It Seats About Twenty

The evolution of limo design says a lot about our wildest dreams.

by Anna Davies

July 24, 2008

"The more popular, dangerous girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," Flappers and Philosophers, 1920

Limousines have always carried a dual sense of entitlement and impropriety, their tinted windows making people stop and wonder who's in the backseat and what exactly they're doing. Today, the limo industry serves 1.38 billion customers annually. "You may not have grown up in a mansion," says Robert J. Thompson, director of the Bleir Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, "but if you're just a little bit lucky, chances are you've ridden at least once in a limo by the time you turn twenty."

If he's correct, it's because of two major evolutions in the use and design of the limousine. The first evolution saw limos go from privately owned marks of wealth to "a rentable and portable luxury." The second is a dramatic change in limo design over the course of the twentieth century — today, any larger-than-average, chauffeur-driven vehicle is usually referred to as a limousine.

That wasn't always the case. In the early 1900s, a limousine was any car with a closed compartment, sheltering its passengers while its driver remained on the outside, exposed to the elements. In fact, the word "limousine" is an adaptation of Limosin, a stormy pastoral region of France where shepherds used to wear elaborate weather-protection garments.

1911 Buick Model 41. The first limousines were defined as any vehicle with an enclosed passenger compartment. At a time when car ownership was a status symbol in and of itself, there was no need to "stretch" the limo.

The design of the earliest enclosed automobiles was modeled after the sedan chairs used in pre-Revolutionary France. In another nod to old-world elegance, many of the words associated with driving (chassis, chauffeur, automobile) were consciously adapted from the French, explains David Blanke, author of Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of American Car Culture. Closed cars like England's Rolls Royce and Germany's Mercedes-Benz were imported to America at the then-astronomical price of $5,000. Add the fact that at the turn of the century, only 8,000 vehicles were registered in the entire United States, and you have the ultimate status symbol for the chauffeured elite.

Magazine ad for a 1927 Lincoln. By the '20s, with millions of cars taking to the roads, the wealthy demanded a longer chassis to differentiate themselves.

But in 1908, Henry Ford's modestly priced Model T brought car ownership to the masses — by 1920, there were over nine million vehicles on the road. So fancier manufacturers like Pierce-Arrow, Cadillac and Duesenberg began looking for ways to make their cars stand apart.

What they came up with was the stretch limo, a design that created the enduring notion that long equals luxury. The new stretch limos, with their intimidating, boxy grills and curvilinear bodies, reflected the glamour of both the Hollywood star system and Chicago's gangster culture. "American designers weren't selling to European aristocracy, they were appealing to American wealth," says Blanke. "So they created designs that represented technology, sophistication, and modernity, sort of like how the iPhone differentiates itself from other mobile phones today."

Now, anyone rich enough to have a driver wanted some distance between themselves and that driver. And because the first stretch limos were used by big-band leaders like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman to transport their large orchestras from gig to gig, the design quickly acquired a hip veneer. Suddenly, every Roaring Twenties socialite wanted to be seen in a stretch.

1940 Cadillac limousine, one of only twenty produced. New bawdier curves and aggressive accents made limos of the '30s and '40s the car of choice for both movie stars and gangsters.

Furthermore, points out David Courtwright, professor of history at the University of North Florida, "The association of size with prestige antedates the limousine by many hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, for example, the size of the coach was a mark of social status. Private, elaborately furnished railroad cars in the nineteenth century were essentially limousines rolling on tracks."

The Depression, followed by metal rationing during World War II, temporarily detoured the emerging party on wheels. Cadillac was the only American limo company to continue mass construction of limos during the 1940s, as luxury stalwarts like Pierce-Arrow switched to cheaper cars, then disappeared entirely. But '50s rock-and-roll brought limos back into vogue. Elvis, in particular, was often seen rolling with his Memphis Mafia in a Cadillac Fleetwood plated with twenty-four-carat gold. By the '60s, it was mandatory for any cool band to be seen entering and exiting a limousine, trailed by sordid limo stories, like Keith Moon's legendary drive into a swimming pool, immortalized on the Oasis album cover Be Here Now.

1960 Cadillac Fleetwood. With his blinged-out, custom-built "Solid Gold" Caddy, complete with wet bar and telephone, Elvis Presley was an early adopter of the over-the-top limo amenities that would soon become standard.

Such stories marked a shift in importance from the limo's material trappings to the possibilities it represented. The importance of design began to wane in the face of its "image," foreshadowing its usage as a vehicle for bachelorette parties and prom nights. Explains Stephen Gundle, author of the forthcoming Glamour: A History, "The limo in the popular imagination seemed to become associated with the group, gang, or posse, rather than the individual. They're ostentatious, but more associated with the lifestyle of collectivity — champagne, drugs, debauched nights — than wealth."

1969 converted Lincoln Model 53A sedan. Jackie Gleason's burgundy limo shows the growth of custom-building, in which sedans were converted to limos according to the buyer's specifications. The price tag was often hefty; this beauty went for $65,000 at a time when even very fancy cars sold for well under $10,000.

"I can't think of anything else we need to accomodate a client, except maybe a hot tub," one limo-company exec joked in 1985.

The limo's status as a designer consumable for the upper classes ended in 1970, when a taxi strike paralyzed Manhattan surface transit. An enterprising New Yorker named David Klein began offering transportation in his Volkswagen (which he soon upgraded to a $3,000 Cadillac before amassing a fleet of stretch limos for hire.) Other taxi and livery companies sprung up across the country, offering services in Lincoln Town Cars that were ten feet longer than traditional models. But just as livery services proliferated, the '76 oil crisis caused production of limos to trickle off once again, especially as manufacturers faced the inefficiencies of making a limited number of units. Cadillac shaved twelve inches off its limos in '77 to make them more efficient, and compensated by introducing better stereo systems and a new state-of-the-art feature: Electronic Cruise Control.

1980 Lincoln (owned by Liberace). In the '70s and '80s, limos suddenly became a rentable commodity, and so grew even longer to accomodate the large groups that chartered them. The stretch Lincoln became a familiar sight at proms and bachelorette parties.

But despite this temporary setback, the image of the limo as populist posh was here to stay, and a public in the throes of disco fever soon demanded bigger, more outrageous limousines than ever before. Anything could become a limo in the Wild West of custom-car building, and anyone with a hacksaw and a garage could set up shop as a customizing company. This allowed for experimentation — limos were built out of everything from pickup trucks to Volkswagen Bugs. What began as creature comforts — wet bars, televisions, telephones — gave way to a sky's-the-limit mentality. "I can't think of anything else we need to accommodate a client, except maybe a hot tub," one limousine-company executive presciently joked to the New York Times in 1985.

H2 Hummer. Large enough to hold dozens of passengers, the stretch Hummer represents the ultimate democratization of limousines. Today, many wealthy people have abandoned limos in favor of more stylish small cars.

The hulking stretch SUV, ubiquitous today as the party car, seemed to spring up organically in the mid-'90s for a public whose regular cars had grown so big they dwarfed traditional limousines. But even with big gas guzzlers falling out of favor in recent months, America may never allow the traditional black stretch limo to disappear. And because the limo has become democratized in all possible ways, it holds no meaning beyond its potential destination. "A limo could be delivering an A-list starlet to the red carpet to speak with Joan Rivers, or it could hold an entourage of six year olds on their way to a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese," says pop-culture professor Robert Thompson. It's this uncertainty — that the vehicle could hold someone, or just anyone — that keeps us fascinated with a car that lost its status as a style icon long ago. n°

©2008 Anna Davies and hooksexup.com