TWA Flight 847 Revisited

The chic, blond flight attendant stood in the wings of the mock-up TWA plane and peered intently at the actress who was playing her.

Uli Derickson watched as Lindsay Wagner leaned over the seat and gently touched the blood-caked face of the man portraying Robert Dean Stethem, the Navy diver who was beaten and then shot to death, his body tossed onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport, on the second day of the hijacking nearly three years ago.

“What’s your name?” Wagner, playing Derickson, whispered.

“Robert,” said actor Steven Eckholdt in a barely audible reply.

It was the third week of filming “The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story,” a two-hour NBC-TV movie shot earlier this year, which airs at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39. Inside Stage 23 at Burbank Studios, the real Derickson, who for four weeks served as technical adviser on the project, turned away and grimaced.

Her mouth tightened--the same kind of look Wagner says she saw when she studied Derickson on videotape. (“The first press conference she did, she had (this) nervous habit,” said Wagner later in imitation. “Her tension would be so locked up in her jaws, she’d (grit her teeth).”)

That morning, Derickson could not stomach even the simulation of violence. During the filming and refilming of a scene where two Shia Muslim hijackers beat Stethem and other passengers, Derickson had to leave. She took a walk around the studio lot and had a cup of coffee.

“I started to cry and realized I am shaky,” she said later. She said she could no longer stand the screaming.

The docudrama depicts Derickson’s harrowing two days aboard the TWA plane that was hijacked June 14, 1985, over Athens with 153 aboard--a nightmarish odyssey that shifted from Athens to Beirut, to Algiers, back to Beirut and back to Algiers again. At one point in Beirut, Derickson, the purser or lead flight attendant, ingeniously used her Shell credit card to buy fuel for the aircraft, thereby assuaging the hijackers.

She emerged from the ordeal a heroine: She was credited with intervening with the hijackers to save the life of Clinton Suggs, another Navy diver; with being instrumental in securing the release of 17 women and two children at the first stop in Beirut; with managing to avoid the hijackers’ demands that she single out passengers with Jewish-sounding names. Because she was shrewd and--at least outwardly--calm in dealing with the two original hijackers and able to converse with one of them in her native German, she indirectly helped save all their lives--all except Stethem’s.

Derickson was among some 60 passengers and flight attendants released in Algiers by Amal militia, who had boarded the plane in Beirut. Other hostages were let go along the way. The last 39 passengers and crew were freed June 30 after two weeks of captivity in Beirut.

“I’m no heroine,” Derickson told Jim Calio of People magazine in a two-part, first-person account in August, 1985. “They threw me a hot potato, and I had to handle it.”

From those stories, the docudrama was born. Calio and David Hume Kennerly, former White House photographer during the Ford Administration, are co-executive producers of the Columbia Pictures Television production. They had been looking to do a movie together, and when Calio got his exclusive, he said he called Kennerly, saying, “I think we have one here.”

“Today was a rough day,” Derickson said over lunch on the Burbank lot. “When I was asked to come here, I talked to the producer, Jay Benson, at great length.

“He has done several docudramas, and he said, ‘You might find it hard sometimes to relive what happens. Listen,’ he said, ‘it happens to the toughest guys. I’ve done documentaries on Vietnam and even those guys just finally had to leave, break down.’

“I knew it was going to be hard, and for the first two weeks I was able to look at it, saying (to herself), ‘Oh, we are in Burbank,’ because you see all the unreal things around you, the lighting and the people, and so I felt very good. Well, today we got into the dramatic situation with the beating of the passengers, and I remember on the aircraft that was one of the harder things to have to sit through, to hear the beating of adult men. It’s very hard when you hear the screams of someone being beaten. . . .

Derickson is 43 now, and an American citizen. At the time of the hijacking she was a West German citizen, although she has been in the United States since 1967, when she got her first job as a governess. Later that year she joined TWA.

She lives in rural northwest New Jersey with husband Russell, a retired TWA pilot, and their son, Matthew, 9.

Derickson’s family had been out to visit the set the week before, and she said with a laugh that her son wants to make movies. She is still flying for TWA, and on a flight to Los Angeles last summer met up once again with John Testrake, the captain of that hijacked flight.

Derickson is pretty enough to be taken for an actress: As she walked with a springy step into the studio’s Blue Room for lunch wearing a bright lavender-and-white dress, guests at a nearby table spotted her and whispered: “That must be Lindsay Wagner!”

“Quite frankly, it was not my idea to make a movie,” Derickson said easily. “I’m not a movie-goer myself.” And as for TV, she said she watches “very little of it.”

“I’m an oddball when it comes to that,” she said with a laugh. “I’m a nature lover, so I do a lot of animal watching. . . . We have a bit of wildlife in the Delaware National Park, and our vet does a lot of the tagging of the bears in order to study their habitat . . . and I like to mountain climb.”

While the docudrama is subtitled as her story, it is hardly the full account. Born of Sudeten German parents in the summer of 1944, she was evacuated with her parents to East Germany a year later. As a child she remembers hunger and “taking away the potato peelings from the rabbits to eat.”

In 1950, she and her mother escaped to the West, sleeping in haystacks by day, making their way stealthily to the border by night. Her father followed six weeks later. “I remember not making the wrong move. . . . All the experts, the psychiatrists seem to think that my childhood gave me something that I maybe drew from (on Flight 847).

“After I realized a movie will be made,” Derickson said, “I thought I would like to not have a fairy tale made out of it and (would go with) whoever guaranteed me--up to a point--some input to make sure it was done more or less the way it happened.”

Of course she found it “a very strange, eerie experience to see somebody else do something that you had actually lived through, to see the actress and everybody else involved re-create something that you had experienced.

“I’m not known to be a person who stays back and looks at things. I kind of take actions most of the time in my life. I handle things. And so sometimes you’re tempted to step in there and say, ‘This is really how it went’ . . . little details, not necessarily inaccuracies. They have to take dramatic licenses to make it work better for a movie.”

One of them involved a key point. According to Derickson, a major factor in her dealing with the hijackers, who were in their early 20s, was the fact that she “could have been their mother. I felt this. Therefore, I used my experience in life. These were two young boys, really, and I realized that somehow I am going to get to them. Also, no matter how difficult it was, I always looked upon them as human beings. If you don’t, you might as well give up.”

In the docudrama, the hijacker called “Castro,” with whom she had more contact because he spoke German, is played by Eli Danker, an actor with salt-and-pepper hair who looks like a contemporary of Derickson.

“We tried to stick to the facts as closely as possible,” said Kennerly.

“We had a lot of drafts and she looked at every one,” said Calio.

“Reality is really quite boring,” said director Robert Wendkos with ease. “You heighten it quite a bit.

“We did stick to the truth pretty accurately,” Wendkos said. “The concept on the movie was to really tear the skin off the plane and let the world know what went on behind it. We were determined to make the audience feel like they were hostages themselves--the fear, the terror, the outrage . . . the ordeal of not being allowed to go to the bathroom when they wanted. . . . “

On the choice of Danker, Wendkos said he had to “go a little older. I needed an actor who spoke Arabic and German fluently, and he was a superb actor.”

As technical adviser, Derickson helped modify Norman Morrill’s script during filming. “We got a lot of color and emotional nuances from her,” said Wendkos. “She would remind me what she did. When she stepped over (Kurt) Carlson (a beaten passenger), she said she leaned down to feel his pulse, which was not in the script, so we incorporated that.”

Wagner said that she too checked emotional reactions with Derickson and “sometimes an anecdote would come out, and we would improvise on the spot. Like when they (the hijackers) gave her a big jar of aspirin to pass out to keep the passengers cool when the air conditioners were not going on the ground. We had just been talking about how she was in front of the passengers because there were times when her hands were shaking, when she was crying, and she said, ‘I tried very hard to remain calm and collected. . . .’ ”

Wagner continued: “Then she paused, and said that when she was passing out the aspirin, she must not have been as cool as she thought because one woman said to her, ‘Honey, I think you should take some too.’ ”

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