Fifties (81 page)

By October 1954, the ’55 Chevy was finished and in the showrooms and it was a tour de force. With its lightweight 4.3-liter, 265-cubic-inch V-8 it supplied 160 horsepower. It was a car buff’s delight. In the first year, the company sold 1.83 million cars, plus 393,000 trucks with the V-8.

Armed now with his powerful, completely new car, Cole set out to go after not just Ford but, semicovertly, GM’s own Cadillac as well. For what Ed Cole had really intended from the time he took on the car was to create a Chevrolet that competed with Cadillac, a car almost as big as a Caddy and with just as much power. A poor man’s Caddy, he liked to call it. “He wanted the average guy to feel he was driving a baby Cadillac,” said Bob Cadaret, a designer. Or as Harley Earl said to Harlow Curtice in the design shop one day, “Now,
there
... there’s a car that if it had a Cadillac emblem [on it] I could sell as a Cadillac.” Was there higher praise? The Chevy under Cole kept growing bigger and more powerful: The horsepower, which had once been around 90 to 100, now suddenly took off in quantum leaps: from 160 to 250 and, finally, to 325 and 410. Inside were such options as power steering, power brakes, and air-conditioning. In the end he had done what he set out to do—produced a Chevy that was the virtual automotive equivalent of a Cadillac. That was what the public wanted, he liked to say, “austere mink.”

Ed Cole had stunned the corporation by putting the car together in such a short time, and not only had he successfully challenged an ever more confident Ford Company (and in the process been part of a year in which some $65 billion was spent on motor vehicles—one fifth of the national GNP), but it had set the stage for the next decade, for ever bigger more powerful cars. The next year the advertising slogan was: “The hot one’s even hotter.”

THIRTY-THREE

I
N THE HOME IT
was to be a new, even easier age, the good life without sweat. “Never before so much for so few,” wrote
Life
in 1954. Poppy Cannon, a food writer of that period, agreed: “Never before has so much been available to so many of us as now,” she wrote in 1953, singling out as the key to the new American dream, the can opener—in her words, “that
open sesame
to wealth and freedom ... freedom from tedium, space, work and your own inexperience.” “Never has a whole people spent so much money on so many expensive things in such an easy way as Americans are doing today,” reported
Fortune
in October 1956 in a glowing account of the consumer-driven economy entitled “What A Country!” It was, in fact, an astonishing age of abundance, an age of wondrous kitchen and household aids, ever bigger, but not ever more expensive as in the auto industry—the very success of the item
meant that the price kept coming down: consumers were buying more for less.

Life in America, it appeared, was in all ways going to get better: A new car could replace an old one, and a larger, more modern refrigerator would take the place of one bought three years earlier, just as a new car had replaced an old one. Thus, the great fear of manufacturers, as they watched their markets reach saturation points, was that their sales would decline; this proved to be false. So did another of the retailers’ fears—that people might save too much. Of the many things to be concerned about in postwar America, the idea of Americans saving too much was not one of them. The market was saturated, but people kept on buying—newer, improved products that were easier to handle, that produced cleaner laundry, washed more dishes and glasses, and housed more frozen steaks. What the leaders of the auto industry had done in autos with the annual model change, now, on a somewhat different scale, the manufacturers of home appliances and furniture were doing in their businesses. No wonder people bought more appliances. Suddenly, the old ones seemed inconvenient and outdated. That was, as much as anything else, a reflection of the new fantasy kitchen, as portrayed in endless women’s magazines. Virtually every house had a refrigerator. Yet in 1955 alone, for example,
Fortune
reported, consumers had spent $1.3 billion buying 4 million new units, a significant increase over the previous year. The explanation was simple: frozen food. The old refrigerators had tiny freezers—enough space only to freeze a few trays of ice. The new refrigerators were designed for a wondrous, new world of frozen foods and TV dinners.

If there was one figure who came to symbolize the dazzling new American kitchen and all its astonishing appliances, as well as the revolution in selling and advertising that was taking place, it was Betty Furness—the Lady from Westinghouse. In 1949 Betty Furness was thirty-three, an ingenue whose career was winding down after thirty-six films in five years (most of them B films). In those days, the people who did television commercials usually had come from radio, which meant they were good at reading lines but not at memorizing them, and they had no earthly idea of how to look at the camera. One poor woman who was directed to stand at a Westinghouse stove and heat some chocolate had been so terrified by the idea of talking and demonstrating at the same time that she had spilled melted chocolate all over the stove.

Furness had been doing some live television acting on
Studio One
at the time, and she had been appalled by these performers’ lack
of professionalism, and she spoke out indignantly on the set about incompetent radio amateurs intruding in a visual medium. The next thing she knew, someone from the ad agency asked her to try a commercial. She gamely gave it a try, found that she was good at it, and got the job, which paid $150 a week—good money in 1949. It was, she soon discovered, hard work. On each episode of
Studio One,
where Westinghouse was the sole sponsor, she had to deliver one three-minute commercial and two one-and-a-half-minute commercials. They were live, and different each week, so the lines had to be memorized.

She soon discovered her chief asset was that she was attractive, but not in a way that made women jealous. Men liked her looks, but even more important, women, the prime targets of these commercials, liked her too. She came across, in fact, very much like the women portrayed in photos and ads in women’s magazines—bright, upbeat, and confident, and modern without looking too glamorous. She was the all-American wife in the all-American kitchen. She exuded confidence that she could handle anything in this sparkling new workplace that promised to make household chores, if not downright obsolete, at least easy and glamorous. The advertising people wanted her to appear even more housewifely, and they pressured her to put on a wedding ring: There was even serious talk of having her take an assumed name under which she would in effect become the living Westinghouse logo. “We want you to be like Betty Crocker,” someone from the ad agency told her. “But I’m not, I’m Betty Furness,” she answered. “Well,” he said. “What about wearing an apron when you do these commercials? That seems more kitcheny.” “I don’t want to wear an apron, and I don’t want to seem more a part of the kitchen,” she said. She had a strong sense of her own identity, and they were smart enough to let her alone after that.

She became a celebrity of significant proportions for the first time during the 1952 political conventions. Westinghouse had bought an immense amount of time, and she was on air constantly, almost as much as Walter Cronkite, it seemed, who also made his reputation during that campaign. There was an agreement not to put her on more than three times an hour, but she noted later, since the networks were on all day, she made as many as twenty to twenty-five appearances every day for a week. Add on an additional week for the other convention, and that was a lot more time on the air than any American politician was getting. Mercifully, the TelePrompTer had arrived by then and she did not have to spend all her spare time learning her lines.

Her clothes became something of an issue. She had to change minimally three times a day in order to stay fresh for herself and her viewers. She had an intuitive sense about her role, which was to keep as many people as possible from going to the bathroom during the commercial break. Therefore, she had to be interesting and unpredictable. If she changed her clothes constantly, housewives would be curious about what she was going to wear next. At the 1956 conventions she showed up with twenty-eight different outfits, so many that
Life
magazine later did a panel of photos showing her in each outfit. She bought all her clothes herself. There was a reason for this. If she let Westinghouse pay for the clothes, then the company would decide what she should wear and she was sure that she would have to look more like the wives of Westinghouse executives. But she knew exactly the look she wanted: modern, neat, no frills, sophisticated but modest.

Suddenly, she not only was famous, but all sorts of people she did not know seemed to think of her as a friend. Whenever she went out people recognized her and wanted to talk to her. To her surprise, she was Betty to them; they did not feel the need to use her last name, since she had been in their homes and, indeed, had helped them out in their kitchens. The sale of Westinghouse appliances boomed, and there was no doubt that there was a connection to this pleasant, attractive woman’s appearances as the Westinghouse hostess. “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse,” she said at the end of each commercial, and it became her trademark. One small incident alone demonstrated her power. In June 1952 she presented the American people with the Mobilair fan. In retrospect, she thought, it was a clunky machine, larger than most fans and mounted on wheels so it could be wheeled from room to room. It cost $89. It could blow air into a room or suck it out. Why anyone would have wanted one was beyond her. But the day after she went on television with one, the Mobilairs sold out in a number of major cities.

The Westinghouse people realized they had a star on their hands, and they asked her to sign a three-year, noncancellable contract to represent Westinghouse exclusively, for $100,000 a year. With that she became the queen of American appliances, standing between a great faceless industrial company and American housewives. She knew little about the machines themselves except that they seemed well made and that the people who made them seemed like solid Americans from Ohio.

The one thing she did notice about the appliances, as she continued to promote them, was her sense that she was beginning to
shrink—because the machines were getting bigger. When she started in 1950, the first refrigerators came up to her shoulders, which made them about fifty-eight inches high, on average. Gradually, they began to gain on her and became ever fancier, with enormous “frost-free” freezers. In this new wonder age, she mused at the time, people were being swallowed up by their kitchen appliances.

The only appliance she represented for Westinghouse that did not sell well was the dishwasher. For a long time the people at Westinghouse, as well as at other companies, were both surprised and disappointed by that appliance’s poor showing. Persistent research with consumers finally showed that women were wary of buying dishwashers because the modern kitchen had become so automated that they feared if they stopped doing the dishes by hand, they would lose their last toehold in the kitchen and husbands would start wondering why they needed wives at all.

Furness did not take her new fame too seriously. Once, Westinghouse decided that she should do an institutional advertisement explaining how jet engines worked. She was appalled by the idea. They’re going to laugh at me, she told her colleagues, but they insisted she do it. So the ad was written, and she stood there with what to her nonetheless seemed like a complicated explanation. “The way these engines work,” she began and then quickly inserted her own words, “they tell me ...”

Near the end of her eleven-year stint, there was a new president of Westinghouse who was clearly unhappy with her work—in part, she suspected, because he had not invented her. Immediately, he began casting doubts on her—and suggesting that perhaps Westinghouse needed a new and younger woman for its image. Gil Baird, the Westinghouse executive in charge of dealing with her, was told he should get a new person for the ads. Baird said he did not think it a particularly good idea. Why not? the new president asked. “Because,” said Baird, “when you walk down the street no one knows who you are, but when Betty Furness walks down the street, everyone thinks Westinghouse.”

The power that Betty Furness had as a commercial symbol for Westinghouse was a reflection of the growing power of television as a vehicle for advertising and also of the growing power of advertising in American life. For the fifties was a decade that revolutionized Madison Avenue. At the turn of the century, the home had been a reasonably safe haven from the purveyors of goods (among other
reasons, because there was so little disposable income) other than the occasional traveling salesman. Radio advertising had been clever and deft and had greatly expanded the possibilities for reaching the consumer; but television opened up the field even more dramatically and offered a vast array of new techniques, from the subtle and sophisticated to hammering away with a brief, repetitive message. At first the television departments of the major agencies were small, understaffed, and lost money. That changed quickly enough. “We discovered,” said Rosser Reeves, one of the prime architects and beneficiaries of television advertising, “that this was no tame kitten; we had a ferocious man-eating tiger. We could take the same advertising campaign from print or radio and put it on TV, and even when there were very few sets, sales would go through the roof.” The speed with which television’s power ascended awed even those who prophesied it: In 1949, Madison Avenue’s total television billings were $12.3 million; the next year, it jumped to $40.8 million; and the year after that, it jumped to $128 million. Television, of course, could do what radio never could, for it was visual. “Show the product,” said Ben Duffy, one of the men who was writing the rules even as he learned them, “and show it in use.” Many advertisers did that and more: A Remington razor shaved the fuzz off a peach, as Stephen Fox noted in
The Mirror Makers,
and a Band-Aid was used to show it was strong enough to lift an egg.