At that, Sloan turned to Kettering. “I come to you if the subject is research or invention or ideas,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it, Ket; you are whom I put my undying admiration, trust and faith in. But when it comes to style or the aesthetics of things, I have to defer to Harley.
“I know what you are saying, Ket. Know that. But I feel Harley is right here. This is one of the few great opportunities we will ever get to do something, as Harley just said, ‘significant.’ I know that committee that’s gathering in the next room would jump at the suggestion of Kahn in a minute. I know if I said, ‘Let’s give the job to Kahn,’ that would be it, but on that whole committee there isn’t an ounce of real awareness of what-is-what and who-is-who in architecture. And we are not doing this to please us, as if selecting an architect to do our own home. This is for a General Motors you and I have dreamed of and have wrestled with through these damned years of Depression and war and labor turmoil. These new buildings or this new facility is to be for a General Motors we bequeath to the next generation. You and I and Harley, we’ll be gone, has-beens, names under portraits, names on gravestones, all but forgotten. But these buildings we set into being with this decision will be the flagship of this great corporation. We believe that it will be greater than we have ever known, and our legacy for all who come after, as lofty as all that sounds.”
Read more than seventy years after the fact, Sloan’s rhetoric sounds rehearsed, as if he and Harley had choreographed their side of the conversation in advance and the meeting was merely an attempt to get Kettering to accept what the two of them had already decided. But Kettering was as stubborn as Harley, and they went back and forth until Harley finally suggested they settle the matter with a competition—Kahn and Saarinen would be asked to submit a proposal and the best one in the eyes of the executive committee would win the contract. Sloan immediately pronounced it a great idea and Kettering grudgingly agreed to go along, saying, “I don’t know how he’ll feel about being in a contest, but I think that [Kahn’s company] would want this job very much, and would win it. They have the experience, the expertise and they know us inside and out.”
Harley wouldn’t let the argument go. “Ket, they know the older General Motors. But they do not know the General Motors that’s coming. We are going to stomp on Ford and Chrysler, believe me. And these new facilities are going to show the way. I say Kahn can’t do it and that Saarinen will, just because he does not know our old ways as much. He will approach us from a new direction. I’ll bet you a dinner at Delmonico’s in New York on the outcome of this.”
Seeking to end the meeting on that jocular note, Sloan asked whether he could join them at Delmonico’s. “You’re welcome,” Harley said, “and will I enjoy that meal, with Ket paying for the best champagne. Have you ever bought me a meal, Ket?”
“It will be your treat, Harley,” Kettering replied, “not mine.”
There is no record of who picked up the tab or whether the dinner ever took place, but when ground was broken for the Technical Center on October 23, 1945, it was Eliel Saarinen, not Albert Kahn, who posed for photographers standing next to Harley, Sloan, and an unsmiling Kettering. Two years later, building construction still had not begun when Kettering retired from GM at the age of seventy-one, leaving Harley solely responsible for oversight of Saarinen and the $100 million project.
That summer, Harley took his mind off the future long enough to join Sue and their now college-age sons on what proved to be an elegiac journey through the past. Having grown up the daughter of a rancher in Banning, California, Sue delighted in taking her city-born boys on annual road trips to rustic guest ranches all over the West in the days when 80 percent of America’s roads were unpaved. Harley rarely accompanied them because although he was an avid hunter and fisherman, he didn’t care for horseback riding and he couldn’t take that much time away from work. This time Sue and Jerry drove to a Wyoming dude ranch in an Oldsmobile that Harley bought specifically for the trip, and he made arrangements to meet them in San Francisco.
After a week at the ranch, Sue and Jerry connected with Jim, the older boy, in Cody, Wyoming. He’d spent two months in an Idaho logging camp doing the kind of hard, dangerous work his grandfather had endured in the Michigan pine forest sixty-five years earlier. Jim knew nothing of that history, however, because he and Jerry had met J.W. only once, when they were so young they had no memory of it.
The three of them then drove over the Sierra Nevadas, through the Tioga Pass, dipped down into Yosemite, and then picked up Harley in San Francisco for the last leg of the journey along the scenic Pacific Coast Highway to Los Angeles. The boys hadn’t been there since they were little, and all they remembered of that visit was being led into their great-grandmother Taft’s bedroom to give her a dutiful kiss. It was the only time they ever saw her. She died in 1938 at the age of ninety-seven.
On this trip, Sue and the boys spent most of their time with her parents, who still lived next door to the Hollywood hilltop house that she and Harley had built in 1925 and where Billy, the brother Jim and Jerry didn’t know about, was born. Cecil B. DeMille still lived a hundred yards down the street. Harley visited separately with his father, brothers Art and Carl, and sister Jessie. “He had a particular affection for my mother,” Jessie’s son, John Sampson, recalled recently. “He stopped by whenever he came to town for the Los Angeles Auto Show.”
To his nieces and nephews, Harley was the family’s glamorous celebrity. “I had an uncle I could brag about,” said Jessie’s daughter, Virginia Ramshaw. She and her brother John would never forget the time Harley took them to dinner at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, where his star status qualified them for a table among the Hollywood elite in the middle of the room “while all the commoners sat around the perimeter,” John said, adding, “But Harley didn’t flash money; he was very shy about money.”
He had good reason for that: money was a divisive issue in the extended family. Thanks to the success of Earl Automobile Works, J.W.’s children by his first wife, Abbie, had been able to attend private universities, establish professional careers, and experience life beyond the city of their birth. J.W. gave Jessie her own car, which she crashed, and an extended world tour as a graduation present.
Life was markedly different for his son and daughter by his second wife, Nellie. “Henry and Janelle could not go to college because after the stock market crash grandfather didn’t have the money,” their cousin Virginia explained recently. “I was very close to Janelle. She didn’t ever talk about Harley, Art, or Carl. Uncle Henry worked at the dime store. In high school, he was drafted and served under General Patton in the Second Armored Division and was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.”
The disparity fed the resentment Nellie harbored for her stepchildren. Only Jessie maintained a relationship with her stepmother and half siblings, and she saw to it that her children did as well. She regularly brought bags of groceries to J.W. and Nellie and had helped arrange a surprise eightieth birthday party for her father at their home. Harley was not in town for the party, but he sent a gift that made an impression on everyone there. J.W. described the moment with a draftsmanlike exactitude in a letter to Harley dated February 6, 1946: “Jessie brought me a box five-feet-six inches long, five inches wide and five inches deep with those eighty roses, all long, with red buds,” he wrote. “Many [guests] exclaimed they had never seen anything like it. Then came your phone call and that nearly bowled me over.”
The letter made it clear that despite the enduring rift in the family, the bond between father and son remained strong. “Thanks ever and ever so much, and on top of all that, your checks,” J.W. said in closing. “And now I stop and think and wonder why. Loads of love, Dad.”
Harley outdid the roses during the Los Angeles trip, presenting his dad with a new ’47 Chevrolet, a no-frills black sedan that only a clergyman or funeral director could love. Given that J.W. was a devout Methodist church leader who wore a white shirt and tie every day,
whether working in his tiny real estate office on Hollywood Boulevard or building a rabbit hutch in his backyard, it seems likely that Harley special-ordered the car after carefully considering what his father might feel comfortable driving. It would have been unlike the car designer in him to do otherwise. But Nellie didn’t see it that way. She grumbled that Harley could have afforded something nicer.
After a week of visiting old friends and favorite haunts, Harley sold the Oldsmobile to a local dealer and he and Sue and the boys hopped aboard the Super Chief streamliner and headed back to Detroit and the future, having taken what would turn out to be their last family vacation to Los Angeles.
The ’48 Cadillacs didn’t go into production until late February 1948, due to factory retooling delays, and they arrived in dealer showrooms a month later with little of the traditional fanfare. There had been no splashy unveiling at the Waldorf-Astoria in January; the industry did not mount the New York Auto Show for 1948 because only Cadillac had a new auto to show. The company’s ads and brochures downplayed the car’s most distinctive design feature, referring only to the rear fenders’ “rudder-type styling.” According to Bill Mitchell, it was “merely a humped up taillight really; it wasn’t a fin at all.” But Cadillac dealers, historically a conservative lot, were concerned when they first saw the new cars; nothing had prepared them for how radically different they looked from the prewar models. Their concern turned to alarm when longtime customers, after waiting six years for a new Caddy, reacted negatively to the never-before-seen rear fender treatment. Sales managers complained to the home office that the “fishtails” were driving people away. Calls were made demanding that the Styling Section fix the problem by fast-tracking a new rear fender design sans fins, a daunting prospect given that stylists had already incorporated them into the design of the ’49 and ’50 models. The ghost of the “pregnant Buick” seemed to hover in the hallways at GM headquarters. “We almost started a war inside the corporation,” Harley recalled years later.
Before any drastic action was taken, however, something happened. As the new models began to appear on the streets, people stopped, looked, and decided they liked what they saw, including Frank Hershey’s fishtailed fenders. “Their form, like that of a salmon, is entirely suited to smooth travel in one direction,” said Motor magazine. “Static pictures can do scant justice to their natural look as they glide along the road.” Some people did more than just look. It wasn’t unusual to see a passerby stop beside a parked Cadillac and almost unconsciously run an admiring hand along the curve of the fender and over the rounded nub that housed the taillight.
After a sputtering start, sales accelerated to a record level by the end of the year. Fortune magazine later suggested it was the Cadillac that sold the public on tail fins, not the other way around. In an article headlined “The Cadillac Phenomenon,” the magazine quoted a Cadillac competitor saying that if his company had introduced fins, “we would have been murdered.”
Harley believed the tail fin caught on because Cadillac owners felt it “gave them an extra receipt for their money in the form of a visible prestige marking for an expensive car.” In accordance with his three-year design cycle, the fins went unchanged for the next few model years as the Styling staff performed a series of face-lifts on other parts of the car. They lengthened the rear deck until there was nearly as much metal behind the driver as in front. They eliminated the center roof support, or “B-pillar,” between the front- and rear-side windows, creating the so-called hardtop roofline that lent the two-door coupe the alfresco look of a convertible, but with the top up. They fashioned the first curved, one-piece windshield, a product of years of GM research and vision tests at the Dartmouth Eye Institute. More playfully, they added a pair of bullet-shaped front bumper guards that, when viewed head-on, resembled chrome-plated female breasts, which quickly earned the nickname “Dagmars,” after a buxom blond TV personality of the day.
Cadillac engineers contributed a new high-compression 331-cubic-inch V-8 that moved Mechanix Illustrated magazine to declare, “With this engine, Cadillac, despite its large size, out-performs just about every car being made.” Indeed, American race-car driver and racing-team owner Briggs Cunningham, a buddy of Harley’s from West Palm Beach, Florida, promptly entered a Cadillac Coupe de Ville in France’s legendary twenty-four-hour Le Mans Grand Prix, and the car finished in tenth place.
The end result was an automobile that perfectly captured America’s sense of itself at the dawn of the 1950s—powerful, exceptional, and, in Harley’s word, “significant.” The new generation of Cadillac was embraced by the burgeoning middle class, not as a symbol of wealth and privilege but rather as one of accomplishment, a car for the man who had earned his place in the world, not inherited it. At a time when the average family income was $4,200 a year and the lowest-priced Cadillac cost $3,000, polls indicated that a majority of Americans would buy a Cadillac over any other car if they could afford to. It didn’t matter that only a fraction of them could; most believed that one day they would. In the wake of winning a world war, anything seemed attainable. “Probably never before has one material object become so much the focus for so many of the aspirations that propel the American ego,” said Fortune.
African Americans aspired to equality more than anything else, of course, and according to Ebony magazine, owning a Cadillac was “a solid and substantial symbol for many a Negro that he is as good as any white man.” In a 1949 editorial headlined “Why Do Negroes Buy Cadillacs?” the magazine declared, “To be able to buy the most expensive car made in America is as graphic a demonstration of that equality as can be found. It’s the acme of dignity and stature.” Fortune noted that Cadillac did not advertise in Ebony at the time and quoted one of its executives as saying, “You can never tell which man on the street will turn up with $5,000 to buy a Cadillac. And if he has had to cross over the tracks to get there, Cadillac doesn’t worry.”
Cadillac sales exceeded 100,000 in 1950, the first time a luxury car had reached that level. It was peanuts compared with Chevrolet’s industry-topping total of 1.5 million, but nearly double the combined sales of the Packard, Chrysler, and Lincoln luxury models.
GM sold a record 3 million cars in 1950, nearly as many as the rest of the industry combined. The company produced not only the top-selling car in the luxury and low-priced categories but also the three bestselling mid-priced cars—Buick, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile, which ranked fourth, fifth, and sixth, respectively. The list offered empirical proof that Sloan’s organizing principle of “a car for every purse and purpose” and Harley’s “trickle down” design system that played to consumers’ desire for social mobility made for an unbeatable combination.
The big story in the 1950 industry standings, however, was Ford’s return to the number two position, ahead of Chrysler. In the wake of Henry Ford’s death in 1947, his grandson Henry II had hired a team of young former Air Force procurement and logistics officers who called themselves the “Whiz Kids” and tasked them with setting up the modern-day accounting and purchasing systems that his grandfather so disdained. Henry II also brought in a veteran GM divisional vice president, Ernest R. Breech, to be his second in command, charged with massively reorganizing the company based on GM’s decentralized model. Breech, in turn, recruited industrial designer George Walker, one of his golfing buddies, to consult with the styling department on the development of the company’s ’49 Ford.
Although Walker’s firm had done some contract work for Nash Motors and Studebaker, it was primarily known for designing household consumer products. But Henry II picked its design for the company’s namesake car over the one presented by Bob Gregorie’s staff, which prompted the longtime styling chief to resign in a huff. The resultant ’49 model stunned the industry by knocking Chevrolet out of the top spot for the first time since before the Depression, selling nearly 1.5 million units—a whopping 1 million more than the year before—and powering the company to $700 million in profits that year.
Henry II authorized Walker to expand Ford’s styling department and to model it on GM’s Styling Section, with separate studios for Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln. Walker began to style himself as a more flamboyantly dressed and outspoken version of Harley, encouraging reporters to refer to him as “the Cellini of chrome” in the way they had dubbed Harley “the da Vinci of Detroit.” In an interview with Time magazine, Walker described what he called his “finest moment: ‘There I was in my white Continental, and I was wearing pure silk, pure white embroidered cowboy shirt and black gabardine trousers. Beside me in the car was my jet black Great Dane, imported from Europe, named Dana von Krupp. You just can’t do any better than that.’”
Even more provocatively, Walker began recruiting Harley’s former and current designers, including Frank Hershey, whom he put in charge of the Ford design studio. It almost seemed as if Walker was playing a character from a 1950s western movie—the new fast gun in town, calling Harley out into the street.
If Harley was worried, he didn’t show it. On December 29, 1950, the Friday leading into the New Year’s weekend, GM issued a press release announcing that an “experiment in the automotive future—a low, sleek sports car with the dramatic sweeping lines of a jet air craft—was unveiled today by the Styling Section of General Motors.”
It was the XP-8, rechristened Le Sabre and introduced to the press in the form of a gleaming full-size plaster model that only a trained eye could tell wasn’t the real thing. Explaining that the actual roadworthy vehicle would not be finished for four months, GM distributed dramatic photographs of Harley standing next to the model, dressed in an elegant dark suit and brightly patterned tie, and gazing at what may have been the world’s most prodigious tail fin that wasn’t attached to an airplane or a very large fish. The car stood only 36 inches high at the cowl, and 50 at the top of the so-called panoramic windshield, the first with glass bent to wrap around the cockpit. The front fenders barely came up to Harley’s knees.
Fins Page 18
