Near the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece about the Rolls-Royce Phantom being the epitome of luxury automobiles for the past 100 years. Its lineage started with the New Phantom, a.k.a. Phantom I, which means one of the most visually distinctive Rolls-Royces ever made is also a century old: the 1925/1934 Phantom I “Round Door.”
If you’re not familiar with this one-off coupe, you’re probably wondering why the Round Door is identified as both a 1925 and a 1934. Let’s just say money can buy you options.
This Rolls was originally configured with a Cabriolet body by the coachbuilders at Hooper & Co. for its first owner, Anna Thompson Dodge, the wife of Broadway and silent film actor Hugh Dillman. You might recognize her last name, which she took when she married her previous husband: Horace Elgin Dodge, a co-founder of the Dodge Brothers Company.
This Phantom was purchased by the the Raja of Nanpara in India, and then it changed hands once again, with the new owner sending it to Jonckheere in Belgium for a custom body with a sloping radiator grille cover, twin sunroofs, semicircular fender skirts, louvered rear end, side-hinged trunk cover with a prominent fin and, true to the car’s name, round doors. As neat as those doors are, perhaps what’s even cooler is the dramatic way in which the windows open.
By the 1950s, this creation was a battered heap residing in New Jersey. A subsequent owner named Max Obie had it painted gold and charged people $1 to see it within a semi trailer. Over the following decades, it spent time on the East Coast and even Japan before being acquired by the Petersen Automotive Museum in 2001 and restored.
Weighing 5,600 pounds and equipped with a 7,668cc I6 that only generates 110 horsepower, the nearly 20-foot-long Rolls-Royce Round Door is not exactly easy to drive. Then again, it wasn’t meant to be a performance machine; it was built to be a show car, winning the Prix d’Honneur at the 1936 Cannes Concours d’Elegance. You might not be able to see it on the show circuit any more, but you can get an eyeful at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime because the Petersen is on my bucket list, along with the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum, both Packard museums, the Studebaker National Museum . . .