NONFICTION
“Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream”
By Earl Swift
381 pages, It Books/HarperCollins
As General Motors’ legendary executive designer, Harley Earl supervised the creation of Space Age “concept cars,” as well as the iconic 1957 Chevy.
“Go all the way,” Harley prodded his team of browbeaten stylists, “then back off.” The outcome was a fabrication of rubber-tipped Dagmars, fins that shot straight back and, as Swift tells it, “a small V8 that didn’t know it was small.”
This was the ’57 Chevy, and it was, in a word, “optimism … happily nosing into the future.”
Full of crackerjack reporting and fuel-injected mirth, Earl Swift’s “Auto Biography” chronicles the life of a single vehicle, its 14 owners — “players in a single narrative” — who, over the course of five decades, pledged allegiance to a particular Highland Green 1957 Chevrolet “midline” 210 Townsman six-passenger station wagon that becomes, in its way, the hero of the book.
Through a combination of serendipity and years of pavement pounding, Swift put together the car’s chain of ownership, beginning with the original buyer, a Norfolk boilermaker named Nicholas Thornhill, who purchased it with cash for $2,456. From post-war Triumphalism to the Great Swindle of 2007, Swift follows the succession of buyers and their life stories before landing on the wagon’s 13th, Tommy Arney, “Auto Biography’s” Sisyphean anti-hero.
“A wreck of a boy and disaster of a man,” Tommy Arney once bit an adversary in the neck and then asked for a toothpick. (“I just wanted people to respect me,” he said, “but I went about it the wrong way.”)
Arney started life in Meat Camp, North Carolina, then punched and stabbed his way out to become “Norfolk’s king of go-go.” “Worth millions on paper,” despite a fifth-grade education and a rap sheet longer than a donkey’s ear, he fought successfully against Hodgkin’s disease in 1988, emerging as “the New Tommy Arney”: rehabilitated thug, workbench Plato, respectable family man and entrepreneur. But his cowboy ways eventually put him on the wrong side of federal prosecutors, who sent Arney to jail over the fraudulent bank loans he had arranged to keep his “little empire” afloat.
Arney was also a vintage car mastermind. Proprietor of Moyock Muscle, acres of derelict classic cars “sugared in rust.” (Tommy’s aide de camp is quick to howl, “It’s not a junkyard!”) Amid ongoing legal challenges, impending financial collapse, and considerable flamboyant profanity, Arney decided the time was right to conduct a complete restoration of the ’57 Chevy wagon, which had fallen into his hands.
Swift’s lengthy step-by-step description of the disassembly and recreation process — a $50,000 investment — is as nail-biting as any drugstore action-thriller. For those interested in this sort of thing, it’s hard to conceive of a more riveting (or unriveting) work on the subject than “Auto Biography.”
Swift handles his principals with compassion. His prose has a he-man vivacity, almost every page charged with humorous incident or observation. (A Bel Air is so big that “the cast of Riverdance could jig across the hood without leaving a dent.”) There’s plenty of absorbing historical and technical detail. In a crash test between old and new, a 1950s “battering ram” falls to pieces when it collides with today’s “accordion” car, its engine dropping “in the driver’s lap like a red-hot medicine ball.”
“We buy the cars we want,” Swift believes, “not the cars we need.” He classifies four stages of automobile ownership: (1) love; (2) mechanical reliance; (3) despair; and (4) abandonment, or “organ donor.” In the case of the ’57 Chevy featured in “Auto Biography,” there is the rare fifth stage, “object of renewed desire.”
How do we assign value to restored objects like an old car? How much of the original can be replaced before it is no longer the same wagon? These are some of the thought-provoking questions posed by “Auto Biography.” If the ’57 Chevy is now a nostalgic province for every Cornball Daddy-O, Swift reminds us that utopias, like automobiles, have “ever changing styles.” (To confirm, just take a peek at Harley Earl’s needle-nosed Firebird 1, currently on display at the High Museum’s “Dream Car” exhibit.)
On the other hand, Swift marvels at the "durability of the suburban ideal," and that "three generations on, we still demand elbow room and privacy." As the chronicle draws to an end, Tommy Arney and his cantankerous crew have overhauled the "tattered emblem of that ideal … making it seem new." At a bittersweet reunion of surviving owners, they roll out their Tangerine Twist and Timor Beige metalline confection. In compliment, one astonished reveler exclaims, "Why not make it loud?"
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