by Tom Wolfe
Since then Barris has made a lot of trips to Detroit. The auto companies, mainly GM and Ford, pump him for ideas about what the kids are going for. He tells them what’s wrong with their cars, mainly that they aren’t streamlined and sexy enough.
“But, as they told me, they have to design a car they can sell to the farmer in Kansas as well as the hot dog in Hollywood.”
For that reason—the inevitable compromise—the customizers do not dream of working as stylists for the Detroit companies, although they deal with them more and more. It would be like René Magritte or somebody going on the payroll of Continental Can to do great ideas of Western man. This is an old story in art, of course, genius vs. the organization. But the customizers don’t think of corporate bureaucracy quite the way your conventional artist does, whether he be William Gropper or Larry Rivers, namely, as a lot of small-minded Babbitts, venal enemies of culture, etc. They just think of the big companies as part of that vast mass of adult America, sclerotic from years of just being too old, whose rules and ideas weigh down upon Youth like a vast, bloated sac. Both Barris and Roth have met Detroit’s Young Stylists, and seem to look upon them as monks from another country. The Young Stylists are designers Detroit recruits from the art schools and sets up in a room with clay and styluses and tells to go to it—start carving models, dream cars, new ideas. Roth especially cannot conceive of anyone having any valid concepts about cars who hasn’t come out of the teen-age netherworld. And maybe he’s right. While the Young Stylists sit in a north-lit studio smoothing out little Mondrian solids, Barris and Roth carry on in the Dionysian loop-the-loop of streamlined baroque modern.
I’ve mentioned Ed Roth several times in the course of this without really telling you about him. And I want to, because he, more than any other of the customizers, has kept alive the spirit of alienation and rebellion that is so important to the teen-age ethos that customizing grew up in. He’s also the most colorful, and the most intellectual, and the most capricious. Also the most cynical. He’s the Salvador Dalí of the movement—a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster. Roth is really too bright to stay within the ethos, but he stays in it with a spirit of luxurious obstinacy. Any style of life is going to produce its celebrities if it sticks to its rigid standards, but in the East a talented guy would most likely be drawn into the Establishment in one way or another. That’s not so inevitable in California.
I had been told that Roth was a surly guy who never bathed and was hard to get along with, but from the moment I first talked to him on the telephone he was an easy guy and very articulate. His studio—and he calls it a studio, by the way—is out in Maywood, on the other side of the city from North Hollywood, in what looked to me like a much older and more rundown section. When I walked up, Roth was out on the apron of his place doing complicated drawings and lettering on somebody’s ice-cream truck with an airbrush. I knew right away it was Roth from pictures I had seen of him; he has a beatnik-style beard. “Ed Roth?” I said. He said yeah and we started talking and so forth. A little while later we were sitting in a diner having a couple of sandwiches and Roth, who was wearing a short-sleeved T shirt, pointed to this huge tattoo on his left arm that says “Roth” in the lettering style with big serifs that he uses as his signature. “I had that done a couple of years ago because guys keep coming up to me saying, ‘Are you Ed Roth?’ ”
Roth is a big, powerful guy, about six feet four, two hundred seventy pounds, thirty-one years old. He has a constant sort of court attendant named Dirty Doug, a skinny little guy who blew in from out of nowhere, sort of like Ronny Camp over at Barris’. Dirty Doug has a job sweeping up in a steel mill, but what he obviously lives for is the work he does around Roth’s. Roth seems to have a lot of sympathy for the Ronny Camp-Dirty Doug syndrome and keeps him around as a permanent fixture. At Roth’s behest, apparently, Dirty Doug has dropped his last name, Kinney, altogether, and refers to himself as Dirty Doug—not Doug. The relationship between Roth and Dirty Doug—which is sort of Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson, Lone Ranger and Tonto, Raffles and Bunny—is part of the folklore of the hot-rod and custom-car kids. It even crops up in the hot-rod comic books, which are an interesting phenomenon in themselves. Dirty Doug, in this folklore, is every rejected outcast little kid in the alien netherworld, and Roth is the understanding, if rather overly pranksterish, protective giant or Robin Hood—you know, a good-bad giant, not part of the Establishment.
Dirty Doug drove up in one of his two Cadillacs one Saturday afternoon while I was at Roths’s, and he had just gone through another experience of rejection. The police had hounded him out of Newport. He has two Cadillacs, he said, because one is always in the shop. Dirty Doug’s cars, like most customizers’, are always in the process of becoming. The streaks of “primer” paint on the Cadillac he was driving at the time had led to his rejection in Newport. He had driven to Newport for the weekend. “All the cops have to do is see paint like that and already you’re ‘one of those hot-rodders,’ ” he said. “They practically followed me down the street and gave me a ticket every twenty-five feet. I was going to stay the whole weekend, but I came on back.”
At custom-car shows, kids are always asking Roth, “Where’s Dirty Doug?” and if Dirty Doug couldn’t make it for some reason, Roth will recruit any kid around who knows the pitch and install him as Dirty Doug, just to keep the fans happy.
Thus Roth protects the image of Dirty Doug even when the guy’s not around, and I think it becomes a very important piece of mythology. The thing is, Roth is not buying the act of the National Hot Rod Association, which for its own reasons, not necessarily the kids’ reasons, is trying to assimilate the hot-rod ethos into conventional America. It wants to make all the kids look like candidates for the Peace Corps or something.
The heart of the contretemps between the NHRA Establishment and Roth can be illustrated in their slightly different approach to drag racing on the streets. The Establishment tries to eliminate the practice altogether and restricts drag racing to certified drag strips and, furthermore, lets the people know about that. They encourage the hot-rod clubs to help out little old ladies whose cars are stuck in the snow and then hand them a card reading something like, “You have just been assisted by a member of the Blue Bolt Hot Rod Club, an organization of car enthusiasts dedicated to promoting safety on our highways.”
Roth’s motto is: “Hell, if a guy wants to go, let him go.”
Roth’s designs are utterly baroque. His air car—the Rotar—is not nearly as good a piece of design as Barris’, but his beatnik Bandit is one of the great objets of customizing. It’s a very Rabelaisian tour de force—a twenty-first-century version of a ’32 Ford hot-rod roadster. And Roth’s new car, the Mysterion, which he was working on when I was out there, is another tour de force, this time in the hottest new concept in customizing, asymmetrical design. Asymmetrical design, I gather, has grown out of the fact that the driver sits on one side of the car, not in the middle, thereby giving a car an eccentric motif to begin with. In Roth’s Mysterion—a bubbletop coupe powered by two 406-horsepower Thunderbird motors—a thick metal arm sweeps up to the left from the front bumper level, as from the six to the three on a clock, and at the top of it is an elliptical shape housing a bank of three headlights. No headlights on the right side at all; just a small clearance light to orient the oncoming driver. This big arm, by the way, comes up in a spherical geometrical arc, not a flat plane. Balancing this, as far as the design goes, is an arm that comes up over the back of the bubbletop on the right side, like from the nine to the twelve on a clock, also in a spherical arc, if you can picture all this. Anyway, this car takes the Streamline and the abstract curve and baroque curvilinear one step further, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it inspiring Detroit designs in the years to come.
Roth is a brilliant designer, but as I was saying, his conduct and his attitude dilute the Halazone with which the Establishment is trying to transfuse the whole field. For one thing,
Roth, a rather thorough-going bohemian, kept turning up at the car shows in a T shirt. That was what he wore at the big National Show at the New York Coliseum, for example. Roth also insists on sleeping in a car or station wagon while on the road, even though he is making a lot of money now and could travel first class. Things came to a head early this year when Roth was out in Terre Haute, Indiana, for a show. At night Roth would just drive his car out in a cornfield, lie back on the front seat, stick his feet out the window and go to sleep. One morning some kid came by and saw him and took a picture while Roth was still sleeping and sent it to the model company Roth has a contract with, Revel, with a note saying, “Dear Sirs: Here is a picture of the man you say on your boxes is the King of the Customizers.” The way Roth tells it, it must have been an extraordinarily good camera, because he says, with considerable pride, “There were a bunch of flies flying around my feet, and this picture showed all of them.”
Revel asked Roth if he wouldn’t sort of spruce up a little bit for the image and all that, and so Roth entered into a kind of reverse rebellion. He bought a full set of tails, silk hat, boiled shirt, cuff links, studs, the whole apparatus, for $215, also a monocle, and now he comes to all the shows like that. “I bow and kiss all the girls’ hands,” he told me. “The guys get pretty teed off about that, but what can they do? I’m being a perfect gentleman.”
To keep things going at the shows, where he gets $1000 to $2000 per appearance—he’s that much of a drawing card—Roth creates and builds one new car a year. This is the Dalí pattern, too. Dalí usually turns out one huge and (if that’s possible any more) shocking painting each year or so and ships it on over to New York, where they install it in Carstairs or hire a hall if the thing is too big, and Dalí books in at the St. Regis and appears on television wearing a rhinoceros horn on his forehead. The new car each year also keeps Roths model-car deal going. But most of Roth’s income right now is the heavy business he does in Weirdo and Monster shirts. Roth is very handy with the airbrush—has a very sure hand—and one day at a car show he got the idea of drawing a grotesque cartoon on some guy’s sweat shirt with the airbrush, and that started the Weirdo shirts. The typical Weirdo shirt is in a vein of draftsmanship you might call Mad Magazine Bosch, very slickly done for something so grotesque, and will show a guy who looks like Frankenstein, the big square steam-shovel jaw and all, only he has a wacky leer on his face, at the wheel of a hot-rod roadster, and usually he has a round object up in the air in his right hand that looks like it is attached to the dashboard by a cord. This, it turns out, is the gearshift. It doesn’t look like a gearshift to me, but every kid knows immediately what it is.
“Kids love dragging a car,” Roth told me. “I mean they really love it. And what they love the most is when they shift from low to second. They get so they can practically feel the r.p.m.’s. They can shift without hardly hitting the clutch at all.”
These shirts always have a big caption, and usually something rebellious or at least alienated, something like “MOTHER IS WRONG” or “BORN TO LOSE.”
“A teen-ager always has resentment to adult authority,” Roth told me. “These shirts are like a tattoo, only it’s a tattoo they can take off if they want to.”
I gather Roth doesn’t look back on his own childhood with any great relish. Apparently his father was pretty strict and never took any abiding interest in Roth’s creative flights, which were mostly in the direction of cars, like Barris’.
“You’ve got to be real careful when you raise a kid,” Roth told me several times. “You’ve got to spend time with him. If he’s working on something, building something, you’ve got to work with him.” Roth’s early career was almost exactly like Barris’, the hot rods, the drive-ins, the drag racing, the college (East Los Angeles Junior College and UCLA), taking mechanical drawing, the chopped and channeled ’32 Ford (a big favorite with all the hot-rodders), purple paint, finally the first custom shop, one stall in a ten-stall body shop.
“They threw me out of there,” Roth said, “because I painted a can of Lucky Lager beer on the wall with an airbrush. I mean, it was a perfect can of Lucky Lager beer, all the details, the highlights, the seals, the small print, the whole thing. Somehow this can of Lucky Lager beer really bugged the guy who owned the place. Here was this can of Lucky Lager beer on his wall.”
The Establishment can’t take this side of Roth, just as no Establishment could accommodate Dadaists for very long. Beatniks more easily than Dadaists. The trick has always been to absorb them somehow. So far Roth has resisted absorption.
“We were the real gangsters of the hot-rod field,” Roth said. “They keep telling us we have a rotten attitude. We have a different attitude, but that doesn’t make us rotten.”
Several times, though, Roth would chuckle over something, usually some particularly good gesture he had made, like the Lucky Lager, and say, “I am a real rotten guy.”
Roth pointed out, with some insight, I think, that the kids have a revealing vocabulary. They use the words “rotten,” “bad” and “tough” in a very fey, ironic way. Often a particularly baroque and sleek custom car will be called a “big, bad Merc” (for Mercury) or something like that. In this case “bad” means “good,” but it also retains some of the original meaning of “bad.” The kids know that to adults, like their own parents, this car is going to look sinister and somehow like an assault on their style of life. Which it is. It’s rebellion, which the parents don’t go for—“bad,” which the kids do go for, “bad” meaning “good.”
Roth said that Detroit is beginning to understand that there are just a hell of a lot of these bad kids in the United States and that they are growing up. “And they want a better car. They don’t want an old man’s car.”
Roth has had pretty much the same experience as Barris with the motor companies. He has been taken to Detroit and feted and offered a job as a designer and a consultant. But he never took it seriously.
“I met a lot of the young designers,” said Roth. “They were nice guys and they know a lot about design, but none of them has actually done a car. They’re just up there working away on those clay models.”
I think this was more than the craftsman’s scorn of the designer who never actually does the work, like some of the conventional sculptors today who have never chiseled a piece of stone or cast anything. I think it was more that the young Detroit stylists came to the automobile strictly from art school and the abstract world of design—rather than via the teen-age mystique of the automobile and the teen-age ethos of rebellion. This status-group feeling is very important to Roth, and to Barris, for that matter, because it was only because of the existence of this status group—and this style of life—that custom-car sculpture developed at all.
With the Custom Car Caravan on the road—it has already reached Freedomland—the manufacturers may be well on the way to routinizing the charisma, as Max Weber used to say, which is to say, bringing the whole field into a nice, safe, vinyl-glamorous marketable ball of polyethylene. It’s probably already happening. The customizers will end up like those poor bastards in Haiti, the artists, who got too much, too soon, from Selden Rodman and the other folk-doters on the subject of primitive genius, so they’re all down there at this moment carving African masks out of mahogany—what I mean is, they never had an African mask in Haiti before Selden Rodman got there.
I think Roth has a premonition that something like that is liable to happen, although it will happen to him last, if at all. I couldn’t help but get a kick out of what Roth told me about his new house. We had been talking about how much money he was making, and he told me how his taxable income was only about $6200 in 1959, but might hit $15,000 this year, maybe more, and he mentioned he was building a new house for his wife and five kids down at Newport, near the beach. I immediately asked him for details, hoping to hear about an utterly baroque piece of streamlined architecture.
“No, this is going to be my wife’s house, the way she wants it, nothing way out;
I mean, she has to do the home scene.” He has also given her a huge white Cadillac, by the way, unadorned except for his signature—“Roth”—with those big serifs, on the side. I saw the thing, it’s huge, and in the back seat were his children, very sweet-looking kids, all drawing away on drawing pads.
But I think Roth was a little embarrassed that he had disappointed me on the house, because he told me his idea of the perfect house—which turned out to be a kind of ironic parable:
“This house would have this big, round living room with a dome over it, you know? Right in the middle of the living room would be a huge television set on a swivel so you could turn it and see it from wherever you are in the room. And you have this huge easy chair for yourself, you know the kind that you can lean back to about ninety-three different positions and it vibrates and massages your back and all that, and this chair is on tracks, like a railroad yard.
“You can take one track into the kitchen, which just shoots off one side of the living room, and you can ride backward if you want to and watch the television all the time, and of course in the meantime you’ve pressed a lot of buttons so your TV dinner is cooking in the kitchen and all you have to do is go and take it out of the oven.
