Gull
Page 2
He spent thirty of the forty-five minutes before he left in the microfilm library, figuring that whatever John DeLorean had been doing in the years since he had last seen him it was unlikely to have gone unreported.
He did not have far to look: 1 April 1973, resigned from General Motors, walking away from a $600,000 salary as well as that promised presidency, becoming instead president of the National Alliance of Businessmen in Washington with a pledge to increase the number of young black kids in America’s largest corporations (‘I started on the same side of the tracks as them’); same month married for the third time, to Cristina Ferrare, a model whom he had fallen for after seeing her photograph in Vogue. (The story got cuter: he had torn out the photo spread and carried it in his wallet until he met her in person at a Gucci show where she was modelling the fall range.) Both articles reported his dream of setting up his own motor company. ‘One day,’ they were quick to add. ‘One day.’
Last thing Randall did before walking to the departure gate was buy a tie, tweed-knit: he was going for lunch with John DeLorean.
There was, besides the ticket at the desk, a man waiting for him at the other side – from that day on there would always be a man waiting for him at the other side – who led him, this first man of many, to a car that drove him the thirty or so miles to Bloomfield Hills. They passed the Country Club, they passed any number of likely and inviting-looking restaurants and hotels. (Randall, for all that he was nervous, was beginning to feel very hungry too.) They stopped finally before a concrete and steel triple-decker of an office building, the name Thomas Kimmerly, Attorney at Law, prominently displayed on the lawn sloping down to the road.
‘Is this it?’
The driver, who had not spoken more than half a dozen words in the forty air-conditioned minutes he and Randall had spent confined to the car together, nodded. ‘This is where I was told: 100 West Long Lake Road.’
For a fleeting instant Randall imagined some retrospective action for his temerity at the Auto Show.
The driver turned in his seat. ‘I have somewhere else I am supposed to be.’
‘Sorry.’
He let himself out into midday, mid-year – who knows: mid-decade, maybe – Midwest heat and walked up the winding path to the door where he hesitated again, checked back... but the car was already gone.
The receptionist had been monitoring his stop-start progress. She had one hand on the phone as he entered.
‘I was hoping you could tell me where to find...’ Randall began, but got no further.
‘Hey, you made it!’ DeLorean was leaning over the first-floor stair rail, gone greyer than seemed mathematically or biologically possible, and looking somehow younger for it, dressed in a denim shirt and jeans, finished off with a pair of tooled silver-on-black cowboy boots. The receptionist took her hand from the phone. Randall put his hand to the knot of his tie. ‘Come on up!’
By the time Randall had reached the top of the stairs DeLorean was already halfway along the landing and was holding open a door – Suite 206 – for Randall, when he had caught up, to pass through. The only thing about him that did not always seem to be in a hurry was his voice.
‘Tom is letting me have the use of a couple of hundred square feet here until we have the prototype ready to show investors.’
Inside, Suite 206 was part office, part workshop, with drawing boards and flipcharts between the desks and file cabinets and a full exhaust up on one table as though for dissection.
So it was true.
‘You’re really doing it? You’re making your own cars?’
‘GM and their cronies at Chrysler and Ford will probably do everything they can to stop me, like they stopped Preston Tucker, but, yes, I am, even if I have to go somewhere else to do it.’
He strode through the room, indicating as he passed it a large platter of fruit – ‘This is lunch, by the way, help yourself’ – stopping finally before a table, just along from the exhaust, on which stood a model – balsa wood, Randall wanted to say – maybe twelve inches long. He picked it up with the fingertips of both hands.
‘And this is what they are all afraid of. This will change everything. We’re calling it the DSV – DeLorean Safety Vehicle, the world’s first ethical car. Forget the minimum requirements, this car will have, as standard, features no other company has even thought of before, or if they thought of them it was only to say they were too expensive: airbags for a start, on both sides, side impact strips, copper facings on the brake discs for fade resistance, rustproof stainless steel, and an integral monocoque structure – that means the chassis and the body are a single unit – spreads the stress in the event of a collision...’ (‘Integral monocoque structure,’ Randall repeated to himself: there could be a test after this for all he knew.) ‘It’ll be light too: two thousand pounds. We’re using a brand new process, ERM, stands for Elastic Reservoir Moulding.’ (Randall’s brain had reached the limit of its own elasticity.) ‘I’ve bought exclusive rights in it... Here.’
He held out the model to Randall whose first instinct was to fold his hands behind his back.
‘I have to warn you, I come from a long line of klutzes.’
‘Take it.’
And how could he refuse a second time? The lines were sleeker than the Safety Vehicle name suggested, sportier. He was conscious as he turned it about of DeLorean’s eyes on him.
‘It’s... It’s... Wow,’ he said, a different kind of ineptitude.
DeLorean nodded nevertheless, accepting the compliment on the model car’s behalf. ‘How much do you think a car like that ought to cost?’
There was no getting a question like that right, not that DeLorean was inclined to wait for an answer. ‘Twenty, twenty-five thousand, would you say?’
‘About that.’
DeLorean smiled. ‘Try twelve.’
‘Twelve thousand dollars?’ Randall didn’t have to feign the astonishment.
‘Within reach of two-thirds of American households. Cheap to run too.’
‘The People’s Sports Car,’ Randall said and thought as he did that he caught out the corner of his eye a decisive movement in that formidable jaw.
‘It stayed with me,’ DeLorean said, measuring the words, ‘what you said in McCormick Place about wanting more from the future... Oh, don’t get me wrong’ – the thought had barely had the opportunity to form in Randall’s head – ‘I had been contemplating something like this for a while, a long, long while. The thing is, I am putting together a team here. I want you to join it.’
The model slipped in Randall’s hand. He righted it at the second attempt. ‘You know I have no experience in this business? I didn’t last six months on the auto pages.’
‘You have something better than experience: you have a nose for bullshit. That ’73 Vega? You were absolutely right, the only new thing about it was the bumper. It’s a year on year racket to part people from their money.’
‘I spent twelve months running supplies in the An Hoa Basin,’ Randall said, out of embarrassment as much as anything. He almost never spoke about that time to anyone who hadn’t been there. ‘If you didn’t have a bullshit detector before you went there you sure as hell had one by the time you left.’
DeLorean seemed to assess him differently. ‘Don’t tell me, the further up the chain of command you went the worse the smell got?’ It sounded like another potential trap of a question, but no. ‘I did a couple of years myself: ’43 to ’45,’ DeLorean said. ‘Never made it out of the US. I kept telling them ways they could improve their basic training, they kept sending me back to take it again. They hate it when they can’t make you exactly the same as them. I guess that’s why we’re both here.’
Randall looked at the model again, not knowing where else at that moment to look. Suddenly he frowned. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but there is one slight problem with this.’ He gave it back: ‘No doors.’
DeLorean’s own frown lifted. He ran a finger along the model’s undercarriage,
pressed something... pressed again, a little more firmly. A portion of each side of the car rose up slowly, coming to rest finally in perfect symmetry, like the wings of a bird riding a current.
‘There are your doors,’ DeLorean said.
That was it for Randall; that was the moment the flame was lit. It flickered at times; it was all he could do at others to protect it, such were the winds whipped up, not least by DeLorean himself, but it never, ever, until the very end, went out.
*
On his way back from the airport he had the cab swing by Pattie’s place, her parents’ place once upon a time. He had shaken her father’s hand on this porch: sealing the deal, the old man said. A week later he was dead. Brain haemorrhage. A week after that Pattie and Randall were married. He wasn’t the only one who had issues then, or now.
She opened the door to him, a smile on her face from whatever she had been doing in the moments before he knocked, which withered on the instant.
‘You’re supposed to give me forty-eight hours’ notice,’ she said from behind the screen door.
The TV was on. He could see over her shoulder the back of Tamsin’s head, dark against the scalding oranges and yellows and pinks of her cartoons. Pattie shifted her weight, from left foot to right, closing off the view. That’s what they had come to.
‘I’m thinking of moving to Detroit,’ Randall said. Pattie’s eye narrowed. ‘With work, I mean.’
She shrugged away any suggestion that it mattered to her what he was going for. ‘Well that ought to make things easier for everyone.’
Randall made the same left-right switch in his weight, gaining momentary advantage. Cartoons, Tamsin’s head. ‘Do you think since I’m here...?’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Pattie said.
*
Word got around pretty quickly that the editor had told him not even to bother working his notice, but to collect his things and go: the last thing this paper needed was someone working there whose heart wasn’t in it.
Randall was clearing his desk when Anderson from the business pages wandered over and leaned his not inconsiderable bulk against the partition between Randall’s desk and Hal Lewis’s, though Hal had, in the time it had taken Anderson to get from one side of the room to the other, made himself scarce. There was another man with him, soberest of sober suits, hair going white at the temples. Anderson did not introduce him but instead lit himself a cigarette and stood for a moment watching, smoking.
‘So,’ he said at last, ‘you’re going to work for John Z.’
‘That is correct.’ Randall pulled open a drawer. Paperclips and thumbtacks. He pushed it shut with his thigh.
‘Going to make your fortune.’
‘All we talked about was making cars.’
‘Cars, of course.’ Anderson let that sit a moment then jerked his thumb. ‘This is Dan Stevens. Dan started in Chrysler when Walter Chrysler himself was still running the show, 1935. He knows the industry better than any man alive.’
Dan Stevens inspected his fingernails during this brief encomium. He looked up now, blinking against the smoke of Anderson’s cigarette. ‘I suppose Mr DeLorean was telling you that Bank of America has already pledged eighteen million dollars.’
‘It came up in the conversation,’ Randall said, ‘yes.’
To be precise it had come up as they walked downstairs to the lobby at the end of lunch (an apple, a banana and three lychees), Randall’s mind already made up.
‘And Johnny Carson, I’m sure... half a million?’
‘That came up too.’ And Sammy Davis Junior, Randall did not say, and Ira Levin, and Roy Clark. Hee Haw!
Anderson smiled, practically licked his lips. ‘And did it also come up that John Z was arrested back when he was at college for selling stuff that wasn’t his to sell?’
Randall couldn’t help it, he froze.
‘Advertising space for the Detroit Yellow Pages. An old scam. Lucky not to do time for it.’
Dan Stevens frowned. His entire demeanour suggested that unlike Anderson he took no pleasure in communicating any of this. ‘The way I hear it his departure from GM wasn’t quite how he has been describing it. The board had his letter of resignation ready and waiting for him to sign when he went in looking for a showdown.’
Anderson took another draw then crushed his cigarette in the ashtray Randall had just that moment emptied. ‘The man is a liability. He loves the limelight too much. Nobody in the industry will touch him any more.’
Randall stared at the last of the smoke drifting up from the butt then he tipped it into the wastebasket and shoved basket and ashtray both into Anderson’s arms.
‘Bullshit,’ he said, and with a nod to the other man as he headed for the door, ‘A pleasure meeting you, Mr Stevens.’
*
That was the summer that Liz and Robert bought the orange Morris Marina. Only four years old and less than seventy thousand miles on the clock. They took it a day here and a day there over the July fortnight: Ballywalter, Castlerock, Whitepark Bay, the Ulster American Folk Park, which was as close, Liz had thought, walking around its reconstructed settlers’ cabins, as they were ever likely to get to the real thing. They had talked about a package holiday on the continent – Torremolinos, Benidorm – had gone as far as making an appointment with Joe Walsh Tours in Castle Street the first weekend after Easter, but even at their rates, what with the new car and everything... No, it was just too much of a stretch. Maybe next year, they said, just as they had the year before. Instead, the next year Liz buried her brother, Pete, and felt guilty enough those first few months just breathing in and out, never mind lying sunning herself somewhere on the Costa Brava.
Anyway, a day here, a day there... Meant you weren’t tied, didn’t it?
3
The team that DeLorean was putting together was still under half a dozen strong when Randall moved into the on-loan Kimmerly offices. Besides being temporary landlord Tom Kimmerly himself was acting as the company’s attorney and chief secretary. His was the name entered in the Michigan State Business Register next to number 190407, the DeLorean Manufacturing Company. Bill Collins the chief engineer was another GM refugee – another former Pontiac man – who had felt the life, and the spirit, being slowly squeezed out of him by the sheer weight of the behemoth. Almost the first thing he and DeLorean had done together on his defection was fly to Europe, to the Turin Auto Show, searching for a designer they could work with. Actually, searching for one particular designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose concept car for Lotus – more space-age architectural sculpture than automobile – had been shown in Turin the same year as DeLorean’s last ever Vega was being unveiled in Chicago.
(‘You can drive yourself nuts in this world comparing things that bear no direct comparison,’ DeLorean told Randall. ‘Or you can spur yourself on.’)
Giugiaro was intrigued by their vision: a high-concept design in the mass-produced quantities he had recently achieved with the Volkswagen Golf...
The scale model Randall had seen (it was epo-wood, he had since discovered, not balsa) was the first fruit of their three-way collaboration, although by the time DeLorean handed it to him the plans had already been modified. It was clear even without the benefit of a full-size prototype that the Safety Vehicle name was not going to stay the course: too awkward on the tongue – too much drag. They settled instead on DMC-12, the concluding digits a reminder to everyone involved that despite the name change the ambition of delivering a safe – and ethical – car at an affordable price remained undimmed.
Also notionally installed in Long Lake Road was Dick Brown, who had made a name for himself with Mazda, taking it from nowhere to fourth in the American export market in just two years, and whose job it was to build up a network of dealers willing to part with $25000 in advance for the rights to sell the DMC-12 at a profit to them of $4000 a car. His target was a hundred and fifty dealers nationwide in the first twelve months, hence ‘notionally installed’.
DeLorean talked at times like a football coach (he had a share in the San Diego Chargers) deploying his specialists according to the play. Roy was his gunner, bearing down on the opposition’s punt returner, putting the fear of God into him. It wasn’t always pretty, but you couldn’t argue with the results.
As for Randall he was, to borrow from another code, a classic utility player. Whatever needed doing, he did it. Technically he was in the employ of Tom Kimmerly and the DeLorean Manufacturing Company, which controlled the DeLorean Motor Company, but at any given moment of any given day in the years that followed he could be acting for the John Z. DeLorean Corporation, the DeLorean Sports Car Partnership, the DeLorean Research Limited Partnership, or the Composite Technology Corporation, whose function it was to oversee development of the Elastic Reservoir Moulding process for the car’s body.
JZDC
DSCP
DRLP
CTC
DMC squared
Almost from the start there were accusations – Randall’s old pal Anderson ran one of the first in the Daily News – that as much energy and imagination was expended on moving capital from company to company as on designing and developing sports cars. DeLorean invoked Preston Tucker again, and his ill-starred attempt in the post-war years to break the Great Triopoly of Chrysler, GM and Ford. Tucker’s problem wasn’t so much that he had only one basket: he had only one egg. He left himself too get-at-able.