Peter Mullin has had a lifelong enthusiasm for cars. But it wasn’t until the L.A. insurance and benefits executive opened up his Paul Williams-designed home for an auto calendar shoot 30 years ago that he found his real passion: classic French cars from the 1920s and ’30s.
“I came home one day and saw these cars in my driveway – they were the most gorgeous cars I had seen in my life,” he said.
Mullin, who turned 72 last week, now boasts a collection of more than 150 classic cars – including Bugattis, Delahayes and Talbot-Lagos. He has two separate museums in which to house them: the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard that’s open to the public and a private museum in West Los Angeles.
Mullin, chairman of Mullin TBG Insurance Agency Services in El Segundo, was reappointed this month as chairman of the Petersen Automotive Museum on the Miracle Mile’s Museum Row, returning to that post after nearly 20 years. His main goal: upgrade the museum’s drab exterior.
Of all the cars Mullin has collected, one stands out: a 1925 Bugatti that spent 73 years at the bottom of a lake in northern Italy.
The car apparently was abandoned in 1936 and later was driven into the lake. Divers located it in the 1960s; three years ago, the car finally was fished out by a local diving group that wanted to put the car up for auction to raise money. Mullin said he paid in the six figures – one report put it at $360,000 – for a car that was considered only 20 percent salvageable.
“It may not be the most expensive car in my collection, but it’s definitely the one everyone talks about,” he said.
Fish Tale
Duncan Lemmon, president of Santa Monica real estate brokerage Lee & Associates Los Angeles West Inc., traveled 36 hours last year to a remote resort off the island of Borneo in Malaysia.
It was for a diving expedition to see the vast array of sea life in the region with his partner Debbie Betts and friends John and Monica Bayless.
“We were pooped by the time we got there,” he said.
But not too pooped to dive. Lemmon, 62, did 16 dives in five days.
“One of the good dive spots was Barracuda Point,” he said. “You’d see a massive flow of barracudas just rolling around in the surf; you could watch them all day.”
But while he found the schools of sharp-toothed fish fascinating, it was a smaller specimen that made a big impression.
On his last day at the resort, he went snorkeling around his hotel when he was confronted by an oval-shaped striped fish about 18 inches long.
“All of a sudden, I saw from the side this fish come flying at me and just do a U-turn right before it hit me,” he said.
The fish did it again, and Lemmon laughed. But he might not have laughed had he recognized the fish.
“I found out later it was a triggerfish, a species that protects its nest fiercely,” he said. “Their teeth are strong enough to break seashells, and they’ve actually attacked divers and broken their goggles.”
Staff reporters Howard Fine and Bethany Firnhaber contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
