Formal Approach

The Limousine is one of the many things the French have devised to make good living better. It originated, as a carriage, in Limousin, and it's not Limousin's only contribution: The district grows the oak staves so essential to the aging of cognac. The French also devised the coupe de ville--the town car with a tiny cabin for two, or at the most four, mounted on an elegantly long chassis, abruptly cut off just behind the chauffeur, who rode, with the footman, if the equipage was really of the first rank, with nothing to keep the weather out but wool underwear and a windshield. The town car has gone for good, and until not too long ago it looked as if the limousine, essentially a big sedan with a glass division between passengers and hired help, had joined it in oblivion. It was the Depression of the 1930s that shelved the limousine, almost forever. Conspicuously consuming as a yacht, and a lot more evident, the limousine does not flourish when the proletariat is prowling around the barricades. In the late 1930s, some of the more stubborn of the monied, particularly in New York, commissioned from bespoke coachbuilders, notably Brewster, miniature limousines built on small chassis, often the Ford V-8, thinking to deceive the serfs standing in the bread lines and stay the hands that held the half bricks; but while many of these were elegant little things, they really weren't limousines in anything but a technical category. A Volkswagen dealer in Pomona, California, took this notion to the end of the line a few years ago by removing the back windows of a VW sedan, replacing them with a classic blind rear-quarter arrangement in black fabric, complete with landau folding irons and a tiny rear window. The same thing has been done with a Renault, but it can't really come off: A limousine must be big.

The notion that the limousine was for dowagers or for tycoons too gouty to lay a (continued on page 193)Elegance On Wheels (continued from page 158) firm foot on the gas pedal restrained it, too. The limousine was not for swingers. I confess that I subscribed to this fallacy, and for too long. There are times when it's superbly enjoyable to drive, and there are times when it's a tremendous bore or a needless diversion from more important things. If one wants to work, to read, to think while on the road, or to give deserved attention to one's companions, the answer, and the only answer, is a limousine with a professional at the wheel. Leaving a post-theater party in New York or Chicago or San Francisco at, say, two in the morning, with a run to Greenwich or Evanston or Hills-borough ahead--really, who wants to steer the thing? No. The way to go is in the back seat, cosseted on fine fabric upholstery, shielded from vulgar curiosity by a blind quarter or by black glass or one-way, the stereo FM or the eight-track cartridge tape weaving the sound, brandy in cut crystal there if you want it, and tomorrow another bright day.

You don't need to own the thing. There are limousine rental services everywhere. The phrase "Carey Cadillac" is part of the fixed idiom of the country. If you incline to the elegance of cars of the classic period, and you live in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco, you can be accommodated by agencies specializing in luxury rentals, which will sometimes have the odd P-11 Rolls-Royce or Cadillac V-16 for hire. A few years ago I rented a Minerva so huge it had full-swiveling overuphol-stered chairs for jump seats. The same garage had an Isotta-Fraschini carrying a luxury I've never seen in another car, or indeed heard of: a small flat tank of Britannia metal had been built into the body beside the rear right seat, and a small folding silver tap lived in an embrasure over the seat arm. Thus the patron was spared the difficulty of reaching forward, when the car was running, to open the liquor cabinet. After all, one must keep one's strength for the important things.

The ideal of personal transportation on this level, for long a secret held by the plutocracy, has become so widely known in very recent years, with gross amounts of cash so plentiful, that limousines, of whatever make, are in short supply. For either of the two most prestigious, a Rolls-Royce Phantom V or a Mercedes-Benz Grand Mercedes 600, a wait of at least three months from date of order can be anticipated. The vehicle will reward the delay. Indeed, the 1967 limousine owner knows luxuries denied his predecessors of the heyday of the device three or four decades ago. In the 1920s and 1930s, Lucullan wheel-borne living could not be taken much farther than a liquor dispensary, a vanity and rear-seat instrumentation, insofar as useful devices were concerned; and imaginative buyers who were anxious to extend the image went in the obvious direction: They scoured the markets for rare woods and fabrics. For a London client, the coachmaker Clark of Wolver-hampton did a brougham coupe de ville on the Phantom I chassis in the style of Louis XIV, at an expense of nine months in time and a great many pounds sterling. The upholstery was Aubusson petit point, the woodwork carved and gilt, the carpeting Oriental. Gamboling nymphs decorated the door panels, the ceiling, too, perhaps done by an artist lying on his back on a miniature scaffolding, after the manner of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. At the other end of the spectrum was a Duesenberg done in French-polished black ebony and sterling silver.

Not a limousine on the market today places a speedometer, tachometer or compass under the observation of the owner and his guests. Missing, too, is the engine-room indicator for conveying orders to the chauffeur, a glass circle cut up like a pie into segments which, when individually lighted, showed HOME or FAST or LEFT or STOP or whatever. Modern upholstery materials are conventional if luxurious and, most of them, superior in comfort, in beauty and durability to the best in the world when coach-makers like Hibbard & Darrin and Rollston were accepting commissions from the landed gentry. Where use of genuine tree wood is concerned, walnut is almost all one hears of, a splendid timber, to be sure, but plebeian next to teak, rosewood, yew, bird's-eye maple or zebrawood. Usually it forms a cabinet to house the AM/FM radio or TV (90 percent of the buyers specify TV if it's offered). The rear cabin may also carry a telephone, dictaphone, stereo tape recorder, file cabinet, short-wave radio, and public-address-system microphone.

Cadillac, Chrysler, Continental, Mercedes, Rolls-Royce? It is from these first five that one will start to make a choice, because while the burgeoning market has attracted new blood, these manufactories have the vital background and experience. Cadillac has been building motorcars since 1903, and the make has survived many once-esteemed competitors: Packard and Pierce-Arrow for example. The Cadillac V-16 was a bench mark in Detroit topography, and Cadillac had developed a high-speed V-8 engine as early as 1914, only seven years after De Dion-Bouton had made the first one. Cadillac has a thicker book of experience on this engine configuration, now the big-bore standard of the world, than any other maker. The Cadillac certainly occupies the place in the United States held by Rolls-Royce in England and Mercedes-Benz in Germany: number one. The word itself is a synonym for quality and luxury, and the firm has been indefatigable not only in providing all the old standards of comfort and convenience but in breaking ground for new. Cadillac has offered such esoteric devices as automatic dimmers, automatic lights-on at twilight, lights that stay on for a set interval after you've left the car, to show you into the house, front-wheel turning lights, constant temperature control (same setting from Nome to St. Petersburg) and even electrically heated seats! Not quite 21 feet long, the Cadillac Fleetwood limousine will be garaged by perhaps 2500 fortunates this year.

Chrysler doesn't make a standard limousine, although the current Imperial offers as options a swiveling right front seat, typewriter, dictaphone, TV and a mobile facsimile transmitter and receiver, in phase with the trend toward the use of the limousine as a rolling board room, attractive among other reasons because it's comparatively hard for industrial espionage operatives to bug it. As a special-order proposition, Chrysler cooperates with the Armbruster Company of Fort Smith, Arkansas, onetime stagecoach builders, in making a deluxe all-equipment limousine on Chrysler or Pontiac chassis.

The Lincoln Continental Executive is also a special-order modification car, built by Lehmann-Peterson of Chicago. Like the Armbruster Chrysler conversion, it has solid rear-facing armchairs instead of the traditional folding jump seats for extra passengers. Every available mechanical option is cataloged, and, as in the Cadillac, the rear quarter is semiblind, with a small rear window. These were once almost de rigueur for an automobile pretending to the rank of limousine, but status building has lately required that the passengers be set up in the public gaze behind glass. A useful little gadget optional with the Continental is a chauffeur-paging transmitter, small enough to be carried in purse or pocket. When the party is over and you wish Higgins to tool around to the front door, you press a button, automatically beeping a radio signal to him. Communication on a less remote basis is through microphones and speakers hidden in the roof lining, an on-off cutoff switch tucked into the right rear armrest.

For the ultradiffident, the Checker people, famous for nearly indestructible taxicabs and long-life sedans, wagons and coaches, make a useful but comparatively frill-free limousine, notably roomy and economical; it will run on low-octane fuel, for example.

The American limousines offer superb comfort, silence, convenience, reliability and cheapness--they run in the $10,000$-15,000 category. The imports? They offer two things, for prices around $24,000-$33,000: cachet, in the Rolls-Royce; mechanical sophistication and fabulous performance in the Mercedes-Benz. As for the record of experience in producing great motorcars, there is little to choose between them: Daimler-Benz is the oldest automobile manufactory in the world, and Rolls-Royce the most famous.

Rolls-Royce and its subsidiary, Mulliner-Park Ward coachworks, produce about five Phantom V limousines a week. The chassis, end product of more than 60 years of the company's obsessive concern with the creating of fine motorcars, is complex: There are three separate braking systems, and the rear-end hydraulic leveling apparatus senses when the rear doors are opened and works faster then, to compensate for the weight of passengers getting in and out. The engine is a V-8 of unstated horsepower, but big enough to move the car at a hair over 100 miles an hour. To this chassis a body of aluminum is mated, hand-formed and hand-fitted, as always. One of the gauges that the British still insist is basic to the judgment of a fine car is the amount and quality of the wood and leather it contains--the more a car looks like a manorial library, someone has said, the better the British like it--and the figuring of the walnut veneer in one Royce will never be duplicated in another; the upholstery will require the hides of 10 cows, and these 10 will be selected from 30. Rolls-Royce has not yet been moved by the rolling-conference-room notion and still provides two large, soft high-backed seats for the principals, and a pair of front-facing jump seats--luxuriously upholstered, but still jump seats--for lesser lights. There are quieter limousines than a Rolls-Royce, faster ones and more comfortable, but more imposing, no. In any gathering of splendid motorcars, the Parthenon-shaped radiator grille of the Phantom V can be dominated by only one other car: the even-more-utterly-deluxe, six-months-to-special-order model designed for the use of heads of state, and priced at around $30,000.

Daimler-Benz claims for its 600 line current title as the most advanced luxury motorcars in the world, a claim that will not be disputed by me. The 600 is certainly unique: It has every comfort that can be imagined in the current state of the art, but still it will run at 125 miles an hour; indeed, it has been seen leaving out-and-out sports cars on winding roads.

Again, a V-8 engine, fuel-injected instead of carbureted, a superior automatic transmission and power steering remarkable in that it's soft and easy but still feeds back road feel to the driver. Most power-steering systems completely insulate the driver from road sensation, no problem at ordinary speeds, but unsafe at high rates, and particularly so over changing surfaces. Like the Royce, the Mercedes has disk brakes.

The 600 Mercedes uses hydraulics to an extent not before attempted. The windows rise and fall hydraulically; the door locks are hydraulic, and all the doors, the trunk and the fuel fillercap can be locked simultaneously with one key. The doors have hydraulic assistance closers. They need never be slammed: A finger push to start them, and the hydraulic system will do the rest. The front seats and seat backs are infinitely adjustable by the same means; so are the rear seats and the center armrest. The shock absorbers can be hydraulically adjusted while the car is moving. The system is necessarily complicated, and it was initially thought it might be a source of trouble--but not by people who know Daimler-Benz engineering standards.

Interior equipment of the Mercedes 600 is, of course, lavish: a cigarette lighter in each door, 13 lights scattered around the cabin, headrests for back-seat passengers. To solve the privacy problem and still preserve the big glass area today's buyers demand, Mercedes has resorted to an efficient but nonhydraulic device: curtains. About one hundred 600s will come to the American market this year.

If you can't satisfy yourself with a choice among these off-the-peg models, you can still find coachmakers, if you look hard enough, who will take a commission to build a limousine to your own design, but it will cost as much as it would to build a good small house, and take longer. Still, it might be a source of more fun and bigger kicks, at that.