He left Automobile, very reluctantly, for Winding Road, and spent the last couple of years writing columns for Eddie Alterman at Car and Driver. He and I had a pleasant quasi-business lunch somewhere along the way, and I occasionally bumped into him at various car shows and product presentations and auto biz social events.
Most of the obituaries on David E. Davis, Jr., quote Time magazine as calling him “the dean of automotive journalism.” I think of him, along with Denise McCluggage and the late Leon Mandel, with whom I worked at AutoWeek, and Karl Ludvigson, as the founding parents of modern, post-war car magazines.
David E. died Sunday, March 27, in Ann Arbor, following complications from bladder cancer surgery. He was 80.
He was much better known for raising the quality of Car and Driver and designing and founding Automobile. But the first monthly major car magazine I bought as soon-to-be 12-year-old was the September 1970 issue of Motor Trend, the one promising scoops on all the 1971 models. The January 1972 issue would have hit my parents’ mailbox in December ’71, with two photos of an odd little orange car on the cover, “Honda’s Car Revolution,” the ’72 “Z”. Below those words, “Paris Auto Show,” “What if the Feds break up GM?”, “Racing Season’s Finale: American 500, Riverside Can-Am” and … “Classic: David E. Davis, Jr. on the ’40 Packard Woodie.”
I probably read the Pinto vs. Vega vs. Gremlin comparo first, but ignored the “Giant Snowmobile Buyer’s Guide.” Motor Trend’s “In Retrospect” Packard feature began with the center spread, so 13-year-olds could hang the ash and birch-on-cream colored One-Sixty Super Eight wagon on bedroom walls. “Charlie’s Angels” was, after all, another four years off.
David E. was impressed with the Packard’s quality, with its quiet comfort. “It doesn’t rattle and bang like most contemporary wagons. Oh, it creaks a little, but what yacht doesn’t?” The huge wagon, which weighs 3,855 pounds, “just doesn’t make any noise. Without arrogance, without accusation, the old Packard One-Sixty Super Eight Station Wagon makes it pretty clear that there hasn’t been much automotive progress, really, since 1940.”
I don’t remember whether I read the interview of Davis in Motor Trend 11 months earlier. He was creative director of Chevrolet’s ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, and I do remember reading all about the Car of the Year, the Vega, in that same issue, with hope that the Chevy subcompact would change the type and size of cars we would drive, for the better. Ah, well.
David E. rejoined Car and Driver the same year “Charlie’s Angels” made its television debut. I had my driver’s license by then, but I had much less optimism about the future of the automobile. American cars had generally gotten bigger and uglier, with huge, ill-fitting bumpers, before they got smaller. Quality was abysmal, V-8s made less than 200 horsepower and gas was getting more expensive.
Motor Trend, Road & Track, and Car and Driver got better and thicker and, in every way, more colorful, as the American and European auto industry declined, the result of government fiddling, insurance company hubris, auto company mismanagement and shifting consumer tastes.
It was period of cultural decline, of malaise. Most popular music was bad, clothing and hairstyles were hideous, politics were more Machiavellian than ever and cars were just plain mediocre. Only Hollywood movies and car magazines were on the upswing.
David E. was at the forefront of the latter’s effort. He made car magazines more readable, more entertaining and more important than ever in the 1970s. He struck at the cultural elite’s disapproval of the automobile while continuing to take in as much good food, wine, sport and culture that 80 years would allow.
David E. was a raconteur, an impresario, a bon vivant in a tweed, three-piece suit who in the ‘00s, appeared in The New York Times’ “On the Street” fashion roundup.
If I did read that February 1971 MT interview, I would have read clues that David E. would go on to launch a fourth major car magazine, one very much in his image.
“The (car) magazines I think sort of got themselves hoisted on their own petard, with a feeling that in order to be a car magazine you had to devote an awful lot of time to performance per se. And I just don’t think that’s true. The public involvement with automobiles is a heck of a lot deeper than anything as superficial as just a quarter-mile acceleration or road racing or anything else. If I was doing a car magazine again, there would be a heck of a lot less emphasis on racing and a lot more on product.”
He left C/D in 1985, and with Rupert Murdoch’s financial backing, launched Automobile in 1986. It was about the experiences we have with cars; about the freedom they provide. He decreed that none of the cars in his magazine would be boring. While often considered an insult, the shorthand David E.’s competitors used to describe Automobile was apt: “What wine goes best with that car?”
It’s the kind of question we’ve all tried to answer since David E. changed the business. It’s not just about the nuts and bolts. It’s not just engine and transmission with sheetmetal wrapped around seats, after all. It’s about the way a car (or truck) makes us feel, when we first lay eyes on it, and when we drive it. No numbers or hard facts will get a Camaro guy into a Mustang, or a Corvette guy into a Porsche 911, or vice versa.
I worked for a couple of dailies, a business weekly, a Washington newsletter, while most of this was going on. By the time I got to write about cars, Automobile was 10 years old, and the type of assignments I got didn’t often put me in David E.’s orbit. I got to work for him, however briefly, because Motor Trend, which I joined in August ’00, was sold to the same company that owned Automobile.
Though David E. grew up in Royal Oak, just north of Detroit, he first developed his interest in sports cars about the same age I reached my automotive malaise. In high school, he was interested, he wrote in a 1978 C/D column (collected in his book, “Thus Spake David E.”) in a zaftig female classmate and the Chrysler Town & Country convertibles advertised in his favorite magazines, The New Yorker and Esquire.
“About the time the agony of high school ended for me, I saw my first Jaguar XK120. It was small and black and looked like it could do laps inside your average 1949 Chrysler. I abandoned my search for Town and Country country, and never looked back.”
Thank you, David E., for making this a writers’ art, for introducing enthusiasts and casual readers to writers who like cars, but don’t know much about them, like Jean Shepherd, Gordon Baxter, David Halberstam, P.J. O’Rourke and Bruce McCall. Pardon the plagiarism, but without arrogance, without accusation, your life’s work makes it pretty clear that there hasn’t been much automotive magazine progress, really since 1972.
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