To Fly Forever : The Wind Over an Open Cockpit Frees Cliff Robertson From the World’s Cares

“Nineteen years ago, just before we mar ried, I told Dina Merrill about my eight children.

But there’s only one, she said, a daughter by a previous marriage. Wrong, I said. Come down to the hangar at Santa Paula Airport and meet the other seven.

I told her that no matter my devotion and commitment to marriage, I would not forsake my airplanes, my children. They were an established part of my life. They were paid for. They had a home. And when I rented them to movies and television shows, they even paid their way.

Dina accepted that and we kept the airplanes.

But I did give up hot-air ballooning.

Now, as then, my collection includes a Spitfire that flew with the Royal Air Force in 1943. I have three British-built Tiger Moths from the ‘30s and another vintage biplane, a French Stampe . My German Me108 from World War II is on loan to the Experimental Aircraft Assn. museum at Oshkosh, Wisc. And there’s the twin-engined Beech Baron that I use for scouting locations, getting from A to B--or from A to Z, if Z doesn’t happen to have commuter air service.

This isn’t materialism. I don’t think of the airplanes as possessions. They are my dear friends. I share their life and they fulfill mine. I treat them as I would a friend: respect them, trust them, never take them for granted.

I had my first airplane ride when I was about 8. It was Christmas Day at Lindbergh Field in San Diego, and Santa Claus had arrived by airplane. They were taking people for rides, and I went up with my cousin and uncle in a Lockheed Orion.

It was all red and owned by the Gilmore Oil Co. I can remember exactly where I was seated. The inside was all leather, even the ceiling. The smell, the noise, the motion. All the hopes. All the wishing. Here was a fantasy consummated by a dream machine, and when I came down to earth, I was still up there.

I became my heroes--Tailspin Tommy of the Big Little Books, Smilin’ Jack of the comics and a guy named Lindbergh.

I used to ride my bicycle from La Jolla into San Diego in the summertime, when I was 14, to work at a little dirt-strip airport called Speer. I was an airport rat--washing airplanes, cleaning engine parts, doing all the dirty work for which I didn’t get paid a nickel--but every third day they’d take me up in a Piper Cub and give me 10 or 15 minutes of instruction for free.

Today, I prefer to fly the old planes, as I love to drive my 1966 Ford Mustang and live in a 1925 house in La Jolla. There’s honesty in the craftsmanship they represent. There’s a greater fidelity to the love affair--something you just can’t seem to find with newer, flashier things.

I also get a deep sense of yesterday from my planes of the ‘30s. They take me back to boyhood--to a more innocent time of life, a period of pure joys. They are the residuals and remembrances of an uncomplicated, easier part of my life.

I once directed a movie called ‘The Pilot.’ I played an airline captain, an alcoholic whose life and marriage were in big trouble but who had two wonderful things in his life to fall back on--flying and his 11-year-old daughter.

I wrote one scene myself. In it, the pilot tells his daughter about Tailspin Tommy and Charles Lindbergh. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘Tailspin Tommy was really Charles Lindbergh. Only Lindbergh made a mistake. He landed in Paris, and that’s when his troubles began. Tommy just kept on flying.’

I relate to that. Whenever I land, the pace has to resume.

It’s quite simple. I resent much of today. The accelerated life style is too complicated. Unbridled building has submerged much of yesterday. With it has gone gentleness, dignity and quality of life.

I thank God I’ve got flying.

As a musician would say, the old biplanes are more legato. They are a pause in a hectic, crazy vortex--a comfortable saddle and my Walden Pond. Up there, the wind over an open cockpit disengages me from the cares that infest the world.

Part of the time, I’m honing skills; but there are moments for hearing the wires, smelling familiar fumes, watching fabric quiver, feeling perfect balance, and then--through that Proustian sense-memory--I go back to a little hangar at Speer Airport where I cleaned engine parts.

You can’t go home again, but you can stand in the doorway for a few minutes.”