Fifties (105 page)

Cole’s car, in comparison with the Volkswagen, was sporty—indeed, the name Corvair was meant to imply a kinship with the Corvette. It was 1,300 pounds lighter than the smaller Chevys of the time, but it was filled with compromises that bothered some of the engineers working on the program, and apparently bothered Cole, too. The tires were smaller than they should have been. The engine became a half-breed—part aluminum, part cast iron. Because of the size of the tires, the car had a tendency to swing out or, in the vernacular of auto engineers, to jack on corners, the rear tires losing traction if the driver did not have a particularly good feel for the car. A seasoned, experienced race driver soon realized that one of the keys to safe handling of the car was to keep the tire pressure at different levels for the front and rear tires, but few ordinary drivers paid attention to their tire pressure. Because its weight was differently aligned and the engine was in the rear, no one had much of a natural feel for driving it. The early tests reflected serious problems in handling. Cole’s desire to add stability to the rear end through a stabilizing mechanism was lost in cost cutting. It was estimated that a better stabilizing system, such as a stabilizing bar, would have cost only about $14 or $15 more per car. Some of the Corvair engineers protested that the safety bar was necessary, but their protests were lost in the rush to get to market. There was, thought Cole’s opposite number at Ford, Don Frey, who watched the birth of the Corvair and was aware of the fierce intramural struggle going on, a certain hubris to Ed Cole, and it showed here more than anywhere else. “We tested two of them,” said Frey, who was generally an admirer of Cole’s, “and we were appalled.” Cole was so strong-willed that on occasion no one could stop him; this was one of the times he should have been stopped, Frey thought.

On sharp corners, particularly with neophyte drivers at the
wheel, the car had a tendency to flip at high speeds. Perhaps a race driver could handle the car, but what about ordinary Americans, many of them younger and anxious to go for higher speeds than the car was able to negotiate safely? What made this different was not that the Corvair was that much less safe than the Volkswagen, which was, if anything, less safe, a number of engineers thought. But there was less of a tendency on the part of its owners to drive the Beetle at high speed.

In addition, General Motors was about to come under a new and different kind of political and social scrutiny than in the past. By the time the stabilizing bar was added, in 1963, the number of lawsuits against Chevy on the Corvair was mounting and within a year would reach a hundred. Once the stabilizing bar was added and the tendency to swing out was eliminated,
Car and Driver
wrote a harsh epitaph for the early cost-conscious Corvair. It was, said the magazine, a bible of auto enthusiasts, “one of the nastiest-handling cars ever built. The tail gave little warning that it was about to let go, and when it did, it let go with a vengeance few drivers could deal with. The rear wheels would lose traction, tuck under and with the tail end jacked up in the air, the car would swing around like a 3-pound hammer on a 30-foot string. This is not to say that the car was unstable within the limits of everyday fair-weather driving—just that those limits were none too clearly posted, and once transgressed, you were in pretty hairy territory, indeed.”

Among those following the flaws of the Corvair and the crippling accidents left in its wake was a young man named Ralph Nader. He had already set out on a lonely path as a kind of one-man consumer critic of Detroit and what he considered its lack of concern for the greater good of its consumers, including on the issue of safety. GM, in turn, would lash out at Nader and would be caught in the act. Humiliating Senate hearings would follow in which General Motors was forced to apologize for its arrogance. For the first time, the government began to pay attention to the auto industry and the impact of its decisions on the people of the nation. The legacy of the Corvair was that it connected the fifties to the sixties. At the same time, top executives at General Motors were convinced that their great mistake had not been in trying to do the car too cheaply, thereby making it a dangerous vehicle, but in bothering to produce a small car in the first place.

FORTY-THREE

T
HE RADIO QUIZ SHOWS
had been, in retrospect, small potatoes, with prizes to match. On
Take It Or Leave It,
the ultimate challenge was the “$64 question”—a phrase that even worked itself into the American vernacular by 1945. In the new age of television, though, everything had to be bigger and better. Americans were not going to sit home, glued to their television sets, wondering whether some electronic stranger, who had briefly entered their living rooms, was going to be able to double his winnings from $32 to $64. In the postwar era that was pocket money.

Such was the dilemma facing Lou Cowan in early 1955. Cowan, one of the most inventive figures in the early days of television, needed a gimmick for a game show worthy of television, one so compelling that millions of Americans would faithfully tune in. He needed high drama, and what better way to achieve that than a
very
large prize? Six hundred and forty dollars? Not so terribly exciting. Nor, for that matter, was $6,400. “But $64,000 gets into the realm of the almost impossible,” he thought. Cowan liked the double-or-nothing format—so he envisioned a contestant who had answered a series of questions correctly and won the dizzying sum of $32,000. At that point it would be time to play double or nothing, for $64,000. With one answer to one question, an ordinary American could be wealthy beyond his or her wildest dreams.

The concept depended on the belief that seemingly unexceptional Americans did indeed have secret talents and secret knowledge. That appealed greatly to Cowan, who, with his Eastern European Jewish background, had a highly idealized view of his fellow citizens’ potential to reach beyond the apparent limits life had dealt them. His was an idealistic, almost innocent belief in the ordinary people of the country. Cowan’s wife, Polly, daughter of a successful Chicago businessman and a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, most decidedly did not like the idea for the show. She thought it essentially a corruption of the real uses of learning—glorifying trivial memorization rather than true thought and analysis. She believed that the rewards for knowledge should not be huge amounts of cash, doled out in front of millions of cheering strangers, ultimately to benefit commercial hucksters; instead, it should be the joy of knowledge itself. She did not hesitate to make her feelings known to her husband and in a way the debate in the Cowan household reflected the schizophrenic nature of the program itself—a compelling mix of achievement, purity and, of course, avarice.

Polly’s doubts did not deter her husband. With his generous and optimistic nature, he saw the show as emblematic of the American dream; it offered everyone not only a chance to become rich overnight but to win the esteem of his fellow citizens. It proved every American had the potential to be extraordinary. It reflected, one of his sons said years later, a “White Christmas” vision of America, in which the immediate descendants of the immigrants, caught up in their optimism about the new world and the nobility of the American experiment, romanticized America and saw it as they wanted it to be.

Cowan was an independent television packager, a familiar figure in the early days of television; he and others like him came up with ideas, found sponsors, and then sold the entire package to the then rather passive networks. He sold this idea to Revlon, which was so enthusiastic that Walter Craig, an executive of the advertising agency that worked for Revlon, locked the door at Cowan’s initial presentation and said, “Nobody leaves this room until we have a signed contract.”

The name of the program was
The $64,000 Question.
It aired for the first time from 10:00 to 10:30
P.M.
in June 1955, on CBS. It was an immediate hit. Millions of people identified with the contestants—who were very much like neighbors. The program showed a CBS psychologist named Gerhart Wiebe who said, “We’re all pretty much alike, and we’re all smart.” The show contained all kinds of dramatic touches attesting to its integrity. The questions sat all week in a locked vault at a bank, and when they finally arrived on the set, they were transported by an executive from Manufacturers Trust, who was accompanied by two armed guards. An IBM machine shuffled the questions on the set. Ed Murrow, the most distinguished American broadcaster of two generations, a man who had pioneered the socially conscious documentary and who was becoming increasingly skeptical about the future of prime-time television, watched the first broadcast and turned to his partner, Fred Friendly. “Any bets on how long we’ll keep this time period now?” he asked. He was prophetic in his wariness.

Eight thousand dollars was the maximum a contestant could win on one show; then he or she had to come back next week. Suspense would start building. At the eight thousand-dollar level, the contestant had to enter an isolation booth, presumably so no one in the studio audience could whisper an answer. The speed with which the program enthralled the entire country was breathtaking. Its success surprised even Lou Cowan. The show offered hope of an overnight fortune, and it proved that ordinary people were not in fact necessarily ordinary. As such there was a powerful chord of populism to it. But more than anything else, it appealed to the viewers’ sense of greed. Five weeks after its premiere,
The $64,000 Question
was the top-rated show on television. Studies showed that approximately 47.5 million people were watching. The sales of Revlon (“the greatest name in cosmetics”) skyrocketed. Some Revlon products sold out overnight, and the show’s master of ceremonies had to beg the public to be more patient until more Revlon Living Lipstick was available. The head of Hazel Bishop, a rival cosmetics company, subsequently blamed his company’s disappointing year on the fact that “a new television program sponsored by your company’s principal competitor captured the imagination of the public.” It was the most primal lesson yet on the commercial power of television.

The contestants became the forerunners of Andy Warhol’s idea of instant fame: people plucked out of total anonymity and beamed into the homes of millions of their fellow Americans. Between ten and twenty thousand people a week wrote letters, volunteering themselves or their friends to be contestants. After only a few appearances
on the show, audiences began to regard the contestants as old and familiar friends. Perhaps, in retrospect, the most important thing illuminated by the show was how easily television conferred fame and established an image. Virtual strangers could become familiar to millions of their fellow citizens.

One of the first contestants, Redmond O’Hanlon, a New York City policeman, whose category was Shakespeare, reached the $16,000 plateau. At that point he decided to stop and, in his words, put “the conservatism of a father of five children” over “the egotism of the scholar.” Soon Catherine Kreitzer, a fifty-four-year-old grandmother whose category was the Bible, reached $32,000. She was confident, Mrs. Kreitzer said, that she could win the full amount, but she stopped, quoting from the Bible: “Let your moderation be known unto all men.” Perhaps the most engaging of all the early contestants was Gino Prato, a New York shoe repairman, whose category was opera. He easily reached the $32,000 plateau, whereupon his ninety-two-year-old father in Italy cabled him to stop at once. Prato, in time, became roving ambassador for a rubber-heel company, was given season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, and went on to other television shows as well. If the producers faced a dilemma in the beginning, it was the hesitance of the top contestants to go for the ultimate question. Some of it was the fear of losing everything and some was the nation’s then extremely harsh income tax schedules. As Kent Anderson pointed out in his book
Television Fraud,
a contestant who went for the whole thing was risking almost $20,000 in order to win only $12,000 more.

A Marine captain named Richard McCutcheon became the first contestant to go all the way. Bookies kept odds on whether or not he could get the right answer. His field was cooking, not military history. With an audience estimated at 55 million watching, on September 13, 1955, he became the first contestant to climb the television Mt. Everest. For $64,000 he was asked to name the five dishes and two wines from the menu served by King George VI of England for French president Albert Lebrun in 1939. He did: consommé quenelles, filet de truite saumonée, petits pois à la françaises, sauce maltaise, and corbeille. The wines were Château d’Yquem and Madera Sercial. The nation was ecstatic—it had a winner. “If you’re symbolic of the Marine Corps, Dick,” said Hal March, the emcee, “I don’t see how we’ll ever lose any battles.”

Everyone involved seemed to profit from the show: Lou Cowan soon became president of CBS; the bank official who was in charge of the questions became a vice-president at Manufacturers Trust.
But no one profited more than Revlon. The impact of the show upon its revenues was a startling reflection of changes that were taking place every day in more subtle ways because of the ferocious commercial drive of television and its effect upon both consumers and industry.

Revlon, at the time, was the leading cosmetic company in the nation, but Coty, Max Factor, and Helena Rubinstein were relatively close behind in net sales. In 1953, for example Revlon had net sales of $28.4 million; Helena Rubinstein had $20.4 million; Coty had $19.6; Max Factor, $19 million; and Hazel Bishop, $9.9. All in all, it was a fairly evenly divided pie, and Revlon’s sales increased on average about 15 percent annually in the years just before 1955. But sponsoring the quiz show changed all that. In the first six-month season, Revlon increased its sale from $33.6 million to $51.6—a stunning 54 percent increase. The stock jumped from 12 to 20. The following year saw sales increase to $85.7 million. By 1958 Revlon completely dominated its field. (Asked later by a staff member of a House subcommittee whether sponsoring
The $64,000 Question
had had anything to do with Revlon’s amazing surge to the top, a somewhat disingenuous Martin Revson answered, “It helped. It helped.”)