The Celebrity Collector - Cliff Robertson Collects Vintage Aircraft

Cliff Robertson, an airport rat from La Jolla

Few collectors can put their arms around something as large and unusual as vintage aircraft. Cliff Robertson had the name, the means and the passion for flying to make it work, and his love of planes started long before his acting career, which brought him an Oscar for Charly in 1968.

Robertson was born in La Jolla, California, in 1925, into a prosperous ranching family. At about 13 he would bicycle 13 miles to Speer Airport in San Diego, long since gone, to watch planes take off and land. He called himself an “airport rat,” one of a group of boys with the same dream.

“In the summer, I’d ride my bike there six days a week and volunteer to clean planes and grease engines for zero money,” Robertson remembered from his home near Southampton, Long Island. “The payoff came once a week, when the chief pilot would take me up in a little Taylor Cub for a fifteen-minute ride. That made it all worthwhile. I never dreamed of one day owning a plane.”

The Robertson air force in 2004

At the time of the 2004 interview Robertson owned four planes, and that was a reduction. His fleet had once included a Spitfire Mark IX and three Tiger Moths, all since sold. The remaining four were a French Stampe, a Messerschmitt, a Grob Astir glider and a Beech Baron.

The Stampe is a biplane of Belgian origin. It first flew in 1933 as a trainer, and after World War II its production was taken over in France by the Société Nationale de Construction Aéronautique du Nord (SNCAN). About 700 were built. It is one of the rare airplanes that was seldom scrapped; collectors like Robertson bought and restored them instead.

The Messerschmitt 108 was a four-seat liaison aircraft developed in the 1930s for the Luftwaffe. It was advanced for its time, with retractable landing gear, an enclosed cockpit and cantilevered wings, and it carried high-ranking German officers. Its better-known cousin, the 109, was a single-seat, short-range fighter.

The Grob Astir is a two-seat fiberglass glider with no engine at all. It must be towed aloft, and staying up demands a shrewd, skilled pilot. Robertson held the Nevada distance soaring record for its class after gliding 240 miles in the 1990s, with a passenger 6 feet 4 inches tall aboard.

The Beech Baron was the one modern machine, a twin-engine executive propeller plane with leather seats and fuel-injected engines. “I fly it along the East Coast to get to speaking engagements, scouting locations, that sort of thing,” he said. He kept it in a hangar on Long Island.

The Spitfire, the Tiger Moths and Charles Lindbergh

The Supermarine Spitfire Mark IX that Robertson once owned belongs to the most famous family of military aircraft ever built, and one of the most beautiful. Spitfires fought the Messerschmitt in World War II and helped turn back the German threat in the Battle of Britain. By the time production ended in 1949, more than 22,000 Spitfires and Seafires had been made. Robertson sold his after getting “an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

The Tiger Moth was a British two-seat biplane designed by Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, an entomologist who named several of his designs after moths. The first was tested in 1934, and in World War II it proved invaluable as a trainer. It had no brakes; a skid on the tail slowed it down on grass training fields.

In 1969 Charles Lindbergh flew one of Robertson’s Tiger Moths at Santa Paula Airport in California, where Robertson kept a hangar. He had a third in Creve Coeur, Missouri. “He made his flight log entry that day, just like an ordinary pilot,” Robertson said. Robertson later narrated a film shown at the Smithsonian marking the anniversary of Lindbergh’s historic flight.

For a collector of aircraft, ownership means hangars, maintenance and flying hours rather than a display cabinet. Other collectors of big, working machines include Jay Leno with his cars and motorcycles and Billy Gray with his speedway bikes.

Gustave Whitehead’s 1901 airplane, rebuilt and flown

In the 1980s Robertson set out to test the legend of Gustave Whitehead, the German immigrant said to have built and flown an airplane in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1901, two years before the Wright Brothers. Robertson rebuilt Whitehead’s craft and piloted it himself down a runway in Bridgeport. It lifted off the trailer holding it and briefly flew, lending credence to the story.

“We’ll never take away the rightful role of the Wright Brothers,” Robertson said, “but if this poor little German immigrant did indeed get an airplane to go up and fly one day, then let’s give him the recognition he deserves.” The remark fit his screen image as a solid, intense and earnest Everyman.

Relief flights and aviation honors

“Flying is freedom,” Robertson once said. “It’s the essence of the good life.” He added, “There’s synergism in an activity like aviation. You must give back what you take out.” In 1969, during the civil war in Nigeria, he helped organize flights of food and medical supplies into Biafra, which was caught in the middle of the conflict. In 1978, when famine struck Ethiopia, he organized supply flights there as well.

Four years later the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association gave him its L.P. Sharples Award for his contributions to aviation. He was also honored by the U.S. Air Force, the National Soaring Museum and the National Aviation Club, and he often spoke at aviation programs.

From the Merchant Marine to Picnic, PT 109 and Charly

Acting was not an early ambition. “I acted in class plays to get out of having to do after-school chores,” he admitted. He enrolled at Antioch College in Ohio to study writing and worked on the town paper, where someone suggested his style suited the theater. World War II put those plans on hold. An eye that tested below 20-20 kept him out of Navy flight training, so he joined the Merchant Marine and saw action in the South Pacific, the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic and France. “It was a dangerous way to spend the war,” he said, “but I’m still here. Not everybody was so lucky.”

After the war he went to New York to write for the stage and fell into acting “because it was there and it was something I could do.” In 1950 he joined a national touring company of Mister Roberts for two years, then appeared on Broadway in Joshua Logan’s The Wisteria Trees with Helen Hayes. His screen debut came in 1955 in Logan’s film of Picnic, and the same year he drew praise as Joan Crawford’s troubled boyfriend in Autumn Leaves.

In 1963 President Kennedy chose him to portray Kennedy in the World War II film PT 109. He won an Emmy in 1965 for the television play The Game and the Oscar in 1968 for Charly, playing an intellectually disabled man given temporary brilliance by a scientific experiment. By 2004 he had made about 70 films, most recently as Uncle Ben in Spider-Man, and had just finished Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet. He also appeared on the 1960s television series Batman, the show remembered by fans of Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl.