Hard Landing (7 page)

It was on a winter day in 1961 that he left his office on Broad Street in Newark, stepped from the curb ankle-deep into icy slush, and resolved to reach Texas before the next winter. After arriving he had six months to kill while waiting for his Texas bar exam results (he ranked third in the state), so Kelleher joined his brother-in-law in backing President Kennedy’s navy secretary, a little-known Texan named John Connally, in a dark-horse race for governor. Though he began the race with polls giving him 4 percent of the vote, Connally won, principally on the strength of a massive outpouring in San Antonio. Kelleher had delivered the city’s North Side.

Five years later, with a law practice devoted to pipeline cases and property disputes, Kelleher was watching Rollin King sketch the Texas Triangle on a cocktail napkin. Kelleher wasted no time incorporating Air Southwest as a commercial airline and readily obtained an operating certificate from the state. He drained his savings and borrowed more to put up the first $20,000 invested in the new Air Southwest.

Then, he smacked headlong into the juggernaut of Braniff and Trans-Texas, “demonstrating the
ancient truth,” as
Texas Monthly
noted at the time, “that with enough money to pay for enough good lawyers, a dedicated opponent can keep almost anything from happening for years and years.” Lawyers for the incumbent carriers chased Southwest from one Texas court to the next, mounting every argument they could muster against the state’s operating certificate. Kelleher won in the Texas Supreme Court in 1970 and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the matter—yet the fighting had only begun.

Braniff and Trans-Texas rushed to the CAB in Washington with the inventive claim that Southwest would, in fact, engage in interstate commerce even if its planes never left Texas airspace. After all, some Southwest passengers would no doubt buy tickets on connecting flights on other airlines that
did
fly outside the state. Kelleher was speechless. He had designed the legal architecture of Southwest Airlines specifically around the boundaries of federal jurisdiction, and suddenly he was being told that perhaps he was subject to federal jurisdiction after all. Kelleher stepped from CAB headquarters along
Connecticut Avenue and clenched his jaw in such fury that he
split four molars at once, which drove him to his knees in pain.

The CAB refused to protect the entrenched airlines. When the case went before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a judge wrote, “This litigation should have been terminated long ago; its
undue prolongation approaches harassment.”

Kelleher’s law partners, meanwhile, thought he was off his rocker. He had been devoting three quarters of his time to battling for Southwest. All of the seed money raised to launch the company had long ago been burned up in legal and consulting costs; Kelleher was now representing Southwest for free, to be compensated only if the company ever actually went into business and earned the money to pay his fee. He had to keep fighting if he had any hopes of getting paid—not to mention recovering any of the $20,000 he had put up in the beginning.

And there was more than money involved. Kelleher was outraged. He would
show those bastards at Braniff. He would show those yahoos at Trans-Texas.

Air Southwest renamed itself Southwest Airlines and seemed ready at last to take to the skies. Veteran pilots were hired from a charter operation that was shutting down. Some of the stewardesses came from American Airlines, which had a policy of dismissing any over age 32. Unfortunately, in the years after Southwest had filed its original application for service in Texas, a couple of Lockheed Electras had lost their wings due to a severe vibration problem. Southwest, left with little choice but to go into business with the jet aircraft now in common use throughout the industry, bought three 737s and soon a fourth, all still in their coats of factory-white paint. In June 1971, with the maiden flight scheduled for the following day, Braniff and Trans-Texas once again got a court order halting operations on grounds that Southwest had departed from the plan on which its flying authority had been granted by the state.

Kelleher jumped into a Southwest plane conducting its final proving flight and was dropped off at the Texas capital of Austin, where the members of the Texas Supreme Court were attending a
cocktail party. They consented to hear his appeal the first thing the following morning. That night the Texas attorney general gave Kelleher the use of his library; all night Kelleher stayed up researching and writing.
He went before the Supreme Court without a change of clothes, made his case, and won. The battle, for the time being, was over.

“What do I do
if the sheriff shows up tomorrow with another restraining order?” a Southwest executive asked when Kelleher assured him the company’s first flight with paying passengers could proceed.

“Leave tire marks in his back,” Kelleher shot back.

Kelleher was a born slob. En route to a speech before a church
congregation in San Antonio he once spilled an entire Bloody Mary on his suit. (He made the speech anyway.) On another occasion, driving to a bank to plead for more money to keep Southwest alive, he accelerated too quickly in reverse and spilled a full cup of coffee on his clothes. (He still got the loan.) He could not bear to evict loiterers from his office. Ultimately his legal assistant, Colleen Barrett, made it her mission to impose a semblance of order on Kelleher’s life, taking control of his calendar, traveling with him, saying no to people to whom he would otherwise say yes. She once told him she intended to
fill a fogger with stain remover to spray him when he returned from lunch.

Southwest’s operation was born in similar chaos. The
airplane hangar at its home base in Dallas was so encrusted with grit that it took two days to get the doors open the first time. The company had to borrow a jack to change aircraft tires, and its mechanics had to pump the air by hand. When a wing flap was damaged in a collision with a bird, Southwest’s mechanics broke through a locked fence protecting a 737 owned by LTV Corporation, stole the corresponding flap, and installed it on their own plane.

Such resourcefulness came naturally to an upstart company whose culture consisted principally of the survival instinct. Employees were painfully aware that Braniff and Trans-Texas—the latter now having changed its name to Texas International—had done everything possible to keep the people at Southwest from ever starting their jobs. They knew that Herb Kelleher had been working largely gratis to keep the dream alive.

From the beginning Southwest had another competitor as well: the automobile. Texans thought nothing of jumping into their cars or pickups for the 250-mile drive from Houston to Dallas, say, or a drive of roughly the same distance from Dallas to San Antonio.
Southwest promoted its new service as an alternative to driving, showing a weary businessman yawning behind the wheel while another enjoyed a quick and relaxing flight aboard Southwest.

But therein resided another of Southwest’s many legal travails—the matter of which airport it should serve in its headquarters city. As the company was fighting for its life, the U.S. government was filling a cow pasture with the world’s largest expanse of concrete to create Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport—DFW, by its federal airport code. The nearly 18,000 acres of airport property was as big as the island of Manhattan—big enough, certainly, to provide a home for a new airline with just three jets. The problem for Southwest was that DFW, in the interest of perfect compromise, was under construction in the middle of nowhere, precisely equidistant from the far-flung metropolises of Dallas and Fort Worth. Southwest’s reason for being would evaporate at DFW; how could it ever coax people from their cars for a 45-minute flight when the trip to the airport took at least that long? No, thank you, Kelleher said. While all the other airlines moved to the gleaming new DFW, Southwest would remain at the broken-down Dallas Love Field, which, though obsolescent, was conveniently situated on the perimeter of downtown Dallas.

Once again the incumbent airlines saw an opportunity to torpedo Southwest. The municipal bonds used to finance the construction of DFW, it turned out, contained some fine print requiring all airlines to abandon Love Field. The Dallas City Council, reminded of these provisions, announced that Southwest would be thrown out and Love Field put in mothballs. Southwest could serve Dallas from DFW or not at all. The decision was a death sentence.

Kelleher stared at the fatal provision in the bond issue. Then it hit him: The language specified that all “certificated” airlines had to leave Love Field. The only meaningful certificates in the legal world of the airlines were those once handed out by the CAB, and Southwest had never gotten that piece of paper because it was never subject to CAB jurisdiction. Southwest was an airline—no point in fooling anyone there—but not a
certificated
airline. Kelleher went all the way through the court system again, and once again he won.

Remaining at Dallas Love Field was vital in another respect. It enabled Southwest Airlines to establish its marketing identity on a double
entendre, to position itself around the eminently marketable concept of “love” and everything that the word might imply to a good-old-boy Texas businessman in the early 1970s.

In-flight almonds were called “love bites.” The company’s stock symbol was LUV. Eventually the automatic ticket dispenser was called a “quickie machine.” But most conspicuously, flight attendants were made to dress in orange hot pants, clinging tops, white belts, and vinyl knee-high boots. “
Our love service means having things around to make you happy,” a Southwest flight attendant cheerfully promised in a television ad, “like me!”

Southwest offered no apologies for making sex so vital to its public image. This was, after all, 1971. To recruit flight attendants it ran advertisements seeking “
Raquel Welch look-alikes.” Another television commercial,
shot from behind and below, showed flight attendants in hot pants climbing a set of boarding stairs. A third promoted Southwest’s frequent service with a leggy flight attendant seated in an overstuffed chair asking, “How do we love you? Let us count the ways: eight-thirty … eleven o’clock … one-thirty … four o’clock …” And as her voice and image began to fade, an airplane slowly moved across the screen, its fuselage suggestively pointed into her lap. The approach was crude, but the passengers followed.

The Southwest flight attendants were part of a long tradition, for the first women ever to work in an aircraft cabin were hired as part of a marketing gimmick. In 1930, a time when the public was still largely terrified of flying, a nurse named Ellen Church was
denied a job as a pilot at Boeing Air Transport (within a year of Boeing’s affiliating with United Air Lines). But a shrewd official of the airline saw in her the potential for something else. “
It strikes me,” he wrote in a memo to his boss, “that there would be a great psychological punch to having young women stewardesses.… Imagine the national publicity we could get from it.” He recommended hiring nurses, because they were trained to attend to the frightened and infirm and would undoubtedly be sufficiently mature besides. “I am not suggesting at all the flapper type of girl, or one that would go haywire. You know nurses as well as I do, and you know that they are not given to flightiness.” Nurses, he pointed out, have seen enough of men “not to be inclined to chase them around the block at every opportunity.” His
four-page guidebook for flight attendants urged them to be “good girls.” It would be one of the last times that anyone would worry about the flight attendants making passes at the passengers rather than the other way around.

As the years progressed, the ostensible reasons for hiring only women as flight attendants ranged from their purported
comforting properties to the belief that they simply had a greater toleration for abuse. A report compiled at American in the early 1960s asserted that flight attendants married so quickly because “they learn a great deal of patience and tact in handling people—assets that prove invaluable in the
give-and-take of marriage.” The average stewardess kept her job only two years, perhaps a few months longer. The airlines could have reduced the turnover rate by employing married women, but they steadfastly maintained no-marriage rules into the 1960s and beyond. It was claimed that the rigors of family life presented too many restrictions on the go-anywhere, go-anytime career of the stewardess. But one of the real reasons for the no-marriage policy emerged in a class action suit against United that dragged on for decades. In a deposition a company executive admitted that the policy was partly intended to create the impression that in the abstract, at least, male passengers had a chance with any flight attendant.

The sexual chemistry in the crucible of the airplane cabin worked not only because all the flight attendants were female but also because virtually all the passengers were male. Wives sometimes accompanied men as passengers, but it was certainly rare for a woman to fly alone, on business, even in the 1960s and early 1970s. “If you’re interested in meeting a man en route, consider flying first class-at least one way,” an American promotional document read in 1972. “Since most businessmen, and very few women, travel this way, you’ll find it easier to see, and be seen.” United in 1970 was still flying a men-only flight between Chicago and New York, complete with free cigars and golf balls.

For the most part the airlines over the years made the sexual culture of the passenger cabin only an implicit part of their marketing. Though trained to serve and to display themselves as physical specimens, stewardesses were a protected and patronized lot. Once booze began flowing in airplane cabins, C. R. Smith decreed that on American
Airlines it would be given away, not sold. “Would you
want your daughter to be an airline hostess if she sold whiskey?” he asked. In 1957, when American opened its Stewardess College, it established rigorous curfews and installed an elaborate protective
alarm system around the perimeter of the school. Stewardess uniforms were proper—tailored, if anything, and a bit on the military side. Even at Continental Airlines, where Chairman Robert Six unabashedly
demanded comeliness in his flight attendants, the outfits were classy rather than sexy. In 1963 Six’s wife, the actress Audrey
Meadows of
Honeymooners
fame, was responsible for adding an elegant string of pearls to the uniform.