The Kandy-Kolored
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
THE FIRST GOOD LOOK I
HAD AT CUSTOMIZED CARS WAS AT an event called a “Teen Fair,” held
in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood. This was a
wild place to be taking a look at art objects—eventually, I should
say, you have to reach the conclusion that these customized cars
are art objects, at least if you use the
standards applied in a civilized society. But I will get to that in
a moment. Anyway, about noon you drive up to a place that looks
like an outdoor amusement park, and there are three serious-looking
kids, like the cafeteria committee in high school, taking tickets,
but the scene inside is quite mad. Inside, two things hit you. The
first is a huge platform a good seven feet off the ground with a
hully-gully band—everything is electrified, the bass, the guitars,
the saxophones—and then behind the band, on the platform, about two
hundred kids are doing frantic dances called the hully-gully, the
bird, and the shampoo. As I said, it’s noontime. The dances the
kids are doing are very jerky. The boys and girls don’t touch, not
even with their hands. They just ricochet around. Then you notice
that all the girls are dressed exactly alike. They have bouffant
hairdos—all of them—and slacks that are, well, skin-tight does not
get the idea across; it’s more the conformation than how tight the
slacks are. It’s as if some lecherous old tailor with a
gluteus-maximus fixation designed them, striation by striation.
About the time you’ve managed to focus on this, you notice that out
in the middle of the park is a huge, perfectly round swimming pool;
really rather enormous. And there is a Chris-Craft cabin cruiser in
the pool, going around and around, sending up big waves, with more
of these bouffant babies bunched in the back of it. In the water,
suspended like plankton, are kids in scuba-diving outfits; others
are tooling around underwater, breathing through a snorkel. And all
over the place are booths, put up by shoe companies and guitar
companies and God knows who else, and there are kids dancing in all
of them—dancing the bird, the hully-gully, and the shampoo—with the
music of the hully-gully band piped all over the park through
loudspeakers.
All this time, Tex Smith, from
Hot Rod Magazine, who brought me over to the
place, is trying to lead me to the customized-car exhibit—“Tom, I
want you to see this car that Bill Cushenberry built, The
Silhouette”—which is to say, here are two hundred kids ricocheting
over a platform at high noon, and a speedy little boat barreling
around and around and around in a round swimming pool, and I seem
to be the only person who is distracted. The customized-car exhibit
turns out to be the Ford Custom Car Caravan, which Ford is sending
all over the country. At first, with the noise and peripheral
motion and the inchoate leching you are liable to be doing, what
with bouffant nymphets rocketing all over the place, these
customized cars do not strike you as anything very special.
Obviously they are very special, but the
first thing you think of is the usual—you know, that the kids who
own these cars are probably skinny little hoods who wear T shirts
and carry their cigarette packs by winding them around in the T
shirt up near the shoulder.
But after a while, I was glad I had
seen the cars in this natural setting, which was, after all, a kind
of Plato’s Republic for teen-agers. Because if you watched anything
at this fair very long, you kept noticing the same thing. These
kids are absolutely maniacal about form. They are practically
religious about it. For example, the dancers: none of them ever
smiled. They stared at each other’s legs and feet, concentrating.
The dances had no grace about them at all, they were more in the
nature of a hoedown, but everybody was concentrating to do them
exactly right. And the bouffant kids all had
form, wild form, but form with rigid standards, one gathers. Even
the boys. Their dress was prosaic—Levi’s, Slim Jims, sport shirts,
T shirts, polo shirts—but the form was consistent: a stove-pipe
silhouette. And they all had the same hairstyle: some wore it long,
some short, but none of them had a part; all that hair was brushed
back straight from the hairline. I went by one of the guitar
booths, and there was a little kid in there, about thirteen,
playing the hell out of an electric guitar. The kid was named
Cranston something or other. He looked like he ought to be named
Kermet or Herschel; all his genes were kind of horribly Okie.
Cranston was playing away and a big crowd was watching. But
Cranston was slouched back with his spine bent like a sapling up
against a table, looking gloriously bored. At thirteen, this kid
was being fanatically cool. They all were. They were all wonderful
slaves to form. They have created their own style of life, and they
are much more authoritarian about enforcing it than are adults. Not
only that, but today these kids—especially in California—have
money, which, needless to say, is why all
these shoe merchants and guitar sellers and the Ford Motor Company
were at a Teen Fair in the first place. I don’t mind observing that
it is this same combination—money plus slavish devotion to
form—that accounts for Versailles or St. Mark’s Square. Naturally,
most of the artifacts that these kids’ money-plus-form produce are
of a pretty ghastly order. But so was most of the paraphernalia
that developed in England during the Regency. I mean, most of it
was on the order of starched cravats. A man could walk into Beau
Brummel’s house at 11 A.M., and here would come the butler with a
tray of wilted linen. “These were some of our failures,” he
confides. But then Brummel comes downstairs wearing one perfect
starched cravat. Like one perfect iris, the flower of Mayfair
civilization. But the Regency period did see some tremendous formal
architecture. And the kids’ formal society has also brought at
least one substantial thing to a formal development of a high
order—the customized cars. I don’t have to dwell on the point that
cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe’s
great formal century, say, 1750 to 1850. They are freedom, style,
sex, power, motion, color—everything is right there.
Things have been going on in the
development of the kids’ formal attitude toward cars since 1945,
things of great sophistication that adults have not been even
remotely aware of, mainly because the kids are so inarticulate
about it, especially the ones most hipped on the subject. They are
not from the levels of society that produce children who write
sensitive analytical prose at age seventeen, or if they do, they
soon fall into the hands of English instructors who put them onto
Hemingway or a lot of goddamn-and-hungry-breast writers. If they
ever write about a highway again, it’s a rain-slicked highway and
the sound of the automobiles passing over it is like the sound of
tearing silk, not that one household in ten thousand has heard the
sound of tearing silk since 1945.
Anyway, we are back at the Teen Fair
and I am talking to Tex Smith and to Don Beebe, a portly young guy
with a white sport shirt and Cuban sunglasses. As they tell me
about the Ford Custom Car Caravan, I can see that Ford has begun to
comprehend this teen-age style of life and its potential. The way
Ford appears to figure it is this: Thousands of kids are getting
hold of cars and either hopping them up for speed or customizing
them to some extent, usually a little of both. Before they get
married they pour all their money into this.
If Ford can get them hooked on Fords now, after the kids are
married they’ll buy new Fords. Even the kids who aren’t full-time
car nuts themselves will be influenced by which car is considered
“boss.” They use that word a lot, “boss.” The kids used to consider
Ford the hot car, but then, from 1955 to 1962, Chevrolet became the
favorite. They had big engines and were easy to hop up, the styling
was simple, and the kids could customize them easily. In 1959, and
more so in 1960, Plymouth became a hot car, too. In 1961 and 1962,
it was all Chevrolet and Plymouth. Now Ford is making a big push. A
lot of the professional hot-rod and custom-car people, adults, will
tell you that now Ford is the hot car, but you have to discount
some of it, because Ford is laying money on everybody right and
left, in one form or another. In the Custom Car Caravan, all the
cars have been fashioned out of Ford bodies except the ones that
are completely handmade, like the aforementioned
Silhouette.
Anyway, Don Beebe is saying, over a
loudspeaker, “I hate to break up that dancing, but let’s have a
little drag racing.” He has a phonograph hooked up to the
loudspeaker, and he puts on a record, produced by Riverside
Records, of drag-strip sounds, mainly dragsters blasting off and
squealing from the starting line. Well, he doesn’t really break up
the dancing, but a hundred kids come over, when they hear the
drag-strip sounds, to where Beebe has a slot-racing stand. Slot
racing is a model-train-type game in which two model drag racers,
each about five inches long, powered by electricity, run down a
model drag strip. Beebe takes a microphone and announces that Dick
Dale, the singer, is here, and anybody who will race Dick at the
slot-racing stand will get one of his records. Dick Dale is pretty
popular among the kids out here because he sings a lot of “surfing”
songs. The surfers—surfboard riders—are a cult much admired by all
the kids. They have their own argot, with adjectives like “hang
ten,” meaning the best there is. They also go in for one particular
brand of customizing: they take old wood-bodied station wagons,
which they call “woodies,” and fix them up for riding, sleeping and
hauling surfing equipment for their weekends at the beach. The
surfers also get a hell of a bang out of slot racing for some
reason, so with Dick Dale slot racing at the Teen Fair, you have
about three areas of the arcane teen world all rolled into
one.
Dick Dale, rigged out in Byronic shirt
and blue cashmere V-neck sweater and wraparound sunglasses,
singer’s mufti U.S.A., has one cord with a starter button, while a
bouffant nymphet from Newport named Sherma, Sherma of the Capri
pants, has the other one. Don Beebe flashes a starting light and
Sherma lets out a cry, not a thrilled cry, just nerves, and a model
1963 Ford and a model dragster go running down the slot board,
which is about chest high. The slot board is said to be
one-twenty-fifth the actual size of a drag strip, which somehow
reminds you of those incredible stamp-size pictures in the
dictionary with the notation that this is one-hundredth the size of
a real elephant. A hundred kids were packed in around the slot
racers and did not find it incredible. That is, they were
interested in who would win, Dick Dale or Sherma. I’m sure they had
no trouble magnifying the slot racers twenty-five times to the size
of the full-blown, esoteric world of hot rods and custom
cars.
I MET GEORGE BARRIS, ONE OF THE CELEBRITIES OF
THE custom-car world, at the Teen Fair. Barris is the biggest name
in customizing. He is a good example of a kid who grew up
completely absorbed in this teen-age world of cars, who pursued the
pure flame and its forms with such devotion that he emerged an
artist. It was like Tiepolo emerging from the studios of Venice,
where the rounded Grecian haunches of the murals on the Palladian
domes hung in the atmosphere like clouds. Except that Barris
emerged from the auto-body shops of Los Angeles.
Barris invited me out to his
studio—only he would never think of calling it that, he calls it
Kustom City—at 10811 Riverside Drive in North Hollywood. If there
is a river within a thousand miles of Riverside Drive, I saw no
sign of it. It’s like every place else out there: endless scorched
boulevards lined with one-story stores, shops, bowling alleys,
skating rinks, tacos drive-ins, all of them shaped not like
rectangles but like trapezoids, from the way the roofs slant up
from the back and the plate-glass fronts slant out as if they’re
going to pitch forward on the sidewalk and throw up. The signs are
great, too. They all stand free on poles outside. They have
horribly slick dog-legged shapes that I call boomerang modern. As
for Kustom City—Barris grew up at the time when it was considered
sharp to change all the C’s to K’s. He also sells Kandy Lac to
paint cars Kandy Kolors with, and I know that sibilant C in City
must have bothered the hell out of him at some point. It’s
interesting, I think, that he still calls the place Kustom City,
and still sells Kandy Kolors, because he is an intelligent person.
What it means is, he is absolutely untouched by the big amoeba god
of Anglo-European sophistication that gets you in the East. You
know how it is in the East. One day you notice that the boss’s
button-down shirt has this sweet percale roll to it, while your own
was obviously slapped together by some mass-production graph
keepers who are saving an eighth of inch of cloth per shirt, twelve
inches per bolt or the like, and this starts eating at
you.
Barris, whose family is Greek, is a
solid little guy, five feet seven, thirty-seven years old, and he
looks just like Picasso. When he’s working, which is most of the
time, he wears a heavy white T-style shirt, faded off-white pants
cut full with pleats in the manner of Picasso walking along in the
wind on a bluff at Rapallo, and crepe-sole slipper-style shoes,
also off-white. Picasso, I should add, means nothing to Barris,
although he knows who he is. It’s just that to Barris and the
customizers there is no one great universe of form and design
called Art. Yet that’s the universe he’s in. He’s not building
cars, he’s creating forms.
Barris starts taking me through Kustom
City, and the place looks like any other body shop at first, but
pretty soon you realize you’re in a gallery.
This place is full of cars such as you have never seen before. Half
of them will never touch the road. They’re put on trucks and
trailers and carted all over the country to be exhibited at hot-rod
and custom-car shows. They’ll run, if it comes to that—they’re full
of big, powerful, hopped-up chrome-plated motors, because all that
speed and power, and all that lovely apparatus, has tremendous
emotional meaning to everybody in customizing. But it’s like one of
these Picasso or Miró rugs. You don’t walk on the damn things. You
hang them on the wall. It’s the same thing with Barris’ cars. In
effect, they’re sculpture.
For example, there is an incredible
object he built called the XPAK-400 air car. The customizers love
all that X jazz. It runs on a cushion of air, which is beside the
point, because it’s a pure piece of curvilinear abstract sculpture.
If Brancusi is any good, then this thing belongs on a pedestal,
too. There is not a straight line in it, and only one true circle,
and those countless planes, and tremendous baroque fins, and yet
all in all it’s a rigid little piece of solid geometrical harmony.
As a matter of fact, Brancusi and Barris both developed out of a
design concept that we can call Streamlined Modern or Thirties
Curvilinear—via utterly different roads, of course—and Barris and
most other custom artists are carrying this idea of the abstract
curve, which is very tough to handle, on and on and on at a time
when your conventional designers—from architects to the guys who
lay out magazines—are all Mondrian. Even the young Detroit car
stylists are all Mondrian. Only the aircraft designers have done
anything more with the Streamline, and they have only because
they’re forced to by physics, and so on. I want to return to that
subject in a minute, but first I want to tell you about another car
Barris was showing me.
This was stuck back in a storeroom.
Barris wasn’t interested in it any more since he did it nine years
ago. But this car—this old car, as far as Barris was concerned—was
like a dream prefiguration of a very hot sports car, the Quantum,
that Saab has come out with this year after a couple of years of
consultation with all sorts of aerodynamic experts and
advance-guard designers. They’re beautiful cars—Saab’s and Barris’.
They’re the same body, practically—with this lovely topology
rolling down over the tunneled headlights, with the whole hood
curving down very low to the ground in front. I told Barris about
the similarity, but he just shrugged; he is quite used to some
manufacturer coming up with one of his cars five or six years
later.
Anyway, Barris and I were walking
around the side of Kustom City, through the parking lot, when I saw
an Avanti, the new Studebaker sports model, very expensive. This
one had paper mock-ups added to the front and the rear, and so I
asked Barris about it. That wasn’t much, he said; starting with the
paper mock-ups, it brought the hood out a foot with a chic slope to
it. He was doing the same sort of thing in the back to eliminate
that kind of loaf-of-bread look. It really makes the car. Barris
doesn’t regard this as a very major project. It may end up in
something like a kit you can buy, similar to the old Continental
kits, to rig up front and back.
If Barris and the customizers hadn’t
been buried in the alien and suspect underworld of California
youth, I don’t think they would seem at all unusual by now. But
they’ve had access to almost nothing but the hot-rod press. They’re
like Easter Islanders. Suddenly you come upon the astonishing
objects, and then you have to figure out how they got there and why
they’re there.
If you study the work of Barris or
Cushenberry, the aforementioned Silhouette, or Ed Roth or Darryl
Starbird, can you beat that name?, I think you come up with a
fragment of art history. Somewhere back in the thirties, designers,
automobile designers among them, came up with the idea of the
Streamline. It sounded “functional,” and on an airplane it is
functional, but on a car it’s not, unless you’re making a
Bonneville speed run. Actually, it’s baroque. The Streamline is
baroque abstract or baroque modern or whatever you want to call it.
Well, about the time the Streamline got going—in the thirties, you
may recall, we had curved buildings, like the showpieces later, at
the World’s Fair—in came the Bauhaus movement, which was blown-up
Mondrian, really. Before you knew it, everything was Mondrian—the
Kleenex box: Mondrian; the format of the cover of Life Magazine: Mondrian; those bled-to-the-edge
photograph layouts in Paris-Match: Mondrian.
Even automobiles: Mondrian. They call Detroit automobiles
streamlined, but they’re not. If you don’t believe it, look down
from an airplane at all the cars parked on a shopping-center apron,
and except that all the colors are pastel instead of primary, what
have you got? A Mondrian painting. The Mondrian principle, those
straight edges, is very tight, very Apollonian. The Streamline
principle, which really has no function, which curves around and
swoops and flows just for the thrill of it, is very free Dionysian.
For reasons I don’t have to labor over, the kids preferred the
Dionysian. And since Detroit blew the thing, the Dionysian
principle in cars was left to people in the teen-age netherworld,
like George Barris.
Barris was living in Sacramento when he
started customizing cars in 1940. As the plot develops, you have
the old story of the creative child, the break from the mold of the
parents, the garret struggle, the bohemian life, the first success,
the accolade of the esoteric following, and finally the money
starts pouring in. With this difference: We’re out on old Easter
Island, in the buried netherworld of teen-age Californians, and
those objects, those cars, they have to do with the gods and the
spirit and a lot of mystic stuff in the community.
Barris told me his folks were Greeks
who owned a restaurant, and “they wanted me to be a restaurant man,
like every other typical Greek, I guess,” he said. But Barris, even
at ten, was wild about cars, carving streamlined cars out of balsa
wood. After a few years, he got a car of his own, a 1925 Buick,
then a 1932 Ford. Barris established many of the formal conventions
of customizing himself. Early in the game he had clients, other
kids who paid him to customize their cars. In 1943 he moved to Los
Angeles and landed in the middle of the tremendous teen-age culture
that developed there during the war. Family life was dislocated, as
the phrase goes, but the money was pouring in, and the kids began
to work up their own style of life—as they’ve been doing ever
since—and to establish those fanatic forms and conventions I was
talking about earlier. Right at the heart of it, of course, was the
automobile. Cars were hard to come by, what with the war, so the
kids were raiding junkyards for parts, which led to custom-built
cars, mostly roadsters by the very nature of it, and also to a lot
of radical, hopped-up engines. All teen-age car nuts had elements
of both in their work—customizing and hotrodding, form and
power—but tended to concentrate on one or the other. Barris—and Ed
Roth later told me it was the same with him—naturally gravitated
toward customizing. In high school, and later for a brief time at
Sacramento College and the Los Angeles Art Center, he was taking
what he described to me as mechanical drawing, shop, and free
art.
I liked this term “free art.” In
Barris’ world at the time, and now for that matter, there was no
such thing as great big old fructuous Art. There was mechanical
drawing and then there was free art, which did not mean that it was
liberating in any way, but rather that it was footloose and free
and not going anywhere in particular. The kind of art that appealed
to Barris, and meant something to the people he hung around with,
was the automobile.
Barris gets a wonderful reflective grin
on his face when he starts talking about the old days—1944 to 1948.
He was a hot-rodder when hot-rodders were hot-rodders, that’s the
kind of look he gets. They all do. The professional
hot-rodders—such as the Petersen magazine syndicate (Hot Rod Magazine and many others) and the National Hot
Rod Association—have gone to great lengths to obliterate the memory
of the gamey hot-rod days, and they try to give everybody in the
field transfusions of Halazone so that the public will look at the
hot-rodders as nice boys with short-sleeved sport shirts just back
from the laundry and a chemistry set, such an interesting
hobby.
In point of fact, Barris told me, it
was a lurid time. Everybody would meet in drive-ins, the most
famous of them being the Piccadilly out near Sepulveda Boulevard.
It was a hell of a show, all the weird-looking roadsters and custom
cars, with very loud varoom-varoom motors. By this time Barris had
a ’36 Ford roadster with many exotic features.
“I had just come from Sacramento, and I
wasn’t supposed to know anything. I was a tourist, but my car was
wilder than anything around. I remember one night this kid comes up
with a roadster with no door handles. It looked real sharp, but he
had to kick the door from the inside to open it. You should have
seen the look on his face when he saw mine—I had the same thing,
only with electric buttons.”
The real action, though, was the drag
racing, which was quite, but quite, illegal.
“We’d all be at the Piccadilly or some
place, and guys would start challenging each other. You know, a guy
goes up to another guy’s car and looks it up and down like it has
gangrene or something, and he says: ‘You wanna go?’ Or, if it was a real grudge match for some reason,
he’d say, ‘You wanna go for pink slips?’ The registrations on the
cars were pink; in other words, the winner got the other guy’s
car.
“Well, as soon as a few guys had
challenged each other, everybody would ride out onto this stretch
of Sepulveda Boulevard or the old divided highway, in Compton, and
the guys would start dragging, one car on one side of the center
line, the other car on the other. Go a quarter of a mile. It was
wild. Some nights there’d be a thousand kids lining the road to
watch, boys and girls, all sitting on the sides of their cars with
the lights shining across the highway.”
But George, what happened if some
ordinary motorist happened to be coming down the highway at this
point?
“Oh, we’d block off the highway at each
end, and if some guy wanted to get through anyway, we’d tell him,
‘Well, Mister, there are going to be two cars coming down both
sides of the road pretty fast in a minute, and you can go through
if you want to, but you’ll just have to take your best
shot.’
“They always turned around, of course,
and after a while the cops would come. Then you really saw something. Everybody jumped in their cars and
took off, in every direction. Some guys would head right across a
field. Of course, all our cars were so hopped up, the cops could
never catch anybody.
“Then one night we got raided at the
Piccadilly. It was one Friday night. The cops came in and just
started loading everybody in the wagons. I was sitting in a car
with a cop who was off duty—he was a hot-rodder himself—or they
would have picked me up, too. Saturday night everybody came back to
the Piccadilly to talk about what happened the night before, and
the cops came back again and picked up three hundred fifty that
night. That pretty well ended the Piccadilly.”
From the very moment he was on his own
in Los Angeles, when he was about eighteen, Barris never did
anything but customize cars. He never took any other kind of job.
At first he worked in a body shop that took him on because so many
kids were coming by wanting this and that done to their cars, and
the boss really didn’t know how to do it, because it was all
esoteric teen-age stuff. Barris was making next to nothing at
first, but he never remembers feeling hard up, nor does any kid out
there today I talked to. They have a magic economy or something.
Anyway, in 1945 Barris opened his own shop on Compton Avenue, in
Los Angeles, doing nothing but customizing. There was that much
demand for it. It was no sweat, he said; pretty soon he was making
better than $100 a week.
Most of the work he was doing then was
modifying Detroit cars—chopping and channeling. Chopping is
lowering the top of the car, bringing it nearer to the hood line.
Channeling is lowering the body itself down between the wheels.
Also, they’d usually strip off all the chrome and the door handles
and cover up the wheel openings in the back. At that time, the look
the kids liked was to have the body lowered in the back and
slightly jacked up in the front, although today it’s just the
opposite. The front windshield in those days was divided by a post,
and so chopping the top gave the car a very sinister appearance.
The front windshield always looked like a couple of narrow, slitty
little eyes. And I think this, more than anything else, diverted
everybody from what Barris and the others were really doing.
Hot-rodders had a terrible reputation at that time, and no line was
ever drawn between hot-rodders and custom-car owners, because, in
truth, they were speed maniacs, too.
This was Barris’ chopped-and-channeled
Mercury period. Mercurys were his favorite. All the kids knew the
Barris styling and he was getting a lot of business. What he was
really doing, in a formal sense, was trying to achieve the kind of
streamlining that Detroit, for all intents and purposes, had
abandoned. When modified, some of the old Mercurys were more
streamlined than any standard model that Detroit has put out to
this day. Many of the coupes he modified had a very sleek slope to
the back window that has been picked up just this year in the
“fastback” look of the Rivieras, Sting Rays, and a few other
cars.
At this point Barris and the other
customizers didn’t really have enough capital to do many completely
original cars, but they were getting more and more radical in
modifying Detroit cars. They were doing things Detroit didn’t do
until years later—tailfins, bubbletops, twin headlights, concealed
headlights, “Frenched” headlights, the low-slung body itself. They
lifted some twenty designs from him alone. One, for example, is the
way cars now have the exhaust pipes exit through the rear bumper or
fender. Another is the bullet-shaped, or breast-shaped if you’d
rather, front bumpers on the Cadillac.
Barris says “lifted,” because some are
exact down to the most minute details. Three years ago when he was
in Detroit, Barris met a lot of car designers and, “I was amazed,”
he told me. “They could tell me about cars I built in 1945. They
knew all about the four-door ’48 Studebaker I restyled. I chopped
the top and dropped the hood and it ended up a pretty good-looking
car. And the bubbletop I built in 1954—they knew all about it. And
all this time we thought they frowned on us.”
Even today—dealing with movie stars and
auto manufacturers and all sorts of people on the outside—I think
Barris, and certainly the others, still feel psychologically a part
of the alien teen-age netherworld in which they grew up. All that
while they were carrying the torch for the Dionysian Streamline.
They were America’s modern baroque designers—and, oddly enough,
“serious” designers, Anglo-European-steeped designers, are just
coming around to it. Take Saarinen, especially in something like
his T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy. The man in his last years came
around to baroque modern.
It’s interesting that the customizers,
like sports-car fans, have always wanted cars minus most of the
chrome—but for different ideals. The sports-car owner thinks chrome
trim interferes with the “classic” look of his car. In other words,
he wants to simplify the thing. The customizer thinks chrome
interferes with something else—the luxurious baroque Streamline.
The sports-car people snigger at tailfins. The customizers love
them and, looked at from a baroque standard of beauty, they are
really not so trashy at all. They are an inspiration, if you will,
a wonderful fantasy extension of the curved line, and since the car
in America is half fantasy anyway, a kind of baroque extension of
the ego, you can build up a good argument for them.
Getting back to Easter Island, here
were Barris and the others with their blowtorches and hard-rubber
mallets, creating their baroque sculpture, cut off from the rest of
the world and publicized almost solely via the teen-age grapevine.
Barris was making a fairly good living, but others were starving at
this thing. The pattern was always the same: a guy would open a
body shop and take on enough hack collision work to pay the rent so
that he could slam the door shut at 2 P.M. and get in there and do
his custom jobs, and pretty soon the guy got so he couldn’t even
face any collision work. Dealing with all
those crusty old arteriosclerotic bastards takes up all your
time, man, and so they’re trying to make a
living doing nothing but custom work, and they are
starving.
The situation is a lot like that today,
except that customizing is beginning to be rationalized, in the
sense Max Weber used that word. This rationalization, or efficient
exploitation, began in the late forties when an $80-a-week movie
writer named Robert Petersen noticed all the kids pouring money
into cars in a little world they had created for themselves, and he
decided to exploit it by starting Hot Rod
Magazine, which clicked right away and led to a whole chain
of hot-rod and custom-car magazines. Petersen, by the way, now has
a pot of money and drives Maseratis and other high-status-level
sports cars of the Apollonian sort, not the Dionysian custom kind.
Which is kind of a shame, because he has the money to commission
something really incredible.
Up to that time the only custom-car
show in the country was a wild event Barris used to put on bereft
of any sort of midwifery by forty-two-year-old promoters with
Windsor-knot ties who usually run low-cost productions. This car
show was utterly within the teen-age netherworld, with no
advertising or coverage of any sort. It took place each
spring—during the high-school Easter vacations—when all the kids,
as they still do, would converge on the beach at Balboa for their
beer-drinking-Fasching rites, or whatever
the Germans call it. Barris would rent the parking lot of a service
station on a corner for a week, and kids from all over California
would come with their customized cars. First there would be a
parade; the cars, about a hundred fifty of them, would drive all
through the streets of Balboa, and the kids would line the
sidewalks to watch them; then they’d drive back to the lot and park
and be on exhibit for the week.
Barris still goes off to Balboa and
places like that. He likes that scene. Last year at Pacific Ocean
Park he noticed all these bouffant babies and got the idea of
spraying all those great puffed-up dandelion heads with fluorescent
water colors, the same Kandy Kolors he uses on the cars. Barris
took out an air gun, the girls all lined up and gave him fifty
cents per, and he sprayed them with these weird, brilliant color
combinations all afternoon until he ran out of colors. Each girl
would go skipping and screaming away out onto the sidewalks and the
beaches. Barris told me, “It was great that night to take one of
the rides, like the Bubble Ride, and look down and see all those
fluorescent colors. The kids were bopping [dancing] and running
around.”
The Bubble is a ride that swings out
over the ocean. It is supposed to be like a satellite in
orbit.
“But the fellows sky-diving got the
best look as they came down by parachute.”
In 1948 Petersen put on the first
custom-car show in the Los Angeles armory, and this brought
customizing out into the open a little. A wild-looking Buick Barris
had remodeled was one of the hits of the show, and he was on his
way, too.
At some point in the fifties a lot of
Hollywood people discovered Barris and the customizers. It was
somewhat the way the literary set had discovered the puppeteer Tony
Sarg during the thirties and deified him in a very arty, in-groupy
way, only I think in the case of Hollywood and Barris there was
something a lot more in-the-grain about it. The people who end up
in Hollywood are mostly Dionysian sorts and they feel alien and
resentful when confronted with the Anglo-European ethos. They’re a
little slow to note the difference between top-sides and sneakers,
but they appreciate Cuban sunglasses.
In his showroom at Kustom City, down
past the XPAK-400 air car, Barris has a corner practically papered
with photographs of cars he has customized or handmade for
Hollywood people: Harry Karl, Jayne Mansfield, Elvis Presley,
Liberace, and even celebrities from the outside like Barry
Goldwater (a Jaguar with a lot of airplane-style dials on the
dashboard) and quite a few others. In fact, he built most of the
wild cars that show-business people come up with for publicity
purposes. He did the “diamond-dust” paint job on the Bobby Darin
Dream Car, which was designed and built by Andy DiDia of Detroit.
That car is an example par excellence of baroque streamlining, by
the way. It was badly panned when pictures of it were first
published, mainly because it looked like Darin was again forcing
his ego on the world. But as baroque modern sculpture—again, given
the fantasy quotient in cars to begin with—it is pretty good
stuff.
As the hot-rod and custom-car-show idea
began catching on, and there are really quite a few big ones now,
including one at the Coliseum up at Columbus Circle last year, it
became like the culture boom in the other arts. The big names,
particularly Barris and Roth but also Starbird, began to make a lot
of money in the same thing Picasso has made a lot of money in:
reproductions. Barris’ creations are reproduced by AMT Models as
model cars. Roth’s are reproduced by Revel. The way people have
taken to these models makes it clearer still that what we have here
is no longer a car but a design object, an objet, as they say.
Of course, it’s not an unencumbered art
form like oil painting or most conventional modern sculpture. It
carries a lot of mental baggage with it, plain old mechanical
craftsmanship, the connotations of speed and power and the
aforementioned mystique that the teen-age netherworld brings to
cars. What you have is something more like sculpture in the era of
Benvenuto Cellini, when sculpture was always more tied up with
religion and architecture. In a lot of other ways it’s like the
Renaissance, too. Young customizers have come to Barris’ shop, for
example, like apprentices coming to the feet of the master. Barris
said there were eleven young guys in Los Angeles right now who had
worked for him and then gone out on their own, and he doesn’t seem
to begrudge them that.
“But they take on too much work,” he
told me. “They want a name, fast, and they take on a lot of work,
which they do for practically nothing, just to get a name. They’re
usually undercapitalized to begin with, and they take on too much
work, and then they can’t deliver and they go
bankrupt.”
There’s another side to this, too. You
have the kid from the small town in the Midwest who’s like the kid
from Keokuk who wants to go to New York and live in the Village and
be an artist and the like—he means, you know, things around home
are but hopelessly, totally square; home and
all that goes with it. Only the kid from the Midwest who wants to
be a custom-car artist goes to Los Angeles to do it. He does pretty
much the same thing. He lives a kind of suburban bohemian life and
takes odd jobs and spends the rest of his time at the feet of
somebody like Barris, working on cars.
I ran into a kid like that at Barris’.
We were going through his place, back into his interiors—car
interiors—department, and we came upon Ronny Camp. Ronny is
twenty-two, but he looks about eighteen because he has teen-age
posture. Ronny is, in fact, a bright and sensitive kid with an
artistic eye, but at first glance he seems always to have his feet
propped up on a table or something so you can’t walk past, and you
have to kind of bat them down, and he then screws up his mouth and
withdraws his eyeballs to the optic chiasma and glares at you with
his red sulk. That was the misleading first
impression.
Ronny was crazy over automobiles and
nobody in his hometown, Lafayette, Indiana, knew anything about
customizing. So one day Ronny packs up and tells the folks, This is
it, I’m striking out for hip territory, Los Angeles, where a
customizing artist is an artist. He had no idea where he was going,
you understand, all he knew was that he was going to Barris’ shop
and make it from there. So off he goes in his 1960
Chevrolet.
Ronny got a job at a service station
and poured every spare cent into getting the car customized at
Barris’. His car was right there while we were talking, a fact I
was very aware of, because he never looked at me. He never took his
eyes off that car. It’s what is called semi-custom. Nothing has
been done to it to give it a really sculptural quality, but a lot
of streamlining details have been added. The main thing you notice
is the color—tangerine flake. This paint—one of Barris’ Kandy Kolor
concoctions—makes the car look like it has been encrusted with
chips of some kind of semi-precious ossified tangerine, all coated
with a half-inch of clear lacquer. There used to be very scholarly
and abstruse studies of color and color symbolism around the turn
of the century, and theorists concluded that preferences for
certain colors were closely associated with rebelliousness, and
these are the very same colors many of the kids go for—purple,
carnal yellow, various violets and lavenders and fuchsias and many
other of these Kandy Kolors.
After he got his car fixed up, Ronny
made a triumphal progress back home. He won the trophy in his class
at the national hot-rod and custom-car show in Indianapolis, and he
came tooling into Lafayette, Indiana, and down the main street in
his tangerine-flake 1960 Chevrolet. It was like Ezra Pound going
back to Hamilton, New York, with his Bollingen plaque and saying,
Here I am, Hamilton, New York. The way Ronny and Barris tell it,
the homecoming was a big success—all the kids thought Ronny was all
right, after all, and he made a big hit at home. I can’t believe
the part about home. I mean, I can’t really believe Ronny made a
hit with a tangerine-flake Chevrolet. But I like to conjecture
about his parents. I don’t know anything about them, really. All I
know is, I would have had a hell of a lump
in my throat if I had seen Ronny coming up to the front door in his
tangerine-flake car, bursting so flush and vertical with triumph
that no one would ever think of him as a child of the red
sulk—Ronny, all the way back from California with his
grail.
ALONG ABOUT 1957, BARRIS STARTED HEARING FROM
THE DETROIT auto manufacturers.
“One day,” he said, “I was working in
the shop—we were over in Lynwood then—and Chuck Jordan from
Cadillac walked in. He just walked in and said he was from
Cadillac. I thought he meant the local agency. We had done this
Cadillac for Liberace, the interior had his songs, all the notes,
done in black and white Moroccan leather, and I thought he wanted
to see something about that. But he said he was from the Cadillac
styling center in Detroit and they were interested in our colors.
Chuck—he’s up there pretty good at Cadillac now, I think—said he
had read some articles about our colors, so I mixed up some samples
for him. I had developed a translucent paint, using six different
ingredients, and it had a lot of brilliance and depth. That was
what interested them. In this paint you look through a clear
surface into the color, which is very brilliant. Anyway, this was
the first time we had any idea they even knew who we
were.”
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 Dali 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 Roth’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 Dali 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 Roth’s 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.
“Then you can roll right back into the
living room, and if somebody rings the doorbell you don’t move at
all. You just press a button on this big automatic console you have
by your chair and the front door opens, and you just yell for the
guy to come in, and you can keep watching television.
“At night, if you want to go to bed,
you take another track into the bedroom, which shoots off on
another side, and you just kind of roll out of the chair into the
sack. On the ceiling above your bed you have another TV set, so you
can watch all night.”
Roth is given, apparently, to spinning
out long Jean Shepherd stories like this with a very straight face,
and he told me all of this very seriously. I guess I didn’t look
like I was taking it very seriously, because he said, “I have a TV
set over the bed in my house right now—you can ask my
wife.”
I met his wife, but I didn’t ask her.
The funny thing is, I did find myself taking the story seriously.
To me it was a sort of parable of the Bad Guys, and the Custom
Sculpture. The Bad Guys built themselves a little world and got
onto something good and then the Establishment, all sorts of
Establishments, began closing in, with a lot of cajolery, thievery
and hypnosis, and in the end, thrown into a vinyl Petri dish, the
only way left to tell the whole bunch of them where to head in was
to draw them a huge asinine picture of themselves, which they were
sure to like. After all, Roth’s dream house is nothing more than
his set of boiled shirt and tails expanded into a whole universe.
And he is not really very hopeful about that either.