It
was the sixties, and Pontiac was pushing cars for young people. He not only
knew how to appeal to the new generation, he became part of it. He shed his
first wife. He redesigned his hair, which became noticeably less gray. (He went
gray years later, when it was time to raise money for his own company and he needed
to look more distinguished.) His ties disappeared. His suits, on those occasions
when he dressed formally, were of fashionable Italian cut. He wore loafers
without socks and carefully shaved the hair around his ankles. He lifted
weights to build up his body, and changed his diet to lose weight. His
marriages increased his celebrity: His second bride, a girl of nineteen, was
Kelly Harmon, daughter of the famed football player Tommy Harmon. The match gave
him Ricky Nelson, son of Ozzie and Harriet, as a brother-in-law.) That marriage
lasted two and a half years. (When he seemed depressed by its breakup, some of
his good buddies in Hollywood hired a bunch of what might generously be called starlets,
got makeup men to style their look as much like Kelly's as possible, and made
them available to the saddened auto executive. The message was implicit; There
were a lot more fish in the sea.) His third wife was Cristina Ferrare, one of
the most beautiful models in the country. In an environment where ego was always
supposed to be controlled, his burgeoned: As a kind of Christmas card he sent
General Motors dealers thousands of posters of himself posing with his adopted
son, Zach. His friends now included the great and famous of Hollywood, all of
whom lived lives faster than those of his Bloomfield Hills colleagues. For his new
business friends, he chose self-made men of minimal restraint, maximum glitter,
and extraordinary access to money. Unlike the titans of Detroit, who had to
hide their pleasure as part of the covenant of Detroit success, his new friends
had FUN.
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It
soon became obvious that DeLorean was bored with Detroit. He took to insulting
his GM superiors first by his manner of dress - blue jeans, cowboy boots - and
then, when that seemed inadequate, with the condescending profanity of his
tongue. Soon he was gone from GM. (His business practices had become bothersome
to GM officials, and he did not leave of his own volition) General Motors,
which always took care of its own, particularly its own senior executives, was
extremely generous to DeLorean; it gave him a Cadillac dealership in Florida,
which in those days was like giving someone the right to print money.
Nonetheless he promptly collaborated on a scathing indictment of GM as an institution,
which confirmed most of the darker visions the company's critics had long
harbored. (When, during his brief tour as the head of a company, his own
behavior seemed to fall considerably beneath that of the GM executives whom he
had denounced, one of his colleagues, Bill Haddad, said of DeLorean, "He is
what he condemns.") His post-GM business ventures did not do well, and he
left behind a trail of bad feeling and litigation.
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Having
been ousted by GM, he longed now to return to the automobile world and create
his own sports car. His would be, he announced, an ethical car company. He
played Britain, which wanted the factory for Northern Ireland, off against
Puerto Rico – the underemployed of the world competing desperately for the right
to have those jobs. The British won, if that is the word, and put up some $90
million for him in start-up money. His predecessors some seventy years earlier
had been passionate men who had poured their entire savings into their
mechanical dreams and had literally lived out the creation of their cars.
DeLorean was different. He put relatively little money of his own into his car and
though he was starting a company, he continued to live in high style. As he
readied his car, he bought expensive property for himself - a duplex in
Manhattan, and a twenty-five-room house on a 430-acre spread in the most
exclusive part of New Jersey. (They were worth by 1985, when they became the
center of a keenly contested THIRD divorce, an estimated $9 million.) He already
owned an expensive spread in Southern California. He rented a Park Avenue suite
in Manhattan for his corporate headquarters. His top people received credit
cards for Tiffany's and the 21 Club. He billed the company some $78,000 for his
move to New York, though in fact he was already there. He drew a consultant's
fee of $300,000 a year. The company bought a $53,000 Mercedes for Christina.
One Christmas, even as the company was getting started, he bought her three
sable coats, average cost about $30,000, each a of a different length. "I
forgot which length you wanted," said his note to her.
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There
had been a great deal of hoopla at the beginning of his attempt to create his
own company and car - DeLorean appearing in Cutty Sark Scotch ads; DeLorean
lending his name to a men's cologne that sold in chic stores - and his
colleagues in Detroit watched it all with more than normal curiosity. In 1981
there were reports from Belfast that the car was in serious trouble, that
DeLorean visited the factory only on the rarest occasions, and that there were grave
financial questions about his use of money. As much as $18 million had
mysteriously vanished into some secret account
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David
Halberstam "The Reckoning" (1987)
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