My dad would say the best artists hide their mistakes. I don’t know what an accountant was doing giving advice to his budding car designer son, but there is no better example of this adage than Earl Bruce’s Gullwing Mercedes. Back in the 1950s, the hardest custom color to shoot was Candy Root Beer. I’ve asked the custom paint greats like Larry Watson and Junior Conway about this odd phenomenon, and they said it was something about the pigments; after laying down the perfect Candy Root Beer, it would sometimes blotch for no reason. It was a peculiar color unto itself. So for those in the know a nice Candy Root Beer paint job with no blemishes had a certain cache. In 1955 Bruce had his then-new 300 SL Gullwing painted Candy Root Beer, and sure enough, the lower portions of the body started to blotch soon after the lacquer set up. Von Dutch was just making a name for himself flaming and pinstriping cars in the L.A. area, so Bruce wheeled the Merc’ over to ’Dutch’s for a flame job “to cover up the bad spots.” According to ’Dutch, after two cases of beer, a few jugs of wine, and about 20-odd rolls of masking tape, the white flame job was almost complete. Outlined in yellow pinstriping and with a custom ’Dutch-fabbed grille shield thrown into the deal, one of the most notorious paint jobs ever created was foisted upon the streets of L.A. ’Dutch said, “People couldn’t accept a flamed 300 SL Gullwing back then. They thought it was desecrating a shrine.”
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