Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  In Pollard the Chevy found an ideal partner. It used to be that virtually any boy growing up in America could pop the hood on a car and identify the drivetrain’s various components, and through the early seventies, those components were relatively few and plain to see. Most could probably tell you what those components did—could explain how a carburetor blended air and gasoline in the proportions necessary for ignition, how the distributor regulated the sparks that touched off combustion, and what the valve covers covered, exactly. Many boys could make simple repairs to the running gear—indeed, had to possess that knowledge just to keep their machines on the road. Some might have been up to more complicated tasks, such as packing the wheel bearings, adjusting the timing, or tackling a brake job.

  And a few would possess an understanding of all things mechanical, could diagnose a problem by sight, smell, or sound; not only understood, cerebrally, the principles that governed the internal combustion power plant but seemed to intuit them on some primal, brain-stem level. A wrench was appendage, more than tool. Intricate machinery held no mystery.

  Sid Pollard was one of those kids.

  He didn’t lament the wagon’s age or relatively primitive engineering. Just the opposite was true: He’d gravitated toward vehicles that required attention since high school, when he’d owned a succession of Renaults and a ’65 Mercedes—cars not exactly celebrated for their reliability, but far more interesting than the never-fail Japanese cars that seemed to breed in American driveways in the seventies, cars that gave him little excuse to tinker. As Ozzie Nelson had boasted a generation before, he could fix most any problem under the hood, for at least long enough to get home, with only a hammer and pliers.

  Besides, Pollard adored the way the Chevy looked—the heavy chrome of its prow, the paint job straight out of Miami, its slab sides and wraparound rear glass. The bright Chevy emblem in the grille, and the wide, shallow V on the hood, a stylistic boast to the world that the car packed a V8. The way the tailgate folded down while the hatch window above it swung up. Everything about it, really: It was a big green summary of everything Sid Pollard loved about cars.

  THE ’57 CHEVY inherited some of its classic good looks from the 1955 model, for the two were variations on a theme, the first and last renditions of a single three-year design cycle. In the middle of 1951, a full six years before Pollard’s wagon rolled out of the Baltimore plant, GM drafted the specifications for the “A” body its 1955 cars would share with those of the succeeding two years, and it became the task of corporate engineers and draftsmen to translate those specs into a general shape. This roughed-in “A” body core was passed on to the Chevy styling studio, which was led by designer Clare “Mac” MacKichan, a vastly talented craftsman who answered to Harley Earl, and who now had before him a fresh-slate assignment—a car that was to be new from the tires up. In the years since the war, Chevy had fallen behind Ford and Chrysler in both styling and performance. MacKichan’s job was to inject a fresh, youthful vigor into what the public was coming to view as an old man’s car.

  The design team started with a couple of assumptions. One, the new car wouldn’t have traditional fenders, nor any hint of them. Unlike the ’54 Chevy, which swelled around its rear wheels in a vestigial nod to the running board days, the new car would fully incorporate its wheels into its flanks. Second, it would most likely have a one-piece, wraparound windshield, a first for Chevrolet.

  Beyond that, MacKichan had nothing but latitude, and he ran with it. He and his people came up with a bold look for the ’55 model. Its hood would dip while its front fenders ran high, reversing the traditional arrangement; in profile, the line along the top of the fenders—called the belt line—would run flat to the windshield, then dip an inch or so, and at this new height continue under the windows in a straight shot to the tail.

  Seen from the side, it worked—its high fenders seemed defiant challenges to any air that might get in their way. From the front, it didn’t fare so well: The diving hood ended with an inward curl over a wide, thin grille, and to modern eyes the combination suggests a toothless mouth. Still, MacKichan and Earl liked it enough that they had the design reproduced as a clay model. It seemed on its way to mass production.

  Only then, happily, an engineering problem intervened: The Chevy was getting a new engine to go along with its modern sheet metal—the company’s first V8, which would replace a six-cylinder that dated to 1929—and the thing wouldn’t fit under the dipped hood. MacKichan and company tried raising both the hood and fenders to accommodate it, but the result looked skinny and tall, so they refashioned the whole front end of the car, raising the hood and lowering the fenders to create a more or less horizontal plane. The step-down in the belt line was now superfluous, so they ran that line straight for the entire length of the car, from headlights to taillights, except for a little triangular notch just forward of the rear roof pillar. Curved and asymmetrical, the notch created the illusion of a small rise over the car’s rear quarter. The effect was dynamite.

  Now came the question of what to do about the grille. Earl was in the habit of spending a few weeks each year in Europe, studying the cars that automakers there unveiled at the continent’s auto shows, and he returned from his 1953 trip excited. A new Ferrari he’d seen boasted a simple but stunning egg-crate grille, and he suggested—decreed, actually—that something similar might work on the Chevy. He took personal command of the design, overseeing the creation of a round-cornered rectangle of crisscrossing chrome blades.

  At a time when front ends were crowded with heavy chrome and missile-shaped bumper guards (“Dagmars,” they were nicknamed, after a busty blond TV star who recorded the novelty song “Mama Will Bark” with Frank Sinatra), the grille’s forceful simplicity was almost shocking—and made more so by its marriage to a low, unadorned front bumper, wide-spaced and hooded headlights, and the car’s slab-sided body. The interior was likewise uncluttered, with a dash borrowed from the ’53 Corvette, a stroke aimed at younger buyers. MacKichan found the package “quite refreshing.” Earl was even more pleased. “Now there’s a car,” he said, “that if it had a Cadillac emblem on it, I could sell as a Cadillac.”

  The buying public wasn’t so enthusiastic. When it was introduced in late October 1954, the all-new ’55 Chevy didn’t move off the lot at near the speed GM had expected. When days, then weeks, passed, and sales remained slow, the company’s panicked bosses started looking for something to blame, and they fastened on Earl’s grille. The car’s front end was simply too radical, too austere, they said, for the mainstream, middle-class American buyer.

  MacKichan was ordered to come up with a new front end for a midyear replacement. His studio dropped everything to devise a variation on the egg crate that stretched across the entire front of the car and incorporated the turn signal lamps. It was a pleasing compromise, only a touch busier than the original—but that touch, to corporate eyes, made all the difference, for it turned the car’s grimace into a smile. Then, before the switch could be accomplished, the public suddenly and overwhelmingly warmed to the egg crate: By December 1954, the unedited car was posting record sales, stunning the executives who’d denounced it just weeks before. The Plan B front end instead became the face of the 1956 Chevy.

  The bosses considered another candidate for the egg crate’s replacement, as well. In 1953, MacKichan’s assistant chief designer, Carl Renner, had sketched a Chevy with a muscular grille-bumper assembly that more resembled a high-end car. The crash program to remake the ’55 rescued that fish-mouthed grille from the studio’s file of dead ideas. It was stamped into reality as the face of the ’57.

  By August 1954, when Earl described his work to a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, every detail of the car now decaying at Moyock Muscle had been decided. “Most Americans are at least a little excited over the appearance of new-model automobiles each year,” read one passage of the story, which was titled “I Dream Automobiles.” Earl wasn’t, he said, “because, considering the share of all
cars my company produces, the odds are almost even that your new car is one I designed myself and put out of my life at least twenty-seven months ago.

  “It hasn’t been too long ago that we settled what your 1957 car will look like.”

  Park them side by side, and it’s not immediately apparent that the 1957 model shares much hardware with its older Chevy siblings. Their roofs, doors, and glass—their “A” body cores—might be identical, but MacKichan’s studio was under heavy pressure to make something special of the last car in the design cycle, and its stylists worked magic in obscuring its origins. It was longer than the ’56 car by more than two inches. It was a couple of inches lower, as well, a feat the studio pulled off by downsizing the wheels from fifteen-inchers to fourteen—a questionable “advance” in terms of performance and tire wear, but true to the most holy of Earl’s commandments. The new grille-bumper arrangement not only obliterated any trace of the egg crate, it seemed to reshape the metal around it, to soften its edges. The ’55 had been a handsome car. The ’57 was pretty.

  And the later model was dressed to take off from the local air force base. Its vestigial Dagmars were etched with crosshairs, unless covered with optional rubber warheads. Its hood had lost the big, stylized bird ornament that perched front and center on past Chevys, and had gained a pair of grooves cradling finned chrome darts. The company called these new decorations “scoop assemblies.” The automotive press labeled them “wind splitz,” and motorheads came to call them “cheese cutters.” What they were clearly intended to evoke, however, were gunsights.

  And not least, there were those fins.

  THE CHEVY WASN’T the first American car to borrow from aircraft: The nose of Studebaker’s futuristic 1950 model narrowed to a point, attached to which was a “spinner,” a circular chrome gewgaw that did not actually spin, but nonetheless evoked a propeller. A team of former and moonlighting Studebaker stylists put a spinner on the nose of the ’49 Ford, too. Those designs traded on America’s passion for everything plane-related in the years after the country’s air victory in World War II; climb into a Studie and you could imagine yourself downing Messerschmidts and Zeros.

  Over at GM, meanwhile, Earl was finding inspiration in the back end of airplanes, rather than their noses—and in the tail of one airplane, in particular. In 1941, he and a contingent of GM stylists called on the army’s Selfridge Field, on the outskirts of Detroit, where they beheld the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. The new fighter was big, fast, and heavily armed, with a fifty-two-foot wingspan, twin engines and a bristle of machine guns and cannons on its nose. It was also unlike any other warplane in the sky: The pilot sat in a small pod positioned on the center of the airplane’s broad wing; the engines rode in separate fuselages, off to his right and left, and these narrowed to twin tail booms ending in paddle-shaped vertical stabilizers. “We had to stand thirty feet away from it because it was still in security,” Earl said of the viewing, “but even at that distance we could soak up the lines of its twin booms and twin tails.” Entranced, Earl put his stylists at work incorporating the Lightning’s look into GM’s cars. The war intervened, halting civilian auto production, but the company was ready with its first cautious application of the P-38’s style when cars again rolled off the line—the Cadillac of 1948 sported nubby rises on its rear.

  Modest though they were—and they were so much so that it’s a stretch to classify them as tailfins—customers didn’t know what to make of these new additions, and the motoring press greeted them with mockery. But acceptance of what Earl acknowledged was a “fairly sharp departure” came soon enough. “Cadillac owners realized that it gave them an extra receipt for their money,” he said, “in the form of a visible prestige marking for an expensive car.”

  Those early “fishtails,” as Earl called them, were just earning their place as a Cadillac standard when GM unleashed its Buick LeSabre concept car of 1951, a low-riding convertible studded with Jet Age details. Its nose narrowed to an oval grille that mimicked the business end of the Air Force’s new F-86 SabreJet, and its rear sported what, back before the war, would have been called a boat tail—only here it ended in what appeared a chrome jet exhaust port flanked by high, squarish fins, each trailed by three flame-shaped taillights.

  Work on the ’55 cars was starting even as the LeSabre was flooring car show audiences around the country, and quieted-down versions of its fins soon found their way onto GM’s production cars. The Olds and Buick sported bulges that in succeeding years would sharpen into prominent blades. The ’55 Chevy, too: Its taillights were mounted on quarter panels that protruded a demure couple of inches beyond the trunk. Pontiac’s proto-fins were flashier, but still only promises. Only Cadillac’s top-of-the-line convertible, the Eldorado, sported bona fide scimitars on its tail: It abandoned the brand’s nubs for great, triangular fins that tapered to sharp, chrome-edged points a foot behind the car proper. Nowadays, the ’55 Eldorado is a rarity, but its tail remains familiar because Chevy stylists would borrow those fins, with only slight alteration, for their ’57 design.

  A front end passed over once before. A rear end ripped off from a two-year-old Cadillac. The ’57 Chevy’s designers weren’t excited by the car—not at first, and not compared to the ’55; it seemed a cut-and-paste job, a mash of old ideas. But that became a lonely view, especially regarding the fins, because they were executed just about flawlessly. Unlike the Caddie’s, they didn’t rise; rather, the car’s trunk or hatch sloped downward, while its belt line—the top edge of the fins—kept going straight; they stretched rearward, not skyward. Because they extended the belt line, they helped the car appear longer; and because they were integrated so seamlessly into the car’s lines, they came across as elemental, not an add-on—a point underlined by a little door hidden under the chrome of the left fin, concealing the gas filler cap.

  Sure, they were silly. But they looked terrific.

  6

  FOR FOUR MONTHS after the county’s visit, Arney assures me he’s ready to start work on the Chevy, and each time he makes the promise, something happens to push the announced start date back. He’s ensnared by a succession of distractions, most of them involving real estate—he has to prepare an empty storefront for an incoming customer, or clean out another property in the wake of an ended lease—or his restaurants, or the ten horses that he keeps at the Arney Compound. Being a hands-on variety of businessman, he insists on being present for each and every task, if not performing it himself.

  He’s rarely at Moyock Muscle when I visit. As Thanksgiving comes and goes, then Christmas, many of my visits consist of killing time, waiting to see whether he’ll turn up. I sit in the Stingray convertibles in the showroom. I stroll through the Quonset’s rear, behind the office, where a workshop as big as the showroom is populated by additional Corvettes under repair, along with thousands of tools and pieces of car.

  More often than not, Painter Paul is the only other soul on the premises, and it’s in his workspaces, in the lot’s rear corner, that I waste most of these days. I inspect the odd tools he uses to bend and cut metal, the paint pots and spray guns in the paint shed. I explore the body shop’s small back room, unused save for the storage of a single rusty bumper and stacks of brittle, yellowing magazines—Hot Rod Deluxe, Car Kulture DeLuxe, American Rodder, Street Rodder, Custom Rodder—everything sweatered in a Pompeian stratum of fine gray dust, the by-product of sanding out in the main room. On the wall is a faded foldout poster of Miss Ginger Miller, Penthouse Pet of the Year for 1989, which has evidently hung in that spot for twenty-two years.

  I quiz Painter Paul about his tattoos—a large, spike-collared bulldog on his left pectoral, a horned, bone-munching ghoul on his left shoulder, and “Sabbath,” his dog’s name, in Old English script on the opposite arm. “My brother did them,” he tells me.

  “Oh,” I say. “Your brother’s a tattoo artist?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” he replies, “but he does them.”

  When I ask him when he e
xpects to start work on the Chevy, he snorts. “Don’t be thinking that this is going to happen quickly,” he tells me. “It’s going to take fucking forever.” Look around, he says. He has spent the past several weeks restoring a 1965 GMC pickup, has painted it a gorgeous deep gold with ivory trim, and fitted a gleaming, varnished wood floor into its bed. It lacks an interior—not a big job on a pickup—and an engine, which Arney already owns and might take a few days, tops, to install. Those fixes would yield a truck of considerable value. In its incomplete state, it’s not worth nearly as much, and on top of that, it’s an investment Arney’s already spent a pile of money on. Painter Paul is pessimistic about when, or if, it might be finished. “It’ll sit,” he says.

  In one of the three sheds that constitute his work area, he points out two unfinished convertibles—a 1967 Mustang, complete but for an engine, and a 1965 Chevy Impala painted a deep red and minus an interior. Both have been there for years—in the case of the Impala, six or more. “He never fucking finishes anything,” Painter Paul sighs. “Got half-finished cars all over the place.”

  January 2011 comes and goes, with the Chevy still slouched in the weeds outside the body shop. It’s with Painter Paul’s words in my head that I corner Arney one early afternoon in late February at the bar at Bootleggers and ask: What’s the plan? Just when, if ever, does he plan to get around to the Chevy? Neighboring restaurants are packed with lunch crowds, but besides the two of us, a waitress, a cook, and Slick, who’s running the bar, the place is empty.

  Arney eyes me impassively. “Well, to tell you the truth, it wouldn’t bother me one bit to shitcan the project,” he says, “because not fixing that car would save me about thirty, forty thousand dollars.” Money is tight, and he’s saddled with a slew of obligations that have to take precedence over the wagon. Such as, for instance, Bootleggers, which is seriously underperforming. And dozens of other properties that are sitting empty, sucking up dollars in mortgage, interest, and insurance, and for which he hasn’t been able to find renters or buyers. And the banks that are breathing down his neck. And the FBI.