Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola

11. The Disenchanted: Tucker: The Man and His Dream and New York Stories

11 The Disenchanted Tucker: The Man and His Dream and New York Stories A good salesman could sell bubblegum in the lockjaw ward at Bellevue. —Seth Davis, a stockbroker in the film Boiler Room Preston Tucker, the maverick automobile inventor who was the subject of Coppola's biographical film, first came to Coppola's attention when, as a child of eight, he saw the first Tucker automobile on display in 1948. He never forgot the experience and decided to make a movie about the flamboyant inventor many years later. Preston Tucker was born in suburban Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1903. He got his start in the auto industry by selling used cars. By 1935 he was entering racing cars in the Indianapolis 500, sponsored by none other than auto tycoon Henry Ford. During the Second World War, Tucker operated the Ypsilanti Machine and Tool Company, which had several profitable defense contracts. He designed an assault vehicle that had a cruising speed of 150 mph, but military officials nixed it as going too fast. The gun turret he designed for the combat car was utilized on bombers. At the end of World War II, Tucker decided the time was right to produce the revolutionary auto he had had in mind for some years. In 1946 he 262 Part Four: The Vintage Years organized the Tucker Corporation, with former executives from Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors on the governing board. Tucker mounted an advertising campaign to herald the Tucker automobile as "the car of tomorrow , today." "Thanks to World War II," says Roger White, a specialist in the Smithsonian Institution's Division of Transportation, "no new cars had been made since 1941. So the Tucker car, with its rocket-ship styling, captured the imagination of the American public." Moreover, the safety features Tucker had developed "were an unusual and timely idea."1 The Tucker car boasted an air-cooled, rear-mounted engine with a 160-horsepower motor and an automatic transmission. In addition, the safety features included a pop-out safety windshield made of shatter-proof glass, a padded dashboard, and a third "Cyclops" headlight that swiveled with the steering wheel, providing motorists with additional illumination on turns. Because of the car's sleek exterior, which resembled a rocket ship, it was christened the Tucker Torpedo. In July 1946 Tucker leased a huge 457-acre factory at 7601 South Cicero, on Chicago's Southwest Side, a former Dodge plant that had turned out B-19 bomber engines during the war. He supervised his engineering team in designing a hand-built prototype. The prototype was unveiled at the Chicago plant in June 1947. When Tucker attempted to drive the prototype onstage, the car, which had been assembled from spare parts scavenged from junkyards, simply refused to start. His rag-tag mechanics hastily made some last-minute adjustments in the vehicle backstage. When the audience finally got a look at the first Tucker Torpedo, they were simply delighted. Tucker took the prototype on a triumphant nationwide tour, and young Francis Coppola, age eight, was dazzled by it when his father took him to see it at an auto exhibition on Long Island. Coppola recalls in his commentary on the DVD of Tucker, "When I was a boy, my father conducted the orchestra for auto shows, and I traveled with him sometimes." Carmine Coppola had been enthusiastic about the Tucker car for some time and had shown Francis magazine stories about it. When Francis finally saw the Tucker prototype, "I thought it was a beautiful, gleaming car; it looked to me like a rocket ship." Carmine Coppola actually ordered a Tucker Torpedo," and I kept asking my father when our Tucker was going to come."2 To finance the manufacturing of his car, Tucker sold stock in the corporation to small-time investors, from pharmacists to grocery store managers. Carmine Coppola invested five thousand dollars of his savings in Tucker stock. The Disenchanted 263 While Tucker was on his nationwide tour with the prototype, some executives back at the plant in Chicago were resigning because the Tucker Corporation was desperately underfinanced and was running short of steel and other raw materials. "It was not an ideal time to be entering the field; the steel shortage was acute after the war. Tucker was taking on a major, maybe a staggering load," White explains. "To produce a reasonably priced mass-market car takes an enormous amount...