The idea of a luxury truck is hardly shocking today, with trucks like F-150 Lariats selling for over $80,000 and into the $90s (and you can find some over $100K) and crammed full of leather and wood and all sorts of tech and saffron and myrrh and all the spices of the Levant, or whatever it is that they stick into pickup trucks to make them so damn expensive. But there was a time when trucks were really just thought of as workhorses, utility vehicles with jobs to do, not gleaming luxurious carriages that smelled like leather and status and maybe thick slabs of beef. GMC, though, in a rare moment of far-future prescience, once tried to combine the idea of trucks and luxury, and the end results were, well, weird. Let’s look at two of these attempts today, the Beau James and the Gentleman Jim.
I want to talk about both of these 1975 GMC special editions because they kind of baffle me. It’s not that they were bad trucks – they were still third-gen GMC C/K trucks, and those were, by all accounts, good trucks, especially in the contexts of doing trucky things. But luxurious? That’s kind of a stretch. And, more significantly, there’s a bigger reason.
The real reason I’m writing about these truck editions at all is because of the somewhat confusing names and the way these trucks were marketed, which reflect a sort of aesthetic and set of cultural references that feels unusually impenetrable to me, and I think most of us today. Both of these trucks share their names with movies, and both could be named for the same person, the mayor of New York City from 1926 to 1932, James John Walker.
James John Walker was also sometimes called Beau James, which is where we get the name for this 1975 GMC special edition truck:
The Beau James was, as the ad copy says, “created for those who like the special things life has to offer; the extra touches, the small refinements, the quietly appreciated subtleties.” I guess that’s what the Beau James offered: velour seat trim, wood paneling, A/C, AM/FM radio, all the candy 1970s trucks could offer. And all of this was riding on the 1/2 ton truck suspension with the 3/4 ton frame, a combination that provided a smoother ride thanks to the softer springs. So there was at least an attempt at some real refinement here.
Visually, there were some obvious luxury-style touches, like whitewall tires surrounding some hilarious-looking wire wheel covers. The paint scheme was blue-and-silver, with some fancy BEAU JAMES decals on the bed, in a nice, ornate typeface, and all capped off with a big, square Beau James hood ornament.
It was definitely more luxurious than your average GMC pickup truck, though it wasn’t really going to give GM’s actual luxury marque, Cadillac, anything to worry about. Still, this really can be thought of as one of the earliest attempts to push the humble pickup truck into the premium car category.
What I can’t stop thinking about, though, is why did they name this truck after a nickname for a fairly progressive and flamboyant Mayor whose career ended in scandal, after he was found taking bribes to award municipal contracts. He was also instrumental in legalizing boxing in New York when he was a member of the state senate, introducing the “Walker Law.”
There was a movie about Walker in 1957 called, as you may guess, Beau James and starring Bob Hope:
… and Dean Martin also wrote a song about Walker’s tenure as mayor – albeit pretty idealized – in a song called, yes, Beau James:
Clearly, Beau James was a cultural figure of some import. There was a short-lived Broadway musical called Jimmy that ran from 1969 to 1970, which wasn’t all that far from when the GMC Beau James was around, in 1975.
My early childhood was spent in the 1970s, and I don’t recall hearing about ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker once. Mayor LaGuardia, sure – I think some of the first McDonald’s Happy Meal prizes I got had a Mayor LaGuardia action figure. But Beau James? Was this a thing? A thing that GMC marketing people felt would be a great way to sell a luxury pickup truck? To name it after a Great Depression-era Big Apple mayor who was against Prohibition?
I mean, it must have been, because somehow GMC saw fit to name another luxury truck after Mayor Jimmy Walker. Behold the GMC Gentleman Jim:
Yes, James Walker, our pal Beau James, was also sometimes known as “Gentleman Jim” or “Gentleman Jimmy.”
Now, it’s possible this truck was named for another Gentleman Jim – the famous boxer James Corbett was also known as “Gentleman Jim” so it could be named for him, too. But the fact that James Walker was also known by this name when GMC named their other luxury truck from 1975 after him is just too close a connection to ignore.
The Gentleman Jim was a bit more sporty than the Beau James, with rally-style wheels instead of the wires, and a black-and-gold two-tone paint job. There were gold GENTLEMAN JIM decals on the bed, some swanky bed rails, CIBIE driving lights, A/C, 8-track player, stainless splash guards, but unlike the Beau James, the seats were just vinyl and there was no big, showy hood ornament.
The goal was still the same – bring pickup trucks upmarket, and make them desirable transportation for sexy, urbane go-getters who still occasionally wanted to haul a quarter ton of gravel. These were trucks trying to get into the Personal Luxury Coupé club along with the Thunderbirds and Toronados and Monacos and Chrysler Cordobas, pitting their wire wheels and long truck beds against all that rich, Corinthian leather.
And, somehow, in this equation, the persona of that ex-NYC mayor somehow seemed to fit the bill, twice. About 4,000 Beau James trucks were made, and about 2,500 Gentleman Jims, so these weren’t just some quirky one-offs. There’s a cultural calculus that went on in the creation of these trucks that I think is lost to time now. And, whatever they were thinking, it doesn’t seem to have swept the industry going forward, unless I somehow forgot about Ford’s Ed Koch Signature Series F-150 from the 1980s.
It’s all just so weird! I mean, luxury trucks are kind of weird, too, if you think too much about spending over $100 grand on an F-150, but at least we’re not naming them for dandy big-city mayors. Maybe that’s progress?
Oh, and I checked: this is not where the GMC Jimmy gets its name. Whew. At least, that’s what I heard. I heard it just sounds kind of like when you say “GM.” Let’s hope that’s true.
[Ed note: Why are New York mayors always so weird? This is the crazy thing about living up here having grown up in Texas. There’s no shortage of strange Texas politicians, including some I worked for when I was younger. The difference is that, for every weirdo mayor or State Senator in Texas, you’d at least get a few normal ones in between. I remember being excited for the Bloomberg administration to end, which was a real Monkey’s Paw situation when we ended up with Bill de Blasio. In the last election, voters got two mainstream choices: Eric Adams and Curtis Silwa. Adams barely lasted a year before getting indicted and Silwa is the head of the Guardian Angels and is most notable for wearing a beret and having 16 cats. In retrospect, Silwa might have been the better choice! – MH]
A musical play based on the life and good times of Jimmy Walker?
Sounds DYN-O-MITE!!