Sex and the Stewardess

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.