Joe Wilharber, the man who put glitz into Hollywood film cars

Ron Kellogg is a man most typical car enthusiasts might not have heard of. At his home in Whittier, California, he has one of the world’s largest collections of automotive films and photography, the Kellogg Auto Archives. And he didn’t just find himself with a bunch of negatives overnight. Instead, he built the collection over the last several decades from smaller collections.

One of those smaller collections that Ron’s agreed to share with us comes from the car rental business of Joe Wilharber. In 1923, Joe was persuaded to let Dorothy Davenport rent his personal Stutz Bearcat for her drug-addiction movie, “Human Wreckage,” and he then realized he could make a living by maintaining a collection of exotic cars that he’d then rent to the movie studios. Fortunately for him, the movie industry boomed during the Depression, and audiences loved to see the high-priced European machinery that he specialized in.

One newspaper article that Ron saved gives a glimpse of Wilharber’s inventory: Mary Pickford’s $24,000 Delage town car, Rudolph Valentino’s $20,000 Isotta Fraschini town car, a 1909 Unic taxi, Alexander Korda’s $14,000 Fiat town car, a 1902 Reo (that won a “worn out car” race from Los Angeles to Sacramento, a race that suspiciously sounds like a Jay Lamm production, had Jay been around then), Winifred Sheehan’s Voisin touring car, Barney Oldfield’s Austro-Daimler, D.W. Giffith’s 1914 Fiat, another 1914 Fiat that was used in Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels,” and a Ford Model T touring car used in “They Had to See Paris.” “He has a line of French taxis that would make a Parisian pedestrian shudder,” one observer wrote.

Wilharber at one point mentioned that he wanted to buy Fatty Arbuckle’s Pierce-Arrow, but could never strike a deal.

By the mid-1930s, Wilharber’s business, Foreign Auto Rentals Inc., had grown to become one of the two largest film-car rental agencies in Hollywood, along with Eugene LaJunie (who, oddly enough, specialized in older American cars, like Stutz Bearcats). He apparently kept a staff of mechanics at Foreign Auto Rentals to keep the cars in shape for whatever Hollywood would need of him.

After about 1938, Wilharber seems to have dropped off the face of the map. Ron said he didn’t know what ever happened to Foreign Auto Rentals; he got the following photos from Dean Batchelor’s estate, and Batchelor never said how he obtained the photos before he died. However, the building that housed Foreign Auto Rentals, which was located at 6422 Selma Avenue and is visible in the background of one of the photos, still stands today and houses an art studio.