Fly Me to the Crown

The Advent of Royal Flight Attendants

It used to be said that all the crowned heads of Europe were descended from Her Majesty Queen Victoria and her nine children and 42 grandchildren. Today, many remaining members of the nobility are still to the manor born, but I have observed a modern strain of blood that seems to be blending with the royal blue all around the world: that of flight attendants.

The much-heralded Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and future Queen Consort of the United Kingdom, is the daughter of two former flight attendants. Carole Goldsmith Middleton flew for British Airways, when still known as BOAC in 1980, her job position then titled stewardess rather than flight attendant, prior to starting a lucrative party bag and mail-order company with her husband Michael, whom she met when he was also employed by the airline as a flight attendant/steward. Their adorable grandson, Prince George, destined to become king, is half blueblood and half stew blood.

The esteemed Queen of Sweden, the former Silvia Renate Sommerlath, was a flight attendant prior to meeting King Carl XVI Gustav at the 1972 Summer Olympics. They are the parents of three children including Sweden’s future queen, Crown Princess Victoria. The half German and half Brazilian Queen Silvia, who speaks seven languages, including SSL (Swedish Sign Language), also worked as an interpreter before her marriage to the king in 1976.

The eldest son of Prince Albert II of Monaco, Alexandre Grimaldi-Coste, is also the son of a former flight attendant, Togo-born Air France hotesse de l’air Nicole Coste. Albert and Nicole met on a Paris-Nice flight in 1997and their son arrived six years later. While born outside of marriage and therefore not in line for the throne, the 18-year-old student at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. is an acknowledged member of the Monegasque royal family and maintains his own bedroom in the Monte Carlo palace.

Not that he is exactly a king, but he sees himself as a monarch and he most definitely is a ruler and probably the most powerful (and dangerous) man on the planet, so he who must be named must also be named for marrying a flight attendant. Vladimir Putin met Russian Aeroflot stewardess Lyudmila Shkrebneva in 1980 on a double date and they married three years later and remained married until 2014. She is the mother of his two adult daughters Katerina and Maria.

The richest royal in the world is the eccentric Germany-based playboy, King Rama X of Thailand, also known as Vajiralongkorn, worth somewhere between $30 and $60 billion dollars. The Queen of Thailand is Suthida Tidjai, a former flight attendant for both JALways (a Japan Airlines subsidiary), from 2000–to 2002, and later Thai Airways International, from 2003–to 2008. While Her Majesty Queen Suthida Bajarasudha Bimollaksana remains the queen, Vajiralongkoun has now announced an official relationship with a chief concubine, the Royal Noble Consort Niramon Ounproon. Officially called Sineenat, she was not a flight attendant, but she served Thailand as Major General Niramon Ounprom, a pilot. Last year, her seemingly antiquated title was stripped for disloyalty to the queen but Sineenat has recently been reinstated as Royal Noble Consort while Suthida, the long-serving stewardess, remains Queen of Thailand.

The Sultan of Brunei is no longer the richest man in the world but he remains the second wealthiest royal, worth around $20 billion, according to Forbes. Miriam Abdul-Aziz was a stewardess for Royal Brunei Airlines when she met the Sultan in 1980. In 2003, he divorced Miriam, his second wife of 22-years, under the country’s Sharia Islamic law. No reason was given for the divorce. The woman who had been HRH Pengiran Isteri Hajah Mariam lost her title of two decades but gained $4 billion dollars in her divorce settlement. She had two sons and two daughters by the Sultan and now lives between Singapore and London, and is known for losing millions at the casinos. Her newlywed daughter, Princess Fadzilah Lubabul, captain of her country’s netball team, was married this past January in Brunei’s 1,700-room palace.

Doria Ragland, the mother of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is best known in the media as a yoga instructor, but she has embarked upon many careers, including that as a make-up artist, where she met Meghan’s cinematographer father on the set of General Hospital, and as a travel agent, a social worker, and… a flight attendant.

Leopoldine Doualla-Bella Smith is a born princess of the Cameroonian royal family. She was also the first Black flight attendant in the world. After graduating high school in 1956, she was sent to Paris to train with Air France, and began flying with UAT (Union Aeromaritime de Transport) in 1957. In 1960, she became a stewardess for the new airline Air Afrique, serving 11 nations that were former colonies of France; she was also Air Afrique’s very first employee, carrying the ID card: “Employee no. 001”. Leopoldine eventually married an American diplomat, Leroy Smith, whom she met while studying at Georgetown, and the couple went on to serve in the Peace Corps. The Smiths now live in Denver, where they began the Business and Intercultural Services for Educational Travel and Associated Learning (BISETAL). Princess Leopoldine, now 83, also volunteers as a greeter at Denver International Airport.

Johanna Sigurdadottir is not from a royal house, but is a powerhouse in her own right. This former flight attendant for Icelandic Airlines (1962–1971) served as Prime Minister of Iceland from 2009 until 2013. In 1975, she presided over the Board of Svolurnar, the Association of Former Stewardesses. She is also the first openly LGBT head of government. In 2010, when same-sex marriage was legalized in Iceland and during her time in office, she married writer Jonina Leosdottir.

King Hussein of Jordan’s third wife and first queen, Alia Toukan, had been a flight attendant for Royal Jordanian Airlines. The queen, who later perished in a helicopter crash in 1977 at the age of 29, was the mother of Princess Haya bint Hussein. Princess Haya, an Olympic equestrian and Oxford graduate, is not only the daughter of a king, but for fifteen years (2004–2019), she was the second official wife of the absolute ruler of the Emirate of Dubai, the fifth richest monarch in the world, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. She is also the half-sister of the present King of Jordan, Abdullah II. Haya, who has served as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, now lives in the UK and was involved in a contentious divorce from the Sheikh in 2019. In December of 2021, the High Court of Justice Family Division, London, awarded Haya $728 million dollars and full custody of her two children. Sheikh Mohammad, apparently a difficult husband and father, is a brilliant businessman whose grandfather was the ruler of Abu Dhabi. Therefore, the children of Sheikh Mohammad and Princess Haya are descendants of three heads of state… and a flight attendant.

A former queen of Jordan, from 1978–to 1999, Queen Noor Al-Hussein, the American born Lisa Halaby, was not a flight attendant, but her father, Najeeb Halaby, was CEO of Pan Am and head of the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration.

Sara Ben-Artsi met Benjamin Netanyahu while working as an El Al flight attendant. She became his third wife in 1991 and is the mother of the former Israeli Prime Minister’s two sons.

I have not been able to locate any substantial background information pertaining to the Crown Princess of Greece’s mother. The daughter, Marie-Chantal, is married to Pavlos, the Crown Prince (although the Greek monarchy was abolished in 1973) and she now manufactures a successful eponymous line of high-end children’s attire. Her father, the American entrepreneur, billionaire and founder of DFS (Duty Free Shoppers), Robert Miller, offered a $22 million dollar dowry when the couple married in 1995. Little is known about Marie-Chantal’s socialite mother, Maria Elena Pesante Becarra Miller, now known as Chantal, other than that she is the daughter of a construction worker from Guayaquil, Ecuador, and that she met the “Duty Free King” in Hong Kong. How did she get there? I may be wrong but I am guessing that she was a flight attendant….

What is it about flight attendants?

Even if they don’t marry royalty, many marry extremely prominent and wealthy men. Former stewardess Candy Spelling, the widow of producer Aaron and mother of Tori, lived in the largest house in Los Angeles County, a 73,500 square feet mansion that included a bowling alley and three gift wrapping rooms. The also famously lavish-living Susan Gutfreund, the widow of John Gutfreund, a man who had been anointed the “King of Wall Street” in 1990, had been a Pam Am flight attendant. Native Texan Alana Collins was a stewardess for two years prior to becoming a model and marrying both George Hamilton and Rod Stewart. Kelsey Grammer met his present wife, Kayte Walsh, the mother of three of his seven children, when she was a first-class air hostess on a Virgin Atlantic flight. Henry Fonda’s widow, Shirlee, had been an American Airlines flight attendant. The extravagant Instagram star Jamie Chua was a Business Class stewardess for Singapore Airlines when she met the Indonesian tycoon Nurdian Cuaca. They divorced after 15 years and two children. The Pakistani cricket star Hasan Ali recently wed the India-born Shamia Arzoo, who had flown for Jet Airways. The best known of the Russian oligarchs, the now sanctioned Roman Abramovich, worth an estimated $14.5 billion dollars in 2021, was married to a former Russian Aeroflot stewardess from 1991–2007. They have five children. He has since remarried and divorced again.

Now, as anyone who flies can see, flight attendants can be any gender, any age, and seemingly any weight. But that was not always true. Stewardesses in their midcentury heyday were what models became in the 1990s, pretty young women perceived as generic objects of desire. A New York restaurant was considered a “hot spot” if there were a plethora of attractive flight attendants in attendance. Groups of stews were invited for free dinners at fine restaurants to attract paying clientele, and offered bottles of champagne gratis in nightclubs. To be dating a glamorous flight attendant gave a man clout.

Women then didn’t have the job opportunities they have today. Educated females were basically pigeonholed into the professions of teacher, nurse, or secretary. Working for the airlines offered a brief period of travel, adventure and a diversion (usually) just prior to marriage. Most of the airlines stipulated that they had to be women in their 20’s, between 5’2 and 5’9, weighing no more than 140 pounds, childless and single. And they were forced to retire from the job at the elderly age of 32. Eastern Airlines told potential stewardesses that it offered “the finest school for brides in the country.” In 1963, TWA only accepted 3% of applicants for training. In the 1970s, a popular National Airlines commercial would show a pretty young woman declaring, “Hi, I’m (her name). Fly me!” And this was at the height of the women’s liberation movement! (Patricia Ireland, later an attorney and the president of the National Organization for Women from 1991 to 2001, had been a Pan Am flight attendant during the 1960s. In her memoir, she notes, “It was understood that working on an airplane — especially in first class — was a dandy way to meet a man.”)

The comely young women who took to the air had to have excellent posture, abundant poise, a ready smile, fine conversational skills and a knowledge of first aid and safety protocols. At flight attendant training centers, so-called “charm farms,” they were taught make-up and grooming, with only certain hairstyles allowed. They wore hats and gloves, designer uniforms, famously by Emilio Pucci for Braniff International Airways. There were frequent weigh-ins and even the trimmest stewardesses were commanded to wear girdles. In the 1960s, stewardesses were instructed in blowing out matches after lighting passengers’ cigarettes.

When commercial flights began in the 1920s, air stewards were men. Working on a plane was considered too dangerous a job for a woman. The first women hired had to be registered nurses. That was in 1930 and the airline was Boeing Air Transport, which later became United. Most flight attendants remained male until the 1950’s when pressurized planes came into being, and women became the cabin crew of choice when commercial jet flights began taking off in 1958.

During the 1960s and ’70s, the average air hostess worked two years and then departed the skies for nuptial “bliss.” Today, it is not uncommon to come across a flight attendant who has been flying for 40 years. Then there’s 84-year-old Bette Nash, a veteran of 63 years, who in 2021 was still attending to American Airlines passengers three times a week aboard flights between D.C. and Boston.

At present, somewhere between 22% and 28% of US flight attendants are men, although I have yet to find a male (or non-binary) air host who has married into royalty.