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.
Jackie and Pancho Barnes had several things in common: they both wished they were men and wanted nothing to do with women. They both idolized Chuck and lived vicariously through his accomplishments. Chuck was exactly who they wanted to be if they could only have been born as men. And, of course, they were both obsessed with flying.
I could also say they were both generous, but Pancho didn't expect anything in return. Jackie tried to buy me. She couldn't, but that didn't stop her from trying. She wanted Chuck. I don't mean romantically. Jackie was all power and ambition. She wanted Chuck's time to help her achieve her records, and she wanted the prestige of having him at her side at aviation conferences and in her big living room. Colonel Ascani once said to me, "Jackie's house is the only place where Chuck can't be outranked no matter who else is there." That was true. As far as Jackie was concerned, Chuck was always the star of her show. She loved to show him off and if she could've found a way to bottle and sell him, she'd have done it in a minute. So she gave me expensive clothes not only to keep me quiet, but to assuage the guilt she felt.
Pancho couldn't stand women and neither could Jackie. Jackie would get annoyed if any women's groups invited her to give a talk. "What do I have in common with a bunch of damned housewives?" she would complain. I got the message. I think they were both intimidated by good-looking women, although Jackie could be quite attractive when she was dressed to the nines. She was a powerfully built woman big-boned, with strong manly hands that could belong to a steamfitter. But she also had big beautiful brown eyes and blonde curly hair. Pancho was just a mess.
Jackie was always buying me but Pancho called a spade a spade. Her bar was little more than a desert whorehouse. She knew it and so did I. She respected me because, unlike a lot of other wives, I never made a fuss about my husband going there. If that was where Chuck wanted to be, fine by me. I never saw anyone at Pancho's that would make me feel threatened. Pancho was amoral, with the foulest mouth imaginable. Jackie at least tried to be a lady even if she wished she were a man. Pancho looked like a man and didn't give a damn, I guess.
Both of them put up with me because I was part of a package that included Chuck. The big difference between them was that Pancho was not particularly important in Chuck's life, but Jackie really was. She introduced him to the right people and gave him an opportunity to grow in ways that he never would have experienced if he hadn't known her. And she also did the same for me, through him. She'd literally tell him how to dress and act: put this tie on not that one; don't say this, do that. She taught him a tremendous amount, doing for Chuck what Floyd had once done for her. Chuck never would have accepted that from anybody else. And Chuck was the only person on earth who could tell off Jackie. Whenever she made a scene in a restaurant (which always happened when everything was going smoothly and everybody was having a good time, because she couldn't stand tranquillity) and began to complain loudly about this and that, Chuck would say, "Goddamn it, Jackie, shut up." And she would. Those two had a real hold over one another.
She was very demanding of Chuck and tried to keep him under her thumb. He'd get mad as a hornet at the things she sometimes did or said, but he usually did what she asked, whether it was dropping everything to go off with her to some aviation meeting or make a talk to a group she was entertaining. Bud Anderson would come back from playing golf with Jackie and say to Chuck, "That woman gives me fits, and I'm not in the front lines with her like YOU are." I think one reason why Chuck didn't say "That's it, I've had enough," is that it would have crushed her. We were like adopted family.
I couldn't believe people actually lived that way. Her living room was as large as the movie theater in my home town. She had had it enlarged to fit an enormous rug she bought that was in the Yugoslavian exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair. She and Floyd each had their own private secretary and personal maid. The ranch had its own switchboard and operator, and Jackie would stay in her bedroom until nearly noon, phoning friends all over the world. The place crawled with servants, who came and went in droves. The kitchen help were always in trouble because Jackie was a fabulous cook and never satisfied with their dishes. Maybe because of her terrible childhood, she had a cleanliness fetish, took three or four showers a day, and had her bed linen changed daily. She was a good golfer and expected those she invited down to play with her; Chuck, of course, was the exception. He didn't like the game and couldn't be bothered to learn. She loved to gamble, playing pennyante poker with the guys after dinner. Jack Ridley once played twenty-one with her and was amazed when she asked for another card with seventeen showing. "That gal adds by tapping her fingers," Jack laughed. And she could drink most of the guys under the table. She had a real wooden leg; her drink was Beefeaters on the rocks.
Everyone who came down to the ranch had to put up with her in some way. No one escaped. The Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, had to go out with her while she showed off her new Lincoln. Jackie loved to drive fast and roared off doing seventy-five over undulating hills. The car cracked down so hard that it broke the shock absorbers. Symington got out and walked back to the ranch.
"I'll never get in a car with that woman again," he said.
At first I was very intimidated by these lush surroundings and by Jackie, who charged around like a bull moose in heat. But gradually I got used to it-and her. When Chuck helped her get her speed record, she came out to Edwards and moved into our house. I moved out with the children, down to the ranch, and Chuck moved into the bachelor officers' quarters on base. I spent hours cleaning my house waxed all the floors, and she sat in there and had her maid scrape off all the wax because she was afraid that Floyd would slip on it. I was so mad I could spit. Susie came down with chicken pox, and Jackie wanted to fumigate my place. I said to her, "No way. That darned stuff will turn my drapes yellow." She was furious. "Goddamn it if I get sick now I'll lose everything and I have all this money invested in this project." I told her, "Oh, Jackie quit worrying. You probably had the chicken pox and if you didn't, you'll just fly with it as well as you would without it. Forget about it." I finally convinced her after she had fifteen doctors give her the same opinion.
She didn't get chicken pox, but she sure got chickens. She and Chuck were making a low-altitude practice run out over the desert and accidentally came over a farmer's poultry shed about ten feet off the deck, and a couple of thousand broilers panicked and stampeded into a wire fence. Jackie had to pay a few thousand in damages for all the dead birds.