Yeager: An Autobiography

JACKIE

In May 1953, a pilot named Jacqueline Cochran set a new world speed record of 652 mph on a one-hundred-kilometer course at Edwards, flying a Canadian-built Sabre. Jackie's record was my project. I was her teacher and chase pilot.

I first met her in 1947, not long after I broke the sound barrier, in Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington's office. She was a tall, blonde woman in her forties. "I'm Jackie Cochran," she said, pumping my hand. "Great job, Captain Yeager. We're all proud of you." She invited me to lunch, acting as if I should know exactly who she was, and caused an uproar just entering the posh Washington restaurant. The owner began bowing and scraping, and the waiters went flying. During the meal she sent back every other course, complaining loudly, and even marched into the kitchen to give the chef hell.

In between pumping me for all the details of my X-1 flights, I learned a little about who she was. She was a honcho on several important aviation boards and committees and was a famous aviatrix before the war, winner of the Bendix air races, she had been a close friend of Amelia Earhart's. During the war she was a colonel, in charge of the WASPs, the Women's Air Force Service Pilots, who ferried B-17 bombers to England. Hell, she knew everybody and bounced all over the world: on VE Day, she was one of the first Americans to get down inside Hitler's bunker in Berlin, and came away with a gold doorknob off his bathroom by trading for it with a Russian soldier for a pack of Lucky Strikes. On VJ Day she was in Tokyo, playing poker with a couple of generals on MacArthur's staff and conned her way on board the battleship Missouri to watch the surrender ceremonies. As I would learn more than once over the next couple of decades, when Jackie Cochran set her mind to do something, she was a damned Sherman tank at full steam.

Hap Arnold loved her scrambled eggs and Tooev Spaatz was a drinking buddy. She was as nuts about flying as I was. "If I were a man," she said, "I would've been a war ace like you. I'm a damned good pilot. All these generals would be pounding on my door instead of the other way around. Being a woman I need all the clout I can get." But clout was no problem for Jackie. Her husband was Floyd Odlum, who owned General Dynamics, the Atlas Corporation, RKO, and a bunch of other companies.

We liked each other right off the bat. I could talk flying with her as if she were a regular at Pancho's. She knew airplanes and said flat out that flying was the most important thing in her life. She was tough and bossy and used to getting her own way, but I figured that's how rich people behaved. When we parted that day she said, "Let's stay in touch." We sure did that. Glennis and I became Jackie and Floyd's closest friends. It was a friendship that lasted more than twenty-five years, until their deaths. I was the executor of Floyd's estate. They treated me like an adopted son. I flew around the world with Jackie, and she was right-she was a damned good pilot one of the best. And I'm sure the reason she latched onto me was because for Jackie, nothing but the best would do, and she thought I was the best pilot in the Air Force. Hell, she'd say that to anybody, anytime. She grabbed Bud Anderson on the golf course one day and said, "Andy, isn't Chuck the best pilot you've ever seen?" And Andy said, "Yeah, except when I shave."

Jackie played a big role in my life, and I in hers. It was Jackie who got the Air Force to send that two-star general to examine Glennis when she was so sick. She did it by marching on General Vandenberg the Chief of Staff, and telling him what a disgrace it was that the wife of his X-1A pilot was desperately ill and being neglected. Floyd, who was crippled from arthritis, heard that the doctors thought Glennis had rheumatoid arthritis, and made arrangements for her to receive an exotic drug from the pituitary glands of hogs that cost three thousand dollars a shot, but it was contra-indicated during pregnancy. It was Jackie who decided that I deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor and went to work lobbying everyone from the President on down until I got it. Jackie usually got what she wanted, and she wanted those high speed records. I helped her get them.

I've heard people claim that Jackie got me my general's star. That just isn't so, but I have no doubt that she tried. I met two sitting presidents in her living room, Eisenhower and Johnson. Any Air Force brass that Jackie didn't know on a first-name basis just wasn't worth knowing. Wherever she traveled overseas, she was treated like a visiting head of state. Between her powerful personality and Floyd's power as an industrialist, doors flew open for her. His name and connections were all Jackie needed to blast her way in where she wanted to go, whether it was wild boar hunting in Spain with General Franco or having tea with the queen of Holland or a private audience with the pope. She was always roaring off somewhere, often flying herself in her own Lodestar, with her retinue of private secretary, maid, and hairdresser. If it was a long trip and she needed a good copilot, she'd pull the right strings and get me to go with her. She even got me excused from classes at the War College, something that had never been done before, so that I could attend an international aviation conference and help negotiate some rules regarding world speed and altitude records with the Russians.

There weren't many like Jackie back in Hamlin, for sure. I never met anyone like her, man or woman. She came on like a human steamroller, and she'd take over your life if you let her. She was forever telling me how to talk and act, what tie to wear, what pants and jacket, what speeches to give and which to refuse. Hell, she would do that with presidents. She'd read something in the papers about the Air Force or space program that she didn't like and pick up the telephone to call the White House. One time she didn't get through to Johnson. He called her back, but she told Floyd to tell LBJ she was washing her hair and call back later. Floyd wanted to strangle her, but LBJ did call back.

He also paid a visit to her ranch at Indio. Jackie fed the President lunch; General Eisenhower and myself were also invited. Johnson said to her, "Hey, Jackie, when are you gonna show me that golf course you're always bragging on?" She said, "Right now. Come on, we don t need dessert, we're both fat enough." And she grabbed him and hustled him into her car and took off. Man, General Eisenhower was furious at her. When she got back, he took her aside and blasted her. "Damn it, Jackie, you should know better than that. A civilian never drives a President. My God, what if there was an accident?" Jackie said, "Well, then Lyndon should've said something."

General Eisenhower was almost like family. Floyd and Jackie were his earliest supporters for the presidency, and he used their guest cottage as his office to write his memoirs. The first time she had him over for dinner as President, the White House called to say that Mamie Eisenhower expected to be asked to bring along some guests of her own. Jackie said, "Why, of course." But she turned purple when Mamie's guest list arrived showing thirty names.

For Glennis and me, Jackie's world was something we could never have even imagined. The first time we were invited down to the Cochran-Odlum Ranch was in 1950; it was a three-hour drive from Edwards, about twenty-five miles from Palm Springs driving desert all the way, but the minute we drove through those big gates, it was like entering the Garden of Eden. Thick groves of tangerine and grapefruit trees lined both sides of the driveway, and the perfume from those blossoms made your head swim. Jackie bragged that during spring, she could fly over her ranch at night and smell those blossoms a mile up. I don't doubt it. They owned a thousand acres, and it was all green grass, shade trees, a manmade pond, date-bearing palm trees, oleander and jacaranda, a private nine-hole golf course, a skeet range, stables for a dozen Arabian horses, tennis courts and an Olympic-size swimming pool. That first visit we two desert rats were in a state of shock. We stayed in guest house number one right next to the main house, a six-room cottage, which was always reserved for General Eisenhower. I said to Glennis, "This ain't no cabin up a holler."

Jackie Cochran didn't own a pair of shoes until she was eight years old. Compared to what she suffered as a child in rural Florida, I was raised like a little country gentleman. She never knew her real parents or why she was given away. The people who raised her lived in a shack without power or running water. As a little kid she had to forage in the woods for food to keep from starving to death. She had no education, no affection, no nothing. She was kept filthy dirty, her only clothes an old four sack. Who knows all the things that happened to her growing up; she didn't talk about it much. But when she married Floyd in 1934, she hired a private detective to go back to Florida and find out who her parents were. She figured Floyd had a right to know about her heredity. The detective gave her a written report in a sealed envelope, which Floyd returned to her unopened. "It's still unopened," she told me, "sitting in my vault unread all these years." It was still there when she died in 1980, and was burned unopened.

Jackie was tough as nails. She learned how to become a hairdresser, got out of Florida, and finally landed in New York. She got into the cosmetics business and started her own company. She became very successful, got interested in flying, and her boyfriend at the time, named Mickey Rosen, who stayed close to her all her life, taught her how to read and write, and tutored her so that she could take her exam for her pilot's license orally, rather than in writing, because writing was a real struggle. She bought an airplane, a Waco, and entered air race competitions. Then she met Floyd, the son of a Methodist minister from Ohio, who had started out as a shoe salesman and had built himself a business empire. Floyd was a real gentleman, a tremendous human being, and he polished Jackie. Until he got clobbered by arthritis, he flew with her to all the air races. By the time we met them, Floyd was confined to a wheelchair, always in terrible pain, and spent a lot of time in the big outdoor pool that was kept heated to ninety degrees.

Over the years, Glennis and I came to consider that ranch as a second home, but, man, those first weekend visits we spent most of the time just pinching ourselves. It was the garden spot of the world with an army of servants, and it was just unbelievable for us to be there. I'd get up real early and go down to the stables. Glennis was out on that golf course until sunset. I loved shooting skeet, and Floyd had the finest collection of guns I'd ever seen. In the evening, we'd dress and go up to the main house for cocktails and a wonderful dinner party. You never knew who you might meet: wheels from all over the world. Dr. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, might be seated on my right and Bob Hope on my left. Jackie knew how to collect interesting people, and in her house we met African big-game hunters, dukes and duchesses, a Las Vegas casino owner, doctors, writers, movie stars, adventurers-even a Nevada sheriff. But what she liked most of all was to invite down a bunch of us test pilots from Edwards and talk flying.

She took Glennis and the other wives into her room and threw open her clothes closet and told them to help themselves to her wardrobe. She'd go over to the spring fashion show in Paris and clean out Christian Dior, come back with twenty thousand dollars in dresses, and give Glennis the clothes the models had worn. She drooled over Glennis's slim figure, really a perfect model's figure, and loved to see her wearing those expensive fashions. She gave her furs and jewels, too. She was extremely generous that way. So was Floyd. He'd hire a fleet of taxis to take all of us into Palm Springs and spend Saturday night as his guests at some posh private club.

For us military pilots at Edwards, being invited down to Jackie's was a big, big deal. She really liked Col. Fred Ascani. Jackie was a devout Catholic and so was Colonel Fred, but she gave him hell for having eight kids. They'd argue birth control all the time. She liked Jack and Nell Ridley and Pete Everest and his wife, Avis. General Boyd was a special favorite. She usually invited down the old man as her only guest. But Jackie was damned fussy about everything, including her guest list, and really put me and Glennis on the spot by asking our advice about the pilots she should invite down. But there were some guys, like Dick Frost, for instance, who politely turned down her invitation because they found her too overbearing and wanted nothing to do with her. Jackie was a tiger. She expected to get her own way in everything, and, if you ever crossed her, you'd better duck. I remember the first time I met General Eisenhower there, we sat down after dinner and talked together for more than an hour. Hell, he remembered everything about me: how I had gone to him during the war and asked to stay with my squadron, and he even recalled the article in Stars and Stripes when I had shot down five Germans. He laughed and said, "How could I forget anybody who refused to go home?" Jackie couldn't stand it any more and came over to where we were seated. "General, do you realize what a famous pilot you're talking to?" she smiled. Well, the General really laid it on with a damned trowel. He said, "I've known Chuck more than twenty years. We go back together to since the war." Later, Jackie was really sizzling. She said to me, "How could you let me play the fool? Why didn't you tell me you knew General Eisenhower from day one?" I said, "Hell, you never asked." I thought she was going to punch me. She turned her back and marched out, slamming the door nearly off its hinges and didn't talk to me again for a couple of days.

General Eisenhower presented me with the Harmon Trophy at the White House in the spring of 1954 for my flight in the X-1A, and we got to know each other quite well at Jackie's place. One time I brought down a friend of mine named Delbert Moses, a big raw-boned Texan, who was a neighbor. Delbert was an electrician, a very nice and quiet guy who seldom said a word. Floyd had planted what he called "Hell's Half-Acre"-lemons that were sweet, oranges that were sour, all kinds of oddball fruits-and I took ol' Delbert over to show it to him. We began to pick some tangerines that were sour as lemons to take hack to our friends. We were talking about a hundred feet from General Eisenhower's study, where he was working on his memoirs. The next moment, he was right on us, waving a walking stick. "What are you two doing here?" He thought we were thieves stealing fruit. Then he saw me and smiled. "Oh, it's you, Chuck," and invited both of us over to his study for a cup of coffee. Delbert was really flabbergasted.

Jackie was Floyd's hobby. Going for speed records cost a fortune, but he happily paid the bills, and kept pushing her to try for more. She'd say to him, "But I'm not sure I can do this even with Chuck helping me." And he'd tell her, "Of course you can and I expect you to do it." He was damned proud of her, and really got a kick out of her. Sometimes she could be so outrageous that you just had to laugh. She got all over me about learning to play golf. I said, "No way." God, she hounded me to at least go on the course with her. She and Floyd had opened it to the townspeople of Indio, charging them five bucks to play nine holes. One day I did go out with her, and there were a bunch of people playing ahead. Jackie just said, "Coming through, coming through." One guy didn't recognize her and said, "The hell you are. What gives you the right?" Jackie got hot. "You son of a bitch, get your fat ass off my golf course and never come back." Man, that was it for me.

I'd come back from a trip with her, flop down and sigh, and tell Glennis, "Never again. Damn it, never again." Well, then she would have my mother down and make a big fuss over her, or when I was out of the country, have Glennis and the kids stay for a week. She even flew them back to West Virginia in her Lodestar for a surprise visit with my parents. If one of our kids got sick, she wanted to send for a specialist. Floyd was the same; they just couldn't do enough for us. Jackie smoked, but she would get annoyed if other people smoked around her. That was how she was. But she was a remarkable person and I respected the hell out of her for how much she had accomplished and how far she had come. She was a pain at times, but I figured she had earned that right. Jackie had paid her dues in spades.

In the spring of 1953, when I was preparing for my flights in the X-1A, Jackie approached General Vandenberg about trying to set speed records in an F-86. She would use a Canadian-built Sabre, built by Floyd's company, which had more thrust than the American jets, but, being a civilian, she needed special permission to use Air Force facilities and equipment. During a trip out to Edwards, General Vandenberg discussed Jackie's request with General Boyd, who knew her well and admired her. When the old man and I had been to France testing the French airplanes, Jackie happened to be in Paris, and he had taken her up in a two-place jet fighter, the first time she had flown over 600 mph. So, General Vandenberg approved Jackie's request, and the old man asked Colonel Ascani to make all the arrangements, which was ironic because Colonel Ascani then owned the existing low-altitude speed record. Anyway, he asked me to be Jackie's instructor on the F-86.

It was summer on the desert, and in order to get smooth air for precision flying, we had to fly early in the morning. That first day, I set us up for a six A.M. takeoff and told her she had to be there at five to get briefed on the flight, get her G suit on and so forth, in order to start engines at six. I was there at a quarter to five. At five, no Jackie. Six, no Jackie. Six-fifteen rolled around and she came bouncing in. I shut the door to the office we were using and sat her down. I said, "Look, I want to tell you something. If you want to fly this program, you're gonna be here on time. You've got fifteen people out here working at four in the morning to pre-flight your airplane and get your gear ready, while you, a single pilot, can't get here on time. Look at all the man-hours you've already wasted for the Air Force, not to mention the guys who are busting their tails for you. If you want this program, you're gonna be here when you're scheduled to be here." From then on we had no more problems. If I said be here at five, she was.

She had no jet experience and was a little apprehensive. I had checked her out in the airplane's systems the day before, teaching her the cockpit, the landing gear handle, the flaps and the throttle, the techniques for flying the Sabre-but only what she needed to know, the basics. I would be right with her on these flights and could analyze any problem that came up and tell her what to do. I didn't want to get her muddled by throwing everything at her all at once, and it made it a lot easier for her. The big thing I told her over and over: "If I tell you to do something, you do it immediately and don't ask why."

We lined up both airplanes for that first takeoff. I climbed up onto her wing and watched her start up, then ran over to my airplane and started up. We both closed our canopies, and I checked and saw that she had her flaps set for takeoff. I spoke to her on the radio. She was a little scared. "Don't get too close," she said. "Forget about me," I told her. "I'm used to this. This way I can watch you and see if you do anything you shouldn't." I remembered setting her air conditioner selector switch down to the cool position because the sun was up and blazing against her canopy. So, we took off together and about the time she broke ground, she flipped the gear handle and the gear came up. She radioed, "I've never been so hot in my life. This cockpit is burning me alive." I moved in real close to where our wings were overlapping and I could see the corners of her flying suit rippling from blowing air. The Sabre was equipped with a powerful canopy defroster that bled air right off the engine compressor and it was really hot at low altitude and full power. I could also see her hand on the throttle. I said, "Take your hand off the throttle, move it back six or eight inches. Okay. Now, raise it up a little higher and move it outboard." I was watching her hand and I could see the lever for the defroster control. Somebody had accidentally hit it when she got in the cockpit and turned it on. I told her to move back the lever. She did. Her flying suit stopped rippling and she cooled down. We flew for a while. She was always excellent at landing airplanes; nothing bothered her. After she landed, I debriefed her. She bitched and moaned about that hot cockpit.

I said, "You've got to get used to things like that. That happens in flying."

We had maybe a half-dozen of these orientation flights. Finally, General Doolittle called me and asked me to fly down to Jackie's ranch and meet with him privately. She was staying in my place at Edwards. General Doolittle was a close friend of hers, and he really put me on the spot by asking me point blank whether I thought Jackie could keep from busting her ass in a Sabre and fly proficiently to set records. "The Chief of Staff is concerned about this," he said. "The last thing we want is a catastrophe involving Jackie Cochran. If you think she can go through with this, we'll back her. If you think she can't, just say the word and we'll back off. But know this, Chuck. If you say she can, the monkey is on your back to keep her from getting hurt." I told him, "General, she's a good pilot with a tremendous background of experience in flying. She can fly practically anything, and I really think she can do this program."

So we went for it. She had a lot of confidence in me, but occasionally other pilots like Pete Everest and Tom Curtis flew chase for her, and she would be upset because I knew better than they what her capability was. Jackie hated the smell of sweat and kerosene inside the cockpit and on her parachute, so every time she flew, she carried a perfume spray. Everv airplane she flew in smelled like a French whorehouse. For a year after Jackie went through there, pilots could still smell her perfume aboard those Sabres she flew.

After six or so flights in the Sabre, I figured she knew it well enough, so I took her up to 45,000 feet and told her to push her nose straight down. We dove together, wing to wing, kept it wide open and made a tremendous sonic boom above Edwards. She became the first woman to fly faster than sound, and forever after, she loved to brag that she and I were the first and probably the last man and woman team to break Mach 1 together. Then we began practicing for the three-kilometer run. To get the maximum true speed out of the Sabre we had to fly when it was as hot as possible because the hotter the air, the higher the true speed, which is many miles an hour faster than on a cool day. But hot air means turbulence. One boiling afternoon we were about a hundred feet off the deck going at .92 Mach and the air was shaking our airplanes like a cocktail mixer. Suddenly I saw fuel gushing out of her wing and the side of her fuselage. I told her "Hey, you've got a little problem. Shut off your throttle-stop cock it. Turn off your engine. Get your nose up." She obeyed immediately. But her fuel was still gushing out back. Meanwhile, I got on the radio used another channel, and told tower to get the fire trucks out because we had a bad fuel leak. They scrambled. I told her, "Okay, start a gradual left turn and the minute the airspeed gets below 200 knots get your landing gear down." She did. I was right beside her. I said, "Okay, drop the nose. Keep your airspeed up to 150." She did it perfectly and she lined up for a lakebed landing. Man, I got her out of that thing the minute we landed.

The next day Jackie broke the speed record. We came back down, and the official judges verified the data from the special recording devices, and, I swear it was worth the effort just seeing the expression on that woman's face. She was very quiet, really surprised me. "Thank you, Major Yeager," she said, and she hugged me. The first person she heard from was Colonel Ascani, who held the previous record and sent her a warm letter of congratulations. We celebrated her achievement at the officers' club at Edwards. Jackie was so thrilled that she could hardly speak. But the person wearing the biggest smile was Floyd. Man, he practically busted with pride. I had taken him up a few days before in a two-seat jet trainer, after driving him in from the house in my Model A. He was so frail that there was no way to get a parachute on him, but I flew nice and level, and he thoroughly enjoyed going around the course we had laid out for Jackie. Privately, he thanked me for helping Jackie get through the program successfully. I told him, "It's her mark, Floyd, she did it herself." And that was true, even though some of the pilots at Edwards thought I had pulled her around the course like a dog on a leash. Bull. I chased her. That's all.

Five years later, she would prove how good she was. This time she would attempt new speed records in the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a Mach 2 airplane that plenty of experienced fighter pilots were scared of. And she would set records that still stand. And later that same year, she and I would fly to Russia together and have more adventures in three weeks than most people have in a lifetime. But those stories are for a later chapter. Jackie Cochran was a truly extraordinary person.