TRAVELING in style : AUTOMOTIVE AUTOCRAT : A Rolls-Royce is Earl Grey tea and weekends at Ascot and all things By Royal Appointment. It is, in short, a legend that is at its haughtiest and mightiest only on the highways, byways and motor ways of England.
o realize that a car has a soul is to accept that it is a creature of habitat. Thereupon, there really is no other highway for stretching a Porsche to its tiptoes than 200 kilometers of mostly Bavarian autobahn between bookbinding Stuttgart and beer-drinking Munich. The throat of a V-12 Ferrari--a tame tenor on the Hollywood Freeway--somehow, inexplicably, maybe as a trick of its heritage, rises to a ripping alto when shaking off Milan and driving the Alpine foothills in search of Lago di Como. And a Rolls-Royce . . . well, it’s forever Earl Grey tea and weekends at Ascot and all things By Royal Appointment and a legend that is at its haughtiest and mightiest only on the highways, byways and motor ways of England. Not in Scotland, mind you, where England continues to be blamed for Emperor Hadrian and his wall. Nor Wales, of course, where the Plaid Cymru party still seeks home rule. But in emerald, tweedy, fabled, Conservative, drafty, thatched, humorous and unhurried England, where the Rolls-Royce was born in 1905 as “the new all-British motor car” of C. S. Rolls & Co. and where this rolling thing of steel and walnut, rubber and leather remains an icon.
“I would endorse that,” agrees Gillian Hepworth, speaking for Guy Salmon Car Rentals, firmly established renter of Rolls-Royce to visiting Americans. “A Rolls-Royce is so very English. It is not a car you race down the autobahn . You drive it in stately fashion, and there is no statelier country for doing that, than England.”
A Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit rented from Guy Salmon of London costs $800 a day. Or about $4,900 a week. Or $19,000 a month. Plus insurance and an enormous Value Added Tax of 15%.
Avis also rents the Silver Spirit for a mere $700 a day--or $24,900 for a 29-day rental which includes, bless ‘em, comprehensive insurance and unlimited mileage.
In its 1905 catalogue, the 11-car Rolls-Royce line (entry level then being a two-cylinder Tonneau for $600) was introduced as “a model of accurate and scientific construction . . . the most perfect and luxurious car . . . fast, silent, vibrationless.”
It still is.
In 1905, the company’s showroom was at 14-15 Conduit Street near fashionable New Bond Street in London’s West End.
It still is.
In 1933, Sir Henry Royce died, the color of the famed and entwined RR emblem went from red to black in mourning, and a young delivery driver and factotum named Roger Cra’ster started working for the company.
He still does.
“The classic truth of the Rolls-Royce is that it is the magic of a name,” Cra’ster says. “And it still is.”
We were in his office above that first showroom on Conduit Street. He produced tea in bone-china cups. We exchanged schools, spoke an update on the Los Angeles Cra’ster had known as a Rolls-Royce representative in the ‘50s, and then explored that mystique of his marque.
It has to do with aristocracy implied. “The inference is that if you are in a Rolls-Royce, you are at least influential,” Cra’ster explains. “Of course, if you’re worthy of a Rolls-Royce it’s an entirely different matter.
“I remember once driving around a Royal Air Force station. The guards on the gate saluted me. I drove around this highly secret station and nobody stopped me. And I couldn’t have done that in any other car.”
To a bred-in-the-bone motorist, such challenges are irresistible. I proposed a trial marriage. Rolls-Royce accepted. For seven days, it was agreed, my charge would be a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit, all Wedgwood blue, all magnolia-cream leather, all snootiness.
We drove its world; from the Dorchester to the Savoy, from chic pubs in Belgravia’s mews to the empty Cotswolds and antique stores of Regency Cheltenham.
Cra’ster was correct. At the wheel of a Rolls-Royce, the unworthy assume influence. It’s like marrying old money. If you admired it in the first place, you quickly want to become it. So the actor in all of us starts to dress the Rolls-Royce part (gabardine blazer and a Burberry raincoat are excellent form when driving the car during daylight hours; but no tank tops and Andy Capp cloth hats, old boy, and act the part (one searches for full-service stations because no Rolls-Royce owner pumps his own four-star petrol) and eventually, inevitably, totally, one becomes swallowed by the game.
Do both sides play? Of course.
At the Savoy, in a pouring rain, in a car-clogged forecourt, at lunchtime, the doorman waved Lady Wedgwood and me through irritable traffic to his front door. Cabdrivers said nothing. Fords and Vauxhalls moved over. They knew their place. You feel like a lord. Or a pit bull.
“Just leave her with me, sir,” he said. “She’ll be here when you get out.”
She was--with a fresh newspaper on the front seat.
At Harrods, with the rain now a metropolitan monsoon, we were allowed to triple park. A green-and-gold commissionaire holding a green-and-gold umbrella opened our door. He was our cover and interference to the green and gold store. “About an hour, sir?” “Yes, about an hour.” Exactly 60 minutes later, the car slid from nowhere to the store doorway where we had been waiting for nine seconds.
It is said that the Denver Boot--that impregnable clamp and imported conqueror of red-zone and parking ticket scofflaws--was not designed to imprison a Rolls-Royce tire. Or tyre . I did not challenge that. But in sedate Cheltenham, the premise of one law for the poor, one law for the Rolls-Royce owner, was fully tested. The curb was clearly marked. No parking. But I stopped there anyway, directly behind an Austin Mini. The traffic warden eyed the Rolls-Royce.
“Going to be long, sir?”
“About 30 minutes.”
“Don’t be much longer, sir.”
He continued writing a ticket for the Mini.
But this was fluff. I was allowing Cra’ster’s Theory that a Rolls-Royce will rise above its driver. Not only that, I was groveling before this vehicle.
Enough. We would see if this product of the late and Honorable Charles S. Rolls, MA, once a racer of cars, former holder of world speed records and flier of airplanes, had evolved as thoroughbred automobile or Mayfair fop.
Clearly, no Silver Spirit is a Corvette. Too heavy and not aerodynamic enough. Its broad track and long wheelbase preclude nimbleness. Too much of everything at slow speeds in tight quarters make any maneuver an end result of calculating all the options. But as a cruiser of motor ways . . . ah, even in this age of shaky superlatives, the Rolls-Royce motorcar is consummate. At 80 m.p.h. she’s only flexing. At 100 her legs are ready. At 130, its indicated apogee on a deserted stretch of the M1 nearing Leicester at dawn, the Rolls speeds flat and stable. Wind and engine noise are a subdued second to Count Basie and “April in Paris” on the tape deck. Whether a Rolls-Royce simply holds its own or munches BMWs, Jaguars or Mercedes is a matter of choice. The car can do it. Can you?
Lady Wedgwood and I finally found each other on an innocent secondary road leading from Marlborough to the Wiltshire village of Aldbourne. It was a dark, clear night on an empty road of stern macadam, and there was a full, earned respect between car and driver. A string of red lights ahead formed into a road construction site abandoned for the day. Fluorescent cones formed a detour, and a driver’s mental computer took it all in: Two lanes wide, a fast, flat, sweeping left-hander followed by a straight, full-bore exit.
No sweat. Balance the car with a touch of brake and a feather of throttle. Enter the left-hander fast, looking for the apex and exit as one. There they are. I clipped the apex, dove for the exit and had it made . . . when a rumble and a jink said that everything, suddenly, was very wrong. The curve, dammit, had been set with a negative camber, a banking sloping down from the apex of the turn. In a microsecond, the weight of the Rolls-Royce, more than two tons, had shifted to the outside of the car and the turn. The geometry was a tangle. She was ready to slide.
Only one thing to do. Drive the Rolls like a Ferrari.
I flicked the steering a notch to shake the center of gravity loose from somewhere over the rear passenger door handle. Felt the weight settle. Straightened up the front end. Quick, ease on power and hope there’s enough torque in this duchess to restore balance, direction and control. It worked. We came out from the cones like Emerson Fittipaldi. A Rolls-Royce had behaved like a real car.
The next day, at London Airport, I turned the car back to a genial, polite, Tom Murphy, the car’s venerable handler and silent sufferer of all those who drive her. I stared a goodby at the car. I’d beaten it. For one moment on a dark back road in Wiltshire, I had been the absolute master of this Rolls-Royce. I swear the car sneered. But then it had seen my final clumsiness and knew.
I hadn’t yet learned to step out of a Rolls-Royce as if I owned it.
