So, Where’s the Wienermobile?
When you visit the Petersen Automotive Museum, don’t waste your time looking for county supervisors’ bulletproof cars--you know, the ones equipped with trunks rigged with hidden escape buttons in case kidnapers try to stash their victims there.
Or the Mercedes smashed in by golf club-wielding actor Jack Nicholson.
Or the world’s fastest Hyundai--the one driven by Rodney King.
The museum, which opened in June at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, is supposed to depict how The Car shaped The City--for better or worse.
“What we’re about is the history of the automobile and its impact on American life and culture using Los Angeles as the prime example,” said Matt Roth, the museum’s curator.
On a certain formal level, it does deliver. There’s the 1984 Buick used to pace the torch relay leading up to the Los Angeles Coliseum and the opening of the Olympics. And a three-wheeled Dale built by a transsexual con artist from the San Fernando Valley. And there are lowriders.
James Bond’s Aston Martin is garaged there. It has a few things that the county supervisors’ cars don’t, such as machine guns, tire-slashing wheels, a smoke screen and oil-slick delivery system, and an ejector seat. (Yeah, but 007’s car doesn’t have the feature that some of the supervisors’ cars have--an intercom that allows passengers to talk to outsiders while seated safely inside.)
Cars are exhibited among such things as a strip mall, a drive-in restaurant and a replica of the Dog Cafe, which once stood on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. The exhibits are designed to show how cars influenced life in Southern California and vice versa.
This is, after all, the place where for $20,000 you can have your face sculpted on a mannequin of a gas station attendant or car salesman. Seriously.
Still, there’s part of Los Angeles’ soul missing from this latest and very Angeleno addition to the County Museum of Natural History.
Maybe the problem is that they didn’t ask the public for suggestions on how to illustrate our peculiar relationship with our cars.
So don’t expect to find a couple necking on Mulholland Drive. Or a sculpture of a carjacking. Or drivers applying makeup or jabbering on a cellular phone while speeding down PCH in their Beamer.
If this place was supposed to show how the internal combustion engine shaped life in L.A., here are some vehicles that might be there:
* The LAPD’s battering-ram-equipped tank.
* The Quakey Shake Van. That’s the one that travels to schools and simulates a 5.6-magnitude earthquake to teach kids about life on the Fault Zone.
* A Humvee, like the ones that roamed the streets after the riots.
* The 1955 Buick convertible featured in Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” video.
* The Rolls-Royce that Zsa Zsa Gabor was driving when she slapped a cop.
* The Wienermobile. Its driver once said: “I relish this job, but to keep it, you have to cut the mustard.”
* The dichondra car. Built by the Dichondra Weed and Feed people for an ad campaign, it was bought by a mushroom grower who soon discovered it had disadvantages: It had to be clipped with hedge shears. It had to be watered daily. It attracted dogs.
* Edward Kienholz’s “Back Seat Dodge--’38.” The artwork, which depicts a couple in the car’s back seat in, let’s say, amorous embrace, set off an art-versus-morality controversy in the ‘60s. County supervisors sought to remove the “revolting . . . and pornographic exhibition” from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ultimately, the supervisors agreed to a compromise--the door to the car would be closed to visitors age 18 and younger--unless they had parental consent.
* And let’s not forget the latest addition: O.J.’s white Ford Bronco.
Los Angeles isn’t just home to the cars that made this place famous; it’s home to the car-men.
Where are the statues of famous auto pitchmen? Ralph Williams, lying Joe Isuzu and Cal Worthington--accompanied, of course, by his menagerie of animals, all named Spot.
The vanished, fabled trolley cars are there--in an exhibit that reproduces a scene from Laurel and Hardy’s “Hog Wild” showing the comedians trapped in their crushed Model T between two trolley cars.
But the Petersen ought to include an exhibit on the Great Southern California Automobile Conspiracy theory. That’s the one where it is said that General Motors, Standard Oil of California and Firestone Tire and Rubber got together to force the car culture on a city that had been happily dependent on a vast and efficient system of public transit.
The theory is still hotly argued, but is countered with evidence that the public began forsaking the streetcars long before GM and its partners took apart the Pacific Electric Co. in the 1950s. Scholars point out that Pacific Electric was losing money and patronage as early as 1930. They blame the streetcar’s fading popularity on rising fares, poor maintenance and the region’s love affair with the car.
Don’t look for an exhibit on famous lemons either. This museum is looking to the car makers for financial support.
