Showing posts with label New Stewardesses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Stewardesses. Show all posts

Monday, February 1, 2021

The New Stewardesses #3: The Diary


The New Stewardesses #3: The Diary, by Judi Lynn
No month stated, 1975  Award Books

The New Stewardesses series loses the illustrated cover art for this third and final volume, going for more of a sleaze paperback-esque photo cover. But as with the previous two volumes, “Judi Lynn” doesn’t get overly explicit, and while there’s certainly a lot of stew sex in The Diary, it isn’t very graphic, usually over and done with in the span of a sentence or two. 

Whoever Lynn was, she(?) was certainly in a bad mood when writing this one – in chapter one a few main characters are casually killed off, then a few chapters later another main character is raped in her own apartment, and later on another of the stews is even involved in a shootout. Then there’s the stew who is arrested for smuggling diamonds, as is her airline captain boyfriend. All this is far removed from the soap opera melodrama of the previous two books. And whereas those two books followed one after another, The Diary occurs a year after the second volume; initially I thought this one too opened immediately after the previous book’s events, but a random comment that some of the stews opened their Cloud Nine clothing store in Manhattan “a year ago” proves otherwise, as they opened the store in the previous book. 

We’ll vaguely recall stew Cynthia, who was one of the main protagonists of the earlier books; in fact she opened the series, with the line “Cynthia was nude” being the first line of the first volume. The Diary opens with Cynthia in Paris, fully in love with her pilot boyfriend Dan. We get the first of many somewhat-explicit sex scenes as the two conjugate. Here we also have Esther, a stew who I think was only nominally mentioned before – they’re all so minimally described, and as ever Lynne doesn’t catch us up on previous events. Well, Esther is one of the owners of Cloud Nine, and there’s vague mystery as Cynthia wonders what’s taking Esther so long to show up for the flight back to New York. Esther arrives just in time, getting off a flight that’s just come in from London; Cynthia wonders what Esther was doing there, but Esther is vague about it. Then they’re off on the flight to New York, serving drinks, and somewhere “over the Atlantic” the right wing friggin’ explodes and the plane crashes into the ocean. Cynthia, Dan, Esther, and the two hundred passengers on the plane are all killed. And we’re only on chapter 1! 

Curiously this plane crash doesn’t seem to do much financial damage to the airline the stews work for. In fact, it’s never mentioned again, other than the ramifications of Esther’s death, as she is the author of the titular diary. While Cynthia was one of the most frequently-appearing stews in the first two books, she’s gone and forgotten this time, never mentioned again, and Esther gets the most focus. This is because another stew, Sandy, who also runs Cloud Nine, finds Esther’s diary in the store and begins reading it. I can’t recall if Sandy much appeared in the previous books, but she’s definitely the main protagonist this time. In fact The Diary has the most coherent plot in the series, as Sandy reads Esther’s diary, meets up with the man Esther was in love with, and also discovers that Esther had a big secret she hid from her sister stews. 

For once Lynn decides to actually describe a character; Sandy, we’re informed, is “almost plain without makeup” and doesn’t have a “rubber-doll inflated body.” I was shocked to see that Sandy had indeed appeared in previous books; checking my typically-overwitten reviews of the previous two books, I see she delivered a passenger’s baby in volume 2 (and also opened Cloud Nine with Esther), and she had a lesbian fling in volume 1. No mention’s made of any of that, this time; instead Sandy becomes solely focused on Chuck, a dashing young lawyer whose photograph inexplicably happens to be in Esther’s diary. Esther never mentioned him, and part of the hazy mystery which propels Sandy’s storyline is whether Chuck and Esther were lovers…and who the “Ellen” is Esther keeps mentioning, someone clearly dear to Esther who lives in London. 

Meanwhile, more dark stuff ensues; Laura, one of Sandy’s stew roomates, is raped in their own apartment; Sandy comes in to find her after the fact, Laura claiming that the rapist posed as someone from the phone company to get in. There’s no apprehension of the rapist, this minor subplot instead being about Laura slowly coming out of her shocked state and deciding to marry her doctor boyfriend. Jennifer is another of the roomates; checking my reviews she seems to be the closest thing The New Stewardesses has to a main character, but she doesn’t factor as much in The Diary. Jennifer’s storyline has her deciding to go Full Whore; as we’ll recall, she slept around the most of them all in previous books, even getting an abortion in the second volume. This time she breaks up with an airline executive who wants to marry her and decides to become the “kept woman” of a businessman who lives on Long Island. Even her fellow stews are shocked by the brazen hussiness, but Jennifer defiantly moves into an apartment the guy furnishes for her and becomes a happy mistress, for a time at least. 

Surprisingly the “stewardess stuff” is almost nonexistent this time; the novel is more about Sandy plumbing the mysteries of Esther’s diary while being courted by Chuck. This takes up most of the narrative; Chuck clearly likes Sandy, but she’s afraid he was doing her dead best friend and feels guilty about her attraction to him. Not that this prevents the eventual boinkery (minimally explicit as all the others in the novel, a la “he thrust within her” and the like). Humorously Sandy will ponder this or that mystery about Chuck or Ellen, then open Esther’s diary, and find herself on an entry that discusses that very topic. Also it becomes super clear who Ellen is, but Sandy is thunderstruck when she learns, toward the very end of the novel, that Ellen is (spoiler alert): Esther’s 8 year-old daughter. This causes more tension with Chuck, as Sandy wonders if he’s the father, but when Sandy finally confronts Chuck about the diary (which Sandy has kept secret from everyone), she learns that Chuck was more of a big brother to Esther, and also Ellen was fathered by some guy who knocked Esther up when she was a teenager. At Chuck’s recommendation, the girl was sent off to a convent in London to be raised(!).

I mentioned spoilers above, but The Diary seems very hard to find; I was lucky to come across a copy for cheap several years ago. So hell, I’ll tell you all how The New Stewardesses comes to a close. The other stews warn Jennifer she’s in for heartbreak – they say she’ll fall in love with this married guy and he’ll refuse to leave his wife and kids for her. And folks…this is exactly what happens! Things continue in the dark direction as Jennifer heads to Jones Beach to drown herself. But an off-duty cop named Jim happens to be there, saves her, and takes her back to his dingy apartment in Queens. Unsurprisingly, Jennifer will slowly begin to fall in love with this guy, even after Jim gets in a shootout during one of their dates. The novel ends with the new couple about to go off happily ever after together. 

Meanwhile Laura has gotten over her rape and is about to marry her doctor boyfriend, and Sandy at novel’s end decides to retire from the stew game, marry Chuck, and together they’ll raise Esther’s daughter Ellen. Plus she’ll continue to manage Cloud Nine, implying she’d still be a character if the series were to continue. But given how love and marriage is in the air throughout The Diary, I almost wonder if this one was intentionally written as a series finale. It certainly works that way. Overall The Diary was pretty much up to the admittedly-low standards of the previous two books, way too light on the sleazy stew thrills hyped by the cover copy, but the fact that this one actually had a plot put it above the other two.

Thursday, May 9, 2019

The New Stewardesses #2: The London Affair


The New Stewardesses #2: The London Affair, by Judi Lynn
No month stated, 1975  Award Books

The second installment of the three-volume New Stewardesses series is titled “The London Affair,” but friends, the titular stewardesses are in and out of London within the first several pages. This is very funny, given how much the previous volume built up the trip to London. The stews actually spend more time in Montreal, with the majority of the tale set in New York City. But then I don’t think “Judi Lynn” put much planning per se into the series, as these “novels” really come off more like arbitrary short stories featuring an easily-confused cast of characters.

And boy are they easily confused, mostly because the author does nothing to vary their personalities. Or for that matter, to even friggin’ describe them. Whoever this mystery author was, she or he is very much in the Irving Greenfield mode; if you missed the previous book, you’re just shit outta luck. There’s no recap of the first volume, no re-introduction to any of the characters or their ongoing plots. But those of us who did read the first one will recall the climactic events saw most of the stews on a flight to London. Well, they arrive on the first page of this volume…and the author, same as last time, does zero to bring the locale to life. If you are looking for a glimpse of swinging ‘70s London, you won’t find it here.

What you will find is a lot of softcore smut, and it gets a bit more explicit than it did last time. But we’re still not talking full-on sleaze or anything. As with the previous book, there’s more focus on heavy petting and “Let’s screw” dialog, before the author leaves the actual tomfoolery off-page. So we get to London, the stews talk excitedly of being here…then they go to a hotel and get caught up in their various soap opera subplots. Actually that implies there’s more meat to the subplots than actually exists. The characters on display are such ciphers, folks, that nothing much makes an impression – I’d forgotten how hard the New Stewardess books are to read, let alone to review.

So first up Captain Rick Andersen and stew Jennifer get busy, and if I recall part of the previous book’s subplot was that they’d been a couple years before, then Jennifer found out about Rick’s old wife and kid or somesuch, so ended it. That’s not really elaborated here. Instead it’s straight to the softcore smut, while at the same time in another room another stew named Laura finds out that a doctor she’s having a fling with has flown across the ocean to spend the night with her. “They shared their ultimate joy and fell asleep in each other’s arms,” it goes, again reminding one of the stuff in the previous book. But as mentioned, this one does get a bit more explicit at times:


Here in London we meet John Carter (not the Martian one), head of World Wide Airlines, a portly 53 year-old who makes it a point to bang all the sexy stews in his employ. His assistant, James Gilbert, has a “pimp instinct” for such things and to this end scopes out hotstuff stew Cynthia. But Cynthia refuses to sleep with Carter, having sworn to back off on sex for the time being, given how outrageous her sex life was becoming. This plot initially appears to be going somewhere, but ultimately doesn’t. Instead two other stews, Sandy and Esther, discuss opening a fashion store in Manhattan when they get back home, calling it Cloud Nine and staffing it only with stews. Surprisingly, this subplot actually does pan out.

But before we even get to page 25 the stews have already left London. Next up they go to Montreal, which actually takes up more of the text than the London trip. Humorously, the author doesn’t seem to understand that people in Montreal speak French. However the crux of this particular storyline is that Jennifer, who is once again shacked up in a hotel room with Captain Rick, is arrested by a cop making a random “morals raid” and hauled off as a prostitute. Despite her protestations that she’s Rick’s girlfriend, the cops insist the hotel is frequented by whores and Jennifer and Rick aren’t married, thus she’s a hooker and she’s under arrest. A lawyer character is heavily built up and quickly dropped once he gets Jennifer freed from jail the next day.

Jennifer really can’t catch a break this time around. Next up she and Laura are working on a Miami-bound flight…and there are three hippie terrorists onboard, a girl and two guys. This is actually the situation hyped the most on the back cover and the first-page preview, but it too only lasts a few pages. And the hijacking attempt is ludicrous in today’s post-9/11 world; the hippie freaks have smuggled a knife onto the plane, one of ‘em whips it out, and they insist the plane fly to Cuba. The pilot has “no choice” but to comply. Oh, and even more ludicrous – a cop happens to be onboard, a new character brazenly introduced into the text and specifically stated as carrying a gun…and he doesn’t do anything!!

Instead everybody bides their time – perhaps indication of the author biding his/her own time as the pages pad out – and eventually they’re on the way to Miami, despite the storm front they’re flying into. We’re told the veteran pilot has handled all sorts of severe weather but this one’s a doozy and even he’s scared. The attempts at ratcheting up the tension are laughable because, as stated, there’s absolutely no characterization on display, just ciphers with names. Even worse, at this point the cop finally decides to do something and disarms the terrorist, and that’s it for the attempted hijacking. 

And Jennifer, who as you’ll notice is the closest we get to a main character, still can’t catch a break – next she finds out she’s pregnant with Rick’s child. Her immediate response is to get an abortion, which her fellow stews encourage her to do, even though Rick is against it. After some deliberation Jennifer has it done (thankfully off-page), and afterwards she has the expected second thoughts about it. And Jennifer still can’t catch a break! Later on she’s propositioned by a passenger during a flight, one who naturally assumes she’s a whore, and Jennifer turns him down cold…only to be called into an executive office a few days later, where she’s informed the passenger has sent the airline a sworn statement that Jennifer propositioned him.

Even more ludicrous than the hijacking storyline, this one sees Jennifer being reprimanded, the airline taking the passenger’s side without any attempt to hear Jennifer or to believe her when she protests that the guy was the one making the indecent proposition. She’s put on unpaid leave, but some fellow stews band together in a strike. Finally the airline hires a former FBI agent to look into it, and he puts things right…and also gets a date with Jennifer, unsurprisingly. Oh, and as if paying off the karmic balance for Jennifer’s abortion, the author has stew Sandy delivering a passenger’s baby on one of her flights. Sandy you’ll recall becomes co-owner of Cloud Nine boutique in Manhattan, and the novel climaxes with its grand opening.

Only one more volume followed, The Diary, which appears to have received a scarce printing. Somehow I was able to get a copy for cheap so one of these days I’ll get around to reading the damn thing.

Monday, February 29, 2016

The New Stewardesses #1


The New Stewardesses #1, by Judi Lynn
No month stated, 1974  Award Books

I’d never heard of this obscure stewardess cash-in series from the ‘70s  until Curt Purcell reviewed it a few years ago. I picked up the first two volumes at the time, and consider myself very lucky to have recently come upon the uber-rare third volume, The Diary – and for a nice price, too, thanks be to the gods of trash. But if this first volume’s any indication, The New Stewardesses isn’t really much to get excited over.

Clearly designed to capitalize on the success of Coffee, Tea, Or Me (something which is even acknowledged in the book itself), The New Stewardesses treads a clumsy line between a regular sort of novel and the pseudo-factual style of many of those “tell-all” kind of books. Only the author, whoever he or she is, seems unable to tell a sensible tale, constantly backpedaling and stalling. In fact, the majority of the novel is told in summary, which gets to be quite annoying after awhile.

Telling the story of six recent graduates of World Wide Airlines’s stewardess school, the novel is more soap opera than sleaze, randomly hopscotching from point A to point Z in the hectic romantic lives of its six titular characters. Author Judy Lynn doesn’t do much to differentiate her heroines, which makes the back cover copy a godsend. For we must rely on it while reading the book to know who the hell is who:

CAROLE: An old-fashioned girl torn between a man who wants love and marriage and the rich, young playboy only out for kicks. 

SANDY: She discovered a different kind of love in stewardess school, with a beautiful classmate who offered much more than “coffe, tea or milk.” 

CYNTHIA: She could write her own Masters and Johnson report. One of her sexual adventures was at 10,000 feet – and then there were the really way-out things she did. 

JENNIFER: Behind her angel’s face lurked a ruthless drive to succeed. If getting ahead meant sleeping around, it was worth it. 

IRIS: An incurable romantic, always falling for the wrong man at the wrong time – a natural for the bed of every scheming guy. 

LAURA: The all-American girl who was very sure she’d found that special man – but could her transcontinental love affair survive?

Usurprisingly, most of that is hyperbole that isn’t really reflected in the narrative. Despite having an opening line of “Cynthia was nude,” The New Stewardesses is more along the lines of a potted history about young single women in the early ‘70s with very little sleaze or porn. There isn’t even as much “stewardess stuff” as you might expect, with more focus on the romantically-harried backstories of the six interchangeable protagonists. There’s also a lot of expository stuff about flying and stewardessing shoehorned into the narrative, but not much in the way of a central plot.

Lynn’s writing doesn’t vary from chapter to chapter. We’ll start off with a sentence or two about Plot A, which concerns World Wide Airlines Flight 632 from New York to London, upon which all six characters are stewardessing, and then she will jump back to some random event in the lives of one of her characters. Some of this material will be about the stewardess school they attended in Dallas or, more commonly, will be incidental, random moments in their love lives. And though there is at least one sex scene in every chapter, as mentioned the novel is not very explicit. In each case Lynn is more about the preamble and setup than the actual deed-doing. Here’s a good example:

Robert cupped Cynthia’s breasts in his strong, large hands. He kissed each breast and his tongue pressed against her nipples. He traced his fingers lightly around her nipples. Cynthia ran her long fingernails along his chest then back and down his sides. She leaned down and searched his mouth with her tongue as he pressed against and into her.

That’s about all you’ll get throughout, after which Lynn will write something like, “They made love passionately through the night,” or somesuch. Also from the above you can get an idea of the simplistic, “See Spot Run” type of narrative style Lynn employs. There is on the whole a simplistic feel to the entire book, as if it were written for brain-addled, glue-sniffing children. More damningly though, the book is mostly relayed more through telling rather than showing. In this way it’s reminiscent of later trashy misfires like Taboo and Belladonna.

To continue pissing on the book, I also have to gripe about the fact that very little in it is described. Lynn rarely if ever brings the groovy era to life; description is so minimal as to be threadbare. We’re initially told what each of the six women look like, but it’s mostly reduced to hair color, after which it’s up to us to remember who is who. Locations and settings are seldom described, which again lends the novel almost a child’s book tone. How things look, feel, taste, smell – Lynn is either uninterested or incapable of telling us. The narrative style is as bland as the heroines.

As mentioned the characters have their own varied backgrounds which become confusing; perhaps the central one is that Jennifer, a beautiful redhead, was once in a serious relationship with a World Wide Airlines first officer named Rick, but she broke it off when she discovered he’d briefly been married and even had a daughter, all of which he’d kept from Jennifer. But now as a last-second stew onboard Flight 632 Jennifer is nonplussed to discover that, you guesed it, Rick is acting as first officer on the plane – and meanwhile she’s purposefully been avoiding all of his flights.

But nothing whatsoever is done with this plot, as 632 doesn’t even arrive in London until the last page, and the novel ends on a sort of cliffhanger; the series is clearly envisioned to be sequential, and again comes off like a soap opera in novel form. Instead, more focus is placed on random events in the pasts of these women – like cute little Sandy’s lesbian fling with fellow student Barbara in stewardess school, which Sandy is now ashamed of and wants to forget. But it’s hard to get a grasp of any of this stuff, because each chapter is like a blur of “this happened, and then this happened, but before that this happened, and later on that happened,” until you finally just wish Flanders was dead. 

There are only brief flashes amid the chaff. We learn in one of the hopscotching subplots that a dude attempted his own stew cash-in book, to be titled “Stewardesses I’ve Flown,” all about the many stews he’d slept with, but even this is sort of lost in the mire. It would be one thing if Plot A, the flight to London, were given more focus, but about the most that happens is one guy spazzes out and says he wants to go back to New York and first officer Rick comes out and punches him in the face! Flights in the flashbacks seem more dramatic, like one where a stew sees a streaker, and another where a dude tries to hijack the plane to Cuba, only for ol’ Rick, again serving on this flight, to come out and get him soused on free booze.

The New Stewardesses ends just as 632 lands in London, and the various girls are eager to see the city, though we are told via foreshadowing that some of them might not be too happy with what happens here. Lynn desperately dangles a carrot of how exciting and interesting future volumes of the series will be, practically begging us to keep reading. As mentioned I actually have the second one, so here’s hoping it shucks the backstory-flashback nonsense and gets on to some genuine mid-‘70s stewsploitation.