Her Royal Highness the Princess Alexandra of Kent–the Queen`s cousin, don`t you know–churned up in an odd place the other day. She was seen out in suburban Maryland, bounding and grinding over a muddy field behind the wheel of a new British Range Rover. A rather royal version of mucking about, what?
It was a commercial proposition, to be sure. The Royal Family spends much of its time hawking British goods abroad, and HRH Alexandra was there both to demonstrate the Range Rover`s prowess in muck and to dedicate the opening of Range Rover of America, which will start marketing the luxury utility vehicle in the U.S. next spring.
But the princess` presence and that of the Range Rover underscore a new trend among the elite on both sides of the Atlantic: The status car of the future is less likely to have a chauffeur and a glass partition than four-wheel drive and mud-spattered sides. Whether it`s a British import or America`s own home-grown Jeep Wagoneer or Cherokee, the ”four by four” has become terrifically chic.
Automotive status is a tricky subject. Millions of people buy expensive and impressive cars to proclaim their status. Hence the popularity of the Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volvo. Mercedes even calls its relatively low-priced
($26,400) 190 D model ”the conquest car,” because it supposedly demonstrates that its owner has ”arrived.”
But for the truly elite–the upper classes and celebrities who are quite secure in their status–such ostentation is unnecessary and undesirable. To drive a big, expensive, flashy car is for them not only in questionable taste but also indicates that they might actually be worried about their status.
WHEN LESS IS MORE
As social scientist Paul Fussell noted in his recent book, ”Class,” the less status you drive the better.
”If your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you`re not taking seriously so easily purchasable and thus vulgar a class totem,” he wrote. ”You have a Chevy, Ford, Plymouth or Dodge, and in the least interesting style and color. It may be clean, although slightly dirty is best.
”You may not have a Rolls, Cadillac or a Mercedes. . . . The worst kind of upper-middle-class types own a Mercedes, just as the best own elderly Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Chryslers, and perhaps Jeeps and Land Rovers, the latter conveying the preppy suggestion that one of your residences is in a place so unpublic that the roads to it are not even paved, indeed are hardly passable by your ordinary vulgar automobile.”
Thus do you find not only HRH Alexandra in a Range Rover but HM Elizabeth II as well. The company`s slogan might as well be Ask the Queen who Owns One, because the Range Rover is her majesty`s personal auto. She and her husband, Prince Philip, can be seen tooling around in it without benefit of chauffeur or footman on the country roads near her Scottish estate at Balmoral Castle, even though it comes fully equipped for a mere $30,000.
Range Rover is expecting to sell about 3,000 cars in America initially. Much more popular, especially among the Town and Country set, are the American Jeep Wagoneer and Cherokee. Jeep sold 110,000 of them last year and they were featured in last month`s Town and Country Magazine, which for a car is like being listed in the Social Register.
Far more circumspect than the Mercedes, the Jeep has startlingly similar demographics. The median income for owners of Mercedes, which have base prices ranging from $26,400 to $68,000, is $80,000 a year, and 88 percent of them have attended college. The Jeep Wagoneer base price is a paltry $15,500, but the median income of its owners is also $80,000 and 82 percent of them have attended college.
Mercedes has developed its own version of the Jeep called the ”G-Car,”
but has kept it out of the U.S., fearing it would sell only about 1,500 a year in a market more interested in ”conquest” than cross-country.
But hey, there`s nothing wrong with being upper-middle-class. You have to start somewhere. Many simply cannot afford the country place that the Jeep or Range Rover requires, and would have to sneak out to the forest preserves at night to splatter their vehicle with mud.
Mercedes does make a truly well-built car, as do BMW, Volvo and Rolls-Royce. This is good, as they are sometimes accepted by the Truly Elite if they are very, very old. The BMW, in fact, first became fashionable about two decades ago when a few of the Rockefellers turned to it as a means of avoiding embarrassing ostentation. It became ostentatious only when people started emulating the Rockefellers.
The Volvo carries the stigma/cachet of being the car of liberal Democrats, though this is perhaps inaccurate. A recent survey found more Volvos per capita in Virginia`s Republican-dominated Fairfax County than there were per capita in posh but Democratic Montgomery County, Md., just across the Potomac River.
The Jaguar, another prestige car tolerated by the upper classes, has to be bought new. Though nowadays they are extremely well built (British management overcame the labor problem), the old ones tend to spend most of the time in pieces on garage floors.
BEATLES AND BUGATTIS
As for exotic high-performance cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis, the new ones tend to be owned by raffish sorts like ”Miami Vice`s” Don Johnson and your better-heeled Riviera playboy. Very old ones are acceptable, however –say, a Triumph TR-3 or Austin Healy, but not a Nissan 300 ZX. French aristocrat Jacques Estelle, who was one of the wealthiest men in posh, prestigious Bedford Village, N.Y., when he lived there in the 1950s, owned just two cars: a battered, beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, and a then-20-year-old Bugatti. He mostly drove it on his driveway, which was about a mile and a half long.
Limousines are common as dirt–some 5,000 in ”power town” Washington and no fewer than 45,000 in glitzy New York–and it`s always presumed that they`re rented (for a mere $200 to $300 a day, for heaven`s sake). Rolls-Royce and stretch Mercedes limos are the most gauche, but an extremely old Cadillac limousine is acceptable. Wealthy columnist William F. Buckley rides in a fairly new Cadillac limousine he had custom-stretched in Arkansas, but the car represents reverse snobbery and Buckley`s fierce if English-accented Americanism.
As always, the best guide to car status is who drives what. Society and celebrity grandee Cleveland Amory rides around Manhattan in a blue Checker town car–a civilian version of the famous taxicab. Washington socialite Juliette Claggett McLennan, great-granddaughter of original Marshall Field partner Levi Leiter and great-grandniece of Lady Mary Curzon, the vicerene of India, has three cars: an old Chevrolet station wagon, an older Honda and the tiny 1951 Crosley station wagon in which she learned to drive in Newport. Rock legend Rod Stewart and acting legend Jack Nicholson drive Range Rovers. Another very interesting Range Rover owner/driver is none other than Henry Ford II (has he driven a Ford, lately?).
Chicago socialite and Republican lady Mary McDonald drives a 1979 Mercury Monarch (she put her old wooden-sided Chrysler Town & Country on blocks and it died). Chicago`s No. 1 society lady, Hope (Mrs. Brooks) McCormick, has an old Ford Thunderbird on her country place but rides in a chauffeur-driven stretch Mercedes in town (she probably doesn`t want anyone to recognize her).
Teddy Kennedy drives an extremely old and extremely noisy Pontiac convertible. His niece, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, shows up at chic places in a Jeep.
President Reagan, overcoming his humble Midwest origins, has Arrived. To prove it, the personal car he keeps at his California ranch is, that`s right, a Jeep. —
