Imagine you’re Lance Reventlow. You’re young, dangerously handsome, unimaginably wealthy. Your mother is Barbara Hutton, the original “poor little rich girl,” heiress to the vast Woolworth fortune. You haven’t seen your father, an authoritarian Danish count with the movie- villain name Court Haugwitz-Hardenberg Reventlow, since he lost a sordid public custody battle for you years ago. Instead, you’re treated like a favorite son by Cary Grant, who is another one of your mother’s many exes. (She would go on to have a grand total of seven.)
You live in a posh house in the Hollywood Hills with a proper British manservant named Dudley. You date Hollywood starlets and drive a Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing that you bought on the spur of the moment. You make the rounds of Los Angeles with a group of other rich kids known collectively as the Alpaca Rat Pack. But this is the 1950s, so your antics don’t involve hard drugs or dive bars, and most nights end at the Luau, an upscale Polynesian restaurant where a large table, Bar 5, is always reserved for you no matter how crowded the place gets.
You’re an instrument-rated pilot and world-class skier, but cars are your passion—the way they look, the way they work, the way they drive. Inevitably, you gravitate to racing. You start in Southern California in a
300SL, not your street car but an even more exotic sleeper with a rare aluminum body. You’re not a natural, but you’re competent, and you want to get better. In 1957, you travel to Europe with your racing sensei, Warren Olson, the Cooper distributor in L.A., and you tow a Formula 2 Cooper T43 from country to country with a stately 1936 Rolls-Royce that your mother bought to mark the year you were born.
In creating the Scarabs, Lance Reventlow did a great thing. He took his vast fortune and built a world-beating race car that made history.
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