A Theatrical Showdown

by Kirk Woodward 

[Kirk Woodward’s “A Theatrical Showdown” is fundamentally a report on a production in his New Jersey area of Theresa Rebeck’s 2018 play Bernhardt/Hamlet, a depiction of Sarah Bernhardt’s audacious performance of William Shakespeare’s Danish prince.  Kirk, who’s a prolific contributor to Rick On Theater, has expanded this coverage to include aspects of the life and art of “the Divine Sarah,” as Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) dubbed her, that Rebeck—whose play is only partially factual—doesn’t consider.  Additionally, on 9 October 2018, I posted Bernhardt/Hamlet, my performance report on the Broadway production of the play.

[The principal subject with which Kirk deals that neither Rebeck nor I considered is the rivalry between Bernhardt and the other famous European theater diva of the Belle Époque, the Italian actress Eleonora Duse.  This rivalry was more than just personal or a matter of clashing egos; the actresses were models of two competing styles of acting, as Uta Hagen (1919-2004), one of America’s most influential acting teachers and theoreticians, demonstrated in her 1973 book, Respect for Acting.

[At a time on Western stages when Romanticism, which flourished from approximately 1800 to 1850 (but lingered in popularity through World War II), and Realism, which arose in about 1870 and dominated the stage through the 1950s and ’60s (and continues down to the present), were both seen and applauded by audiences.  Bernhardt was the prototype of the Romantic actor, expressing extremes of emotion in declaratory speech and melodramatic gesture, while Duse was considered then the epitome of the Realistic performer, with her emphasis on conversational speech, natural behavior, and psychological truth.]

I have been fascinated recently by the life and work of the actress Sarah Bernhardt (French; 1844-1923). She was almost certainly the greatest celebrity of her time, in the sense that she was celebrated for herself no matter what she did. Her acting career stretched over about seven decades (she first appeared on stage, at school, when she was seven), and to the end of her life she was famous, not to say notorious.

She was a handful – intelligent, skilled, and wildly willful and impulsive. She was not to be contained. Many great actors are no longer remembered today; some are remembered by specialists, like Bernhardt’s hugely admired contemporary Eleanora Duse (Italian; 1858-1924), about whom more below. Very few are household names today, especially in this world of instant notoriety.

But Bernhardt! My wife Pat’s mother Rose, when out of patience with Pat, would say to her, “Don’t be such a Sarah Bernhardt,” and Bernhardt had died before Rose was born. (Rose also said, “Don’t be such a Sarah Heartburn!” which a newspaper had called her during her lifetime.) No one alive today ever saw Bernhardt perform on the stage; but she lives vividly in imagination.

We can still see glimpses of her, incidentally: there are silent snippets on YouTube of her performing in a play (apparently La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, French; 1831-1908); in conversation on a bench with the actor and playwright Sacha Guitry (Russian-born French; 1885-1957); and in a play called “Daniel” (1920), in which we glimpse some of the physicality for which her performances were famous – although she does the scene in bed!

These observations and more were inspired by a production at the Studio Players of Montclair, New Jersey, of a play called Bernhardt/Hamlet by Theresa Rebeck (b. 1958), commissioned and first produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2018. (For a report, including a review round-up, on the Roundabout production of Rebeck’s play on Broadway, see Bernhardt/Hamlet [9 October 2018] on Rick On Theater.)

The Studio Players production (14-29 March 2025) featured a stunning performance by the actor Melody Combs Williams as Bernhardt, so inspired that it left me feeling I had known Bernhardt personally. Williams captured Bernhardt’s determination, her quirkiness, and her physical expressiveness as well.

Before I saw Bernhardt/Hamlet I wondered if there was enough drama in the story to support a full length two act drama. Certainly there was controversy over Bernhardt’s Hamlet (1899), a role usually played by a male actor, but is that enough? Of course there was controversy over nearly everything Bernhardt did.

The play portrays her playing a male role as a scandal. In fact “trouser roles” – women playing men – were fairly common on the stage at that time, and Bernhardt played at least seven male roles on stage before and after her Hamlet, beginning in 1867.

Most remarkably, she played two in her old age – Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in 1916, and a thirty-year-old male in Daniel (written by Louis Verneuil, French; 1893-1952, her grandson-in-law), when she was 75 years old. Both of those roles followed the amputation of one of her legs, which developed gangrene after years of dealing with injuries she had received during performances. She had spunk to beat the band.

Although she is often cited (including in Bernhardt/Hamlet) as the first woman to have played Hamlet in a major production, she was actually preceded by Mrs. Millicent Bandmann-Palmer (English; 1845-1926), who played the role at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin for six performances during the week of 16 June 1904, in what appears to have been a serious performance.

Mrs. Bandmann-Palmer is referenced by the writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm (English; 1872-1956), writing for the London Saturday Review (17 June 1899, in a piece about Bernhardt’s Hamlet titled “Hamlet, Princess of Denmark”), who says,

True, Mrs. Bandmann Palmer has already set the example, and it has not been followed; but Mrs. Bandmann Palmer’s influence is not so deep and wide as Sarah’s, and I have horrible misgivings.

Beerbohm, who writes of Bernhardt that he is a “lover of her incomparable art,” simply does not accept her in the role of Hamlet:

She would not, of course attempt to play Othello – at least, I risk the assumption that she would not, dangerous though it is to assume what she might not do. . . . But, in point of fact, she is just as well qualified to play Othello as she is to play Hamlet. . . . Sarah ought not to have supposed that Hamlet’s weakness set him in any possible relation to her own feminine mind and body. Her friends ought to have restrained her. The native critics ought not to have encouraged her. The custom-house officials at Charing Cross ought to have confiscated her sable doublet and hose.

So there is controversy, but I would say not enough to support a full length play, especially since Sarah, in the play as in real life, refuses to let the furor, whatever it is, bother her much – she lives for such moments, and, a shrewd and capable businesswoman as well as a skilled actor, she knows that controversy brings in box office business, which in fact it did.

Theresa Rebeck adds another element of drama to Bernhardt’s situation by introducing a fictional affair between her and the playwright Edmond Rostand (French; 1868-1918), the author of Les Romanesques (1894, the source of the remarkably long-running musical The Fantasticks) and Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), among other plays. Cyrano features significantly in the second act of Rebeck’s play, although Bernhardt doesn’t, and didn’t, appear in it.

Bernhardt/Hamlet has Bernhardt coercing Rostand into writing a new version of Hamlet for her. What’s not clear in the play is that since Bernhardt performed exclusively in French, Shakespeare’s play had to be rewritten – that is, translated – by someone. It was certainly not a scandal to “rewrite” Shakespeare from English to French.

The play has Rostand abandoning the project after an argument with Bernhardt; the fact appears to be that he had little to do with the translation, which was written by two others.

Bernhardt is presented as feeling that Shakespeare’s poetry gets in the way of the character of Hamlet, since he is, we might say, “all talk and no action.” Surely it’s at least dubious that Bernhardt felt this way.

She regarded acting as primarily a vocal art, with the physical a close second, and she was famous for her declamation of emotional speeches, a sample of which is on YouTube as she recites a poem by Victor Hugo (French; 1802-1885), again, in French, the only language in which she performed.

In one of the best scenes in the play, Bernhardt and her fellow cast member, the celebrated Constant Coquelin (French; 1841-1909), rehearse part of the opening scene of Hamlet, with Coquelin in the role of Hamlet’s father’s ghost. (The actual Coquelin did work with Bernhardt, but not on her Hamlet.)

In the scene, progress is slow and the lines are stale until Bernhardt, seizing an impromptu moment, urges her fellow actor to go with his impulses, and the scene begins to achieve a gripping reality.

This scene dramatizes one of the central issues in any discussion of acting. The issue goes by various names. It is frequently called the conflict between “internal” and “external” styles of acting. Sometimes, more confusingly, it is known as the conflict between “presentational” and “representational” acting.

“Internal” acting is best known today as “Method acting,” as described in Isaac Butler’s excellent The Method (2022). (See “The Method – a Review” [12 March 2022] and “Bombast to Beckett” [13 January 2025].)

In Bernhardt’s time its embodiment was Eleanora Duse, who was often considered Bernhardt’s great rival. “External” acting is best represented in the popular mind by, well, Sarah Bernhardt.

The two styles of acting are well described in the lively book Playing to the Gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, and the Rivalry That Changed Acting Forever (2019) by Peter Rader. The book apparently evolved from a screenplay, and Rader appears to make up some dialogue, but he is an entertaining writer.

The big difference between Bernhardt and all the stars that preceded her . . . was that other divas received their press coverage in the theater section. Bernhardt’s exploits usually made it to the front page.

He makes the major question about acting clear: Does acting emerge from the inner mental and emotional equipment of the actor, or is it a matter of showing, demonstrating, making clear to the audience what is going on in the play?

My own conclusion, and I suspect the conclusion of actors more skilled than I am, is that the issue is a matter of emphasis, and that the same actor may at one moment be more absorbed by the process of thought and emotion, and in the next moment by the awareness of what the audience needs to see and hear.

This combination is perhaps best seen in comedy, where continual consciousness of what’s happening in the auditorium (in particular, laughter) is often matched by the actor’s absolute genuineness, which only makes the performance more funny.

(Duse did occasionally perform in comedies, but Bernhardt, with rare exceptions, did not. Neither Bernhardt nor Duse were best known for their comedic performances.)

I strongly suspect that their opposing styles represent different poles of the planet, so to speak, rather than different planets, or perhaps a better metaphor is different points on a spectrum.

The two women had much in common, including difficult and largely loveless childhoods, in which they were manipulated by adults, sexually and in other ways, until they found out how to stand on their own and make their own decisions. Both were “theatrical” in nature, although Duse’s theatricality pointed inward and Bernhardt’s pointed outward.

Duse saw Bernhardt perform in 1882 in Naples, watching every performance during Bernhardt’s visit. Duse was younger than Bernhardt, and she represented a pendulum swing in fashions of acting. Their careers intersected. Throughout their careers both had their champions, of course. Sigmund Freud (Austrian; 1856-1939), for example, wrote of Bernhardt:

From the moment I heard her first lines, pronounced in her vibrant and adorable voice, I had the feeling I had known her for years. None of the lines that she spoke could surprise me; I believed immediately everything that she said. The smallest centimeter of this character was alive and enchanted you. And then, there was the manner she had to flatter, to implore, to embrace. Her incredible positions, the manner in which she keeps silent, but each of her limbs and each of her movements play the role for her! Strange creature! It is easy for me to imagine that she has no need to be any different on the street than she is on the stage!

Some stories about Bernhardt are simply too good to be true. For example, her only husband, Aristides Damala (Greek [Aristides Damalas]; 1855-1889; m. 1882), was said to have been an inspiration for Dracula in the 1897 novel of that name by Bram Stoker (Irish; 1847-1912). And some stories were true: she was a notable sculptor, as if being a great actor weren’t enough. She loved animals and travelled with many of them, including lions and cheetahs, none of whom appear to have bitten her.

As for Duse, her most famous champion (among many) was George Bernard Shaw (Irish; 1856-1950). As the extremely influential theater reviewer for the London Saturday Review (and Max Beerbohm’s predecessor in the job), Shaw promoted the kind of path he wanted theater to take, and it was in Duse’s direction: more true to life, more involved with social issues, less histrionic, less acting for acting’s own sake.

Theatrical fashions in general were changing in Duse’s direction (and have continued to). Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian; 1828-1906) wrote,

No declamation! No theatricalities! No grand mannerisms! Express every mood in a manner that seems credible and natural. Never think of this or that actress whom you may have seen . . . . [An actor should] present a real and living human being.

As Duse became more noticed, comparisons between her and Bernhardt in the press often favored her. Konstantin Stanislavski (Russian; 1863-1938) and Lee Strasberg (1901-1982), later to become highly influential theorists and teachers of acting, both saw her perform and found inspiration there.

The rivalry (for so it became, although the two had not yet actually met) reached a showdown in 1895, when Bernhardt and Duse booked performances of the play Magda (originally titled Heimat [‘Home’ or ‘Homeland’]) by Hermann Sudermann (German; 1857-1928) in London within two days of each other.

Magda, although largely unknown today, was a sensation in its time, featuring a heroine of independent bent, frequently described during that period as a “New Woman.” It was in other words a basically modern play for its time, and in accepting it Bernhardt, who would not try an Ibsen play for years to come (the lovely The Lady from the Sea, for one performance in 1906), was directly challenging Duse’s increasing status as the preeminent modern actress.

George Bernard Shaw’s review of the two performances, entitled “Duse and Bernhardt” and published in the Saturday Review on 15 June 1895 (not in the Times of London as Rader states – Shaw was not a staff writer for the Times then or ever, although he contributed articles and letters to the editor over the years), is a classic, an indispensable piece of writing on theater. Here are excerpts:

Sarah was very charming, very jolly when the sun shone, very petulant when the clouds covered it, and positively angry when they wanted to take her child away from her. And she did not trouble us with any fuss about the main theme of Sudermann's play, the revolt of the modern woman against that ideal of home which exacts the sacrifice of her whole life to its care, not by her grace, and as its own sole help and refuge, but as a right which it has to the services of all females as abject slaves. In fact, there is not the slightest reason to suspect Madame Bernhardt of having discovered any such theme in the play; though Duse, with one look at Schwartze, the father, nailed it to the stage as the subject of the impending dramatic struggle before she had been five minutes on the scene.

Madame Bernhardt has the charm of a jolly maturity, rather spoilt and petulant, perhaps, but always ready with a sunshine-through-the-clouds smile if only she is made much of. . . . The dress, the title of the play, the order of the words may vary; but the woman is always the same. She does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it.

Obvious as the disparity of the two famous artists has been to many of us since we first saw Duse, I doubt whether any of us realized, after Madame Bernhardt's very clever performance as Magda on Monday night, that there was room in the nature of things for its annihilation within forty-eight hours by so comparatively quiet a talent as Duse's. And yet annihilation is the only word for it.

Bernhardt finally met Duse in 1897, in what sounds like a polite wrestling match. Bernhardt offered Duse the use of her theater in Paris at no cost and Duse chose to open with one of Bernhardt’s starring roles, Marguerite Gautier in The Lady of the Camellias. When she watched Bernhardt in a play, she stood every time Bernhardt came on stage. When Bernhardt watched Duse perform, she was illuminated by a small spotlight she had had installed. She also gave Duse an inconvenient, uncomfortable dressing room. 

Did I say that neither of these performers excelled in comedy?

For me the most interesting part of this story is that, although Bernhardt remained herself, she continued to do her best to evolve, commissioning new plays and rethinking older productions. And, of course, she played Hamlet. (She also shared with Duse a play written by one of Duse’s lovers, the dramatist and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italian; 1863-1938, as well as the poet himself).

Bernhardt did her best to keep up with the world; she was not habitually old-fashioned. She used the latest available technology in her theaters, including electricity; she embraced the Art Nouveau style (popular between 1890 and 1910) for her advertising posters; she continually reexamined her repertory, although she returned to the old warhorses of plays when money ran low. She modified her acting style somewhat. She taught acting so she could encourage those starting young.

During the First World War, right after her leg was amputated (22 February 1915), she joined a theater company that brought entertainment to soldiers on the front lines. She toured the United States – in 1916-1918, when she was 72 to 73 – to raise support for France in the war. She made movies. “Now that the public is willing to accept me as I am, I’m going to do new things,” she said.

Duse, more fragile than Bernhardt (who had her own physical challenges), retired early from the stage, returning, shortly after Bernhardt died, to make a film and to do a rapturously received last tour of the United States (1923-1924), where she died (Pittsburgh, 23 April 1924).

So who won the showdown? Certainly Bernhardt is still better known, while Duse’s approach to acting is more in vogue. But, as noted above, actors do their best with what they have, and one may have an “official” opinion on technique which varies from actual practice. “Whatever works” could be a motto for many actors, and many theaters as well.

Theater is protean, a shape-changer. Society changes, technology changes, fashions change, so theater changes too, and does its best to keep up, or even to get ahead. That may be the reason for its resilience.

And speaking of resilience, my admiration for both Bernhardt and Duse has grown enormously as I’ve learned more about them. They persisted through all sorts of things, when it was difficult to do so, and they gave so much of themselves. May their tribe increase.

[Ironically, though Duse was 14 years her rival’s junior, the two renowned women died almost exactly 13 months apart: Bernhardt first at 78, then Duse at 65.  This little factoid, seemingly insignificant, brings to my mind something upon which I remarked in another recent post almost four months ago, about another actress who died about a century ago.  (Coincidentally, the thought also originated in a post from Kirk Woodward.)

[Above, Kirk remarks, “No one alive today ever saw Bernhardt perform on the stage; but she lives vividly in imagination.”  In an earlier post, my friend observed how close we actually are to events that “seem buried in the mists of history.”  No, no one today would be old enough to have seen either Bernhardt or Duse perform live . . . but we’re not all that far removed from the two divas.  A little more than a generation in my case, actually.

[My mother was born nine days after Bernhardt died (7 April would have been Mom’s 102nd birthday); my dad would have been almost 4½ years old (a little over a year old and 5½ for Duse).  Clearly not old enough to have seen the two women act, but it was almost within both my parents’ lifetimes.  Not so far back as we might think.  Of course, I’m pretty old now—some of you youngsters’ll have to go back two generations. That’s still just a hop, skip, and a jump.

[On a less metaphysical note, here are some additional thoughts I had in regard to Sarah Bernhardt and Bernhardt/Hamlet (and maybe some other semi-related topics:

[In a remark early in his post, Kirk states of the Montclair, New Jersey, production of Rebeck’s play by the Studio Players that “a stunning performance by the actor Melody Combs Williams as Bernhardt [is] so inspired that it left me feeling I had known Bernhardt personally.” 

[It seems an almost impossible coincidence that in my own 2018 report on Bernhardt/Hamlet, I observed: “I’ll never forget my reaction to seeing Pat Carroll become Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at the Provincetown Playhouse back in June 1980.  I literally found myself thinking, ‘Man, Stein’s a really fascinating person.  I’m so glad I got to meet her.’  I had to remind myself constantly that I was watching an actor in a play.”  (Four years later, I reiterated that response in a tribute to Carroll, who had died a few weeks earlier.)

[Aside from the “fictional affair” with Rostand, there are some facts about Bernhardt’s professional association with the playwright that aren’t in Rebeck’s play or Kirk’s article.  I did some rudimentary research on Rostand when I was reading plays for a small theater, and I read three of his non-Cyrano de Bergerac plays (the reports on which are on this blog).  Here are some pertinent factoids: Bernhardt did play Roxane in Cyrano, just not in the 1897 première, but in many revivals, including in 1900 opposite Constant Coquelin, the original Cyrano, on tour in the U.S.  (On this same tour, he played the gravedigger—not old Hamlet’s ghost—to her Hamlet.) 

[Bernhardt also played Mélissande in Rostand’s La Princesse Lointaine (1897; presented in the U.S. as The Lady of Dreams); starred in La Samaritaine (1897; The Woman of Samaria), many times playing the title part the author wrote for her; and originated the title role, Napoléon’s son (another “trousers role”), in L’Aiglon (1900; The Eaglet), also created for her.  Rebeck also has Rostand writing Bernhardt’s adaptation of Hamlet, but he had no hand in that production at all.

[As for that French translation Bernhardt used for her Hamlet performances, we actually know who did that for her: Eugène Morand (Russian-born French; 1853-1930), a playwright and painter, and Marcel Schwob (French; 1867-1905), a symbolist short-story writer.  Their text was published in 1900 as La tragique histoire d'Hamlet, prince de Danemark (Charpentier et Fasquelle; “The tragic story of Hamlet, prince of Denmark”).

[The “rewriting” of Shakespeare, as Kirk puts it, reminds me of something my father told me—and which I’ve put on ROT a few times.  Dad, who studied German in high school, was amused when he was assigned to read German translations of Shakespeare and other works of literature, to find the title page of the texts inscribed with the phrase: übersetzt und verbessert.  In English, that means “translated and improved”!

[A few notes about Dumas, fils’s La Dame aux camélias: The play was/is often called Camille in English, but the character Bernhardt played is called Marguerite Gautier (sometimes spelled “Gauthier”).  Calling Marguerite “Camille” was a solely American thing—not even “English-language.”  American actresses took to calling her Camille, but Bernhardt wouldn’t have (though her 1915 film of the play was entitled Camille).

[I recalled that Uta Hagen says something about the two acting styles on stages around the turn of the 20th century using Duse and Bernhardt as examples of each style in Respect for Acting.  I looked it up and confirmed my recollection (see pages 11 and 12).   

[(I tried to identify the play Hagen cites in her example, but I couldn’t.  The only title that came up was The Lady of the Camelias, but I have a French text of the play, and the line Hagen quotes (“Je jure, je jure, JE JUUUURE!” – “I swear, I swear, I SWEEAARE!”) doesn’t appear in it. There are a couple of lines that are close—Marguerite says “I swear . . .” a few times, but there’s no line where she says it three times. 

[There were, however, several later adaptations of the novel, and we don’t know which version Bernhardt used.  We also don’t know how accurate Hagen’s recollection was, or if she was even trying to be verbatim.

[(It’s also hard to figure when Hagen might have seen the actresses perform; she was born in 1919—and emigrated to the U.S. in 1924 when she was only 5, and Bernhardt and Duse died in 1923 and ’24, respectively.  Seeing either actress on film wouldn’t have sufficed, as they’d have been silent movies—no spoken dialogue.  Could she have been recounting hearsay, not first-hand observation?)

[I considered that what Hagen said the actresses did (whether she’d seen it or it was described to her) was actor-chosen, not textual.  But in the scenes in which Marguerite swears in the script, there also isn’t a child on stage with her.  Hagen describes Duse as saying the words twice and then putting her hand on her son’s head.

[There are several other reasons that La Dame doesn’t fit, the two most significant of which are that Hagen says that the “wife” swears to her “husband” and, as I noted, that Duse put her hand on the head of “her son.”  In La Dame, Armand is Marguerite’s lover, but they are never married, and Marguerite has no son (by Armand or anyone else).  

[There is also the fact that the oath that Marguerite makes to Armand (and also, in another scene, to his father) is that she loves Armand, not that she has been faithful to him, which is what Hagen asserts in her book.   

[So, I’m leaning towards the solution being that the play Hagen meant wasn’t La Dame, but something else altogether.  Duse and Bernhardt did the same plays relatively often, so it could well have been a different play, but I haven’t yet been able to isolate a likely play that both actresses performed. 

[By the way, I also tried to find out why some references spell Marguerite’s name “Gauthier” rather than “Gautier.”  Aside from my French copy of the text, I checked a few online (including the novel), and they all spell it without the h.  The French Wikipédia also uses “Gautier.”  Only a couple of the entries on the Internet Broadway Database spell it with the h, but several of the cast listings only name the actors, not the characters, so that’s not particularly helpful.

[There doesn’t seem to be any rationale for when the name is spelled one way or the other.  There’s also no discernable difference in the names themselves—it’s just a variation and doesn’t seem to signify anything meaningful.

[On IBDB, none of the entries that listed the character names used Camille for Marguerite, either, but a lot of the domestic productions only listed the performers name, so it’s impossible to know how common or rare the use of Camille was on Broadway.  (Several of the listings did use Camille for the production title, and many film versions used that title, but most still called the character “Marguerite.”)

[Aristides Damala, Bernhardt’s husband (as Kirk calls him above), apparently mostly went by “Jacques Damala,” but his Greek birth name was “Aristides Damalas.”  I’d never heard of him; my “research” on Bernhardt for the performance report on Bernhardt/Hamlet was cursory and Damala(s) doesn’t feature in Rebeck’s play.  

[In my report on Bernhardt/Hamlet, I write that the Czech Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), who designed many of the distinctive posters for Bernhardt’s plays, is a prominent character in the play.  Rebeck’s family is of Czech and Slovak heritage and while visiting the Mucha Museum in Prague around 2008, Rebeck says, she was inspired to write a play about Sarah Bernhardt.  It took her a decade to complete the work.  The 2018 production in New York City by the Roundabout Theatre Company was the play’s world première.]

What Are “Jupiter 8,” “6000 SUX,” and “The Freeze,” and What Do They Have in Common?

 

[They are all vehicles in movies and television created by Gene Winfield (1927-2025), legendary customizer of cars for film and TV as well as private clients.  He also built cars for himself for fun and profit, showed them at car shows, and raced them as well.  “Windy” Winfield died at 97 on 4 March, possibly the most celebrated auto customizer in the rodder-sphere.

[On 3 June 2020, I blogged that “The Bond Car Is Back!“ about the modified Aston Martin DB5 that Sean Connery drove as James Bond in Goldfinger (1964).  Gene Winfield had nothing to do with that custom job, but this post is in the same line as “The Bond Car Is Back!”—iconic, souped-up movie and TV cars.  (Just think of them as car characters.)] 

“GENE WINFIELD, WHOSE CARS STARRED
IN FILM AND ON TV, DIES AT 97”
by Richard Sandomir 

[Gene Winfield’s obituary ran in the New York Times on 22 March 2025 in Section B (“Business/Sports”).  It was published online on 16 March.]

He was know[n] for modifying cars with innovative metal work and paint jobs, and for building vehicles like the Galileo shuttle for the original “Star Trek” series.

Gene Winfield, a hot rodder and prominent car customizer who built fanciful vehicles for “Star Trek” [NBC; 1966-69], “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” [NBC; 1964-68] and other television series and for films like “Blade Runner” [1982] and “Sleeper” [1973], died on March 4 in Atascadero, Calif. He was 97.

His son, Steve, said he died in an assisted living facility from metastatic melanoma. He had also been diagnosed with kidney failure.

Mr. Winfield began to attract national attention in the late 1950s with a two-door 1956 Mercury hard top called the Jade Idol.

According to the custom car website Kustorama, he transformed the Mercury for a customer by adding features like handmade fenders rolled in aluminum in the front end; headlight rings made from 1959 Chrysler Imperial Crown hubcaps; a television set integrated into a new dashboard; and a steering column taken from an Edsel [automobile model produced by the Ford Motor Company from 1958 to 1960, discontinued due to extreme unpopularity].

Automobile magazine [cited below in Gary Medley’s Fuel Curve article] described the Jade Idol as having “a shark[-]like presence that represented a new direction in customs.”

The car got its name from Mr. Winfield’s inventive paint scheme: multiple shades of green and pearl white, with one color artfully blending into the other, using a technique that he developed. It became known as the Winfield Fade.

In a 2014 interview with the racing news website On All Cylinders [see below], Mr. Winfield said that he began his paint experiments with motorcycles, followed by a white Chevy.

“I put purple around the chrome strips,” he said. “When I got done, it was a little bit gaudy to me; it was different, though, and everybody loved it. So as I started to do the next one or two, I made it softer and started blending.”

Another famous custom job was a roadster [a two-seat automobile with an open body, a folding, retractable, or removable top, and often a luggage compartment or rumble seat in the rear], the King T, which he built in the early 1960s with Don Tognotti [ca. 1940-2000]. They painted a Model T Ford lavender and added modifications like a Chevrolet V-8 engine paired with a four-speed automatic transmission; four-wheel disc brakes; and 15-inch chrome wheels with wood inlays. It won an award for “most beautiful roadster” at the 1964 Oakland Roadster Show in California.

Mr. Winfield chopped off the tops of many cars that he customized — including hundred[s] of Mercurys — and put them back a few inches lower to give the cars sleeker looks.

“He would go to a World of Wheels show [series of indoor car shows held in various locations across the country that brings together a diverse collection of vehicles] and, with his crew, cut off the top of a vehicle with a blowtorch and put it back four inches lower; it was quite a spectacle,” said John Buck, producer of the Grand National Roadster Show [Pomona, California] and the Sacramento Autorama, to which Mr. Winfield brought his cars, charming the crowds.

Mr. Winfield’s custom cars, if not his name, became widely known in the 1960s when they were seen on television and in the movies.

He towed the Reactor — a futuristic, low-slung, aluminum two-seater with a gold and green color scheme, front-wheel drive and a hinged roof panel — on a trailer to the 20th Century Fox studio in Hollywood in 1966, hoping to get it a screen role.

“I went up to the gate and conned them into letting me in to show my car to their transportation department,” he told Motorious, a website for car collectors and restorers, in 2017. “From there, the transportation coordinator gave me the names and addresses of all these other studios, and for two days I took the car around and handed out my business card. Two weeks later, ‘Bewitched’ [ABC; 1964-72] called me and said that they wanted the Reactor on their set.” It was the centerpiece of an episode called “Super Car.”

The Reactor was then used on three more series: “Star Trek,” “Mission: Impossible” [CBS; 1966-73] and “Batman” [ABC; 1966-68], on which Catwoman (Eartha Kitt, 1927-2008) used it as the Catmobile.

He did some of his TV work as a division manager for the model-car company AMT, for which he built the Galileo Shuttle for “Star Trek.” Based on a design by Thomas Kellogg [1932-2003], it appeared in a few episodes. He constructed it in two units.

“One would be a complete exterior, full size,” he told the official Star Trek website in 2011. ”Then we built the complete interior. This interior had what we called ‘wild’ walls. What you do is you make the walls in four-foot sections on wheels, so you can put up one wall and they could film the actors sitting on the seats and whatnot.”

Robert Eugene Winfield was born on June 16, 1927, in Springfield, Mo., and grew up with five brothers and sisters, mainly in Modesto, Calif. His father, Frank, was a butcher who ran a wagon from which he and his mother, Virginia (Akins) Winfield, sold hamburgers and hot dogs for a nickel. After his parents divorced, his mother opened her own hamburger restaurant, where Gene started working at 10.

He was 14 when he opened his first shop, to which he brought his first car, a 1929 Ford Model A coupe. To it, he added oxtails [sic; probably ‘foxtails,’ which was a thing in ’40s and ’50s], two antennas and a blue paint job. But his hope of hot-rodding it in the streets was soon dashed when it was wrecked in a crash with a taxicab. He quickly bought two more roadsters.

He served stints in the Navy, from 1944 to 1945, and in the Army, from 1949 to 1951. While stationed in Japan, he learned welding skills from an expert Japanese welder. Back home, his custom work got better, and he began to attract customers. He also began racing in the streets and on dry lakes in the late 1940s; in 1951 he took his custom-built Ford Model T coupe — which he called the Thing — and drove it 135 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. [In 1951, the land speed record was 185.49 mph.]

But what established his reputation were the cars that he customized — like the Maybellene, a modified 1961 Cadillac named for the Chuck Berry hit song and painted in cream and butterscotch tones — and the ones that he made for Hollywood.

[Berry (1926-2017) was a renowned rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues guitarist. He released “Maybellene” in 1955 and it charted at number 1 on Billboard’s Rhythm and Blues chart and number 5 on the Popular Records chart.]

For “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” the cheeky spy series [NBC; 1964-68] starring Robert Vaughn [1932-2016] and David McCallum [1933-2023], Mr. Winfield built a gull-wing car, with mock flame throwers in the front end and a Corvair engine. For “Get Smart,” the spy-spoof sitcom [NBC/CBS; 1965-70/Fox; 1995] starring Don Adams [1923-2005] as an inept secret agent, he designed a sports car with gadgets like a retractable cannon.

For “Sleeper,” Woody Allen’s [b. 1935] 1973 science fiction comedy, he created a car with a bubble top over a Volkswagen chassis.

He also built 25 vehicles for the dystopian science-fiction film “Blade Runner” (1982), based on designs by Syd Mead [1933-2019], a few of which were called Spinners. One of them was flown by the police officer played by Edward James Olmos [b. 1947].

One of the cars he built for “Blade Runner turned up in “Back to the Future Part II” [1989][.]

Mr. Winfield’s son said that he preferred customizing cars to creating them for television and films.

“The movie cars were dictated to him, but his custom car customer would say, ‘Gene, here’s my car, do whatever your inspiration says,’” he said. “That’s how he turned out the Jade Idol.”

In addition to his son, from his marriage to Dolores Johnston, which ended in divorce, Mr. Winfield is survived by a daughter, Jana Troutt, from the same marriage; a daughter, Nancy Winfield, from another marriage, to Kathy Horrigan, which also ended in divorce; a son, Jerry Carrico, from another relationship; five grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

Mr. Winfield said that he met with Ridley Scott [b. 1937], the director of “Blade Runner,” every two or three weeks as he and his crew built the cars for the film.

“The only thing that I was unhappy about in the end results was that Ridley Scott had us do a lot of things that had to be absolutely near perfect as far as surface and shapes and colors,” he said in an interview with Blade Zone, a fan website. “We went through hours, and hours, and hours of colors and all of this sort of thing, and then it was all filmed at night in the rain.”

With a laugh, he added, “You don’t see even half of what we did.”

[Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for the New York Times for more than three decades.  He joined the Times Obituaries desk in 2016 after 25 years covering sports media and sports business for the paper.  He’s worked for Long Island’s Newsday and other publications, and written several books, including his most recent, The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic (Hachette Books, 2017).  

[Sandomir’s journalism background of more than 40 years has helped him become a better storyteller, which is critical to writing obits.  He graduated from Queens College of the State University of New York in 1979 with a B.A. in communications.] 

*  *  *  *
“GENE WINFIELD – IDOL GENIUS OF THE SILVER SCREEN”
by Gary Medley
 

[This interview with Winfield was published on the website Fuel Curve on 4 March 2025. (The interview was conducted and the story originally published in February 2019.)] 

In Southern California, rods and customs enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the film industry. Movie directors are drawn to automobiles as cinematic and graphic devices. At the same time, a host of SoCal customizers have thrived crafting unique vehicles for the silver screen. One such customizer is the legendary Gene Winfield, a metal man without peer. Known as “Windy,” Winfield built not only some of the most recognized 1950s-era customs – the Jade Idol . . ., for instance – he also reigns as one of the most prolific Hollywood car creators.

Gene Winfield, now a vibrant 91, was born in 1927 in Springfield, Missouri. His parents moved the family to Modesto, California, when he was a toddler, where his father, Frank, worked as a butcher before setting up a mobile burger business (who said food carts are new?). Later, after his parents divorced, his mother, Ginny, opened a luncheon restaurant, where by age 10 Winfield worked as a carhop.

[A carhop, for those too young to remember this phenomenon, is a waiter or waitress who brings food to customers in their cars at drive-in restaurants. Carhops, usually teens, have long been associated with hot rods and 1950s pop culture, but they started in the 1920s, when automobiles were beginning to be common. They flourished in the 1940s and ’50s, but declined during the mid-1960s as drive-ins began offering inside seating and drive-through service.

[A hot rod is a vehicle modified to run and/or accelerate faster. A hot rod may be any car, truck, or motorcycle, often old or classic, modified for increased speed and/or performance, or the term may be used to describe modified cars from the original (or traditional) “hot rod” era, after World War II and prior to 1960.

[No definition fits all cars dubbed a “hot rod,” and the term is used for a wide range of vehicles, but most often they’re individually designed and constructed using components from many makes of old or new cars.]

Gene demonstrated a creative streak early on, becoming an expert builder of model airplanes and, more importantly, getting hooked on photography. The focus of his attention? Cars. Particularly any car that had been modified. Not only did Gene see interesting cars through the viewfinder, he saw them in his future, as well.

At 15, Winfield bought his first car, a ’29 Model A coupe. Before long it sported twin antennas flying foxtails. He tweaked the motor in anticipation of street racing and he painted it a deep blue, his first “custom” paint job.

Winfield enlisted in the Navy as World War II was winding down in 1945. Upon his return to Modesto, the 18-year-old began customizing cars in a chicken house behind his mother’s home. A small workspace and dirt floor could not contain Gene’s creativity. He radically transformed his brother’s ’41 Plymouth, slicing three inches off the top and windshield. Word got around about his skill set and soon he was performing all manner of mods [car-enthusiast slang for ‘modifications’], including suspension work and custom touches like shaving emblems.

Racing drew Winfield’s attention as well. He converted a ’27 T roadster into a lakes runner that, with tuning help from Alex Xydias [1922-2024] of So-Cal Speed Shop, topped 120mph. Later he put together a ’27 T coupe – dubbed “The Thing” – that ran 135mph at Bonneville. Winfield even held a NASCAR [National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing] license, piloting jalopies in circle-track competition.

[The Bonneville Salt Flats are a 30,000-acre expanse of hard, white salt crust on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake Basin in Utah. The flats are the site of the Bonneville Speedway, a facility known as a place for setting land speed records.]

In a curious twist, Winfield had a second stint in the military, drafted into joining the Army in 1949. A year later he found himself in Japan as cook. Culinary responsibilities aside, Gene rented [a] small shop in Tokyo to build cars, including sports cars and the odd pre-war Ford. With the help of a Japanese gentleman who was a skilled metal man, Winfield greatly improved his metal working skills, learning hammer welding and shaping. He returned to Modesto in 1951 and opened Winfield’s Custom Shop.

Winfield’s first real “custom” was a ’50 Mercury, which he built to show off his handiwork to potential customers. The plan worked, and his shop hummed along successfully throughout the 1950s.

Along the way, a few milestones took place, most notably the famed “Winfield Fade,” a paint technique whereby one candy paint color would fade into another candy paint color. The most significant example is the epic “Jade Idol,” a super-smooth 1956 Mercury custom. Built for a customer with a . . . robust $15,000 budget, Winfield went wild. Writer Preston Lerner described the Jade Idol for Automobile magazine this way:

“The Jade Idol put Winfield on the national map. Sectioned four inches, with canted quad headlights, rear quarter panels grafted from a ‘57 Chrysler New Yorker, and an elegant scratch-built [constructed entirely from raw materials and components, rather than being built from a kit or modified from an existing model] grille that was repeated at the rear, the Idol had a shark-like presence that represented a new direction in customs.”

The significant press coverage garnered by the Jade Idol made him famous worldwide. In other words, the Gene Winfield legend was born.

In 1962, Winfield’s fame caught the eye of AMT, maker of plastic model car kits. Initially, AMT hired him as a freelance design consultant before he joined full time to manage their new Speed and Custom Division Shop. There he built full-scale promotional vehicles that mirrored and/or inspired the model kits.

The AMT connection proved fruitful in an unforeseen way: It became an audition for Hollywood. Soon studio creative types called on Winfield to build cars for movies and TV. And he was prolific! His film credits include vehicles for such series as “Get Smart,” “Bewitched (the futuristic Reactor),” and “Star Trek.” By 1970, he opened a shop in North Hollywood adjacent to the studios. Eventually his creations graced more than 20 films, including Mission[:] Impossible, Sleeper, and 25 futuristic rides for the sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

In recent years, Gene Winfield was honored as the Detroit Autorama “Builder of the Year” in 2008, and since 2013 has been a regular on the International Show Car Series circuit, chopping tops and shaping sheet metal in a special section . . . called “The Summit Racing Equipment Chop Shop.”

Despite closing in on the century mark, Gene Winfield is as energetic and engaged as ever. Goodguys [presumably, Goodguys Rod & Custom Association, the largest U.S. association catering to street rods, custom cars, and show cars] recently spoke with him from his Mohave, California, shop. His voice was strong and clear, his enthusiasm unchecked. His secret to success? ”I like people and I like to make them happy,” Winfield explained. ”I treat my customers the way I would want to be treated, and I try to build a car as a piece of art. The customer wants to make a statement, a car that will make an onlooker say, ‘Wow, he made that?’”

His secret to his longevity? ”I don’t drink or smoke or use coffee, never have.”

[Gary Medley has been a friend, ally, and contributor to the performance community for decades.  His interest in cars and journalism was pretty much a genetic imperative, as he is the son of Tom Medley, creator of Stroker McGurk, a cartoon character featured in Hot Rod magazine from 1948 to 1955, making brief comebacks in 1964 and 1965.  

[Medley’s own career path has traveled from the halls of Petersen Publishing to PR director for an Indy Car race to pitching tight-fitting Italian-made cycling shorts and countless other forms of high-speed life.  Living between two volcanoes in Hood River, Oregon, Medley will be a regular Fuel Curve contributor when he’s not working to sustain his father’s legacy.] 

*  *  *  *
“AMERICAN DREAM CARS OF THE 1960S AT PEBBLE BEACH”
by Mike Eppinger

[This article appeared in Old Cars Weekly (Boulder, Colorado), now called just Old Cars, on 5 July 2017.]

The Reactor will appear along with nine other one-off creations at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance this August

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Stargazers with dreams too big for a small town often pack their bags and head for one city: Hollywood. Legendary custom car builder Gene Winfield is a man who had very big dreams, but not for himself. His aspiration was to create a futuristic, aluminum-bodied custom automobile.

“I put the car in an open trailer and I towed it straight to Hollywood,” said Winfield of Modesto, California, about his custom coupe, called The Reactor. Appearing at the 2017 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in a special class for one-off American Dream Cars of the 1960s, the Reactor will uphold its celebrity status as both an iconic dream and significant character in some of the world’s most-remembered films and television shows.

[The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is an annual automotive event held on the Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, California. It’s widely considered the most prestigious car show in the world and is the top Concours d’Elegance competition worldwide. (French [concours d’élégance]: translates as a “competition of elegance” and refers to an event where prestigious vehicles are displayed and judged.)]

Winfield initially imagined and built The Reactor for Joe Kizis’ 1965 annual Autorama car show in Hartford, Connecticut. After its time spent touring back east, Winfield brought the Reactor back to California, where he entered it in the Grand National Roadster Show. Against tough competition, the Reactor won the coveted Tournament of Fame Award. Winfield soon realized even bigger dreams for his car. So, he packed up the Reactor and took it to Hollywood, where it captured the attention of leading filmmakers.

“I didn’t know anybody,” Winfield recalled, “but I found 20th Century Fox Studios and I went up to the gate and conned them into letting me in to show my car to their transportation department. From there, the transportation coordinator gave me the names and addresses of all these other studios, and for two days, I took the car around and handed out my business card. Two weeks later, Bewitched called me and said that they wanted The Reactor on their set.”

The car was created around a Citroën DS [a front mid-engined, front-wheel drive executive car manufactured and marketed by the French company Citroën from 1955 to 1975] chassis and its unique hydro-pneumatic suspension so that it could move up and down, a feature that was far ahead of its time. “The inspiration I had for the car was to make something different, something wild,” Winfield said. He installed a 180-hp turbocharged engine from a Chevrolet Corvair Corsa, and paired it with the Citroën DS’s drivetrain. The Reactor was born as a two-seater, mid-engine car, with its most recognizable feature being its very low profile. Cleverly, Winfield used the Corvair flat-6 engine as a stylistic tool, because he wanted the Reactor to be as low and close to the ground as possible.

Automobiles ranging from a DiDia [a DiDia 150, a custom-designed, one-of-a-kind car conceived by Andrew Di Dia (1917-2014)] once owned by Bobby Darin [pop singer; 1936-73] to a car powered by gyrodynamics [the study of the behavior and motion of rotating bodies, particularly gyroscopes, and the forces and torques involved in their movement] will also be showcased in the American Dream Cars of the 1960s class.

[Mike Eppinger was Old Cars Weekly’s online editor, but his abilities include building a restored and modified 1969 Camaro.  His energy and creativity are matched only by his lifelong passion for all things automotive.]

*  *  *  *
“INTERVIEW: A FEW MINUTES WITH
HOT RODDING LEGEND GENE WINFIELD”
by Lori Sams 

[The interview was posted on the online magazine OnAllCylinders on 31 January 2014; it was last updated on 4 March 2025.]

During the interview, Gene took [a] break to chat with a fan that stopped by. He was telling us about how one of the Star Trek vehicles is still around and it is now at NASA. He got to go to NASA and they gave him a 7 hour tour of the facilities. He was in awe.

Gene Winfield has been customizing vehicles for longer than most of us have been alive. He has customized vehicles for many TV shows, movies, and commercials. Some of the shows and movies that have featured Winfield’s vehicles include Blade Runner, Robocop, Batman, Get Smart, and Star Trek.

While visiting the Cavalcade of Customs in Cincinnati, we got to hang out with the King of Kustoms. Winfield was showing off his car-chopping skills at the Genuine Hotrod Chop Shop, which is held at several of the Summit Racing Show Car Series indoor shows.

He took a break from fabricating to answer a few questions–questions like: What’s his favorite project of all time? How did his famous blended paint technique come about? What current rodding trends does he like?

 

OnAllCylinders: How many years have you been involved in hot rodding?

Gene Winfield: My first shop was in late ’46.

 

OAC: You’ve raced, you’ve built cars, and you still seem to be going strong. 

Winfield: I just painted a 1968 Mustang with a NASCAR motor that I am going to race at Bonneville. I have a Sprint car [an open-wheel race car designed for running on short tracks] and I drive a midget car [an open-wheel racing cars with a very high power-to-weight ratio that typically uses a four-cylinder engine] that I race in Lima, OH every year.

 

OAC: So you still have a passion for racing?

Winfield: I love it. I love the Sprint cars and midgets on the dirt track when you get them all crossed up. I love it.

OAC: What prompted you to start experimenting with blended paint schemes?

Winfield: I was doing a couple motorcycles and they had small tanks, and I just started blending and playing. I liked it. I liked what I saw and I said, “I can do this.” I decided to do a whole car so in 1957, I did a brand new Chevy with almost zero miles. I blended the car. At first I only blended around the chrome, and it was not a real custom. We knocked off the hood and truck emblems, but that was it. And we lowered it a little bit, too.

It was a white car, and I put purple around the chrome strips. When I got done, it was a little bit gaudy to me. It was different, though, and everybody loved it. So as I started to do the next one or two, I made it softer and started blending. And when I paint a car, I paint it until I like it. It doesn’t matter if it takes me two hours, three days, or two weeks–I paint until I like it. I don’t care if the customer likes it or not, but usually they do.

 

OAC: Most customers probably like it, though, right?

Winfield: There have only been two times, actually, in my life they didn’t like it. One was a lady and it was just too gaudy and too loud for her. The other was the same deal. This customer came to me, and I had painted four cars– brand new cars–in four years. And he brought me the fifth brand new car in the same year. He lived approximately 60 miles from me, so he would bring me a car with 74 or 80 miles on it. He would drive it one night up and down his street and bring it to me the next day. So anyways, he says to me “Gene, paint it wild. Do anything you want–any color, anything you want.”

So I did, and it was too wild.

It was too wild, so he said to change it. I never even pulled it out of the booth. I went ahead and softened it up, but I never got a picture of it. That was a big mistake. Later, for the next 10-15 years, he said he wished he would have left that paint job. It was shades of green and black. It was wild.

 

OAC: The white and the purple–you seem to see that a lot. Did you start that?

Winfield: Yeah. The most radical one I did was years ago, though. I painted it in ’59 and premiered it in 1960, and it was called the Jade Idol. The Jade idol is still around in Dedham, MA. It’s for sale, and the owner wants 400,000 dollars for it. It was a very radical paint job with greens and black and different shades. Then I blended a little bit of soft gold powder just in a few places on the hood and trunk.

In 2009, I built the Jade Idol II. It’s a similar car–the headlights were almost identical–so we called it Jade Idol II. It had some damage and I just repainted it. It was rubbed out yesterday at my shop in California.

OAC: Of all the cars you have done, which is your favorite?

Winfield: The favorite of the old custom cars is the Jade Idol. And then the favorite of the aluminum cars–I built two aluminum cars in the 1960s, one in 1963 and one in 1965–is the Reactor. It was pretty futuristic at the time and is still futuristic today. It was on the Bewitched television show. They wrote an entire episode about this car on Bewitched. It was really cool. It was filmed in 1966 or ’67 [Season 3, Episode 19, “Super Car,” aired 19 January 1967].

 

OAC: You’ve worked on a lot of television shows and movies. Did you meet any cool celebrities?

Winfield: Yes, lots of them. Loren [sic; Lorne] Greene [1915-87] of Bonanza [NBC; 1959-73], and of course all of his co-workers. In fact, I did a car for Michael Landon [1936-91]. I restored a car for him. And I met all the people from Bewitched, of course. I also met The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Stephanie Powers [b. 1942] and all the different shows.

I didn’t get any of their autographs, and I realized later in life that I should have. And most of them are dead and gone. Now I try to get autographs from anybody that I meet. So it is a lot of fun.

 

OAC: As far as the hot rod scene, what is your favorite trend?

Winfield: I like the rat rods [a custom car with a deliberately worn-down, unfinished appearance, typically lacking paint, showing rust, and made from cheap or cast-off parts]. Some of them are totally junk and some are well engineered. They are doing some unbelievable stuff to lower them. They are going lower than we ever did. And of course they create rust and primer and stuff–which is OK. We ran primer but with the idea of painting, and we eventually did paint our cars. They make ’em rust and they are never going to paint them.

I like all phases of hot rodding. I like the real modern, the far out and wildest hot rod thing you can do, and the mild stuff, too. I like it all.

I have a hot rod that I started building many years ago. Someday I hope to finish it. I started building it with the idea of winning the open roadster show, called the America’s Most Beautiful Roadster–or AMBR cars. But those AMBR cars are like the Detroit Autorama Ridler. Now, all those cars have a million-plus, some of them 2-3 million dollars in them. They work on them for five, six, ten years–or whatever. This roadster–I started it 25-30 years ago, and I still have it. As I was building it, my ideas would start changing. Each year I would get new ideas and each year I would upgrade it and change it. So it’s still not finished, and I haven’t touched it in a few years.

And of course I keep building a car every couple of years for myself. I started to build a ’58 Pontiac. A ’58 Pontiac like a Bonneville is pretty scarce, and a restored Bonneville goes for a lot of money. I finally found one and bought it. I was getting ready to start it and a guy brought me an Econoline pickup that he knew I wanted to build again, like I did for Ford in ’62 or ’63.

 

OAC: Was that the Pacifica?

Winfield: Yes, the Pacifica. So I built the Pacifica for Ford, and it was in the Ford Custom Car Caravan. So I knew it ended up in Detroit. In fact, AMT sold it to Troy Ruttman [1930-97], the Indianapolis driver, and they used it for a parts truck in Dearborn. I ran ads in the paper and everything trying to find it. I got a hold of Troy’s brother, who is now in Florida, and he didn’t know what happened to it.

So this guy brought me this car and gave it to me for my birthday–no engine or transmission but a nice body. I went ahead and jumped on it, and in a year and a half, I built the Pacifica. So I have that at home now, and it’s all finished and runs good and everything.

My Pontiac is still sitting there.

 

OAC:  What do you do in your spare time? You turned your hobby into work. Do you have any other hobbies?

Winfield:  I like to take pictures. I haven’t gone out and taken still shots of scenery or anything in a while. I always have a camera. In fact, I have a Hasselblad camera at home. The Hasselblad camera is a Swiss/German camera.  When I bought it in 1972, I paid 4,000 dollars for it. Now the camera is, I think, worth about 35,000-40,000 dollars.  So it’s a good camera. It’s a 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ image, and you do big slides and you have a projector.

 

OAC: Do you still enjoy teaching and instructing?

Winfield: I love it. I do metalworking constantly all over the place.

 

OAC: Do you have a favorite place you’ve visited?

Winfield:  No, but I like Australia a lot. And Japan, too–been there seven times. I have been to Canada all the way from the West Coast to the East Coast of Nova Scotia. I painted five cars in Canada last year, and I did two workshops in Canada. I also did two workshops [i]n Australia. I painted a car and a motorcycle and did a show all in 18 days.

[The vehicles I named in the headline of this post were seen in TV’s Star Trek (Jupiter 8), the film Robocop (6000 SUX), the television series Mission: Impossible (The Freeze).  Other Winfield creations—some mentioned in the articles above—include the shuttle Galileo II (Star Trek), the Catmobile (Batman—driven by Eartha Kitt as Catwoman), the Super Car (Bewitched), the Spinners (Blade Runner), the Star Car (The Last Star Fighter).

[There were a slew more, and many of Winfield’s creations were used more than once—sometimes with different names.]