David Cooper instructed the tall, elegant gentleman with a white beard to close his eyes and imagine he was behind the wheel of his mother's car in the 1940s. Pretend it's raining, Cooper said. You need to turn on your wipers. What do you do? Arturo Peralta-Ramos reached above his head. Melissa Harris' Chicago Confidential Bio | E-mail | Recent columns Related David Cooper adopts creative business model for car collecting Restoring vintage automobiles 1937 Delage D8-120 Aerosport Coupe Maps 401 N May St, Chicago, IL 60642, USA Ads by Google Car Repair Specialists in Middlesbrough. Car Service Mechanic Near You. acornvehiclerepairs-ts5.co.uk Repair Garage Flawless Car Repair Work. We're The Experts. Call Us Now. platinummotors-middlesbrough.co.uk It was the first of many clues that helped Cooper confirm he had just purchased a rare find: A 1937 Delage D8-120 Aerosport Coupe, one of only 12 made. This particular Delage was one of the last of its kind built with windshield wipers activated by an overhead switch. Cooper has spent five years collecting stories and records about this car in an effort to prove it was originally purchased by Peralta-Ramos' mother, the Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers. By tracing the car's history, Cooper would substantially increase its value. That is, once his team of artisans put it back together. Cooper's journey would take him from an Austrian ski town to Peralta-Ramos' smoke-filled private office in his adobe-style hacienda in Taos, N.M. "Did I think I'd have to spend this much effort to trace down its history? No," Cooper said. "But it's also something that makes our shop unique. I've had people doing research for me at archives in Washington, London, even Copenhagen. Auto shops don't normally do that." Cooper is a vintage car restorer, whose life has become wrapped around Rogers'. A fashion icon, she had three husbands and a long string of lovers, from Clark Gable to Roald Dahl to Ian Fleming. She died in 1953 at age 50 after surgery for an aneurysm. As a young child, she contracted rheumatic fever and was told she wouldn't live past age 10. She suffered heart attacks, contracted pneumonia and had a weak arm. Her tastes were so eccentric (and extravagant) that she owned a 24-karat toothpick. According to The New York Times, she wrote "an anguished" Gable before sprinting away to New Mexico in 1947, "I have always found life so short, so terrifyingly uncertain." According to the newspaper, not long before Rogers "installed herself in New Mexico," she was frequently spotted jetting through New York in a chauffeured, custom Delage coupe that interior designer Billy Baldwin described as being so stuffed with throws and other furs that he could barely squeeze in. Cooper, 55, raced vintage cars in the 1980s. The son of a manufacturing executive and a college professor, he grew up in Evanston and majored in political philosophy at the University of Michigan. After graduation, he joined his father's sewing-equipment company. When his father sold the firm, Cooper decided to turn his car hobby into a business and opened a garage. The West Loop operation, called Cooper Technica, specializes in very old and very high-end European luxury cars. One shop wall is lined with cabinets of books. In 2006, he began looking for investment opportunities. He told his contacts he wanted to buy a car that was French, built before World War II, touring, streamlined, had a famous owner and was in boxes. "That was the only way I could afford it," he said. Cooper got a hit on Rogers' rare Delage. There were two problems: The car broker had no proof of the Rogers connection, and the car's parts were spread across three countries. The body was being worked on outside London; the mechanicals were being restored in Lyon, France; and a few parts were in boxes in a garage near Geneva, Switzerland. "I had already done some homework on Delages, and I didn't think they were doing the restoration right," Cooper said. "It turned out to be that there is quite a bit of difference between a Series 1 and a Series 2 Aerosport. They knew this car was a Series 2, but they hadn't done enough homework to figure out all of the differences." Cooper made three trips to Europe in three months to arrange the purchase. He later decided to open a garage in Lyon, where craftsmen familiar with Delages would restore the car. There are five key features to a classic car: The chassis, engine, drive train, transmission and body. To be deemed an "original," Cooper said, a car must retain three of those features, and one of those must be the chassis. The art world calls this provenance. Cooper had the Delage's chassis, engine, drive train and less than one-quarter of the body. But he had no records linking his Delage's badge or engine number to the one Rogers purchased for her third husband, Ronald Balcom, at the 1937 Paris salon. Cooper wrote letters to all of Rogers' relatives. Her granddaughter replied that her uncle and Rogers' only surviving child, Arturo Peralta-Ramos, would meet with him. Peralta-Ramos told Cooper about traveling from his family's home in Austria to Paris in the spring of 1938 to visit the workshop of the car's designer, Letourneur & Marchand. There he remembered watching his mother use her lipstick to draw a new shape on the car's rear fender. The new lines gave the rear a longer and sleeker look that better matched its streamlined front.
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