![]() ![]() The Oakland Museum of California hosted a retrospective of California car culture that prominently featured Roth, and the Laguna Museum of Art recently featured works by Roth and other underground “Kustom Kulture” artists. The question is a serious one for Roth, whose creations have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the four or five years since he sold the rights to the Rat Fink and his name to Mooneyes Inc., a California car-parts company that has aggressively marketed his wares. “How can I expect to stay home and be sealed to a woman if I’m doing this?” he asks. Last month, when Roth proposed to Ilene Brothersen, a divorced mother of two and the Sanpete County auditor, his old dilemma of competing lifestyles came roaring back. “You know, I thought those days would never end,” he says. In his garage, a T-shirt wrapped around his face to keep out the fiberglass dust, Roth is almost ready to send the frame and engine of Stealth ’99 out for chroming, and the body is beginning to take shape.īut he takes a moment to reminisce about the times, decades back, when his Maywood, Calif., garage was a gathering place for movie stars, bikers and artists. Earlier this year he started work on “Stealth ‘99,” an extravagantly angular creation based on the stealth bomber. Two years ago, he built his first new car in nearly 30 years-the Beatnik Bandit II-and spent nearly five months on the road at car shows. Roth has had less success reconciling his obsession with his wheeled creations. A painting of Jesus Christ hangs above a photo of one of his trikes. The nexus between Roth’s God and the ghoulish Rat Fink can be found today on a cluttered table in his living room: Boxes of modeling clay and an unfinished character are stacked beneath his Mormon scriptures. “People who bother to find out about him know he’s just a good-natured clown.” “It took me awhile to figure out that there was nothing wrong with Rat Fink,” he said. In 1988, he abandoned Los Angeles altogether for the bucolic isolation of Manti, where his attitude toward his cartoon creation mellowed. So for a decade, Roth turned his considerable talents to the mundane: He painted signs and pinstriped trains at Knott’s Berry Farm. “Moms used to drag their kids away from my booth.” “Some people thought Rat Fink was ghastly, with his bloodshot eyes and teeth,” Roth said. ![]() While Roth says religion saved him from a destructive lifestyle, it brought with it new turmoil: how to reconcile his outrageous genius with his newfound beliefs.Īt the time, his solution “was to give it all up.” Roth said he was “really ripped” one day, working in his shop, when a friend dropped off a copy of the Book of Mormon. A series of his posters depicting the exploits of the outlaw motorcycle club are for auction now at Bonham’s in London. Roth had also been publicly vilified for crusading for the Hell’s Angels. Roth’s conversion to Mormonism in 1974 came at a time when he was disillusioned with making cars and had turned his attention to “trikes,” the hybrid three-wheeled motorcycles shunned by hot-rod traditionalists and banned from auto shows. “It’s like, I’ll be sitting there and all I’ll be able to think is, ‘Go get the Chrysler Hemi!’ ” ![]() “If I’m having a design problem, I’ll go to the temple for three or four hours and it will come to me,” Roth said. But it has taken him years to get comfortable with the idea. He’s more than half inclined these days to see his inspiration as personal, divine revelation, in keeping with his Mormon beliefs. “When I was a kid, you wondered where these things were coming from.” “You realized that Roth had a vision,” said Ken Gross, curator and executive director of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, home to Roth’s 1959 seminal roadster, the Outlaw. “He’s the Salvador Dali of the movement-a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster,” Wolfe wrote. Author Tom Wolfe, in his 1964 essay on the California hot-rod phenomenon, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” described Roth as the “most colorful, the most intellectual and the most capricious” of the car customizers. ![]()
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