the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

PANDERING WILL GET YOU NOWHERE 89
For 1956, Dodge switched from pink and white to two shades of
purple (“regal orchid” and “misty orchid” in the promotional literature).
This time around, the carmaker ditched some of the accessories—the
cigarette case, lighter, makeup case, and lipstick—but continued to offer
the raincoat and hat.
If the color scheme didn’t create a sufficiently glamorous ambience,
the La Femme offered another peculiar option that was available on a few
other high- end Chrysler cars as well—a special “Highway Hi-Fi” record
player, mounted under the dash. Developed by CBS Laboratories for the
carmaker, the device had a special bump-resistant tone arm, designed to
keep the needle in the grooves of specially constructed thirty-minutelong
rec ords that spun at a superslow 16 rpm. Besides the fact that the
turntable wouldn’t play regular 45s or LPs, the system had another inconve
nient flaw—in order to change the musical program, a driver had to pull
over, stop the car, and queue up a new disc before resuming the trip.
The Lady of the House Goes Drag Racing
All that might have added up to the ideal vehicle for, say, Liberace
(especially if Dodge had added a few sequins and an under-dash piano),
but the intended audience was decidedly unimpressed, judging by how
few La Femmes were sold. Dodge moved roughly twenty- fi ve genderneutral
Royal Custom Lancers for each La Femme that it managed to
peddle. When the La Femme was discontinued in the fall of 1956, Chrysler
president Patterson theorized that the automaker had focused a bit
too heavily on pleasing women, and ignored their husbands’ tastes. “La
Femme was definitely a two-car proposition,” he told United Press International.
“It was so feminine [that] a he-man would be embarrassed to
drive it—rather impractical for an automobile.”
Still, he admitted: “It’s tough to sell [to a woman]. You never know
what she’ll go for. Sometimes it’s the little things that interest her—the
appointments, the dashboard.”
In the 1950s, Detroit didn’t yet grasp the importance of using sur-