![]() ![]() He decided it was time to reexamine his life, and he turned to the Book of Mormon after a friend gave him a copy. The Choppers venture also cost him his wife, who divorced him. By 1970, Roth was forced to sell his collection of custom cars, 15 vehicles for which he received a total of $5,500. Increasingly respectable hot rod magazines refused to carry advertising for Choppers, however, and it was a failure. He invested all his money in launching a magazine, Choppers, devoted to outlaw motorcycle culture. One writer who was attracted to Roth’s world was Tom Wolfe, who wrote about the scene in his book “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”īut while Rat Fink T-shirts and other merchandise and Big Daddy Roth model kits were spreading his name and works into the mainstream, Roth preferred life on the fringes. Actors, writers, bikers, would-be artists and all manner of humanity stopped by at all hours, said Williams. It became “sort of a subcultural Grand Central Station for the time,” recalled Williams. After Revell started producing the model kits, Roth was able to open a studio in Maywood. The Outlaw became an immediate hit at car shows when Roth introduced it in 1959. “The Outlaw runs,” said the Petersen museum’s Messer, “but you won’t be driving it very far unless you’re about 3 feet tall.” He used fiberglass extensively in creating exotic cars that were extraordinary to behold but mostly impractical to operate. ![]() In the late 1940s, he became fascinated by a new compound called fiberglass when he saw a Ford ad showing how a car made of the material would deflect a sledgehammer blow. He earned an engineering degree from what is now East Los Angeles College because he wanted to learn more about automotive design, but later described his college years as a waste of time. He bought his first car, a 1933 Ford coupe, when he was 14. In elementary school, Roth entertained himself by drawing pictures of airplanes, hot rods and monsters, which were to figure prominently in his most famous creations. His life was intertwined with cars and pop culture from the beginning: His father worked as a limousine driver for silent film star Mary Pickford. Roth was born March 4, 1932, in Beverly Hills to German Lutheran parents. He took what he inherited from Von Dutch and, between them, they created an American art form.” “But he got absolutely no academic recognition. “He was a very singular figure and probably one of the best-known American artists in the country,” Robert Williams, who worked as Roth’s art director from 1965 to 1970, said Thursday. In the last two decades, as art museums and other institutions have begun taking a closer look at pop culture, Roth and his peers gained more respect from the academics who had long dismissed their works as lowbrow. His fans admired the energy and anti-establishment attitude he carried throughout his life. “I know what I am,” Roth told The Times in 1973. The company canceled his contract in 1967. Revell, however, lost its love for Roth when he began hanging out with members of the Hells Angels as his interest in customizing motorcycles grew. Roth, who was 6 feet 4, mentioned that he had been called “Big Ed” in high school, so the publicist suggested “Big Daddy,” which Roth loved. It was a Revell publicity man who came up with Roth’s nickname after telling him, “We can’t put ‘Beatnik Bandit by Ed Roth’ on the box.” The Revell company sold millions of Big Daddy Roth model car kits, from which Roth received a royalty of 1 cent each. The character’s wise-guy, street smart attitude lives on in such descendants as Bart Simpson, Ren & Stimpy and the foulmouthed “South Park” kids. Rat Fink’s sinister glare, razor-sharp teeth and bulging, bloodshot eyes became ubiquitous on T-shirts, posters and car decals in the ‘60s. Roth developed Rat Fink in the ‘50s as the underground culture’s response to Mickey Mouse. ![]() “His stuff was all outrageous,” said Dick Messer at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, where the Outlaw car now resides. Nora Donnelly, who organized the “Customized” exhibition for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it premiered last fall, said: “An enormous amount of people have been influenced by him, in the hot rod art world as well as in the contemporary art world.” “You can clearly see that influence on the arts, and it certainly had a bigger influence here in the West than it did in the East, where New York largely dominated the art world.” “Our specific purpose,” said Howard Fox, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, “was to reveal the influence of the automobile generally, and the concepts of speed, the aesthetics of sleekness and the interest that painters and sculptors of the 1960s had in new materials we often associate with these fast-paced racing cars, and with “Big Daddy” Roth in particular. ![]()
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