My first Pebble Beach car bacchanalia, where too much is never enough

A ten-year-old boy, as blond and wide-eyed as Richie Rich from his bow-tie to his short pants, sat in a 1932 Morgan Aero Super Sports, fielding inquiries from admirers.

“Do you prefer the four-wheel or the three-wheel?” a man asked him, taking amused photos.

“Oh, I prefer the three-wheel,” the boy said.

He got out of the car.

“I’m gonna go eat ice cream now,” he said. “Actually, I’m gonna go check out the Lamborghini stand.”

This piquant scene took place at The Quail, the Friday party at a fancy country club that’s fondly thought of as a laid-back alternative for vintage car lovers during Pebble Beach weekend. Tickets start around $500, meaning it’s an excellent place to watch the obscenely wealthy in their natural habitat. In addition to seemingly endless displays of new-production Bugattis and Paganis and Maseratis and AMGs and Land Rover Extended Wheelbase Heritage Whatevers, there’s also an extraordinary, though manageable, array of impeccably restored vintage cars on hand, from late-50s Mercedes roadsters to a golfing green of “The Great Ferraris,” to a 1912 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost to the Von-Will “Bob Justice” Mustang of Wharton, Texas, as well as a 1930 Alfa Romeo GC 1750 Gran Sport Zagato that has never seen the parking lot of a Kroger’s. In the Quail parking lot, on the other hand, $250,000 Bentley convertibles sit as ordinarily as Honda Accords, and in similar numbers.

Your Quail ticket—or your mooched press pass—gets you unlimited access to looking at these cars, as well as their owners and restorers. It also lets you visit booths for such high-end products as Payne Mason Cigars, Steinway pianos, and “The Super Yacht Authority.” You can sample an unlimited supply of top-flight alcohol and food, available at tasteful intervals, accompanied by interchanges like this one:

“Hey, Walker, do me a solid,” a young linen-clad man said as he handed his crystal champagne flute off to his friend. “I gotta get some of these oysters.”

While I stood in a half-hour line for a tasting, someone asked me, without apparent irony, “Do you have a favorite caviar?” An hour later, as I gorged on thin-crust pizza in the Italian tent, a straw-hat wearing swell said, “it’s like walking through the dorm food line in college.” My dorm cafeteria didn’t serve Wood-Grilled Monterey Calamari with white beans and roasted peppers, but that was a while ago, and maybe things have changed.

But the food is but a tasty sidebar. As everyone defensively told me all weekend, it’s all about the cars. If you love them, Pebble Beach yields the Earth’s richest ore.

At mid-afternoon at the Quail, as I sat with some car-journalist colleagues chatting amiably about the benefits of freeloading, a determined madman approached. His name was Mark Gessler, and he made his fortune in the genetics racket. Now he’s the founder and president of the Historic Vehicle Association, based in suburban D.C., and he’s also the driving force behind the National Historic Vehicle Register. He organized, as he told us in near-excruciating detail, the first-ever vintage car show on the National Mall.

Gessler has catholic tastes, with a small c. The first car on the NHVR, named this January, was the 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe Prototype, a logical choice. The second, crowned in May, was “Old Red,” the first Meyers Manx dune buggy, from 1964.

He pointed out that Old Red was sitting right behind us, as was its creator, Bruce Meyers, who, at 88 years old, had driven it up to Monterey from Los Angeles. Meyers looked more virile and full-chested than the late-era Norman Mailer. He glowed proudly as several of his creations—“I built 5,200 of ‘em, that took a lot of doing”—sat there in equivalent standing with a 1966 Plymouth Satellite and a 1959 Aston Martin D8. Of particular note was a groovy number with hideous flowered vinyl patterning on the roof and the seats, which Meyers calls “The Mod Car.”

“I took it to a car show,” he said. “It was purple metal flake. We made the seats out of garden furniture. People love it so much that we want to make them again. But we can’t find the material.”

A little later, Meyers said, “My Manxes all have flat fenders.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“So you can put a bottle of beer on it!” he cackled, while putting a bottle of beer on it.

That night, I went to a car auction. If you go to Pebble Beach and don’t, you’re missing out, since the whole point of all the weekend’s champagne-soaked frippery is that this is the world’s largest car sale, where price is no object and money doesn’t mean shit. Nearly $400 million exchanged hands last weekend.

There are several sales, but I went to the RM Auctions one, held at the Portola Hotel in downtown Monterey. Outside, vintage muscle cars roared in a circle around the fountain at the hotel entrance, giving a large crowd of plebes a vicarious thrill and a lungful of vintage lead. Inside, disreputable characters were trying to argue their way into the auction hall. Some of them breached the gates.

I weaseled in just as the thrilling final bids emerged for a 1964 Ferrari 250 LM by Scaglietti. The market for Ferraris, always potent, was particularly hot this year. The night before, one had gone for a record-setting $38 million (including taxes and fees), breaking the previous car-auction record by a lot. The 1964 was a bargain by comparison, selling for $11,550,000, that extra $50,000 being too much, apparently, for the competitive bidder. The room erupted in applause for the winner, as if to say, “Yay, you’re rich!”

After that crowning cargasm, the crowd thinned a lot. I took a seat close to the front, so I could have a good look at the auctioneer, a young British gentleman who effectively presided with an air of cloying dickishness. “Three hundred ten thousand,” he said, regarding a 1951 Delahaye that eventually went for $412,500, “Do you really want to lose that bid? You might be down a pair of shoes, but you’ll be up a car.”

Right behind us, a guy bought a 1952 Jaguar XK120 Fixed Head Coupe for $154,000. There was much kissing and hand-shaking among his group, who were clearly excited to have scored. “Congratulations for everything!” someone said to the winner, the key phrase that welcomes people to the ruling class.

I was sitting next to a charming L.A. television type whom had taken this press trip with his wife as a retirement present. When a 2003 Aston Martin by Zagato came up for bid, he leaned in and whispered:

“I’m interested to see how much this goes for. Aston lent me one when it was a new production car. It was also the show car for The O.C. and Vegas. I had it for 40 seconds before I wrecked it. Never even got it off the street where we live. That car cost the networks hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was at CBS at the time. Vegas was on NBC. My boss wanted to give me a raise.”

The Aston went for $269,500.

The televison man looked terribly pleased.