She Loved a Fast Taxi Down a Dirt Strip

Pancho Barnes was a Southern California original. Born to privilege in Pasadena, she shed the conventions of early 20th century society to live life for one purpose: enjoyment. She hunted adventure in Mexico, learned to fly when few women dared, feuded with Howard Hughes, tried to seduce the actor who played the Cisco Kid, raced Amelia Earhart across the country, outdrank Hollywood legends and, you may remember from the book and movie “The Right Stuff,” ran the raucous “Happy Bottom Riding Club,” her guest ranch and bar near Edwards Air Force Base. Over the years, she played with and hosted giants of aviation and the big screen. Until her death in 1974, her racy stories, off-color jokes and enormous laugh captivated everyone around her.

The following is an excerpt from “The Happy Bottom Riding Club, The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes,” to be published by Random House late this month. Barnes, not yet 27, has split with her husband, C. Rankin Barnes, an Episcopal minister, and left their San Marino estate for a seven-month journey to Mexico, fleeing bandits and revolutionaries, traveling by tramp steamer, burro and on foot before hitchhiking back to California. Now she wants to learn to fly.

In the late spring of 1927, while Pancho was riding a burro across the Sierra Madre, another audacious explorer, a traveler of a different sort, was piloting a monoplane across the Atlantic. When Charles Augustus Lindbergh completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight in history on May 21, he became not just a hero, not just an immediate celebrity, not just an instant legend, but the most famous human being on earth. Afterward, when he crisscrossed the United States on a Guggenheim-funded tour to promote aviation, stopping at countless cities and towns along the way, thousands and thousands of people came to pay homage to the future.

The next spring, a tall, slender, sandy-haired woman who looked enough like Lindbergh to be his sister flew from Newfoundland to Wales in 20 hours and 40 minutes. Although she was a licensed pilot, Amelia Earhart went as a passenger on that flight, a stunt orchestrated by her husband-to-be, the New York publisher G.P. Putnam. Shrewdly, he labeled her “Lady Lindy” and set in motion a public relations juggernaut that made her Lindbergh’s equal on the pages of the daily newspapers, if not also in the skies.

She may have been aviation’s first bona fide national heroine, but Earhart--who was known simply by her initials, A.E.--was hardly the first or the best of the female fliers. More than a decade before A.E. went along for the famous transatlantic ride, a young stunt pilot named Ruth Law flew nonstop solo from Chicago to New York. Before her, there was San Francisco journalist Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to receive a pilot’s license (in 1911), who flew the English Channel, and her friend Mathilde Moisant, the second licensed woman, a fearless pilot who set altitude records, put on exhibitions throughout Mexico and narrowly escaped death on more than one occasion. There was “Queen Bess”--Bessie Coleman--the first African American woman aviator, licensed two years before A.E., who toured the South as a flying daredevil.

There were others, too, wing-walkers and parachutists, barnstormers and record-breakers both female and male, who flew their tiny open-cockpit planes in the years immediately before and after the First World War. But it was not until Lindbergh and Earhart in the late 1920s that America became plane crazy. Long Island, especially Roosevelt Field, was one center of activity. So was Dayton, Ohio, hometown of the Wright brothers. In the West, aviators were drawn to Southern California, with its open land and clear skies. There, by the middle 1920s, dozens and dozens of little airfields were being carved from farmlands and orchards with thousand-foot dirt runways and shacks for hangars: Arcadia, Alhambra, Baldwin Park, Culver City, Crawford out in Venice, Rogers at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax, Martin Brothers in Santa Ana. Metropolitan in Van Nuys was the biggest, 80 acres surrounded by chicken farms, where the owner raised banana squash between the runways. Kids rode their bikes out to the airstrips after school to gawk at the World War I Jennies and the pilots in their greasy overalls hunkered down in the shade under the wings. Crowds came out on the weekends to see the pilots loop and spin and dive. Daredevils and would-be record-breakers came from all over the country to fly the skies of Southern California. A.E. said the flying conditions in and around Los Angeles were the best she’d found anywhere. Ruth Elder, a fiercely competitive long-distance flier, thought Los Angeles was “the aviation center of America.” Bobbi Trout, a local girl who set out to break every record she could, said of Southern California: “The flyer learns here as nowhere else the meaning of the joy of flying.”

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In the spring of 1928, Pancho was ready for a new adventure. The Mexican trip had been wonderful, exciting, memorable. She continued to regale her friends with her tales of adventure, embroidering them in the telling, conscious of herself as the main character in a dramatic narrative she could shape and reshape. She started up her parties again in the newly redecorated San Marino mansion. She rode her horses. But she was bored.

Her cousin Dean Banks had just started taking flying lessons at an old balloon field in nearby Arcadia and asked her if she wanted to come along. Equally interested in new adventures, and in not allowing Dean to get too much ahead of her in anything, she readily agreed. Although she had not considered the idea of taking flying lessons before that moment, now, suddenly, it seemed like the best idea in the world.

The airfield wasn’t much, a narrow dirt strip with two ancient, cavernous balloon hangars, a mooring mast and a few pilots tending to World War I vintage planes. Dean introduced her to Ben Caitlin, his teacher, who had learned to fly in France during the war. He stared at her. Her hair was still cut short, as it had been in Mexico, and she was wearing old riding clothes. Her arms and shoulders were hard and visibly muscled, like a man’s.

“So you want to learn how to fly?” he said. He made his living giving flying lessons, but women were not his favorite pupils.

“Yes,” she said.

“Now, when is it you wanted to start learning?” he asked.

Pancho didn’t hesitate. “Well, right now is OK,” she said.

Caitlin reached into the front cockpit of one of the planes, grabbed a leather helmet and a pair of goggles and tossed them to her. Moments later, they were airborne, Pancho strapped in up front, Caitlin at the controls in back. She had been in an airplane once before, years ago. When her mother was still alive, the family had taken a scenic boat trip to Catalina Island. You could see the island from Grandmother Dobbins’ house up on the cliff above Laguna Beach. The water was rough that day, the crossing uncomfortable, and Pancho, as seasick as she would ever be, refused to get back on the boat to go to the mainland. She spotted a tiny plane that had just landed with a passenger, ran over and chartered it for a quick, uneventful return flight.

Her first flight with Ben Caitlin that spring morning was uneventful, too. She liked the fast taxi down the dirt strip, dust flying everywhere, and she liked suddenly, effortlessly being lifted above it all, the engine loud in her ears, the wind whipping at her face. But before she had a chance to feel airborne, they were down again and Ben was jumping out of the cockpit. They agreed to another, longer flight the next day.

The morning was bright and clear. Ben took the little plane up to a thousand feet, then banked it sharply to the right, dipping the wing straight down. The horizon disappeared; the earth tilted to meet them. Pancho felt her body being pulled, its weight straining against the seat straps. Ben straightened their course, but before Pancho could get her bearings, he pointed the nose up and looped the plane in a long, slow outside circle, turning the world upside down. They flew belly-up for what seemed a long moment. When they were right side up again, Ben rolled the plane, wing over wing, first to the right, then to the left, until Pancho didn’t know what was earth and what was sky anymore. He climbed again, put the plane into a stall and spun it straight down in a tight spiral. The earth came at them, spinning like a platter. In a few hundred feet, the nose of the plane would bore a hole in the ground. At what looked like the last possible moment, Ben pulled out of it, straightened the plane and landed on the little airstrip.

When they had taxied to a stop, he yelled up to her, grinning, “Still want to learn how to fly?” He had, in aviation parlance, “wrung her out good.” He expected to see her pale and shaken, queasy, finished with flying. But there she sat, grinning back, her face flushed, her eyes a little wild, riding the last wave of an adrenaline rush so exquisite that it was almost painful to feel it ebb away.

“Hell, yes, I want to learn how to fly,” she told him.

He shook his head, trying to figure her out. “I suppose I’ll have to teach you,” he said. “But I have to tell you, I’ve had 33 women students and not a single one of them has ever soloed.”

Pancho came to the airfield several times a week from then on. Ben charged her $5 for a 15-minute lesson. They wore no parachutes because Ben couldn’t afford them. In the cockpit, there wasn’t much to learn. The only instrument was an oil gauge. Pilots looked over the side to judge altitude. They dipped a string in the gas tank to gauge fuel level. They hung a key chain from the control board to show if they were flying straight. In the cockpit, life was simple: stick and rudder, up and back, left and right. The planes stayed in the air, when they stayed in the air, by quick thinking and guts. Flying was 85% man and 15% machine, Ben always told her. There was no talking tube between the two open cockpits, so Ben instructed by hand signals: Hand up meant “point the nose of the plane up”; hand down, nose down. Hand out to the side meant “pick that wing up”; hand on the right cheek meant the plane was skipping or skidding to the right and needed correction.

Ben started by teaching Pancho how to fly straight and level, pointing to a road below so she could orient herself. It didn’t take her long to catch on, tracing the road from above, holding the nose level by gauging the horizon line and keeping her eye on the key chain. Next he started her on turns, then figure-eights. Each day was a new challenge, each day another thrill. Ben had never had a female student so quick to learn and so fearless as Pancho, so eager, so filled with pleasure by the act of flying.

When the lesson was over, Ben would take the plane up around 1,200 feet and perform aerobatics--wing-overs, loops, barrel rolls, slips, stalls and spins. He wasn’t trying to scare her anymore. He was just having fun. He was also showing her how it felt when an engine stalled out, which happened often in those tiny planes, and what to do when the ship started spinning. One evening at dusk, they were flying back in after another lesson when, with Ben at the controls, the plane went into a dizzying spin and came down to within 50 feet of the ground before he pulled it out and landed. As soon as they stopped taxiing, he jumped out of the cockpit and leaned against the side of the plane. Pancho joined him.

“Well, Ben, I’ve got to the point where nothing worries me anymore,” she said, laughing. “You were pretty low that time, but, you know, I’m just so used to these maneuvers that I never get scared.” Ben didn’t say anything, so she looked at him more closely. His breathing was quick and shallow.

“We damn near got it,” he said. “The rudder stuck and I kicked it and fought it all the way down. I just kicked it hard enough and got it loose. But we almost spun in.” Pilots always talked about spinning in, never about crashing. After that, Ben didn’t spin anymore. A few days later, the owner of the airplane they’d been using, Jimmy Rosen, spun in. The ship was demolished and Jimmy was killed instantly. A while later, another flier crashed into the old balloon mooring mast. His plane ricocheted and bounced onto the Pacific Electric railroad tracks that bordered the airfield, cutting down power poles along the way. Crashes were commonplace, although it was equally commonplace for a pilot to walk away from a wreck. The planes flew only 90 miles an hour, often less, and were easy to jump clear of. The dirt runways and pasturelands where the pilots set down were forgiving. Pancho didn’t think about the danger, or if she did, it was only to acknowledge that it was the danger that leavened the thrill.

By early summer, she was ready to learn to land. The Arcadia airstrip was short, with a nasty prevailing crosswind and a stand of tall eucalyptus trees on the east end. A few of the trees had been topped and trimmed to leave space for an airplane to slink through on its approach, but the clearance was tight. A pilot had to sideslip a plane through the gap in the trees, left wing pointed down, then quickly straighten out before setting the ship down. The landings looked spectacular, but to Pancho, who learned the graceful maneuver easily, they were just normal procedure. By summer she was also ready to own her own plane. Barnstormers were paying $600 for World War I-surplus Jennies. Amateur pilots might spend $1,000 for a decent little plane. But Pancho was accustomed to getting the best. In early July, she bought a used Travel Air biplane for $5,500, five times what an average family made in a year.

Now she was spending all her time out at the airfield with Ben, her cousin Dean and the pilots who flew in and out of Arcadia. Her mother’s money supported her. Servants kept the San Marino house running. A nanny took care of her son. Seven and a half years into her marriage to the Reverend Barnes, there was not only no marriage but no pretense of one. Rankin lived in the rectory, Pancho lived in the big house. There was no formal, legal separation, but they never lived together again.

There also was no animosity. Pancho liked Rankin and he was fond of her. In small doses, they actually enjoyed each other’s company. But the non-marriage marriage suited them both. Rankin had a wife whom he did not have to support or service. He was free to pursue his ambitions in the church, wherever they took him. Even if he allowed himself to dream of a more suitable wife, a helpmate who would entertain church officials and play hostess at teas for the ladies, he knew that the drawbacks of realizing such a dream outweighed the benefits. He was moving up in the church hierarchy now, becoming noticed on the national level. Divorce and remarriage would jeopardize everything he had worked for.

“Dearest sweetheart,” he wrote to her when he traveled that year. He was away from California during much of 1928, traveling on church business to the East, on family business to the Midwest. His letters were kind and chatty, affectionate without being intimate, a friend writing a friend. He kept in touch, told her where he was going and what he was doing, but he never said he missed her. She responded in kind, fondly but with little emotion.

Like Rankin, Pancho didn’t think much of divorce. Marriage was, as far as she could tell, a confining institution with few benefits to confer on an independent woman of means. She had no desire to be married to anyone, but the current situation was quite tolerable. She had a husband she didn’t have to make a home for or share her life with. She had no responsibilities as either wife or mother. But if she needed to, if society forced her to, she could fall back on the respectability of her status as a married woman.

Now she was consumed by only one thing: She wanted to solo in her plane. Soloing--flying alone and in complete control--would mean she was a real pilot. But her teacher didn’t think she was ready after fewer than six hours in the air. The situation was further complicated when Ben and the other pilots flying out of Arcadia were kicked off the airfield after one crash too many. While Ben looked around for another venue, Pancho moved her plane to an airfield at Baldwin Park, a few miles southeast of Arcadia. Instead of a eucalyptus tree hazard, this one had a big red barn sitting on the path for takeoffs.

Pancho and her Cousin Dean visited Ben’s house several times a week to play poker and nag him about allowing Pancho to solo. They let him win at cards, but the strategy didn’t work. Increasingly impatient and characteristically overconfident, Pancho took matters into her own hands. She and Dean hooked up with a friend who claimed to have flown solo once. The three kidnapped Pancho’s plane with Dale, the young friend, at the controls and Pancho and Dean squeezed together in the passenger cockpit. Dale managed to take off, narrowly missing the red barn, and flew south to San Diego, but he had great trouble landing. Pancho counted the passes he made over the field--two, three, six, eight, and still he couldn’t land. Eventually, they got down in one piece, and Pancho immediately ran over to the resident field instructor, asking to solo. He refused her. They took off again in search of a more agreeable instructor. At Santa Ana airport, their next stop, Pancho tried again, and again she was refused. Now it was dusk and the weather was turning bad. With Dale at the controls, they set off in the rain to try to find their way to Culver City. Fog rolled in and they had to fly low to get their bearings. Pancho had never been scared in an airplane before, but she was worried now. They were lost. It was dark, and fuel might soon be a problem. Dale, whether he had actually soloed before or not, was flying way beyond his abilities. Pancho also realized that, despite her earlier bravado, she was not skilled enough to pilot the plane either. It was only luck that they happened on an airfield in Compton, many miles from their destination. Shaken, they left the plane there and caught a ride back home.

Ben was furious when he learned of the escapade and refused to give Pancho any more lessons, let alone authorize her to fly solo. It took her most of the rest of the summer to get back into his good graces. When he finally agreed to take her on as a student again, he told her that she would have to make six perfect landings in a row before he allowed her to take the ship up alone. Day after day, she drove out to Baldwin Park to practice her three-point landings. The airfield there was a little longer than Arcadia’s, with fewer hazards and less crosswind. That made landing easier, but it was still the hardest part of learning to fly. She kept at it. Finally, one afternoon in early September, she taxied back to the hangar after her sixth perfect landing. Ben climbed out of the ship and told her to take it up by herself.

She opened the throttle and roared down the field before he could change his mind. The little plane lifted into the air so quickly that it surprised her. Without Ben’s weight, the plane soared. She sat in the open cockpit, caught in the moment, completely focused, almost breathless with joy. She scanned the horizon. She looked earthward. She checked the key chain hanging from the controls. She pulled back slightly on the stick. Then she stopped thinking and started flying. She climbed to a thousand feet and circled the field a few times, then brought it in for a good landing. She had been airborne, alone, for five minutes. She was a pilot.

Ben barely had time to congratulate her before she took off again, this time with her first passenger, a childhood friend named Nelse Griffith. The excitement of being up with a new pilot was not enough for him. They were all daredevils. They were all invincible.

“Hey, let’s show them something,” he yelled at Pancho when they had flown around for a few minutes. ‘I’ll wing walk. You bring it across the field low.” Nelse inched out of the passenger cockpit and stepped out onto the wing, crouching, holding the flying wires with both hands. Pancho, grinning, flew the plane 50 feet above the field, made a pass, then zoomed up and came around again, with Nelse still clutching the wires. When she’d unloaded Nelse, it was Dean’s turn for a run. Pancho didn’t want the afternoon to end. Up above the earth, in the pilot’s seat, she was herself, with no apologies, no compromises, no holding back. This was an adventure of her own making, and she could have it any day she wanted. The German flyer Thea Rasche, a contemporary of Pancho’s, said that flying was “more thrilling than love for a man and far less dangerous.” For Pancho the thrill was more visceral. “Flying,” she told her friends, “makes me feel like a sex maniac in a whorehouse.”