Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  THE MAGIC SKYWAY

  WALTER BUHL FORD III was the great-grandson of the original Henry Ford. Buhlie, he was called, a nickname that matched his devilish rich-kid personality. His parents had sent him off to the Berkshire School, a coed prep school in western Massachusetts, but he left before graduating and a few years later ended up at Cleary College, a business school in Ypsilanti that had opened a century earlier as the Cleary School of Penmanship. If his uncle, Henry Ford II, was not considered much of a student, the Hotchkiss-to-Yale trajectory of HF2 looked scholarly compared to the academic track of young Buhlie.

  At noon on March 7, 1964, a “bleak and cold” Saturday, two branches of the automotive aristocracy of Detroit convened to witness Buhlie’s marriage to Barbara Monroe Posselius, whose maternal grandfather had been a vice president of Chrysler Corporation. Bobbi and Buhlie had known each other since their preschool days. They grew up on streets bordering the lush Country Club of Detroit in Grosse Pointe Farms, he on Provençal Road, she on Irvine Lane. She was only eighteen, and he was twenty. The wedding was staged in front of a fireplace in the living room of the rectory at St. Paul on the Lake Catholic Church in Grosse Pointe Farms; the guest list of fifty was limited to relatives and a half dozen of the couple’s closest friends.

  Buhlie’s cousins, Anne and Charlotte, daughters of HF2, came from New York by private jet in time to attend the rehearsal dinner Friday night at the home of Uncle Benson Ford, and arranged to make their escape back to Manhattan before dusk Saturday after the wedding reception. Their lavish coming-out parties as Detroit debutantes had cost multiple times more than this modest affair, the first Ford wedding of their generation. Now here they came in designer coats and mink hats, accompanied by their father, with whom they were barely on speaking terms since he had separated from their mother, Anne, for la dolce vita with his Italian mistress and soon-to-be second wife, Cristina. The estranged Mrs. Ford was in no mood for a Ford gathering and stayed in New York, preparing for a European trip. As the sisters approached the entrance to the rectory, with the wind lashing off Lake St. Clair, they encountered their father’s mother, the elderly Mrs. Edsel Ford, wrapped in a full-length fur coat. “Hello, Granny,” they said.

  Riddle: What Ford was the direct descendant of the founding Ford but the son of a Ford who had no blood relationship to old Henry? Answer: Buhlie, whose mother, Josephine Clay Ford, known as Dodie, was the granddaughter of Henry Ford and the younger sister of HF2, but who just happened to marry Walter Buhl Ford II, an industrial designer from an investment banking family who was not related but carried the same last name and a wealthy Detroit heritage of his own. On his father’s side, Buhlie was the great-great-grandson of a Buhl who was mayor of Detroit in 1848 and related to the Buhls who built the Buhl Building, the downtown skyscraper that housed the Detroit office of J. Walter Thompson, the ad men for Ford. A grandmother on that side, the former Virginia Brush, was the descendant of a Brush who commanded the Michigan Militia during the War of 1812. That is the derivation of Brush Street, which runs north out of downtown between John R and Beaubien. Another Brush married the granddaughter of Gen. Lewis Cass, the first governor of the Michigan Territory. The Cass name is all over Detroit, from Cass Tech, where Motown’s Diane Ross and Paul Riser went to high school, to Cass Avenue, which runs parallel with Woodward, one block to the west, and over the years nurtured one of the city’s bohemian enclaves.

  The wedding was swift and unpretentious. The maid of honor was Barbara’s little sister, sixteen-year-old Nancy Posselius, and the best man Buhlie’s little brother, fourteen-year-old Alfred Brush Ford. The groom slipped a slight platinum band onto the bride’s ring finger at the end of the brief ceremony, and the newlyweds disappeared into the back of a chauffeured maroon Mercury sedan to lead a procession of limousines up to her grandmother’s house on Lewiston Road for a champagne reception and luncheon. With the festivities over, Buhlie and Bobbi departed for a three-week honeymoon in Nassau before they were to settle in an Ann Arbor apartment where he would continue his studies at the nearby business school. The wedding was mandatory coverage in the society pages of the News and Free Press, but its newsworthiness could not match another event that featured Buhlie earlier that same week.

  More than seven hundred car dealers from the Midwest were in Detroit for a merchandizing fair at Cobo Hall sponsored by Ford Motor Company. The brainchild of Lee Iacocca at the Ford Division and Bill Laurie and his ad men at J. Walter Thompson, the fair was designed to prepare Ford dealers for the bigger car markets of the future. There were eighteen booths at the fair, each manned by a Ford executive and dealing with a specific aspect of the business, including new models, used cars, trucks, service and parts, and advertising, marketing, and public relations. Ford was in a heady place that month. Its sales for the past year and a half had been at record levels, and it was about to launch a new model it hoped would awe the buying public and overwhelm the competition. “We at Ford Division are taking what we think are some pretty drastic steps to prepare both ourselves and our dealers for these big markets of the future,” Iacocca said. This was a not-so-veiled reference to preparations for the car that people had been talking about, but not seeing, most of the new year, the one that was about to start production and would be unveiled in mid-April at the New York World’s Fair: the Mustang.

  It was never clear whether Buhlie was in on a grander scheme or unwittingly contributed to it in his own carefree way, but here is what happened: Fred Olmsted, who covered the auto industry for the Free Press, had been tracking the Mustang’s progress week by week, staying in constant touch with his sources at Ford and J. Walter Thompson. At the lunch hour on the Monday before the merchandising fair opened, Olmsted left the Free Press Building on West Lafayette, turned north on Washington Boulevard, and was passing an open parking lot near the Sheraton Cadillac when he came across a shiny object that stopped him in his tracks. It was the phantom car he had been waiting to see, and a beauty—a Rangoon red Mustang convertible. Olmsted found a pay phone and called back to his office, “Get a photographer over here quick!” These would be the first public photos of Ford’s secret car. Photographer Ray Glonka arrived and started snapping away: side views, grille views, rear views, license plate.

  Before writing a story to accompany the pictures of the Mustang convertible in the parking lot, Olmsted contacted a Ford spokesman, who tried but failed to talk him out of running the photos altogether. Maintaining the suspense was Ford’s job, not the duty of a newspaper. Working off the fact that the license plate, I 2H36, was visible in one picture, Ford then undertook an investigation of who, among the select number of insiders with access to a Mustang, could have been so foolish as to park it in such a public place. The search led directly to the top. HF2 himself had been tooling around in a Mustang for a few weeks, eschewing his chauffeur to drive from Grosse Pointe Farms to the Glass House in Dearborn. He had been boasting about it to his younger sister, Dodie, who told him she wanted to see what all the excitement was about. So she ended up with the Rangoon red convertible, and when her about-to-be-married rambunctious son asked if he could take it out for a spin, she obliged him. It was Buhlie who took it downtown and steered it into the open parking lot. “It’s a hot job,” an attendant recalled the young driver telling him. He later told Olmsted that “the engine has a lot of snap.”

  Olmsted’s scoop was the talk of the town and even made the following week’s issues of Time and Newsweek, both of which were already in the process of preparing cover stories on Lee Iacocca and the Mustang. Iacocca would later tell Robert A. Fria, a Mustang expert, that none of this was planned, but “that dirty Walter Buhl Ford just let our secret out of the bag.” Whether the whole matter was a setup by Ford or a mistake by Buhlie seemed irrelevant in the end. In a case like that, the truism that all publicity is good publicity certainly applied and was in keeping with a detailed campaign plan. It was an old plan, something that had been in J. W
alter Thompson’s playbook since it helped introduce the 1948 Fords a generation earlier with “a long, gradual buildup”—drop hints, embargo facts, build excitement with insiders, give the trade journals tantalizing scraps but not too much, let the excitement grow, tease it out month by month. In this latest iteration it would take on mythological proportions as one of the most successful marketing campaigns in U.S. history.

  On the morning of March 9, two days after Buhlie’s wedding, the first batch of Mustangs to be sold to the public started moving down the line at the Dearborn Assembly Plant at the River Rouge Complex. A line that had been dedicated to Ford Fairlanes was reconfigured to make the Mustangs. The public had been clamoring for the car for three months. They were not taking formal orders yet, but Ford already had the names of twenty-three thousand drivers who visited their local dealers and said they wanted to order the car as soon as possible. Now each car on the line had its own dealer order, with its own specifications and Vehicle Identification Number. The step-by-step assembly began: chassis, paint job, front suspension, body drop down to the main floor for installation of engine and transmission, then fender, grille, wheels, doors, and front bucket seats. In the industry, that first day of production is known as Job One. Iacocca and his entire team were there to witness the Job One they had been anticipating for nearly two years. Don Frey was the idea man who had pushed the car the hardest over that time, though Iacocca hungrily gobbled up most of the credit. Frey, the assistant general manager and chief engineer of Ford Division under Iacocca, had kept at it even when HF2 seemed resistant, and took the heat when the Deuce said it was his ass if the project failed. Job One was his day of affirmation. As he later told the author David Halberstam, “The biggest thrill I’ve ever had in my life was going to the assembly plant for the first full day of production on the Mustang and seeing Mustangs as far as I could see . . . like a football field filled with Mustangs.”

  It took some time for the line to reach full speed; 593 Mustangs were produced that first week. At peak production with twelve-hour runs the assembly line would turn out 1,200 cars per day, with a second Mustang assembly going on line in San Jose, California, but even then they would be built at a rate slower than they were being ordered. That too was part of the Mustang tease. In the world of selling things, hype and expectations feed off one another. Customers will wait in line for hours outside a pancake house on a weekend morning if they hear it is the place to be, and they will wait for a car if it is the thing to have. Long before Job One, Ford and its ad agency had skillfully made the Mustang the car to have.

  As the manager of J. Walter Thompson’s Detroit office, Bill Laurie had driven a Mustang months before Buhlie, or at least an early prototype. On a summer day in 1963, after several Mustang prototypes had been used in research tests with young Detroit couples, Laurie borrowed one for a weekend test drive. As his son David recalled the scene, his father pulled into their driveway on Merriweather Road, collected David and his mother, Thayer, and off they drove across the bridge into Ontario, heading southeast forty-five miles to the tip of Canada’s Point Pelee National Park on Lake Erie. “We were in this weird car that no one had ever seen before, and when we parked it a hundred people were coming over and taking photos of it. ‘What is it?’ ‘A Mustang.’ No one had ever seen one before.”

  Truth be told, the car was not Laurie’s type—sexy perhaps, but not sophisticated or substantive enough. Still and always he preferred the dark green Thunderbird convertible. Maybe people thought ad men were promoters of style over substance, but that did not mean they had to take home what they were selling, even if there was internal pressure to do so. Memos flowed out of JWT headquarters urging employees to buy the products they advertised, from cars to soap and cigarettes, “as the most significant way we can say to our clients and to our friends that we believe in what we are doing.” When Liggett & Myers introduced the new Lark cigarette a year earlier, cartons were made available in the mail room at 420 Lex and an internal memo suggested, “We think you will want to try this new . . . brand. It is, as the package says—Richly Rewarding Yet Uncommonly Smooth.” Norman Strouse, the company chairman, would even sign off on personal notes to friends around the country with suggestions that they drive Fords. For Laurie, Thunderbird, yes, Mustang, no. Too much like a middling Falcon in disguise for his taste. It was lower and wider than the Falcon and had a racier look, but many of the underpinnings did in fact come from the Falcon, and so did the engines, either a standard Falcon 170-cubic-inch six-cylinder or a zoomier Falcon 164-horsepower, 260-cubic-inch V-8.

  The success of the Mustang to a large extent rested on this paradox: everything about it was geared toward the new, yet very little about it was in fact new. The engines and underpinnings were Falcons; the basic campaign strategy was as old as Ford’s relationship with J. Walter Thompson. Was it new that Ford would launch it in spring when all other cars were launched in early fall? Not really. In fact Iacocca had used the same spring launch only two years earlier to introduce the Ford Galaxie 500 XL, a car that had some of the attributes of the later Mustang, a sports coupe with bucket seats and a sharp new interior. Nothing new and yet everything new. The Mustang design looked new, hip, modern, and Ford spent more than $10 million to market it as new. There is always a measure of luck in any commercial success, but usually that luck comes after intense study and practice. The Mustang design evolved from years of practice by Ford’s talented designers and intense study on a macro level by Iacocca and the ad men and on a micro level by Ford’s research department on what the new generation of drivers wanted in terms of a new car.

  From the research department’s study of Falcon sales, they determined that customers were requesting more and more options to make the car sportier and more powerful. From their research in Dearborn with young adults brought in to look at prototypes, they determined that a lower price made all the difference in how they viewed the Mustang’s practicality. And from their studies of the baby-boom population at large, they realized there was a generational hunger for something iconic that could emblematize freedom and youth. From these studies came the three basic themes of the Mustang campaign: performance, price, and styling.

  • • •

  On the first of April, the young men and women who had been hired by Ford Motor Company to work as hosts and hostesses at the Ford pavilion at the New York World’s Fair gathered for the first time at the Commodore Hotel at the corner of 42nd and Lexington, a half block from J. Walter Thompson headquarters. They were in their early twenties, most of them, and they arrived nearly two hundred strong from all regions of the country, but a preponderance hailed from the Midwest or the West Coast. Vincent Currie, a student at Wayne State, drove out from Detroit in his little Renault and took lodging at the YMCA until he could find other quarters. Ray Chatelin, another Wayne State student, caught a plane from Detroit and also spent his first nights in the city at the YMCA. Both had seen notices for the job on bulletin boards at school and went through a brief hiring process in Dearborn. It seemed to Chatelin that Ford was looking for “wholesome types” from outside New York. The feeling, he said, was that “New Yorkers were too abrupt and they wanted people who would be a little bit more gentle.” The chosen ones spent one day in sessions at the Commodore for orientation and physical exams, then four days of training at the Crystal Ballroom of the Sheraton-Tenney Inn out near LaGuardia Airport in the shadows of the expansive World’s Fair grounds.

  The Ford pavilion was called the Ford Wonder Rotunda, a name that brings part of our story full circle. The name paid homage to the Ford Rotunda that Alfred Kahn had designed for the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago in 1934 and that subsequently was moved to Dearborn, where it became one of America’s most popular tourist attractions until it burned to the ground on November 9, 1962. Although the New York structure was lightened and brightened with voluminous sheets of glass between curved pylons, while the original was virtually windowless limestone, it nonetheless evoked the
old Rotunda in its circular center and overall presentation. John G. Mullaly, the Ford man in charge at the pavilion, had been working on plans for the fair and was on leave from his job as manager of the old Rotunda when it was destroyed by fire. He had viewed the charred remains with Henry Ford II, and though they knew the original would not be rebuilt in Dearborn, the notion of reimagining it in New York in a recognizable if more modern style—what one Ford publicist called “a modern fairyland palace in white”—was already taking hold.

  The young hosts and hostesses were to work in various staging areas at the Ford Wonder Rotunda. With its side attachment, a massive rectangular building the size of a football field, the Ford pavilion covered seven acres of the fairgrounds in the Flushing Meadows section of Queens. As Robert Caro reported in The Power Broker, his seminal book on Robert Moses, the fair’s president and mastermind, Ford and General Motors were granted far more space than other exhibitors because of their cozy relationship with Moses, a planner and proponent of urban highways whose professional interests were inextricably linked to the Detroit auto industry. Inside the Ford pavilion, shiny new Ford cars were on pedestal display, but the wonder around them was mostly the work of Walt Disney. Ford turned to Disney’s WED Enterprises to create the amusements. Here was International Gardens, exquisitely detailed miniature reproductions of the landscapes of twelve diverse places in world history, from ancient Rome and medieval Europe to modern Malaysia. There were dioramas of the life and times of Henry Ford, including the Quadricycle that started him on his way. Up there was the Auto Parts Harmonic Orchestra, an automated musical array constructed from car parts. And then the main attraction: the Magic Skyway, Disney’s twelve-minute ride from past to future, transporting visitors in custom-fitted Ford-built convertibles, first circling the building to take in a bird’s-eye view of the fairgrounds, then slipping into a time tunnel and moving past animatronic displays of volcanoes erupting, dinosaurs lumbering and fighting, prehistoric birds taking wing, cavemen grunting, cooking, and painting, then in and out of another time tunnel to behold the quintessential early-sixties vision of a futuristic space city with sky highways and hovercraft and jagged towers. It was this Magic Skyway that would draw visitors by the hundreds of thousands to Ford’s corner of the fair. It was at the Magic Skyway where Ray Chatelin and Vincent Currie and most of their young colleagues would be stationed. And it was on the Magic Skyway that visitors might take their first memorable ride in Ford’s exciting new car, the Mustang.