Sue Mengers gets hijacked

Posted: 1/8/13 at 4:31pm

Bette Midler is doing a one-woman show about Sue Mengers. Sue lived an extraordinary life. For example:

"On January 27, 1979, Tramont (Sue Menger's husband) got a collect call from Mengers’s mother—“‘Collect call’ were the only English words she learned,” says Sue—informing him that his wife’s L.A.–to–New York flight had been hijacked. A woman who claimed she was wired with nitroglycerin was holding the plane hostage on the ground at J.F.K. According to Joe Armstrong, who was also on the plane—he was then the editor in chief and publisher of New York and New West magazines and is now vice president of Talk Media—the passengers were terrified. “People were on their knees praying, you saw people with their hands in their faces in fetal positions on the floor. We thought a big ball of fire could come roaring down that aisle. Except Sue. She kept saying, ‘I’m keeping Candy waiting at Elaine’s.’ The rest of us are thinking, ‘We’re gonna die any minute!’”

The hijacker wanted Charl­ton Heston to read a largely incoherent statement on television. When Mengers heard this, she was flabbergasted. Recalls Armstrong, “Sue said, ‘Charlton Heston!??’—like he’s a B actor—‘I can get Barbra Streisand!’” Adds Mengers, “But she want­ed ****ing Charlton Heston, no substitutes. With my luck Streisand would have said no anyway. ‘Blow her up!’

“Meanwhile,” Mengers continues, “Jean-Claude didn’t feel like talking to my mother, so she screamed at the operator, ‘She’s been hijacked!’ So then Jean-Claude had a dilemma. Should he fly in? If it was gonna explode, I was already dead, so who did he call for advice? Bob Evans [the marriage expert]! Bob said, ‘What if she ­doesn’t die? You gotta keep your marriage going, you better go.’ So, begrudgingly, he got on a plane, figuring he’d either bring me home or my ashes.”

After five, six, seven hours, in Mengers’s words, “I realized, This could be serious. I’m gonna ****in’ die here, and I thought, I’m not going to go without being stoned. So I lit up a joint. Theodore Bikel, who was on the plane, took his guitar and started striding up and down, singing, ‘Hava Nagila, hava Nagila’ ... There is nothing worse than Theodore Bikel. Nothing. And so I was thinking, I’m gonna die listening to Theodore Bikel, and he wouldn’t ****in’ sit down and shut up. Like he’s consoling us with these songs.” Finally, after eight hours on the ground, an F.B.I. agent was able to overpower the hijacker and disarm her; the bomb turned out to be a phony. As the pas­sengers disembarked, Armstrong noticed 80-odd stretchers, with bottles of plasma, waiting in a hangar while ambulances stood outside. Mengers went off to Elaine’s with some of her fellow abductees, “having the best time,” she adds, “and when I got to the hotel at two in the morning, there was Jean-Claude, livid.”


When Sue was Queen Updated On: 1/8/13 at 04:31 PM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/8/13 at 7:52pm

I tried but I couldn't get through it.

I used to love reading about her in SPY Magazine though.

Posted: 1/9/13 at 10:28am

That is exactly where I first heard of her- GOD, do I miss Spy.

This article makes her seem awfully unlikeable but there are a few gems.