I remember reading LIFE Magazine in 1957 and being awestruck by a double-page ad showing an artist rendering of TWA’s magnificent new Lockheed 1649 Starliner. Named “Jetstream,” this graceful airliner was poised to enter service later that year. Gazing at the ad, however, it was hard comprehending that an artist could create a painting so realistic, so dramatic, and so beautiful. As a nine-year-old kid who loved drawing planes, I could only dream of making such perfectly straight lines and precise lettering, or rendering metal so flawlessly.
I also distinctly remember looking at the airplane’s wings and thinking they were really long and that the engines were placed too far outboard on the leading edges. Even at that young age, I could tell the artist had exaggerated the airliner’s structure for dramatic effect, yet I was totally captivated by that image. I scoured every inch of the ad studying the artist’s technique, and then found his name written elegantly in script within the clouds. The name was Ren Wicks.
Years later, as a new member of the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, I met Ren and so began a wonderful friendship based on our mutual love of aviation and history. He was a stylish gentleman who always wore a dark blue blazer with an ascot. During lunch at Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood, I couldn’t resist asking him about that TWA ad, and I could tell by the expression on his face there was a good story involved. Wicks was personal artist for TWA Chairman and billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes.
“Hughes called and woke me up at 3:00 o’clock in the morning, and told me to meet him at a warehouse in Culver City,” recalled Wicks. The two men sat on metal folding chairs cloaked in the secrecy of that vast empty space and discussed the illustration in detail. “Hughes specifically asked me to lengthen the wings and exaggerate the distance from the inboard engines to the fuselage,” Wicks continued. Then they went to breakfast where Hughes asked to borrow a dime to make a phone call.
Those long straight wings were a key selling point for Lockheed, since the increased distance from engines to cabin significantly reduced noise and vibration inside the airliner. By complying with Hughes’s request to alter the airliner’s wings in the painting, Ren’s Connie assumed the proportions of a sailplane, even resembling another aircraft closely associated with Howard Hughes – the 300-foot-wingspan HK-1 “Spruce Goose.” (To this day, the HK-1 has the longest wingspan of any airplane ever built.)
Adding to the feeling of the Jetstream gracefully soaring above the clouds was the subtle use of wide-angle distortion Wicks deftly employed in depicting this elegant aircraft. The painting is simply a timeless classic, but is the airplane in scale and structurally correct? Not even close. Did this ad sell countless tickets for TWA passengers flying aboard one of the most beautiful airliners of all time? You bet!
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