Autos That Make the Statusphere

A $60,000 replicar can get you there in no time

"I've had four Ex-es." burbles Phyllis Diller, "and I wouldn't be without one. It's my Ex I love." Comedienne Diller is not celebrating postmarital reruns.

She is lauding her sleek, faithful, potent Excalibur, which to anyone not hopelessly besotted with Arthurian lore means an automobile. Not just any automobile, but one of the classiest, flashiest chariots to make the scene since the fall of Rome.

Only 280 of these imperial vehicles are handmade each year in Milwaukee and anyone with $27,200 in cash and as loud a voice as Phyllis Diller's can have a new Ex in the driveway within four months or so.

There are other automotive routes to the statusphere, other limited-edition models that will guarantee gawps and gawks and parking space wherever one goes. They are not like the Mercedes and the Rolls-Royce, which are (relatively) mass manufactured and as common in some moneyed turf as hogs in a holler. Whereas most toys for the rich look as if they had all come from the same department store, a replicated Duesenberg SSJ or Auburn 866 boat-tail speedster is not something your dentist or psychiatrist is apt to call his own.

In the history of automotive design, the Italians have contributed passion; the French, intellectuality; the English, quiet luxury; and the Germans and Americans, engineering. To the delight of shahs and stars and the merely rich, the new replicars combine all these elements, making even a run to the deli a royal procession.

Such a drive can be an ego trip. Or it can be a rediscovery of old excitements: the fragrance of wood and leather, the closeness to the road, a sense of individualism preserved on the all-too-homogenized human highway.

None of these cars, however distinctive, can be called originals--which may be all to the good. Those old Auburns and Stutzes and Cords were by present-day standards woefully underpowered and undersprung, cranky and uncomfortable.

The best and brightest new chariots have power brakes and steering, automatic transmission, air conditioning, pushbutton everything, burnished walnut burl paneling, 18 layers of paint, bark-tanned glove-leather upholstery, gold-plated fixtures, eight-track stereo and, at extra cost, carpeting of ermine, mink or chinchilla.

And they are all built around American-made engines and drive trains.

The Excalibur, which echoes the lines of the classic '28 SSK Mercedes-Benz, comes close to being an original; everything save the 454-cu.-in., 215-net-h.p. Chevrolet V-8 engine is built from hubs up in Milwaukee. The $64,500 Stutz Blackhawk VI starts out as a new wide-track Pontiac Grand Prix, which is sent to Turin, where Italian descendants of descendants of coachmakers handcraft a body of 18-gauge steel (twice the weight of Mercedes metal); the Shah of Iran is said to have ordered twelve of them.

But wait! Attendez! The superchariot around no one else's corner is le Clenet, a car that evokes Gatsbyesque images but is a wholly new design. Alain Clenet, 33, is the son of one of France's biggest Ford dealers. After three years of design-by-committee for American Motors in Detroit, he dropped out to Santa Barbara to make a car that would be "a personal statement." His first two-seater roadster was the smash hit of the 1976 Los Angeles auto show.

Now, with 55 employees ensconced in a five-story building at the Santa Barbara airport, Clenet buys new Mercury Cougars, strips them to the chassis, moves the 400-cu.-in., V-8 engine 3 ft. aft for better readability, and builds his car. Each one takes 1,800 hours of handwork and costs $39,500. The names of hammerer, upholsterer and painter are engraved on the doorjambs. If there is such a thing as a Rodin of the road, this is it.

A lot of Americans these days have fallen out of love with conventional cars. But as Clenets, Excaliburs, Stutzes, Auburns and Cords show, the romance is still there. Lower the roof, turn the key, press the pedal, switch on the Cole Porter, and 1930 is over the next hill..

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