In the Land of Status Consciousness, How a Stretch Limo Is Born
As someone who came here three years ago, I know Southern California can be tough on immigrants hoping to become grander versions of themselves. What befalls certain new arrivals from the Midwest when they get to Brea, however, is something else again.
In the dusty lot at Krystal Enterprises, the newcomers stand glassy-eyed in the sunshine. They’re naively of a piece, perfect for life in their birthplace--Wixom, Mich.--but entirely insufficient to their California dreams. They will have to be radically reconfigured, and the process is anything but gentle.
For the new Lincoln Town Cars to be transformed into those icons of Los Angeles, stretch limousines, the initiation is even more unceremonious than for would-be filmmakers, displaced writers and similarly frothy types.
The Lincolns’ grille-smiles quickly are wiped from their faces. Their pretty pieces of chrome trim are torn off. Their cuddly interiors are yanked out. They are hollowed to their shells.
Then they’re chop-sawed in half at a point about three inches behind their center doorposts.
Even actors auditioning for the first time are treated more kindly.
Los Angeles long has had a unique association with stretch limousines, even though New York is thought to have more of them. Years of television images showing the show business aristocracy alighting at the Oscars and the Emmys have forged the connection in the public mind.
Three of the nation’s six largest manufacturers--Krystal (at 1,400 vehicles a year, the world’s largest, by a wide margin), Classic Limousine of Fountain Valley and Tiffany Coachworks of Corona--are but a traffic jam away from L.A. Two of the country’s six largest limousine livery services also are here, Burbank-based Music Express Limousine and Messenger Service and L.A.-based CLS Transportation, Inc.
At present, 27,540 stretch limos are in service in the United States, more than ever before, according to the trade magazine Limousine & Chauffered Transportation. Exactly how many are in Southern California is uncalculated. The magazine’s annual survey is not broken out by state, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles doesn’t keep separate statistics for stretch limousines. Grammys night next month, however, will feel like all 27,540 have converged on Staples Center.
Actually, the most well-heeled people nowadays, even in Hollywood, prefer non-stretched chauffeured luxury sedans for day-to-day business transportation. The stretch limousine, says CLS owner Charlie Horky, “went from being a status thing in the ‘70s and ‘80s to being thought of as just too ostentatious.”
Nonetheless, the national stretch limo fleet has grown by 23% in the past dozen years because more and more “ordinary” people lease them for weddings, bar mitzvahs, high school proms and other occasions when they want to feel pampered and noticeable.
The transformation of a new Lincoln Town Car into a vehicle capable of inducing such feelings is remarkable to observe.
After the gutted sedan is cut in half, its two parts are connected by a pair of heavy steel beams 72, 85, 100 or 120 inches long, depending on the desired length of the final product. A new metal floor is affixed to the beams, and new vertical pillars are fashioned to connect the floor and a new segment of roof. All of this is welded together by hand. The center section is designed “to eliminate flex in the middle,” in the words of Steve Lasser, Krystal’s manager of facilities and materials.
The middle section is sheathed in reinforced steel, and all metal and welds are meticulously hand-ground. Then the limo is spray-painted by hand and oven-dried.
The hollowed interior is strung with electrical wires for mood lights, sound systems, VCRs, etc. Finally it is fitted with plush carpeting and roof lining, soft leather seats, typically a bar and handsome trim of burled wood.
On second thought, the process is not much different from what flesh-and-blood newcomers undergo to be transformed into bigger, bolder models in Southern California.
They will leave a part of themselves back home, which is to say that they, too, get sundered. Like a halved Town Car, they will never be quite in touch with themselves again. Expanding, they will require new supportive undergirding--steelier determination, say--lest they flex in the middle when competitive pressures demand rigidity.
Because they’re in the world capital of body-consciousness, they may have to re-sheath themselves via Bally gyms and the region’s ubiquitous cosmetic surgery clinics. The time also may come when, after too much lacquering, they’ll need to be dried out in the area’s renowned rehab centers. A little interior rewiring--that is, therapy--eventually may be in order if the increased wattage of their ambitions overloads the original equipment.
Of course, the analogy between would-be stretch limos and seekers of the California dream is far from precise. For one thing, the inner spaces of human beings can’t be filled with leather and chrome. For another, transforming a Lincoln takes Krystal Enterprises only 10 days.
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James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com
