The Strouse-picked man running JWT’s Detroit office in 1963 not only understood the ground rules of the community; he was part of the rule-making elite. This was William D. Laurie, who came to the agency with a life history that neatly connected cars, advertising, and Detroit society. Laurie grew up in Grosse Pointe, graduated from the University of Michigan, married Thayer Hutchinson, the elegant debutante daughter of B. E. Hutchinson, once treasurer of the Chrysler Corporation, and settled the family in a modernist house on a double lot his father-in-law procured for them in Grosse Pointe Farms, the toniest of the Grosse Pointe enclaves. Unlike Strouse, who was physically unprepossessing, Laurie looked the part of the quintessential Mad Men account executive, charming and handsome with his slick-combed hair and Brooks Brothers suits. He was a sophisticated aesthete and power player in Detroit who began his career as an apprentice copywriter in a local agency, Maxon Inc., where his first auto client was the old Reo automobile, and rose to vice president with accounts including Packard, Hotpoint, Pfeiffer Beer, Mohawk Carpets, and Hiram Walker & Sons Distillery. Hiram Walker was a nineteenth-century Detroiter who made his fortune distilling whisky across the river in Windsor (the Canadians spelled the liquor without an e) and was the grandfather of Arthur Buhl, the Detroit businessman who built the Buhl Building, where J. Walter Thompson made its Detroit offices. Laurie came to work in the Buhl Building in 1957, lured to JWT from Maxon after a breakfast at Strouse’s penthouse apartment on Beekman Place overlooking the United Nations Plaza and the East River in Manhattan. Upon meeting Laurie, Strouse proclaimed him “the kind of man one can like almost on sight . . . what the English used to call so charmingly ‘a man of parts.’ ”
Some of Laurie’s parts were defined by the many professional and social clubs to which he belonged: Adcraft Club, Country Club of Detroit (situated in Grosse Pointe), Detroit Club, Detroit Athletic Club, Little Club of Grosse Pointe, Witenagemot Club, and Yondotega Club. The range here was from exclusive to more exclusive to most exclusive. Yondotega was in that last category, a hideaway for the Fords, Fishers, Briggses, and Buhls, affectionately known, in a vernacular peculiar to the rich, as “just an old dump” on East Jefferson along the Detroit River. “Yondotega” was said to be Algonquin for “happy spot on the river.” The dump was limited to a hundred members, and the only way you could get in was if someone died. The happy hundred living white men could play cards and eat elegant meals together on Wednesday nights, Bill Laurie frequently among them. He loved the exclusive clubs, all of them.
The only black people who entered this elite life were servants. In its upper reaches, Detroit was not all that different in those relationships from Montgomery, Alabama, where Laurie’s namesake father had made his start in the ad business before moving the family to Grosse Pointe. The younger of Laurie’s two sons, David, who was ten in 1963, later said he knew only two African Americans growing up. One was Julia Newton, their live-in maid and nanny, who had previously served a Brahmin family in Boston. “She basically brought me up. Her room was right next door to mine. She would get me up in the morning. I loved Julia to death,” he recalled. The other was a woman named Cynthia who performed the same tasks for his Hutchinson grandparents. By the late sixties, when as a teenager he had long hair and was protesting the war in Vietnam, David Laurie thought more about “the racial underpinnings of living in Detroit.” He asked his parents, “How come we don’t know any black people?” It was, he said, “a weird place.”
The politics of the family folded neatly into that elite milieu. The patriarch, B. E. Hutchinson, had been an influential rightist who helped finance William F. Buckley’s National Review when it was energizing and redefining the American conservative movement in the midfifties. Bill Laurie too befriended Buckley, hosting him on occasion in Grosse Pointe, sailing with him at the family’s summer estate in Jamestown, Rhode Island, an island community off Newport, and keeping prized autographed copies of God and Man at Yale and other early Buckley books in prominent positions on the coffee tables at home. Thayer Laurie was her father’s daughter, more conservative and political than her husband, and by 1963 was actively supporting Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination. Neither of them liked George Romney. Romney rose from the same Detroit auto culture, and he was now the most prominent Republican in Michigan, but he was decidedly not part of the club. The Lauries were Episcopalian, prominent members of Christ Church in Grosse Pointe, and Romney was a Mormon. More than that, his politics were too moderate for their tastes.
Laurie’s house at 121 Merriweather Road showed other aspects of the man of many parts. The modernist design, so distinct from the traditional houses of Grosse Pointe Farms, was conceived by Alexander Girard, known as Sandro, a world-class architect, interior designer, and art collector who had become such a close family friend that he was David’s godfather. The glistening, airy rooms were filled with an eclectic array of modern art, old American folk art, and exquisite modern furniture, much of it accumulated in trips with Sandro and his wife, Susan, or with another couple with whom the Lauries were close, Charles Eames and his wife, Ray, noted designers who had met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills.
There were books everywhere in the Laurie house and a built-in stereo system playing Bill’s favorite music, especially the jazz compositions of Duke Ellington and a recording of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. At the back of the house was a hexagon-shaped room—the Hex, they called it—with burlap walls and toys Thayer collected during outings with Sandro. In the dining room was a duck press with the 21 Club logo on it, a cherished gift Laurie received decades earlier from his boss at Maxon after a night at the Manhattan restaurant celebrating an advertising deal. Laurie had no idea how to press a duck but occasionally tried to squeeze oranges with the press, sending juice flying across the room. Directly above the living room was a hideaway designed like an old ship’s cabin, with brass lanterns, more books, and built-in bunk beds, a motif inspired by Laurie’s years as a naval officer during World War II aboard merchant marine vessels carrying munitions across the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans to Soviet allies on what was known as the Murmansk run.
Laurie was able to escape the confinements of the auto culture, but he was also tightly connected to it. He and Thayer hosted parties at the Merriweather Road house to entertain friends and clients, who often merged. Lee Iacocca was a frequent guest, among other top Ford executives. Other visitors included Tennessee Ernie Ford, the conveniently named southern singer whose Ford-sponsored television show ran on Thursday nights on NBC from 1955 to 1961 (“Bless your pea-pickin’ hearts,” Tennessee Ernie would drawl in closing), and Charles Schultz, who first deployed his Peanuts comic strip characters in ads selling the new Ford Falcon in 1959. Henry Ford II lived nearby, and Laurie was at a level professionally and socially where he could associate comfortably with the Ford boss, though he found the Deuce’s carryings-on unrefined. Every fall, when the new line of Ford cars came out, two of the latest models would arrive at the Laurie house. It was always a yellow Ford station wagon for Thayer and a dark green Thunderbird convertible tricked out with leather seats for Bill. The man next door was Laurie’s nemesis, a Chrysler executive, generating yearly competition about who had what in the driveway.
• • •
From his office high atop the Buhl Building, Bill Laurie could see across to Windsor, Ontario, and at closer distance the steady passage of barges and ships plying the Detroit River, one of the busiest inland waterways in America, most of the cargo related to the auto industry. Many years on the Fourth of July, after dinner at the London Chop House, he would take the family up to his office aerie to watch fireworks explode in the night sky over the water. Across from his massive desk and walls lined with naval awards, he kept a seventeenth-century antique telescope by the window for daily viewing of river activities.
Laurie knew what was going on, outside and in. Elsewhere in the Buhl Building, at a location known only to him and two men who worked in Fo
rward Planning, was an office they called the Tomb. The room was isolated, locked off, on a different floor from the rest of the JWT operation. Only Laurie and the two forward planners had keys. Cleaning women were not allowed in. The Tomb was cleaned by building guards, but only when the forward planners were around to watch. All wastepaper was burned. It was there that J. Walter Thompson’s advance team worked on the T-5, the Ford project that Iacocca had revealed to Laurie and Strouse and their second-in-command that afternoon deep in the heavily secured interior of Ford’s Design Center.
The forward planners had set up shop in the Tomb months earlier, in November 1962, about one year after Iacocca and his Ford team had first begun thinking about this new car. The long process began during the early months of JFK’s New Frontier in 1961, when the world was changing, the demographics of America were changing, and market researchers at Ford and J. Walter Thompson were taking notice, with Iacocca in the lead. Three trends were converging. The first was an increase in the number of young people. As a JWT memo noted, the era of World War II was long distant not only emotionally but statistically—nearly 50 percent of Americans “were not born when Hitler invaded Poland [in 1939]” and “thirty percent were not here when the Korean War started in 1950.” Combined, these were the children of the postwar baby boom, the largest rising generation in American history. Second, the population was becoming more educated, with a direct correlation to car buying. Industry research showed that 46 percent of all cars were being sold to the 20 percent of the populace with some college education. A third factor was the sharp rise in two-car families. In studying these trends, Ford concluded that “there appeared no car on the market that met the spirit, the major desires of this more sophisticated, more youthful, better educated population trending toward multiple car ownership.” Don Frey, Iacocca’s top product planning manager, described this situation as “a market looking for a product.” Laurie and Franklyn Thomas over at JWT used another description; they said it was “reminiscent of a Pirandello play called Six Characters in Search of an Author.”
After a few false starts with cars and mockups that were too small or sporty or narrow in their potential appeal, Iacocca passed down a mission statement along the chain of command through Frey and Eugene Bordinat, the design vice president, to stylists Joe Oros and Dave Ash and others: Come up with a car that can trump the Chevrolet Corvair Monza. The Ford Falcon was practical and a decent seller, but not sexy enough. Design a car that will appeal to the coming-of-age postwar baby boomers and men and women of all ages who want to feel young and free. Make a car that is sporty and stylish, that weighs about 2,500 pounds, costs about $2,500, seats four comfortably, uses a standard floor shift, with plenty of options.
Fear and excitement, in equal parts, fueled the drive to produce this new car. The fear was always there, what executives called “the terror of error,” but it was compounded in this case because the previous creative burst from Ford was one of the defining busts in automaker history, the Edsel, which had been introduced with great expectations in September 1957 and had collapsed into history’s dustbin by 1960, losing Ford scores of millions of dollars and forever turning the name of Henry Ford II’s father into a symbol of failure. To get Ford to buy in again on another new car would take some doing, but Lido Anthony Iacocca was confident he could do it. Since those early days in 1961, he had been holding twice-monthly dinner meetings with his project crew, including the forward planners and a writer from JWT, at the nearby Fairlane Room, meticulously planning the concept of a car he was certain would do what the Edsel could not: hit the sweet spot of American yearning. They called Iacocca a car guy, and he held an engineering degree from Lehigh University, but mostly he was a salesman, and at age thirty-eight this would be the biggest sales job of his life.
What would this car look like? The basic answer came on August 16, 1962, when Iacocca, HF2, and other top Ford executives gathered in the secure Ford Design Center. There stood seven mockups of cars covered in canvas, rough drafts made of clay and aluminum foil, many of them finished only on one side. Only one of the seven was designed directly by Iacocca’s stylists, the others done by Lincoln-Mercury or corporate’s Advance Design team. The lone Ford Division mockup was put together hastily, a last-minute entry done in three days. It was the one that wowed everyone. The white model with the long hood and short deck. Somehow it transcended its inert condition. Iacocca said later that even in clay and without a motor it seemed to be rushing ahead, beauty and daring in motion. Here was the choice: Project T-5.
J. Walter Thompson’s forward planning men would soon set up the Tomb, and then Laurie and Strouse would get ushered into the styling room for their first glimpse. By midspring 1963 Laurie had established a “hot project” staff at the Buhl Building in Detroit and at 420 Lex in New York, larger than the original two-man effort but still select and sworn to secrecy. The car was taking shape, but what would they call it? Cougar? Thunderbolt? TBird II? Monte Carlo? Ford K-2? Mustang? Falcon Special? Thunderstar? XTC? Colt? Panther? Allegro? Torino?
Chapter 8
* * *
THE PITCH OF HIS HUM
THE CARAVAN OF three hundred cars unwound languidly from the church parking lot at 9:30 on the morning of March 17, snaking north up 12th Street a block, then west across Euclid a half mile and right at Linwood before easing to a stop near the corner with Philadelphia. Another five hundred people waited as a greeting party outside the remodeled Oriole Theater. The slow-motion procession on this sun-dappled Sunday looked like a funeral cortege but felt like something more joyous. For the flock of New Bethel Baptist, this was the last migration in an urban rite of passage, more beginning than ending. The Oriole was their new house of worship, a gathering place that seemed entirely appropriate for a congregation led by Detroit’s most theatrical preacher, the Reverend Clarence La Vaughn Franklin.
In the old days, before urban renewal, New Bethel Baptist rocked on Hastings Street in the raucous heart of Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, its church a spiritual colossus of warm knotty-pine paneling. Even without summer air-conditioning the church lured thousands of hungry souls inside each Sunday night, elbow to elbow from floor to balcony, with hundreds more on occasion lining the street outside and listening to the broadcast via loudspeakers. Then Hastings and its life force vanished in 1961, replaced by the concrete of the Chrysler Freeway, and New Bethel, after depositing a $200,000-plus eminent domain check from the city, moved across town to transitional quarters on 12th Street. Now the church had used part of that payoff and a loan from the National Bank of Detroit to transform the old theater on Linwood into a magisterial religious sanctuary, a remodeling that, with Franklin in the pulpit, seemed much like a distinction without a difference.
“This is a day of victory, triumph and achievement, and we are happy,” the reverend exclaimed to the multitudes in his church-christening sermon. “Nothing can be achieved without conflict and trial. That is the main reason we here at New Bethel are able to say there is power in faith.” Faith rewarded, a church blessed, a pastor and his people awash in good wishes, including telegrams from Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and President Kennedy. With that the organist, Harold Smith, began to strike the reverberant keys, and soon the New Bethel choir was singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Lord Will Make a Way” and “How Great Thou Art.”
C. L. Franklin, who had just turned forty-eight, was at the pinnacle of his career but in the midst of personal change as the world was changing around him. He had spent much of the past decade on the road as a celebrity preacher, the marquee performer in a traveling show of sermon and song that at various times included his daughters Aretha, Erma, and Carolyn, along with Little Sammie Bryant, a three-foot-small performing dynamo, and before that the Ward sisters, led by Clara Ward, a noted gospel artist who had been the reverend’s off-and-on lover. Franklin was the leading circuit flyer in black America, the modern variation of the old-fashioned circuit-riding preacher, us
ing a plane rather than a horse and filling large auditoriums rather than one-room churches. But now Aretha was about to turn twenty-one and gone from Detroit, bursting into soul-singing stardom in New York, and Erma had left Clark College in Atlanta after her sophomore year to record on the Epic label. For their flamboyant widower father, the grind of so much travel, combined with the great expectations people had for his every appearance, as he later explained, “kind of broke me down,” leaving him exhausted and susceptible to ill health. Beyond that, in the seven years since his longtime friend and colleague in the Baptist ministry, Martin Luther King Jr., intensified the civil rights movement with the Montgomery bus boycott, Franklin had been devoting more time each year to the rhetoric of equality and a bit less to the spectacle of evangelistic entertainment. The goings-on in his native South in the first months of 1963 had prompted him to seek a more activist role, at once deepening his commitment and exposing him to factional discord within the church community and the civil rights movement.
Although the story of his rise to prominence had familiar elements, Franklin stood apart from his Baptist brethren, larger than life, a splashy exaggeration of common traits. He emerged from the poor black terrain of the Mississippi Delta, in Sunflower County, and started preaching when he was sixteen, finding his way to churches in Memphis and Buffalo before reaching Detroit in 1946. New Bethel was already there, its roots stretching back to a Depression-era prayer-and-song society formed by a group of Detroit women, but under Franklin’s leadership it grew into what later might be called a megachurch, with nearly ten thousand members. From its location at Hastings and Willis, amid the hubbub of Hastings, New Bethel developed a reputation as the people’s palace, embracing rich and poor, upright and derelict, matron and streetwalker, foundry worker and mortician. The church was there for daily survival as well as spiritual salvation. Erma Franklin recalled how newcomers would arrive in Detroit from Mississippi or Alabama or Tennessee and ask, “Can you tell me where C. L. Franklin lives?” “They would show up sometimes twelve thirty, one o’clock in the morning, and they would say, well, you know, ‘I got here, I don’t have any money, I don’t have a job, can you help me?’ And he would take money out of his pocket and find them a place to stay.”
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