• "In a dream world, where all wishes come true, I would have a Rolls and someone to drive me." Irene Worth

    Worth the Trip: Irene Worth and two Rolls-Royces, naturally
    Vanity Fair

“Ralph Richardson had three Rolls-Royces. He loved them very much and used them all the time. He was a fantastic driver and really respected cars. So that if Ralph chose a car, it was the best one of that year,” Irene Worth recalled, installing herself in the capacious backseat of a cream-colored Silver Spur sedan. “A Rolls is a fantastic car for an actor, because it just sails along. It’s a real rest cure to ride in one. I think everybody should be issued a Rolls when he turns twenty-one — we might have less nervous tension that way. General transportation, like flying, tires the body.” She should know. Irene Worth has been crisscrossing the Atlantic for more than forty years, first on the Queen Mary, now on the Concorde, starring alternately on Broadway, Off Broadway, and in London’s West End. The Queen has titled her (Honorary Commander of the British Empire — she’s American), and Noel Coward wrote his last play for her (Suite in Three Keys), but Miss Worth remains a practicing nonconformist: she’s as at home on a crosstown bus as she is in a Rolls. “I’m totally uninterested in the idea of luxury,” she said firmly. “I’m interested in the divine engine of the Rolls, that superb, sublime motor.”

"In a dream world, where all wishes come true, I would have a Rolls and someone to drive me."

We had offered to chauffeur her around in the Silver Spur, the largest and most popular Rolls sedan sold in America, but she wanted a convertible, and the open-top Rolls, the Corniche 11, at $199,500 and climbing, is a rare bird. After much ado, a new white one was located for us in northern Virginia, and a Silver Spur was thrown in for comparison. We were also provided with a Rolls-Royce executive’s lipstick-red convertible in New York, which was then sold only hours after we had dropped it off. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars of North America says that it sells every vehicle imported, and that business picked up after Black Monday. In any case, we were in and out of several Rollses over the space of a few days, constantly marveling at their idiosyncrasies.

Unlike the Bentley Turbo, a superbly fast and stable sports version of the four-door Rolls-Royce sedan, the Silver Spur and Corniche II are rather loosely sprung. While this contributes greatly to the sense of flotation — the absorption of road inconsistencies — it makes the car keel into and out of comers, thrusting from starboard to port those occupants who aren’t battened down with seat belts. This is typical of cars of the mid-sixties, which is when Rolls-Royce’s current models were designed. Platform, chassis, drivetrain, dashboard — almost everything except the Silver Spur’s body was held over from the 1965 Silver Shadow. As for the Corniche, it’s a Silver Shadow that was renamed in 1971, after Rolls-Royce went into receivership.

The postwar “divine engine” made its first appearance in 1947, two years before Miss Worth triumphed on Broadway opposite Alec Guinness in The Cocktail Party. It gets about ten miles per gallon. Rolls-Royce’s failure to embrace modern technology means the company is producing vintage cars that ask to be driven the old-fashioned way — “in a stately manner,” according to the handbook. And that’s why the cars are so delightful to be driven in. A Mercedes-Benz or BMW sedan has a very high roadholding capacity, and can be pushed and prodded according to the driver’s whim. The Rolls demands — and via a plush cabin helps create — a fairly centered, relaxed driving attitude. Not surprising then that Miss Worth found the Rolls to be “a pacifying experience, a thousand times more relaxing and calming than a limo or a taxi.”

Two things, principally, perpetuate the Rolls-Royce mystique, and they are interdependent: the quality of the investment, and the quality of the parts. It is estimated that 60 percent or more of all Rolls-Royces built since 1904 are still on the road. Post-WW. II models, because of their longevity and infrequent design changes, continue to hold their value, while many pre-war editions are practically priceless. There are those who argue that Rolls owners don’t drive very much and that’s why their cars last longer. A trip to the factory in North West England would convince them otherwise. The steel for the bodywork is double-gauge, the engine utilizes plated fittings, the door handles are cast in solid brass and then nickel- and chromeplated. Regardless of the model, it adds up to more than two and a half tons of car. You feel it, and hear it, when you open and close the door.

What recent models lack is an assembly quality commensurate with that of the components, not to mention the price. Various anomalies among the cars we drove included: a paint bubble, like a large water bead, on the hood of one of the convertibles; coat hooks improperly aligned; squeaks in the dashboard; an odometer that functioned only intermittently; a loose headrest; and a faulty exterior-temperature gauge. Oddly, the steering column is angled slightly toward the driver’s window, so he has to drive with one shoulder set back. Perhaps this is fallout from the old class system: the Rolls driver (presumably hired) doesn’t get a vanity mirror either, and front-seat passengers miss out on grab handles above the doors. Even the ventilation-system outlets seemed to direct all the air through the center of the beautifully veneered dashboard toward the rear of the car; side vents aren’t provided.

“Nothing is here without a function,” remarked Miss Worth, lifting the. trunk lid and pointing to cubicles containing cellular-telephone equipment, a tool kit, a battery, and containers of spare brake fluid. “It’s so wonderfully thought out; I think a housewife couldn’t have designed this better. It really is practical, like all good classical things. You can get a lot of luggage back here,” she noted. “I think, however, that one of the great losses in transporting people around, especially women, is the demise of the running board,” she said a moment later while shutting the rear passenger door with a resounding but comforting thud. “Now there’s no way to get out of a car unless you lead with your behind. It’s like being some kind of folded-over anemone or something. And I don’t like these slightly contoured seats, or the little island here in the middle that doesn’t do anything except accommodate the armrest. It should be a smooth, continuous seating surface, so that when one has to do that inevitable sliding over it’s not such a chore. These telephones in the armrests are rather pretentious too. I hate it when people drive and use the telephone and gossip away. They do that a lot in London now. It’s sheer show-off rubbish.” But these were just quibbles.

“The Rolls is wonderful,” Miss Worth concluded. “If you’re going to buy the best, the freshest eggs, you get the best car. Not for ostentation or luxury, but for sheer beauty and efficiency. I think, however, that I should have little controls back here for the radio so I’m not dependent on the driver all the time for the music.”

A few days later, the stately Silver Spur had been swapped for the convertible. “I think in America people are forever making statements about themselves,” Miss Worth remarked. We were by now in Lenox, Massachusetts, turning out of the drive of the Mount, which had been built by Edith Wharton. “She was rather a Rolls-Royce of writers, the construction and design of her writing is so high. The Corniche also has a very beautiful design, though it’s far from inconspicuous.” As for the livability of the convertible, Miss Worth found the backseat to be cramped and somewhat claustrophobic due to the vast expanses of the exquisitely finished fabric top and its large, elbowlike hinges. With the top up, a well was exposed, leaving ample room “for stowing away any work that needed to be done, books for reference, and a change of shoes.” The car drove beautifully at all speeds, though it exhibited much of the rolling motion of the Silver Spur, whose drivetrain it shares. The engine always had more power than one felt inclined to use, partly because of the booming noise that sets in around 75 m.p.h. as a result of the soft top, and the antilock brakes did a yeoman’s job of stopping two and a half tons in motion.

Miss Worth’s quest for total autorelaxation took her to the front quarters, into a leather-covered seat that offered little torso support but did have an adjustment for the lumbar region. “The headrest doesn’t rest the head and the neck,” she pointed out. “It seems to be there merely to conform to safety regulations. In London, I’ve been driven to the theater every night, and when I got into the Ford I was almost totally in a bed of extreme comfort with a lot of legroom and support under the neck,” she recalled. “The glass of the visor mirror of the Corniche is of very poor quality,” she added. “It distorts. I think this car is a designer’s car. I’m not sure that it’s a person’s car. Though I like the purring sound when it gets up to speed; it’s the sound of gathering forces.”

“I got into this car under the most terrible stress,” Miss Worth confided after we had been driving for a time. “Two calls from London within the space of fifteen minutes, messing me about — the leak in the oven, and the handyman saying he couldn’t fix it, until I persuaded him he could. I got into the Corniche feeling awful. Then all my troubles seemed to have stopped, and now I feel fine. In a dream world, where all wishes come true, I would have a Rolls and someone to drive me. It would be not only a luxury but a necessity. The sense of security, relaxation, and pleasure is so profound.”  MG

published October 1988, photography by Ruven Afanador