A jet-setting book called "Coffee, Tea or Me?" got a huge amount of attention after it was published in 1967 and was billed as a racy memoir by two saucy Eastern Airlines stewardesses, the attractive Trudy Baker and the beautiful Rachel Jones.
OK, I know there are five objectionable adjectives in that sentence. Please bear with me. The book got rave reviews and sold over a million copies. "Gives the lowdown on stewardesses; reads like a footnote to `Human Sexual Response,"' burbled Look Magazine.
I know Look Magazine ceased regular publication in 1971, and Eastern Airlines went ignominiously belly-up once Frank Lorenzo got through with it in 1991.
I also know that "Coffee, Tea or Me" and its three sequels are regarded collectively as the force that breathed life into the image of airline stewardesses as free-spirited party girls living exotic lives in endless pursuit of men and adventure. I know that a generation of actual flight attendants rolled their eyes whenever the book -- published right on the cusp of the women's movement -- was mentioned.
But I didn't know until the other day that the book was actually written by a man, Donald Bain. The real stewardesses who were billed as the authors of "Coffee, Tea or Me?" and its sequels were actually hired by the publisher to travel the country promoting it on television and in newspapers, which they did to spectacular effect. Their real names were not Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones.
Back in fashion
Long out of print, the book is being re-issued in June by Penguin Books. In the new edition, which features the same 1960s-vintage Playboy magazine-style girly cartoons that graced the original, Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones are still listed as the authors -- though this time the words "With Donald Bain" appear below theirs.
Oddly enough, despite the miseries and wholesale layoffs in the airline industry, stewardesses -- who became known as flight attendants partly in the reaction to "Coffee, Tea or Me?" -- are in some sort of cultural vogue these days.
Flight attendants feature prominently in recent two movies, View From the Top, with Gwyneth Paltrow, and Catch Me if You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the celebrated 1960s criminal imposter Frank Abagnale, whose cons included a brief stint posing as an airline pilot as a ploy to provide cover to kite checks and, incidentally, date sexy stewardesses.
Curiously enough, Abagnale, the great imposter himself, is quoted in the publisher's promotions about the re-issue of "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" He hails it as "the original tale of the glamorous world of flying and the women who made it so" and adds, "Oh, how I miss those days."
Bain, meanwhile, is the ghostwriter of more than 80 books, including the 21 tomes in the Murder, She Wrote series, in which he shares a byline with the main character, Jessica Fletcher -- who is, of course, fictional. He is more than happy to account for himself.
"Sometimes you get lucky," he says in his autobiography, Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume (Barricade Books, 2002).
But luck had little to do with the success of the stewardess books that launched his ghostwriting career.
In a telephone interview, he explained that he got involved with the stewardess project while working as a young public relations executive with American Airlines in New York and hoping to start a writing career. He already had a lot of experience as a business traveler -- during a time when most business travelers were male.
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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