When Ragtops were in Flower
December, 1976
Among the footnotes to the great American Bicentennial, it will be noted that 1976 marked the end of the domestically produced convertible. The final expression of this special breed of automobile came in the form of the Cadillac Eldorado, a leviathan intended to sell for about $12,000 but whose desirability in the face of extinction escalated its black-market price to almost 20 grand. The demise of the Eldo convertible by no means ends the ragtop in the market place. Nearly a dozen models remain, ranging from the compact and lovable MGs to the regal, preposterously priced ($67,500) Rools-Royce Corniche. But the fact is that the convertible's classic role as the ultimate form of automotive frivolity and wretched excess has ended. There was a day not so long ago when the ragtop was the supreme statement of every auto maker--his convertibles, roadsters, cabriolets, etc., were the most expensive and prestigious versions of his wares--but that has changed. Sedans and hardtops have taken the place of the convertible and, considering the hard reality of safety, production costs and shifting consumer interest, it is hard to imagine a time when it will experience a time when it will experience a renaissance.
Therefore, to fully appreciate the impact of the convertible, we've got to spiral back in time, perhaps 40 years. The great (continued on page 266)ragtops(continued from page 205) manufacturers of the day--Rolls-Royce, Bugatti, Minerva, Hispano-Suiza, Alfa Romeo, Delage, Talbot, Isotta-Fraschini, Duesenberg--did not build complete automobiles that could be purchased from a showroom floor like an off-the-rack suit. Each automobile was tailored to the individual tastes of the customer, through the services of special coachbuilders who fitted handcrafted bodies to chassis provided by the car maker. No two Rolls or Duesenbergs were alike and each bore evidences of the unique tastes and prejudices of its purchaser. This car-making syndrome reached its peak in the late Twenties and early Thirties, before the world-wide economic collapse in the Great Depression and the social and military revolutions of World War Two caused a major redistribution of wealth and a muting--or at least a modification--of the expressions of conspicuous consumption. About a dozen ultraexpensive car makers and roughly twice as many custom coach-builders serviced this trade in Europe and America. By 1950, only a handful were left.
The automobiles they created came in a variety of shapes and sizes (all immense). Great formal limousines and coupes tie ville, where the poor chauffeur sat in an open cockpit in a loony holdover from horse-drawn-carriage days, were among the most spectacular and high-priced of the lot. And there were elegant sedans and coupes and fire-breathing sports cars, with their louvers and straps and flapping, lightweight bodywork. But perhaps the most desirable and exciting of the lot were the incredible roadsters and drophead coupes that combined all the sheer size and opulence of the giant limousines with the performance and limited passenger capacity of sports cars. While the limousine was used for such heavy-duty operations as opera and theater transport, state funerals and coronations, the sedan for family drives to the country and the sports car for short-haul, nerve-fraying blasts along curving roads, the great coupes embodied a wistful element of glamor and romance missing in the others. Yes, there was a certain ingredient of gentle sin in these machines. These were the cars for weekend trysts, afternoon assignations and evening rendezvous with mistresses and lovers--for silent, private, luxurious trips to the south of France or up to Newport in the company of a deliciously elegant and eager female. These were the original hustlers' cars, the ultimate sexual-fantasy vehicle. If you couldn't get laid with a Bugatti or a Duesenberg, you had two alternatives: a cathouse or a monastery; it was that simple.
Imagine, if you will, an automobile 233 inches long, with a 784-cubic-inch, straight-eight engine capable of propelling it over 125 mph. Imagine some more: its hand-built two-place roadster body set on a chassis costing $80,000 minus the coach-work--30,000 hard, uninflated dollars of 1930, by the way. That machine, a Type 41 Bugatti, the largest automobile ever produced in quantity (if six or seven versions can be described as quantity), typifies the sense of automotive extravagance that died in die rubble of the Hitler war. Called the Royale by its eccentric creator, Ettore Bugatti, whose sensibilities lay somewhere between pure sculpture and engineering, the Type 41 was intended for sale to European royalty, though the realities of worldwide depression resulted in the three versions that were actually sold to fall into the hands of the bourgeoisie: a Parisian clothing magnate, a German doctor and a British army captain. (Historians cannot agree on whether three or four additional Royales were built, simply because a number of them were fitted with more than one body by Bugatti and many of the records from his Alsace company--run more like a fiefdom than a factory--were lost in World War Two.) While Bugatti maintained the unsold Royales for his family in the form of elegant coupes and limousines, two of the three customers' cars were classic, two-place roadsters. Again, it is simply beyond the ken of contemporary automotive thinking to create a monster car, the hood of which was nearly as long as a Honda Civic, intended for the transport of two people and their luggage.
The larger-than-life roadsters of the Thirties were a unique permutation of automotive elegance that will never be seen again. All the thoroughbred marques of the era sold roadsters with blockbuster price tags. Bodies were built out of everything from aluminum to steel to aircraft fabric to tulipwood. That special moment in history, when technological optimism knew no boundaries, when concerns about ecology, pollution, distribution of wealth, resource shortages, etc., were unthinkable in the rush toward a hazy, Buck Rogers utopia, produced automobiles without finite limits. Anything that could be done was done, regardless of mundane considerations of cost or time.
This unbounded energy resulted in startling mechanical exotica such as double-overhead camshafts, supercharging, independent suspensions, transaxles and the widespread use of aluminum and magnesium. Perhaps the most lurid examples of this energy were the Gatsbyesque two-seaters, those block-long roadsters and drophead coupes intended only for transporting a pair of bodies in the ultimate luxury. The most staggering example of this particular type of vehicle is the stark, white Bugatti Royale Coupe presently on display in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Built in 1930-1931 for Dr. Joseph Fuchs at the Bugatti works in Molsheim, Alsace-Lorraine, with a custom body by Ludwig Weinberger of Munich, the car reached the United States, apparently after wandering around the Far East for a brief period, and was found in a Long Island junk yard in 1943. Its discoverer was Charles A. Chayne, a vice-president of General Motors and a classic-car enthusiast who had the car completely restored. It now sits amid the regiments of locomotives, old cars and airplanes of the imposing Ford Museum, its body so well proportioned that from a distance it does not look outsized. Only upon close examination does the immensity of its 169-inch wheelbase and its 24-inch wheels come into focus. Before lending it to the museum, Chayne had a number of pictures taken standing next to his Royale. The bulk of the automobile is such that he appears to be a small boy lurking in the shadow of the great machine, when, in fact, he was a burly man, 6'3" tall.
The Chayne Type 41 Royale is one of the rarest and most valuable automobiles in die world. This is the only open car of the existing six. The five others, all part of great automobile collections, are sedans and limousines, one of them having been converted by Bugatti from a magnificent roadster built in 1931-1932 for Armand Esders of Paris. This machine, with a long and graceful body designed by Bugatti's eldest son, Jean, is memorable because it carried no headlights. Because he never drove at night, M. Esders specified that the car be built minus front lighting. But the Chayne-Fuchs Royale remains the unrivaled champion of four-wheeled extravagance: never has more been lavished on a device to carry a pair of human beings down a highway.
This is not to say that others did not operate in the same league with Bugatti. A pair of gruff, much-loved brothers operating in that unlikely outpost of the American heartland, Indianapolis, Indiana, Fred and Augie Duesenberg created some of the world's greatest racing and passenger cars during their long and illustrious career. A Duesenberg, using a revolutionary system--four-wheel hydraulic brakes--won the Grand Prix of France in 1921, a feat not duplicated by an American car until Dan Gurney drove one of his Eagles to victory in the Belgian Grand Prix 46 years later. While Bugatti did maintain a body-fabrication shop of his own, the Duesenbergs were primarily chassis manufacturers, and many of their cars carried bodies designed and built by American special coachbuilders such as Murphy, Locke and LeBaron and by European houses such as Franay, Weymann, Hibbard and Darrin. However, some of the most beautiful Duesenbergs of all were designed in house by a man acclaimed by many to be America's greatest automotive (continued on page 270)ragtops(continued from page 266) stylist, Gordon Buehrig. The famed, coffin-nosed 810/812 Cord was a Buehrig creation, as were several magnificent Duesenberg SJ boattail roadsters. If there is a car larger than life, "it's a Duesie," as the old slang accolade goes.
Although they had been prominent in the automotive world for nearly 20 years, thanks to their racing accomplishments and much-applauded efforts in behalf of building passenger cars, the Duesenbergs made their first giant splash in 1928--1929, when the first versions of the fabled J hit the American roads. Like the Bugatti, it was built without compromise by the proud craftsmen who populated the low, brick Duesenberg factory on Indianapolis' West Washington Street. It, too, was a monster; not as large as the incredible Royale but immense (142-1/2-inch wheel-base, which, for comparison's sake, is more than a foot longer than contemporary Cadillac and Lincoln sedans), and it cost the earth. A bare chassis was a minimum of $8500 and, depending on the bodywork, an owner could easily unload over $20,000 for a fully road-prepared J Duesenberg.
The J was a mighty enough performer to operate without serious challenge on American highways. With its straight-eight, 420-cubic-inch (6.9 liters), double-overhead-camshaft engine, built with the same painstaking care and brilliant technology developed through racing (in those days, competition with cars as well as horses improved the breed), it produced 265 horsepower and was capable of 116 mph. However, this was not enough. In 1932, the Duesenbergs introduced their masterpiece, the SJ, a supercharged version of the J. With the addition of the centrifugal blower, or supercharger (which pumped the air/fuel mixture into the engine's combustion chambers under pressure), output was increased to 320 horsepower--a prodigious feat, considering the relatively low octane of the pump gasoline of the day. These SJs, complete with their four distinctive, chrome-plated, external exhaust pipes that became a hallmark for all supercharged automobiles, could accelerate from 0 to 100 mph in 17 seconds and run over 130 mph flat-out. As with ihe Bugatti Royale, the big Duesenbergs carried three-speed transmissions, which permitted proud owners to astound witnesses by informing them of their car's ability to run 104 mph in second gear.
Like the other great automobiles of the day, a substantial percentage of the 470 to 480 Js and SJs produced were fitted with four- and seven-seater bodies of various configurations. But there were those people--perhaps the most profligate of the lot--who insisted that their Duesenbergs be limited to carrying two souls. The most famous of these customers were Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, who had a pair of short-whcelbase (well, relatively short, at 125 inches), lightweight SJs built by the coachbuilder Murphy of Pasadena.
Some of the most beautiful Duesenbergs were created by Buehrig and the factory coachbuilders, but the particular 1933 boattail SJ "speedster" model pictured on page 204 was built by the custom firm of Schwartz & Company. With its lightweight body, this machine is still capable of nearly 130 mph in top gear as a perfectly restored member of the marvelous Harrah automobile collection in Reno, Nevada.
While it is primarily perceived as the builder of great, silent limousines for the chauffeured transport of aristocracy, there was a day when Rolls-Royce was the source of magnificent roadsters and drop-head coupes with a distinct sporting flavor. The years since World War Two have seen Rolls-Royce concentrate primarily on sedans and large convertibles, but during the decade 1925--1935--which might be described as the golden years of automotive coachbuilding--a number of wonderful, two-place Rolls were on the road. Perhaps the most exciting performers of the lot were the 7.7-liter, 160-hp Phantom IIs, which could nudge 100 mph. The Phantom III arrived in 1935 as an ultrnsmooth, 7.3-liter V12 (the entwined Rs on its label had been changed from the traditional red to black, in mourning for partner Henry Royce, who had died in 1933). Although not quite as rapid as the II, the Phantom III is considered by many Rolls aficionados the high-water mark for this legendary make.
While Bugattis, Rolls-Royces and Duesenbergs were without peer in terms of sheer cost, other manufacturers of the day were producing luxurious roadsters for somewhat less money, although they remained staggeringly expensive in terms of the masses. Packard, for example, produced a splendid, narrow-bodied roadster in 1930 that could be bought, complete, from the factory for $5200. While this was perhaps one third of what one might have to pay for a Bugatti or a Ducsenberg, one must not forget that Henry Ford was selling his 1930 Model A standard roadster for about $430. The Packard, therefore, was a car for the well to do, as opposed to the filthy rich, and the rare Speedster Runabout shown on pages 202--203 is one of the most desirable artifacts from this much-lamented company. Powered by a straight-eight engine of 384.9 cubic inches, developing 145 hp, the Runabout was sold with a guarantee that it would exceed 100 mph. While approximately 150 of these exquisite machines were manufactured, only 18 are known to exist, which places their value at astronomical levels among serious collectors.
Mercedes-Benz sporting vehicles of the golden era were directly related to machines the company raced in Continental sports-car competition. Unlike Rolls-Royce and Packard, which had forsaken active racing almost from the time the companies were established, and Bugatti and Duesenberg, whose racing cars were much smaller and lighter than their Royales and SJs, Mercedes-Benz often competed with cars similar to the models it sold on the open market. After dropping out of Grand Prix racing in 1926-1927 to concentrate on the design and development of a new generation of powerful sports cars, Mercedes-Benz introduced the S series, a collection of supercharged roadsters in a variety of weights and sizes, ranging from the S (Sport) to SS (Super Sport) to SSK (Super Sport Kurz-- a short-wheelbase version) to SSKL (Super Sport Kurz Leicht--a lightweight, short-wheelbase pure racer). The basic design work was done by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, perhaps Germany's greatest mechanical genius and the creator of the contemporary sports car that bears his name. The SSKs were excellent sports/racing machines and accounted for numerous victories, including the 1929 Ulster Tourist Trophy, the 1931 Mille Miglia and the 1931 and 1932 Avus races. The SSKL was a rough-and-tumble racer, light and brutally overpowered for all but the finest competition drivers of the day. For highspeed touring, the SS and SSK were favorite machines for Europe's wealthy, and the automobile pictured on page 201--a 1929 SSK drophead coupe with body by Corsica Coachworks--was among the most desirable of all.
Like the SJ Duesenberg, the SSK used a large-displacement (431.3 cubic inches), supercharged, in-line engine. Its Roots-type blower--activated by cramming the throttle wide open and recommended not to be used for more than 15--20 seconds at a time, lest it ruin the engine--boosted the output of the six-cylinder, overhead-camshaft power plant from 140 to 200 hp for short bursts of acceleration and top speed. Old-timers still rhapsodize about the ominous, unearthly shriek of an S-series Mercedes-Benz while running with its supercharger, or Kompressor, in operation.
In full road trim, the SSK was hardly ihe dainty piece that its designation kurz implies. Its wheelbase was a substantial 116 inches and it weighed 4590 pounds. However, its engine was powerful enough to push it along in excess of 120 mph and its suspension (semielliptical springs, front and rear), its four-speed transmission and its giant four-wheel brakes were efficient enough to make it one of the finest-handling road cars of the day. With its original cost in excess of $18,000, it is understandable that no more than 33 SSKs were built, and probably no more than five were fitted with Corsica bodies. This exquisite example from the Harrah collection is one of only two Corsica SSKs known to exist.
Most men who love automobiles maintain that we will never again see an era like that which produced these incredible roadsters and drophead coupes. The safety freaks wail that such cars are unsafe, that they provide no roll-over protection, which is true. They are also extremely expensive to manufacture and each year fewer and fewer are made. It was a unique time, when wealth had no sanctions on excess and technological knowledge was blossoming at a staggering rate. Of course, die aristocracy that bought and drove these cars is old and tattered now, and, with the exception of a few Italian and English custom coach-builders and some high-performance GT machines being built by Ferrari, Lamborghini. Maserati, et al., there is nothing left of this world of unbridled automotive elegance.
Egalitarian instincts might cause us to applaud the end of such overpowering displays of wealth as a Bugatti Royale or an SSK Mercedes-Benz; but when they are viewed more as sculpture--as expressions of a unique 20th Century art form--their impact becomes that of aesthetics and not economics. Who cares that they were created for the selfish nutrition of egos or that unforgivable sums of money were expended in such pursuit? The fact remains that--as in all times when rich, perhaps vulgar men have patronized great artists for their personal aggrandizement-the result has far transcended the motivations for creation. After all, Da Vinci and Michelangelo were subsidized by men who had rather superficial interests in art; so, perhaps, might we be grateful to the decadent, frivolous rich folk who unleashed the genius of men like Ettore Bugatti and the Duesenbergs.
In the end, their service was to art, not to science.
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