On one occasion, the lady occupying 1A was causing some consternation amongst the crew. She was wearing a threadbare camel coat, really scruffy shoes and wore a headscarf on her head, probably to disguise her somewhat bedraggled appearance. She was clutching a shopping basket and seemed totally out of place – she just had an air of bewilderment about her. (I realise that this may sound a little class-ist, but 99.9% of our lovely passengers would pull out all the stops when it came to dressing for the journey.) Even the flight deck were known to polish their shoes. (Honestly, I’m not exaggerating at all.)
We knew that this lady couldn’t have boarded without the correct checks to her boarding card, (although it has been known….), and according to the manifest, 1A should have been unoccupied. This obviously needed to be sorted before the door was closed.
It was down to me to find out if she had taken the wrong turning somewhere and had ended taking a seat on Concorde by mistake……. an aircraft door is just that when approached from the finger.
I asked her for her boarding card, and then I asked her if I could take her coat…(we kept the boarding cards with the coats for obvious reasons.) She was, in fact, sitting in the wrong seat, but this lady was actually the mother of a very,
VERY, famous celebrity and was used to travelling in 1A and had, out of habit, just taken her usual seat instead of 10A which she had been allocated this time.
I have never judged a book by its cover since! (I did actually mention the name of the celebrity at one point in this paragraph, but I doubt if they would want their mother to be portrayed as ‘down at heel’!!)
Another time, Elizabeth Taylor was travelling with us to JFK and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, she was just jaw-droppingly beautiful. She came to the front door to ask me for a glass of champagne, (no ringing the call bell, quite happy to stretch her legs and come to the galley). As I poured it for her I said how much I had admired her from being a small girl, and, as I handed her to drink to her, I commented on her fabulous diamond ring. (The Richard Burton ring…ENORMOUS!!!!!) She put her glass down on the galley top, took the ring off and handed it to me to try on!!!! In all my life I am sure that I will never come as close to a diamond that big again. I was truly honoured and she spent another ten minutes or so chatting with me in the forward galley. She was just one of the girls, really enjoying a joke with the crew, and I was star-struck. Of all the hundreds of famous names that I have had the privilege of looking after, she is in my top three for all-round gorgeousness.
On another occasion, on the evening departure out of JFK we were ready to go but missing one passenger. She was, (and still is), a very famous American film star and with the help of several ground crew eventually made her way down the finger to the aircraft, in a wheelchair, a little worse for wear after what must have been a very good lunch indeed. We helped her to her seat and she apologised profusely, explaining that she was ‘over emotional’ due to being pregnant.
"Gosh," says I, wondering about the wisdom of having a little drink or two when expecting a baby but saying nothing of the sort, "how far along are you?"
"About 20 minutes," came the reply in a low southern drawl.
I have reflected upon this episode a few times since then.
It must have been a truely earth-moving experience, requiring the assistance of a wheelchair afterwards.
Warm regards,
LL x