Cadillac had never offered customers more than three color choices, but in October 1926 the company announced that its ’27 models would be available in five hundred different color and upholstery combinations. The Don Lee dealership even mounted a weeklong exhibition of brightly colored two-tone models to illustrate the possibilities. The show’s highlight, a cream-colored Cadillac roadster with khaki fenders and orange wheels, had Harley’s fingerprints all over it.
The LaSalle was supposed to be introduced in January 1927 at the New York Auto Show, the industry’s traditional venue for unveiling new models. But because of the late start with the body design, the car wasn’t ready and the debut had to be pushed back to the Boston Auto Show at the Copley Plaza Hotel several weeks later. Boston didn’t pack the promotional punch of New York, however, as demonstrated by a photo session the company set up on the street in front of the hotel. Ten Cadillac managers and executives were gathered to pose with a beautiful new roadster. Harley was among the group, standing in back and a head taller than the rest. The show was to mark his debut, too, as the company was finally letting it be known that he had been named to head a new design department at the corporation. Several uniformed police officers were hired to hold back the crowd that was expected to gather at the sight of the new car parked at the curb. But no crowd showed up; passersby did not stop to get a closer look. “Knowing Harley, I doubt if he ever again went to Boston,” cracked chief engineer Ernest Seaholm, who was seated behind the wheel in some of the photographs.
Despite the cool reception it received in Boston, the LaSalle was everything Alfred Sloan and Larry Fisher had hoped it would be, “longer and lower than other production cars, with sweeping fenders, elongated windows and a novel molding accentuating its horizontal lines,” as described by automotive historian David Gartman. “Like the handcrafted luxury classics, Earl’s design rounded off all sharp corners, thus replacing the mechanical look of rectilinear lines with the organic appearance of curvilinearity. The whole package, down to the last detail, blended into one harmonious, unified whole that contrasted sharply with the fragmented, assembled look of most production cars.”
The LaSalle drew raves from the automotive press when it officially hit the market on March 5, 1927, with one reporter saying it was “about the most beautiful line of cars” he had ever seen. Newspaper articles reported the LaSalle already had placed second in an unnamed “international contest for efficiency and beauty” in Berlin, and that its young designer had “spent the greater part of two years in the study of body design in the United States and in Europe in preparation for the task.” Nowhere was the press coverage more positive than in Los Angeles, where the Times published an article that opened with this sentence: “Happy as a boy who succeeded in scoring a touchdown for his alma mater, elated over the success that has attended his effort and the reception given his brainchild throughout the world, Harley Earl, the man who designed the new LaSalle, companion to the Cadillac, is back in town for six weeks’ well earned vacation and rest.”
The article went on to report that Harley had received a “tremendous ovation” at a meeting with Southern California Cadillac and LaSalle dealers. “We designed and planned the LaSalle for the coming generation,” he was quoted as saying. Never mind that the car was the spitting image of a Hispano-Suiza. “We dreamed of it as a fine, flexible American car—distinctly American in its lines, appearance and atmosphere,” he supposedly told the dealers. “The public has received it as no new car has ever been received. Drive by the homes of the genuinely elite anywhere in America and you will see these cars displayed before the homes or on the driveways of the best people.” The quotes sounded as if someone in the GM publicity department had written them.
Again, the newspaper’s editors attempted to put a West Coast spin on the story, ending the article with the manager of the Don Lee dealership saying, “Harley Earl’s success in creating the LaSalle and in being chosen to head the designing division of General Motors is just another tribute to California, which is being called upon more and more every day to furnish new talent for the automobile manufacturing organizations back East.”
In truth, Harley’s new job with GM meant the end for Don Lee Coach and Body Works, which soon would fold without him. It also meant the end of an era for Harley and Sue. As they made the rounds visiting old friends and family on their extended vacation, they were confronted with the reality that they really were saying goodbye to the town where they had been born and raised.
So much had changed. The big house where Harley and his siblings grew up was gone, the victim of a pro-business ordinance passed in 1920 that decreed all residential housing had to be removed from Hollywood Boulevard by March 1, 1925. Mary Hazard Taft, a spry eighty-six years old and twenty years a widow, still occupied the Taft family’s original Hollywood homestead just off the now paved boulevard, but J.W. and his wife, Nellie, had moved several miles south to a modest Spanish-style house where they lived with their two children, Henry and Janelle, Harley’s little brother Billy, and his sister, Jessie, who was soon to marry a doctor. Harley and Sue had sold their house down the street from the DeMille mansion to heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey and his actress wife, Estelle Taylor, closing the deal shortly after Sue’s parents moved into their new home next door.
The leave-taking surely was harder on Sue than Harley. He was riding a cresting wave of public recognition and looking forward to the challenge and excitement of a job that was a dream come true. Knowing her husband’s penchant for working long hours, Sue faced the prospect of raising Billy basically on her own, with no grandparents or other relatives around to help, in a strange, cold industrial city half a continent away from everything she knew.
There is an Earl family photograph that captures the moment. Taken in front of Sue’s parents’ house during the second week of May 1927, it shows Sue sitting behind the wheel of a new LaSalle roadster with Billy, a towheaded two-year-old wearing a newsboy cap, standing on the seat next to her. Neither of them is smiling.
A few days after the photo was taken, Billy was admitted to the hospital to have his tonsils taken out. In a scene frighteningly reminiscent of what happened to Harley’s mother, Abbie, the procedure somehow went awry, and the little boy stopped breathing and died on the operating table.
5
Battleground Detroit
Harley reported to his new job in Detroit on June 14, 1927, barely two weeks after Billy died. He could have pushed back his start date; given the enormity of the tragedy, Alfred Sloan surely would not have objected. But Harley needed to work, to lose himself in a swirl of shop activity, with customers calling and creative decisions crowding all other thoughts from his head.
His son’s death had shaken him to his core, but it seemed to have broken Sue, who was so flattened by grief he feared he might lose her as well. She didn’t want to return to Detroit; she hated being separated from her parents and, more achingly, from Billy. She insisted that he be buried in the Carpenter family plot at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale rather than Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles where Harley’s mother, Abbie, and other members of the Earl clan were buried. If she was going to have to leave her little boy behind, then she wanted him to be with her family.
Harley’s first week at work didn’t go the way he had imagined. His new office turned out to be a cramped space on the tenth floor of GM’s headquarters on Grand Boulevard. He had no secretary, no staff, and no studio. For the first two days, he didn’t receive a single visitor or phone call: not a word from Sloan, who was in GM’s New York office; nothing from Larry Fisher, who worked at the Fisher Body plant on Piquette Street several miles away.
Finally, after three days, William Fisher, the general manager of the Fisher Body division, poked his head in the door and asked, “How are you getting along?” Not very well, Harley admitted. He had only a rudimentary understanding of the company’s organizational structure. He was supposed to begin building a staff from scratch, but “I d
on’t know a soul in the building,” he said. “I don’t know who to call.”
Fisher offered one of his own people. “I have a man working for me that goes between plants,” he said. “He’s been doing it for a couple of years, and he’s a very smart young fellow and knows everybody at the divisions and in our plants and subsidiaries. He knows where to find everybody.”
He would send the man to him with a sealed letter, Fisher said. “You tear it open and read it and ask him some questions. And if you like him, just write ‘yes’ on the paper, seal it, and [send] it back up, and I’ll take care of it.”
Three days later, Howard O’Leary became Harley’s administrative assistant, a position he would hold for the next twenty-seven years. A few days after that, on June 23, the GM board of directors officially approved Sloan’s recommendation for the creation of a new fifty-person department under Harley’s direction.
Sloan’s grand plan was for Harley to gradually assume overall design responsibility for every model manufactured by the five divisions and to develop an organizational process that would facilitate frequent styling changes. The GM president believed the company’s future depended on its ability to deliver a new look for each of its lines every year, thereby enticing people to trade in last year’s model for this year’s new-and-improved version.
Most of GM’s divisional managers and engineers were cool to the idea of annual models, however. They didn’t mind styling changes, so long as they were incremental and not mandated by any fixed schedule, and if styling decisions didn’t dictate to the engineering imperative. The introduction of new models had always been attendant to a mechanical advancement—a bigger engine, better brakes, smoother transmission, improved accelerator, or whatever else Boss Ket’s boys came up with. Any changes in outward appearance were considered incidental, a nice bit of wrapping. What Sloan had in mind was a radical departure, tantamount to putting the cart before the horse.
Anticipating pushback from the divisions, he soft-pedaled Harley’s mission at the outset, telling the executive committee and board of directors vaguely that the styling staff would “study the question of art and color combination in General Motors products.” He named the new department the Art and Colour Section, choosing the British spelling to make it sound more important.
“I personally thought it was a sissy name,” Harley groused to a reporter years later. “I could just see the fellows [at Don Lee] back in California when I told them I was working with ‘Art and Colour.’ They would have all taken out their handkerchiefs and started waving.”
Sloan set up Art and Colour as part of the GM corporate staff, with Harley reporting directly to him. “I think you had better work just for me for a while until I see how they take you,” he said. He empowered Harley only to advise Fisher Body and the auto divisions on matters of design, but gave him no instructions on how to proceed. Nor did he tell the division managers that they had to consult with the new department, though he encouraged them to do so. It was up to them to avail themselves of Harley’s expertise, or not.
“Mr. Sloan never gave orders that you had to do anything,” Harley explained to writer Stanley Brams. “That was his way of operating. And he made it very clear to me that he would give me a good recommendation, but from there on I was on my own.”
Sloan gave him one directive at the outset—design cars that will sell.
Despite all the praise for his work on the LaSalle, Harley wasn’t sure he was up to the job. He worried that what had worked so well for him on Sunset Boulevard might not play on Main Street. “I didn’t know how to build anything except what pleased me,” he recalled in a 1969 interview, “and I didn’t know if what I liked would appeal to the public.”
Sloan, however, remained confident that his new director of Art and Colour had the creative chops and the charisma needed to bring GM’s engineering culture around to the idea that, as the automobile business entered its fourth decade, looks were as important to the average buyer as mechanics and price, if not more.
Harley’s arrival in Detroit coincided with a pivotal event in the annals of the industry. After dominating all competitors for nearly twenty years, Ford had seen sales of its venerable Model T hit a wall in 1926, dropping by nearly a third, or almost half a million units. Henry Ford cut the price of his bottom-of-the-line runabout to $260, to no avail. By January 1927, the company had lost nearly half of its market share and its sixty-three-year-old founder was about the only auto executive in Detroit who hadn’t seen it coming.
Ford’s son, Edsel, who held the title of company president, was among those who had been telling his father for years that their boxy, bolted-together “Tin Lizzie” was mechanically outmoded and needed a major body makeover if the company was to remain competitive. But Henry wouldn’t hear of it. As far as he was concerned, the car was perfect. The problem lay with the dealers, he’d argue; they were lazy and inefficient. Or he’d blame the customers, saying they were letting themselves be seduced by competitors’ slick advertising into buying needlessly expensive, impractical cars. He predicted that eventually they would realize their mistake and come flocking back to Ford’s showrooms.
The father-son disagreements became a source of tension within the company as they escalated into angry confrontations in the presence of other employees, with Henry invariably the aggressor. At one executive meeting, as Edsel argued in favor of equipping the Model T with hydraulic brakes, Henry stood up and shouted, “Edsel, you shut up,” and stomped out of the room.
Edsel grew so frustrated with his father’s bullheadedness that in 1924 he enlisted the aid of several Ford engineers to build a mock-up of a moderately restyled Model T—less blocky, with a bright red paint job—while Henry was traveling in Europe. Edsel kept their work secret, hoping to win his father over by surprising him with the finished product. But the night before the planned unveiling, Henry unexpectedly walked into the garage where the vehicle was parked and flew into such a rage at the subterfuge that he ripped off the doors, windshield, and top with his bare hands.
Henry’s almost irrational refusal to update his car became fodder for newspaper cartoonists and columnists. America’s most popular humorist, Will Rogers, poked fun at him. “Ford could be elected President,” Rogers quipped. “He’d only have to make one speech: ‘Voters, if I am elected I will change the front.’”
Henry finally approved some cosmetic changes to the 1926–1927 models, including lowering the roofline and offering four colors—green, maroon, gray, and blue—in addition to the traditional black. But the improvements proved too little, too late. The market had changed. For the first time, Americans were buying more used cars than new ones, and for less than the price of a new Model T you could purchase a better equipped secondhand Chevrolet or Dodge. For only a few hundred dollars more, you could get a brand-new Chevrolet with all the latest styling and comfort features, and you could mitigate the cost differential by financing it through General Motors Acceptance Company. Ford still didn’t offer its own in-house financing. Little wonder that Chevrolet sales surged as the Model T tanked.
On May 25, 1927, Henry capitulated, stunning the country with an abrupt announcement that Ford would immediately cease making the only car that most Americans had ever owned. The next day, he and Edsel made a show of driving the 15 millionth—and supposedly last—Model T off the Highland Park assembly line and then piloted it through the rain to the Ford Engineering Laboratory in Dearborn, where a crowd of several hundred watched as they posed for pictures alongside the other iconic vehicles from the company’s glorious past—Henry’s original quadricycle and the prototype Model T. (The company actually produced a total of 15,007,033 Model Ts.)
As for the future, Ford said he would soon introduce a new vehicle, another “Model A,” but in truth the company had nothing in its development pipeline—not an engine, not a chassis, not even a drawing of what the new Ford might look like. So, in what’s been called “history’s worst case of product planning,” Hen
ry shut down all thirty-six of his assembly plants around the country, throwing as many as 100,000 men out of work and leaving 10,000 dealerships with an inventory of officially obsolete vehicles while he and Edsel and a group of Ford engineers scrambled to come up with a new car that would save them all.
The demise of the clunky Model T, coupled with the successful introduction of the stylish LaSalle, seemed to pave the path to Harley’s door for the managers of GM’s auto divisions. Chevrolet’s chief engineer, O. E. Hunt, was the first to seek an Art and Colour consultation. He needed what Harley called a “face-lifting” on the 1928 models—not a restyling of the body proper, but rather an updating of the radiator shell, headlights, trim, and accent features to create a fresh appearance without necessitating a major factory retooling. Next came Buick, which planned to introduce a new LaSalle-like “companion” car called the Marquette for 1929, priced to fill the gap between its cheapest model and the most expensive Oldsmobile. Then Oldsmobile, too, approached Harley about its planned companion car for ’29, the Viking.
With Howard O’Leary’s recruiting help, Harley set about assembling a staff. He needed draftsmen, woodworkers, clay modelers, metalworkers, pattern makers, and, most of all, designers, who were in short supply because the industry had never much concerned itself with styling. The few experienced designers working in the industry were employed by a handful of custom coach builders that made bodies for Packard, Peerless, Duesenberg, and other low-volume luxury carmakers. The big companies didn’t have designers. No art school in the country offered a course in automotive design; it wasn’t recognized as an art or a profession.
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