Milestone for a Legend

By John Wright/Crewe

Each workday morning at 9, outside a red brick building in Crewe, England, a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit waits, washed and polished, for three people. As they are chauffeured deep into the Cheshire countryside, the passengers quiz the driver about the car, watch the passing hedgerows or simply sink blissfully into the leathery smells. After 60 circuitous miles, they return to the building and take a lingering look as the $98,000 sedan collects three more of Rolls' 3,800 employees for the pleasure trip they are entitled to under company policy. "I knew I'd ride in a Rolls one day," says Jack Goodwin, 62, a gearbox builder at the firm since 1938, "but I assumed I'd be in a wooden box."

"We're really one contented family," notes Ron Lindop, 50, a Rolls wood polisher for 35 years. Especially contented is Richard Perry, 54, the chief executive who has just overseen production of the company's 100,000th car. The royal-blue Silver Spur Centenary will go on display at the Crewe plant alongside a 1904 two-cylinder tourer and a 1907 Silver Ghost. Twenty-five duplicate Centenarys will be sold for $125,000 each. Says Perry of the historic achievement: "Eighty-one years is a long time to produce 100,000 cars, but that fact speaks volumes for itself."

Indeed, the speed of the assembly line at Crewe would give Henry Ford ulcers: one Silver Spirit is finished in three months. There is the matter of eleven full hides from Scandinavian steers "kept virtually free from pests and barbed wire," according to the company, for the hand-sewn upholstery. Or the Lombard walnut selected in Milan each year by Rolls experts to assure that each dashboard's unique pattern can be repaired from the same slice of the same tree. Or the famed flying-lady hood ornament, officially "the Spirit of Ecstasy," made by a 4,000-year-old Chinese casting method that produces a faithful replica; hand sanding then leaves each one slightly different.

Pride stays in overdrive at Rolls. Perry terms it "the fragile prize called reputation" and says of his products, "The rest of the world has been unable to make anything like them." Adds Dennis Jones, who takes a full day to make a radiator grille: "Henry Royce would be proud to have his name on this car." Royce, an engineer, met Entrepreneur Charles Rolls in 1904 at Manchester's Midland Hotel, and the first Silver Ghost was on the road three years later. Rolls died in an air crash in 1910, but Royce went on to launch the posh Phantom series in the 1920s and to acquire Bentley Motor Ltd. in 1931, two years before his death.

Along the way, Rolls-Royces have fallen into the hands of everyone from V.I. Lenin, who fitted his with caterpillar treads to brave the fierce Russian winters, to John Lennon, who chose a psychedelic yellow Phantom V. Lord Mountbatten bought a new one nearly every year. Indian maharajas ordered them gold-plated, Lawrence of Arabia covered his with armor. Field Marshal Montgomery's Rolls was the first private car to land with Allied forces on D day. Other owners have included Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and the Michael Jackson clan, who are said to own eight among them. Queen Elizabeth has five Rolls-Royces and was disturbed when she saw the new square side mirrors on her latest, a 1978 Phantom VI. Company officials scrambled to replace them with the old round version.

The reliability of the car has spawned a mystique sprinkled with apocryphal stories, including a report that Rolls once sent two engineers to Switzerland to repair a car but never mailed a bill. When the customer queried the company, he was informed that he must be mistaken, a Rolls never breaks down. True story? Says Spokesman David Preston briskly: "No doubt it has happened." Rolls officials still do not say the product breaks down, but rather "fails to proceed." Even the embarrassing recall of 2,000 cars in 1978 was, in a sense, due to their tendency to keep on going: the cruise control sometimes had problems disengaging.

With such a reputation, the company fears its name will fall too deeply into common use as a generic word for quality. To prevent this catastrophe, Chief Legal Officer Lewis Gaze pursues some 500 trademark infringers around the globe each year. Past targets have included "the Rolls-Royce of dentist chairs," a house of ill repute in Washington, dubbed "the Rolls-Royce Club," and even an admiring Italian who called himself Roly Royce.

Despite the company's awesome reputation, the end of the road seemed near in 1971 when it went bankrupt because of its failing aircraft-engine business, which was then spun off as a separate company. The automobile operation merged in 1980 with Vickers, the engineering firm, but output skidded in three years from 3,018 cars to 1,567. The company headed into the recession by laying off about 1,000 workers in 1982, and a five-week strike over wages the following year put another rattle in Rolls. A campaign was launched to promote used-car sales to stem a frightening new phenomenon, what officials called a "depreciation" in resale value. Prices for new Rolls in the U.S. were slashed by $18,000 on most cars, a saving kept discreetly out of the company's classy advertising, which never mentions money.

As Rolls-Royce celebrates No. 100,000 with a party at the Crewe plant and a parade of vintage cars, shareholders can rejoice at 1984 profits, which bounded to $18.9 million from the previous year's $1.7 million. The waiting list for a Silver Spirit is now six months. The wait is nine months for a Mulsanne Turbo, the flag bearer of a company decision last year to revive the Bentley name, which now accounts for 20% of production. Rolls executives, however, estimate that it will be 1990 before total output again hits the prerecession level of 3,000 cars a year, and that suits them fine. "To take it higher," says Peter Ward, sales and marketing managing director, "would be irresponsible."