Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  Harley had never before addressed the writers’ gathering. He didn’t like talking to large groups of people, supposedly because he was self-conscious about his stammer. “Harlow Curtice promised me I only had to get up and take a bow,” he told them. “My work is really over. Whether it is good or bad, you fellows who haven’t seen the show will know later. But I am very, very indebted to these guests of ours here today. For the last twenty-six or twenty-seven years, I have not gotten around to thanking them. This is really my first opportunity. The corporation has kept me more or less under cover.

  “I want to thank you fellows for the fair way you have treated us in the Styling Section over all these years. I also want to thank the men who have written in telling us all the good things as well as the bad things, trying to coach us along. I hope you won’t stop that. It means an awful lot more to me than you might think.”

  Inside the hotel’s grand ballroom, thirty-eight automobiles were presented with the backing of a full orchestra, a fourteen-voice choral group, and a ballet troupe of two dozen dancers who put on a stage performance dramatizing “the story of engineering progress from the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel to the present day,” according to GM press material. Created by the noted Broadway choreographers Richard and Edith Barstow, the dance performance “is believed to represent the first effort to tell an industrial or engineering story through the medium of ballet,” the company claimed. There was also a “Fashions First” revue that featured a parade of fashion models wearing opera gloves and evening gowns created by such leading designers as Christian Dior from fabrics that matched the color of the cars the women caressed.

  As if all that weren’t enough, the entire production—performers, technicians, stagehands, mechanics, and sixty tractor-trailer loads of cars and exhibits—was set to go on a three-month national tour after the Waldorf show, with weeklong stands in Miami, Kansas City, Dallas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

  The New York show drew an estimated fifty thousand people the first day. They crowded around and stood on their tiptoes to get a better look at Harley’s dream cars, especially his most famous “floozy,” the Le Sabre, the automotive equivalent of Mae West. Pontiac’s La Parisienne, a chauffeur-ready town car with a landau roof over the rear passenger compartment and a hand-lacquered jet-black exterior finish, seemed demure in comparison. Only the “roulette pink” leather bucket seats gave away its Harley Earl pedigree. Someone in Styling decided to outfit the car with a pair of “French” poodles—one dyed pink and the other blue—until the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals complained.

  The two-seater Buick Wildcat and four-passenger Oldsmobile Starfire dream cars were billed as “sports convertibles” in keeping with an overall sporty theme set by the PR department. They boasted fiberglass bodies in brilliant colors, Le Sabre–style wraparound windshields, and elongated versions of Cadillac’s P-38-inspired tail fins, a harbinger of bigger things to come.

  The most dramatic design element of the Cadillac Le Mans was its lack of a rear seat, which made the “three-passenger” convertible two and a half feet shorter than a standard model and allowed GM ad copywriters to call it a “luxury sports car” even though it weighed approximately 4,000 pounds. The metallic silver-blue dream car sat five inches closer to the ground than Cadillac’s top-of-the-line El Dorado, but—with the same massive grille, peaked snout, and sharply defined tail fins—it looked startlingly like a great white shark on wheels.

  According to Harley, after seeing the Le Mans at the Los Angeles show, actor John Wayne walked up to him and announced that he wanted to buy one. Harley tried to tell him that it was just a show car and not for sale, and besides, he explained, it was made of fiberglass. “I don’t care if it’s made of pudding,” the Duke replied. “I want one.”

  As it turned out, the least flashy dream car generated the most buzz. Plain white, with red leather seats, a manually operated black canvas top, and minimal chrome ornamentation, the Chevrolet Corvette didn’t even have outside door handles or roll-up windows. Like the European sports cars that had inspired its creation, America’s “first real sports car” came with canvas-and-Plexiglas side curtains that were to be stored in the trunk and snapped into place in the event of inclement weather. The car measured just 47 inches at the top of the wraparound windshield and weighed less than 2,900 pounds, with rounded fenders in front and back, recessed headlights covered by chrome “stone guard” mini-grilles, and jet-style taillight housings molded with vestigial fins.

  The Corvette’s most striking feature, however, was a low, rounded horizontal grille that framed a set of thirteen gleaming teeth, forming a face that was at once a first for a sports car and an instant classic.

  The excitement surrounding the Corvette was such that on the second day of the show Harlow Curtice announced the company would begin production in June. An internal decision was made to continue with the fiberglass body, rather than switching to sheet metal as originally planned, and to set up a production line capable of turning out 10,000 cars per year. Ford dispatched a team of engineers to the Waldorf to check out GM’s new sensation. They were easy to spot as they practically crawled all over the car measuring every dimension.

  Frank Hershey had managed to keep his sports car project hidden from upper management for a time, but word eventually got out when he brought a young engineer into his secret room to help lay out some key mechanical dimensions. That attracted the attention of Ford’s chief engineer, Earle MacPherson, who was livid to learn that such a project had been undertaken without his knowledge. At Ford, styling was subordinate to engineering, the way it had been at General Motors before Harley broke the mold.

  MacPherson’s pique briefly threatened the project, as Hershey struggled to justify his clandestine undertaking to management. But GM’s announcement about the Corvette settled the issue. Even though the sports car market was small—estimated at about 12,000 units a year at the time—Ford’s top executives agreed that the Corvette challenge needed to be answered. Ford held an edge on Chevrolet among young hot rod, racing, and custom car enthusiasts whose preferred power plant was Ford’s flat-head V-8, and the company couldn’t afford to cede that territory to its longtime archrival.

  So the race was on, with Hershey playing the tortoise to Harley’s hare. Knowing his old boss’s playbook better than anybody, he was confident his sports car could catch the Corvette in the long run, though not the short. He was given a May 1 deadline for the delivery of a full-size clay model and immediately clashed with his superiors over what kind of car it should be.

  “They said they wanted a car that a banker could drive up to his bank and get out and people wouldn’t point and say ‘Look at that young hot-rodder,’” Hershey told Alexandra Earl years later. “They wanted a car that had ‘dignity’ but would still be a ‘sports-type’ car.” They didn’t want to call it a sports car, however, so they invented a new term for it, a “personal luxury car.”

  As Hershey and his team worked feverishly on the styling and mechanics of what was being referred to internally as the “Sportsman” or “Sportsliner,” Ford division general manager Lewis Crusoe launched an intramural contest to come up with a better name, offering a prize that pointed up the absence of women in the ranks—a $250 Brooks Brothers suit. That was enough to garner some five thousand submissions, ranging from Runabout, El Tigre, Coronado, and Detroiter to Hep Cat and even Beaver. Crusoe himself suggested Savile because he purchased his suits at expensive men’s stores on London’s famed Savile Row.

  The prize went to a young Ford stylist named Alden Giberson, who submitted the name of a powerful creature from Native American myth. “‘Thunderbird’ was the best damn name,” said Hershey. “It was as American as you can get.” In addition to honoring the country’s original occupants, it practically dictated an ad line for a sports car. “‘Sounds like thunder; flies like a bird,’” Hershey enthused forty years later. “You just couldn’t beat it. Gen
eral Motors wishes they had thought of that name. What is a ‘Corvette’? A small navy mine sweeper?”

  The first Corvettes started coming off a temporary production line in Flint on June 30, 1953. They were basically handmade, and due to the late start and some quality issues with the fiberglass body sections, which were molded by a company in Ohio, only 300 were manufactured that year, all of them white with red leather seats.

  Automotive writers praised the Corvette’s styling and performance, noting its top-end speed of 110 miles per hour and acceleration rate of zero-to-sixty in eleven seconds, which was considered fairly quick in those days. Road & Track may have paid it the ultimate compliment: “The Corvette corners like a genuine sports car.”

  When it came to sales, however, the Corvette sputtered at the starting line. In a misbegotten attempt to create an exclusive image for the car, Chevrolet division managers decided to limit its availability during the first production run to VIP customers only, which included GM executives, business leaders, politicians, and celebrities such as John Wayne, who was allotted one apparently to make up for his disappointment over not being able to buy a Cadillac Le Mans. As a result, of the more than 1 million people who saw the Corvette at the Motorama shows, only 180 were able to purchase one by the end of the year. In January 1954, Chevrolet switched production to a St. Louis plant and began turning 50 cars a day; however, it quickly had to cut back due to a lack of demand. As Motor Trend noted, “The long gap between initial publicity and availability has cooled the desires of many buyers.”

  It was more than the wait that discouraged customers. Harley had conceived and designed the Corvette with young people in mind. He’d seen his sons’ college friends driving racy, inexpensive foreign sports cars for lack of a domestic alternative. He remembered being their age and winning a road race in his father’s New Jersey–made Mercer Raceabout. He thought America should be making a rambunctious, rebellious car like that again. There was a market for it. So it seemed oddly discordant when Chevrolet chose to introduce the Corvette at the Motorama shows with a short promotional film that featured a well-dressed, obviously well-to-do couple in their mid- to late thirties—“Mr. and Mrs. America,” according to the narration—cruising along manicured boulevards past stately mansions in what appeared to be Grosse Pointe.

  When the Corvette hit the showrooms, it turned out that Mr. and Mrs. America cared more about outside door handles and roll-up windows than sports car authenticity, and the young people for whom the car was intended couldn’t afford its $3,000 to $4,000 price tag. As a result, Chevrolet struggled to sell a total of 700 Corvettes in its first two model years, sparking talk inside the company about discontinuing the car.

  The Ford Thunderbird made its debut as a show car at the Detroit Auto Show in January 1954 and went on sale to the public the following December, making it a 1955 model. Like the Corvette, it was low and light, with a rounded horizontal grille and minimal external trim. “I didn’t want to have a lot [of] gewgaws on it,” said Frank Hershey. “It was designed to be simple but elegant; the T-Bird was a dignified sports car.” Even so, he couldn’t help copping one of Harley’s least dignified trademarks, a set of chrome “Dagmars” affixed to the front and rear bumpers, the latter serving as portholes for the twin exhaust pipes.

  In contrast to the Corvette’s softly rounded shape, the T-Bird was sleek, crisp, and sharply creased, with a straight through-line from the front fenders to the back. Its roll-up windows and detachable fiberglass hardtop sealed the rain out of the cockpit (the early Corvettes’ snap-on side curtains leaked like crazy). And driving enthusiasts vastly preferred its new 292-cubic-inch V-8 and optional three-speed manual transmission to the Corvette’s tired six-cylinder engine and two-speed “Powerglide” automatic.

  Hershey and his team gilded the power plant with chrome manifold covers engraved with an ancient Thunderbird insignia and topped it off with a formidable-looking four-barrel carburetor and chrome air filter that sat so tall in the engine compartment they had to design the hood with a center air scoop to accommodate them. He was certain they had created a real Corvette killer the day Henry Ford II called him to say he was sending over a guest who wanted to tour the styling department and check out the new car he’d been hearing about. The guest turned out to be actor Tyrone Power. “He went crazy about the Thunderbird,” Hershey recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to buy one in reserve in case I wreck the first one.’”

  Ford planned a production run of 15,000 T-Birds for 1955, but after taking more than 3,000 orders during the car’s first ten days on the market, the company upped its projection and wound up producing more than 16,000 for the year.

  As one automotive writer put it, Frank Hershey’s T-Bird “walked a finely drawn line between sportiness and class, managing to bridge the tastes of a wide spectrum of buyers of different ages, income levels, and social strata. In looks, price, and positioning, the Thunderbird was an inherently desirable car, which also made it a fine showroom traffic-builder.”

  Apparently, that wasn’t enough for Ford’s top executives. Barely a month after the T-Birds first appeared in showrooms, Hershey began hearing rumors that the higher-ups were talking about killing the car because they didn’t think it would ever be profitable enough to justify the investment. A two-seater wouldn’t sell to single-car families, they said. Henry Ford II complained that his golf clubs wouldn’t fit in the trunk. The company would be better off making a bigger car and just calling it a Thunderbird.

  Hershey was upset but not surprised. “The company was in such a mess at the time,” he said. “It was amazing they could build a car at all.”

  His antipathy toward management was partly a character trait and mostly directed at the Whiz Kid executive team that Henry II had hired after the war to bring a system of financial controls to the company. They definitely had done that, but from his perspective they were glorified bean counters without a molecule of gasoline in their bloodstreams. He particularly disliked Robert McNamara, the Ford division controller who was rumored to be on track to become general manager. Hershey said, “They were grooming Mac, who didn’t know anything about automobiles, and didn’t like automobiles, and had no right to be in the automobile business. But he thought he did.”

  Hershey recalled an encounter with McNamara late one night when he was working on a new dashboard instrumentation design. “From now on there is no reason to keep designing new instrument boards all the time,” McNamara told him. “We’re going to make one board and use it in every car.”

  “If you want to stop people from buying Ford cars, then just do that,” Hershey replied impertinently as he proceeded to lecture the ranking executive. “Don’t you know there is a little boy in every man, Mac, and they like to think they are in command of the car? And do you know what makes them think they are in command of that car? All those instruments on the board. What do you see when you are driving the car? Ninety-nine percent of the time you are sitting behind that instrument board and it wants to be pleasant and informative and make you feel like you are in control. Mac, I don’t think you’ve ever been a kid.”

  In response, McNamara “glared at me and got up and walked out,” Hershey said. “I knew eventually we were going to lock horns.”

  Shortly thereafter, Ford division general manager Lewis Crusoe ordered the Thunderbird design team to start working on a bigger, four-seat version for the 1958 model year. It was one of the last directives Crusoe issued before McNamara took over as general manager. One of the first things McNamara did was discontinue Hershey’s employment. “The Thunderbird got me fired,” he said.

  Instead of killing the Corvette, the Thunderbird helped save it by proving to GM that the sports car market was larger than anyone had thought. Ford sold 53,000 of the two-seater “Little Birds” between its introduction and the end of 1957, and Corvette sales increased in each of those years. Even after Ford withdrew from the sports car race with the introduction of the four-seater “Square Bird,” in 1
958, Chevrolet continued to lose money on the Corvette for another two years.

  The Corvette survived when the T-Bird didn’t because it was Harley’s baby, the product of his passion. And no one—not Harlow Curtice and not Alfred Sloan—was going to kill it as long as he was alive.

  15

  The Hot One

  The U.S. economy was firing on all cylinders in 1955, with the gross national product growing at a rate of 7.1 percent, a median family income that had more than doubled—to $5,100—since the war, a rapidly expanding middle class, a booming housing market, and a federal budget headed toward surplus territory.

  It was a moment in the nation’s history that would be conjured again and again in coming decades by politicians and writers waxing nostalgic about the days when America was great. “We were young and proud,” Detroit’s own Bob Seger would sing thirty years later in the voice of an aging assembly line worker. “Back in ’55, we were makin’ Thunderbirds.”

  Mostly, they were making Chevrolets. GM’s low-priced line had been the number one seller since Ford’s surprise first-place finish in 1949. But the margin of victory had dwindled each year until 1954, when the race ended in a virtual dead heat with both companies claiming victory by a few thousand units. That set the stage for a grudge match in 1955, when Ford introduced a flashy new series called the Fairlane, after Henry Ford’s famed Fair Lane estate in Dearborn.

  The Fairlane looked like something Harley Earl’s Styling staff might have designed, what with its copycat chrome Dagmars and wraparound windshield, as well as a checkmark-shaped chrome strip running from headlight to taillight along each side, neatly dividing the body into sections tailor-made for two-tone paint combinations. The top-of-the-line Crown Victoria Skyliner flaunted a chrome molding that ran up the B-pillars and across the roof, the front half of which was made of smoked acrylic glass that provided the driver with a view of the sky. Auto writers described the molding variously as a “basket handle” or a “tiara,” and one of them noted that the acrylic roof section looked impressive but “tended to bake the passengers like ants under a magnifying glass.”