It’s the first Tuesday of the new year, and I’d hope everyone in Curbsideland is having a great start to 2025, or at least is giving themselves the grace to allow time for good things to gain traction. If it seems like I had just written about a Corvair, it’s because I had, with the penultimate essay of new content I had scheduled for the end of last year before the “best of” articles had rerun. In case you are wondering why I had started scheduling my weekly posts specifically for Tuesday mornings roughly four or five years ago, there was no real science behind it. I had only known that I had wanted to start contributing regularly on a weekly basis, and I also didn’t want to worry about doing last-minute editing on Sunday afternoons for a Monday feature, so Tuesday morning it was.
I had seen this ’64 Corvair on the first Sunday of last month, and it was as if it was practically begging to become my next subject car. I was going to brunch across the street with friends, one of whom I hadn’t seen for at least six years, when I saw what looked like four round taillamps set into a cute, little butt end. Could that be… is that another Corvair at the curb? This was the second Corvair I had seen in this neighborhood in just over a couple of months, and the only first-generation model I had seen in the wild here in Chicago. You can toggle between this essay on this ’64 and last month’s piece on the redesigned ’65 to look at the significant differences in the stylistic details of the two cars, with both examples still sharing strong Corvair brand identity.
Where the lines of the ’65 have a decidedly sophisticated, international flair, this Azure Aqua convertible has a perky, wholesome, all-American look by comparison. It’s an older compact that actually looks like a compact, and not just nominally. Within the context of the early 1960s, these were small cars, especially considering that full-sized cars were still considered the standard. It’s just so cute and innocent looking. How could anything this apple-pie-on-wheels have ever been implicated in any deadly automotive mishaps? It occurs to me that this first-generation Corvair convertible is like the Tuesday Weld of cars: so sweet, pretty, and unassuming on the outside and yet, like the actress and many of her roles, seemingly complicated, intense, and perhaps, misunderstood.
Curbside’s Paul Niedermeyer had written this comprehensive essay on the 1960 – ’63 Corvair which had originally run at the end of 2012. This is recommended reading for a basic understanding of some of the challenges that drivers experienced with the handling of the early cars. There were specific tire pressure recommendations from the factory, front and rear, which were intended to neutralize the car’s tendency to oversteer and potential to flip over in emergency maneuvers. Changes for ’64 included a standard anti-roll bar up front and a modified rear suspension, by which time the handling issues had been mostly sorted out. Once the Corvair had found its true calling as the sporty, “bucket seat” (basically two individual bench seats up front) Monza after failing to fully succeed as a no-frills economy car, it was still unconventional with its air-cooled, rear-engine design.
The Corvair did things its own way and on its own terms, and so did Tuesday Weld. I’ve long been a cinema buff and have spent many cold, winter evenings watching classic films. This fascination with vintage movies had started while I was in college, when I would scour the VHS section of the student library for titles or cover artwork that looked interesting, in the days before I had discovered the internet. It was in my early twenties that I had first started educating myself about the careers of many interesting actors, actresses, directors, and the like, but for some reason and at the time, the mystique of Tuesday Weld had eluded me. She had started her career as a child model, moving to television (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) and eventually movies, being cast in roles that seemed to contrast her beautiful, girl-next-door looks with overt sex appeal (Sex Kittens Go To College).
There are many beautiful actresses with compelling filmographies to study and enjoy, but it was during a chance viewing of what I’d estimate to be the second half of the film Pretty Poison from 1968 while channel-surfing (I still can’t decide if it’s a dark comedy or pure tragedy) that piqued my interest in Ms. Weld’s body of work. It’s important to be able to separate the actor / actress from the roles they portray, but without giving away any of the plot, I’ll just say that I kept looking at the character of Sue Ann Stepanek and wondering how such an apparent ingenue could progressively reveal herself to be so… complicated, and in a bad way. Ms. Weld also seemingly didn’t give two cents about her public perception, dating men decades older than her, smoking, drinking… empowered with the agency to make her own choices (good or bad), and living her life the way she wanted to at that time. She could be thought of as the 2000s-era Lindsay Lohan of her day. (I am also a Lohan fan.)
The decidedly idiosyncratic early Corvair was an eventual target of political activist and consumer advocate Ralph Nader for its unsafe handling characteristics under certain circumstances. We all know how that went, and if not, Paul’s essay linked above includes pertinent details. I like that this example is from the final year of the first generation, capping the fifth model year of Corvair production. The Monza convertible was the second-most popular of any Corvair sold that year, with its 31,000 units second only to the 88,400 Monza coupes that found buyers. The turbocharged Monza Spyder was the least-popular series, with combined production of 11,300 units split between 6,500 coupes and 4,800 convertibles. The total of 192,000 Corvairs sold for ’64 was significantly behind Ford’s 300,800 Falcons and also 251,000 Plymouth Valiants (including 23,400 Barracudas, which were still considered Valiants) that year.
Ms. Weld’s film career and accolades continued to gain traction as the ’60s progressed, even as she turned down roles that became big box office successes, with Rosemary’s Baby and Bonnie & Clyde being commonly cited as examples. By the time the ’70s had rolled around, she had taken an extended hiatus from pictures until her turn in 1977s Looking For Mr. Goodbar (a film I still haven’t seen). To me, her temporary disappearance echoes how the Corvair had simply vanished after ’69 with little fanfare, as I had referenced in last month’s essay.
The thing I have come to appreciate about many of Weld’s roles, even those of the beautiful brat, was the sense of menace that seemed to be lurking just beneath the surface, hidden under those cascading, blonde locks and behind that perfect pout. Even with the proper tire inflation, I wonder how many modern day owners and drivers of the early Chevrolet Corvair secretly enjoy the thought that they’re driving a beautiful car that, rightly or wrongly, was thought to be just a little bit dangerous.
Uptown, Chicago, Illinois.
Sunday, December 1, 2024.
Mr. Joseph, your analogies make the car and the actress alluring. I need to go downstairs and start my day, but just the opening lines of this essay told me to finish reading this before descending to reality. I, too, regret the passing of the Corvair. It was again one of those cars that brought a different look and feel, for those who drove them, to motoring. Thanks, also, for identifying the location where this is seen.
Thanks, Thomas! Yes, to me, the Corvair was a different animal, which is one of reasons I like it. I also like to include a time and place stamp for the sighting just for my own record. Sometimes, I’ve written about a car I had spotted years and years ago and I like to include the year for context.
Joe, what a great analogy. Not one that would have ever occurred to me but now that you’ve made it, it’s perfect. For me, a regular TV viewer in the 1960s and 70s, Tuesday Weld’s characters always conveyed a certain air of menace that was only just barely below the surface. I think that even as a child, I understood that her characters were the type of people who were much better seen than actually interacted with. Nowadays, popular culture would put many of Tuesday’s roles in the “crazy girlfriend” category. Fascinating, yet scary. As a non-Corvair owner, that aura does indeed linger a bit in my mind around these cars.
Thanks also for referencing Dobie Gillis. I was also fascinated with this show due largely to its co-star, Bob Denver/Gilligan. At that age, I had a hard time separating actors from their roles, and I was desperate to figure out how Maynard G. Krebs went from Dobie’s sidekick to the Skipper’s little buddy. This fascination was simply accelerated by my Mom’s adamant hate of Maynard G. Krebs (and therefore Bob Denver as Mom also had a hard time separating actors from the roles they played). If there was one thing Mom hated more than hippies, it was beatniks. Thus, Dobie Gillis was forbidden fruit.
Tuesday was only on that for one season, perhaps because she spent much of her time just being gorgeous yet mean to the show’s namesake main character.
Well, any year that starts with a Corvair has promise, so I’ll take that as a good sign.
ps…If the entrancing whiff of possible danger motivates Corvair owners, I wonder how come the same thing doesn’t work for Pintos.
Thanks so much, Jeff! I definitely agree that many of Weld’s characters from the ’60s might fall into the slight unbalanced girlfriend archetype, though I found that quality actually endearing in her character in 1961’s “Bachelor Flat”.
I grew up on “Gilligan” reruns in the ’80s, so to learn that Bob Denver has played any other role was somewhat shocking, so associated with “Gilligan” was he in my mind.
I like Pintos now, but they never had the same cool factor in my mind as the ‘Vair. Not even the Cruising Wagon, though I like those too!
I think I have always preferred the looks of the original Corvair over the looks of the 2nd generation. Whether that is purely an aesthetic choice or because these imprinted themselves on me from a young age, I can’t say.
I have never paid much attention to Tuesday Weld – perhaps because much of her work was during my childhood, when her name was a great subject for jokes. She was one of those actors whose movies were on late-night TV – too old to be modern and too modern to catch my interest in classic films. Maybe it’s time for a fresh look.
I do like the “rare”, station wagon, models. Prefer the “updated”, coupe though.(and convert)
The “post”, coupes/sedans, though are likely better to invest time/effort/money, into. (that structural, integrity factor)
JP, I appreciate your perspective on Weld and her body of work as someone who has been a youth when she has started her film career. I’ve been spending time with youths who are in their late teens and twenties and have come to realize just how fee of my cultural references are ones with which they have any frame of reference.
My brother’s first car was “Pierre” a well used yellow ’64 Monza Spyder coupe with 4 spd and a 4 carb conversion (no turbo). It was a fun car for buzzing around in. He was 18, I was 23, and my main memory of that car was driving around at night in the winter to get away from the ‘rents for a while (when we were visiting them near Bethlehem PA) so we could get high. The heater was not working well and we were freezing our butts off but not caring a bit thanks to Schaeffer beer and really good weed! Never owned one but still have some big love for ‘Vairs… good times!
I love reading firsthand accounts like this – thank you for sharing it! And Unlike the name “Pierre” as the name for one of these. After all, I’m sure the early Corvair seemed plenty European in character.
Growing up in the 70s I never really saw these in real life. But I did see them and other late 50s early 60s cars rendered in my older siblings hand me down Mad magazines and such of that era. I saw things like Corvairs and tail fins and thought wow these artists are very creative. Even today I sometimes see some old car and think wait that was real?
Anyhow I feel like I’m going to own a second gen vert one of these days.
Andy…Then you should definitely travel west to Clark’s Corvair parts in Shelburne Falls! It’s right on Rt. 2, just west of Greenfield. I drive by regularly (particularly as I used to live in the Valley) and am always tempted to stop.
I think for Corvair owners, this is a national treasure. Right in our Massachusetts back yards!
https://ssl.corvair.com/user-cgi/main
Andy, I hope you get that second-genersrion convertible! I just got a die cast model of one that I need to take out of the box. Beautiful cars.
And Jeff, you just reminded me that years ago, I had purchased a vintage “Clark’s Corvairs” t-shirt from some shop! I need to dig that out and wear it again…
You remembered, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”! Everyone always says “the Dobie Gillis show”.
My fav characters were “Mr/Mrs Gillis”. (“Frank Faylen/Florida Friebus”)
I now feel like I need to see if YouTube has any episodes available for free viewing!
You do indeed “JD”. Depending on your age, wait till ya see all the “familiar” faces.
“Doris Packer’s”, character almost needed a show of it’s own. lol
Many are available on YT. The series has “aged” very well, as it still retains a modern and “hip” sensibility. Look for a very young Warren Beatty as a rich jock who is Dobie’s rival for Thalia’s (Weld) attention. ‘Pretty Poison’ is a fave movie, and is a cult classic (Beverly Garland plays a MONSTER mother, lol!). Tuesday Weld has an “unusual” screen presence – like Kim Novak, she seems “otherworldly”, and thus
fascinating to watch…
Florida Friebus…an all time great character actor and a TV mainstay for those of us of a certain age.
Among many other characters, she was Mrs. Bakerman on The Bob Newhart Show. 🙂
I have had direct experience with two first generation Corvairs, one a van, back in the early 60’s, and another in the mid ’70’s, a Monza coupe. I was surprised when my Dad bought the four speed Monza, which seemed very unlike him, at the time. He had never liked manual transmissions, and I was already in my early 20’s and did not need him to supply me with a car. However I drove the Corvair quite a bit. The styling was nice and it was fun with the four speed, seemed to handle okay, it also kept it’s fan belt on most of the time. These cars really needed the specific replacement belt. which wasn’t carried by the local Grand Auto store. I guess my Dad had an interest in the design of the Corvair drivetrain, since he had bought a two or three year old van for a family trip to Mexico in ’62. After that trip, I suppose that he decided that there wasn’t anything that the Corvair did that couldn’t be done better by a conventional car and he replaced it with a new ’64 Pontiac Tempest wagon. My own conclusion was that there wasn’t anything that the Monza did that couldn’t be done better by a Mustang, and it seems that America also came to that conclusion.
Happy 2025 to you Joseph, I look forward to a New Year of reading your enjoyable posts!
Jose, thank you, and Happy New Year to you, as well! Reading what you wrote to the effect of “nothing that couldn’t be done better by a conventional car” is an interesting idea and makes me wonder at what point many consumers came to this conclusion.
I recently watched an old Chevy dealer promo film from ’65 on YouTube that compared the Corvair with the car they referred to at first as the “Falcon Mustang” (of course intentionally, to make a point). Some of the Corvair selling points Chevy made was the many body styles the Corvair was available in. I *love* the Corvair, but I felt like Chevy was stretching it.
My opinion on the ’60-63 Corvairs remains that they all should have had a suspension more like the ’64’s, or at least a standard anti-roll bar; even if owners followed the tire pressure recommendations religiously, front 15psi tires would become overloaded if the car’s full 6 passenger capacity was used (with luggage in the front trunk), above what the tire manufacturers specified. Chevrolet cheaped out by not putting in a sway bar all along, and paid the price.
I’m far from an expert on car handling though, so I’ll concentrate the rest of this post on the Corvair’s styling, which I find intriguing because of its modern relevancy, which I’ll get to in a moment. The convertible looks a bit stodgier to my eyes than the coupe or sedan, though still attractive. But while this was a leading-edge and influential design in 1960, it looked quite dated by 1964. The Mustang looks a generation ahead. ’63-later Rambler Classics look more modern. The car I most see in the side view shown in the third pic here is a ’62-63 Lark Daytona, which combined a stubby front only slightly changed from the original ’59 models with new elongated rear overhang, which gave it vaguely rear-engine proportions (similar styling of the headlamp bezels too). The updated grille on the ’64 Studes made them look more modern to me than this Corvair to my eyes, and that’s just not how things should be if you’re GM. The 2nd-gen ‘Vairs couldn’t have arrived at a more crucial time, but while very attractive, the Mustang was by then the definitive sporty American coupe and nothing Chevy (or anyone else) did could change that.
But it’s the front-end styling of the Corvair that most intrigues me, as Chevrolet faced the same challenges there that many new cars have faced in the last decade. Namely, how do you give a car an attractive, distinctive face when there’s no engine up front and thus no need for a grille? Grilles of course have long been most obvious indicator of what brand car you’re looking at – even non-car people can usually identify, say, a BMW, because of the twin-kidney grille. But EVs, like rear-engined cars, don’t need grilles, and that presents a dilemma to designers – how do give your car a recognizable face without a grille? One common option is a fake grille, but that flies in the face of form following function and rarely looks right. Other approaches include the blank stare of a Tesla Model 3 or Y (the former recently cleaned up some), or my favorite, the little vertical lights and light bar on Rivians. Rivian came up with a distinctive “face” without aping front-engine cars, which I like. EVs weren’t much of a thing in the early 1960s, but rear engines were, and it’s interesting to compare the faces of ’50s/’60s rear-engine cars with those on modern EVs and see how designers dealt with this challenge then and now. The ’64 Corvair did a nice job. There’s something to look at out front between the headlamps, but it’s not a grille. The trimpiece does look a bit like that on other early-’60s Chevys (and some Buicks and Oldsmobiles), but it’s set against painted sheetmetal instead of a grille on the Corvair. It’s one of the nicest faces ever to grace a rear-engine (or no-engine) car.
You bring up a great point about EVs and different ways that manufacturers have found to make them look more conventional up frontz including shakes and cutouts that include shapes that seem analogous to traditional grilles.
As far as the Studebaker Lark styling comparison, I wasn’t there when either car was new, so I can’t agree or disagree with your impression for that time period. I do look the like of the ’64 Lark, but comparing it with the Corvair to me is like apples and oranges. The rest of the Corvair has it altogether in a generally more attractive package, IMO.
CC effect is 5×5 again Monza ragtop is a very rare car over here yet I was beside one in traffic recently white with a red top nice looking car actually and in restored condition not beater class.
I’d be curious to know how many Corvairs are (or remain) in Oceania!
Another “just right” survivor =8-) .
I love the first generation Corvairs and had I held onto it I could now afford the premium fuel my ’62 base coupe demanded .
I loved zizzing that car up the Angeles Crest Highway at improbable speeds, it was -so- light the relatively low powered engine and ‘Slip ‘N Slide Powerglide’ slush box didn’t hurt it’s performance at all .
I *must* be ancient as I remember Dobie Gillis, mostly I remember Bob Denver (‘Gilligan’) acting the fool .
Keep looking for those Curbside Classics, we love ’em ! .
-Nate
-Nate
Tuesday’s gone with the wind…
The Corvair, 1st and 2nd generation, were a couple of the few GM designs that resonated with me. The first gen, like Tuesday, was uniquely attractive.