DeLorean had become celebrated, justifiably or not, as a rebel within the ranks of the industry. His self-proclaimed rebellion against GM, his ability to charm the media, his good looks (which with the help of modern surgery he worked to improve much as one restyled a car, replacing a weaker jaw with a stronger one), and his flamboyant life-style had made him something of a national figure. Like Iacocca he was that rarity in contemporary Detroit, a star, an audacious man who liked to deal with the press and who sought personal publicity. The media buildup of him in the good days was exceptional; in the words of Hillel Levin, a Detroit writer, DeLorean had become “a Gary Cooper industrialist in a movie scripted by Ayn Rand.” The fact that he was so public and exciting a figure eventually helped him when it came time to build his own car. The ironic likelihood was that a more serious person with a better professional background might not have been able to raise the money for a new company, while someone like DeLorean, who had caught the public’s eye (more often than not for the wrong reason), could.
DeLorean combined the worst of two cultures: He was the swinger as car man and the car man as swinger. The original entrepreneurs of Detroit had been true Calvinists, men obsessed by their visions, who worked long into the night in their kitchens or garages and sacrificed all their time and money to bring those dreams to life. DeLorean was different, the company founder in an age when narcissism had replaced Calvinism. He was a modern man, obsessed more by his own looks, fame, and luxuries than by his product. He had been a poor blue-collar kid in Detroit, his father a Rumanian immigrant who had toiled on the Ford line. The son’s dream was to escape the harshness and monotony of that life. He had studied engineering at local schools, and when his skills and charm propelled him to a level where for the first time he encountered the prospect of living in a fantasy world, he found it irresistible.
As a young man working for GM, DeLorean was clearly gifted, full of good ideas. Sponsored by Bunkie Knudsen, he rose quickly in the Pontiac division. Soon, as head of Pontiac, he had his first contacts with Hollywood, and he was seduced by it. At this point, in his early forties, he reinvented himself. He was no longer what he had been—in Detroit’s lexicon, a damn good car guy, an engineer that the old-timers would have approved of; he became the styled and stylish voice of youth in a middle-aged corporation. It was the sixties, and Pontiac was pushing cars for young people. He not only knew how to appeal to the new generation, he became part of it. He shed his first wife. He redesigned his hair, which became noticeably less gray. (He went gray years later, when it was time to raise money for his own company and he needed to look more distinguished.) His ties disappeared. His suits, on those occasions when he dressed formally, were of fashionable Italian cut. He wore loafers without socks and carefully shaved the hair around his ankles. He lifted weights to build up his body, and changed his diet to lose weight. His marriages increased his celebrity: His second bride, a girl of nineteen, was Kelly Harmon, daughter of the famed football player Tommy Harmon. (The match gave him Ricky Nelson, son of Ozzie and Harriet, as a brother-in-law.) That marriage lasted two and a half years. (When he seemed depressed by its breakup, some of his good buddies in Hollywood hired a bunch of what might generously be called starlets, got makeup men to style their look as much like Kelly’s as possible, and made them available to the saddened auto executive. The message was implicit: There were a lot more fish in the sea.) His third wife was Cristina Ferrare, one of the most beautiful models in the country. In an environment where ego was always supposed to be controlled, his burgeoned: As a kind of Christmas card he sent General Motors dealers thousands of posters of himself posing with his adopted son, Zach. His friends now included the great and famous of Hollywood, all of whom lived lives faster than those of his Bloomfield Hills colleagues. For his new business friends, he chose self-made men of minimal restraint, maximum glitter, and extraordinary access to money. Unlike the titans of Detroit, who had to hide their pleasure as part of the covenant of Detroit success, his new friends had fun.
It soon became obvious that DeLorean was bored with Detroit. He took to insulting his GM superiors first by his manner of dress—blue jeans, cowboy boots—and then, when that seemed inadequate, with the condescending profanity of his tongue. Soon he was gone from GM. (His business practices had become bothersome to GM officials, and he did not leave of his own volition.) General Motors, which always took care of its own, particularly its own senior executives, was extremely generous to DeLorean; it gave him a Cadillac dealership in Florida, which in those days was like giving someone the right to print money. Nonetheless he promptly collaborated on a scathing indictment of GM as an institution, which confirmed most of the darker visions the company’s critics had long harbored. (When, during his brief tour as the head of a company, his own behavior seemed to fall considerably beneath that of the GM executives whom he had denounced, one of his colleagues, Bill Haddad, said of DeLorean, “He is what he condemns.”) His post-GM business ventures did not do well, and he left behind a trail of bad feeling and litigation.
Having been ousted by GM, he longed now to return to the automobile world and create his own sports car. His would be, he announced, an ethical car company. He played Britain, which wanted the factory for Northern Ireland, off against Puerto Rico—the underemployed of the world competing desperately for the right to have those jobs. The British won, if that is the word, and put up some $90 million for him in start-up money. His predecessors some seventy years earlier had been passionate men who had poured their entire savings into their mechanical dreams and who had literally lived out the creation of their cars. DeLorean was different. He put relatively little money of his own into his car, and though he was starting a company, he continued to live in high style. As he readied his car, he bought expensive property for himself—a duplex in Manhattan, and a twenty-five-room house on a 430-acre spread in the most exclusive part of New Jersey. (They were worth by 1985, when they became the center of a keenly contested third divorce, an estimated $9 million.) He already owned an expensive spread in Southern California. He rented a Park Avenue suite in Manhattan for his corporate headquarters. His top people received credit cards for Tiffany’s and the 21 Club. He billed the company some $78,000 for his move to New York, though in fact he was already there. He drew a consultant’s fee of $300,000 a year. The company bought a $53,000 Mercedes for Cristina. One Christmas, even as the company was getting started, he bought her three sable coats, average cost about $30,000, each of a different length. “I forgot which length you wanted,” said his note to her.
There had been a great deal of hoopla at the beginning of his attempt to create his own company and car—DeLorean appearing in Cutty Sark Scotch ads; DeLorean lending his name to a men’s cologne that sold in chic stores—and his colleagues in Detroit watched it all with more than normal curiosity. In 1981 there were reports from Belfast that the car was in serious trouble, that DeLorean visited the factory only on the rarest occasions, and that there were grave financial questions about his use of money. As much as $18 million had mysteriously vanished into some secret account in Switzerland. Still the car was yet to come, and Detroit was willing to give DeLorean the benefit of the doubt; high liver though he might be, no one had ever doubted his talent. That summer, just before the car was launched, a reporter called DeLorean to talk in general about the problems of Detroit. DeLorean, who liked dealing with the press, was friendly and lingered on the phone.
“What about the problem of worker productivity?” the reporter asked.
“The problem, I’m afraid,” said DeLorean, “is the ‘me generation.’”
42. THE HAMMER AND THE NAIL
FINALLY, BY THE MID-EIGHTIES, Ishihara had accumulated enough power so that he could move against Shioji and, some eight years after becoming president, take command of the company. The split between the two men had been private at first, but gradually it became more and more public. Shioji seemed to take particular pleasure in flaunting his vendetta with Ishihara.
At first his demonstrations of disrespect were rather mild; he used phrases that deprived the president of normal conversational respect. That was shocking enough. Soon, however, he was telling journalists that Ishihara was a stupid ass, adding that if he, rather than Ishihara, were president of the company, it would not be lagging so badly behind Toyota. In Japan, where it was one’s duty to esteem one’s superior, such blatant disrespect was unthinkable; defying that convention made it all the sweeter for Shioji when he hurled an especially sharp barb at Ishihara. He felt it showed the world that he was Ishihara’s equal.
They had fought over the American plant, and Ishihara (with Kawamata’s support) had won that round, making it a truck factory instead of auto and placing it in Tennessee with a manager, Marvin Runyon, who was determined to keep the UAW out. If that victory was Ishihara’s, then Shioji was determined to get his revenge in other ways. But Shioji’s own freedom of movement was circumscribed by the very nature of the union system in whose development he had played so important a part. He could not lightly take his workers out on a strike. In Japan a strike was a grievous thing. It was one thing to have passionate rallies, to accuse the bosses of insensitivity to the working class, to wear armbands, and blare out messages on a bullhorn, for a zen labor struggle was usually quite enough, and an embarrassed management quickly got the message. But a real strike—in which workers walked off the job—had a terrible finality to it. Japanese harmony, so crucial to the survival and the success of the state, so carefully put together, could disintegrate very rapidly, and if it did, everyone would suffer. Even a modest strike meant not only that the company’s profits would decline but that the workers would lose their annual bonuses. In Japan, unlike the United States, when the company did poorly, the workers did poorly as well. So in protecting the workers’ interests, Shioji could not lightly lead them out on strike. He had to negotiate their interests deftly. That meant that there was often an elliptical quality to his struggle with Ishihara. It was never about the things it was supposed to be about, and it was rarely frontal. It was verbal, and about protocol, and it divided the company (to the delight of the people at Toyota), but it did not result in a strike.
In the early eighties, for the first time in more than twenty-five years, there were work stoppages. These were not strikes—they had not been voted by the workers; they were part of an ongoing test of will. An assembly line, usually run by someone very close to Shioji, might shut down for a few days. The explanation for the stoppage would be that there had been an accident at the working station. Work, Shioji’s people announced, could not continue for reasons of safety. The message was clear: The company needed Shioji’s cooperation.
In the end the struggle between the two men, one that had been building for some twenty years, came to a climax not over an issue of wages, or the issue of installation of robots, but over the decision to place a Nissan factory in England. Ishihara wanted the factory, and Shioji, still angry over his inability to influence the American factory, opposed it. The struggle spanned several years, and during it the members of the British embassy in Tokyo felt, as one member said, like a child whose parents are always about to get divorced—caught in a family squabble over which they had no control. The decision was made no less stressful by the fact that it was being made by a company that was steadily losing ground to its main competitor, Toyota.
The British factory became a heated issue in the early eighties. Having gotten by the first hurdle, the decision to build in America, and having figured out how to do it for a relatively low cost, Ishihara was trying to turn Nissan into a more international company. The Japanese market was fast becoming a mature one, and anti-Japanese protectionism was on the rise throughout the world. To his mind the only way for Nissan to continue its success was to get into other areas; he passionately wanted to enter the defense industry and build rockets, and at the same time he wanted to expand the auto market beyond Japan’s frontiers. To that aim he became a constant traveler and salesman. (“I think,” said Shioji, “he is never in Tokyo, but he is this traveling Japanese gentleman who prints up a lot of calling cards with his name on them and goes throughout the world stopping off at every country and handing them out to everyone he meets, asking to do a joint venture with them.”) In particular Ishihara wanted to penetrate the Common Market, where anti-Japanese feeling, be it suspicion or prejudice, was considerably stronger than in the United States. To Italy the Japanese were allowed to export only two thousand cars. The French, whose tolerance for Japanese trade practices was almost nonexistent, kept the imports under 3 percent and, even worse, deliberately forced Japanese goods to enter through a port manned by a minimal number of inspectors all of whom seemed distinguished by the slowness of their procedures—a process that mimicked the one that exporters to Japan found themselves undergoing. In England the suspicions of Japanese intentions were immense; the Japanese were limited to 11 percent of the market, and there was serious talk of cutting even that figure back. In West Germany the market had been relatively open, but the Germans were said to be thinking of a 10 percent cap.
To evade these worrying restrictions, Ishihara wanted to build a Nissan factory within the Common Market, and he aimed to do it by starting with a toehold in England. But his position within his own company was vulnerable. If there was a wariness on the part of the Japanese of doing business in America, then their attitude was one of pure terror where Britain was concerned. “The British disease,” the Japanese called England’s condition, and for them it was the summation of all that was wrong with the West, an overtaxed society collapsing of its own indifference, both labor and management willing to destroy a company rather than find common ground. In their own professional lifetime most senior Japanese managers had seen England fall from its position as one of the world’s foremost manufacturing centers, its craftsmanship universally admired, to its present condition as one of the world’s weakest ones. When the Japanese noted things about American society that they did not like, they talked about the Americans coming down with the British disease, and when the smallest domestic signs were detected of what they considered decline, be it juvenile delinquents beating up a park bum or the desire of one Japanese family to sue a neighbor over a domestic squabble, they spoke of the danger of Japan’s coming down with the British disease. Now Ishihara was suggesting that Nissan manufacture cars in England, the very place that was the exporter no longer of fine finished industrial goods but of the British disease.
He was largely without support in his own company other than that which came from the power of the presidency. Kawamata, Nissan’s chairman, far more leery of international expansion, was opposed, if not actively, at least passively. Shioji was furiously against it. Frustrated and embittered by Ishihara, he chose this struggle as a vehicle for his revenge. He had no love for British labor in the first place. Unlike American labor leaders, the British union officials had paid no attention at all to him before, and as a young Japanese attending international meetings, he had felt their snobbery. Nor did he admire their politics; he thought them far too left-wing, too much interested in ideology and too little in work. In his view they stood for factionalism in the workplace as a way of life.
The British badly wanted the factory. They were the tired men of the Common Market, much scorned by other industrial countries both old and new, and this, the coming of a new Japanese factory, would be an immense vote of confidence for an industry that seemed to be dying. They also saw it as a chance—if the union agreements could be worked out—for a nation that had virtually choked itself to death on its labor troubles to achieve a new, less contentious kind of industrial order. To the surprise of British officials desperate for Nissan’s approval, they were getting preliminary assent from various labor leaders to labor agreements for the Japanese that would be virtually strike-free. But within Nissan itself, despite growing evidence of how flexible, indeed malleable, the British intended to be, the struggle was intense. In the beginning it appeared that Ishihara
would lose, that the opposition to him was too great.
Shioji’s lobbying was zealous. On his own he went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and spoke against the project; on his own he attended meetings at the British embassy where he berated British unions—he had respect for the people of England, he said, but not for their unions—and Ishihara. For an influential Japanese to sit in front of foreigners and attack the president of his company was extraordinary, but there he was, doing it. No mention was ever made of Ishihara’s name. “There are people in this company,” Shioji told the British, “who do not seem to understand that this company is about making motor cars, and that is special. There are people in this company who want to speculate and diversify, to build rockets and boats, but that would be a mistake because we are the makers of automobiles, and that makes us unique. There is a mystique to making motor cars, and these people do not seem to understand it.” The British listening to him were astonished. It did not bode well for their chance at a factory. At the same time Kawamata’s opposition was a serious problem. The old man, the British thought, was always in the way. Privately (with other Japanese but never with foreigners), Ishihara spoke of his frustration with Kawamata and the problems he had, because of this, in running the company.
What seemed to strengthen Shioji’s position was the fact that in its domestic competition with Toyota, Nissan was steadily slipping. In 1980 the two auto makers had been fairly close in domestic sales: Toyota held its customary edge, with 1.49 million cars sold as compared with 1.22 million for Nissan. But then Nissan seemed to grow weaker while Toyota gained. By the end of 1983 Nissan had 1.12 million and Toyota had 1.59 million, and was climbing. Nissan was in serious trouble, not just from Toyota’s growing strength and endless resource (it was reliably reported in 1983 that Toyota made a greater profit than all the other auto companies combined), but from the challenge beneath it of Honda and Mazda, which were much more innovative and creative companies.
Reckoning Page 81
