LOUDER THAN LIFE
This is not the Porsche that Dean Jeffries is known for. That Porsche, a 550 Spyder on which Jeffries had painted the number 130 and the words ‘Little Bastard’, came to its end about a month later as a rumpled heap along Highway 46 in central California, the brief life of a young screen phenom ebbing away in the wreckage.
No, the Porsche pictured here was Jeffries’ own, taken in trade in 1957 when he was a rookie customiser with not much to his name other than his well-greased pompadour, doodling with French curves and loading paint guns in a rented workspace behind George Barris’s shop in south Los Angeles. Jeffries customised the Porsche with some hot-rod glosses, then sold it on for a bag full of cash, the car subsequently taking a wild ride across America that only a Hollywood screenwriter could concoct. Now the car is back in Los Angeles – indeed, parked just a few blocks from where it all began.
And where it all began was at long-gone cruiser joints such as Piccadilly’s Drive-In on Sepulveda Boulevard in Culver City, home of the ‘Juicy Jumbo Hamburger’, where the early rodders of the magazine piece ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’, Barris was an institution in the underground world of custom car building. Apprentices were streaming into his shop in Lynwood like students migrating to the feet of the master, with, as Wolfe wrote, ‘their blowtorches and hard-rubber mallets, creating their baroque sculpture, cut off from the rest of the world and publicised almost solely by the teen-age grapevine’.
