a cab and come on up there.

“This scared me. I could picture a whole army of Shriners in the hallway, whooping it up so that every airlines person in the hotel knew that a stew in Room Whatchamacallit was putting out for an army. So I told him I would go to their hotel instead.

“We took a cab, and he sneaked me up to his room, and I was back in high school again. It seemed that way. I felt like the only whore in town. I was there for hours, taking on one man after the other, and I was so exhausted in the morning that I had to call in sick and get someone else to take the flight for me. I suppose that was one of the reasons I got grounded not long after, but it was coming anyway, so it didn’t make any real difference...

“That night, though, it did settle things for me. Until then I was a stew during the days and a whore at night, and it was something special, doing it as a sideline, but that one night made me realize that I would have to give up flying because this life was where I belonged.

“Not because I enjoyed it. Not even because of the money itself, although it did add up to a perfect fortune for one night’s work. I think it was just the whole feel of that night and the way it stayed in my mind. One man after the other. Except it got to the point where they weren’t even men anymore. Not men at all. That’s a fact — it wasn’t one man after another, but one cock after another, cock after cock after cock, and they would go either in my cunt or in my mouth, it hardly mattered, and they would move around in there until they finished, and then some other cock would come and take their place. Just cock after cock after cock—

“When they grounded me, well, it was no big deal. I had over a thousand dollars set aside. It seemed I couldn’t spend the money as fast as I could make it, so I had plenty of money. And I also knew what I would do. I wasn’t at loose ends. I had another career just waiting for me, and I went right into it.

“Just like that.”

GILLIAN: As far as my combining two careers was concerned, I don’t suppose that sort of thing happens very often. I just don’t think it can for any length of time. In my own case, I know I would have quit before long if I hadn’t been grounded. I was making money in two different ways, and one of them took up almost all of my time and a tremendous amount of concentration. You need a certain kind of dedication to function as a stewardess. I never really had it, which may explain why I was never a great stew to begin with, but when tricking started to take up time and energy, I just couldn’t make it as a stewardess any longer.

But you have to remember that I was a pro hooker almost from the first time. You might say that I was an amateur when I conned the nice guy out of two hundred bucks. Maybe. But after that I was strictly business, and I wasn’t just turning an occasional trick to make ends meet. I was doing it on a regular basis several times a week.

Now I know damned well that there are stewardesses around who are what you might call amateur whores. They would hate the label if you tried to pin it on them, but that’s what they are.

JWW: How do you mean that?

GILLIAN: In the usual way. They screw for money.

JWW: What makes them amateurs?

GILLIAN: Partly their own attitude, I suppose. And partly the fact that they don’t do it more than a couple of times a month, if that often. And they don’t exactly ask for money, and they don’t exactly get it on a businesslike basis. It’s more a matter of getting cab fare from the guy, except the cab fare is generally a twenty and sometimes a fifty, or else the cab fare is small and there’s a messenger who shows up the next day with a piece of jewelry that can be hocked for twenty or thirty dollars. They can tell themselves that all the get are presents and favors, but who’s kidding who? They put out and they get paid for it.

JWW: That sort of amateur prostitution isn’t limited to stewardesses.

GILLIAN: Oh, of course not. There’s probably a lot less of it among stews than in other lines of work, as far as that goes. Among the girls I know in the life, quite a few have said that they started out as amateurs in about the way I described. Party girls, I guess some people like to call them. They may have had jobs as models or secretaries or clerks, and now and then they would take a date with a guy, and some money would change hands in the most refined sort of way. The girls I know are ones who ultimately decided to stop kidding themselves and turn pro, but they all will say that they have friends who did the same thing and never did turn pro and are now married with kids and a house out on the Island, and if anybody ever intimated that they were once the next thing to a prostitute, why, they would scratch your eyes out for saying so...

I’ll tell you, it’s such a funny world, such a funny life, and the older I get and the more I learn about life and about myself, the funnier it all seems. I do learn about myself and think about such things, although I would prefer to come on brassy and slick. But I’m sure from the things I’ve said you know me well enough to get past the surface.

JWW: Yes, I would say so.

GILLIAN: I think about how I got into this business, and for all that it’s the usual question that the worst kind of John asks, it’s also the question every prostitute asks herself a hundred times a day. Even if we consider ourselves born whores, still, it’s never something we set out to be early in life. It’s more along the lines of something that happened to us, and it’s hard to say where or when or how or why.

JWW: For the most part, you seem pretty well satisfied with the way things worked out.

GILLIAN: Do you really think so?

JWW: Yes, by and large. You question things, but it wouldn’t be healthy if you didn’t. But it seems to me that you aren’t really unhappy to be doing what you’re doing.

GILLIAN: I suppose you’re right. Actually I suppose you are right. It isn’t a bad life. The work is easy and the money is good, and both of those things are important. They aren’t everything, John, but we can’t kid ourselves. They are important, and the older you get the more important they become.

JWW: Amen to that.

GILLIAN: Also, you know, this feels right for me. This way of living. You talk about identity and it’s just a fashionable word, but maybe it means something. This is where I am. For the time being, anyway. I don’t know that I’ll do this forever. But for the time being.

That’s another way that hooking is like being a stew, I guess. There’s no future in it, really. Not in the long run. But sometimes there’s a good present.

KIM — The Autograph Hound

“I remember the first time I went to New York, I was a kid in high school at the time. There was this world premiere of a movie on Broadway and a crowd of us stood there in the rain for hours until the celebrities started to arrive. It took so long that I thought no one would ever show up, but then they started coming, and it was just one limousine after another pulling up in front of the theater and everybody who got out, everybody was somebody! It was the most fantastic feeling. I felt — well, I don’t know how to say it except that I felt as though I was in a movie myself with all of these stars playing opposite me.”

She manages an uncertain smile. She is a pixie of a girl with bright dark eyes and a trim figure. Just twenty-two, she has been a stewardess for a little over a year. Her home base is New York, and she flies primarily to and from Los Angeles.

“I don’t know why it is, but I’ve always had this thing for celebrities. People in the public eye. By this I don’t necessarily mean people in show business, although when you hear the word celebrity you naturally think first and foremost of show business. At least I do. But anyone prominent, really. Anybody who is somebody. I’ve always divided the world up into two classes of people, the ones you’ve heard of and the nobodies.

“When I was a kid I was a real nut. I was particularly crazy about musicians. You know, rock musicians, singers. That whole scene. I collected records and I belonged to it must have been a dozen fan clubs and I went to the concerts and screamed my head off for this group or that group. I was the typical teenybopper fan. I had pictures of all the different stars.

“A lot of girls go through this but outgrow it. I did and at the same time I didn’t. I outgrew being a teenybopper, for example. Now there are girls who make the groupie scene in their late teens and go through the screaming bit and even chase around after the musicians, but I was past that by the time I was, oh, fourteen or fifteen. It just seemed childish in a way that I couldn’t accept any more. I’m glad of that, too, because when I see these groupie girls nowadays I just think they’re pathetic. And the musicians, I’ve been on a lot of flights with these rock musicians, they’re always flying to one concert or another, and I’ve gotten to know some of them, and honestly, they have nothing but contempt for these girls, the groupies. They may use them, you know, sexually, but even so it’s a very contemptuous thing, they just use them without having the slightest feeling or respect for them, and actually they mock them, that’s what it comes to. I’ve worked flights where we would have a rock group on board and a contingent of fans would meet the plane, all of those yelling, screaming girls, and some of them as old as I am, really, and I look at them and try to imagine what it would have been like if I had wound up like that, and it gives me the chills. Because I got completely away from this years ago, you know, but if I hadn’t, well, I might have wound up like those poor pathetic girls.”

But while Kim outgrew the teenybopper stage, she did not cease to be fascinated by celebrities. Instead, she merely continued her fascination on a more sophisticated level. She got away from the herd aspect of groupie behavior along with its juvenile connotations, but prominent persons remained her main area of interest — and, specifically, her sexual fixation.

It was her interest in celebrities which led Kim to become a stewardess.

“I went into it for the glamour,” she said frankly. “I think a lot of girls do, although they may not admit it in those terms. For some of them the glamour means travel and new faces and associating with pilots. It’s the same with some girls who become nurses — they think doctors are glamorous or they may find the whole idea of life and death very dramatic. I’m not saying that this is what makes every girl become a nurse or a stewardess, but I think it plays a part in a lot of cases.

“For me, I wanted to be somebody, and yet I knew I didn’t have the talent or drive to do anything distinguished on my own. If you haven’t got it, why try? I figured that the closest I could come to being someone significant was by associating with significant people, as if some of their glamour would rub off on me.

“Or to put it another way, I wanted to get into that feeling of excitement I first got outside that movie theater on Broadway. At that premiere. I really felt alive that day in a very special way.”

Girls with Kim’s particular orientation have received a certain amount of attention in the past year or so, and a term has been coined to describe them. They are known, quite succinctly, as “Celebrity Fuckers.” The term could hardly be clearer in meaning. Kim and girls like her find their ultimate satisfaction in having sexual relations with prominent persons. These sexual partners are valued not for their looks, personalities, poise, or even sexual ability, but in direct proportion to their prominence in the public eye. One might say that the Celebrity Fucker has carried the old hobby of autograph collecting to its logical extreme.

The basic appeal of this mode of behavior is not too difficult to comprehend. On the one hand, the Celebrity Fucker manages to achieve, if only in her own eyes, a sort of associate prominence, as if sleeping with a star is the closest possible thing to being a star. In addition, there is a definite game aspect to the whole performance; Celebrity Fuckers are apt to compare notes with one another, to brag about particular conquests, and to brandish past lovers, either publicly or to themselves, as a sportsman displays trophies of the hunt.

In Kim’s case, another consideration is certainly highly relevant: she finds sexual relations exciting only when her partner is famous to one degree or another, and she is otherwise incapable of getting any kick out of sex.

KIM: I know that this all started taking shape a long ways back, like when I was caught up in the teenybopper scene with the fan clubs and screaming at concerts and all. Not that I ever had any personal contact with any of those musicians or anything like that. I didn’t. I never got sexually close to any of them. But when I was twelve and thirteen and fourteen and just beginning to be really aware of sex and of my own body, this was also the time that I was completely hung up on these musicians.

JWW: And they served as sex symbols for you?

KIM: Oh, completely. I would say completely. This is what they do. The average teenybopper doesn’t know anything about music. At those concerts, well, you can’t even hear the music in the first place, not with all the screaming that goes on there. It’s all a sexual thing. You scream and shout and carry on, and you get completely caught up with the whole crowd in the rhythm and all, and you look at those boys and imagine doing things with them, and that’s how teenyboppers get their cookies.

JWW: You actually had climaxes this way?

KIM: Are you serious? Well, I suppose people don’t realize this. I suppose they don’t. I guess if they did parents would never let their little daughters trip off to those concerts. My God, yes, of course I used to come that way. That’s what the entire teenybopper groupie scene is about. It’s sex, pure and simple. You know those revival meetings they have in the South, where the women roll around on the floor and scream and shout? Well, they have orgasms that way. They come.

JWW: Sometimes they do, yes. But in most cases I don’t think they think of it in those terms. It’s a religious experience, and if it’s basically sexual in nature, I don’t think most participants see it that way.

KIM: Maybe teenies don’t at first, either. Because the first time it happens you don’t know what it is. I had my first climax at a concert. I didn’t know what it was. I had never had one before, so how could I know? Then I talked about it later with a girlfriend of mine, and she told me what it was, and showed me how to have the same feeling happen whenever I wanted it to.

JWW: By masturbating, you mean?

KIM: Yes. I got so I used to do that all the time. Rubbing myself with my finger. I could come easily that way, but it was never anywhere near as powerful a sensation as what I used to experience at a concert. Masturbating was just doing it to myself, you know, and I was in control of it, and you can’t blow your mind that way. It was all too self-centered. But at a concert with all the girls around me going ape and the music and the boys on stage, it was much bigger and more explosive. Instead of my doing it, I was there and I couldn’t even keep it from happening. It was like, oh, getting carried away on a wave. That’s a good description of it. Getting picked up by a wave of feeling and just carried out to sea.

JWW: Did you try to duplicate the environment when you masturbated?

KIM: You mean by inviting a crowd of girls over? I don’t think—

JWW: No, I don’t mean that—

KIM: Oh, I see. I didn’t understand you at first. Yes, I guess I did try to get the same kind of thing started. I would play rock music, for instance. It’s amazing that I have eardrums left when you consider the volume I used to play that stuff at. I’m lucky I’m not deaf... I would play the records and look at pictures of different musicians while I touched myself, or sometimes I would close my eyes and imagine that a certain musician was doing various things to me. That we were having intercourse. I used to have certain pictures of this one star with very tight pants so that you could see the outline of his penis and I would think about that, you know, and do things like kissing the picture. Crazy kid things. You look at the average girl that age and you think how cute and nuts and kooky she is, and actually she has sex fantasies like this. And I was pretty tame compared to some of the girls in that bag. I never managed to get next to the stars, see. But the real dyed-in-the-wool groupies will find ways to get to the boys’ dressing rooms or their hotel rooms, and they’ll have sex with them. These are girls as young as thirteen or fourteen who are doing this, and there are more of them than you would think. They’ll even bribe other men in order to get to the musicians. For example they may have sex with a bellhop in order to get upstairs in the hotel. Just young kids, and here they have all these ways of using sex which are too old for them and which are also not normal and can’t lead them to a normal attitude toward sex.

JWW: Aside from your experiences at concerts and in autoeroticism, did you have any direct experiences with sex during those ears?

KIM: Not until I was done with the teenybopper thing. But as I said, I outgrew that fairly early, at fifteen or so. I had been pretty ugly before then, flat-chested and kind of pimply, and at fifteen I started to blossom. I didn’t go and turn into Miss America, but my complexion cleared up and my figure filled out, and boys started to take an interest in me.

JWW: Perhaps that was why you began to get away from the rock music scene.

KIM: Oh, probably. But also it was a matter of outgrowing it and feeling too old for it.

JWW: I see.

KIM: But the dating I did, it didn’t really take the place of what I had had before. That’s why I don’t think you could say that being popular was the reason for my getting away from the teenybopper scene.

As far as sex was concerned, I did get involved to a degree with the boys I dated, but it never really meant anything to me. I couldn’t feel it.

JWW: You didn’t become excited?

KIM: Excited, yes. But not really excited. Do you know what I mean?

JWW: I don’t think so.

KIM: Well, it was the same as the difference between what I felt at the concerts and what I could make myself feel by playing with myself. When I went out with a boy and we necked or petted, I would get sexually excited, but I was never really transported. I might even have an orgasm, but it was the kind of orgasm that I could make myself have by masturbating. It wasn’t a moving experience. It was an orgasm, but just a little sort of tickle, not a big moment.

JWW: I see.

KIM: That’s probably why I never really did that much with the boys I dated. I would park with a boy if I sort of liked him and if he really wanted to, and we would run through the things that kids do. Feeling each other and handling each other and so on. And eventually I did have intercourse a few times. I guess I must have done it with three boys before I started as a stew.

JWW: And it, too, was not particularly satisfying?

KIM: That’s about it. It wasn’t a bad experience the way it was for some kids, but it wasn’t terrific, either. I figured maybe that was as much as sex could be. What I had experienced at the concerts, well, I began to think that maybe that had only been going on in my imagination. That it was part of getting caught up in what all the other girls were feeling and that it wasn’t exclusively sexual at all, and that what I was getting with these boys was all there was to it.

But at the same time, oh, I had the feeling that there was something more, and every now and then I would get a little bit of a hint of it. I don’t know how to put this into words exactly, but I thought, oh, that I was like wasting my time with these boys.

JWW: That you should have been doing something else?

KIM: No, see, I put it wrong. Because what else was there for me to do? No, maybe not that I was wasting my time but that I was sort of marking time. Sort of like running in place and waiting until it was time for me to do whatever it was that I was going to do.

Sometimes I would have this crazy conversation with myself where I told myself that I was destined for great things. It was just a game I played with myself. Great things, gee, I didn’t have anything great that I wanted to do. I was an average girl, you know, and I never pretended to be anything better than that, either.

JWW: And you were still fascinated by celebrities?.

KIM: Yes.

JWW: In a sexual way?

KIM: Yes, although I don’t know how completely I realized it was working that way. I had certain movie stars that appealed to me and I might have fantasies about them during masturbation, or I might even try to imagine that the boy I was with was someone in particular, some movie star. Or just that he was someone famous but not anyone specific, just that he wasn’t an ordinary nothing from my high school but someone glamorous, you know...

Then the summer after I graduated from high school I met — and had sex with him, and you might say that was the turning point of my life.

The actor Kim met shortly after high school graduation was the first celebrity with whom she had sexual relations. He was the first of an impressively long line. Kim’s sexual nature is such that she seems to get at least as much pleasure out of discussing her conquests — and naming them — as she does from sex itself. Her conversation was liberally salted with famous names, many of the household-word variety, and all of which have been deleted from the material that follows. I have furthermore altered descriptions to such an extent that the reader may as well abandon the temptation to play Guess Who with Kim’s story.

Kim met the actor backstage after a road company performance of a play in which he was touring.

KIM: They started the policy of stock companies with name stars that summer. Before then all we had in town was this local stock company with actors you never heard of, and I hardly ever would go, but when this man came to town I had to go. I had seen him in I don’t know how many movies and I was really excited at the idea of seeing him in person.

A boy I knew was working as an apprentice, and he managed to get me backstage to meet the actor. This boy thought I was going to be his date that night, and I thought so, too, but when I was introduced to the star something clicked between us. No big love thing but a really strong attraction. I remember that I had this tremendous sexual response that almost knocked me over. I got this quivering between my legs and my heart was pounding and I felt myself getting moist in the groin. I was just standing there looking at him, at this man who must have been almost fifty years old and who wasn’t what you would call handsome, although he was very distinguished looking and so poised and all... I had more sexual feeling from this than I normally had in the course of a whole evening of making out.

If you can get an introduction the way I did, a road show is a great place to make out with a celebrity. Especially in this kind of arrangement where they have a local company and the star travels doing a week in this town and a week in that town, because that way the star is really at loose ends for someone to have sex with. And he doesn’t have to worry about getting involved the way he might otherwise, because he knows in a day or two he’ll be able to get out of town and never see you again.

This particular actor was very smooth about it, which was good, because I was so nervous and inexperienced it was incredible. But he managed things very nicely, and we ditched the boy who brought me, and we went to his hotel room. We talked for a little while and had some drinks, and then we went to bed.

It was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me in my entire life.

JWW: The star was a superior sex partner?

KIM: No. That had nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact he wasn’t good in bed. He was a nice man, a sincere man, and I liked him a great deal and to this day I have a great deal of respect for him, but you have to realize that he was an older man and a heavy drinker, and he wasn’t good in bed in a physical sense at all.

As a matter of fact, he had trouble getting hard. He tried to give the impression that this had never happened before, but he was so cool about it that I knew he was acting. You might think that this would cause me to lose respect for him. Actually it made me respect him all the more, that he was so human and everything. It was, I don’t know, touching.

He showed me how to do fellatio. I had never done this before. Boys had asked me to kiss them there and I had done this, but you know, just a brief kiss, and here I was giving him, well, I was blowing him, I guess, is what you would say. And much to my surprise I found that I liked to do this. I had always thought of it as unnatural and nothing that a girl would enjoy doing, but I had an orgasm doing it. Just from doing it, there was something so exciting about it. Because of who he was and how I felt.

Afterward he did the same for me. That is, he ate me. A boy had done this before and while I liked it, well, it was nothing sensational. But now when this star did it I absolutely went out of my mind. Absolutely out of my mind. I came all over the place and it was so good I thought I was going to die from it. I guess it got him excited that I was so hot, and he did get an erection this time, and we had regular sex, that is, he screwed me, and I came again the minute he was inside me...

For the next two weeks I was walking on air. You couldn’t talk to me. I was like in another world all by myself. I would walk down the street and all I could think of was that I had been screwed by this important man. That I was the only girl in the whole town who had been to bed with him, and that he had liked it, and remembering how I had liked it, and everything.

I happened to see an old movie of his on television about that time and I had an orgasm without even touching myself, just from watching him and thinking how I had been with him.

The hour or so she spent in that actor’s bed was a turning point in Kim’s life. From that day on, there was no question in her mind as to her role. She was a Celebrity Fucker.

“I had never heard the term, of course,” she told me. “I never heard it until much later, after I had become a stewardess and had a lot of experience with a great many famous people. And at the time, you know, I never thought of myself as being a particular type of girl. Before when I was in the teeny scene I thought of myself as one of a whole crowd of girls who were turned on by this particular music and this particular kind of mob scene. But when I made it with the actor, and afterward when I started to seek out other celebrities and have sex with them, it never occurred to me that I was doing a thing that other girls also did. There was no label for it in my mind. All I knew, really, was that I could really feel alive when I was with someone famous. I know it sounds absolutely perverted to put it in cold words like that, but that’s how I am. I dig celebrities and I feel my whole self come alive when I’m with them, and afterward I feel completely great. I have this feeling of pride after I make it with someone famous whom I respect and idolize. I have a real feeling of accomplishment, and forever afterward I have the feeling, oh, that this particular celebrity belongs to me in a kind of secret way.

“Not that I’ll ever try to get in touch with the person again, or that I would make a pest of myself in any way. I never did that, not even at the very beginning. And I never built up any garbage in my mind about being in love. I know it’s sex, but sex all by itself can be very groovy.

“I’ve met other girls now who swing the same way. As a matter of fact I really enjoy talking to other girls in the same boat because you really can’t open up to other people or you get this very strange reaction. But with other girls I will compare notes. Some of them, frankly, are pretty disgusting about it. They’ll get very physical in their descriptions, more so than I would care for. For instance, they’ll say that so-and-so has a very small penis, or something like that, which may be so but it isn’t something to mention to anyone. I might tell what a certain person likes to do in bed but I wouldn’t tell this to just anyone, only to somebody who I knew wouldn’t spread it around...

“Some girls, you know, have very different reasons for getting together with celebrities.”

For example?

“A large number of them are nothing but opportunists. They’re trying to get something for themselves out of it, some advantage. I mean beyond the kicks that they might get. For instance, they might want a career in show business and they think that if they sleep around enough someone will give them a chance. I don’t know if this ever does them any good or not. I don’t think it does, to tell you the truth, because celebrities, well, they don’t have trouble finding someone anxious to sleep with them, and in that business they aren’t going to pass out important jobs to incompetent people just for the sake of a little sex.

“Others have come right out and told me that they don’t get anything out of it in a sexual sense. They get a kick out of adding another celebrity to their collection. That’s exactly what it is with them, a collection. As if they were collecting autographs, except with a penis instead of a pen. That is really what it amounts to. And the actual sex for these girls is just something to go through in order to add the person to your collection. It’s a compulsion, really. I think that’s the word for it.”

I asked Kim if she always enjoyed sexual relations with the men she slept with.

“Well, not absolutely always,” she admitted. “I have to say that I have a certain amount of the collector in me. You start doing something, you know, and it becomes a thing in itself to the point where you almost forget once in a while why you got into it in the first place. So there are times when I meet a guy on a flight and I recognize him, say he’s an actor, and he isn’t a person who particularly turns me on. Not my type for one reason or another. Maybe it’s something physical about him that turns me off or maybe, you know, his image is just not the kind that I groove on. He’s not my idol, you might say.

“I have to admit to you that I’ll generally go with him anyway, and I’ll be more likely to do this the more prominent he is, so it’s a case of adding him to my collection at least to a degree. When this happens I usually don’t get any particular kick out of the sex part, but sometimes there are surprises. One character actor who I thought of as a major turn-off wound up being so really groovy in bed that he got to me in spite of myself.”

Kim had begun to establish a pattern for herself as a Celebrity Fucker when the opportunity to enroll for stewardess training first presented itself. As far as she was concerned, there was one reason and one reason only for taking the position. She felt it was the best possible way to meet interesting men — i.e., celebrities of one sort or another. She was accepted for training, did well at stew school, and went on to get her wings.

KIM: For a girl like me, you couldn’t possibly find a better way to make a living than as a stewardess. It’s really the perfect career for a girl who wants to meet prominent and influential people. Even the off-beat flights get a good share of VIPs, you know. Show business people are always going off to location work in some strange area, or playing some out-of-the-way night club, or you’ll have professional athletes competing in the smaller cities — what with one thing or another, you always encounter celebrities wherever you go.

JWW: Of course you’re in the best possible spot to find them.

KIM: Oh, no question. New York and Los Angeles are the two places where everything is happening, and everybody who is anybody spends his life flying back and forth between those two cities. A girl who crews regularly on a New York-L.A. flight is going to meet almost everyone sooner or later. I guess there are still a few cranks who refuse to fly, the Super Chief set, but how many of those are there? No more than a handful. Everybody else flies, and any stew who wants to can meet her share of them.

JWW: Do you actually seek the men out?

KIM: You have to, John. Well, that’s not always true. Some men in the world of entertainment are absolutely compulsive about making a pass at every halfway attractive girl who comes near them. A certain comedian is notorious. He can’t see a skirt without putting his hand under it. And because he’s so famous and such a funny man he gets away with things that an ordinary man would get his face slapped for constantly. With men like him, you don’t have to be aggressive. All you have to do is be alive, and when he makes a pass you let him know you’re game, and he’ll take it from there.

Also there are celebrities who aren’t quite so prominent, guys who don’t always get recognized when they go out in public, and they may be more willing to make a play for a girl who attracts them. You see, most of the really top-ranking stars won’t do this. They don’t want any bad publicity and they don’t dare take chances; in fact many of them would rather pay money to a call girl than take chances by picking up a non-professional.

So what you really have to do in most cases is let the guy know you’re available and that you know what the score is. Now here is where it really helps, being a stew and all. Because suppose you were walking down Sunset Boulevard and you ran into — and decide, wow, you’d really love to ball him. Well, what could you do? Run up to him on the street and tell him you were hot for him? You couldn’t do this, you see, not only because it would be awkward to begin with but because he would just turn tail and run away from you ninety-nine times out of a hundred. He would be afraid of getting involved with a lunatic.

But on a plane it’s a different story. In fact the reason I mentioned — ’s name is that I had him on a flight to JFK just a couple of weeks ago, and believe me, that was just the reaction I had, that I wanted to ball him. He looked absolutely gorgeous in person. But as luck would have it he was flying with—, and according to the fan magazines and columns she’s his current girlfriend.

JWW: A tough break for you.

KIM: You haven’t heard the whole story yet. Now I knew it wouldn’t be worthwhile trying to date him in New York, not if he was with her. But he had a reputation for being quite a stud, so I decided to give him a play. First of all I spent a lot of time giving him and his girl really good service, and letting him have a little body english in the process. I did this to find out if he was interested in me, and he was. He didn’t make it too obvious in front of her, but I could tell from the way he was looking me over that he liked what he saw.

So I waited until the girl went to the head. I had been watching for an opening, and as soon as she was in the can I dropped into the seat next to him. I figured the hell with subtlety and I just grabbed right for his crotch and gave him a feel. This took him completely by surprise—

JWW: Yes, I can see where it might—

KIM: —but he was pretty quick on the uptake. I snuggled up to him and let him feel me a little. There was no tremendous rush, because she figured to spend a couple of minutes in the can at the very least. He felt my breasts and underneath my dress and evidently he liked what he felt.

I told him to go to the john himself after his girl came back, and to lock the door but to open it when I gave a knock. He just nodded, and I got up and went back to the serving galley and waited. I figured it was about a fifty-fifty chance whether he would go for it or not. He could decide it would be more of a kick to tell his girl about it and have a good laugh at my expense. But somehow I had the feeling that the whole sneaky quality of it would turn him on. I knew he liked me, and from what I knew about him I suspected this might happen.

Sure enough, his gal came back, and the two of them sat and chatted for a while, and then he excused himself and went up the aisle to the john. I was careful to notice which one he went into. Then without being obvious about it I went to the door and gave a little knock, and he opened it and I ducked inside and he closed it and locked it. He already had his penis out of his pants and he was already hard as a rock.

JWW: And you had relations in the lavatory?

KIM: It’s not exactly the first time it’s ever been done that way. We had a quickie standing up and he took my phone number for future reference, although I’m sure he’ll never call me. Why should he when he’s got a girlfriend like her? A quick screw in a toilet is one thing, but he wouldn’t bother to call me. We made it, though, and it was very kicky to make it right in the middle of a flight like that. I’ve done it in mid-flight before. You hear about girls balling pilots up front, and this happens, but that’s not my scene. I’ve made it with passengers, though. At their seats, usually. There’s plenty of room in the first-class section, and with the lights out, you know, on a night flight, it’s no real problem. You can do it sitting on his lap or you can give him head or any number of ways. This was the first time I ever did it in the toilet, though, although I’ve heard of it being done from time to time.

Then he let himself out and went back to his seat, and I waited a few seconds and went back to my station, and that was that. He and I hardly looked at each other the rest of the trip, and I’m sure that girl of his never had the slightest suspicion of what went on. Here he had excused himself and knocked off a piece and come back and sat down next to her and she never knew a thing about it. In fact, from the way we didn’t look at each other you would think it didn’t happen, that it was a dream.

But when he deplaned at JFK he gave me this secret little wink, a quick secret wink, and I got this feeling that went all through me. Like the two of us had a little private secret that the rest of the world would never know about. It was a very warm feeling, very exciting and satisfying for me.

As a general rule, Kim’s conquests involve a less aggressive display on her own part and proceed with rather less direct sexuality. Her overtures are more apt to be verbal than physical and her objective is generally a date on the ground instead of a quickie in the air. The usual pattern runs along the following lines: Kim sets the stage, letting the celebrity know she is ready and willing to play; the celebrity asks her to have dinner or a drink with him after landing, and once the plane is on the ground the two of them go as quickly as possible to her room or his, where sexual relations occur almost immediately. At times Kim likes to give the impression that she and her dates take time to establish emotional rapport, talk things over, and get to know one another. This is actually rarely the case. Kim’s special charm, the charm of any Celebrity Fucker, is her delightful availability and the disposable nature of her charms. She is to be used for the specified purpose and then sent home as quickly as possible.

Most of the time this is the way Kim prefers it, as far as that goes. While she intimates that she enjoys getting to know celebrities, it is fairly obvious that they terrify her on every level but the sexual plane. In her private world, still divided into somebodies and nobodies, Kim is manifestly a nobody with no special qualities to render her important. She becomes someone only by having sexual relations with a somebody — and sex is thus at once a means of elevating her own self while bringing the celebrity down to her own level

Once sex is over and done with, she is at a loss for something to do, for a way to justify her existence in the presence of these exalted celebrities. And so hit-and-run sex is ideal for her.

Almost in spite of this attitude, she has begun to develop a certain collection of quasi-celebrities who actually seek her out for additional sexual satisfaction instead of contenting themselves with a single bout. These men are in the lower echelons of the Hollywood-New York entertainment world, minor actors and directors and writers and such. It is interesting to note that Kim’s popularity in these circles derives not only from her sexual availability and physical attributes but also, paradoxically, from her prowess as a Celebrity Fucker. The practice of hero worship in varying forms manifests itself among show business people as well as stewardesses, and many of these men get a special thrill out of having sexual relations with a girl who has herself had relations with various important stars.

“I’ve been getting asked to a lot of parties lately,” Kim told me proudly. “Some of these are, you know, sex parties, actually. Where there will be a bunch of prominent men and the girls are all girls like me, not hookers but girls who like to go with celebrities, and things get pretty wild. You could call them regular orgies, I suppose, with swapping back and forth all night long, and threesomes and foursomes, and some girls will put on shows, like one of them has a dog that will eat her and things like that. I don’t mean that kind of party, which I frankly don’t care for unless it means a chance to meet a very big star that I might not get to see otherwise. For example, — throws parties like that when he’s in town, and when I get invited I go, even if I have to screw a zebra in the front window...

“But also there are parties, you know, where I’ll just go as someone’s date, no sex at all, a regular party, and I’ll get to meet guys and maybe set something up for later on or maybe not, but actually to mingle with those people. So I don’t know what might happen next month or next year. I mean, who knows, I could find myself a celebrity in my own right, you never know.”

Content

John Warren Wells
Sex and The Stewardess

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