Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  While Harley searched the custom body shops in the United States and Europe, O’Leary placed ads in newspapers and general-interest magazines, hoping to draw responses from sculptors, architects, engineers, illustrators, graphic designers, interior decorators, or anyone else with an artistic sensibility and an interest in cars. If they showed any promise, Harley figured he could train them himself.

  They would all have to be men, of course, and particularly masculine in their comportment, because Harley worried that any hint of softness or femininity would make it harder for him to get his design ideas across in the hypermale world of GM engineers, some of whom were already referring to Art and Colour derisively as the “beauty parlor” or the “powder room.”

  “Detroit was macho in those days,” recalled Frank Hershey, one of Harley’s earliest design hires. “Everything was macho—the Fisher brothers, the Dodge brothers, all those people.”

  Ideally, Harley was looking for men like himself who’d grown up enthralled with the power and form of the automobile, daydreaming about roadsters and racing cars, drawing pictures of them in the margins of their schoolbooks. Edsel Ford would have been a perfect candidate but for his lineage. He’d been captivated by cars since he was a toddler and his father took him along on one of the first quadricycle test drives. Edsel was only ten when Henry gave him his first car. As a teenager, he studied mechanical drawing at the Detroit University School and began sketching cars while working part-time in his father’s office. Instead of going to college, he went to work for the company full-time and was named president at twenty-five, although his father maintained ironfisted executive control of the company through force of will and majority ownership of the stock.

  Three years later, in 1922, Edsel persuaded Henry to buy Lincoln Motor Company, the struggling luxury carmaker founded by Henry Leland, for $8 million. Once again, his father named him president, but this time actually let him run the company as he saw fit. Out from under Henry’s thumb, Edsel proved himself a capable executive with an eye for design. He directed a stylish makeover of Lincoln’s dowdy L Series cars, improving sales and turning the brand into a worthy competitor to Cadillac. “Father made the most popular car in the world,” he said at the time. “I would like to make the best car in the world.”

  In most ways, Edsel was the antithesis of his father—erudite, charming, philanthropic, socially active, and politically progressive, with a strong creative bent, a passion for art and photography, and, as one biographer put it, “a superb sense of design and unerring taste.” He also smoked and drank and enjoyed going out to local jazz clubs—behavior that Henry saw as signs of weakness and played into his opinion that Edsel wasn’t disciplined or “tough enough” to run Ford Motors. In the aftermath of the Model T fiasco, however, Henry announced that Edsel would be in charge of designing the new Model A, finally acknowledging, albeit grudgingly, “We’ve got a pretty good man in my son. He knows style—how a car ought to look.”

  Edsel and Harley were both thirty-three years old when they took over styling responsibilities at the world’s two largest car companies in June 1927. Edsel was born on November 6, 1893; Harley, sixteen days later. Neither sensed that they held the future of the industry in their hands. With Ford factories sitting idle at a cost of $42 million a month in lost revenue, Edsel was under more pressure. He and his father wanted the Model A ready for the spring 1928 selling season, which gave them little time. In an effort to speed up the design process, Edsel borrowed a page from Harley’s LaSalle playbook and largely copied an existing automobile, the 1926 Lincoln he had helped design. Aided by a single engineering assistant and several large blackboards, he created six different models of a car that would sit closer to the ground than the Model T, with a lower roofline, a front grille, a nickel-plated radiator shell, and sweeping, cupped fenders.

  His father, meanwhile, oversaw a team of about thirty engineers who focused on mechanical improvements. In the course of considerable trial, error, and argument, Henry approved the adoption of an automatic starter (at last), a modern three-speed transmission, four-wheel brakes, automatic windshield wipers, tilt-beam headlights, hydraulic shock absorbers, and a windshield with laminated shatterproof glass. That last safety feature was added after three of the engineers were involved in a test-drive traffic accident in which one of them, Harold Hicks, was thrown partially through the windshield and badly mangled his forearm on jagged shards of glass. Henry and Edsel quickly decided that safety glass should be included on the Model A as standard equipment, something that no other nonluxury car offered at the time. Hicks commented later that the crash and his injury “probably saved the lives of a good many people.”

  When it came to the Model A’s engine, Edsel and the engineering team argued for a six-cylinder instead of a four because Chevrolet was rumored to be developing a six for its 1929 models. But Henry crankily rejected the idea, saying, “I’ve got no use for a car that has more spark plugs than a cow has teats.”

  On August 10, Edsel announced that a prototype Model A had been completed. “The new Ford automobile is an accomplished fact,” he said. Of course, there remained the epic task of retooling the thirty-six factories before any more could be built. The Rouge would have to be gutted at an estimated cost of $50 million, “probably the biggest replacement of a plant in the history of American industry,” according to the New York Times.

  All during the Ford shutdown, of course, GM pressed its advantage. The Chevrolet division upped production, redoubled sales efforts, and embarked on a naked campaign to recruit disaffected Ford salesmen and dealerships, succeeding in stealing away more than a thousand of the latter. By June, Chevrolet had produced 700,000 cars, more than its total for all of 1926. Ford countered by plastering its dealer showrooms with banners that read “Wait for the New Ford.” It seemed that many people did, as car sales slackened across the board, except for the Chevrolet, which shot past Ford to become the number-one-selling car in America, the first time Ford had been bested since the Model T was introduced.

  The press seized on the story, describing it variously as the “Ford auto war” (Springfield [Massachusetts] Daily News), a “fight for the national automobile championship” (the New York Times), and “the most titanic industrial struggle” in U.S. history (Scripps-Howard News Service). Only Charles Lindbergh’s pioneering transatlantic flight on May 21 garnered more news coverage that spring and summer. Public interest had reached a fever pitch by December 2, when the Model A made its debut. An enormous crowd stormed Ford’s New York showroom, spilling out onto the street and blocking traffic, forcing the company to move the event to Madison Square Garden. Similar scenes played out in Detroit, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Kansas City as an estimated ten million people, roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population, turned out in the first thirty-six hours to get a look at “Henry’s new car,” this despite the fact that most dealers didn’t even have cars to show, only a short promotional film provided by the company. That didn’t seem to matter, as Ford took 400,000 orders the first day, 50,000 of them in New York alone.

  Stylistically, the Model A was no LaSalle, but it was a marked improvement on the Model T. Available in an array of descriptive colors—Niagara Blue, Arabian Sand, Dawn Gray, Andalusian Blue, Balsam Green, Rose Beige—with steel spoke wheels and no visible bolts in the body or fenders, the car was dubbed “the baby Lincoln” by Ford dealers eager to play up the new look of luxury that could be purchased for $100–$125 less than a Chevrolet (or $1,500–$3,000 less than a Lincoln or LaSalle). The company had 700,000 orders before the month was out, far more than its factories could fill as they struggled to get back on line after the six-month shutdown.

  Despite all the Model A hype, however, it was General Motors, not Ford, that ended the year triumphant, selling a record 1.5 million cars and posting the highest annual industrial profit in history, $235 million. Henry Ford’s impromptu model change cost his company an estimated $250 million and its position as the industry leader. It als
o helped build the case among GM executives for Art and Colour’s mission as an agent of continuous, planned, and affordable styling change.

  By the spring of 1928, Harley and Howard O’Leary had filled more than half of their fifty budgeted positions and the department’s new, larger quarters on the third floor of the GM building bustled with activity, including the constant comings and goings of job applicants. Franklin Quick Hershey was a lanky twenty-one-year-old when he first walked into Art and Colour clutching his portfolio of sketches. Born in Detroit, he had been raised in Beverly Hills by his well-to-do mother, who purchased a new car from Don Lee Cadillac every year when he was growing up. By age twelve, Frank could identify every make and model of car he encountered, not only by sight but also by sound, thanks to the warm Southern California nights when he slept on the screened porch of his house and listened to the cars coming down the street:

  “The Marmon had a hollow, spooky sound, partly because they didn’t have any louvers in the hood,” he recalled in a videotaped 1991 interview with Alexandra Earl, Harley’s granddaughter. “Studebakers were distinctive because their rear axles whined all the time. The Pierce-Arrow had a swishing sound, sort of like it was riding on water, almost like steam, it was so quiet. And I could always tell a Cadillac because they sounded like the valves needed adjusting.”

  Like Harley, Hershey had attended the University of Southern California and competed on the track team as a long jumper. “But I gave up college to be a car designer,” he said. “That’s all I ever wanted to be.” His mother used her connections to line up a job for him at the Walter M. Murphy Company, a custom coach builder in Pasadena, where young Frank worked on Duesenberg, Bentley, and Bugatti bodies for rich clients, including a number of Hollywood celebrities. Harley hired him on the spot.

  Attracted by the good pay and ground-floor opportunity to participate in what promised to be the best-funded artistic enterprise of the time, Hershey and the rest of the young staff quickly ran up against the realities of working for an industrial giant that didn’t necessarily take their creative aspirations into account. Instead of crafting beautiful new car bodies, they found themselves designing headlights, hood ornaments, taillights, and bumpers for minor styling face-lifts. Hershey recalled drawing “an awful lot of hubcaps.”

  The problem was partly institutional. In keeping with long-standing industry practice, GM engineers designed their chassis complete with fenders, running boards, radiators, hoods, and trunks, leaving Fisher Body to design what was once called the coach—the basic passenger compartment with windows, doors, and interior upholstery. Alfred Sloan created Art and Colour hoping to end this outdated, bifurcated process and to place the responsibility for the total outward appearance of all GM cars in Harley’s hands. But Fisher’s so-called body engineers, some of them former blacksmiths and mechanics, were not about to hand over their hard-won design authority docilely to some new kid from California.

  “These were rough-and-tumble guys who’d experienced the hard times of the beginning of the industry,” Hershey said. “There were no artists [at Fisher Body]; the chief engineer was doing the designing.”

  The engineers had personal issues with Harley. For one thing, they didn’t like the way he dressed. “His clothes were very expensive,” Hershey said. “He’d wear white pants and a dark coat, beautiful ties and beautiful shoes. All these guys always wore dark suits that were not very well tailored because they didn’t care about that. But Harley did. He got that from Hollywood. He was Hollywood. He dealt with Hollywood people. He dressed like people in Hollywood dressed. So they would laugh at him behind his back. I used to hear them talking about him all the time—‘this big sissy from Hollywood telling us how to make a car.’”

  The disdain went both ways, as Harley in turn made fun of the engineers’ sartorial idiosyncrasies. “Having come from California, he had never run into the kind of people we had in the automotive industry at that time,” said designer Clare MacKichan. “He always [joked] that the engineers would wear big suspenders and a belt because they didn’t trust anybody.” Harley also lampooned them for never taking off their hats. “The factories were not heated,” MacKichan explained, “and they’d spend quite a bit of time in the factories, so they wore their hats all the time, and when they came into the styling section they wore their hats because that was their custom. And he would make a lot of fun of that, of course. He had absolutely no respect for ninety-nine percent of the engineering people.”

  The engineers also resented Harley’s close relationship with the big bosses. “Sloan and the Fishers were behind him, but they couldn’t control the engineers and their dislike for him,” said Hershey. “I don’t know if they knew it or not, but the enmity was there, and [the engineers] fought Harley.”

  The engineers did so quietly by disparaging Earl’s design suggestions to the division chiefs, who had the final say on styling changes, citing various technical reasons why this idea or that could not be done or would be too costly. Lacking his own body engineer to counter their arguments, Harley found himself at a disadvantage, but he said nothing to the Fishers or Sloan because he figured they expected him to work things out on his own.

  The situation appeared to improve when Buick executives asked for his help with the 1929 “silver anniversary” models, marking twenty-five years since Billy Durant launched General Motors with the purchase of the failing Buick company from David Dunbar Buick, who died in 1929 poor and largely forgotten. They weren’t looking for a mere face-lift this time; they wanted whole new bodies for their sedan, coupe, roadster, and phaeton. It was a huge opportunity. Buick was GM’s oldest and most profitable division, and the third-best-selling car in America, behind Chevrolet and Ford. A successful restyling of the entire Buick line would raise Art and Colour’s profile tremendously, inside the company and out.

  Over the better part of a year, from dramatic, flowing pencil sketches, precise chalk drawings on seven-foot-high blackboards, and, ultimately, full-size clay models, Harley and his staff created a vision of a new Buick that was longer, lower, wider, and more rounded than its predecessors. Just below the so-called beltline, where the windows meet the lower portion of the body, they sculpted a slight roll that ran from the hood all the way around the car. This 1¼-inch curvature would barely be noticeable to the modern eye, but back in the era of uniformly flat side panels, it amounted to a distinctive design feature.

  Hearing nothing to the contrary from Buick management, Harley assumed that Art and Colour’s styling proposal had been accepted as presented. It wasn’t until he saw the first cars out of the factory that he realized Fisher engineers changed his specifications without telling him and, in his view, destroyed the integrity of the car’s design. “I roared like a Ventura sea lion,” he said in 1954, apparently still smarting from the incident twenty-five years after the fact. “Unfortunately, the factory, for operational reasons, pulled the side panels in at the bottom more than the design called for. In addition, five inches were added in vertical height, with the result that the arc I had plotted was pulled out of shape in two directions, the highlight line was unpleasant and the effect was bulgy.”

  Put more simply, the changes exaggerated the beltline roll and made the body appear plump, even fat. Walter Chrysler, one of Alfred Sloan’s closest friends, apparently couldn’t resist some competitive snark. He told a reporter he thought the new models looked “pregnant,” a description that quickly spread through the press, and in a matter of a few weeks Art and Colour’s debut design effort was widely derided as the “pregnant Buick.” Sales were abysmal, falling by more than 25 percent from the year before, enough to drop Buick to fourth place behind Hudson.

  Harley was “practically suicidal,” according to Frank Hershey, who thought the engineers’ actions were a deliberate act of sabotage aimed at undermining the man they had taken to calling “Hollywood Harley.”

  “That’s why they screwed up that Buick,” Hershey said. “I think they did it intentionall
y.”

  Ironically, while Art and Colour was being blamed for the pregnancy, Buick sales brochures were praising the artistry of the men actually responsible for it: “Built by the Fisher Body Corporation working in cooperation with Buick engineers . . . the new Buick bodies are justly named—Masterpieces by Fisher . . . their lines and distinctive colors establish a new vogue . . . the master work of master craftsmen . . . the crowning achievement of 25 years of leadership in the automobile world.” There was no mention anywhere, however, of Art and Colour’s role in the restyling.

  If the engineers’ plan was to damage Harley in the eyes of Alfred Sloan and the Fishers, as Frank Hershey believed, it backfired. Harley went to Sloan, insisting that in order to avoid another such fiasco Fisher needed to run all styling changes by Art and Colour for approval. Sloan agreed, and also signed off on Harley’s hiring his own body engineer, Vincent Kaptur, a twelve-year Packard veteran who served from then on as Art and Colour’s liaison with Fisher and seemed to be at Harley’s side wherever he went.

  Sloan likewise didn’t blame Harley and the staff when two more cars they helped design—the Buick Marquette and the Oldsmobile Viking—failed to sell. He knew the fault wasn’t in the styling but rather in executive management decisions that resulted in the two cars competing against each other in the already glutted $1,000–$1,500 price range. There were larger forces at work as well.

  When the Marquette and the Viking were introduced in early 1929, the auto industry and the national economy were in a state of flux. The number of cars in the United States had quadrupled to more than 20 million since the beginning of the decade. Cars were now America’s most valuable product, and its number one export. Manufacturing them consumed 20 percent of the U.S. output of steel, 80 percent of the rubber, and 75 percent of the plate glass. Fueling them had transformed the petroleum industry from one that largely produced lighting fuel and lubricants to one that primarily produced gasoline. Cars were rearranging where Americans lived, moving them from the farm to the city and from the city to the suburbs, nurturing new communities that were sprouting up along the nation’s improving roadways even as rural railroad towns began to wither beside the tracks. Cars had turned Detroit into the country’s fourth-largest city (behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia) and arguably its most vibrant. The roar of the Twenties was really the sound of America becoming a car economy.