Full Flaps

By John Skow

A HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE

by Ernest K. Gann Knopf; 544 pages; $12.95

Cancel all reservations for airline flights, select a reliable four-engine armchair and take off: "The Gremlin's Castle was trembling in an incipient stall ... Almost directly ahead stood the Taj Mahal ... We were obviously going to knock it down ... Desperate in the seconds remaining, I made a wild decision. I doubted if anyone had ever tried it in a C87 ... 'Hogarty!' I yelled. 'Give me full flaps!''

Readers of Fate Is the Hunter, Ernest K. Gann's unnerving account of his days as an airline and Air Transport Command pilot, will recognize the flying style. What is surprising about this rambunctious autobiography, however, is that although Gann tells a number of good wing-and-prayer yarns, some of his most surprising adventures have had nothing to do with aviation. He has been a newsreel cameraman, soldier, Broadway actor, polo player, farmer, cartoonist, commercial fisherman, deepwater yachtsman, Hollywood talent scout and, of course, a bestselling novelist (The High and the Mighty, Band of Brothers). He wrote, directed and sold a movie while still in high school, talked his way into the Yale Drama School without bothering with the usual formality of attending college, worked for a while as an assistant to Leon Leonidoff, the Radio City impresario, and filmed screen tests for Warner Bros., all before he thought of learning to fly.

His versatility included, as he admits, a powerful talent for getting fired, and for 'maneuvering himself into situations where honor and restlessness demanded that he resign. He was also good at spending money. The result was that his career continued to take peculiar turns--the commercial fishing venture, for instance--well after he had achieved what for an other man would have been professional security as a flyer and writer.

Gann would be the perfect subject for a memoir if gentlemanly reserve did not glaze over his confessions when he describes the people he has known. He gives a vivid account of how it was to see the dome of the Taj Mahal from several feet away, but is woefully reticent, for in stance, when he encounters another monument, Actor John Wayne. Chapters given to his divorce and remarriage show little more than the rough shape of a life. Only when Gann describes the drowning of his oldest son, who was chief mate on an unseaworthy tanker, does uncalculated emotion break through.

Yet in the end the autobiography has done its job, and the reader has seen a man intelligent and selfabsorbed, better at action than ideas, somewhat rueful and, by his own testimony, a reasonably decent fellow. The inclination is to accept the judgment. -- John Skow

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