The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (66 page)

In his day-to-day activities Ford indulged in a lifelong habit of footracing friends and acquaintances. According to Charles Sorensen, “He could run like a deer. Often when I was on a trip with him he would have the car stopped and say, ‘Let's take a run.’ He always won easily—even, when he was seventy, over active men half his age.” This mania for physical fitness influenced Ford's hiring of managers at his company. “The first thing I would consider is health. I would never choose a man who looked sickly, weak, or run down,” he told Allan L. Benson. “A man who does not care enough about his own body to take proper care of it and keep it in a high state of efficiency is not likely to care enough about somebody else's business to give it efficient management.”
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Thus Henry Ford's health agenda, like that of the larger physical-culture movement, combined an ethos of physical and mental strength with ideas of personality, unlimited human potential, and self-development. It promised success to the vigorous, healthy individual operating in a new economic atmosphere of consumer abundance. Ultimately, however, Ford's physical energies overflowed the confines of exercise and diet, just as his New Thought principles transcended the goal of mere material success. Both the physical and the mental converged to shape a new morality that found an outlet in a different, more intimate area.

Henry Ford liked to visit an old farmhouse sitting on land near the Ford dairy in Dearborn. He would settle in a favorite rocking chair that cradled a small pillow given to him by the mistress of the house. He conversed with her for hours, reflecting upon his ideas and dispensing advice about various daily issues in her life. After a time, however, Ford invariably liked to take a brief nap, and he would fuss with the pillow, plumping it and arranging it to fit the small of his back. It became a standing joke that, despite this elaborate
ritual, the pillow would be on the floor five minutes after he fell asleep. When he awakened, she would tease him by saying, “You see, you can handle an empire but you can't handle a pillow. Now,
I
can do both.”
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The comment typified the woman who made it. Evangeline Dahlinger was a bright, vivacious, ambitious, and outspoken young woman who enjoyed an intimate relationship with Ford that lasted over three decades. A close companion who shared many of his interests as well as his high energy level, she lavished attention, affection, and respect upon a man thirty years her senior. In turn, she became the object of Ford's largesse, receiving not only his personal devotion but an outpouring of gifts that made her comfortably wealthy. Evidence also suggests that Eve Dahlinger enjoyed Ford's physical attentions, bearing him a son in 1923 whose existence became a source of obvious, if muted, pride for him. But, as with nearly everything about Henry Ford, this was no simple matter of a powerful man keeping a secret mistress. The tangled relationship involved company intrigue, marital compliance, and peculiar physical proximity in terms of their living arrangements. Overall, the romance bespoke Ford's embrace of a personal morality that undermined the Victorian traditions of nineteenth-century America.

Sixteen-year-old Evangeline Côté had joined the Ford Motor Company in 1909. Of French Canadian background, she was born in 1893 as the oldest of four children. When her father, a professor, became ill, she went to work to help support him and her three younger brothers. She entered the stenographic department at Ford, and within three years had become its head. Shortly thereafter, she caught the eye of Harold Wills, who asked her to become his personal secretary. In 1913 and 1914, as the company expanded, Wills worked closely with Henry Ford, and Côté made his acquaintance. She became increasingly friendly with the industrialist, first as a special assistant, and then as much more.
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Côté presented obvious attractions to Ford. Physically, she was a petite young woman just over five feet tall, with dark eyes, a curvaceous figure, and toothy grin. Her personality, however, made a bigger impact. Naturally vivacious, Côté was headstrong and independent-minded and tended toward outspokenness. She tempered these traits, however, with a charming and flirtatious personal style. Fun-loving and quick to laugh, she appealed to the opposite sex and, according to one observer, “easily twisted men around her little finger.”
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Moreover, Evangeline Côté broke the mold of expected behavior for females. In many ways, she represented the youthful, liberated “new woman” on the American scene by the 1920s, who was determined to reject traditions of female propriety and self-restraint. Rather than engaging in
sewing, cooking, reading, and domestic management, Côté embraced a vigorous lifestyle of physical activity. An excellent horsewoman who became the women's harness-racing champion in the state of Michigan, she so excelled at riding that she mastered the trick of cantering about while standing atop two horses at the same time. She also loved flying, becoming the first woman in Michigan to earn a pilot's license, and kept a Curtiss Flying Boat at a lake in the northern part of the state. She also adored speedboats and piloted a thirty-six-foot craft with a large Liberty engine. In more sedate moments, she enjoyed long walks through the countryside and ice-skating. In fact, she was so much the tomboy that Ford gave her the nickname Billy. Not surprisingly, Côté rejected the Victorian standard of thrift and, according to one witness, “threw money around riotously. Ford loved it.” Thus, though fully feminine and something of a coquette, this energetic young woman was determined to break free from traditional female stereo-types.
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In particular, two things seemed to attract Henry Ford to Eve Côté.

First, unlike nearly everyone else in his life, she dealt with him honestly and stood her ground when she thought he was wrong. “She was not afraid of him, and I can still hear her giving Mr. Ford a piece of her mind,” an observer noted. To a man often surrounded by sycophants, such conduct was a refreshing change. At the same time, Côté evinced a larger attitude of respect and admiration for Ford, verging on hero-worship. She followed his daily activities with intense interest, deferred to his judgments on many practical matters, and solicited his opinion, even on issues about which she had already made up her mind. This could shade into manipulation as she laughed and gazed at him tenderly with her large light-green eyes.
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Second, Eve's active, vigorous lifestyle proved alluring to a man enamored of health reform and physical culture. The pair loved to ice-skate together and spent many hours taking long walks in the woods and fields near his Fair Lane estate. “They loved to walk the railroad tracks; they would start from Dearborn and walk all the way to Detroit on the tracks—a distance of seven or eight miles,” Eve's son reported. “However, at the end of the line, Ford's car and driver would be waiting to take them back.” Ford drew the line at horseback riding. His well-known distrust of horses kept him on the sidelines as an admiring observer of Côté's riding and racing achievements.
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Ford found himself drawing closer to Evangeline Côté. When he returned from the Peace Ship mission in early 1916, for instance, he brought her an expensive silver brooch set with six large moonstones. Eve returned the devotion, spending as much time as possible with Ford and keeping track of his various endeavors in her diary. By the time of America's
entry into World War I, however, their relationship had reached an impasse.
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Perhaps from a desire to extricate himself from an improper entanglement, or perhaps from a wish to create a façade of propriety behind which the romance could be conducted, Ford decided to find Evangeline a husband. By 1917, he had picked his chauffeur and assistant, Ray Dahlinger, and began maneuvering to position the young man near the attractive Côté. Dahlinger was totally devoted to Ford. He had secured a job at the company and worked his way up from assembly to testing to the experimental room at Highland Park, where he performed stress tests on Model T's. There Dahlinger met Ford, who would come by occasionally to be driven around the track and observe his car's performance firsthand. He became Ford's bodyguard and accompanied him on the Peace Ship. Upon returning, he assumed the duties of Ford's chauffeur and was responsible for upkeep of his automobiles. A hardworking, pleasant-looking young man, Dahlinger was nearly engaged to a good friend of his sister when the Ford plan materialized. Loyal to his boss and aware of Evangeline's charms, Dahlinger became her suitor.
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Côté responded. Strongly desiring children, and resigned to the fact that she could never marry Ford, she cooperated with the scheme. A relationship flowered, and Ray and Evangeline were married on February 20, 1917. They moved into an old farmhouse on Ford land in Dearborn, not far from his Fair Lane estate.
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From nearly the outset, the Dahlinger marriage was strained. After several years, Eve had failed to get pregnant, and the couple were sleeping in separate beds, and eventually separate bedrooms. As a flood of gifts from Henry Ford came pouring into the household, the relationship between Ray and Eve deteriorated. Ford provided a three-hundred-acre farm in nearby Romeo, and stocked it with three hundred head of cattle. He gave the Dahlingers a vacation house in upper Michigan, a number of expensive horses, and a large “flying boat” airplane. Though he was fond of both Dahlingers, the presents obviously reflected his affection for Eve and focused upon her outdoor interests.
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Ford's generosity culminated in a gift of 150acres situated just downriver from his own home on the River Rouge. This became the site for the Dahlinger estate in the late 1920s, a palatial property whose worth obviously surpassed the financial resources of its occupants. The Tudor-style main house had nine fireplaces, eight bathrooms, servants' quarters, and a refrigerated fur-storage vault. It was surrounded by a gatehouse, several barns, a blacksmith shop, a lake and skating house, quarter-mile and half-mile racetracks, a gardener's house, a greenhouse, a boathouse, and a very
large garage. The main house had a secret staircase. After entering a small, out-of-the-way room on the main floor, one could climb these stairs and emerge into Eve's bedroom suite upstairs without being observed.
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Ray Dahlinger cut a sad figure in this complex situation. On the one hand, he displayed occasional bitterness about his peculiar domestic life. Always a convivial consumer of alcohol, he began drinking more heavily. As the mansion went up on the River Rouge site, funded by Ford money, he bridled. “He said he was perfectly happy living in the old farmhouse and he didn't want to live in a ‘goddamn castle,’ ” according to a friend who overheard him complain. Ray and Eve cooperated on various Ford projects, but any real intimacy seems to have evaporated. Though accepting the situation, Ray occasionally betrayed his emotional wounds. In a newspaper story in the Detroit
Times
about his management of the Ford Farms, Dahlinger declared, “Let me tell you one thing that I've always noticed. If a man is a success it is always because of a woman. And I believe it's up to every woman [to guarantee] whether her husband is a success or not.” The irony of this comment turned pathetic within a few years. In a letter to Eve, he pleaded to be rid of their twin beds as something “made for only sick people, not people that love each other.” “I wish our room would have
one
bed just for
you
and
me.
Is it alright for me to say that?” Yet Ray did not lead a monkish existence. He was observed at a Dahlinger party, for example, behind a tree, kissing a woman who had been flirting madly with him for several weeks.
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On the other hand, as compensation for his aggrieved status, Ray enjoyed a privileged position in the Ford organization. He was appointed supervisor of the Ford Farms, an important job that included not only agricultural sites but an airport and Greenfield Village, the historical attraction that Henry Ford had begun constructing in the late 1920s. Dahlinger also helped with special projects, such as a publicity film for the new Model A in the late 1920s. He jealously guarded his position, often in artless fashion, and made many enemies in the process. He sought to hamstring anyone who seemed a threat, causing many to describe him as “unscrupulous” and “a good fellow to stay away from.” Others rolled their eyes at his penchant for telling tall tales designed to exaggerate his own importance, and denounced his habit of appropriating company equipment to use for his seasonal projects. Trying to throw his weight around, he alienated powerful figures in the Ford organization, such as Charles Sorensen.
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Yet Dahlinger remained devoted to Henry Ford as his “ambassador at large” or, more nastily, his “henchman.” He followed the orders of “The Boss” doggedly and without question, even when those orders involved things about which Dahlinger knew nothing. According to many, that was the case most of the time. As Dahlinger once confessed to Eugene Farkas, a
company engineer, “I never do anything unless Mr. Ford tells me to do it. There are a lot of things that I don't like to do, but I've got to do it.” The picture of loyalty, he carried out Ford's wishes and cemented their special relationship. Because others could read the situation accurately and feared crossing his patron, Dahlinger was able to accumulate considerable power.
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