Jean Marie Jennings (née Lienert; February 3, 1954 – December 16, 2024) was an American journalist, publisher and television personality covering the automotive industry.
She guested on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, convinced Jerry Seinfeld to freelance an article for Automobile magazine,[7] and continued to write the Vile Gossip column intermittently for Autoblog.com (2020).
[17] Her oldest brother, Paul Lienert, became a noted automotive journalist, managing editor of AutoWeek, and a correspondent for Thomson Reuters.
[19] Her oldest brother, Paul Lienert, became a noted automotive journalist, managing editor of AutoWeek, and a correspondent for Thomson Reuters.
Mott Children's Hospital, celebrating the life of eleven-year-old Caden Bowles, a car enthusiast who died while waiting for a heart transplant.
[28] In a 2016 interview, she counted as large influences on her life a Catholic upbringing "with a heavy emphasis on reading, Latin, and the pursuit of nothing less than perfection"[20] — along with a disruptive bent brought out by working on an underground newspaper; and a heavy desire to escape her dirt-road, middle-of-nowhere childhood, the latter facilitated by learning to drive at an early age.
[9][29] In 1980, at her brother Paul's encouragement, one month after she was laid off at Chrysler, she applied at Car and Driver and was hired as a staff writer by editor David E. Davis (1930–2011).
Though she considers herself a poor automotive prognosticator,[20] in the November 1984 issue of Car and Driver, she presciently ended her Oldsmobile Calais review, "won't it be embarrassing if, twenty years hence, the division goes under because all its customers have died?
Under the motto "No Boring Cars," the magazine competed directly with three other successful automotive magazines, Motor Trend, Car and Driver and Road & Track — with a decidedly more upscale, high style, high-profile focus,[31] heavier stock paper[31] and the only one of the four to be perfect bound (not stapled)[20] — with lush, four-color printed photography and ground-breaking art direction.
Within a year, the other three major car magazines changed to perfect binding and full color printing, hiring new editors and art directors as well.
She spent 9,000 miles in the first of Brock Yates' One Lap of America with Parnelli Jones in a panel van disguised as a Stroh's Brewery truck; was close to auto writer and racer Denise McCluggage for 30 years; mooned race car drivers Dan Gurney and Phil Hill; drove to the top of the world with Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson; spent a day in 1990 and drank Johnnie Walker Red with Porsche design chief Tony Lapine and 90-year old champion Bugatti driver Eliška Junková (Elizabeth Junek) at her apartment in the Swedish embassy in Prague, just after the Berlin Wall fell;[20] rode motorcycles across China with Malcolm Smith; followed the Camel Trophy in Madagascar; raced in Baja with a Russian circle-track driver; navigated in the 2000-mile Pirelli-Classic Marathon vintage rally in a 1965 MGB across the Alps with Stirling Moss; and in 1983 drove a yellow prototype C4 Corvette with Chuck Yeager.
[8] Irrepressible and inimitable, Jennings once transformed herself into an undercover spokesmodel at the 1988 North American International Auto Show, reciting a memorized sales pitch for the Eagle Premier — wearing a copper lamé gown, heavily teased hair and such heavily glamorized makeup she was left largely unrecognizable.
[6] Jennings was periodically estranged from Davis,[33] whom she described on his death in 2011 as "the most interesting, most difficult, cleverest, darkest, most erudite, dandiest, and most inspirational, charismatic and all-around damnedest human being I will ever meet.
"[34] Jennings was profiled by Susan Orlean for The New Yorker, appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and was a regular on-air contributor, including on Fox Business Network; CNBC's Closing Bell, Squawk Box, Behind the Wheel, and Power Lunch; MSNBC; CBS's This Morning and Evening News; and CNN's American Morning and Headline News.
In 2014, she was a judge for the ten-episode, Chevrolet-sponsored reality show Motor City Masters, which highlighted car-based design challenges.