Hot Rod Icon Tries to Reconcile Mormon Beliefs With Outlaw Past

Dig this, gearheads: Big Daddy is building his last sled.

That’s right. Ed Roth, the beatnik wild child whose mad-genius car creations and fantastic artwork shaped the Southern California hot-rod culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s, is heading pedal-to-the-metal into matrimony.

Roth’s seemingly unlikely slide into semiretired domesticity actually began in 1974 when he converted to the Mormon church and abruptly abandoned his lawless lifestyle.

But Roth remains a man with a toolbox full of contradictions. And evidence of a struggle to reconcile a notorious past with a homespun present is strewn about his cluttered pink stucco home in this tiny farming community 100 miles south of Salt Lake City.

“My fanaticism with cars has just destroyed my personal life,” says the twice-divorced Roth, 65, who nonetheless is building another--he claims his last--in his backyard garage.

“It’s an obsession, an addiction. Every day I pray to God, ‘Release me from my calling!’ ”

A generation of teenage rebels-without-a-car stood in awe of Roth’s chrome and fiberglass creations at car shows, and adopted his airbrush antihero, the bug-eyed, slavering Rat Fink, as a cultural counterpoint to Mickey Mouse.

They forsook their homework to labor, woozy from the fumes of airplane glue, on intricate scale plastic models of Roth’s “Outlaw” roadster, the bubble-topped “Beatnik Bandit,” or the futuristic “Mysterion.” To the chagrin of their parents, they plastered Rat Fink stickers everywhere.

Indeed, while Roth is considered a genius and visionary among car designers--he pioneered the use of fiberglass in car bodies, for instance--it was the Rat Fink and a host of other wild characters that paid the bills.

“Ed was doing these sort of zany yet evil designs that your mother would hate,” recalls Pat Ganahl, former editor of Hot Rod, Rod and Custom and Street Rodder magazines and a longtime fan and friend of Roth.

“And, since hot rods are supposed to be evil, wicked, mean and nasty, they fit right in,” he said. “Rat Fink, after all, is a perfect example of a hot-rod Mickey Mouse.”

Author Tom Wolfe, in his 1964 essay on the California hot-rod phenomenon, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” described Roth as the “most colorful, the most intellectual and the most capricious” of the car customizers.

“He’s the Salvador Dali of the movement--a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster,” Wolfe wrote.

“You realized that Roth had a vision,” said Ken Gross, curator and executive director of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, home to Roth’s 1959 seminal roadster, the Outlaw. “When I was a kid, you wondered where these things were coming from.”

Roth isn’t sure himself. He’s more than half inclined these days to see his inspiration as personal, divine revelation, in keeping with his Mormon beliefs. But it has taken him years to get comfortable with the idea.

“If I’m having a design problem, I’ll go to the [Manti Mormon] temple for three or four hours and it will come to me,” Roth said. “It’s like, I’ll be sitting there and all I’ll be able to think is, ‘Go get the Chrysler Hemi!’ ”

Roth’s conversion to Mormonism in 1974 came at a time when he was disillusioned with making cars and had turned his attention to “trikes,” the hybrid three-wheeled motorcycles shunned by hot-rod traditionalists and banned from auto shows.

Roth had also been publicly vilified for crusading for the Hell’s Angels. A series of his posters depicting the exploits of the outlaw motorcycle club are for auction now at Bonham’s in London.

Roth said he was “really ripped” one day, working in his shop, when a friend dropped off a copy of the Book of Mormon. Roth read it and soon joined the church.

While Roth says religion saved him from a destructive lifestyle, it brought with it new turmoil: how to reconcile his outrageous genius with his newfound beliefs.

At the time, his solution “was to give it all up.”

“Some people thought Rat Fink was ghastly, with his bloodshot eyes and teeth,” Roth said. “Moms used to drag their kids away from my booth.”

So for a decade, Roth turned his considerable talents to the mundane: He painted signs and pinstriped trains at Knott’s Berry Farm.

In 1988, he abandoned Los Angeles altogether for the bucolic isolation of Manti, where his attitude toward his cartoon creation mellowed.

“It took me awhile to figure out that there was nothing wrong with Rat Fink,” he said. “People who bother to find out about him know he’s just a good-natured clown.”

The nexus between Roth’s God and the ghoulish Rat Fink can be found today on a cluttered table in his living room: Boxes of modeling clay and an unfinished character are stacked beneath his Mormon scriptures. A painting of Jesus Christ hangs above a photo of one of his trikes.

Roth has had less success reconciling his obsession with his wheeled creations.

Two years ago, he built his first new car in nearly 30 years--the Beatnik Bandit II--and spent nearly five months on the road at car shows. Earlier this year he started work on “Stealth ‘99,” an extravagantly angular creation based on the stealth bomber.

In his garage, a T-shirt wrapped around his face to keep out the fiberglass dust, Roth is almost ready to send the frame and engine of Stealth ’99 out for chroming, and the body is beginning to take shape.

But he takes a moment to reminisce about the times, decades back, when his Maywood, Calif., garage was a gathering place for movie stars, bikers and artists.

“You know, I thought those days would never end,” he says. Then he goes back to work.

Last month, when Roth proposed to Ilene Brothersen, a divorced mother of two and the Sanpete County auditor, his old dilemma of competing lifestyles came roaring back.

“How can I expect to stay home and be sealed to a woman if I’m doing this?” he asks.

The question is a serious one for Roth, whose creations have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the four or five years since he sold the rights to the Rat Fink and his name to Mooneyes Inc., a California car-parts company that has aggressively marketed his wares.

The Oakland Museum of California hosted a retrospective of California car culture that prominently featured Roth, and the Laguna Museum of Art recently featured works by Roth and other underground “Kustom Kulture” artists.

Roth was to travel to Southern California this month for his annual Rat Fink Party, which attracts thousands of fans, and to host an auction--including a hand-painted Rat Fink toilet seat--with the proceeds going to the Shriners.

In sleepy Manti, Brotherson was unaware she was marrying a cultural icon. It wasn’t until days before Halloween that Roth reluctantly gave her a book about his cars.

“I looked at this and just said, ‘Wow!’ It’s always been his imagination that I thought was so neat,” she said.

“Of course, I haven’t had to deal with the cars yet, have I, Ed?” she said.

Roth, who was helping Brotherson’s younger son carve a pumpkin in the kitchen, only smiled.