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"We Have a Disaster." American Airlines is virtually an extension of C. R. Smith's bulky shadow, so interwoven with his adult life that the two are almost inseparable. Born in Minerva, Texas (pop. 150), the eldest of seven children, Smith quit school to go to work at nine, after his father deserted the family. He worked his way through the University of Texas, took a job with Texas Financier and Promoter A. P. Barrett, and at 30 was named vice president of Southern Air Transport, a small airline Barrett had just bought. Smith learned to fly (though he was never a good pilot), ran the airline so well that when mammoth Aviation Corp. bought it out in 1929, one of the chief assets it acquired was C. R. Smith.
In a series of mergers, American Airlines grew out of Aviation Corp., and Smith became its president. He consolidated the line's crazy-quilt routes into a sense-making network, standardized its motley collection of planes with a whole new fleet of DC-3s, launched the first extensive seat-selling campaign in aviation history. So hard pressed was Smith for money to pay for all this that he went to Fellow-Texan Jesse Jones, then head of Reconstruction Finance Corp., and told him: "We have a disaster, and we heard you were set up to handle disasters." Jones lent him $4,500,000. In 1936 American turned its first profit: a modest $4,600.
Job v. Wife. American Airlines became Smith's life and love—as pretty Dallas Debutante Elizabeth Manget discovered shortly after they were married in 1938. He never slackened his working pace—then or since—despite the fact that beginning in the 1930s he made a fortune in oil and gas that dwarfs his $80,000-a-year salary at American, could retire and live a life of leisure. Smith took off only four days for his honeymoon, on his return sent his wife to his apartment while he went to the office. When he showed up 30 hours later, he could not understand why she was angry. He had his work to do—and that was that. His wife tired of competing with an airline, divorced him after the birth of a son, Douglas, now 19, though they remained good friends. Shortly afterward, Smith went to New York when American's offices were moved from Chicago, threw parties with his brother Bill, often inviting whole casts of Broadway shows.
But Smith soon retreated from his fling at gaiety, nowadays leads a very different life—and, his friends say, a very lonely one. He lives in a six-room bachelor apartment in Manhattan, spends much of his time there reading or working, surrounded by mementos of the Old West. The rooms are paneled in pecky cypress, and most of the furniture (including Smith's bed) is of cactuswood. On the walls hangs a collection of Western paintings insured for $250,000, mostly Remingtons and Russells. Dozens of bearskins cover the floor. Smith's showpiece: an oldtime Western bar, with velvet wall coverings, brass railing, and spittoons.
For relaxation Smith likes to hunt and fish with such cronies as Cities Service Chairman W. Alton Jones and Notre Dame President Father Theodore Hesburgh, or to play poker—often for stakes of $2,000 an evening. Says Smith: "You've got to play for stakes that mean something, or you get sloppy."