Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  Once again, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Sloan’s vision and organizational brilliance got General Motors through the darkest days of the Depression in far better shape than Ford. As GM sales dropped by 40 percent and its stock fell from $73 to $8 a share, the company posted a loss of only $4.5 million on its auto operations in 1932, while Ford lost an estimated $30 million. More important, GM captured 41 percent of the market to Ford’s 25 percent. And even as GM shed plant workers by the thousands, Sloan stood steadfastly behind Harley Earl and the Art and Colour staff. “After the crash we all got a letter saying don’t worry, as long as General Motors existed, we’d have a job,” recalled Frank Hershey.

  The Depression turned out to be a springboard for Harley. Cars had become such an indispensable part of American life that they continued to sell even as the economy cratered, albeit in drastically reduced numbers. In order to stay afloat until the crisis passed, GM needed to draw a larger portion of the smaller buyer pool to its lower-priced (and lower-cost) models. And it didn’t take an automotive genius to see that restyling a car was cheaper than reengineering it. Which put Harley in the catbird seat and gave GM a tremendous competitive advantage because no other major car manufacturer had a full-fledged styling department—not even Chrysler, which was challenging Ford for second place, thanks to its acquisition of Dodge and its introduction of the low-priced Plymouth in 1928.

  The Art and Colour staff soon grew to more than 125, with the designers easily recognized as they walked around the GM building in the white smock uniforms Harley had them wear. But wisecracks about the “beauty parlor” diminished as their work gained credibility across the divisions. Cadillac’s chief engineer, Ernest Seaholm, was an early appreciator of Harley’s styling ideas. He asked Art and Colour to collaborate with GM’s custom body division, Fleetwood, on the design for the Cadillac V-16 Aerodynamic coupe for the 1933 “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in Chicago. The result was a one-of-a-kind promotional show car that boasted a list of styling innovations nearly as long as its 149-inch wheelbase, including a sloping “fastback” rear end, the absence of running boards, pontoon-style fenders, a spare tire tucked away in an integral trunk, a lighted and recessed license plate housing, a gas tank filler hidden beneath the taillight assembly, bullet-shaped headlights, chrome tailpipes, and an exhaust system specially tuned to give the engine a specific tone. Inside, there was walnut trim, “knobs and handles plated in a satin gold finish,” and sun visors “shaped like abstract leaves, made of fine cloth and mounted with screws that had heads of imitation pearl.” Even the engine, the first V-16 to power an American passenger car, had the earmarks of a Harley Earl production, with the surfaces of its various components detailed and finished in enamel paint, porcelain, polished aluminum, and chrome.

  The car was such a hit with World’s Fair attendees that Cadillac decided to put it into production with few changes for the 1936 model year. With advertising aimed at “the very rich and very few,” management’s plan was to build only four hundred of the cars; however, they fell far short of the mark, finding only fifty-some customers for the elegantly appointed, hand-fashioned vehicle. Ernest Seaholm waxed poetic when he later summed up the car as “a dream of the Roaring Twenties, materializing at the time the bottom dropped out of the stock market, advertised for the ‘four hundred’ who were now in hiding, and finding instead only empty pocketbooks.

  “Be that as it may,” he said, “it was an outstanding piece of work.”

  Indeed, auto historians now credit the Aerodynamic coupe with ushering in the modern era of American car design. At the time, it showed GM management how much Harley and his staff could accomplish when they were given a freer hand.

  Art and Colour saved the Pontiac in 1933. Having seen an 80 percent falloff in Pontiac sales since the stock market crash, GM was seriously considering discontinuing its moderately priced line. The division had a new chassis and a powerful new straight-eight engine ready to go, but its body engineers were struggling to come up with a new look for the car. So Harley dispatched Frank Hershey to the plant in Pontiac, Michigan, to check out the wooden mock-up of the body they were considering for the 1933 model year. “Go out there and tell me what you think,” he told the designer. Hershey reported back that the proposed new model “looks just like the old car.” If that was all they were going to do, he said, they “might as well leave it alone.”

  “All right,” said Harley, “you’ve got two weeks to come up with something better.”

  Hershey organized a small team and came back on time with a full-size clay model that featured a louvered hood and a radiator grille that he’d flat-out stolen from his favorite British luxury car. “I was in love with Bentleys,” he admitted. “So I decided to do a Bentley front end on this Pontiac.” The Art and Colour design was accepted and, with the price dropped to $585 and an advertising campaign that prominently pictured the Bentley grille, sales doubled in 1933. As a result, Pontiac got a reprieve that lasted more than sixty years.

  Harley’s beloved LaSalle faced the same fate the following year, the result of an even steeper decline in sales. According to auto historian Michael Lamm, while Harley was in Europe making his annual rounds of auto shows, designer Jules Agramonte made “a full-sized airbrush rendering on black paper of the front of a car with a tall, slender radiator grille. The grille took its inspiration from that day’s track and beach racers.”

  Agramonte showed the drawing to Harry Shaw, the man Harley had left in charge, and suggested it might be a good design for the LaSalle. Shaw was unimpressed and told him to put the drawing away. But when Harley returned, Agramonte pulled it out and put in up on the board for all to see. “Earl came in and got terribly excited about it, and they were working on it night and day from then on,” recalled designer Gordon Buehrig. Harley was so determined to save the LaSalle that he went beyond a clay model and ordered the construction of a wood-and-metal model of Agramonte’s proposed body—trimmed, painted, and accurate in every detail, to the point that you actually could open the doors and sit in it—a process that cost as much as $100,000.

  Harley unveiled his proposed 1934 LaSalle to a group of pertinent executives he gathered in the Styling Auditorium. He “had the LaSalle mock-up onstage, alone, with the curtains drawn. As he rose to make his presentation, he said, ‘Gentlemen, if you decide to discontinue the L’Sawl [as he pronounced it], this is the car you’re not going to build.’ The curtains parted, and there stood the gleaming mockup of the 1934 LaSalle. The audience sat silent for a moment, and then came to life. Everyone liked the design, and GM quickly approved it.”

  The LaSalle would live another seven years.

  7

  A Man of Style and “Statue”

  By all accounts, Harley Earl was hell to work for. Reminiscing about the experience decades later, his designers invariably described him as impatient and relentlessly demanding, with a hair-trigger temper and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of profane invective that he drew from whenever he felt the need to tell one of them that his carefully rendered drawing of a taillight “looks like a baboon’s asshole.”

  Just as easily, he could reduce a man to jelly without saying a word. “He had kind of pale blue eyes and when he’d look at you, boy, I’ll tell you, he looked right through you,” recalled Richard Teague. “He was a terrifying figure,” said Bill Porter. Even GM’s division managers “were physically scared of him,” said Frank Hershey.

  No one ever dared to address him as “Harley”; it was always “Mr. Earl,” usually contracted to sound like “Mistearl,” as if he were some whip-wielding cotton plantation foreman straight out of the antebellum South. Among themselves they referred to him as “the old man,” or “the shadow” because he seemed omnipresent, usually arriving at the office by seven in the morning, before anyone else, and staying until nine or ten at night, when he would take a break and then return in the wee hours, sometimes a little tipsy, to look over the work the designers and modelers had done
that day. “He’d come in there and sneak around,” said Teague. “We always wanted to set bear traps for him at night.”

  As a committed workaholic, Harley expected the same of his staff, recognizing no boundaries between their professional and personal lives. The work was all-encompassing; eighty-hour weeks were not uncommon. When the crunch was on, weekends didn’t exist and neither national nor religious holidays provided any respite. Bernie Smith once worked “a stretch of three months without a single day off, including Easter and Fourth of July, eleven to twelve hours a day.”

  Bill Mitchell remembered leaving the office with another designer at the end of his first week on the job. “This was Christmas Eve, and he said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll work tomorrow.’ And, we did!”

  Virgil Exner described a typical all-nighter: “Harley had selected a front-end design sketch of mine to model in full-scale clay—on a crash basis. He and I, along with a modeling man, worked on it until 5 a.m., at which time Harley called a halt, whereupon we ‘retired’ to an adjoining drafting room and slept on drawing boards until 7:30. We then arose, had a cup of coffee and finished the job for a meeting with Buick executives at 11 a.m.”

  Irv Rybicki remembered the time Harley appeared in the studio and announced that he was not leaving until they came up with a solution for a particular Cadillac design. Then he sat right next to Rybicki and stared down at the blank sheet of paper on his drawing board, waiting for him to begin.

  “I picked up a pencil, and I started sketching,” Rybicki said. “I made about three lines, and Earl put his big hand on the pad, wrinkled up the paper and threw it in the [waste] basket. He looked at me and said, ‘Let’s try again.’ Everything wound up in the basket that day.”

  The intensity took a toll. “It’s tough to be creative around the clock,” said designer Thomas L. Hibbard. “Overtime was a steady diet—and unproductive in many instances. Employees’ family lives fell apart because in many cases evenings for weeks were spent on the job trying to come up with startling innovations to meet a deadline. Those who had the roughest time and were most liable not to make it, of course, were the creative designers.”

  “The really good guys couldn’t take it,” said Bill Porter. “He kept the whole place in a state of suspended anxiety . . . and we lost good designers.”

  Frank Hershey got fed up and went back home to California in 1929, but Howard O’Leary, acting as Harley’s emissary, talked him into returning to the staff in 1931. Gordon Buehrig quit twice, in ’29 and ’33. Ray Dietrich defected to Chrysler in ’31, while both Tom Tjaarda and Bob Gregorie jumped to Edsel Ford’s nascent styling department in ’32. Tom Hibbard quit in ’33 and Virgil Exner exited in ’38.

  They were the lucky ones who left of their own accord. Many more junior staffers were summarily sacked for what sometimes seemed like the slightest of reasons. In the most oft-told tale, Harley walked through the studio at lunchtime one day and discovered a lone soul taking a nap under a drawing board. He woke the poor fellow and informed him that he was fired. From then on, new hires were warned not to hang around the studio during the lunch hour because Harley liked to come through then, and if he started asking questions they couldn’t answer, then it might end their careers. He supposedly canned one young man because he didn’t like the way he walked, and another for showing up to work wearing an expensive tie that matched one of his own. “I saw him chew some guys out so bad they had to go to psychiatrists,” Bill Mitchell told Automotive News.

  But however much they feared Harley, none of the designers described him as mean-spirited. “He was ruthless,” said Strother MacMinn. “I think that’s a better way of putting it, because he didn’t mean harm to anyone.”

  According to MacMinn, the summary terminations and foulmouthed tirades were just Harley’s way of maintaining control over a group of creative individuals who, by their nature, “evaded rational management.”

  “He played all kinds of little tricks and techniques in order to maintain his authority . . . which was good. You have to have that. If you don’t, the whole thing goes off in all directions.”

  Harley may have been “the boss who drove them nuts, drove them to drink and drove them to divorce court,” as writer Michael Lamm put it, but he was also the boss who drove them to do their best work. So they endured the bruising criticism and brutal hours as a trade-off for access to the work they so craved. “You loved automobiles above everything else,” said Frank Hershey, “even your wife or your children.”

  Then, too, Harley could be as charming as he was intimidating. And he had one particular trait that never failed to humanize him in the eyes of his employees—a propensity for mispronunciations and malapropisms that put him in a league with Yogi Berra. “Chromium” invariably came out of his mouth as “chronium,” and “aluminum” sounded like “alumoornum.” Cubic inches became “cubits.” Instead of saying, “It’s all relative,” he’d observe, “It’s all relativity, fellas.” He regularly substituted “statue” for the word “stature,” resulting in howlers like “He’s a man of great statue.” He sometimes called the beltline a “fence.” He once said, in all seriousness, “A car has four wheels and they belong on the ground, not on the roof.” Staffers frequently had to turn away and cover their mouths to stifle laughter.

  Jim Earl attributed his father’s mangled syntax and stuttering to his being “touched by dyslexia.” Though it’s widely recognized today as a cognitive disorder characterized by difficulty in reading comprehension and verbal expression, dyslexia was rarely diagnosed prior to the 1970s, so the Art and Colour staff didn’t know the cause of the boss’s struggle with communication, and Harley probably didn’t either. The problem was compounded by another impediment that seemed shocking given what he did for a living: he couldn’t, or didn’t, draw. No one in the department ever saw him sketch so much as a hood ornament.

  “When he wanted something it would be very difficult to work with him because he knew what he wanted but he couldn’t draw it for you,” said Bill Mitchell. “And he would be so impatient with you if you didn’t get it.”

  The impatience likely was born of frustration. Dyslexics can have the ability to see an object from many different perspectives all at once, but their capacity for processing so much information quickly often results in its getting garbled, distorted, or frozen. Harley seemed to picture in his mind how he wanted something to look, but he couldn’t show his staff what he saw and often couldn’t find the words to describe it either. So he sometimes invented words in the instant, saying, “I want that line to have a dooflunky, to come across, have a little hook in it, and then do a little rashoom or a zong.”

  Mitchell described the process as chaotic: “He had a chair, like a director’s chair in a studio in Hollywood . . . and he would have all these people around him, and everyone would run around like a bunch of monkeys.”

  Harley would sit for hours concentrating on an actual-size drawing or clay model, while designers and modelers in lab coats scrambled to, as one of them said, “dig out ideas from his head.”

  “He was really quite a spectacle,” said Strother MacMinn, recalling how Harley would sprawl out in a chair and “point with the toe of his shoe and—in a very hierarchical, almost demeaning way—direct the designer, ‘Lower that fender line a sixteenth of an inch and let’s see what happens.’

  “He would refine the design with his impeccable eye. He could really do it, but the scene around him was one of a group of serfs serving their lord and master.”

  Harley’s minute, often conflicting refinements led staffers to joke among themselves that “Mistearl wants it raised down one sixty-fourth of an inch.” But even as they chafed under his unceasing judgment, the designers constantly sought his approval by leaving what they considered their best sketches lying on their desks or pinning them on the walls by their drawing boards at the end of the day, hoping he would notice them during his midnight creeps through the st
udio. He didn’t draw and he had difficulty communicating, but “you could show him a wall full of drawings and he’d pick out the best one every time,” said Richard Teague. “There’s no doubt about it. He really knew a good line when he saw it, and he knew how to get from point A to point B with the modelers in the early days. He could literally look at a car and tell you what was wrong with it, and he was usually right because he had such a great grasp of form and shape.”

  In one press interview, Harley downplayed his participation in the creative process, insisting that he functioned merely as a “prompter.”

  “I sometimes wander into their quarters, make some irrelevant or even zany observation and then leave. It is surprising what effect a bit of peculiar behavior will have. First-class minds will seize on anything out of the ordinary and race off looking for explanations or hidden meanings. That’s all I want them to do—start exercising their imaginations. The ideas will soon pop up.”

  He went to considerable lengths to ensure that they could create without corporate interference. After too many instances of middle managers walking into the studio and expressing their opinions about work in progress, he put Art and Colour under lock and key so that only staff and division presidents could enter the studio uninvited. “We were isolated from everything financial,” Frank Hershey said. “We didn’t have to keep any books; it was all done for us . . . we were run just like a big school.”