Fifties (21 page)

Starting in the late twenties, Sloan and his colleagues at GM inaugurated the second stage of the automobile era, in which the car was not merely transportation but a reflection of status, a concept to which most Americans responded enthusiastically as they strove to move upward into the middle class, and then the upper middle class. Under Sloan, the buyer was supposed to covet an ever showier, ever more expensive car; as such a car was not a permanent possession, it was an economic benchmark on life’s journey to the top. Sloan presented the choices to the buyers that Henry Ford had reserved to himself. He had little sympathy for the rigid, unchanging ways of the old man. “We had no stake in the old ways of the automobile business; change meant opportunity,” Sloan later noted.

After World War Two, Sloan pondered what Americans wanted, and he decided they wanted styling first, automatic transmissions second, and high-compression engines third. He gave carte
blanche to his top designer, Harley Earl. If, in a poorer time, Henry Ford represented the Calvinist era, Harley Earl was the standard-bearer of the new age of affluence and abundance. It is possible that no one exerted as much influence on American style and taste in the fifties as he, and no one reflected more accurately what the country had become. The cars he produced in the fifties, wrote the critic Stephen Bayley, “were brought about by a deliberate corporate policy of encouraging dreams. Harley Earl invented the dream car at a moment in American history when the future seemed rosy rather than intimidating, and when there was confidence that a better future would be brought about more quickly by ever increasing consumption of ever changing style.”

Earl was plucked out of Hollywood by Sloan and Lawrence Fisher in 1927. His father had been a carriage builder there and Harley Earl had started out as one of the early customizers in the new auto business, adapting cars for the least conservative of Detroit’s customers: movie stars. Even before he left Hollywood there was a distinctive stamp to Earl cars: They were longer, lower, ever sleeker, ever more rounded, and even when they were standing still, they were to give the impression of power and motion. He cut down the height of the standard frames and added a middle section to the frame. His prewar cars were original, stylish, and a significant break from the boxy look that had become the staple of Detroit in the twenties and thirties.

His mandate came directly from Sloan, and he began a new department, the art and color department, as it was known. Now, models of new cars, which had previously been tiny, were created life-size. “The trouble with small models is that your eyes don’t shrink with the model,” Earl liked to say. When he had arrived in Detroit, the engineering departments were all-powerful, and the advertisements for cars emphasized such features as generator capacity. But gradually, given Sloan’s mandate, power shifted to the styling room. At first he had to fight the division heads, many of whom had come up from engineering and who were contemptuous of his newfangled ways and attempts to gussy up their cars. Those were battles he would always win; he was, it turned out, a very good corporate infighter. Even Harlow Curtice, the president of the company, learned this, though he usually shared Earl’s vision. On one occasion, they were both in the styling room and Curtice did not like a particular car. They argued, but not for long. Earl picked up the phone and dialed it. “Hello, Alfred,” he said. There was a quick exchange of pleasantries. Then down to business: “I’m here with
Harlow and we’re having something of a disagreement. I wondered if you could set Harlow straight.”

A Harley Earl car was easy to spot. He was fascinated by jet airplanes, so long and slim that they appeared to be racing into the future; he admired sharks, long, sleek, and powerful, and his futuristic cars were, in no small way, based on their shape, with a single metal dorsal fin in the rear. “My sense of proportion tells me that oblongs are more attractive than squares,” he once wrote, “just as a ranch house is more attractive than a square three-story flat-roofed house or a greyhound is more attractive than a bulldog.”

Earl was a great showman. In order to push a particular design before skeptical board members and division heads, he would mount the car four inches above where he really wanted it. The executives would circle the car, murmuring their approval. Then, by prearranged signal, Earl would take out a handkerchief and wipe his brow; the car would be released from its props and lowered to the proper height. The difference was stunning. At the lower height it looked ready to explode out of its blocks. The executives were duly impressed. His chief aim was to give his cars the look of motion, even while they were at rest. With one touch of the eraser he scrubbed the running boards. He hid the rear tire from view.

In a corporate culture in which the individual was
always
subordinated to the corporate good and in which a certain anonymity was increasingly valued, Harley Earl deliberately stood apart. After all, he had seen Cecil B. DeMille create his own mystique by going everywhere with a riding crop and wearing boots. Earl was tall, about six feet six, and it was said that he decided to hire no one over six feet six, so that he could always tower over his staff. “The world,” he would say, “stands aside for the man who knows where’s he’s going.” When he entered the room, his manner left no doubt that he expected to be catered to and, of course, listened to. Though Harley Earl needed glasses, he almost never wore them because he believed they detracted from his image and thus diminished his power. Other GM executives drove Cadillacs (or the car of their division after the order came down from Harlow Curtice that it was not becoming for executives of Chevy to drive Caddies), but Harley Earl drove the LeSabre, a highly futuristic car he himself had designed. Typically, it was based on a jet plane, the F-86 Sabre jet; the cost to the company of building this prototype was estimated at roughly $7 million. But at least it was an
American
car. He made sure that he was not one of those stylists who designed for an American company but drove a foreign car. When his son, Jerry, announced he was
planning to drive a Ferrari, Earl put his foot down: “No son of mine is going to drive one of those damn Ferraris,” he said. He immediately ordered the design shop to produce a special Corvette for his son.

Other executives lived in the General Motors base camp of Bloomfield Hills; Earl lived in Grosse Pointe, where the proprietorial class had built fabled residences; soon the new General Motors design shop was located in Warren, near Grosse Pointe, for Earl’s convenience. Earl had hundreds of suits, many of them linen and in offbeat colors. Other executives allowed themselves only three colors for suits: dark blue, light gray, and dark gray. Earl seemed to have a duplicate copy of each suit, which he kept in a massive closet in his office, so that if his clothes became wrinkled during the day, he could change and put on a fresh outfit. Even his shoes looked as if there were shoe trees still in them. When he was meeting with the GM board, his clothes, if anything, were even more eccentric, more flamboyant than usual. His staff would watch him go before the board in a cream-colored linen suit and a dark blue shirt (the reversal of colors normally mandated for GM executives) and
blue suede shoes.
They knew he was making a statement, that he was artistic, that he knew design and taste as they did not and, finally, that he was outside their reach and they were not to fool with him. In retrospect, thought Don Frey, a Ford executive, Harley Earl’s cars looked exactly the way he dressed: a little overripe, but one accepted at the time that this was style. If Earl could have put chrome on his clothes, thought Frey, he most surely would have.

He was Mr. Earl—never, ever Harley—to those who worked for him, no matter how long or how successfully. He was tyrannical to his subordinates: He raged at them, pushed them, and always demanded more. His word was law: In the late fifties, GM made a tentative step toward participating in racing, but Earl would not allow the drivers on the Chevy team to practice in the racing car itself because he did not want the paint job damaged. He liked to keep his subordinates on edge. He might, for example, visit the Buick design room in the late morning and look at a sketch. His face would grow grimmer and grimmer, and finally he would ask, “Who did this one?” Some poor assistant designer would finally be forced to admit that the idea was his. “Well, the next time I come in I don’t want to see it because it’s no damn good.” Off he would go for lunch, but beware the poor designer who did not act immediately on such a warning, for Earl was sure to come back in a few hours to check whether the offending sketch had indeed been taken down. If it had
not, he would rip it off the wall. Another specialty of his was to peer over a working stylist’s shoulder and say rather casually to the claque that arrived with him from the design committee (this sycophantish semicircle was known by the designers in the studio as “the magic crescent”), “Don’t you fellas agree if we raise that one thirty-second of an inch from one end to another, it’ll look better?” He was suggesting several hours more work for something that no one would notice. It was a no-win situation, thought Robert Cumberford, a young designer: You could pretend to change it and try to get away with it, or you could change it and then find that Earl was in a bad mood and refused to believe that you had actually made the adjustment.

If he was not above abusing an employee in front of his colleagues, then he could also be perfectly friendly later the same day if he met him at a social function. He was particularly charming to the wives of his young assistants, and after meeting him, those wives were likely to say to their husbands, “How can you complain and call him a tyrant—why, he’s the most gracious and courteous man I’ve ever met.”

Not everyone admired what Earl was doing. Some critics thought his cars reflected the postwar excesses of American society: They were too large and flashy without being better, they believed. To the doubters, he was the prince of “Gorp” (that is, the combination of fins and chrome that marked the industry’s cars in those years). At Ford he was known, part respectfully, part not so respectfully, as the Cellini of Chrome. One of his foremost colleagues, the famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy, took the occasion of a 1955 speech before the Society of Automobile Engineers to criticize the entire philosophy behind Earl’s cars, which he said had become like jukeboxes on wheels: “Is it responsible to camouflage one of America’s most remarkable machines as a piece of gaudy merchandise?” he asked. Form, Loewy added, “which should be the clean-cut expression of mechanical excellence, has become sensuous and organic.” Loewy was warning Detroit that form had overtaken function. Yet if Earl’s designs did not always please intellectuals, they were stunningly successful with car buyers. Curiously, he did little sketching himself; rather, he would take an idea—from an advertisement he had seen in a magazine, or a photo of an airplane—and suggest his staff work from it.

Earl steadily eroded the autonomy of the division heads. Design became the critical decision and that decision was Earl’s. Engineering became steadily less important. In fact because of Earl and Sloan, all three major auto companies became caught in a vicious syndrome:
a worship of the new at the expense of the old, even if on occasion the old was better. The annual model change forced the companies to opt for a less efficient and less attractive car, just for the sake of change. Or as George Walker, the head of styling at Ford, said at the end of the Earl era, the process contained the seeds of its own destruction: “The 1957 Ford was great, but right away we had to bury it and start another. We design a car, and the minute it’s done, we hate it—we’ve got to do another one. We design a car to make a man unhappy with his 1957 Ford ’long about the end of 1958.”

Earl himself became quite cynical. Young designers who went to work for the company in the mid-fifties and who had admired his earlier work were stunned by his attitude. Robert Cumberford remembered an early orientation meeting with a class of young stylists. Earl stood in front of the group and looked long and hard at them. “General Motors,” he began, “is in business for only one reason. To make money. In order to do that we make cars. But if we could make money making garbage cans, we would make garbage cans.”

Cumberford’s close friend Stan Mott had a similar experience: “Listen,” Earl told a group of designers that included Mott. “I’d put smokestacks right in the middle of the sons of bitches if I thought I could sell more cars.” In all of this the process was becoming increasingly sterile: It was not merely change for change’s sake, but actually a kind of pseudo-change. The industry’s engineers were largely idle, as their skills were ignored. Thus, during a time when the American car industry might have lengthened its technological lead on foreign competitors, it failed to do so. Instead, the industry fiddled with styling details, raising and lowering the skirts, adding and augmenting fins, changing color combinations. Fins, the most famous automotive detail of the era, represented no technological advance; they were solely a design element whose purpose was to make the cars seem sleeker, bigger, and more powerful. “It gave them [the customers] an extra receipt for their money in the form of visible prestige marking for an expensive car,” Earl said, summing up the essential thrust of the industry during the decade. That failure would come back to haunt the entire industry in the seventies. Indeed, it was Earl who coined the phrase that came to symbolize that era, “dynamic obsolescence.”

In the fifties bigger was better, and Americans, it seemed, wanted bigger cars every year. If General Motors assaulted the new American market with ever bigger cars, it was Charles Kettering who
was the technological enabler of that era. Kettering was the chief of research for GM, the resident technological genius. He was the country boy as inventor (“I am a wrench-and-pliers man,” he liked to say, with undue modesty). His inventions were critical to the company’s, indeed to the industry’s, success, beginning with the starter motor, which used a self-starter in the ignition instead of a heavy crank. This device, included for the first time on the 1912 Cadillac, had encouraged women and older people to drive. A long series of other major innovations, all of them wildly practical, followed: heaters for cars; all-purpose Duco paint, which modernized the painting process and changed the time required for paint on cars to dry from seventeen days to three hours; and antiknock fuel. But it was Kettering’s work on high-compression engines and higher octane gas that unlocked the era of bigger, heavier cars with more equipment on them.