The Lincoln Continental

Continental has for more than 30 years been a classifier indicating a desirable, sought-after automobile. Rolls-Royce used to make a Continental, a special high-speed grand touring car. When the postwar Bentley Continental came out in the 1950s it was priced at $26,000 and Messrs. Rolls-Royce urged, indeed ordered, dealers to restrict its sale to highspeed drivers of demonstrable competence. But it is of the Lincoln Continental that most Americans think when they hear the term; not the $10,000 Mark II of 1955, but the prewar model, the Continental that Edsel Ford originally designed for himself and his sons alone to have.

There were only 5320 of these cars built, and probably fewer than half of them survive today. (Some of the 500-odd members of the Lincoln Continental Club own three or four cars.) They were not expensive. Before World War II a Lincoln Continental could be bought for $2640, and afterward for $4260. In the classic-car market today, rough examples can be had for $500 or $600, a fine one will bring $2500 and one particularly lavishly restored specimen is alleged to have changed hands a few years ago for $10,000. The Lincoln Continental is one of the very few automobiles, of the 5000-odd makes the world has known, that will apparently be wanted as long as there are roads to run upon. If anyone foresaw such a turn of events when the car was being designed and when the first models were being built, he kept his opinion tightly to himself. From 1938 to 1948, when production ceased, ownership of a Lincoln Continental conferred a certain prestige. It was an endorsement of one's taste. (It carried no connotation of the love of speed: mechanically the car was indifferent.) For the next seven years, after 1948, the Lincoln was just a good mass-produced car like any other, but in 1955 the new Continental Mark II appeared, offering what its makers hoped was the ultimate in status appeal: a $10,000 automobile so precious that even in transit it wore a fleece-and-plastic envelope. About 3000 Mark IIs were sold in two years. Its successor is the current Lincoln Continental, which looks a little bit like the 1938 classic, a little like the 1955 tycoons' chariot, and has been engineered in terms of the excellence that marked the great Model KB of 1932 and 1933. The new one, the 1962, may be the best of the lot, but still it will never be the Continental. That was Edsel's car.

Edsel Ford was with his father in 1922 when Ford bought Lincoln from Henry and Wilfred Leland. Edsel signed the contract, sitting under a bunting-draped picture of Old Abe. The picture's being there was not a public relations man's idea. There weren't any public relations men around: neither Henry Ford nor Henry Leland believed in them. The picture was legitimately present: Leland called his car the Lincoln because the first time he'd voted, in 1864, he'd voted for Lincoln. Leland admired Lincoln and he liked to think that he imitated Lincoln's rigid ethical standards. The big cars he made were good ones. For example, it was common practice among other fine-car builders to break in their engines, before installing them in chassis, by hooking them up to electric motors, so that expensive blowups clue to careless assembly could be avoided. Leland tested his on gasoline and under load. They were broken in on the road, too, and Lincoln buyers who wanted to run past the first motorcycle cop they saw after leaving the showroom could do it with an easy conscience, at least as far as injuring the engine was concerned.

Lots of Lincoln owners did hurry. When the newspapers of the day reported "the killers made good their escape in a big black touring car," they were often talking about Lincolns, and they were much favored by the police as well. A Model KB Lincoln would do 95 miles an hour, handle well in the bends and stop in 28 feet from 30 miles an hour (stopping in 30 feet from 30 mph is the standard of excellence), the latter feat something that not many cars have ever been able to do. The KB's V-12 engine was justly famous for reliability and long life. It was an expensive car, expensively made, but by 1933 the world market for it, and for the smaller, companion KA, had dwindled so markedly that they were replaced by a standard production model, and in 1935 that was in turn replaced by the famous Lincoln Zephyr.

The Zephyr's designer, John Tjaarda, intended the car to be rear-engined. The first one was, at a time when the only heavily produced rear-engine car in the world was the Czechoslovakian Tatra. (The Zephyr also had a torque-converter transmission, handmade at a cost of $40,000.) The Zephyr was planned by the Briggs body people, like all other Ford cars. Henry Ford was almost indifferent to "styling." He wanted his cars to be cheap to make and he wanted them to run and to last long enough but not too long; if they looked neat and orderly and were painted black he was pleased. Edsel Ford's primary interest was design, and by 1938 he had persuaded his father to let him cancel out Briggs and set up a Ford design department. The 1938 Zephyr was the first project, and as far as Edsel was concerned, the Continental was the second.

The design conception of the Continental was Edsel's own. One of the reasons for the good looks of the Continental, its design integrity, is that it was a one-man idea. Most good cars have been. Bugatti, Voisin, Bentley, Royce, Porsche were men inclined to make their own decisions. Many of the worst automotive abominations that have cluttered our roadways were committee creations. Edsel Ford's authority, in 1933, was strong, and he did not have to accept any dilution of his design. After all, the car was not a company project, it was not to be made to be sold, but for Edsel's own use. He could have what he liked. Only one fairly serious attempt at change was made. Edsel heard strong suggestions that the rear-mounted exterior spare-wheel carrier be deleted from the design, and the spare put inside the trunk like everybody's else. Unerringly, the committee-oriented designers had fastened on the one characteristic that everyone who ever saw a Continental would remember, the one that was held to be so important that it was incorporated into the brutally expensive Mark II. Edsel said the spare had to stay in the open and he made it stick.

The first Continental was a convertible and so were numbers two and three, which were made -- with Henry Ford's permission -- for Edsel's sons, Henry II and Benson. Edsel took number one to Florida in 1939 and returned with 200 blank-check orders, although he'd made no effort to sell the car. Its own looks had done that. (And only its looks: in every other particular of manufacture it was a standard mass-produced Lincoln.) It went on the market in December 1939, and it was an instant success.

The immediate public acceptance of the Continental was a remarkable tribute to the esthetic, even the artistic soundness of its body design, which was, in 1951, to be given the imprimatur of the Museum of Modern Art. The engine was no better than it should have been and perhaps not that good. If the car were driven as it looked as if it should be driven the engine was sure to make trouble, and many collectors, despairing of keeping it running, replaced the engine with a sturdier unit. (The vogue now is to replace the replacement with an original V-12.) But the clean, smooth flow of the Edsel Ford Continental was intriguing to anyone of taste: the fine hood, the beautifully proportioned, squared-off doors, the graceful pontoons over the wheels. Some of the body units were standard Lincoln, the sheet metal hand-stretched and fitted by skilled workmen in custom-coachwork tradition, but few buyers knew this and none cared, because everything looked exactly right.

It was the handwork on the car that killed it; by 1948 the rising cycle of prices would not allow more than cursory handwork on a car selling for only $4620, and the Continental was dropped. But so secure had it become, so important was it in the American consciousness that I am sure a substantial number of the 1938 cars could be sold today, without a line being changed in the body. Even the trunk, which had to be loaded with a derrick over the spare tire, could be kept, for the car in its whole attitude and outward voice, conveyed elegance and purpose and privacy then and it would today. Mechanical concessions would have to be made. The suspension would have to be improved -- although the Continental was reasonably roadable and some present-day owners think it more comfortable for a long trip than a standard 1962 automobile. It would have to be given a modern V-8 engine, strong enough for the work, reliable -- and driving through an automatic transmission. The stick-shift is dead. I agree with Stirling Moss: a street automobile running anything but an automatic is silly.

Lincoln did try to bring back the Continental in 1955. Although the car was called the Mark II, because it seemed a good idea to someone to imitate the terminology of wartime, when military hardware from dishwashers to rockets was tagged Mark this-and-that, it was indisputably an imitation of the Edsel Ford Continental. It was a good car, and good-looking, and it offered flaming proof of the immutable fact that successful creation cannot be an act of will alone. The good and earnest and intelligent men, who staffed the separate division of the Ford Motor Company set up to make the Mark II, were determined that it would be so very good as to be irresistible, and the doors to the money bins were left open day and night to that end. For example, Mark II upholstery leather, the customer-elect was told, had come from cattle reared in unfenced land in Scotland -- unfenced, so that no sharp wire barbs could scar it; Scotland, because there hand-tanning methods produced an unusually soft and supple skin. Indeed it was fine stuff, premium goods, first cabin, number-one chop, but old Continental owners looked upon it and compared it unfavorably with the ordinary shiny brown or black cowhide that had covered the seats of Edsel's car. The hood of the new car was long, as the old one had been, and there was a suggestion of the blind rear quarter that had marked the old one, but it was only a suggestion, it was not the real shield, the solid curtain against the peering eyes of the world that the original Continental had had.

Ford let it be known that more than the credit standing of a prospective Mark II owner might be questioned; his social stature, his moral and ethical principles might well be quietly examined. But snobbery is hard to establish artificially. Some people did want a Mark II badly enough to submit to almost anything in order to get it, but there weren't enough of these. William Clay Ford's automobile was a very much better car than Edsel Ford's had been, but that was all it was -- an automobile, not an artifact, possession of which magically enlarged a man in every dimension.

"I know the old Continentals were not the best cars you could buy in 1939 (concluded on page 156) Lincoln Continental (continued from page 72) and 1940," a man, a wealthy man, said to me, "but I bought three just the same, and I still have one of them, well into its second hundred thousand miles. It's got a Ford engine in it, it's been repainted twice and it's wearing its third top, and I still drive it in preference to anything else on the market -- and I can buy anything else on the market. The continental is a practical classic: it has a heater, a defroster and no service problems, or few at any rate. I don't drive it because I like nostalgic reminders of my life twenty years ago, and I don't drive it because I want to establish a reputation for quaintness and eccentricity. I drive it because it's individual. I think of it as damned-near alive."

That's about as close to articulation as most Continental owners get. Understandably, for they're not talking sense, they're talking about a love affair. They won't be much more moved by the new Continental, the 1962 (though a younger generation of quality-seekers may), than they were by the Mark II, in all probability, despite the fact that it's one of the finest automobiles available today, competitive with any luxury car, and at only about $6500 with everything aboard, air conditioning included. The magazine Road and Track has cited the new Lincoln as one of the seven best-made cars in the world, and it is the only American car on the list.

Extreme care is taken with the Lincoln from beginning to end of the manufacturing process. It probably more closely approaches the legendary "handmade" ideal than any other American car presently in production. One continental body a day is pulled off the assembly line and checked against a master jig which will reveal any errors of fit that have crept in; one body out of every ten is taken off the assembly line and spot-checked; one body a week is minutely examined inside and out and torn to pieces in the process. It is tossed on the junk heap when the inspectors are through with it.

The finished car is given a short but exhaustive road test on public highways, its skilled driver being responsible for checking scores of points. This driver is under no pressure of time, and anything he complains about will be fixed, rebuilt or replaced. When the care goes to the customer even the tone of the horn will be exactly right.

The newest White House state car is a Continental with a few extra features designed into it: it's armor-plated, the rear seat can be raised 10-1/2 inches, to give spectators a better view of the President, it has three different tops and two two-way radios. And a pair of old-fashioned running boards for Secret Service men to stand on. Specialties aside, President Kennedy's car looks much like any other Continental built in the last couple of years. As far as the continental is concerned, company policy is inclining to the "continuity" concept that has served Rolls-Royce so well for so long; only trained eyes can tell a 1962 Continental from a 1961. The company is probably right. The Continental's is a good design, winner of an Industrial Design Institute award this year. Why change it?

Still, every day in the year, somewhere in the country someone takes pen in hand, and asks, of a newspaper, or a magazine, or Ford in particular or Detroit in general, "When are you going to get sensible and make another car like the original Lincoln Continental?"