PHOTOGRAPHERS WOULD CALL HER A natural. Point the camera and she turns on the perfect, pert, pouting performance. It's talent that is being seriously tested at the moment, kneeling in what must be some discomfort on the roof of a Porsche Cayenne limousine, the exotic backdrop consisting of air ducts, water pipes and a large, green exit sign. Still no one appears to be going anywhere, her poses transforming the punters at the inaugural European Limousine and Chauffeur Show into a lust fuelled army of amateur paparazzi, arms holding aloft mobile phone cameras, eager to get a shot.
Dave McPhail, the designer of the stretch Cayenne, might want them to take a bit more interest in the car but he isn't stupid. They'll get to that when the erotic facade abruptly fades as she clumsily makes her way off the roof and back into some clothes.
“Most porn movies can’t do without at least one scene
involving an old Lincoln Town Car”
For now though, she's an integral part of selling the great limousine fantasy; life as one long party with plenty of care-free, high-roller sex thrown in. It's a correlative so effectively woven into limo legend that most porn movies can't do without at least one scene involving an old Lincoln Town Car and a curious chauffeur.
It's also associations like this that have people turning their noses up. Well, this and the increasingly familiar scene from Soho to Tyneside, of white stretch limos spitting out gaggles of pomaded girls into the sodium-lit, alcohol-soaked night, the aura of A-List glamour left somewhere back in the 1970's.
We might well offer a superior chuckle ourselves at this desire to be glottal stop "royalty-for-a-day" but the truth is, there's money here, and lots of it. What does it matter that people yearn for success so huge and wholly farcical? Such concerns are just another example of dreary, pendantic old England.
Limo Bob, on the other hand, is American. Really American. He looks like he's been dressed by a drunk pimp-glittering gold shirt, wrap around shades, enough chains hanging from his neck to anchor a small yacht-but the head of Limo King Enterprises and creator of outrageous cars is a man moulded in the limo ethos, born for this kind of world, even if the Chicago mafia had other ideas and sent his first limo empire up in flames. But more on that later.
Presently, Limo Bob is enjoying his status as the guest of honor and focal point for the event at Sandown Park, here to show us uptight British what it's all about. It's his first time outside any environment that didn't hear the distant flutter of a star spangled banner and he's using the opportunity to do a bit of hustling, handing out his dollar-shaped business card to anyone who happens to brush past him.
‘Limo Bob is enjoying his status as guest of honor
and focal point for the event at Sandown Park’
People hold out their hands, bemused and amused, while Bob, all good-time Yankee exuberance, shouts "How you doing?" at them like he's just run into his old buddies from Senior High.
It's a performance that both characterises and distorts a life that's been hung out to dry more than once. Bob has won and lost a fortune, then won and lost it again, before arriving here in his late forties.
"It all goes to show that no matter what, even though I lost everything twice, with enough perseverance, hard work and the grace of God, I’m back again , making these crazy, 50ft cars with jacuzzis and putting greens on them."
In terms of extravagance, Bob is being modest here, His collection of limos includes the worlds longest 100ft. It features an engine at the front and back, a swimming pool with diving board and a helicopter landing pad. Alas, it isn't street legal so there's no chance of practicing your reverse tuck while your chauffeur schleps up the M1.
It gets even more surreal; there's a Boeing 727 Jet Limo. This is yours for $1 Million.
"It's basically a plane with the wings chopped off", says Bob. "There's a dance floor inside and a bedroom with a heart shaped bed. We're also in the process of doing something using a Lear Jet."
With land and air taken care of, Bob is looking out to sea. "We've started concerting a 50ft yacht. It's going to become a limo you can drive on land and in water. Basically, it'll be the world biggest, most luxurious amphicar."
It wasn't always this off-the-wall, Bob started out driving conventional limos for his dad's business in Florida, albeit at the barely legal age of 15. By the time he was 19 he had his own, lucrative limo business in Chicago. That was when things first took a downturn.
‘I bought two blue limos from a junkyard in New York.
One of them had rusty bullet holes down the side’
"I'd brought a couple of guys back from Florida to help run the business, one who turned out to be pretty undesirable, giving the girls a hard time. So I got rid of him. Turns out he had connections with the mafia, so one by one, over a period of about two months they blew up my limos."
Bob went back to Florida for a few years to lay low, before returning to Chicago and starting up his business all over again. "I bought two blue limos from a junkyard in New York. One of them had rusty bullet holes down the side. I fixed them up, but because they weren't exactly high-class, selling point was a promise that if I was ever late for an appointment, you got the whole thing for free.”
By the late Eighties, flush on Regan-era success, he found himself portrayed as something of a local hero after offering free rides in his limos to folks at retirement homes. "It was completely spontaneous. I just picked these people up and gave them champagne and took them for a ride downtown. The next thing I know, I'm on the evening news. From that time on, the phone didn't stop ringing. And it was superstars wanting me to drive them. I'm going to the airport and picking up people like (Miami Vice Stars) Phillip Michael Thomas and Don Johnson." The investigative journalist in me has a hunch they're the inspiration for a white Ferrari ‘Superossa’, a stretch Tesarossa that makes up part of Bob's rental fleet.
It was just when it all felt so right that it started to go so wrong again. Bob fell prey to what he describes as "a sophisticated con scam with a Hollywood twist." Kim Basinger's brother approached him to set up as a partner and ended up walking off with Bob's entire business.
‘Bob Fell prey to what he describes as “a sophisticated
con scam with a Hollywood twist”’
It wasn't until he'd touted his sense of injustice on some of America's most popular chat shows in front of "a jury of millions", that Bob felt vindicated. He used the popular support as a platform for his third attempt at the limo business, the one that sees him here now, arrayed in gold and not altogether surprisingly, accompanied by a small entourage of body guards.
Under their studied gaze, I get round to the question I'd been meaning to ask the big man since being introduced. These chains around your neck, Bob, do you wear them to bed?
"No, But I had a bit too much to drink one time and forgot to take them off before going to sleep I thought I was getting mugged all night!"
He s let out a huge, booming belly laugh. As far as Bob and the limo business goes, it's time to sit back, stretch out and enjoy the ride. *
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