Picture Car Confidential #9: Remembering Jean Jennings

Jean Jennings, a trailblazing woman and a leading character in the colorful history of automotive media, died in Michigan in December of Alzheimer’s disease, aged 70. Among the sharpest, most “on it” people you could ever meet, the longtime Automobile magazine editor and columnist was diagnosed with the pernicious illness a few years back. Now, if she were here, I’m pretty confident she’d say that once her speedy brain wasn’t exactly right, her work on this planet was finished. So, she split.

Jean played a major role in my life, and I have special affection for her as well as great admiration. Not only was she larger than life, she was driven (from birth, one suspects) to become a celebrity. Which she most emphatically was. Besides an outsized personality, she also had to possess the talent and wit to pull it off, on the magazine page and the television screen, covering the auto beat for Good Morning America.  And she did. I note, parenthetically, that Jean also helped me get my start in the car magazine business when I first sold a piece to the fledgling Automobile magazine, way back in 1985. So maybe that makes me biased. But I was hardly the only one she helped. Two or three generations of aspiring car writers and editors have had their work critiqued and championed by Jean.

Jean was not always right, no one is, but often enough that it only made sense to heed her word. She was a genuine teacher, down to earth and focused. She could read people expertly and possessed, too, the rare skills and long-distance vision needed to successfully navigate the rollicking seas of insensitive publishers and corporate backstabbers. Add the magazine and car-making industries’ historic resistance to opinionated women and their careers, and her ascent seems even more awesome and improbable.

The other week, I was asked to speak along with some other friends at a memorial service for Jean, organized by her husband Tim, and held at the Edsel Ford Experience Center in Dearborn, thanks to the Ford Motor Co., across from the historic Greenfield Village. Ford president and CEO Jim Farley gave an emotional keynote speech, as did a few of Jean’s oldest friends, from New Baltimore, Michigan. What follows is the speech I gave:

I’m honored to be here today with so many of Jean’s friends, her admirers and of course her wonderful family. It’s great to see you all.

I met Jean on the telephone in 1985. She called me not long after I’d begun a one-year clerkship for a New Jersey Supreme Court judge in Perth Amboy. To set the scene, I need to digress a little. When I was in law school in Boston the previous spring, I had answered a classified ad placed by a market research firm. It read: “Earn $75 if you thought about buying a Volvo and didn’t.” Sure, I whispered aloud to myself, I just thought of it and didn’t. So, I signed up, and went to the market research session, where I quickly discovered that none of the Volvo non-customers there knew what they were talking about—“No, ma’am, you didn’t love the Volvo’s front-wheel drive” because there were no front-drive Volvos … yet. “No, you didn’t cross-shop an Olds 98 with a Volvo 240, because no one does,” I told a lady who was filling her handbag with complimentary sandwiches, a conspicuous act of pilferage surely visible to the folks sitting behind the meeting room’s one-way mirrors and, clearly, along with the $75, the real purpose of her attendance. No one seemed to mind. Except me.

So, I wrote a story about it. And I actually sold it to another publication, which will remain nameless. Then, as I was about to embark on my first major story for this other publication, the editor-in-chief, fairly in his cups by the sound of it, chimed in super unhelpfully one night, hours before I was leaving a law school internship in San Francisco for New York, where I was set to pick up a Lotus Esprit Turbo S3 and drive it (my first official car test) back to San Francisco. Who the hell was I? he wanted to know. He denied they’d already run a few pieces of mine and, before long, we got into a fight. As he colorfully explained, he didn’t care that it was 9 o’clock at night or that I was helping write a death penalty appeal before catching a 6 a.m. flight, or that his co-editors had approved the story or that they’d sent me a plane ticket and some gas money already. He insisted on a 1500-word summary of the 2500-word Lotus article I’d been assigned before I took off. And when I refused, he invited me to take it and my Volvo market research piece and the $150 they’d already paid me and shove it all, along with the Esprit story. He spoke additional words, not in a caring way.

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Professional tragedy—or so I thought. My cousin Bill had told me about a new magazine starting up with some major talent. It was to be called Automobile. So I sent the retroactively rejected story in with a cover letter and forgot about it. About 10 weeks later, Jean called. She offered me $1800 for the same piece. I asked her if she could hold on a minute, then came back, and said I guessed so. This was real money at the time—and, here’s some inside baseball, more than many magazines pay today, long before you take inflation into account.

Suffice to say, Jean and I, we’d gotten off on the right foot. And we rarely got off it. The following summer she sent me to every baseball park in America in a Corvette roadster. The summer after that on tour in a Chrysler (actually, Plymouth) minivan with the indie rock duo They Might Be Giants and their soundman. (Before long, I’d become their manager.) My law school classmates, bored out of their minds in their entry-level employment, were jealous. Without Jean, I might never ever have gotten to live in dreamland.

Like the rest of you, I wish we weren’t here remembering our friend. We should be with her, blasting along some lonely, winding two-lane, somewhere warm and this side of funky, top down, slowing each time we hit the city limits of another small, rural town. Maybe we’re scouting dinner, maybe looking for the rest of our number on a group test. Maybe we’re just passing through. Doesn’t matter. Jean brought laughs and paranormal energy to every moment and she’d always be talking up a storm. That’s the Jean I remember. It’s what she did for any and all who knew her, every day. And, in the process of being a thoughtful listener, she could sure blab. With Jean, an explosive torrent of words was always a strong possibility.

Now people who blab, they are my people. But Jean was uniquely magnetic. And she was more than that. I guess most people are the sum of a lot of things. But her story was different. Jean wasn’t a lot of things, she was a really, really lot of things. In fact, I think she was more of more things than anyone I ever met. She had the over-the-top energy, the drive and will to do more, something that many of us—perfectly swell though we may be—lack. She was a great writer, a first-class storyteller, an all-purpose roving wit. She was a collaborator, a conspirator, she was our Captain.

A talented editor and a gifted saleswoman, Jean could talk to anybody about anything anytime, and not just about cars—hardly a given in our business, where so many are what we used to call pocket-protected—that is, uptight, measured, mistrustful. Jean was none of those things. She was warm, open, bawdy, hilarious, and in her element wherever she went. Because her element was her. Soon enough, she became a leader and her legend grew. People respected her, they listened to her, they wanted to be her friend. And why not? I mean, seriously. A raucously amusing writer and television personality with the gift of great gab, equipped with a trailer load of stories and laughs always at the ready. There was a reason she and Tim would find themselves in duck blinds with auto industry CEOs and the rest of us didn’t. She was more entertaining. And a better shot. So, actually, that’s two reasons.

Jean had an “in” entering the business—her father, Automotive News editor Robert Lienert’s elite reputation among Detroit car industry editors and scribes didn’t hurt. But make absolutely no mistake—she did it all by herself, with the skills, nature, and public persona that must have amazed her buttoned-down father more than anyone. When Jean arrived on the scene at Car and Driver, you could count the number of women’s bylines in enthusiast publications on the toes of a one-legged, three-toed sloth. Many scores of women have followed in her path, and the car enthusiast world is far the better and richer for it.

Understandably, Jean has since been held up as a champion and mentor of women, and rightly so, because she always was. She blazed the path for a couple generations of women. But let it not be overlooked that her good works didn’t just favor the many women she hired, promoted, and encouraged, they included her larger practice of hiring the best people she could find to work with, not because of but regardless of skin color, creed, sex, or sexual orientation. Or their level of geekiness. Jean pitched a big tent and the quality of the magazine that she gave most of her professional life to reflected it.

Jean always had a story and she could name-drop with the best. She lived in a world of yarns and humorous anecdotes, which you were going to hear whether you planned to or not. Of course, in the end, you were always glad you did.

Jean knew a lot, she read a lot, she saw a lot. But she didn’t subscribe to any theory or particular historical dialectic; she had people whom she called friends and she called a lot of people friends, tens of thousands of them, if I had to guess, across the spectrum of political and religious belief and non-belief. Most of whose names and faces she could recall on sight. She had an incredible memory. Which was handy; she was a star wherever she went and someone always wanted to talk to her. If not, she’d talk to them and before long, they were wanting to talk to her.

I remember being in Jean’s office in the Ann Arbor, Michigan, Automobile magazine headquarters one morning when she opened a large envelope only to extract a short letter with a gift from an admiring reader. This is back when magazine subscriptions were so cheap that people could readily afford them, even in prison. I’m no prude but I have to admit I was somewhat taken aback. The gift—a pair of black rubber underpants—had come from someone in prison. Now the rubber underpants weren’t her thing, either, but, as Jean explained, she’d received plenty of similar stuff before and that’s not even to mention all the men, executives and otherwise, who attempted to try it on with her. Not the rubber underpants, mind you. Just getting fresh. Which reminds me, I’ve always wondered how an incarcerated member of society got hold of a pair of lady’s rubber underpants. One of life’s mysteries, not that it mattered, as the whole package was swiftly tossed.

So, farewell, Jean. No one ever worked so many happy dichotomies into one life. You were a Marine boot camp sergeant. You were our mom. You were a goody-two shoes and everyone’s naughty friend. You were tough as nails, you were the queen of empathy. An ass-kicking boss, and a real softie. An enforcer of rules and a compassionate booster of those who thought so far out of the box, they were thinking outside the shipping container. An outdoors woman who could rock a society event. I could go on, but mostly you were just Jean.

Once, Jean told the writer Susan Orlean, who spent a week with her for a 2001 New Yorker profile, what she called her slogan. It does a pretty good job standing in for Jean’s philosophy of life. And it was among the many things Jean taught me. “If you have a shitty time,” she said, “no one notices. So you might as well have a good time.”

It isn’t easy for anyone, and Jean had her trials and tribulations, like the rest of us, but I do believe that having a good time is exactly what she did.

***

A man of many pursuits (rock band manager, automotive journalist, concours judge, purveyor of picture cars for film and TV), Jamie Kitman lives and breathes vintage machines. His curious taste for interesting, oddball, and under-appreciated classics—which traffic through his Nyack, New York warehouse—promises us an unending stream of delightful cars to discuss. For more Picture Car Confidential columns, click here. Follow Jamie Kitman on Instagram at @commodorehornblow; follow Octane Film Cars @octanefilmcars and at www.octanefilmcars.com.