‘He is on a diet, is a high insurance risk, fears a thrombosis, is resigned to his first ulcer. He has reached the point where he can’t tell one plastic meal from the next. When he sees his children they hardly recognise him. He hasn’t even had the pleasure of being adulterous – he has no energy for sex.’ In June 1971, a cartoon strip ‘The Awful Secret of George Jetseller’ introduced the Observer’s look at the plight of a new breed of globetrotting executive.
A growing number of multinational companies whose business needs included ‘short, fire-fighting trips’, the explosion in air travel and the borderless convenience of Amex and Diners Club cards had all led to the emergence of an itinerant executive class: Singer Sewing Machine’s European execs clocked up 2,750,000 miles of business travel a year; Unilever spent half a million on travel in 1969. A rapidly homogenising international ‘business culture’ made the jet-set life simpler, as did the ubiquity of a handful of travel essentials: ‘The English language, Scotch whisky and the Hertz Rent-a-Car.’
From the outside it looked like ‘the epitome of glamour’. But for the high-flying ‘stateless persons’, as one exec described himself, ‘reality is grottier’. Clutching duty-free bags, their attaché cases bulging with dirty shirts, the grey-faced executives had little to look forward to on trips other than ‘too much to drink and paperback novels in a succession of indistinguishable hotel bedrooms’. For the ‘few women’ things were even worse: a drink at the bar meant ‘dealing with the inevitable false assumptions’.
Back home, absence had not made the heart grow fonder. In one American computer company’s London office, half the top 10 executives were divorced and another said: ‘I expect I shall change my wife more often than my firm.’ Their average of four children was perhaps, the article speculated, ‘one way they try to keep their wives quiet’. No wonder George Jetseller was ‘seriously thinking of becoming a failure’.
