Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Hollywood: I Drive Therefore I am

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America has long had a love affair with the automobile. Cars are the ultimate expression of form, function, fashion—and speed.

But most of all the car represents freedom.

Try and remember when you were a teenager yearning for your driver’s license so you could hop into daddy’s car and go, go, go. It didn’t matter where, you just wanted to burn rubber and escape into the far horizon.

The brilliant, exhilirating and touching American Grafitti, 1973, is the ultimate expression of American car culture. Almost every single scene takes place in a car.

Los Angeles was the first America city built to accomodate the automobile. And the movie stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, most born dirt-poor, expressed delight in their sudden prosperity and fame by purchasing and posing with their dream machines.

Above, Brigitte Bardot color coordinates her pants and signature ballet flats with a sexy sports car. Très chic.

Silent film comedienne Mabel Normand shows off her custom built Mercer Runabout 22-72, equipped with fold-a-way makeup kit and vanity table. The car was a gift from Mabel's boyfriend, producer Mack Sennett, 1920. The night before their wedding Mabel discovered Mack in bed with actress Mae Busch. The wedding was cancelled. Mabel boozed, became addicted to cocaine and was involved in several high-profile Hollywood scandals. Her brilliant career tanked and she died at the age of 37.

 

For a brief period during the silent era, Esther Ralston, known as The American Venus, was raking in thousands of dollars a week. She splurged on a limited edition Lincoln Town Car, 1927. Esther did not know how to drive so naturally she hired a full time chauffer. Soon enough Esther's career stalled. She lost all her money, sold her car, her mansion, and all her possessions.

 

Rudolph Valentino loved cars and spent hours tinkering with engines. He owned several very expensive custom built vehicles. Rudy proudly displays his Isotta-Franschini limousine, built to his exacting specifications, 1923. I'm reading Evelyn Zumaya's new, groundbreaking biography, “Affairs Valentino.” Along with details of Rudy's love of the automobile—and his horrendous driving—I'm gaining a whole new perspective on this remarkable figure of motion picture history. I'll write a full review as soon as I finish the book.

 

Clark Gable was a no frills kind of guy. He liked to hunt, fish and play poker with his buddies. He was also notoriously cheap. Hence his choice of an unpretentious Detroit built station wagon—chime in if you can ID the car—is fully in character and kind of reassuring.

H/T to reader Bill Brandt for identifying Valentino’s automobile.

Karen and I wish all our friends a restful and inspiring Shabbat.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Yep Gable had a Duesie – a company that boasted that every chassis off the assembly line was tested at Indianapolis to go 100 MPH – cars of that caliber usually were bought as a chassis and then a body maker would make the body – With a segue into the style that Robert loves that is how most of the design houses in Italy – like Pininfarina – got their start but today, sadly, for a variety of reasons they are in decline after 100+ years.
    If you are ever  in Central California on I5 you should turn off on Hwy 41 West for 2 reasons – First it is on the way to the magnificent Hearst Castle at San Simeon and second, stop by the little cafe with the memorial to James Dean – the actual stretch of road he was killed on is closed and 41 was moved a about a mile to the north –
     
    He left Hollywood in his Porsche 550 to go racing in Monterey or Salinas – the sun was setting and according to his passenger, a German mechanic – the last words from Dean – seeing the Ford making a left turn right in front of him, was “I’m sure he sees me”.
     
    Anyway the mechanic was thrown out and survived but was haunted by the experience for the rest of his life and Dean became a legend after only 3 movies.
     
    He had just finished filming Giant a week earlier – with his death – George Stevens wanted to redo the scene at the end with him in a drunken stupor and if I am not mistaken another actor’s voice was dubbed. (duh 😉 )
     
    On So Cal and hot rodding – I could write forever on that – but a legacy to this day is the Bonneville Salt Flats up in Utah have as their official manager the Southern California Timing Association – for over 60 years.
     
    As one more aside one of the early “speedsters” om the flats from So Cal was a converted P38 fighter’s drop tank – it was a teardrop shape and how they stuffed an engine in with suspension is anyone’s guess but that was the innovation from the  LA hot rodding scene…
     
    Offenhauser engines – I could go on and on….
     
     
     

  2. I long for the pre-catalytic converter muscle cars of the late 1960s.  Pontiac GTOs, Dodge Chargers (did anyone look as good behind a steering wheel as McQueen chasing the black Charger), Cobras, Barracudas all could be purchased new for the same price as family four door sedans.  My friends and I laughed at Burt Reynold’s Trans Am being a real muscle car despite what Bruce Springsteen says.
     
    Henry Ford liberated the average citizen from the tyranny of the streetcars and trains. Today in D.C. the lovers of everything N Korean want us to return to trains and streetcars by making gasoline too expensive for the average Joe.  It won’t work because Americans love the freedom cars give us.  Would anyone make American Graffiti for the 21st  Century if the kids could only hang out at the light-rail station?

  3. Never really felt the love for cars myself, but I live in Flagstaff, Arizona, where you can walk to almost everything (well, I can, anyway, some stuff is a bit of a schlepp for a normal person).
     
    She’s since had to sell it, but my sister used to have a 1961 Chevy Apache truck, a two-ton steel behemoth with mint-green paint. Until she sold it, she’d have old Mexican guys come up about once a week, offering to buy it (she lives in Tucson). A lot of the Mexicans in Tucson are ranchers, many of them from families that have lived there since Arizona was a part of Mexico (or, sometimes, Spain)—so many people in Tucson are ranchers that they get a day off school for the rodeo. A ’61 truck like that is, for them, the same American-dream freedom symbol mentioned above, with added elements of machismo and functionality (see any truck ad, for the sort of thing I mean).

  5. There is, or was, an automobile museum in Auburn, Indiana. John O’Hara’s Dusenberg, also there. By the way, O’Hara, or at least until he felt time, was in terms of style and rhythmn, the most graceful of novelists and short story writers. From that point of view, on par with Fitzgerald. In his later years, he grew prolix and self-important, though seldom less than interesting. And maybe, Carole bought Clark a gift…?

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