Fifties (80 page)

As the success of the company grew, its informal rules gradually became codified. The culture was first and foremost hierarchical: An enterprising young executive tended to take all signals, share all attitudes and prejudices of the men above him, as his wife tended to play the sports and card games favored by the boss’s wife, to emulate how she dressed and even to serve the same foods for dinner. The job of a junior executive was to know at all times what the senior executive desired at any given moment, what kind of snack or alcohol he wanted in his hotel room on the road, what his favorite meal at a favorite restaurant was in a given city (and to have an underling there several hours early, standing guard to make sure that nothing went wrong—that the right table was available, that the restaurant did not run out of the favorite food or wine). It was the underling’s job not only to make sure that Harlow Curtice’s favored hors d’oeuvre, smoked oysters, was at cocktail parties, but the underling was to stand as near as possible to Curtice, holding a tray of oysters for him as he moved through a crowd. Thus, at one of GM’s famed Motorama shows in New York, a reporter named Don Silber, from the
Cleveland Press,
once asked Paul Garrett, a high-ranking GM public relations official, what time it was. Garrett did not deign to look at his watch. Instead, he turned to his aide, a man named Ken Yewl, and said, “Ken, tell him what time it is.”

The essential goodness of the corporation was never questioned. It was regarded as, of all the many places to work, the best, because it was the biggest, the most respected, made the most money and, very quietly, through bonuses and stock, rewarded its top people the most handsomely. Early in his career Harlow Curtice, while still the controller at AC Champion Spark Plugs, had ventured to New York with Albert Champion, the head of AC, to meet the top GM people,
including Alfred Sloan. There Curtice had undergone something of an initiation rite as the home office checked out the new boys from the Midwest. Apparently, both men met GM’s standards, for at the end Mr. Sloan offered both Champion and Curtice a chance to invest in GM’s prime management investment program for up-and-coming executives. They could invest about $25,000 and would in a few years’ time, as Mr. Sloan promised, each get back around $1.5 million. It was, in an age of rising income taxes, the company’s pioneering method of trying to protect and reward its top executives. Suddenly, Curtice realized that in addition to being successful, he might also become truly rich. As they were heading back to Flint, Curtice turned to Champion and said, “That sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it—as close to a sure thing as you can get.” “We’re not going to do that, Red,” Champion answered. “I don’t believe in letting New York tell us how to run our business.”

Even within the closed world of General Motors, there was a feeling that Chevrolet was a world apart, perhaps a little too smug. After all, the corporation was mighty, but at Chevrolet they felt the other divisions were just window dressing, that the heart and soul of General Motors was Chevy. It was responsible for nearly 70 to 75 percent of GM’s profits in most years. Chevrolets were what healthy, stable young Americans drove. Chevy belonged on the short list of certifiably
American
things, which could not be duplicated anywhere else in the world: homemade apple pie, Coke, a World Series baseball game, a Norman Rockwell cover on the
Saturday Evening Post,
a grilled hamburger in the backyard. In those years it did a brilliant job of connecting its advertising to those other American artifacts. Chevy was not just the great American car, it was something uniquely American. If there was any fear in those years, it was that the government might break General Motors up into its component parts. If there was nervousness in the rest of GM over the implications of the splitting up of Sloan’s masterpiece, there was a good deal less nervousness at Chevy; indeed they were almost cocky about it, for if the feds acted, and Chevy was broken off, it would still be the largest company in the United States.

In the early fifties, no one from the corporation had any power over Chevy; in fact, in those earlier days the corporation was comparatively weak, with a small, somewhat understaffed headquarters. Chevy was a mighty industrial masterpiece that had been put together by the founding giants of the corporation, such men as Sloan and his great enabler, Big Bill Knudsen. (In the late fifties and early sixties, the corporation shrewdly sought to limit Chevy’s autonomy.
Knowing that the Chevy people were resistant to any change mandated from the outside, the corporation promoted former top executives of Chevy who, knowing the vulnerabilities of the division they had once served, knew exactly how to subdue and undermine this once proud and once independent kingdom. Heading the corporation after heading Chevy was not, in the eyes of some, that much of a promotion: “When you left Chevy and took over the corporation,” Tom Adams, a Detroit advertising man who worked closely with GM, once noted, “it was almost like retiring.”)

Yet for all of Chevrolet’s great wealth and power, if there was a potential weakness in General Motors as Curtice took over (replacing Wilson who had joined Eisenhower’s cabinet), it was the car itself. The basic Chevy was becoming quite stodgy. It was GM’s low-end model, and the inevitable result of the company’s relentless thrust to make its models bigger and heavier and to make more profit per car had gradually undermined the traditional Chevy. General Motors’ great surge to increase automotive power had begun when Bill Knudsen had upgraded Chevy to take the entry-level niche away from Ford. Now it appeared that Chevy was slipping, that its cars had become dowdy, and that entry-level leadership was swinging back to Ford. Ford had introduced an eight-cylinder engine, and not only was that helping Ford at the low end, it was lending a certain ominous success to the whole line-up. Ford’s cars were now regarded as hotter and sexier, and Chevy, with only six cylinders, was now trying to play catch-up. Clearly, the company had stayed too long with the old six-cylinder engine—what was called the “blue flame six.” In addition, the styling of the car was boring, and one auto writer said that it looked like it had been designed “by Herbert Hoover’s haberdasher.” So in late 1951 Wilson, in one of his last major decisions, told his then-assistant Curtice that he had to juice Chevy up.

Curtice envisioned a racier, sportier new Chevy; he wanted an eight-cylinder engine, and he wanted it immediately. Immediately, in this instance, meant two years: Normally, a project like this—the complete redesign of engine, transmission, and body—took at least three and sometimes up to four or five years. But Curtice knew exactly what he had to do: He decided to take the best engineer the company had, Ed Cole, and put him in charge of the new Chevy.

Ed Cole was a troubleshooter and maverick extraordinaire within the organization; he was by normal standards far too idiosyncratic and outspoken for the corporation, probably the last true maverick of his generation at GM. He had always fought the bureaucracy
as it got more powerful. He was disliked and distrusted by the financial people because he loved to spend the company’s money, but he was tolerated by other executives because he was so driven and talented. Cole was the rare man in so large an institution who not only seemed able to deliver what the company demanded but to deliver it under exceptional pressure and crushing deadlines. He had been something of a star at the company during World War Two, working on GM’s tanks, and had gone from there to be a key figure at Cadillac, where he had become chief engineer at the youthful age of thirty-six. Then, during the Korean War, he had taken over an old deserted plant in Cleveland, which was literally filled with stored-up sacks of beans, and created tanks for the Korean War. Cole, unlike many in the company, had liked the intense pressures of wartime, the sense of immediacy, and of course the leverage it gave him to do things his way and ignore those above him who told him that what he intended to do could not be done.

Ed Cole was a farm boy from Marne, Michigan, who had hated the boredom of the farm and had always vowed he would get out as quickly as he could. He had intended to be a lawyer and was on his way to a legal career, except that his great natural ability as a tinkerer convinced him that he probably ought to be an engineer. He had gone to the General Motors Institute in Flint and had done so well that he never actually graduated—instead, he was recruited by Cadillac early and went directly to work in its engineering department. From the start he was different, a man apart, driven, relentless, challenging everything around him. He made the company a great deal of money and, in the words of his friend Tom Adams, cost the company a great deal as well, because he
had to try everything.
He had 150 ideas a week and he had to make sure each actually succeeded or failed. He might well, Adams thought, have been the most driven man he had ever met—in both work and at play. If you hunted with him, he pushed himself and others so ferociously that he was out in front of the dogs. “Ed,” Tom Adams used to tell him. “We don’t really need the dogs when you hunt.” If he fished, he fished longer and harder and had to catch not only the biggest fish but the most fish. If he was down in the Florida Keys and he hooked a mammoth tarpon on light tackle, he would fight the fish for what seemed like the entire afternoon—no matter how brutal the sun on himself, his wife, and his friends, no matter that the tarpon was sure to be released back into the water. If he took his young son, David, fishing up in northern Michigan, where there were a vast number of lakes, he did not fish only one lake every day for five or six days,
getting to know it and its secrets; rather, he arranged to have a boat at a different lake every day.

Any mechanical object that was broken was a challenge to him. The idea of throwing out a broken piece of home equipment was a personal insult. If there was a coffee maker at home that did not work, Ed Cole had to fix it. If he and his pals were on a fishing trip in Canada and the motor on their generator conked out, Ed Cole stayed up all night to fix it—not because he needed to, not because they needed the generator in the morning, but because he was proving to the world that he could fix it, by working all night with a French Canadian guide holding a flashlight. If he was hunting in some farmer’s field and there was a broken reaper, he had to stop and fix it. Once, when the heater in his home swimming pool went out, he did not, as others might do, call a specialty repairman. There was no need for the Yellow Pages with Ed Cole. Instead, he swam to the heater and started repairing it, until there was a small explosion and his eyebrows were singed.

He was a man utterly without sophistication. He was as good an engineer as there was, but outside of that, he had little interest or curiosity. He was not a particularly good businessman and was vulnerable to schemes—he bought, among other things, a fair number of leases from a man who claimed he was going to find vast oil fields in southern Michigan. Bud Goodman, a senior GM executive, liked to joke that he was still teaching Cole how to use a telephone.

He was not genteel or careful as most of the other men rising to power at GM were; they were a reflection of the cautiousness that comes when institutional values become enshrined by generation after generation and when cautiousness is rewarded. Cole argued too often and too loudly for doing whatever it took to build a good car, and by the mid-fifties, he was doing it in a corporation where many of the men around him were less committed to cars and to engineering every year. But they were a poor match for Ed Cole, who seemed to bring a kind of primal force to each encounter.

He was not smooth. He did un-GM things. He got divorced, which violated the then code of the company. He went out for a time with Mamie Van Doren, the flashy movie actress (if he was going to go out with an actress, as someone noted, why couldn’t it be someone like Lee Remick?). He even gave her a Corvette painted a color that matched her lipstick. When he married for the second time, it was to a much younger, striking blonde, and her name was
Dolly;
Dolly Cole, most assuredly, was not a GM type of wife, content to wait her turn in the pecking order at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club.
From the moment she arrived, there was a sense on the part of the other wives that she represented not just a challenge to the culture of the company but a threat to every marriage within it.

Cole’s motto, a friend noted, was the very un-GM-like “Kick the hell out of the status quo.” He had played a critical part in designing the V-8 engine that had reshaped the ’49 Cadillac, but this new challenge at Chevy was even greater, for it required a powerful but lighter engine, which would not load the car down. Ed Cole went on a wartime footing. He scoured the company for its best engineers, offering them the challenge of working on something entirely new. He started in May 1952 and overnight the engineer pool at Chevy grew from some 850 engineers to 3,000. Ed Cole did a brilliant job on the new V-8. It was a marvelous engine, the best, his competitors thought, that the industry had ever produced at that time. His V-8 was inherently balanced—that is, unlike the four-cylinder engine and the six cylinder-engine, the two sets of four cylinders in the V-8 balanced each other and fired at the same time and made the engine smoother and the car less shaky. The power was there, and the new technology had allowed the engine to be considerably lighter than V-8s in the past. Almost everything about the 1955 Chevy was new, in a way that Detroit cars were rarely new: of 4,500 component parts used in it, all but 675 were brand-new. It was, noted Clare MacKichan, one of its designers, designed to exemplify “youth, speed and lightness.” Normally, it was Harley Earl who liked his cars low and powerful, but this time it was Ed Cole who pushed for it. Earl was excited when he got the height down to sixty-one inches. But even then Cole wasn’t satisfied. “Hell, I wouldn’t want to make it over sixty inches,” he said. The two years creating the ’55 Chevy were probably his happiest time in the company—he was dealing with something entirely new, and though he was constantly fighting the financial people, he was doing it with the top brass on his side. As such, he lived with his car; it became a part of the house, and there were meetings all the time, even on weekends. There was a prototype of it in the garage and, wrestling with a new idea, he would get up in the middle of the night, and tinker with the car. When the prototype V-8 engine was completed, he put one under the hood of a ’53 Chevy and blasted off. He and his son David took it on a trip to northern Michigan. A state policeman in a Ford seemed to be tailing him, so Ed Cole simply floored the accelerator and roared away. Later, he stopped for a sandwich at a small café in Baldwin and the trooper came in. He was not angry; he was just curious. “What in God’s name do you have in that Chevy?” he asked. Cole was delighted;
soon almost everyone in the café had gathered around him as he opened up the hood. From then on it became a special pleasure of his—pulling into a gas station, telling the attendant to fill the car up and check on the oil and gas, and hearing the kid, who was almost always a car nut, exclaim, “That’s no Chevy.” “It sure as hell is,” he would always answer.