Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  As headmaster, Harley conducted a nonstop master class in the creation of the modern American car. “The most important part of the design of an automobile is the grille, the face of it,” he told his staff early on. “That’s the whole design right there.” He taught them that a long, narrow hood implied power; the view of it through the windshield, stretching out ahead, gave the driver a feeling of road dominance, which he believed was an important sales feature. He lectured on the “light value” of chrome trim, saying it should be tilted at a 45 degree angle to the horizon to reflect the maximum amount of sunlight into the eye of the beholder while at the same time disguising gaps, seams, and surface flaws in mass-produced bodies. He expounded on his own “highlight rule,” which held that a straight, uninterrupted horizontal line extending from the front to the rear of the body just below the windows reflected light and made the car appear longer.

  Harley had one rule that was never stated but that everyone came to learn nonetheless: “No one was to get publicity in his department but Harley J. Earl,” said Tom Hibbard, who unwittingly violated that rule his first week on the job when he cooperated with a GM public relations man in putting out a press release announcing his hiring while Harley was on vacation. “When Harley returned, he raised hell about it,” Hibbard recalled. “In the early days, with few exceptions, pains were taken to see that no individual but Earl received publicity outside the company or got credit for anything they contributed.”

  Harley believed the practice of “anonymous creativity” and the restricted access to the studios helped shield individual designers from blame if one of their creations failed to catch on with the public, as had happened most dramatically with the “pregnant Buick.” But others saw the policies as self-serving, even Machiavellian. Based on interviews with a handful of Art and Colour’s original designers, art historian C. Edson Armi concluded that Harley had “isolated the staff through a hierarchical, even dictatorial, chain of command through which all professional contacts passed” and “worked hard to solidify his exterior contacts with directors of Chevrolet, Pontiac and the other car divisions by consciously developing [his own] image of an indispensable arbiter of taste.”

  In Armi’s harsh view, Harley made sure that none of his subordinates developed relationships with the division managers even as he “manipulated and intimidated these divisional managers by flaunting his close friendship with GM President Sloan.”

  Harley’s tight connection with Alfred Sloan was embodied in a button on his desk that put him in direct phone contact with the president’s office in New York. No one else in the building had such a button, and Harley didn’t hesitate to push it when he needed to prevail in an argument, the most dramatic instance of which reportedly occurred when Harlow Curtice, the newly named head of Buick, came into the studio one day and got into a dispute with Frank Hershey over the proposed design for one of the upcoming models. After Hershey told Curtice that he “didn’t know a damn thing about styling,” Harley interceded and invited the higher-ranking executive into his office, where he gave a demonstration of his one-touch telephone, placing a call to Sloan.

  “Hello, Alfred, how are you?” he said, speaking warmly into the receiver. “How’s [Sloan’s wife] Irene, all right? That’s good.”

  He quickly got to the point. “Alfred, I’m here in the studio with that sonofabitch Curtice, and he seems to be a little confused. He can’t tell who’s in charge of Buick and who’s in charge of Art & Color. I thought maybe you could straighten out his ass for me.”

  He handed the phone to Curtice, who supposedly listened silently as Sloan told him, “Let him build anything he wants.”

  This often repeated story sounds suspiciously apocryphal, but the Sloan phone was a real thing, and multiple sources claim that eventually Harley didn’t even have to pick up the receiver to get his way; all he had to do was raise an eyebrow and poise his finger over the button.

  Harley’s friendship with Sloan, too, was genuine, and it went beyond work. He and Sue regularly socialized with Alfred and Irene, inviting them over for dinner and poker. Sue always made a point of sitting to Alfred’s left so she could quickly fold her hand if he bet big because she knew he never bluffed. The Earls also accompanied the Sloans every summer, along with Chevrolet general manager William Knudsen and his wife, Clara, on a monthlong cruise down the Atlantic Seaboard to the Bahamas aboard Alfred’s 236-foot, $1 million yacht, Rene. Childless themselves, the Sloans doted on the Earls’ two boys, Jim and Jerry (born in 1930), and they delighted in Sue, who loved to gamble and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind about politics, no matter what the social setting. She once scandalized a group of GM executives attending a formal dinner at the exclusive Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by sashaying into the room proudly sporting a large campaign-style button that disparaged President Roosevelt in language that many in the decidedly Democratic crowd considered uncouth. According to Frank Hershey, the button said, “‘Kill the Roosevelts,’ or something like that.” Her in-your-face gesture set tongues to wagging for weeks at work, but it no doubt further endeared her to Sloan, who despised Roosevelt and thought his New Deal redistribution-of-wealth programs smacked of communism.

  “Sue did what she wanted to do and she didn’t care what people thought,” said her daughter-in-law Connie Earl. “I think Harley liked it because she could say things that he, in his position, couldn’t.”

  Harley’s staff would have been stunned to learn that away from work Sue was the driving force in the boss’s life. “He was what he was, in large part, because of her,” said Connie. “Sue ran the show; what she said, was done.”

  It was Sue who decided they would not live in Bloomfield Hills, home to a preponderance of up-and-coming GM executives, when they finally moved from Larry Fisher’s hotel penthouse in 1931. Instead they chose Indian Village, one of Detroit’s oldest upscale residential areas, originally developed by lumber barons and early industrialists and later favored by the Ford family and Ford executives. Harley told people he wanted to live in the Village because its location east of the city adjacent to Grosse Pointe allowed him “to drive to and from work with the sun at my back.” The real reason was that Sue wanted them to stay away from the encapsulated social life of GM executives and their wives. So they rented a house on Seminole Avenue, a block south of where Edsel Ford and his wife, Eleanor, lived when they first got married. Sue and Eleanor became friends and played bridge together.

  Their social circle may have included the Sloans, the Fishers, and the Edsel Fords, but the Earls lived on a different economic plane. Harley earned $25,000 his first year with GM, less than he’d made in California but, as he joked, “more than any bank president in the country.” By way of comparison, Alfred Sloan spent $120,000 annually to maintain the forty-three-man crew on his yacht. Harley missed out on a stock offering that GM had made to its executives just a few months before he joined the company, a last-of-its-kind opportunity that would have made him a multimillionaire, as it did even some middle managers.

  “Dad was a hired hand,” Jim Earl said recently. “He never had real money, not capital money. Whatever he once had went down the drain in ’29. They lived on his salary. And even during his best years there were probably three or four car dealers in the Detroit area that made more than he did.”

  The market crash left Harley leery of investing, leading him to turn down numerous ground-floor opportunities that others ultimately profited from in his stead. He did not want to risk what he was working so hard for. He’d seen his California relatives, the Taft family, lose the bulk of their Hollywood real estate holdings and his father forced out of retirement and selling real estate to take care of his second family. He was sending J.W. regular support checks and paying down both of their debts to the banks on their stock market losses.

  “Money was always a consideration,” Jim Earl said. “Dad always turned out all the lights in the house at night.”

  Which is not to say they didn�
�t live well. In the mid-1930s, $25,000 a year bought an enviable lifestyle. The Earls belonged to the Country Club of Detroit and the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club (though they didn’t own a boat). Sue employed a cook, a housekeeper, a “nurse” for the children, and a chauffeur whose duties ranged from driving her and her girlfriends to the racetrack to escorting her and the boys on missions of mercy to Corktown, where they regularly distributed baskets of food to needy families. Also called “Irish Town,” this neighborhood was originally populated by immigrants from Ireland’s County Cork who had escaped the potato famine in the 1840s. By the time of the Great Depression, the area was crowded with unemployed autoworkers.

  Harley’s biggest extravagance was his wardrobe. Because of his size, everything he wore, even his hats, had to be custom-made. His shoes came from London and were so exquisitely sculpted that “they looked like they had wooden trees in them even when he was wearing them.” His shirts were made in Paris and his suits were created either by Basil Durant of New York or Eddie Schmidt of Los Angeles. The latter was known as “Hollywood’s tailor” because his appointment-only shop on Sunset Boulevard catered to a moviemaking clientele that included the era’s biggest and most fashionable male star, Clark Gable, who used his services exclusively. During the filming of Gone with the Wind, Gable insisted that producer David O. Selznick bring in Schmidt to recut his entire wardrobe because he didn’t like the way the studio-provided costumes fit.

  Harley’s attire combined with his height, his ice-blue eyes, and his seemingly perpetual tan to ensure that he would be the most visually commanding figure in any room he entered. “He wore clothes that nobody wore back then,” said Connie Earl. “He’d wear pink socks! He loved color. He’d tell designers what he wanted and he would make himself part of the design. He didn’t do it to get people to look at him. How he dressed was one of his greatest pleasures in life.”

  The way Frank Hershey saw it, the colorful clothes and fearsome demeanor were part of a defensive tactic, a façade Harley constructed to conceal his underlying insecurity. “Oh, he was flamboyantly dressed. He wore bright ties; he wore purple shirts, or whatever. But it was calculated. He was projecting an image, but he had to. I mean, he was fighting, he was ‘kicking against the pricks,’ as the saying goes. And while it seemed to us he was living the life of Riley, he wasn’t.”

  8

  “What Will I Tell Mr. Sloan?”

  As the U.S. economy crawled out of the pit of the Great Depression in 1936, General Motors emerged as the dominant force in the auto industry. Having reported a profit in every post-crash year except 1932, the company matched its 1928 production level of 1.7 million vehicles and commanded a 43 percent market share, as Ford dropped behind Chrysler for the first time, to a distant third place.

  GM sales had rebounded across all divisions. Chevrolet alone accounted for 27 percent of all cars sold. Pontiac sales had nearly doubled under the hand of Frank Hershey, who designed the distinctive Silver Streak trim, a wide-ribbed strip of chrome that ran down the center of the hood and rear deck and identified the brand for the next twenty years. Even Cadillac, which had hemorrhaged money for five years after the market crash, was back in profit, thanks to a remarkable intervention by a previously undistinguished middle manager.

  Nicholas Dreystadt was a forty-two-year-old German-born former Mercedes-Benz mechanic who had worked his way up from the shop floor to become Cadillac’s national service manager. Upon learning in June 1932 that members of GM’s executive committee, including Alfred Sloan and William Knudsen, were meeting on the fourteenth floor of the Detroit headquarters to vote on whether to kill off the Cadillac due to flagging sales, Dreystadt took drastic action—he burst into the meeting uninvited.

  Sloan and Knudsen likely had never seen or heard of Dreystadt before. But suddenly there he was, standing in front of them in a rumpled tweed coat pocked with burn holes from pipe embers, speaking in a thick accent and pleading for them to spare the storied luxury line. Struck by his passion and audacity, the committee let him talk.

  He told them he had learned something surprising in his visits to Cadillac service centers around the country, something they probably didn’t know. While overall sales were down, Cadillacs remained extremely popular among a small, hidden elite—black entertainers, boxers, business owners, and professionals, people who earned high incomes but were barred from spending it on the usual accouterments of success. They could not join fancy country clubs, for example, or buy homes in upscale (white) residential areas. About the only American status symbol they could acquire was an expensive automobile. But they couldn’t buy a Cadillac, at least not officially, because in an effort to appeal to the prestige market, the company had long maintained a policy of refusing to sell to “negroes.”

  Dreystadt said he had talked to many black owners as they brought their cars in for servicing, and he discovered that they had gotten around the ban by paying white people several hundred dollars to “front” the purchases for them. He wasn’t about to tell a room full of rich white capitalists that their policy was unfair or immoral. Instead he argued that it made no economic sense to allow outside parties to profit from the sales of their cars. Why not keep that front money in-house by ending the ban and catering to the black bourgeoisie, actually marketing directly to them?

  It was a radical notion; no major American company had done that before. The committee promptly granted a stay of execution for the Cadillac and gave him eighteen months to develop the “Negro market.” Within a year, sales had increased by more than 80 percent and the division was breaking even, earning Dreystadt a promotion to general manager and a permanent place in auto industry annals as “the man who saved Cadillac.”

  Perhaps the best news for GM in 1936, however, was the resurgence of its cornerstone division, Buick, thanks largely to the bond that had developed between Harley Earl and Harlow Curtice since their early contretemps in Harley’s office. An accountant by training, “Red” Curtice had risen from bookkeeper to president of GM’s AC Spark Plug Division when Alfred Sloan handed him the keys to Buick in 1933. Frank Hershey was right when he said that Curtice “didn’t know a damn thing about styling.” But Curtice did know what he liked in a car, and his taste ran to big, bold, and fast. He wanted more than anything to blow away Buick’s age-old image as the stodgy, respectable “doctor’s car.” According to an often told story, when he saw the first drawings for the proposed 1936 models, he asked Harley, “Would you want to be seen driving one of these cars?”

  “To be honest with you, no,” Harley said. “These cars are designed for the Buick market.”

  “There is no ‘Buick market,’” Curtice supposedly replied. “Design me a Buick that you would like to own.”

  That was all Harley needed to hear. When the 1936 models appeared in the showrooms a year and a half later they were rounder and more streamlined than their predecessors, with swept-back windshields and massive vertical-bar “fencer’s mask” grilles. A new model called the Roadmaster weighed in at 4,100 pounds, heavier than a Cadillac, and featured rear-hinged “suicide doors” that gave it the look of a gangland getaway car. A smaller, sportier Century sedan boasted a top speed of 100 miles an hour and a zero-to-sixty acceleration of eighteen seconds, which was considered jackrabbit-quick at the time, earning the car accolades as “the first factory hot rod.” Buick was named the best-looking car of the year in a public opinion poll conducted by Sales Management magazine, and sales bounced back nearly to pre-Depression levels, with Buick ranked as the fifth-best-selling car in the United States.

  Harley had been a Cadillac man since he joined the company, largely out of loyalty to Larry Fisher, his GM mentor. But after Fisher retired in mid-1934, Curtice persuaded Harley to switch his company car from a Cadillac to a Buick. Either as enticement or appreciation, he offered Harley a Century chassis and a budget to design and build a one-of-a-kind car for his personal use, a perquisite enjoyed by the industry’s two other styling chiefs, Edsel Ford and Pac
kard’s Ed Macauley. After ten years in Detroit, Harley was beginning to taste the fruits of his labor.

  In January 1937, Art and Colour was renamed the GM Styling Section and took over the top four floors of the newly constructed eleven-story Research Annex B, known as the Argonaut Building, across Milwaukee Avenue behind GM headquarters. The new quarters provided enough space (80,000 square feet) for each of the five design teams—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac—to have separate studios for the first time. The top floor contained a specially lighted auditorium with raised revolving platforms for presenting finished clay models to division managers and board members, although the Styling staff preferred transporting the models via a large freight elevator to a garden area on the roof where they could be viewed in natural daylight, to better show off the highlights. Outdoor viewing had its drawbacks, however. On one occasion several clay models melted in the heat, and on a bitterly cold winter day another froze and cracked in half.

  Harley’s new office on the eleventh floor caused as much talk around the company as his clothes. Designed with the help of Detroit’s most expensive interior decorator, William Wright, it featured “dark paneled walls; a high, elaborate, hand-carved, beamed ceiling with touches of gilt; deep oriental carpets; lots of leather; and heavy, muted drapes.” At the far end of the room, Harley’s massive oak desk was elevated on a dais, assuring that he would sit at eye level with anyone who stood before him. The overall effect was intimidating. “As you walked into that room and had to make the long trek from the door to his desk to receive your audience, you were in a pretty shaky state by the time you arrived,” recalled Frank Hershey. “And if you could survive that ordeal, then he knew that you had the guts to do this thing.”