Collector’s Got a Classic Case of Auto Motives
It can get pretty hot sitting in a stationary ’48 Bentley with the sunroof off. Not that there was much choice about the sunroof: Owner Linda Rothschild once had the car consigned to a showroom, and when the showroom owner was towing it there, he didn’t secure the roof, and off it flew somewhere, she says.
She’d consigned her two ‘50s T-birds to the same guy to display and found he’d been buzzing around town in them when the traffic tickets started appearing in her mailbox.
Owning the vintage cars has been a big hassle, from the frequent maintenance they require, registration, insurance, garaging and all that to the plunge in value they’ve taken since she bought them at a Newport Beach auction three years ago. She thinks her Bentley is worth little more than half the $15,000 she and a friend paid for it and that she’d have to take a $5,000 loss on each of her two Thunderbirds.
Great hobby, Linda!
“I try not to think about all that, because it was fun buying them, fun owning them and fun driving them. It was a real experience. And the fact that I’m not a businesswoman, and that my timing sucked --I can’t change that,” she says.
We spoke in the parking lot of her mechanic, who was going over the Bentley to prepare it for display at the 21st Annual Newport Beach Classic and Collector Car Auction to be held Saturday and Sunday at the Hyatt Newporter Hotel. Rothschild’s ’56 and ’57 T-birds were in Los Angeles being detailed for the auction.
As we spoke, seated in the Bentley, surrounded by luxurious thick wood paneling and the chromed doodads of a persnickety British technology, her mechanic approached to inform her that, while an assistant was taking a curious look under the hood of her new, $40,000 Ranger Discovery, he’d noticed an oil leak.
One would think automobiles would be more kindly inclined toward her, because Rothschild, 39, has loved them since she was a kid growing up in Newhall in the north San Fernando Valley.
“I didn’t have horses or Barbie dolls. For me it was always cars,” she says. “I don’t know why. It wasn’t something my family was into. My mother and father both worked real hard, and we had the typical station wagon and Oldsmobile. Maybe it was because I idolized my sister, who was much older, and her handsome boyfriend when I was little. In her era they drove a lot of those T-birds, and I remember thinking that they were so hot.
“I swore to myself that I would have one before I ever got married, because I saw my sister get married when I was 8 or 9, and that was it for the rest of her life. I didn’t want that for myself. I decided I wanted to see the world and own a T-bird.”
She saw the world, becoming a flight attendant when she was 18. The T-bird took a little longer. Her first car, a gift from her boyfriend when she was 16, was a 1951 Austin of England model.
“It was like little taxicab. I was very pleased and surprised to get it. It attracted a lot of attention at school, and the cheerleaders would pile in after school and we’d cruise the Dairy Queen. It was just fun. Most people drive cars as a utility thing, as something to make their life more convenient. With me, it is to make my life more interesting. It’s fun, like having a new dress,” she says.
Her successive fun cars included an MG Midget, an MG TC roadster thing, then a new MGB. To her, the small cars were T-bird surrogates, and she figured the MGB was close enough that she could allow herself to get married, which she did--to a Newport Beach real estate developer. She now has two kids, 13 and 7, and she’s mostly been stuck in Mercedes wagons for the past several years.
Then she went to the Newport auction three years ago.
“I’d been looking at T-birds for years trying to find exactly the right one,” she says. “I really wanted a red one, though I didn’t end up getting it. There wasn’t one in the auction, and I was determined to get a T-bird that year.
“So I ended up with a white little ’56 with the tire conversion on the back and the little portholes for $23,000, and the other’s a real clean restored pink ’57 for $21,000. I had a small inheritance from my father, and I spent it all in one day.
“Buying the Bentley was really a fluke. It was the last car in the auction. It had been run through on Saturday, and the man had a reserve on it, which meant he wouldn’t sell it unless the bids met his price. They didn’t, so by Sunday he’d decided he didn’t want to take it home and put it in with no reserve. My girlfriend and I were standing there, and the fever of the auction gets into you, and suddenly we owned this Bentley for $15,000.”
Did her husband notice these new acquisitions?
“He thought I was crazy. But he should always check the auction dates before he leaves town. He was in Hawaii on business, and I was mad because I wasn’t there. And I had my inheritance, wanted a T-bird and was there with my girlfriend, and you know you should never turn a woman loose with her girlfriend and a pocketful of change. It was a really fun day.”
Rothschild does have a thing about auctions.
“I go to all the larger auctions here, and in Monterey, Las Vegas and other places. I go to look and then get carried away. My very first auction I went to about 10 years ago, I got all excited over a little turquoise and white T-bird and placed a bid. Then I got it, and I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t a registered bidder and didn’t have any money.”
She was able to talk her way out of that situation. Another time she bid on a Bentley and says she cried when it went to another bidder, though she couldn’t have afforded her bid.
“Then there was an auction at my little girl’s school last year, and my husband sat with me the whole time. He got up for five minutes to call home, and I bought a playhouse while he was gone to the tune of $3,000, a great big huge wooden playhouse that we had to hire a crane to move in,” she says.
She says she is nearly the only female collector on the auction circuit. The only other one she has met is also a T-bird fanatic. She says the male dealers and collectors are always nice and never patronizing. While she feels she may have been taken advantage of a time or two, she says that’s certainly not unique to her gender.
“There are lot of men involved, I think, that really don’t know cars. They have some money; cars are fun to look at, and they attract girls, so they buy them and then find there’s nothing under the hood,” she says.
She didn’t look under the hood of her cars before she bought them, trusting instead the kindly face of the seller of one of her T-birds, “a little old man, who only drove it on weekends.”
When she went to pick her Bentley up the day after the auction, “I found there was no key, just a little starter button, and it has this weird gearshift, and there was no one there to tell me how it works. It took me something like 15 minutes to figure how to get it into gear so I could get it home. I still don’t know where reverse is on it,” she says.
She guesses she’s put fewer than 50 miles on the Bentley since she bought it, but she’s tooled around quite a bit in her T-birds.
Behind the wheel, she says, “it’s like traveling back in time. You feel like you’re living in the days of ‘Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb.’ Driving the T-bird is like being free: free of your life, free of your children, free of your bills and obligations and the argument you had with your husband, free of your dentist appointment tomorrow. You’re just totally free. The top’s off; the sky’s blue; you’re listening to music from the ‘50s, and you feel like Marilyn Monroe.”
By contrast, in her Ranger “it’s really fun, but it is right now. It’s the kids and the Brownie meetings and the gymnastics classes.” So why is she selling her freedom?
“I like the thrill of the hunt, bidding in the auction and ending up winning. And I love owning them and driving them. But then all the responsibilities of owning them come in, and my kids get chickenpox and I have a Brownie meeting and obligations here and there. I have to have them repaired and have the DMV come down on me because I didn’t get the registration in on time or I have to move them off the street again. It gets to be a pain owning them,” she says.
But not that big a pain.
“The other reason I’m selling them is they’re not exactly the right T-bird. I want a red 1956 in absolutely cherry condition, one that drives like a new Mercedes right off the lot. I’m going to sell all of these and see if I can get that.
“For me it’s the quest of the ultimate dream, the perfect red ’56 that someone is desperate to sell for $5,000. I always think that if I don’t go to one of the auctions, that’s the one where the car will be there at the deal of a lifetime,” Rothschild says.