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#The true story behind HBO’s ‘The Lady and the Dale’ docuseries

#The true story behind HBO’s ‘The Lady and the Dale’ docuseries

When Elon Musk was still in diapers, Elizabeth Carmichael was poised to shake up the auto industry with a wildly innovative car idea.

In 1974 — while the US was nearing the end of a crippling gasoline shortage — Carmichael introduced the public to the Dale: a three-wheeled car that cost just $2,000 and was said to get 70 miles to the gallon.

She presented herself as a car-industry renegade, going against the so-called Big Three automakers, and the media ate it up — calling the car “what everyone’s looking for.” A poster of Carmichael showed her straddling an LA freeway. The Dale even glimmered as a prize on “The Price is Right.”

“We’re going to shock General Motors and Ford right out of their overstuffed chairs!” Carmichael, then 37, claimed.

Well, she certainly shocked everyone.

As revealed in the HBO documentary series “The Lady and the Dale,” premiering Sun., Jan. 31, Carmichael was a bail-jumping felon, a counterfeiter and a con artist wanted by the FBI. She was also new to womanhood, having been born an Indiana man named Jerry Dean Michael until staging his own death — via a fake mob hit.

And Carmichael’s promises about the Dale, including that its “stronger than steel” body was bullet-proof, were too good to be true.

But the public, smarting from escalating gas prices and in the midst of a recession, wanted to believe. “The American people liked the idea that she was looking out for them,” Leslie Kendall, chief historian for Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, told The Post. “Plus she was extremely believable — enough to get a couple million out of people.”

Jerry Michael, as Carmichael was first known, had fathered five kids via three wives by 1961, when he was arrested for counterfeiting. He skipped out on a bench warrant, bringing along his fourth wife, Vivian, then pregnant with their first child. He hopscotched his growing family around the Sunbelt, staying one step ahead of law enforcers and landlords. “Moving is cheaper than paying rent,” he once quipped.

Finally, tired of being chased by the FBI, he faked his own death, ramming his automobile into a tree on a dark road. “Jerry’s car was found on the roadside,” Vivian’s brother Charles Richard Barrett says in the doc. “It had his blood on it. It came out that he’d been killed — but he was still alive … He shot up his car, I guess. And away he went. After that he went underground for a little while.”

By the early 1970s, Michael had been reborn in Southern California as Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, a “widow” who falsely claimed to have a degree in mechanical engineering.

Wife Vivian was still along for the ride, but now posing as the aunt of their five kids who continued to live with them; the couple remained legally married. Carmichael worked for a company, the United States Marketing Institute, that sold advice to inventors. “That job was an inflection point,” the documentary’s co-director Nick Cammilleri told The Post. “This was her making strides. She wound up in a place where she could help other people realize their dreams.”

Carmichael and her kids went on the lam after she was exposed.
Carmichael and her kids went on the lam after she was exposed.
HBO

One client, Dale Clifft, had invented a three-wheeled car, which resembled a dune buggy and was powered by a motorcycle engine. Carmichael was enthralled. “She licensed the rights from Dale Clifft,” said Cammilleri. “Dale saw the power of his invention and viewed [licensing it] as a positive step.”

She hired a canny PR man, rented production space in Encino, Calif., and launched the 20th Century Motor Car Corporation — describing the workplace atmosphere as having “a religious fervor.” Engineer Greg Leas says in the doc: “There was an energy in that place. Almost like a big family.”

Nevertheless, things seemed slightly off to company insiders. Engineer Gerry McGuinness talks in the doc about being paid from stacks of $100 bills and recalls unsavory figures in fancy suits hanging around: “You’re not telling me they’re not the mafia.”

But by 1974, when a group of potential investors wanted to see the car in action, Carmichael’s cash-crunched crew had to cobble together a running version. “It had a BMW motorcycle engine,” mechanic Hans Hasson, who worked at 20th Century Motors, told The Post. “And if you took a sharp turn, [part of the front] went up in the air.”

After seeing the dangerous looking vehicle up close, the would-be investors backed out. Carmichael referred to the display as “an abortion on three wheels.”

Nonetheless, unsuspecting buyers flooded 20th Century Motors with deposit money, and dealerships paid $35,000 each to secure positions as Dale retailers. Carmichael was supposed to keep that money in escrow. Instead, it seemed to finance her lifestyle and the company.

Furthermore, she was selling shares of Dale stock without being licensed to do so.

 A shell of the Dale was displayed at the January 1975 LA Auto Show, leading to much hype. “It generated a lot of wonderment,” said Kendall, who attended the show with his father. “It looked like a bright-yellow rocket ship … If the claims were true, it was a game changer in terms of how cars were built and configured.”

Carmichael company's flagship vehicle was the Dale, a prototype three-wheeled two-seater sports car designed and built by Dale Clift.
Carmichael company’s flagship vehicle was the Dale, a prototype three-wheeled two-seater sports car designed and built by Dale Clift.
Speedway Motors Muse

In February 1975, Carmichael and four company executives went to Dallas, where they hoped to have Dales produced. That was when all hell broke loose. Word had leaked about her illegal stock sales and an SEC investigation was underway. For some reason, Carmichael left behind her two bodyguards – former cellmates from San Quentin – and they got into a heated discussion about how to quell the investigation. One of the ex-cons wanted to kill the investigator. The other disagreed and a fistfight ensued. A gun was drawn and it accidentally went off, killing one of the men and garnering the kind of publicity that Carmichael did not want.   

Once-glowing media coverage of Carmichael and the Dale turned dark, as customers demanded their money back and details emerged about Carmichael’s fraudulent ways. “Things started to fall apart,” McGuinness says in the doc. “It happened rapidly — boom, boom, boom. You could not turn on the TV without seeing a negative report.”

With the bottom dropping out, Carmichael and top staffers convened at a Dallas home where she and her family were camped out. Carmichael’s daughter Candi Michael recalls seeing one of the Dale salesmen with a suitcase full of cash entering the meeting. “He had just closed out [the company] account. They divvied up the money and everybody went their separate ways,” she says in the series. “In less than 10 minutes, our whole family was in the car and we were on the road. That was the end.”

Director Cammilleri believes that Carmichael had every intention of manufacturing the Dale — if only she could have secured financing before her misdeeds came home to roost. “I would say that the Dale car came as close as the Tesla was in 2009,” he said. “If they got the money [from investors], we are telling a different story.”

On the lam with her family, Carmichael was soon tracked to Miami and arrested on charges of grand theft and securities fraud. Some $6 million in company funds remained unaccounted for. She was eventually released on $50,000 bail provided by a studio hoping to make a movie of her life story, likely egged on by revelations the Carmichael was transgender and would be undergoing gender reassignment surgery in Tijuana. 

Los Angeles news article from 1974.
Los Angeles news article from 1974.
Getty Images

Following a drawn-out trial in California, jurors found her guilty of grand theft and securities fraud in late 1977.

Carmichael once again disappeared, after a series of appeals and just before her sentencing in 1980. Nine years later, an episode of the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” led to her capture in Texas. She was sentenced to 32 months and served more than two years in a men’s prison.

Around 1990, a freed Carmichael perfected a highly profitable scheme that employed formerly homeless people to sell roses on Austin street corners.

One of four remaining Dale prototypes now resides at the Petersen museum. Carmichael died of cancer in 2004, at around 67, after a lifetime of deception. “What she tried to do in one year, it took Detroit decades to get right,” said Petersen’s Kendall. “She thought she could create a car by sheer force of will.”

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