Overall, then, the dollars and cents of selling stewardesses as sexual icons broke down this way: domestic airlines facing more competition on their most lucrative routes hired stewardesses and were more likely to use them in their marketing. They did so even though the company might lose much of their thousand-dollar start-up investment in a stewardess if she married early. But both Eastern and Pan Am, which had a certain degree of protection from competition, chose the less fetishized stewards, thereby securing a flight attendant corps that would remain on the job longer than the average stewardess. The trade-off was that stewards’ customer appeal was more restricted to niche markets, including some travelers who preferred male employees and others—both female and male—who found stewards sexually desirable.
As to Eastern’s steward corps itself, two somewhat ironic caveats warrant attention. First, these stewards owed their jobs to a male chauvinist executive who was responding to the technological innovation of the DC-3 in a way that he felt would reinforce the patriarchal order of U.S. society, placing men in workplaces that were deemed complex and hierarchical. And second, the airline willingly surrendered the opportunity to sell sex in its most obvious and widespread form: by commodifying female bodies for the sake of heterosexual men. Rickenbacker’s public statements basically presumed that his steward corps would thereby stand out as asexual when compared to his domestic competitors like United, Delta, and American, who used stewardesses on their flights.
The reality of Eastern’s stewards was, however, quite a bit different. Indeed, these men embodied even more of the “gay” traits seen in Pan Am’s previous “Rodney” campaign, and the airline promoted them as men who remained intriguingly desirable, especially to female customers, whom the airline hoped to attract. Eastern’s most adventurous attempts to eroticize stewards involved their vibrant uniform design, which stood in marked contrast to the more conservative attire worn by stewardesses. Stewardess uniforms of the 1930s were very different from their later manifestations in the 1960s, when they became scanty, bright, form-fitting, fashionable outfits that highlighted the woman’s sexual appeal. Instead, the uniforms of United’s first stewardesses and all other female uniforms from the decade obscured their form. United commissioned a traditional long skirt coupled with a blazer and a knee-length cape for cold weather. The material was cut generously to conceal the woman’s body under layers of drab gray fabric.
Meanwhile, the steward uniforms at Eastern had the opposite effect, accentuating the man’s broad shoulders and tight waist (figure 3). Stewards looked thin and muscular, as the jacket’s wide shoulders tapered off to a more compact lower torso. The pants, starting tight on the waist, then continued this sleek, ever-slimming line all the way down to the ankles. Even the overlap of the coat and the pants was skin-tight. The overall effect was not just to accentuate the steward’s form but also to ensconce him in the most modern and sophisticated style of the day: streamlined design, which celebrated aerodynamic features.44 It was surely more than a coincidence that these uniforms accomplished the same sort of tight body-sculpting on the steward as the DC-3’s sleek chrome exterior and integrated wings accomplished on the aircraft’s form. Eastern’s stewards, far more than stewardesses of the day, were at the pinnacle of modern style.
The steward’s streamlined uniform, with its inspiration from other service uniforms found in upper-class urban society (bellhops, doormen, elevator attendants, and ship stewards), very much belonged to the elite “gay” world. And like its counterparts in these other service professions, the Eastern uniform drew attention for its use of color just as much as its cutting-edge form. After all, it was a dazzling color burst in the otherwise stark airplane cabin. The steward’s white coat already stood out, but the designers took it one step further, accenting the lapel and sleeves with red zigzag piping. The resulting ensemble contrasted sharply with most other forms of professional dress. However, as designer Gilbert Rohde suggested in 1939, this use of color was in the avant-garde of men’s fashion: “No longer does [the man of the future] submerge his personality and stifle his imagination in the monotony of the twentieth-century business suit. He, too, is gay, colourful, and different.... In the nineteenth century, something happened in our Western World, and he gave up his gay dress without a struggle. In the twenty-first century, the strange custom of dressing like a monk will have disappeared.”45
FIGURE 3. “Fashion Preview” for Eastern steward uniform. Great Silver Fleet News, November 1936, 8. Courtesy Eastern Air Lines.
Eastern bought into this futuristic idea that “gayness” needed a space in men’s fashion. Interestingly, however, it limited its uniform makeover to stewards, not the more traditionally manly pilot corps. Pilots, after all, derived their manliness from technical prowess and, quite often, a military or barnstorming background, not a career devoted to service and style. The pilots were shrouded in drab navy blue military-style suits, not streamlined to show off their bodies.
In their public relations materials, Eastern marketed their stewards with the same techniques that one might expect of female stars in the pages of Vogue. The airline’s public relations magazine the Great Silver Fleet News introduced the new uniforms in November 1936 under the headline “Fashion Preview.”46 Below the photo of the steward modeling his uniform came a detailed piece-by-piece description of the outfit. The description itself was more terse than one might expect of an analysis of women’s clothes: the jacket, for example, was efficiently described as “a custom-built white jacket with smart red piping and lettering.” Yet the overall effect was for readers to view the steward as a fashion model whose clothes and looks they could scrutinize and enjoy.
Follow-up stories had a similar emphasis; a month after the uniform’s unveiling, an Eastern steward “led the style parade in his jaunty uniform at the 10th Anniversary Fashion Show.”47 It seems strikingly unusual that a man would “lead a style parade” at a major fashion show, especially as these were heavily female-dominated events, usually occurring in department store parlors and restaurants where middle-class women spent their days.48 A decade later, thousands of men would lead parades, but these would be in honor of their military valor in the war, not their looks and clothing.
Another glamorous sighting in the steward’s first year included a night of publicity at the elite Rainbow Room nightclub atop New York’s Radio City, where a steward awarded a lucky attendee a free flight to Washington, D.C. The Rainbow Room, with its commanding views of the city and bold use of color and streamline motifs, typified the cosmopolitanism and over-the-top style of the 1930s upper-class “gay” nightlife. The club itself was not particularly known for being sexually libertine, attracting instead an upper-crust crowd looking for a night of fun in opulent surroundings with good music and ample alcohol. That said, historian George Chauncey identifies it as one of several new upper-class clubs opening at the time that “were heavily—but covertly—patronized by gay men and lesbians.”49
FIGURE 4. A suggestively playful photo and blurb employing homosexual innuendo in Eastern’s company magazine. Great Silver Fleet News, June 1937, 3. Courtesy Eastern Air Lines.
Eastern’s description of the steward’s visit to the Rainbow Room played quite flirtatiously with how its attractive and fashionable stewards were perceived in this “gay” nightlife environment, even potentially suggesting male-male eroticism (figure 4). The company’s magazine