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Honeymoon Conk-Out. Curiously, acrophobia—the fear of high places—plays a minor role. Pop Music Composer Jesse Fuller says that he would gladly climb up a 150-foot ladder, but he has driven across the U.S. nine times rather than fly. Los Angeles Psychiatrist Martin Grotjahn also notes that for many flying has a sexual connotation; one patient he treated was frightened only of coming in for a landing, a fear that Grotjahn found closely connected with fear of detumescence. Comedian Don Adams, Secret Agent 86 in TV's Get Smart, grounded himself for eight years after the jet plane carrying him and his bride back from their Mexican honeymoon crash-landed in a blizzard when its four motors conked out. Finally, when a psychiatrist suggested to Adams that it might take five years on the couch to get at the root of his fears, he decided that some self-therapy was called for. "I figured I had to fly to prove to my wife I was O.K.," says Adams. "So now I'm scared to death. But I fly."
Others seek to conquer their fear of the unknown by learning how to pilot a plane. Former Heavyweight Champ Floyd Patterson cured himself in this fashion. On the other hand, Producer Stanley Kubrick (2001, A Space Odyssey), while learning to be a pilot, became so dismayed at what he felt were haphazard traffic-control procedures that he has never flown since. Sometimes hypnosis works. Don Newcombe, the former Dodger pitching great, spent a dozen sessions with a hypnotist, now flies regularly and says: "My feeling is that these pilots have just as great a desire to live as I do."
Some people, of course, simply cannot be moved to fly. Says Miami Psychiatrist Sanford Jacobson: "When I was in the military, I saw men leaving Viet Nam who, despite their eagerness to get home, requested the 24-day boat trip to California rather than the 21-hour flight." Even in such company, Italian Tenor Giuseppe di Stefano is a special case. Trying to get up the nerve to fly to Europe, he locked himself and his wife into a hotel room at New
York's Kennedy International Airport for three days. A Pan Am executive finally persuaded him to take off, but when the plane touched down in Boston on the way to Italy, Di Stefano fled from it. He rented a car and drove it back to Manhattan. There, he boarded the next boat to Genoa.