TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82delor

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                                                                                November 1, 1982 

PEOPLE

John De Lorean: A Life in the Fast Lane

Genius, jet-setter, rebel:  the boy from Detroit became a driven
man


John Zachary De Lorean said not long ago that he is a devout
Roman Catholic who, when in New York City, goes every day to St.
Patrick's Cathedral. He said that he is a believer in prayer,
and a "firm believer" in the Ten Commandments. He also, as
improbable as it seems, detected parallels between his life and
that of Jesus Christ. "In many ways, De Lorean said in 1980,
"Jesus was an outsider. Some of the really big things in life
are achieved by those who refuse to conform. I stood up for what
I believed. I'm an outsider, and in my own small way I'm trying
to do something."

No one ever accused De Lorean of lacking hubris. But from all
the evidence, his life has been less devoted to piety than to
speed and glitter. "I live on adrenaline."  De Lorean said
flatly 13 years ago, when he was a golden boy at General Motors.
He was still grabbing for gusto last year:  "A guy's gotta do
what he's gotta do. We only pass this way but once."  A few
months ago, just when the FBI says he began planning his
drug-dealing scheme in earnest, De Lorean told a group of sports
car dealers:  "We will do anything to keep this company alive."
 But what he really seemed committed to keeping alive was an
image of himself:  John De Lorean, the smart and plucky maverick
businessman, the high-stakes gambler who makes his own rules and
always wins.

For a classic American success story, De Lorean's beginnings
were appropriately humble. A Depression boyhood on the
working-class east side of Detroit. An Austrian mother he
adored. An Alsatian father who drank and brawled when not
working his shift at a Ford foundry. The parents separated more
than once when John was a boy. He started working nights and
weekends, sometimes stacking groceries; later, he played the
saxophone in black nightclubs. "I remember the feeling of doing
a good day's work, and that's one hell of a feeling," he told
TIME's Alf McCreary two years ago. "I am still driven by that
work ethic. Money is not important."

During his freshman year as a scholarship student at Detroit's
Lawrence Institute of Technology, his parents divorced. John De
Lorean was drafted into the Army a year later, but never served
overseas. After his discharge, his engineering degree in hand,
he became a company man in his company town:  he took an
engineering job with Chrysler. At 27, armed with a night-school
master's degree in engineering from the Chrysler Institute, he
switched companies to design transmissions for the Packard Motor
Car Co. Shortly he was in charge of all research and development
for Packard. He picked up a second night-school master's, this
one in business from the University of Michigan, and moved to
GM as the director of Pontiac's new "advanced engineering"
department.

Semon ("Bunkie") Knudsen was running the Pontiac division, and
remembers that at first, De Lorean seemed cut from the
standard, colorless GM executive cloth. "He wasn't flamboyant
or anything," Knudsen says. "He was just a nice young man"  But
in the late 1950s, teen-age culture, with its rock 'n' roll and
hot-rods, was ascendant. GM wanted to liven up Pontiac's fusty,
family-car image. De Lorean began working on engineering
innovations that were mainly stylistic, flourishes to appeal to
the young. His touch seemed to be unerring. Pontiacs were given
longer axles (the much copies "wide track" look), then sleeker
radiator grilles and vertically stacked headlights. De Lorean
is credited by GM with investing or introducing such advances as
concealed windshield wipers and radio antennas.

De Lorean's master stroke, the GTO, came just after he was made
Pontiac's chief engineer in 1961. The idea was simple:  put an
enormously powerful engine in an existing mid-size car, the Le
Mans. The result was just what the new youth market wanted:  a
virile street dragster perfect for revving up and peeling out.
The company planned to produce 5,000 GTOs. In 1964, the first
model year, 31,000 were sold, and over the next four years
312,000 more. A rock group named Ronny and the Daytonas recorded
a song, GTO, and it sold 1.2 million copies.

De Lorean in 1967 had Pontiac build a special GTO convertible,
the "Monkeemobile," for the Monkees recording group. "It was
zany promotion," says Jim Wangers, who directed advertising for
Pontiac during that go-go era. "But this was the sort of thing
that John encouraged."  During De Lorean's tenure, Pontiac's
sales tripled. At the height of the GTO euphoria, he became
general manager of the division. Says Knudsen:  "John built an
image of himself that put an aura around him as being someone
who could do almost anything. Apparently he did a very god job
of promoting that image."

After giving Pontiac its new style, De Lorean gradually
transformed himself from a button-down conformist to a vain,
middle-aged clotheshorse. He lost 60 lbs., began lifting weights
and started draping his 6-ft. 4-in. frame in brightly colored
shirts, turtlenecks and nipped-at-the waist suits. He got a
facelift (for a while he denied it) and affected longish hair,
which he dyed black. He divorced his wife of 15 years,
Elizabeth. He married gorgeous, California-blond Kelly Harmon,
then 20 (half his age), daughter of Tom Harmon, the legendary
football player.

After three years, John and Kelly were divorced, and he won
custody of their adopted son, Zachary, now 11. He dated
starlets, and, by now, every move had flair. In London, after
just a single date he arranged to send one woman a dozen roses
every day for a month. "I am myself."  De Lorean said in 1969.
"I get very tired of this swinger label. I am really a pretty
conservative guy."  Indeed, there is no evidence that he ever
used drugs.

At the GM of a decade ago, however, De Lorean seemed exotic.
His high profile, in all of its manifestations, rankled some
straitlaced executive colleagues. Others simply wearied of his
professional swagger. "When John was at General Motors, people
either loved him or they hated him," says J. Patrick Wright, a
business journalist who wrote De Lorean's 1979 memoir, On a
Clear Day You Can See General Motors. According to the book, De
Lorean's febrile management style, impolitic brilliance and
impatience with bureaucracy worked against him. In a chapter
called "How Moral Men Make Immoral Decisions," De Lorean makes
much of his own ethics.

Despite his idiosyncrasies, De Lorean's progress through the
ranks continued. Indeed, in 1972, on the eve of his second
divorce, he was elevated to the command-post 14th floor as the
executive in charge of all North American car and truck
manufacturing (salary and bonuses: $650,000). He worked at the
new job for six months. "I felt I was no longer playing in the
field," he says. "I was the guy up there in the stand, and I
missed the spirit of aggressive competition."

So he quite. The resignation made him even more of a
white-collar folk legend, the free-spirited rebel who "fired
GM," which suited De Lorean fine. "That was some salary to give
up," he said in 1980, "but I have never worried about money. I
do things for themselves." Richard Gerstenberg, then chairman
of GM, arranged for De Lorean to take over as president of the
National Alliance of Business, an organization of socially
conscious executives. Among other good works, the group
encouraged employment of ex-convicts.

A month after De Lorean left GM, he wed Fashion Model Cristina
Ferrare, then 22. The two had a daughter:  Kathryn, now 8.
"Cristina and I have an idyllic relationship," he said
recently. Cristina agreed:  "Every night, I pray to God and
thank Him. Then I lean over and touch John and thank him too."
 They settled into a two-story apartment on New York's Fifth
Avenue and spent weekends on a $3.5 million, 430-acre estate in
rural New Jersey, an hour from Manhattan. They also own a lush
48-acre spread in California's San Diego County; it has been on
the market for $4 million, and last week the price was raised
to $5 million--the amount of De Lorean's bail.

His other holdings, which the FBI estimates at $28 million,
excluding his interest in the De Lorean Motor Co. (DMC), form
a motley portfolio. Since 1973 he has owned 1 1/2% of the New
York Yankees. For a decade he had owned a piece of the San Diego
Chargers football franchise, but in 1976 he sold out and, he
says, "took a big loss." His putative reason:  drug use by
Charger players. Said De Lorean: "Our youth look on them as
heroes, and I didn't want anything to do with these guys in
relation to their drug problem."

For all his supposed scruples, however, De Lorean was building
a reputation for questionable business dealings. A scheme to
promote miniature race cars failed, under a cloud, in the
mid-1970s. An accomplice in several controversial ventures has
been Roy Sigurd Nesseth, a former used-car dealer about De
Lorean's age. Los Angeles Socialite Hazel Dean, sixtyish, has
claimed in court that Nesseth, acting in concert with De Lorean,
defrauded her of several million dollars in the 1970s after she
hired Nesseth to manage her affairs. De Lorean and Nesseth in
1976 took over a failing Wichita, Kans., Cadillac dealership.
After reneging on various agreements, they were sued by the
former owner and local bank. De Lorean leased his 3,000- acre
Idaho ranch to Clark Higley, a local farmer, then mortgaged the
ranch for $880,000 in 1976 and defaulted on the mortgage. Higley
was evicted. Says Higley:  "De Lorean is as smooth as silk. His
henchman, Roy Nesseth, was on the scene giving us a real
struggle. They're just crooks."  Inventor Pete Avery of Phoenix
says that De Lorean cheated him out of the lucrative rights to
a widely used automobile coolant system. Yet Avery, after years
of litigation with De Lorean, appreciates his charm. "He's a
vicious man," says Avery, but adds:  "I like the guy. That
s.o.b. is the only guy I've ever known who has charisma. If he
came into town today, I'd buy him dinner."

Charles De Lorean, 56, an Ohio Cadillac dealer who invested
$100,000 in his older brother's company, believes that John was
"set up" for the drug bust. "It's totally against his ethical
and moral character," says Charles. But even more, it seems, the
younger De Lorean thinks John is too canny to blunder so badly.
"He's not dumb enough to put himself into a situation like
that."

Other people who know De Lorean are amazed, and many of them
saddened, at his fall. Thomas Murphy, who was GM vice chairman
when De Lorean left the company, feels "very sorry for his
family, in particular. I'm just glad that I wasn't faced with
this kind of temptation."  William Collins has known De Lorean
since 1958, when they worked together at Pontiac, and until 1979
was vice president of DMC. "I think his fantastic ego just drove
him to do almost anything," Collins says. Journalist Wright
blames De Lorean's blinding ambition:  "He wanted that company
to work. He wanted that car to be successful. He wanted to show
the people here in Detroit he could to it."

De Lorean's most telling flaw of all may have been blindness to
his flaws. "I haven't failed at anything of importance," he once
said. "I am not capable of addressing failure."  Yet he may have
known that something was wrong. Two years ago, in Ulster, when
DMC's prospects were brightest, John De Lorean confessed to a
certain gnawing discomfort with himself. "I am not a good
example for other people," he said. "I am not a serene person,
nor do I have peace of mind. I am not sure how I got the way I
am now, but I am driven by a force, and that is not a goody way
to live."  But, he added, "I am lucky." He was lucky.

--By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Barbara B. Dolan/Detroit and
Joseph Pilcher/Los Angeles