The Sunday Gentleman (44 page)

That same year, Royce was introduced to a young man named Charles Rolls, third son of a wealthy baron. Rolls, a daredevil balloonist, as well as a cycle and auto racer, had joined with a friend named Claude Johnson, a cultivated bibliophile, to open one of London’s largest automobile salesrooms. Rolls and Johnson sold Panhards and Minervas, but when they went for a ride in Royce’s new car, they were smitten. In March, 1906, Rolls-Royce, Ltd., was formed with a capital of $240,000. The new car, with models selling at from $1,580 to $3,560 each, was to be called Rolls-Royce-Johnson, but that was too cumbersome, and in the end, it was called Rolls-Royce because that name had the sound of “quality, luxury, and something British.”

In 1910, after being taken up for his first airplane ride by Wilbur Wright at Le Mans, France, Charles Rolls forgot about the new automobile that he was backing. He bought a Wright Brothers plane of his own, and in July of that same year, at the age of thirty-three, was killed while trying to pull it out of a steep dive. In the early twenties, Claude Johnson died. And so Henry Royce, surviving his own illness, ran the growing company alone via penny post.

Royce was a fantastic character. He was an engineer with no knowledge of mathematics. “I never use a slide rule,” he said; “I can do simple arithmetic.” His sense of touch was nearly perfect. Purely by feel, he once filed a brass hubcap into an exact-fitting hexagon. He took to playing the flute because he was interested in its sound waves, and he stopped going to church because, he insisted, “You can’t be an engineer and still keep going to church.” He hated waste and inefficiency. Once, observing a laborer awkwardly sweeping a shop floor, he yanked off his coat, grabbed the broom, and demonstrated how to use it properly. He abhorred golf and tennis because they were nonproductive pastimes, and advocated gardening instead. When he died in 1933, he left the surprisingly small estate of $450,000.

As a result of his death, one change was made in the Rolls-Royce car. The front nameplate, a small metal plaque on the radiator grille, had always been made of silver with the RR in red. The year of Royce’s death, the RR was changed from red to mourning black. It has remained black until this day.

Today, it is the airplane engine—the first of which Royce finished in 1915—rather than the car engine, that brings the company its greatest amount of revenue. Rolls-Royce aero engines have made history. They fought the dogfights over France in World War I. They helped Alcock and Brown become the first humans to fly the Atlantic in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh. And during World War II, Rolls-Royce turned out 20,000 engines per year or one million millionaire’s horsepower per week, the only engine to fight against the Luftwaffe and help win the crucial Battle of Britain. Today, planes powered by Rolls-Royce hold every world’s record set for piston and turbine engines.

But while the airplane engine brings in the big money, the men of Rolls-Royce spend most of their time coddling the automobile. It is their first love. All of their energies are devoted to the Rolls-Royce they are building for tomorrow. “The chief change in the postwar car,” says W. A. Robothan, head engineer at Crewe, “will be in making it simpler. Today, the owner-driver is largely predominant, and only 5 percent arc chauffeur-driven. We are going in for increased durability. Our target for the postwar car is that it should run 100,000 miles without a major overhaul, which on the average means ten years of life.”

Recently, an English journalist most accurately summed up the wonder of Rolls-Royce, Ltd. “It is as British as the weather,” he concluded. “It stands for the highest grade precision work, yet can turn its hand to mass production. Its name means civilian luxury, yet its products won the aerial dogfights that saved Britain and mankind. It serves the elite, yet is run by promoted laborers in soft collars.

“No one understands Britain who does not understand Rolls-Royce.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

A slightly shorter version of this story on Rolls-Royce appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
for November 8, 1947. When I had researched the story in London, a half year before, I had found the Rolls-Royce people friendly but somewhat less than fully cooperative. As
Inside Information
, the house organ of the Curtis Publishing Company, explained it at the time:

‘To Wallace, brought up like all other Americans on a diet of promotion and advertising, their reluctance came as a surprise. He learned that Rolls-Royce gives practically no information to British magazines and absolutely nothing to the newspapers.

“‘They were very stuffy about it and did not approve,’ he says. ‘I was unable to get any cooperation in doing research, and none of the officials would talk about the can they were manufacturing for Indian princes and such.’

“The writer patiently set out to explain to the Rolls-Royce management that their business would not be hurt by a magazine article, that undoubtedly many people in the United States had mistaken ideas about the company and the high prices it charged for its motorcars. Perhaps Wallace’s own use of advertising and promotion techniques impressed them; in any event, their air of aloofness became one of friendly—though a trifle reserved—cooperation.

“‘When I broke them down, finally, the word got around London fast,’ Wallace says. ‘A few evenings later, the editor of a big London daily telephoned me at the Savoy Hotel. He had heard, he said, that I was doing a piece on Rolls-Royce for
The Saturday Evening Post
and that I was getting material.’

“Then the editor asked Wallace, ‘Could I have a reporter come around and interview you, old chap?’

“‘But why interview me?’ Wallace replied. ‘I’m not a story.’

“‘Well, you see, it’s the only way we might find out something about Rolls-Royce!’ the editor told him.”

The point of the published anecdote was, indeed, correct. In fact, a year later, the English magazine, John Bull, had to come to me in the States to request permission to reprint my story in order to inform their readers about one of their great English institutions.

Less accurate, however, was another anecdote in
Inside Information
:

“Wallace, by the way, does not own a Rolls-Royce. We thought it might be of interest to have a picture of him with his own bruised automobile by way of contrast with the subject of his article.

“‘Unfortunately,’ Wallace told us, ‘the idea won’t work very well with my car–I own a Cadillac. If you go out in the streets in Hollywood in anything less, they stone you.’”

That the editors had hoped to pose me with my own jalopy, as a telling contrast to the car I had written about, but had then canceled the idea with dismay when they learned I owned a Cadillac, was true. But the final quip, that I owned a Cadillac out of fear that I would be stoned if I drove anything less, was sheer flippancy. I owned a Cadillac (and drove beyond my means) because when I had learned to drive, I’d dreaded the whole business of having to learn to use a clutch and hand shift. I wished it were possible to learn to drive in a vehicle that had eliminated complicated shifting by hand. Then to my amazement and delight, I learned that there was such a car. General Motors had just produced a Cadillac with a new, completely automatic shift. In short, you could drive it—and look, no hands. I begged, I borrowed, perhaps I even stole. But that is how I came to the Cadillac—and how
Inside Information
lost its picture.

In the years following my own difficulties with the Rolls-Royce management, I kept an eye on the company’s promotional activities. I was able to observe a gradual change in its relationship with the press and the public. To survive in the new world, half Communistic, half democratic, where royalty and billionaires were fast becoming curiosities, Rolls-Royce had to become a people’s car—a rich people’s car, to be sure, but a people’s car nonetheless—instead of a car merely for the pedigreed. As a consequence, the Rolls-Royce management had to unbend, open its doors, seek the people, meet the people, sell the people—and yet not destroy their snob appeal. Apparently, Rolls-Royce straddled the fence successfully. If they found as many businessmen, physicians, and attorneys buying Rolls-Royces as were the diminishing ranks of royalty, it did not mean that the car’s image and exclusivity had been tarnished. It only meant that there now existed a new, broader-based, moneyed elite. Rolls-Royce had let down its hair—and was no less attractive for having done so. A Rolls-Royce dealer in San Francisco remarked with pride, and in justification, recently: “As yet, we haven’t sold many to people who wash their own cars.”

The promotional turning point in modern Rolls-Royce history—if one must pinpoint a date—probably occurred in 1958. In that year, the Rolls-Royce management retained advertising man David Ogilvy, along with the other partners in his firm, to help increase sales of the luxury car in the United States. Ogilvy, educated in Edinburgh and at Oxford, had become a New York advertising legend. He had given “the man in the Hathaway shirt” an eye patch, and had made the New World conscious of such necessities of the good life as Schweppes and Beefeater. The Rolls-Royce management recruited him to do what he could for their motorcar.

After a brief study, Ogilvy decided that what was wrong was the static Rolls-Royce image. The image, he suggested, should be altered. For one thing, chauffeurs were passé, The Rolls-Royce had to become a vehicle for do-it-yourself drivers. Dukes and duchesses, maharajas, and Middle East billionaires who reclined in the well-appointed back seats, were out. The Rolls-Royce must become an acceptable vehicle for highly solvent behind-the-wheel republicans and citizens. Baronial castles and Mediterranean yachts were going, and would soon be gone. The Rolls-Royce must take the family to the beach or picnic, and afterward be lodged beneath a carport or inside a garage attached to an unpretentious, modern American house. The old snob sell used in previous advertisements—“The Best Car in the World”—had become obsolete. The new sell should emphasize comfort, durability, and long-range economy.

And so Ogilvy created a fresh advertising campaign for the Rolls-Royce, with the memorable headline: at 60 MILES

AN HOUR THE LOUDEST NOISE IN THIS NEW ROLLS-ROYCE

COMES FROM THE ELECTRIC CLOCK. This was an enormously effective sales technique with the buying public. But—even though the story may be apocryphal—I have been told that the publicity was not appreciated by a dedicated Rolls-Royce engineer in Crewe, who, upon reading the new advertisement, took it as a personal rebuke. The engineer thought that he’d better have another look at that damn clock. Now the electric clock, too, is silent.

The plebeian appeal in advertising has continued. An advertisement in
The New Yorker
during 1965 included the following copy:

“Myth has it that Rolls-Royce is very aloof about who can buy a Rolls-Royce or Bentley car—and that if you are lucky enough to buy one of these cars, it will be taken away from you if you don’t take proper care of it. Nonsense! Rolls-Royce is as anxious to sell its products as any manufacturer is. It’s easy to buy a Rolls-Royce…Many women tend to shy away from driving the Rolls-Royce—until they get in it, drive it around a bit, discover that the Rolls-Royce is a family car—and give their husbands an ultimatum to buy one by such and such a date
or else
!”

Other recent Rolls-Royce advertising, while still emphasizing that the car can be equipped with such luxuries as a miniature bar, now mention accessories of more practical use to the family. In the four-door saloon model, potential buyers are reminded that the Rolls-Royce now offers “built-in mineral water rack and special reading light,” as well as “built-in picnic tables.” All well and good, those picnic tables, but one feels that King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Nizam of Hyderabad would have been aghast.

When I set out recently to investigate what had happened to Rolls-Royce since 1947, I found that this altering of the image was one change that had taken place. As a corollary, the management had become considerably more receptive to publicity. When I made inquiries of the management about the latest developments concerning the automobile, I received immediate and direct replies. When I wanted to read what had been written about the car since I had written about it, I was pleased to find no dearth of articles in periodicals and newspapers of recent years. But I also found out something else that was quite gratifying: My story about the motorcar, like the car itself, had suffered little depreciation across the years. An article about an American automobile, written in 1947, would be entirely out of date today. My article on Rolls-Royce, except for very minor changes and modifications, was as accurate in the mid-sixties as when it had been written.

Today, the Rolls-Royce remains the most expensive automobile in the world. While there is a simple four-door model that may be purchased for around $18,000, the Rolls-Royce convertibles and limousines sell for prices varying from $27,000 to $30,000 each. The only car nearly as costly is Rolls-Royce’s sibling, the Bentley, which has a model that sells for $26,000. Below that, for the more insecure rich, I found a German Mercedes-Benz that sells for $20,500, an Italian Maserati that sells for $16,300, a French Facel that sells for $15,500, and an Italian Ferrari that sells for $14,-200. The most expensive American cars are the Lincoln Continental convertible, which may be purchased for $6,940, and the Cadillac convertible, which may be bought for $6,630.

In 1947, I related how Rolls-Royce had built an economy edition of their big car, an experimental model, which they considered putting on the mass market. But at that time, they rejected the idea because they felt that it would destroy the exclusiveness of the big car. In 1964, the Rolls-Royce management finally decided to go after the mass market with a smaller, cheaper vehicle which was still, at least in part, a Rolls-Royce. Collaborating with another company, the British Motor Car Corporation, makers of the Austin and MG, Rolls-Royce produced a small automobile known as the Vanden Plas Princess “R”—the “R” being the Rolls-Royce part of it. The only portion of the car that is genuine Rolls-Royce, actually the most important portion, is the engine, a modification of one used in Rolls-Royce trucks. This hybrid baby Rolls, which can attain a speed of 112 miles per hour, sells for $5,600.