In a shop window, before a trip home across the Atlantic, Jane Sterling Adriance saw lingerie she liked enough to wreck her travel plans. She had been sent money for airfare to the United States, but she spent the last of her cash on the lingerie, exchanged the fare, and booked passage on a steamship instead.[1]
Jan Sterling later said a lingerie purchase kept her off the Hindenburg. After swapping her airfare for a steamship ticket, she learned mid-voyage that the airship she had originally been booked on had burned in New Jersey on May 6, 1937.
Sterling told the story in 1968, during the taping of a game show pilot, long after she had become known to audiences as Jan Sterling rather than Jane Sterling Adriance.[1] The hinge of the story was small enough to sound almost unserious: a young woman, a shop window, and the last of her money. No warning dream appears in the account. No heroic decision. She wanted the lingerie, bought it, and took the slower way home.[1]
Jane Sterling Adriance had been born in New York City on April 3, 1921, to Eleanor Ward Adriance and William Allen Adriance Jr., an architect and advertising executive.[1] She grew up in a wealthy household, attended private schools, and moved with her family through Europe and South America.[1] In London and Paris, she was taught by private tutors. In London, she also studied at Fay Compton's dramatic school, a practical beginning for a girl who would soon be using variations of her own name on stage.[1]
The airship she said she missed was the Hindenburg, the German passenger airship destroyed by fire while arriving in New Jersey on May 6, 1937.[1] Sterling's account places her original booking on that flight. The revised itinerary put her aboard a steamship instead, and while she was still crossing the ocean, she learned that the aircraft she had meant to take had burned.[1]
A Near Miss Before the Screen Career
In 1938, the year after the Hindenburg disaster, Sterling began her acting career on Broadway. She appeared as Chris Faringdon in Bachelor Born, using names such as Jane Adriance and Jane Sterling before settling into the screen name that would stick.[2] The near-miss story sits just before that public life begins, in the narrow space between a private-school upbringing and a career in theaters, films, and television.
By 1947, she had made her film debut in Tycoon, billed as Jane Darian, and soon afterward became Jan Sterling.[2] A prominent supporting role in Johnny Belinda followed in 1948.[2] During the 1950s, she appeared steadily in films including Caged, Mystery Street, Union Station, The Mating Season, Ace in the Hole, Flesh and Fury, The High and the Mighty, Female on the Beach, and High School Confidential.[2]
The High and the Mighty brought Sterling her most visible awards attention. For the 1954 film, she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and received an Academy Award nomination in the same category.[1] The title carries an accidental echo, since one of the defining stories attached to her youth involved another glamorous form of air travel, one remembered not for arrival but for catastrophe.
Audiences often saw Sterling in roles with hard edges. Her performance opposite Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole is often cited among her strongest work, and she was frequently cast as determined, forceful women.[1][2] The Hindenburg anecdote has a different texture. It does not depend on ambition or calculation. It depends on a purchase that should have been forgettable.
Sterling continued acting across stage, film, and television for decades, with credits spanning from 1938 to 1988.[1] She died in Los Angeles on March 26, 2004, at age 82.[1] The record does not preserve the lingerie, the shop, or the steamship ticket. It leaves the exchange itself: airfare turned into silk, a fast crossing traded for a slow one, and news of the Hindenburg reaching her somewhere at sea.
