Anyway, a day here, a day there… Meant you weren’t tied, didn’t it?
3
The team that DeLorean was putting together was still under half a dozen strong when Randall moved into the on-loan Kimmerly offices. Besides being temporary landlord Tom Kimmerly himself was acting as the company’s attorney and chief secretary. His was the name entered in the Michigan State Business Register next to number 190407, the DeLorean Manufacturing Company. Bill Collins the chief engineer was another GM refugee — another former Pontiac man — who had felt the life, and the spirit, being slowly squeezed out of him by the sheer weight of the behemoth. Almost the first thing he and DeLorean had done together on his defection was fly to Europe, to the Turin Auto Show, searching for a designer they could work with. Actually, searching for one particular designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose concept car for Lotus — more space-age architectural sculpture than automobile — had been shown in Turin the same year as DeLorean’s last ever Vega was being unveiled in Chicago.
(‘You can drive yourself nuts in this world comparing things that bear no direct comparison,’ DeLorean told Randall. ‘Or you can spur yourself on.’)
Giugiaro was intrigued by their vision: a high-concept design in the mass-produced quantities he had recently achieved with the Volkswagen Golf…
The scale model Randall had seen (it was epo-wood, he had since discovered, not balsa) was the first fruit of their three-way collaboration, although by the time DeLorean handed it to him the plans had already been modified. It was clear even without the benefit of a full-size prototype that the Safety Vehicle name was not going to stay the course: too awkward on the tongue — too much drag. They settled instead on DMC-12, the concluding digits a reminder to everyone involved that despite the name change the ambition of delivering a safe — and ethical — car at an affordable price remained undimmed.
Also notionally installed in Long Lake Road was Dick Brown, who had made a name for himself with Mazda, taking it from nowhere to fourth in the American export market in just two years, and whose job it was to build up a network of dealers willing to part with $25000 in advance for the rights to sell the DMC-12 at a profit to them of $4000 a car. His target was a hundred and fifty dealers nationwide in the first twelve months, hence ‘notionally installed’.
More rarely sighted still, but of even greater importance to the whole operation, was Roy Nesseth, Big Bad Roy, one of the few people Randall encountered in those circles taller than DeLorean, six-six, with the heft to go with it. Roy had started out as a dealer himself — still had an interest out in the ‘field’, as Randall quickly learned to call it, Wichita direction, and still had some of the abrasiveness with which members of that trade were traditionally associated, unfairly you might think, unless you had actually met Roy. The more other people complained about his manner — and other people did complain about it, a lot — the more it seemed DeLorean valued him. He it was who coined the nickname, and revelled in using it at every opportunity. ‘Most times you run up against a wall you are able to find a way around it. Other times you have no option but to go straight on through. Those are the times you need Big Bad Roy.’
DeLorean talked at times like a football coach (he had a share in the San Diego Chargers) deploying his specialists according to the play. Roy was his gunner, bearing down on the opposition’s punt returner, putting the fear of God into him. It wasn’t always pretty, but you couldn’t argue with the results.
As for Randall he was, to borrow from another code, a classic utility player. Whatever needed doing, he did it. Technically he was in the employ of Tom Kimmerly and the DeLorean Manufacturing Company, which controlled the DeLorean Motor Company, but at any given moment of any given day in the years that followed he could be acting for the John Z. DeLorean Corporation, the DeLorean Sports Car Partnership, the DeLorean Research Limited Partnership, or the Composite Technology Corporation, whose function it was to oversee development of the Elastic Reservoir Moulding process for the car’s body.
JZDC
DSCP
DRLP
CTC
DMC squared
Almost from the start there were accusations — Randall’s old pal Anderson ran one of the first in the Daily News — that as much energy and imagination was expended on moving capital from company to company as on designing and developing sports cars. DeLorean invoked Preston Tucker again, and his ill-starred attempt in the post-war years to break the Great Triopoly of Chrysler, GM and Ford. Tucker’s problem wasn’t so much that he had only one basket: he had only one egg. He left himself too get-at-able.
Besides, walk into any boardroom, or barroom, anywhere in the country and what else would you hear but talk of investment opportunities, rates of return, tax-saving options, making money work? Some made it work harder, and more effectively, than others, but not to have made it work at all was not just unprofessional, it was close to un-American.
The state of Delaware, anybody? Second smallest in the Union, but holding the registration for half of its publicly traded companies, including General Motors and the Ford Motor Company?
Another friend, Herb Siegel, head of Chris-Craft, the powerboat manufacturer, had given DeLorean the use of a suite in his building on Madison Avenue whenever he was in New York, which once the first prototype was ready was more often than not. Before very long Randall was there too with a third-floor walk-up giving him a view over — but alas no key to — Gramercy Park and a salary that made what he had been earning at the Daily News look like a pittance.
(As if to further prove the wisdom of his decision the Daily News itself — struggling all the time he was there — had, since he left, suffered the greatest ignominy that a newspaper could: it had folded.)
They had the Detroit headquarters, the New York offices, and a queue of people wanting to invest. All that was missing was a factory.
DeLorean had told Randall all along he did not want to commit until he had found the perfect site, although from what Randall could see it was the sites that came to him, trying to convince him of their perfection. Delegations arrived from half a dozen points on the North American compass: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia (so much for no one wanting to touch him); there had been an enquiry from Spain, another from Portugal. One guy turned up at Long Lake Road from Dublin, Ireland. He had been driving from Chicago when he caught an item on the car radio — Detroit itself was preparing a bid for the factory (hear that, Anderson? Detroit) — and decided to detour out to Bloomfield Hills and offer to make representations to the Irish government, for whom he was some kind of unofficial ambassador. It sounded far-fetched — farther fetched for some reason than Portugal or Spain — but DeLorean insisted on following it up.
Limerick was the city mentioned (Randall up to then did not even know there was an actual Limerick city), sitting at the head of the Shannon estuary, giving ready access to the North Atlantic — a three-day crossing in the right conditions — and with an airport half an hour out of town used to handling transatlantic freight.
‘The Irish are our kin,’ DeLorean said. ‘They sent their people here to escape hunger and want. They know what it is to struggle against oppression.’
By a tyrannical neighbour in their case, he meant, by the Big Three in his.
*
Liz read a report in the Belfast Telegraph. Car plant, Limerick, though to be honest it was the photo of the man behind the whole operation that caught her eye: the square jaw, the silver hair, the open-neck shirt and leather jacket, the name that the voice in her head made Delloreen of. There was a big man called DeLorean, whose something-something-something obscene. She turned the page. Prison dispute, men in blankets. She turned again. Tonight’s television: 1, 2, and UTV. Hopeless, hopeless and worse than hopeless.