said that it "...was known to railroad buffs for 65 years as the world's greatest train". Its style was described as "spectacularly understated ... suggesting exclusivity and sophistication". Passengers walked to the train in New York and Chicago on a specially designed crimson carpet, giving rise to the phrase "the red-carpet treatment". "Transportation historians", said the writers of The Art of the Streamliner, "consistently rate the 1938 edition of the Century to be the world's ultimate passenger conveyance—at least on the ground". In 1926, Lucille Ball made her first trip to California from New York on the 20th Century Limited. Regular passengers included Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Lillian Russell, "Diamond Jim" Brady, J. P. Morgan, Enrico Caruso, and Nellie Melba. In fiction The 20th Century Limited was the setting for a Broadway musical composed by Cy Coleman and written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green entitled On the Twentieth Century, about the romantic complications of a beautiful actress and an egocentric producer/director. Madeline Kahn and John Cullum starred in the award-winning production (five Tony Awards out of nine nominations), whose spectacular production design featured both the lavish Art Deco details of the time period as well innovative staging to open up what could be cramped quarters inside a train car. The musical was based on the 1932 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur stage play of the same subject, which in 1934 they adapted as a film entitled Twentieth Century, directed by Howard Hawks, with Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in the lead roles. The train also figured prominently as a setting for major scenes in both Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and George Roy Hill's The Sting (which incorrectly had the train arrive in Chicago at night, not in the morning as it did in reality). While doing research for her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand learned the operation of the train and subsequently devised a fictional company - the "Twentieth Century Motor Company" - which would be important to the novel's plot. The 20th Century Limited is frequently referenced as a main means of train transportation of the fictional Van Dorn detective Isaac Bell in several Clive Cussler period books featuring the early 1900s detective. The Wrecker (Clive Cussler with Justin Scott) is the second in the long-running series and has Bell with other Van Dorn detectives riding the 20th Century Limited often as they pursue a train-wrecking villain. Other