- Coffee, Tea or Me?
-
Coffee, Tea or Me? — The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses Author(s) Trudy Baker, Rachel Jones, Donald Bain Illustrator Bill Wenzel Country United States Language English language Genre(s) Novel Publication date November 21, 1967 Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) ISBN 0142003514 OCLC Number 51728805 Dewey Decimal 387.7/42/0922 21 LC Classification HD6073.A43 B34 2003 Coffee, Tea or Me? is a book of alleged memoirs by Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones written "with" Donald Bain and first published in 1967. The book depicts the anecdotal lives of two lusty young fictional stewardesses. Capitalizing on the success of the publication, Donald Bain wrote three sequels: The Coffee Tea or Me Girls' Round-the-World Diary (1969), The Coffee Tea or Me Girls Lay It on the Line (1972) and The Coffee Tea or Me Girls Get Away from It All (1974). A TV film of the same title, loosely based on Coffee, Tea or Me? was made in 1973.
Contents
Style and content
Written in the first person voice of Trudy Baker, with the alleged ghostwriter's name appearing as a dedication between the index of chapters and the foreword, the book describes a kind of glamorous lifestyle from the stewardess' point of view, working for two years for an unnamed American carrier out of a New York crewbase during the golden age of airline travel.
It is written to emphasize the "sexy" parts of the job, although difficult experiences are also recounted, but it is very much a product of the "swingin' sixties", and reflects the shifts in society and culture then underway. It also contains content that could now be deemed sexist, and contains now dated descriptions of homosexuality (chapter X is entitled "They Looked So Normal"). Illustrations by men's magazine cartoonist Bill Wenzel depict the flight attendants and female passengers as buxom sexpots. In chapter XIV, the attendants list one of the types of passengers that could be denied boarding rights - "most recently, men wearing earrings."
Period references to television shows such as Batman and lists of celebrities who the "authors" claim to have carried on their flights lend an air of timeliness, as well as an incidental description of the airline introducing Boeing 727 service, but overall the story-telling has the feel of a tall-tale, played for its most scandalous value. Other equipment mentioned includes the Boeing 707 and the smaller BAC 111. Certainly, all the names in the volume are fictitious, excepting the famous, and there is no way to gauge the accuracy of any of the accounts therein.
The two most likely candidates for which airline the stewardesses supposedly worked for are American Airlines and Braniff International Airways, the only carriers who purchased BAC-111s to supplement fleets of Boeing 707s and 727s in the mid-1960s time frame of the novel. Mohawk Airlines, a northeast regional line, ordered four BAC-111s but never operated the larger Boeings in its fleet, nor did its regions of service match those described in the book. This is supported by the fact that Donald Bain was a publicity relations employee for American.[1]
The Penguin Group, current publisher, describes the book as "adult fiction".[2]
Printing history
The Bartholomew House Ltd. hardcover edition, a division of Bartell Media Corporation, New York, New York, was published in October 1967, with a second printing in December, and a third in January 1968. The Bantam Books paperback edition, at that time a subsidiary of Grossett & Dunlap, Inc., New York, New York, was released in November 1968, and had reached its tenth printing by January 1969.
References
See also
- Boeing-Boeing, 1962 play
- Boeing Boeing, 1965 film version of the play
- Come Fly with Me, 1963 film
- The Stewardesses, 1969 film
Categories:- 1967 novels
- American novels
- Aviation films
- Boeing-Boeing, 1962 play
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
