He said he was introduced to two Eastern Airlines stewardesses by a New York editor looking for a ghostwriter to craft the book the two stewardesses insisted they had in them.
Not enough
"So we met and they were very entertaining the first half hour," he explained. "But then they basically repeated the first half hour's stories for the second half hour. I realized they didn't have enough to sustain a book and I was going to have to use an awful lot of my own imagination.
"But I got to work, wrote the book and assigned them fictitious names. And then they went on the road to sell it. The two stewardesses became so popular, interestingly enough, that one of them legally changed her real name to the one I had given her on the book."
His own name appears in the original book only once, in the dedication and even here the author hides his identity in a playful way.
"I dedicated it `To Don Bain, without whom this book wouldn't have been possible,"' he said. He dedicated all three sequels to himself. He wrote six subsequent books in the same genre, purportedly the racy memoirs of nurses, school teachers, secretaries and others.
`Who is this guy?'
"They're all dedicated to me," he said. "I always wondered if somebody was going to look at them all and say, `Who is this guy who all these young women are dedicating books to?"'
He said he never publicly discussed the ruse till he wrote his autobiography. But others evidently used it as a come-on for dates. On a business flight with a film crew a few years after the first book appeared, he said, one of his colleagues playfully asked a flight attendant if she had read it.
"Her eyes lit up and she said, `Not only have I read it, I know the guy who wrote it."' said Bain, adding, "My ears pricked up. She said, `Yeah, he was on one of our flights recently, and he's doing a sequel, and I'm going to be in it. We're going to have dinner to talk about it.'
And I thought to myself, man what have I spawned here with this thing? I didn't say a word."
When he wrote the first book, Bain admired flight attendants for their grit and joie de vivre in a world where newspaper help-wanted ads still were classified under "Men" and "Women."
In the introduction to the new edition, he writes to today's flights attendants working in a radically different world in the skies: "Thanks for being on the front line of air-travel security," he writes, adding, "You have my undying gratitude for the tough job you do so admirably, and for allowing me to have had fun writing about an earlier era in air travel and your role in it."
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