The Sunday Gentleman (45 page)

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 featured 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.”

Against it: Behind the times in mechanical improvements and design. The Rolls-Royce still uses old-fashioned drum brakes instead of advanced disc brakes, and old-fashioned non-independent rear suspension. It lacks safety devices, such as a padded dashboard. Its sitting room and luggage space are too confined. But above all, just not enough of those modern innovations.

For the first time in its history, Rolls-Royce is being compared to other automobiles in its own class, and occasionally to its disadvantage. Several British car experts have admitted that certain American automobiles drive more quietly than the Rolls-Royce. And Purdy recently committed major heresy in automotive circles by announcing that the Mercedes-Benz 600 sedan was one “deluxe motorcar mechanically more advanced than the Royce.” According to Purdy, the Mercedes-Benz was “more comfortable than a Rolls-Royce, safer, faster, better handling. It will lack but one thing: the inimitable cachet, the tapestried legend of the Rolls-Royce.”

To all such criticism the members of the Rolls-Royce management reply with unrelenting firmness. They will not introduce disc brakes, until they can eliminate any accompanying brake squeal. They will not change their rear suspension system, until they can find a means of doing so without bringing on “a wholly unacceptable transmission of road and axle noise and transmission jerks.” Rolls-Royce will not change its mechanical apparatus or design simply to give its salesmen something new to promote. As the managing director, Dr. Smith, said to a London reporter: “Innovation is not merit in itself, you know…Most innovation in motorcars nowadays is just gadgetry.”

12

The Man Who Swindled

Goering

Late in May of 1945, shortly after the American Seventh Army had located the late Hermann Goering’s five-hundred-million-dollar art collection in Germany’s subterranean vaults, special Allied teams led by United States Army’s Monuments and Fine Arts Division arrived at the Field Marshal’s villa south of Berchtesgaden to recover and classify the plunder. The collection of twelve hundred paintings, most of it representing Nazi loot taken from the major galleries of Europe, was dazzling. None of the investigators, knee-deep in Raphaels and van Goghs, regarded the oil
Christ and the Adultress
—signed by Jan Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter—as anything more than another of Goering’s numerous “acquired” masterpieces.

The Allied investigators could not foresee that very soon this Vermeer painting would start a curious chain reaction of exposures that would first explode in Holland, and then rock all the art capitals of Europe. They could not know that their routine discovery would generate an artistic controversy that would rage through the remainder of 1945, through all of 1946, and give promise of being extended, amid intrigue, violence and high passion, into 1947.

Yet the most dramatic and fantastic art scandal of modern times, exposing a crime (which started as a practical joke) involving over three million dollars, and more important, involving the reputations of some of the world’s leading art critics and experts, began exactly on that day the Allied investigators learned Goering possessed a Vermeer. The springboard for the scandal, however, was not Goering’s possession of the Old Master, but rather, the discovery of his means of obtaining it. Had it been merely pilfered, like so many of his objets d’art, like the Rubens and Rembrandts lifted from Amsterdam museums, it could have been quietly returned to its rightful owner and the case closed. But strangely, this oil was one of a small group that had not been stolen.