AUTO TUNER
The ‘kustom’ car king who let Batman, Munsters and Hillbillies ride in style,
“As for Kustom City . . . I know that sibilant C in City must have bothered the hell out of him at some point.”
It was 1963 and pioneer “new journalist” Tom Wolfe, writing in Esquire magazine about the hot-rod and custom-car phenomenon, was discovering how George Barris had imposed his considerable personality upon that world simply by substituting K for C and dubbing himself the King of the Kustomizers, a man who painted Kars with Kandy Kolors.
More than half a century later, Kustom City still flourishes on Riverside Dr., North Hollywood. But its driving force — and a genuine icon in an era when the word is much overused — is gone. Barris died last week, aged 89. “Moved to the bigger garage in the sky,” his son Brett posted on Facebook.
Born in Chicago and raised in northern California, Barris is best known for creating the original (and much-copied) Batmobile in1966 and other TV and movie cars.
They include the Munster Koach from The Munsters, KITT from the Knight Rider series, Greased Lightning from the film version of Grease and even the truck from the Beverly Hillbillies.
Celebrity customers for his personalized creations — kreations, if you’d rather — included Elton John, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Clint Eastwood.
But his influence upon the automotive world was far wider-reaching. It was a rare Detroit executive who would come out and admit it but the Big Three kept careful tabs on what Barris was doing to their production line models, both stylistically and with innovative paint finishes.
His first custom was a 1936 Ford convertible, built when he was in high school. He opened an auto shop in a Los Angeles suburb in 1944 and was joined after the Second World War by his older brother Sam.
George was the painter, designer and promoter of the business. Sam did most of the metal work. The shop is said to have been the first to chop the top of a 1949/50/51 Mercury to give it the now-classic lead-sled look with mail-slot windows.
It’s been copied countless times but to figure out for the first time how to cut the Mercury’s compound curves and then make the reshaped pieces fit together again was a real feat of design, engineering, math and artistry.
Barris was also one of the few to successfully marry the techniques of hot-rodding and radical customizing. Ala Kart (that K again) is a 1929 Ford Model A roadster pickup, which still exists, built in 1957 by Barris.
He sketched out his ideas on a napkin in a restaurant, giving the Dodge-engined Ford a sculpted nose with four headlights (from a ’57 Chrysler), reshaped fenders, tubular bumpers and a combination of coil springs and Cadillac airbag suspension.
It could have been a stylistic disaster. Instead, it remains one of the most striking hot-rod creations ever.
Not surprisingly, Barris had a considerable ego and wasn’t universally loved. He was accused of sometimes taking credit for other customizers’ work. His creations all carried the “Barris Kustom” crest, a pseudoclassical coat-of-arms badge. It was said that if Kustom City took in a car for even a minor paint touch-up, it would come out wearing the crest.
Whatever the truth of that, it should not — and does not — take away from the man’s achievements.
“You cannot overstate George Barris’ importance to the automotive world,” says Craig Jackson, CEO of the Barrett-Jackson collector-car auction house. “Barris stood at the intersection of cars, cinema and culture. He earned his celebrity status by making cars so cool that they became part of pop culture.”
Barris was onstage in 2013, Jackson recalls, when his original Batmobile sold for a cool $4.6 million (U.S.).
Not bad for a kid who drove from Sacramento to L.A. in his ’36 Ford and, as he told Tom Wolfe, “wasn’t supposed to know anything . . . But my car was wilder than anything around.”
Yes, it was. Always.
Detroit’s Big Three kept careful tabs on what Barris was doing to their production line models