A Life in the Fast Lane

By KURT ANDERSEN

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 gutter. "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 copied "wide track" look), then sleeker radiator grilles and vertically stacked headlights. De Lorean is credited by GM with inventing 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 good 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 stands, and I missed the spirit of aggressive competition."

So he quit. 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 a 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 do 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 good 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

With reporting by Barbara B. Dolan, Juseph Pilcher

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