While Elon Musk was still in diapers, Elizabeth Carmichael was ready to wake up the auto industry with a hugely innovative car idea.
In 1974 – as the US neared the end of a crippling gasoline shortage – Carmichael introduced the public to the Dale: a three-wheeled car that cost just $ 2,000 and reportedly put 70 miles to the gallon.
She presented herself as a renegade auto industry, going against the so-called Big Three automakers, and the media ate it up calling the car “what everyone is looking for”. A Carmichael poster showed her on an LA freeway. The Dale even glittered like a prize on “The Price is Right.”
“We’re going to shock General Motors and Ford right out of their crowded seats!” Carmichael, then 37, claimed.
She sure shocked everyone.
As revealed in the HBO documentary series “ The Lady and the Dale, ” which premiered on Sunday on Jan. 31, Carmichael was a crook hunter, counterfeiter and con man wanted by the FBI. She was also new to femininity, she was born an Indiana man named Jerry Dean Michael until he staged his own death – via a fake Mafia hit.
And Carmichael’s promises about the Dale, including that its “stronger than steel” body shell was bulletproof, were too good to be true.
But the public, fearful of rising gas prices and in the midst of a recession, wanted to believe. “The American people liked the idea that they were looking for them,” Leslie Kendall, chief historian at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, told The Post. “Plus she was extremely credible – enough to get a few million out of people.”
Jerry Michael, as Carmichael was first called, fathered five children through three women in 1961 when he was arrested for counterfeiting. He skipped an injunction and brought his fourth wife, Vivian, who was then pregnant with their first child. He hopped his growing family around the Sunbelt and stayed one step ahead of law enforcement and landlords. “Moving is cheaper than paying rent,” he once joked.
Finally, tired of the FBI’s chase, he pretended to be dead and crashed his car into a tree on a dark road. “Jerry’s car was found along the road,” Vivian’s brother Charles Richard Barrett said in the document. ‘It had his blood on it. It turns out he was murdered – but he was still alive … He shot his car up, I think. And away he went. Then he went underground for a while. “
In the early 1970s, Michael had been reborn in Southern California as Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, a “widow” who falsely claimed to have earned a degree in mechanical engineering.
Woman Vivian was still on the ride, but now pretended to be the aunt of their five children who stayed with them; the couple remained legally married. Carmichael worked for a company, the United States Marketing Institute, that sold advice to inventors. “That job was a turning point,” documentary co-director Nick Cammilleri told The Post. This was her progress. She ended up in a place where she could help other people realize their dreams. “
A customer, Dale Clifft, invented a three-wheeled car that resembled a dune buggy and was powered by a motorcycle engine. Carmichael was captivated. “She has licensed Dale Clifft’s rights,” Cammilleri said. Dale saw the power of his invention and examined it [licensing it] as a positive step. “
She hired a bright PR guy, rented production space in Encino, California, and launched the 20th Century Motor Car Corporation – Describes the workplace atmosphere as “a religious zeal”. Engineer Greg Leas says in the document, “There was an energy in that place. Almost like a big family. “
Nonetheless, things seemed a bit strange to company insiders. Engineer Gerry McGuinness talks about getting paid from stacks of $ 100 bills in the document and recalls unsavory figures in fancy suits hanging around: “You’re not telling me they’re not the mob.”
But by 1974, when a group of potential investors wanted to see the car in action, Carmichael’s money-ground crew had to put together a running version. “He had a BMW motorcycle engine,” mechanic Hans Hasson, who worked at 20th Century Motors, told The Post. And if you took a sharp turn, [part of the front] took to the air. “
After seeing the dangerous-looking vehicle up close, the potential investors withdrew. Carmichael called the show “a three-wheeled abortion.”
Nonetheless, unsuspecting buyers flooded 20th Century Motors with a deposit, and dealers paid $ 35,000 each to secure their position as a Dale retailer. Carmichael had to keep that money in custody. Instead, it seemed to fund her lifestyle and the business.
In addition, she sold shares of Dale stock without obtaining a license.
A shell of the Dale was shown at the LA Auto Show in January 1975, sparking a lot of hype. “It caused a lot of wonder,” said Kendall, who attended the show with his father. “It looked like a bright yellow missile ship … If the claims were true, the way cars were built and configured would change the game.”
In February 1975, Carmichael and four company executives went to Dallas, where they hoped to have Dales produced. At that moment all hell broke loose. News had been leaked about her illegal sale of stock and an SEC investigation was underway. For some reason, Carmichael left her two bodyguards – former San Quentin cellmates – and they got into a heated argument about how to suppress the investigation. One of the ex-cons wanted to kill the investigator. The other disagreed and a fist fight ensued. A gun was drawn and it went off accidentally, killing one of the men and generating the kind of publicity Carmichael didn’t want.
The once-radiant media coverage of Carmichael and the Dale turned murky as customers demanded a refund and details emerged about Carmichael’s fraudulent ways. “Things started to fall apart,” McGuinness says in the document. It happened quickly – boom, boom, boom. You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing a negative report. “
With the As she dropped out, Carmichael and top staff gathered in a Dallas home where she and her family camped. Carmichael’s daughter Candi Michael recalls seeing one of the Dale salesmen enter the meeting with a suitcase full of cash. ‘It had just closed [the company] account. They divided the money and everyone went their own way, ”she says in the series. “In less than 10 minutes, our whole family was in the car and we were on our way. That was the end. “
Director Cammilleri believes Carmichael intended to manufacture the Dale – if only she could have secured funding before her misdeeds got home. “I would say Dale’s car came as close as the Tesla in 2009,” he said. ‘When they have the money [from investors], we tell a different story. “
Carmichael was on the run with her family and was soon followed to Miami and arrested on charges of theft and securities fraud. About $ 6 million in corporate funds went missing. She was eventually released on $ 50,000 bail provided by a studio hoping to make a film of her life story, likely propelled by revelations that the Carmichael was transgender and would undergo sex reassignment surgery in Tijuana.
After a lengthy trial in California, jurors found her guilty of large-scale theft and securities fraud in late 1977.
Carmichael disappeared again, after a series of appeals and just before her 1980 conviction. Nine years later, an episode of the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” led to her arrest in Texas. She was sentenced to 32 months and spent more than two years in a men’s prison.
Around 1990, a released Carmichael perfected a highly profitable plan that hired previously homeless people to sell roses on Austin’s street corners.
One of the four remaining Dale prototypes is now in the Petersen Museum. Carmichael died of cancer in 2004, aged 67, after a lifetime of cheating. “What she was trying to do in a year, it took Detroit decades to make up for it,” said Petersen’s Kendall. “She thought she could make a car with sheer willpower.”