PACKARD BY DARRIN

Darrin famously built the original ‘Packard Darrin’ more or less before his shop was even functioning, to the order of the actor Dick Powell. It was a two-passenger roadster, built on a 1938 1601 Eight business coupe’s appropriated chassis, with the donor car’s rear fenders modified, the hood sides and radiator surround sectioned, and the hood itself extended over the cowl to a rakish vee’d windshield. It was essentially home-built, and frankly looked it; but Darrin learned much from its creation, and, most importantly, it succeeded in getting his name “out there.” If he hoped for the most famous and prominent Hollywood motorists to buy his creations, he did not have to wait long, because the most famous and prominent of them all was the next client in the door.

THE KING OF HOLLYWOOD

In 1938, Clark Gable was already the well-established “King of Hollywood,” not merely one of America’s most popular stars of the silver screen, but among the country’s best-known celebrities of any type. He was also, more to the point, a serious car guy, who had driven home a Duesenberg JN and a series of important twelve-cylinder Packards, and knew quality engineering and fine styling.

Gable’s car, offered here, was the second “Packard Darrin,” the first four-passenger version of the design, and thus the first “convertible victoria by Darrin,” as they would later more famously become known. It was the only other Darrin Packard to, like the Powell car before it, have a traditional cowl, framed in ash and paneled in aluminum; subsequent cars had a distinctive three-piece cast aluminum cowl, but this was not ready when the Gable car was completed. Darrin was savvy enough to not want to keep the best-known motorist in America waiting.

The result was instant fame, or at least attention, for Darrin—and more attention than even Gable was used to expecting, or wanted. United Press reporter Frederick C. Othman interviewed the car’s creator as saying that Gable, “a nut about automobiles [who] lives ‘em…spent weeks in the shop, watching it being built, like a man with a new house.” Yet Gable’s ownership was short, as Othman noted that “lady motorists formed parades behind Gable’s car; lady pedestrians climbed into it at every stoplight. Gable stood that for a month, and then sold his super-super-super eight at a tremendous loss. He now drives an $800 coupe, painted black.”

The lady pedestrian-catcher was apparently sold by Gable to Andrew “George” Bruce, a Hollywood bit player and friend of the star. A military officer later bought the car in Los Angeles and drove it to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, selling it to Ernest Sulek around 1960 with the comment that “Clark Gable owned this car.” Sulek, in turn, sold the Packard two years later to Sam Broadhead, who began a meticulous restoration. The original Sixteenth Series-exclusive cardboard vehicle number plate that came with the donor coupe had likely been discarded or decayed, and the car was retitled, like so many 1938 Packards, by its original engine number, though a 1940 replacement engine eventually wound up under the hood. In the course of the work, Broadhead reportedly discovered Bruce’s fishing license under the seats, and was eventually able to track him down to help verify the car’s past.

Darrin himself eventually verified the Broadhead car as the “Gable” Packard in articles written for the Packard Club’s Cormorant magazine, identifying its unique hoodline—extended to only half an inch from the door opening—and distinctive coachbuilt cowl, both used on only this and the two-passenger Powell car.

Following many years of enjoyment, the Broadheads sold the Gable Darrin in 1982 to the colorful automotive impresario Ted Leonard of Warwick, Rhode Island, with whom it remained until the Leonard collection was dispersed in the spring of 2009. A year later, following the untimely passing of its intervening owner, it was purchased by the current owner, who submitted the prized Packard to the legendary Fran Roxas of Alsip, Illinois. For a half-century one of America’s most respected craftsmen, Mr. Roxas meticulously restored the car to concours condition. It was proudly debuted at the 2014 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, to much attention and acclaim. Largely exhibited since in the owner’s collection, the Packard’s Roxas restoration remains well-preserved, and it awaits continuing its career on the concours and club circuit.

Every collection of Full Classics requires a “Packard Darrin,” and it can justifiably be said that few if any others carry the rich provenance of this one—only the second built, the first victoria, and the car that Clark Gable once drove through the canyons of his Kingdom.