No man is a traffic island, as the poet almost said. But I met a fellow named Dave Schwartz who was a green and pleasant median strip. (As the other poet almost said, and before “green” was a malediction like “organic.”) Schwartz was the founder of Rent-A-Wreck. He presided over his franchise’s original car lot. The place and the man were quiet, calm, refreshing breaks between the endless lanes of Los Angeles traffic cacophony and chaos.
In 1981 I was living in LA, for my sins. The din of Angelino motor vehicles was unlike the noise of New York’s. There wasn’t much horn honking or many fender crunches, and certainly there were no bellowed recitations of Illiad-long poetic invective such as old-time New York cabbies could produce. What deafened you on LA streets was the roar of, “LOOK AT ME!”
Contrary to received wisdom, Los Angeles was a tiresome place for an automotive enthusiast to be. Not because of a lack of wonderful automobiles but because of an excess. The city was full of desirable, arousing, priapism-inducing cars of every kind: Bugattis, Facel Vegas, Cords, three-wheeled Morgans, SS100 Jaguars, Testarossa Ferraris, Lancia Aurelias, not to mention bevies of MG TCs and TDs, slews of bug-eyed Sprites, more bathtub Porsches than Germany had bathtubs, and ranks and files of plain, vanilla cars-you’d-love-to-own.
Every one of these automobiles was tuned to perfection, washed, waxed, and maintained in a state of preservation that was positively Egyptoid. To say that the fine cars of Los Angeles were merely in “concours condition” would have been to slander the poor Mexicans who daily cleaned each wire wheel spoke with Q-tips dipped in Brasso and dental-flossed every crenellation of tire tread. The scenery was fabulous in LA, as it was in the South Africa of that time. The problem was with the folks who owned the view.
A Sargasso Sea of car-buff slime weed were the people who held the pink slips to LA’s auto treasures. Less charitably they could have been called chrome lampreys sucking the main bearings out of Maseratis, eels on mag wheels, ditch carp with driver’s licenses. No, carp have backbones. Such an invertebrate, sucker-bearing, cephalopodan crowd the city’s car fanciers were—heading backward with eight arms aflutter, spewing clouds of murk—that it was a wonder they could drive at all. But drive they did, to the parking spaces with their names stenciled on the curbs at the movie studios where I was working for them, which was like sitting naked in a washtub full of live squid.
The Hollywooden heads would buy a car for almost any purpose except a worthy one. Many automobiles were purchased to attract members of LA’s eight or ten opposite sexes. Since the denizens of America’s Gomorrah were incapable of verbalizing any idea more complex than “box office gross,” the expensive car served as a substitute for witty come-on and seductive chat. (It should be noted that the pursuit of libidinous satisfaction was such a mania in ’80s LA that if the local citizens had ever performed any normal acts of copulation our country would now be three fathoms deep in twenty-eight-year-olds named after astrological signs.)
Of course there was nothing wrong with owning an expensive car that possessed sex appeal. But “expensive,” not “car,” was the operative word in Los Angeles. The LA woman (a species that resembled a more attractive version of a real woman but acted like Ebenezer Scrooge on cocaine in panty hose) could be hooked only by chumming with large amounts of cash. Probably a few of the shrewder men in town saved on garage and detailing expenses by padding their underpants with hundred-dollar bills. But most of the trollop-trollers relied on a car for bait. Therefore it was imperative that the car be expensive in an obvious manner. A Tatra T87, rare as it was, wouldn’t have done because it looked like a VW beetle with a bolt-on shark fin. On the other hand if LA women knew how many times they’d been bedded by fiberglass kit cars built from actual VW beetles …
The sheikhs of Shakeytown bought cars not just to screw people literally but also to impress people and screw them metaphorically. They could have impressed people with a teenage lover or a Lucien Piccard wristwatch, but they couldn’t lock these and leave them in front of their houses.
Impressing people was, as far as I could determine, how everyone made a living in LA. Doubtless, in the less fashionable neighborhoods, there were people with jobs (washing expensive cars, for instance). But in Beverly Hills and Bel Air you didn’t have a job. You had a deal. You made a deal by impressing someone who used that deal to impress someone else who, in turn, impressed you. The way to get this chain of impressiveness started was with an expensive car. Thus Range Rovers that had seen dirt only in plant store windows, 1940s Chrysler Town and Country convertibles with tops down and aftermarket A/C units going full blast, Shelby Cobras owing their racing pedigrees to Ma Maison parking attendants, and Lamborghini Countaches that had had their highest speeds clocked by repo men on their way back to the dealership. Something as bog slow and dog-ass ugly as a ’58 T-Bird was preferable to something as fast and pretty (and cheap) as a Datsun 240-Z.
The Santa Monica Stirling Mosses would tell you their cars were “well engineered” when they had never looked under the hood and had to take the things to the dealership to get them shifted from first to second. Surely this was the place where the Porsche engine joke originated: “Don’t worry dear, I’ve got a spare one in the trunk.” The Malibu Mario Andrettis would tell you their cars were “beautiful,” which they may well have been. But how could men in orange Gucci loafers with shirts unbuttoned to the location of their ulcers know? And all of the Beverly Phil Hills would tell you they loved cars.
Dave Schwartz said he did not love cars. He said he didn’t give a damn about them. Fibs, I’m sure, but the sort of fibs a loyal Democrat might have told about politics at the embarrassing end of the Carter administration. I like to think what Dave Schwartz didn’t give a damn about was rolling padded expense accounts and four-wheeled siren songs to would-be whores of stage and screen. Schwartz’s Rent-A-Wreck lot on Bundy was filled with the kind of cars that the Rodeo Drive Alfas-aren’t-good-enough Romeos wouldn’t own if their triple-bypass operations depended on it. Here were the scruffed, the dented, the banged-up, the beaters, jalopies, junk heaps, go-to-work specials, mechanics’ delights, rattletraps, crates, and sputterbuses. Prominent among them were the Tin Lizzies of the era: Ford Mustangs 126 of them, every one of which could be parked by sonar with equanimity.
Dave Schwartz was originally a used-car dealer. He set up business in 1959, specializing in very used cars. He did well, he said, because he always told people what was wrong with the cars he sold. In 1970, Dave sold a car to a young lady for $200 and it self-destructed with even greater alacrity than $200 cars usually do, the same day in fact. Dave returned the young lady’s money and offered to sell her something else. But she said she was going to be in Los Angeles for only a few weeks. She hadn’t wanted to buy a car in the first place. It was just cheaper to buy a used car than to rent a new one from Hertz or Avis. A lightbulb appeared over Dave Schwartz’s head.
Rent-A-Wreck was an immediate success. Its rates were, in 1981, less than half what the major car rental companies charged. But there were other reasons for R-A-W’s popularity. Dave and all of his employees were fun. Dave told me that he wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t think the job was fun. He was having fun himself. By the time I met Dave he had more than 150 Rent-A-Wreck franchises nationwide. He continued to run the Bundy operation, for fun. When I arrived in Los Angeles it was Dave, in T-shirt and baseball cap, who met me at the airport.
Dave liked to make sure that people got the car that was right for them. He had me pegged for a ’57 Fairlane 500 two-door coupe. I was flattered, but I had to drive to San Diego that weekend and Dave—true to form—had already told me the Fairlane was not a long-distance runner. So he put me into something even better, a 1967 289 Mustang hardtop with almost all its lime green paint worn away by beach party sand, salt spray, and spilled beer.
Dave and his crew had to move half the cars on the lot to get to the Mustang. They did it with the bravado and good cheer of Kookie, the maestro of valet parking on 77 Sunset Strip. (If anyone reading this is old enough to know what I’m talking about, Kookie was played by Edd Byrnes, my second favorite actor after Jeff Bridges.)
Good cheer was endemic at Rent-A-Wreck, and bravado too. Dave’s head counterman, Ray Tigner, could deliver good cheer with bravado even when he wanted to know when the hell somebody was going to pay his bill. The Bundy lot was a Seven Dwarfs diamond mine place of employment. Dave’s chief mechanic, Elihu Dunbar, was cast in the role of Grumpy. But Elihu wasn’t so much grumpy as he was hard at work fixing cars—something not every mechanic does.
I asked Dave about all this whistle-while-you-work. He credited his two entrepreneurial principles: 1. Fun workers 2. Fun customers. Dave said, “I won’t deal with a customer who isn’t any fun. I can spot them fifty yards away, by posture. And I can weed them out from a single phrase on the telephone. I refer them elsewhere—cheerfully.”
I stayed in Los Angeles for as long as I could stand it, which was four months (or, to put it in actress years, half a career). During that period my ’67 Mustang had only one mechanical glitch. The fuel pump gave out at the corner of Mulholland and Beverly Glen, causing me to roll backward into the San Fernando valley. Dave sent a tow truck and gave me a purple 1968 Cadillac with one side caved in and something interesting dragging underneath.
Elihu Dunbar had the Mustang fixed the next morning. But I was busy for a few days sitting around in producers’ offices listening to their suggestions for making my lousy screenplay much worse. I couldn’t get to Rent-A-Wreck during business hours. I called to apologize. “Don’t worry,” said Dave. “I’ll drive the Mustang home and you can come over tonight and trade me.” I did so and wound up drinking beer and watching a UCLA basketball game, a rare occurrence with the president of Hertz.
The Mustang was pre-dinged and bongo-drummed all over its body, so much so as to make cosmetic harm almost impossible. Driving up Topanga Canyon I was forced off the road by some aromatherapy evangelist in a drug-colored microbus. I drove over several hamster cage–sized rocks, reducing them to pea stone with the right rocker panel. Visible damage to the Mustang: none. The house I was renting had a driveway with the width and angle of ascent of a small-gauge cog railway. My girlfriend misjudged this while trying to back out using the mirror in her compact or something. It took a two-man wrecker crew three hours to extradite the Mustang from a row of Lombardy poplars. Damage: strictly to my reputation with AAA. And there were scores of times when I was able to make extraordinary traffic maneuvers simply on the strength of ugly. No local was going to hazard the Corinthian grille and flying lady of his Holby Hills Halftrack in a dispute over a lane change with my repugnant pony car.
The Mustang had some 120,000 miles on it. The shocks might as well have been toilet plungers. Everything that loosens on a car had long since come unloosed. The transmission slipped around like an Ice Capades performing bear. But damn, the thing would drive. It leapt from stoplights. Amazing what a little V-8 and a four-barrel could do absent antipollution emphysema. On an expressway I could whistle along in the young hundreds. But my specialty was the wonderful stretch of road in Benedict Canyon from Mulholland to the Beverly Hills Hotel. My runs up and down this in the middle of the night were things of terror to the wildlife, the neighbors, my girlfriend, and, for that matter, me.
Downhill was the best. I’d roll off the edge of Mulholland Drive into Benedict Canyon like a dive-bomber. The outside turns on the switchbacks appeared daunting. The land dropped from the road so steeply that the car seemed half-suspended over the pit of doom. In fact, I knew there was a ten-inch-high asphalt curb rendered invisible by color identical to the roadbed’s. So it wasn’t as bad as it looked although, when the Mustang’s full and brutal oversteer was summoned, it was plenty bad enough. Courage for even greater speed was gained on the inside curves where walls of rock rose reassuringly ready to scrub off excess enthusiasm. Nighttime reduced the chances of blind driveway surprises or unannounced head-ons. Which saint is it that protects against burned-out bulbs in car lights?
I’d go down the switchbacks and the S-bends for about a mile of steadily increasing momentum and alarm. Then there was one of the best corners in America—a banked hairpin with high-crowned pavement where, if I set myself just right between curb and crown, it was a bobsled run and I could go through the hairpin as fast as I could make myself.
The Mustang’s body lean was so severe that the tires rubbed against the wheel wells and acrid blue smoke filled the interior. Coming out of the hairpin there was a swerve to the left, a swerve to the right, a slam dunk off a one-lane culvert bridge, and another hairpin—the antithesis of the first—with decreasing radius and off-camber bank. The technique for getting through this turn was to aim straight at a phone pole until my whole life had passed before my eyes up to the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Then, just when word came on the radio that Lee Harvey Oswald had been captured in a Dallas movie theater, I’d crank the wheel full left, stand on the gas, and pray the tires caught. (Of course this worked only for someone born in 1947. I don’t know how anyone else got through the turn.) After that it was almost a straight shot to my house, just a couple of easy sweepers with only a few deep depressions concealing storm sewer drains. And even these weren’t fatal unless I was going over ninety.
The chief pleasure of my sojourn in LA was to find a smooth dude with a Corvette or a Porsche 924 or anything else the dude mistakenly thought was a sports car and trail him off Mulholland and into my canyon. He’d take the first couple of turns in high style, fancying himself A. J. Foyt in $200 blue jeans and an Armani jacket. Then he would look into his rearview mirror and see a full nine yards of ruptured Mustang grille with one headlight pointed at Voyager 2 and the other searching for nightcrawlers. Mr. Open-knuckled-driving-gloves would then put his Bally’d foot down a little harder, smirk in self-satisfaction, look in his mirror again, and find the Mustang nibbling his tail pipe in an all-out NASCAR draft. After that I’d ease up and let him get half a curve ahead until we came to the bobsled hairpin where I’d start tapping shave-and-a-haircut on his bumper until we reached the second, off-camber, hairpin where—if he dared turn his head—he’d see what I looked like sideways in a power slide. I’d take the lead in the sweepers because, just when the dude thought he could get me on pure speed, he’d hit a storm sewer drain.
I was beaten only once—by a Mexican in a Chevy pickup full of yard-care tools and cheering children. But the truth was I didn’t get to race much. Typically the locals drove like the garden slugs that the Mexican had spent his day eradicating. The gentlemen of Los Angeles might as well have put wheels on their drug-sodden wives and rolled bottle blondes up and down Sunset Boulevard.
The Mustang, however, served its purpose even when sitting still. It was a personal litmus test. Wince at it and screw you. The car was beloved by the head of valet parking at the Beverly Hills Hotel. This important arbiter of status bore a striking resemblance to Edd Byrnes. (Come to think of it, for all I know, he was Edd Byrnes.) Anyway, he’d park the Mustang right in front of the hotel, along with the Bentleys and gull-wing Mercs.
Aside from Byrnes and the folks at Rent-A-Wreck, I didn’t care much for Los Angeles, as you may have gathered. Looking for some way to make a sensible sow’s ear out of this vulgar and garish silk purse, I asked Dave Schwartz if I could do a story about R-A-W for Car and Driver. He shrugged. “I chose the name in the first place to discourage business,” he said. “But you’re welcome to hang around.”
It greatly increased my respect for Robin Williams when I learned that he had rented a 1970 Pontiac LeMans while he was trying out for the lead in Mork and Mindy. He decided the car was good luck. He went on to drive something fancier but kept the Rent-A-Wreck LeMans parked at the TV studio. In 1981 you could have rented that same car, if Dave Schwartz liked you. Maybe you would have started making funny noises and a lot of money.
Despite my dislike of Hollywood—or, maybe, as an expression of the hypocrisy behind all professed hatred of popular culture—I’m a sucker for a celeb. Others who had Rented-A-Wreck included Paul Newman, Judge John Sirica, Alan Alda, Garry Trudeau, Jill St. John, Tony Perkins, and Henry Fonda. Each of these people, Dave said, got a car exactly suited to his or her nature.
“What did Henry Fonda get?” I asked.
“A great big flatbed truck,” Dave said. I’m still pondering that.
One other Rent-A-Wreck customer was Jeff Bridges! And when Car and Driver sent a photographer to illustrate my story, the photographer turned out to be Susan Geston, Jeff Bridges’s wife! She’s a good photographer. She took the picture of me, sprawled across the Mustang’s hood, which graces the cover of this book. It is the most … no …the flattering picture of me. She’s a really good photographer.
Susan was about nine and a half months pregnant with her and Jeff’s first child. This piqued the interest of Camilla, an extremely beautiful young lady who was working the Rent-A-Wreck counter with Ray Tigner. Camilla’s boyfriend and later husband (and another loyal R-A-W customer) was Roger McGuinn. Roger stopped by, and Dave and the rest of us spent a cheerful afternoon in this least likely of salons—even Elihu Dunbar put down his wrench for a bit—discussing the things least likely to be discussed in Los Angeles such as babies, Christianity (Roger and Camilla are devout), and very used cars. Later I went back to Susan’s house. Jeff was building a loft to accommodate their about-to-be-expanded family. We had a beer and talked about used cars. In thirty-some years of going to Los Angeles, that was the best day I’ve had.
The next day was the second-best. I returned to Rent-A-Wreck and asked Dave Schwartz to name the most excellent car in the world. Being that I was a car journalist of sorts I’d asked the question before. In those days the answer was usually the 450-Series Mercedes. I didn’t expect that to be Dave’s answer. But I wasn’t prepared to hear “The 1969 Buick Skylark.”
“That can’t possibly be true,” I said.
“I swear it is,” Dave said.
“Why?” I asked.
“The Skylark’s pretty reliable,” he said. “The next best are the ’67 and ’68 Mustangs with automatic transmissions, then sixties Plymouths with the 318 V-8, Dodge Darts with the Slant Six, and Ford Pintos. Although I don’t have any Pintos for the business. They got a lot of bad press because their gas tanks blew up once or twice. Mavericks are great, Oldsmobile Cutlasses, most 1970 through ’74 full-sized American cars, anything from American Motors, and Mustang IIs.”
The list was beginning to sound like every ten-year-old boy’s nightmare about what Dad was going to buy Mom for a second car. I was fond of old buckets-of-bolts myself, but Dave had reached some plane of automotive enlightenment that I could not attain. He claimed his opinions were based on reliability and ease of repair. I suspected him of a Buddhalike love of all carkind, a vehicular agape, a satori of the wheels. I knew Dave Schwartz owned a 1967 Mercedes 250SE convertible, a mint 1950 Mercury coupe, and a 1965 Porsche 356C. But he went home that evening in a 1960 Valiant.