The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  Less accurate, however, was another anecdote in Inside Information:

  “Wallace, by the way, does not own a Rolls-Royce. We thought it might be of interest to have a picture of him with his own bruised automobile by way of contrast with the subject of his article.

  “‘Unfortunately,’ Wallace told us, ‘the idea won’t work very well with my car–I own a Cadillac. If you go out in the streets in Hollywood in anything less, they stone you.’”

  That the editors had hoped to pose me with my own jalopy, as a telling contrast to the car I had written about, but had then canceled the idea with dismay when they learned I owned a Cadillac, was true. But the final quip, that I owned a Cadillac out of fear that I would be stoned if I drove anything less, was sheer flippancy. I owned a Cadillac (and drove beyond my means) because when I had learned to drive, I’d dreaded the whole business of having to learn to use a clutch and hand shift. I wished it were possible to learn to drive in a vehicle that had eliminated complicated shifting by hand. Then to my amazement and delight, I learned that there was such a car. General Motors had just produced a Cadillac with a new, completely automatic shift. In short, you could drive it—and look, no hands. I begged, I borrowed, perhaps I even stole. But that is how I came to the Cadillac—and how Inside Information lost its picture.

  In the years following my own difficulties with the Rolls-Royce management, I kept an eye on the company’s promotional activities. I was able to observe a gradual change in its relationship with the press and the public. To survive in the new world, half Communistic, half democratic, where royalty and billionaires were fast becoming curiosities, Rolls-Royce had to become a people’s car—a rich people’s car, to be sure, but a people’s car nonetheless—instead of a car merely for the pedigreed. As a consequence, the Rolls-Royce management had to unbend, open its doors, seek the people, meet the people, sell the people—and yet not destroy their snob appeal. Apparently, Rolls-Royce straddled the fence successfully. If they found as many businessmen, physicians, and attorneys buying Rolls-Royces as were the diminishing ranks of royalty, it did not mean that the car’s image and exclusivity had been tarnished. It only meant that there now existed a new, broader-based, moneyed elite. Rolls-Royce had let down its hair—and was no less attractive for having done so. A Rolls-Royce dealer in San Francisco remarked with pride, and in justification, recently: “As yet, we haven’t sold many to people who wash their own cars.”

  The promotional turning point in modern Rolls-Royce history—if one must pinpoint a date—probably occurred in 1958. In that year, the Rolls-Royce management retained advertising man David Ogilvy, along with the other partners in his firm, to help increase sales of the luxury car in the United States. Ogilvy, educated in Edinburgh and at Oxford, had become a New York advertising legend. He had given “the man in the Hathaway shirt” an eye patch, and had made the New World conscious of such necessities of the good life as Schweppes and Beefeater. The Rolls-Royce management recruited him to do what he could for their motorcar.

  After a brief study, Ogilvy decided that what was wrong was the static Rolls-Royce image. The image, he suggested, should be altered. For one thing, chauffeurs were passé, The Rolls-Royce had to become a vehicle for do-it-yourself drivers. Dukes and duchesses, maharajas, and Middle East billionaires who reclined in the well-appointed back seats, were out. The Rolls-Royce must become an acceptable vehicle for highly solvent behind-the-wheel republicans and citizens. Baronial castles and Mediterranean yachts were going, and would soon be gone. The Rolls-Royce must take the family to the beach or picnic, and afterward be lodged beneath a carport or inside a garage attached to an unpretentious, modern American house. The old snob sell used in previous advertisements—“The Best Car in the World”—had become obsolete. The new sell should emphasize comfort, durability, and long-range economy.

  And so Ogilvy created a fresh advertising campaign for the Rolls-Royce, with the memorable headline: at 60 MILES

  AN HOUR THE LOUDEST NOISE IN THIS NEW ROLLS-ROYCE

  COMES FROM THE ELECTRIC CLOCK. This was an enormously effective sales technique with the buying public. But—even though the story may be apocryphal—I have been told that the publicity was not appreciated by a dedicated Rolls-Royce engineer in Crewe, who, upon reading the new advertisement, took it as a personal rebuke. The engineer thought that he’d better have another look at that damn clock. Now the electric clock, too, is silent.

  The plebeian appeal in advertising has continued. An advertisement in The New Yorker during 1965 included the following copy:

  “Myth has it that Rolls-Royce is very aloof about who can buy a Rolls-Royce or Bentley car—and that if you are lucky enough to buy one of these cars, it will be taken away from you if you don’t take proper care of it. Nonsense! Rolls-Royce is as anxious to sell its products as any manufacturer is. It’s easy to buy a Rolls-Royce…Many women tend to shy away from driving the Rolls-Royce—until they get in it, drive it around a bit, discover that the Rolls-Royce is a family car—and give their husbands an ultimatum to buy one by such and such a date or else!”

  Other recent Rolls-Royce advertising, while still emphasizing that the car can be equipped with such luxuries as a miniature bar, now mention accessories of more practical use to the family. In the four-door saloon model, potential buyers are reminded that the Rolls-Royce now offers “built-in mineral water rack and special reading light,” as well as “built-in picnic tables.” All well and good, those picnic tables, but one feels that King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Nizam of Hyderabad would have been aghast.

  When I set out recently to investigate what had happened to Rolls-Royce since 1947, I found that this altering of the image was one change that had taken place. As a corollary, the management had become considerably more receptive to publicity. When I made inquiries of the management about the latest developments concerning the automobile, I received immediate and direct replies. When I wanted to read what had been written about the car since I had written about it, I was pleased to find no dearth of articles in periodicals and newspapers of recent years. But I also found out something else that was quite gratifying: My story about the motorcar, like the car itself, had suffered little depreciation across the years. An article about an American automobile, written in 1947, would be entirely out of date today. My article on Rolls-Royce, except for very minor changes and modifications, was as accurate in the mid-sixties as when it had been written.

  Today, the Rolls-Royce remains the most expensive automobile in the world. While there is a simple four-door model that may be purchased for around $18,000, the Rolls-Royce convertibles and limousines sell for prices varying from $27,000 to $30,000 each. The only car nearly as costly is Rolls-Royce’s sibling, the Bentley, which has a model that sells for $26,000. Below that, for the more insecure rich, I found a German Mercedes-Benz that sells for $20,500, an Italian Maserati that sells for $16,300, a French Facel that sells for $15,500, and an Italian Ferrari that sells for $14,-200. The most expensive American cars are the Lincoln Continental convertible, which may be purchased for $6,940, and the Cadillac convertible, which may be bought for $6,630.

  In 1947, I related how Rolls-Royce had built an economy edition of their big car, an experimental model, which they considered putting on the mass market. But at that time, they rejected the idea because they felt that it would destroy the exclusiveness of the big car. In 1964, the Rolls-Royce management finally decided to go after the mass market with a smaller, cheaper vehicle which was still, at least in part, a Rolls-Royce. Collaborating with another company, the British Motor Car Corporation, makers of the Austin and MG, Rolls-Royce produced a small automobile known as the Vanden Plas Princess “R”—the “R” being the Rolls-Royce part of it. The only portion of the car that is genuine Rolls-Royce, actually the most important portion, is the engine, a modification of one used in Rolls-Royce trucks. This hybrid baby Rolls, which can attain a speed of 112 miles per hour, sells for $5,600.

  One major change
that took place at the Rolls-Royce plant in Crewe was that, in 1949, for the first time, the company began to produce a complete motorcar. At the time I had written about Rolls-Royce, its makers had never made a car with a body. The makers did not believe in bodies, because they felt that they were engineers and not carpenters. In those days, while Royce assembled its perfect chassis, one of Great Britain’s three leading coachbuilders prepared a customed body. But in 1949, the engineers ceased looking down their noses at the carpenters. Rolls-Royce, Ltd., bought out and absorbed one of the most venerable coachbuilders in England, Park Ward, Ltd., and began to produce not only a chassis but a body. However, for elaborate custom-made bodies, the services of either 250-year-old Hooper and Company, or Mulliner, are still retained.

  I was pleased to note that, despite all its concessions to a plebeian consumer public, Rolls-Royce has remained the darling of the royal, the wealthy, and the renowned. However, it is true, as I have indicated, that the changing world has made itself felt. A member of the Soviet Russian hierarchy, Anastas Mikoyan, has had a Rolls-Royce for a dozen years, one which he drives to the Kremlin himself. The New York Times has pointed out that when, in another age, the Maharaja of Patiala purchased six new Rolls-Royces in one day, it was front-page news. But in 1960, an American family in Indianapolis bought six Rolls-Royces in a single day, and the event was hardly mentioned in the press at all. Furthermore, there are now American firms who lease Rolls-Royces by the month or rent them by the day—to anyone. One New York City car rental company has twenty-eight Rolls-Royces, and each is rented out for nine dollars an hour. And The New York Times found a Harlem chauffeur who possesses his own big Rolls-Royce—fitted inside with stocked liquor cabinet and French walnut desk—which he rents out along with his own services daily to such visiting celebrities as Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, Aristotle Onassis, Margot Fonteyn, and Lana Turner.

  The elite, however, continue to patronize Rolls-Royce. Not only does Queen Elizabeth own a special large model assembled exclusively for royalty and heads of state, but Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent have similar models. Wealthy and mysterious financiers like the Armenian oil billionaire, Nubar Gulbenkian, and celebrities like Gregory Peck, the actor, are Rolls-Royce owners. Today, one could not travel far through the Near East or India without seeing the familiar Silver Lady mascot on a radiator. Last summer, I stood outside the Monte Carlo Casino one weekday evening and counted five brand-new Rolls-Royces in the parking area.

  Despite the fact that the Rolls-Royce continues to be a vehicle designed mainly for a privileged class, its management persists in fighting down the image they once so carefully built. When The New York Times repeated the oft-told story about Rolls-Royce, Ltd., paying $15,000 to buy back an old Rolls-Royce that was about to be converted into an ordinary taxicab, the company’s promotion personnel in New York immediately declared the story false. I have their release before me. It reads:

  “It has been rumored that Rolls-Royce has paid up to $15,000 in the U.S. to prevent the use of one of its cars as a taxicab…No modern-day manufacturer would attempt to prescribe ways in which a car might or might not be used. It is unlikely that a door-to-door huckster might use a Rolls-Royce in his daily rounds, and Rolls-Royce executives might inwardly wince if they saw a Rolls-Royce being used as a blatantly commercial vehicle, as would any maker of a quality product. However, most of those who buy Rolls-Royce will inevitably display discretion and taste. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t buy a Rolls-Royce in the beginning.”

  Going on with my investigation of the changes in the Rolls-Royce since 1947, I learned that the number of Rolls-Royces produced in ensuing years has not increased dramatically. The Rolls-Royce has never been, and probably will never be, an assembly-line car turned out by the hundreds of thousands. In an average year, there may be 1,200 Rolls-Royces sold in Great Britain, and 600 sold in the United States.

  Since the Rolls-Royce is crafted and assembled by hand, no more than thirty-five a week, or 1,800 a year, are produced at Crewe. On the other hand, there are 150,000 Cadillacs produced annually in Detroit. Where it requires only five minutes to assemble a Cadillac, it takes almost ten weeks to assemble a Rolls-Royce.

  In 1964, the managing director in charge of Rolls-Royce production was a gray-haired Doctor of Philosophy named F. Llewellyn Smith. Under him there were seven thousand persons devoted to making the Rolls-Royce. Since the company still guarantees mechanical repairs on a Rolls-Royce for three years (American-made cars generally carry guarantees of three months), and since the average Rolls-Royce is expected to have a vigorous lifetime of fifteen years and cover 150,000 miles without a major repair (one Rolls-Royce is said to have covered 500,000 miles, and is still as active as ever), the standards of production are as rigorous today as I found them to be in 1947.

  The company takes pride in the durability of its product, and to dramatize this aspect of the automobile’s value, the company permitted Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to make, and release in 1965, a motion picture bearing the title The Yellow Rolls-Royce. The star of the film, the lemon-colored car, is seen as it affects the lives of three of its owners during thirty years, one owner a British diplomat, another an American gangster, another an American millionairess who smuggles it to the Yugoslavian underground during World War II. Although Ingrid Bergman and Jeanne Moreau appeared in this ode to an automobile, one film reviewer was moved to write, “The Rolls-Royce is probably the most elegant thing in the picture. And if nothing else, the film is a testimonial to its endurance.”

  To assure this longevity for each 4,650-pound Rolls-Royce, experts spend three weeks and $700 in testing each individual motorcar. Once a Rolls-Royce leaves the assembly section of the vast one-story eight-acre factory in Crewe, it goes across the road to the testing department. After running each car for forty miles on rollers, and then driving it hard over 150 miles of country roads, it is brought back for an analysis of its weaknesses and for adjustments. Each Rolls-Royce must pass ninety-eight separate tests. If the test driver hears so much as a faint whine in a rear axle, an expert will go after that whine with a stethoscope, until it is located and muffled. Each door is opened and closed 100,000 times by an automatic rig to determine if it is correctly fitted and quiet. Silence is an obsession in Crewe, as always. The Rolls-Royce passengers are expected to be able to carry on a conversation in a normal tone of voice, even when the car is going 110 miles per hour.

  As far as I could learn, the variety of modem Rolls-Royces is as luxurious and individual as ever. The wood used for the dashboard, door interiors, and folding table in a Rolls-Royce is cut from a single walnut log approved by the company. No car leaves the plant without at least fourteen, and sometimes as many as nineteen, coats of paint. Rolls-Royces continue to be ordered with unusual and eccentric accessories, just as they were ordered by the wealthy in the old days—recently an elderly arthritic English Dame had a small elevator attached to the running board of her Rolls; another customer ordered a Rolls with a collapsible bathtub inside and window shades; one maharaja ordered his Rolls with a built-in safe. Cecil Michaelis, the English painter, ordered his Rolls-Royce with an artist’s studio in the rear, and received one with built-in easel, movable roof and side panels to give him ample light and a view of the passing landscape, and seats that converted into a daybed.

  The best illustration of the traditional Rolls-Royce, surviving unchanged, is its radiator grille with the mascot on the radiator cap. The design and shape of the grille today are exactly what they were in 1905, only the grille is somewhat larger than in 1905, because the motorcar itself is larger. In the beginning, Henry Royce, learning what the radiator grille cost to make, had railed against it as “a rather stupid luxury”—but allowed it to remain, because he was seduced by its classic beauty. And so the radiator grille, made of burnished stainless steel, soldered by the nation’s foremost tinsmiths, has remained. And so has the Silver Lady mascot adorning the top of the grille. Every Rolls-Royce leaving the factory has feature
d the Silver Lady on her prow—except one. Queen Elizabeth of England had her Rolls-Royce ornament replaced by a sterling-silver mascot representing St. George and the Dragon, designed by the royal silversmiths, who smashed the mold after pouring a single cast.

  However, the motorcar produced by Rolls-Royce, Ltd., today is no more than the company’s toy and symbol of prestige. The real profits come from the company’s airplane works in Derby and Glasgow. Eighty-five percent of the company’s sales are related to aircraft production. While 7,000 employees continue to concentrate on the motorcar, there are 42,000 others who are dedicated to airplane research, design, and manufacture. Today, more than half of the world’s airlines are flying planes propelled by Rolls-Royce jet or propjet engines. And in 1964, Rolls-Royce announced that it was developing an airplane that would hurtle through space without any engine at all. As Rolls-Royce executives told the press:

  “A new method of propulsion known as surface burning involves no combustion chambers, no air intakes, and no compressors or turbines. Virtually all that remains is the fuel…The idea is to use the shock wave produced by a wedge shape at very high speeds to compress the air behind the wedge so much that, when fuel is injected into it, it explodes. The burning fuel produces a forward thrust. In principle, surface burning could be used for flying at speeds between about five and fifteen times that of sound.”

  But despite the successful advances made by the company in the field of aviation, I suspect that the name Rolls-Royce, at least in our time, will continue to be synonymous with the most luxurious of automobiles.

  Wondering how the Rolls-Royce rates today, speculating on its strengths and its weaknesses, I consulted a number of automotive writers and their published works. The pro and con about the Rolls-Royce seem to be as follows:

  In its favor: Unexcelled materials, craftsmanship, road-ability, driving pleasure, quietness, comfort. The Rolls-Royce depreciates less in cash value than any other car. The Rolls-Royce bestows social prestige. No American car, said Ken W. Purdy, the automotive authority, provides “that air of utter solidity—a manor-house-on-wheels effect—that Messrs. Rolls-Royce achieve by design, finish, masses of walnut and leather, back-seat cocktail cabinets with cut-glass decanters, and so on.”