The Sybaritic Skies

It has a caviar-stocked club room, a brass-railed bar and a lavish grand salon. There is an art gallery, a library and a sauna in the master bedroom. Suede and leather love seats, divans and marble tables are conveniently placed, and for entertainment, Sony videotape monitors and a Thomas electric organ are available. In the gourmet galley, the chef can whip up virtually any dish from terrine of duck to soul food--served with Waterford crystal, Reed and Barton silver and gilded Noritake china.

A Hollywood mansion? A millionaire's resort? Actually, these solaces and services are available on an airplane so sumptuously fitted that it makes Hugh Hefner's vaunted black Bunny--a DC-9 --look like steerage. The world's most luxurious aircraft is Starship I, a maroon and gold Boeing 720 that rents for $2,500 per hour or $5 per mile (whichever comes higher) and is patronized exclusively by musical groups, who are about the only people these days who can afford such prices. They apparently like what they get: Starship is booked solid for the rest of the year.

When a rock superstar turns up his nose at breast of pheasant or Maine lobster, Stewardesses Sandy Cronin and Candy Burton--wearing bodystockings --prepare his favorite dish. Bob Dylan gets his cherished vegetable casseroles, washed down by Chateau Mouton Rothschild '64. For Led Zeppelin, there is Thai food. Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demands branch water from an arcane spring in the Ozarks for his bourbon. The Allman Brothers get collard greens and Coors beer. For British groups, there is Irish ale and a stock of their favorite Dunhill and Rothman cigarettes.

Between meals and copious snacks, Candy and Sandy adjust the two movie screens and tend the stereo. There are occasional misunderstandings. As Sandy puts it delicately, "At first some people thought we came with the day rate. But all in all, the guys in the rock groups are better to serve than drunken businessmen."

Incredible Money. This sybaritic service is the idea of Ward Sylvester, 34, a Harvard Business School graduate and Hollywood promoter. "A lot of young musicians are making incredible money," he explains. "But nobody is targeting them as a market." Sylvester also observes that entertainers do not like commercial airlines and often vice versa. Says he: "Being on a long flight is like a personal appearance for a performer because he spends the whole time signing cocktail napkins." Also, fellow passengers and airline personnel tend to look askance at long-haired young musicians in first class--even if they happen to be millionaires.

To remedy the situation, Sylvester in 1973 purchased a ten-year-old United Air Lines jet for $750,000 and hired an experienced flight crew of 16. For an additional $750,000, he then ripped out Starship's seats and furnished it fit for a shah.

TIME Correspondent David De Voss, who joined Starship's pampered passenger list last week, notes that for harassed entertainers who book into a different city every day and usually stay up most of the night after their gig, Starship is a pad away from home. Moreover, as Organist Jon Lord of Deep Purple--a heavy metal group that has booked Starship for five weeks--points out: "On regular airlines, there are always queues for flights, overbooking, lost luggage and canceled connecting flights. This tour already has less frantic a feel." And what commercial airline would allow its passengers to hold the plane on the tarmac for an hour in order to see an entire movie? That is what happened in Pittsburgh recently when the easy riders became absorbed in Deep Throat.

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