Many talented artists at “Pan Am” have gone to great lengths to reproduce the glamorous feel of what it was like to fly during the Jet Age, but only one of them was really there — the show’s executive producer, Nancy Hult Ganis.

She worked as a Pan Am stewardess for seven years, starting in 1968. She filled out a job application after seeing a poster at a company office that said, “Our stewardesses know their way around the world better than most people know their way around the block.”

After Ganis was hired and told to report to Miami for training, she was off on the adventure of a lifetime. “If you can imagine being a young girl out of college in the ’60s and see the choices that were available. And none of them were very exciting. And then to have the opportunity to go out and see the world at a time when few people traveled outside the United States,” she says.

Ganis calls the new TV series “Pan Am” her “memoir.” She met Europeans, Asians, South Americans — women from all over — whose experiences enlarged her own. And the stewardesses got chummy with the passengers.

“We were invited to people’s homes. We would meet professors who were anthropologists who would invite you on some archaelogical dig at Machu Picchu,” Ganis says. “One of my friends became very good friends with the niece of one of the maharashis, and she was invited to her wedding. One of the other gals was on Sukarno’s private charters. He would go to China or the Soviet Union. So she was invited to the Kremlin, with Khruschev. It was just being that witness to history. Actually, if you think about it, it was a Forrest Gump life.”

It was never easy to get a job at the airlines. Besides fluency in at least one foreign language, Pan Am had other requirements. Best-selling novelist Mary Higgins Clark, who was a Pan Am stewardess in 1949 and ’50, says applicants could not wear glasses, had to have a college degree, stand between 5-foot-2 and 5-foor-7, and be slender.

“They had just dropped the requirement for being a nurse, which is why I could go in,” she says. You also could not wear your hair down. “I wore my hair in a chignon with a hairnet.”

Clark learned French by hiring a tutor for one dollar an hour and eating in enough French restaurants to learn to say, “Pass the butter.”

Her first trip was to “bomb-pocked” London, which hadn’t yet been rebuilt from the ravages of World War II. Once there, she walked around Green Park. At Trafalgar Square she says, “There was a tap on my shoulder, and I saw a made-up woman in a ratty fur. She said, ‘Beg your pardon, luv, but this is my corner.’ ”

After seeing the world, Clark quit Pan Am, married and began writing. “My first two short stories, ‘Stowaway’ and ‘Deadline From Paradise,’ were based on my experiences,” she says.

For Elizabeth Turlington, mother of model Christy Turlington Burns, a stewardess job at Pan Am had been her dream since she was 8 years old. She flew the airline when her family left El Salvador to move to America. During college, she took a break and wanted to travel.

Realizing it would take her “forever” to save her own money to do it, she saw an ad for a Pan Am job in San Francisco and drove from her home in Southern California for an interview. Once she was hired, she flew to Asia, the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and London and mingled with heads of state and movie stars like Paul Newman and Cary Grant.

Grant “was traveling under an assumed name and we were told not to bother him,” she says. “The captain said, ‘If he doesn’t bother us, we won’t bother him.’”

Turlington worked for the airline in the period covered by the series, 1961 to ’66. At that time, she says, stewardesses had to undergo annual physicals and maintain their “hiring weight.”

When a stewardess moved down the aisle, image was everything, “They didn’t want any wiggle. You had to wear a full slip so your bra strap didn’t show,” she says.

And then there were the girdles. “You had to wear them, and I understood — it never happened to me — when you went on a flight and you met with the crew, there were some girdle checks. A pinch test. A supervisor would do the pinching.”

The pinch test is re-created in the first episode in which a stern-faced inspector feels the girdle through the uniform of stewardess Laura (Margot Robbie).

The matron lifts the elastic edge and snaps it against her rear end.

“Is that really necessary?” Laura asks over her shoulder.

On Pan Am, they ran a tight ship.