Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  Clearly, Harley had reconsidered his previous predictions that postwar automobiles would not take styling cues from aircraft design. The Le Sabre was named after the F-86 Sabre jet, the first supersonic fighter plane (originally code-named the XP-86). Its oval grille resembled the front air intake of its namesake, except that a button on the instrument panel would cause it to rotate 180 degrees to reveal a close-set pair of headlights. The rear deck tapered to a “jetlike center tail cone” with a “bomb-shaped hub.” The flanking tail fins would be functional, the press release said, because each would house “aircraft-type 20-gallon rubberized fuel tanks,” one for premium gasoline and the other for super-high-octane methyl alcohol, which would be injected into the combustion chambers through a second carburetor to provide “extra power boost at high speeds.”

  The press release likened the Le Sabre’s interior to a “bomber cockpit” that would be equipped with thermostatically controlled electric seat warmers, which functioned on the same principle as “electrically heated flying suits used by airmen.” The instrument panel would include controls to operate hydraulic jacks on each wheel “so that in the event of a blow out or flat, the driver could jack up the car without leaving his seat.” And between the seats an embedded sensor device would detect the slightest drop of rain and instantly raise the convertible top and windows.

  Harley described the car as a “laboratory on wheels” for testing mechanical and styling ideas, and he cautioned that many of the innovations were not financially practical for current production cars.

  “However, if the time should come when some materials or some devices in this car get within range of the customer’s pocketbook, we’ll be ready.

  “That is the point of building this car,” he said. “To be prepared for the future.”

  14

  The Great American Sports Car Race

  The press got its first look at the real Le Sabre on July 17, 1951, when Harley invited a handpicked group of automotive writers to the Milford Proving Grounds to see the car scream past the reviewing stand at 110 miles an hour. Afterward, he gave them a demonstration of some of its eighty innovations, including the rain sensor, which one of his assistants triggered with an eyedropper. Then each reporter was taken on what was likely the ride of his life. “A quick spin around the 3.8 mile track with its banked turn going by at 90 miles an hour is as smooth as an airplane banking gracefully in the sky,” said the man from the Detroit Free Press, who proclaimed the car “Harley Earl’s magnum opus.”

  A few weeks later, Harley took the Le Sabre to New York for its public debut as the pace car for the Watkins Glen Grand Prix, an annual road race that drew about 100,000 racing fans to a small village in the Finger Lakes region. The Le Sabre traveled in its own specially equipped trailer accompanied by its dedicated “engineer” (chief mechanic), Leonard MacLay, his assistant, Art Carpenter, and a GM photographer. Wherever the car and Harley appeared, crowds pressed in around them, to Harley’s obvious delight. They were a photogenic pair—America’s most spectacular automobile and the tall, tanned, elegantly attired designer who had imagined her. Dominick Fraboni, the owner of Watkins Glen Chevrolet, acted as Harley’s host for the weekend, putting him up at his home and proudly introducing him to folks around town. “General Motors vice presidents didn’t normally come to little dealerships like Watkins Glen,” he later explained to a reporter.

  The car almost didn’t make the race. The day before, Harley took it out for a drive and as he slowed at a crossing the engine flooded and died. He tried repeatedly to restart it, getting madder each time the engine failed to respond. When it finally did, he floored the accelerator and, without lifting his foot, “dropped the transmission into drive,” whereupon “the sudden burst of torque twisted the driveshaft like an aluminum beer can.” MacLay and Carpenter worked all night in Fraboni’s shop to repair the damage in time for the race.

  As Harley led the competitors in a parade around the course through the town that morning, he was struck by the number of foreign sports cars parked along the route, mostly British-made roadsters—Jaguars, Morgans, and MGs—with college-age owners showing them off. “He commented that American auto companies were lacking a sports car,” said Fraboni, who rode in the Le Sabre with him. “When he saw that bunch of cars at the start-finish line, you could see that his wheels were turning.”

  The winning car that day was a white Cunningham C2 roadster built by Briggs Cunningham, whose cars also took second and fourth place, the latter car driven by Cunningham himself.

  After the race, Harley went back to Detroit and began talking up an idea with his designers—a GM sports car, a two-seater convertible, but not like the Le Sabre, which was 17 feet long, 6 feet wide, and weighed 3,800 pounds on account of all its fancy engineering. The car he envisioned would be almost the opposite—light and nimble, simple, unadorned, and affordable for young people: an American version of a classic European roadster like the one he had just bought for his new daughter-in-law, Connie. The nineteen-year-old had come to live with Harley and Sue while her husband, Jim, served a tour of duty as an Air Force pilot in Germany, and she would never forget that car or the way Harley presented it to her. “He sent a company plane to get me in Palm Beach,” Connie recalled shortly before her death in 2016, “and when I walked down the steps at the airport in Detroit, it was waiting for me there on the tarmac, a beautiful little MG, British racing green with white leather seats.”

  A team tasked with designing America’s first sports car quickly got to work in Harley’s top-secret, blacked-out studio. A misleading sign on the door said “Opel Project,” and internal documents referred to the car as the EX-122.

  After Watkins Glen, the Le Sabre appeared at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto and then sailed to France on the ocean liner De Grasse for the annual Paris Auto Show and a command performance at the headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower, who was in his final months as Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe. MacLay took the soon-to-be president for a ride and entertained him with the rain sensor routine. The GM photographer snapped a picture of the man who had overseen history’s largest deployment of air, land, and sea vehicles during D-day standing next to the car as its top went up, a delighted smile on his face and an eyedropper in his hand. Harley wasn’t there that day, but he sent along autographed photos of himself behind the wheel. Ike sent back a note thanking him for the demonstration of the Le Sabre’s “wizardry” and adding, “I was, to say the least, intrigued!”

  Over the next year, the Le Sabre appeared at a succession of state fairs, municipal parades, and auto shows around the country, sometimes with Harley and sometimes solo. In one instance, they both were in Palm Beach but without MacLay, who had stayed behind in Detroit for reasons that are lost to time. Harley was taking Ford executive vice president Ernest Breech for a drive, with the top down as always, when a sudden south Florida rain shower came up. “Don’t worry, we’ll be okay,” Harley said, confident that the rain sensor would do its job. But it didn’t and they got drenched, which prompted an angry call to MacLay ordering him to get on the next flight down there to fix it. “That was one of the times I got fired,” MacLay said later.

  For Harley, the most satisfying stop on the Le Sabre road show may have been the car’s appearance at the Los Angeles County Fair in September 1952 because it gave him the chance for a side trip to show it off at the GM-endowed Art Center School in Los Angeles, where one of his original Art and Colour staffers, Strother MacMinn, was on the faculty. Harley also hosted a press preview at the Beverly Hills Hotel, formally introducing the “car of tomorrow” to the city of his birth. “‘Dream’ Auto Unveiled by Engineer,” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times, which mistakenly credited him with an engineering degree from Stanford but accurately described him as “a native son of Los Angeles, now a famed automobile designer.”

  * * *

  It was agreed from the get-go that the Le Sabre would be Harley’s personal vehicle as well a
s the company’s flagship, so, back in Detroit, car and driver once again became a familiar sight cruising along Lake Shore Drive on his daily commute between home and the office. “Le Sabre Takes Up Residence in the Pointe,” reported the local Grosse Pointe News, with an accompanying photo of Harley and Sue sitting in the car in their driveway on a Sunday afternoon. Newspapers around the country gobbled up GM’s publicity shots of the Le Sabre with Harley either behind the wheel or looming alongside. The PR department planted articles and “guest columns” under his byline, expounding on such subjects as “What Goes into Automobile Styling” and how the term “hardtop” came about. It’s doubtful that he wrote any of them, however, since he rarely put anything down on paper, not even memos to staff. More likely, he dictated them to a PR staffer. A Saturday Evening Post article headlined “I Dream Automobiles” was authored “by Harley J. Earl as told to [Post editor] Arthur W. Baum.” Harley told the magazine’s 6 million readers by way of introduction, “I consider myself an ordinary garden variety American, and I think I can show enough common faults and foibles to prove it. Along with most people, I remember faces and forget names. Sometimes I overestimate the authority of two pairs and a fellow with three of a kind lets me have it in the customary eye. When I hit a golf ball I am sorry to say that it does not always stay on the fairway, and I have seen mallards fly off in excellent health after I have fired both barrels right at them. I don’t like to write letters. I like baseball and I love automobiles.”

  He came across as all-American as one of the magazine’s famous Norman Rockwell cover illustrations, like a Jimmy Stewart character in a Frank Capra movie titled Mr. Earl Goes to Detroit.

  “My primary purpose for 28 years has been to lengthen and lower the American automobile,” he said, “at times in reality and always at least in appearance. Why? Because my sense of proportion tells me that oblongs are more attractive than squares, just as a ranch house is more attractive than a square, three-story, flat-roofed house, or a greyhound is more graceful than an English bulldog. Happily, the car-buying public and I consistently agree on this.”

  No matter who really wrote the article, the Styling staff recognized the voice—minus the malapropisms and profanity. The comment “Let me say quickly that when I refer to myself I am merely using a short cut to talk about my team” was pure Harley, their publicly self-effacing team leader who had recently signed off on a press release that described him as “a man of towering genius.”

  GM’s PR campaign was primarily intended to tout the company’s styling supremacy, but in the process it turned Harley Earl into a household name. He became the de facto face of an increasingly faceless corporation, perhaps the only auto executive whom the average Joe would recognize on the street. And as much as Harley might deny it, he relished his late-blooming celebrity.

  At fifty-nine, he was among the last of GM’s old lions, the generation of executives that helped vanquish Henry Ford in the 1920s and kept the company profitable through the Depression. Their number was dwindling. Boss Ket and the Fisher brothers all were retired now. Big Bill Knudsen had rejoined the company as a board member after the war, but died in 1948, the same year Nicholas Dreystadt succumbed to throat cancer at age fifty-eight. Alfred Sloan was seventy-seven and slowing down, having ceded his day-to-day CEO responsibilities to GM president Charles E. Wilson, who was sixty-three and thus just two years shy of the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five recently set by the executive committee.

  The age mandate wasn’t retroactive, however, so it didn’t apply to Sloan, whose successor, when he decided the time had come, was expected to be Harlow Curtice. That augured well for Harley because the two men had never hesitated to back his big ideas with blank checks, the latest of which was for an expensive reimagination of the traditional auto show.

  After the industry decided to forgo its traditional New York show in 1948, Harley pushed the idea of going it alone, arguing that by mounting its own show GM could control the conditions, lighting, sets, and staging of the exhibition in a way that better presented its products.

  GM’s “Transportation Unlimited” exhibition was the first major postwar auto show. Held the week of January 20–27, 1949, in the grand ballroom of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, it served as the official debut of the tail fins, hardtops, and two-tone paint jobs that would dominate American automobile styling in the next decade. It also showed off products from GM’s Frigidaire, Delco, and Electro-Motive divisions.

  Harley followed up in January 1950 with the “Mid-Century Motorama,” also at the Waldorf. The show’s centerpiece, created by the Styling Section’s Exhibit and Product design studio, consisted of an elaborate 1,500-square-foot revolving platform with five electronically synchronized turntables that displayed flamboyantly painted and trimmed models, including a two-tone (“cabana sand and over surf green”) Oldsmobile Palm Beach Holiday with green alligator leather seats, and—even more jarring to modern sensibilities—a golden Cadillac Debutante with an interior fashioned from “the finest Somaliland leopard skin.” GM publicity material pointed out that in its effort to obtain “perfectly-matching” skins for the car, the company went so far as to hire a furrier who spent months collecting nearly two hundred pelts, from which fourteen were selected as “the best that could possibly be attained.” Styling’s color department paired the leopard interior with a pearlescent “tawny yellow buff” exterior paint that was created by dissolving tiny moon-shaped fish scales and then spraying their pearly essence over the base coat. The glittering effect supposedly inspired George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann’s 1953 hit Broadway comedy The Solid Gold Cadillac, which was later made into a movie starring Judy Holliday.

  “Transportation Unlimited” and “Mid-Century Motorama” were warm-ups. What Harley envisioned as the auto show of the future was equal parts World’s Fair exhibit, traveling Barnum & Bailey big-top performance, and Busby Berkeley movie musical, employing actors, singers, dancers, musicians, high-fashion models, and even a few animals in a lavishly choreographed celebration of the age of American abundance.

  The Le Sabre would play a leading role, of course, since it had not been finished in time to make its official New York debut at the 1950 show. “People will stand in line, four abreast, completely around the city block, just waiting to get inside,” Harley told a group of newly hired young stylists, sounding as if he were describing the world premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s latest Technicolor screen epic. “Once in the ballroom, it will be so crowded around the car that they will not be able to see it and will have to stay for the next show just to get a better view.”

  Each of the auto divisions would present their own one-of-a-kind “dream cars,” Harley said. Like the Le Sabre, they would be eye-popping, heart-stopping creations, the kind of cars a movie star might drive but average folks could only fantasize about. “You know, when you go to Las Vegas to see a stage show, you don’t expect to see your wife on the stage,” he explained. “You expect to see a real floozy.”

  The advent of the Korean War scotched plans for the shows in 1951 and 1952, however, as a shortage of raw materials and defense contract commitments reduced the entire industry’s production capacity to the point where it made little sense to spend money on promotional activity that would only increase consumer demand that already could not be met.

  In the early spring of 1952, Harley showed a painted and fully trimmed mock-up of his EX-122 sports car to Chevrolet’s chief engineer, Ed Cole, the division’s new general manager, Thomas Keating, and GM executive vice president Harlow Curtice. They all agreed the car should be developed under the Chevrolet banner as the division’s dream car at the next Motorama, in January 1953, with general production to begin as soon as possible after that. The tight timetable dictated that its body would be fashioned from a new structural material called GRP (for glass reinforced plastic) that GM had been testing. Also called fiberglass, the resin-based material was lighter than sheet metal and cheaper to use for a prototype body becau
se it required no factory retooling.

  A special committee meeting was called to come up with a name for the car, but after considering three hundred suggestions all they could agree on was that it should be a nonanimal name beginning with the letter “c.” Myron Scott, the assistant director of Chevrolet’s public relations department, took the job home with him that night and patiently searched that section of the dictionary until his finger came upon the name for a class of small, fast British warship—“corvette.” For his extra effort Scott earned a permanent place of honor in GM annals.

  No sooner had the name been settled than Harley’s vaunted security system suffered a serious breach. “A friend of mine at GM sent me a picture of what he called ‘our new Corvette,’” recalled Frank Hershey, who was Ford’s chief of design at the time. “I flipped because it meant they were going to have something we didn’t have.”

  He wasn’t about to let that happen. “As design chief, I had the authority to do whatever I wanted to, and I had an extra room, so I bought an XK-120 Jag, took the same wheelbase, and roughed out a car. Nobody knew about it but the guys in my room. If [management] had found out about it, we never would have done it. It was all secret.”

  Hershey knew that Harley’s head start meant the Corvette most likely would beat his sports car to the marketplace, but still he thrilled to the chase. And the fact that his old mentor didn’t know he was coming up from behind made it all the sweeter.

  GM’s 1953 Motorama kicked off a weeklong run at the Waldorf on January 16, beginning with a traditional conference with automotive writers, whose numbers had grown since the war with the launching of a number of national automotive magazines, including Road & Track, Car Craft, Motor Trend, and Hot Rod. The latter two publications in particular celebrated the emergence of a car-crazy youth culture epitomized by a Los Angeles–based celebrity car customizer named George Barris, whose career rise mirrored that of Harley’s in the early 1920s.