Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  There had never been anything particularly flashy about the Chevrolet. Its trademark emblem looked like a bow tie, after all, and the company had promoted it for years as a sensible, affordable family car with ads and commercials steeped in the milky goodness of Mom, apple pie, and Sunday afternoon drives in the country. “See the USA in your Chevrolet. . . . America’s the greatest land of all,” Dinah Shore belted out at the open and close of her weekly Chevrolet-produced network TV show. Despite the Styling staff’s best efforts, under the aegis of the division’s conservative managers the 1952–1954 Chevrolets were so unexciting that one critic joked they looked as if they were “designed by Herbert Hoover’s haberdasher.” Chevrolet’s chief engineer, Ed Cole, called them “grandmother cars.”

  The advent of the Corvette shook things up at Chevrolet. As Harley’s Chevrolet studio chief, Clare MacKichan was able to purchase one of the first batch of two hundred at cost. “I had number one hundred and ten, I think. And I’ll never forget the day I went down to pick up my car at the Chevrolet dealer on Jefferson Avenue, and there was a car that was not a Chevrolet; it was something from another world as far as the [dealership employees] were concerned. And it was really a sensation when I drove it home. I think every kid from ten miles around came to look at it, to ride in it, and this happened all over the country.”

  MacKichan hoped to create that same youthful excitement with a completely restyled Chevrolet for 1955. Working with Harley and Ed Cole, who had collaborated closely in the development of the Corvette, MacKichan and his Styling team executed what Harley called a “cross-up,” which meant an abrupt change in direction from where everyone else was heading. They veered away from Harley’s well-known preference for soft, rounded shapes and sculpted a car that was more sharp corners than smooth curves, with a flat, squared-off hood and rear deck set nearly flush with the front and back fenders, forming a plateau. They called it the “shoe-box” body.

  “One of the things we wanted was a simplicity of design and a smoothness,” said MacKichan. “At the time there was a tendency to over-chrome the car, and we tried not to do that.” That meant no bulbous chrome bumper guards or Dagmars and only a minimal, tasteful application of side trim. Chevrolet was the only GM line that had not yet sprouted some form of tail fins, and MacKichan kept it that way. Harley dictated the “face” of the car. “He had been to Europe shortly before that so he had the idea that we wanted a small Ferrari-style front end with egg crate within a small grille.”

  Ed Cole and his engineering team brought a revolutionary new engine to the mix. The 265-cubic-inch “small block” V-8—the first Chevrolet V-8 since 1917—was smaller, 41 pounds lighter, and more powerful than anything Ford had to offer, making it an instant favorite among hot rodders and a perfect addition to Chevrolet’s underpowered Corvette, which was being left in the dust by the V-8-equipped Thunderbird.

  When all was said and done, the ’55 Chevy “was a totally new car,” MacKichan said. “There wasn’t one nut or bolt carried over from the ’54. We knew it was going to be a success; we were sure of it.”

  GM president Harlow Curtice recognized early they had a potential game changer on their hands, especially with the sport coupe hardtop and convertible versions, which the Styling staff regarded as their crowning achievement for the 1955 model year. When Curtice learned GM was set to manufacture its 50 millionth car in the fall of 1954, he made sure it was a Bel Air sport coupe with every option, including the new “Turbo Fire” V-8, “Powerglide” automatic transmission, air-conditioning, power brakes, power steering, power seats, and a signal-seeking radio. He arranged with Harley to have the 50 millionth car finished in a glittering “anniversary gold” inside and out and underneath, so even the chassis glinted. The seats were covered in gold vinyl and a fabric woven through with gold metallic thread.

  The two inveterate showmen then turned the assembly process into a public event, with the press invited to record the moment—9:50 a.m. on November 23, 1954—when “GM’s 50-millionth body met its 50-millionth chassis” and line workers added on more than seven hundred parts plated in 24-carat gold, including bumpers and wheel covers. The completed car was rolled to a specially built platform as a band played “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” and Curtice boasted to the gathering that 50 million cars represented “more than any other country or combination of countries has ever produced.”

  With that, Harley had finally made good on his boast to Lawrence Fisher at that Hollywood cocktail party thirty years before: he’d designed a Chevrolet that looked like a Cadillac, and a solid gold one to boot.

  GM subsequently celebrated the 50 million landmark with all-day open houses at 125 factories and facilities, and the commemorative golden Bel Air hardtop became part of the 1955 Motorama road show, which drew more than 2 million attendees.

  The ’55 Bel Air arrived in dealer showrooms priced at just under $2,200 fully loaded, available in twenty-three different two-tone paint combinations and backed by a national ad campaign heralding it as the “Hot One.” Said Motor Trend, “We find it hard to believe it’s a descendant of previous Chevrolets.”

  “That car probably had more impact on the Chevrolet Division than any one it’s ever done since,” said Dave Holls, who was one of the youngest designers in the Styling Section at the time. “Because [prior to that] no self-respecting young man would be caught dead in a Chevrolet; it was just everything that was dull and dumb. And then, all of a sudden, here comes that neat little car with a Ferrari grille and overhead valve engine and a power pack you could buy for $40. And it looked good and it went like a scalded weasel, and boy, all of a sudden Chevy was the ‘in’ thing. If ever there was a time when the kids went 360 degrees from Fords to Chevys, it was 1955.”

  The “Hot One” had barely rolled onto the streets when a new kind of music aimed specifically at teenagers began blaring from car radios all across the country. “As I was motorvatin’ over the hill, I saw Maybellene in a Coupe de Ville,” sang twenty-nine-year-old Chuck Berry, who’d written the song while earning $94 a week as a GM assembly line worker in Chicago. His lyrics told of a working-class guy pursuing a cheating girlfriend who was fleeing in a car that was fancier than his, but not faster. “Cadillac a-rollin’ on an open road, nuthin’ will outrun my V-8 Ford.”

  “Maybellene” was the first popular song to capture the zeitgeist of an exuberant youth culture that was seizing on fast cars and rock ’n’ roll as a means of breaking from the strictures of the past and escaping the grim memories of Depression and war that had enveloped the previous generation. Suddenly the American songbook was injected with references to tailpipes, four-barreled carburetors, and drive-in romance. Berry even offered a sly commentary on the car-crazy consumerism and easy credit terms of the day in his follow-up hit “No Money Down,” which placed his protagonist at a Cadillac dealership trying to trade in “that broken-down, raggedy Ford.”

  Well, Mister, I want a yellow convertible four-door de Ville

  With a continental spare and a wide chrome wheel. . . .

  I want air condition, I want automatic heat.

  And I want a full Murphy bed in my back seat.

  In the dozens of teen-oriented car songs that followed there would be an occasional appearance by a “hot rod Lincoln” or a “little Nash Rambler,” but the road was ruled by Chevys, Fords, and Cadillacs, and nothing could outrun General Motors.

  Chevrolet outsold Ford by more than 250,000 cars in 1955. In naming Harlow Curtice its Man of the Year, Time noted that the United States had “rolled through [the year] in two-toned splendor to an all-time crest of prosperity,” much of which “was directly attributable to the manufacture and sale of that quintessential American product, the automobile.”

  As president of the first corporation in history to earn net profits of more than $1 billion in a year, Curtice had “assumed the responsibility of leadership for American business,” the magazine said, quoting him as declaring, “General Motors must always lead.”r />
  GM didn’t just lead; it dominated. Its five auto divisions produced 50.8 percent of the record 7.9 million cars sold in America in 1955. Its output was more than double that of Ford, more than triple that of Chrysler, and more than ten times that of the smaller independent companies. Indeed, GM sold more than twice as many Chevy Bel Airs as all the Studebakers, Packards, Hudsons, and Nash Ramblers combined.

  Together, GM, Ford, and Chrysler—the so-called Big Three—controlled 94 percent of the U.S. car market, an imbalance that made it nearly impossible for smaller companies to compete, forcing them to combine operations to survive, until only two remained of the dozens that existed prior to the Depression: Studebaker-Packard, an uncomfortable merger of the once proud firms, and American Motors Corporation, a similarly coerced combination of Hudson Motors and Nash. George Romney, now the president of American Motors, would spend the rest of the decade in fourth place railing against the anticompetitive practices of the big companies and pushing for a government breakup of GM. Alfred Sloan worried about the potential regulatory consequences of GM exceeding a 50 percent market share, but Harlow Curtice did not share his concern, prompting the joke inside the company—“The boss says we’re still losing five out of ten sales.”

  Numbers didn’t tell the whole story of GM’s dominance, however. Thanks to Harley, the company had gained an inordinate measure of influence over the look of virtually all makes and models of American automobiles. By the mid-1950s, every design department in the industry had adopted his system, his techniques, and even his theories. Every studio was filled with—if not directed by—men he had trained. Former GM designer Eugene Bordinat was now the number two man at Ford styling. Virgil Exner, formerly chief of the Pontiac studio, had just been made director of styling at Chrysler. Elwood Anderson, formerly chief of the Chevrolet studio, was director of styling at American Motors. Richard Teague held the same position at Packard. “I guess you could say that everybody in the automobile design business in those days came from under [Harley’s] tutelage,” said Clare MacKichan. “I’m trying to think of somebody that didn’t, and I don’t know of anybody.”

  Harley’s reputation and GM’s success attracted the best young designers coming out of the best art and industrial-design schools. “I couldn’t believe I was going to General Motors,” said Norman James, who arrived fresh from Pratt Institute in 1954. “GM had an aura of the Yankees.”

  “Chevrolet sold more cars than anyone else in the world, so they were doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people,” said Robert Cumberford, a product of the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles. “It seemed like the right place to be.”

  “There was a very strong esprit there,” said Glen Wintershied, another graduate of the Art Center School. “The feeling was, ‘We’re the best; we work for the best.’ Harley Earl was the father of American styling.”

  Most of them had not been born when Harley designed the first LaSalle with a team of three back in 1926. Now they were part of a staff that numbered nearly nine hundred and was spread through seventeen design studios and a dozen technical shops and departments, with responsibilities that included mounting the annual Motorama shows and contributing to the design and decor of the new Technical Center, which was nearing its move-in date.

  With so much to oversee, Harley had brought Bill Mitchell back from running his outside design firm and named him director of styling with the promise that he would be promoted to vice president when Harley retired in three years. Mitchell and the studio design chiefs—MacKichan, Ned Nickles (Buick), Art Ross (Oldsmobile), Paul Gillan (Pontiac), and Ed Glowackie (Cadillac)—schooled the younger designers in how to avoid getting fired. Rule Number One, they counseled, was never disagree with the boss, a point they sometimes illustrated with an anecdote about the time Harley supposedly had all the designers seated in a circle around a car as he expounded on how the heavy bumpers made it look lower. “And you boys all agree, don’t you?” he said. None of them did, but no one said so, which proved smart. “And if anyone doesn’t [agree],” he continued, “then he should stand up so we can take a look at the sonofabitch.”

  Another oft-cited example of Harley’s peculiar style of consensus building had him popping into one of the design studios on a Saturday and launching into a caustic critique of the design operations at Ford, where George Walker had just been named vice president of styling, a title that had previously belonged only to Harley. “Why, all they have over there at Ford is a bunch of yes men,” he said, turning to Bill Mitchell and adding, without a trace of irony, “Isn’t that right, Bill?” To which Mitchell responded correctly, “Yes, it is, Mr. Earl.”

  The punishment for breaking Rule Number One was usually swift, as a young Chevrolet designer named Duane “Sparky” Bohnstedt learned when he pushed back on something the boss said during a visit to the studio. “I never want to see that guy’s face again,” Harley told Howard O’Leary as he left. The kindly O’Leary had mitigated many such spontaneous terminations over the years, often saving the employee’s job by doing nothing and giving them a few days off while Harley’s temper cooled. This time he took the boss at his literal word and instead of firing Sparky, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, he stashed him in a studio in a building across the street where Harley wouldn’t see him. The ploy worked for several months, until Harley happened to be passing through the other building and came face-to-face with Sparky and thereupon fired him for not being fired in the first place.

  Harley’s Rule Number Two was, as everyone quickly learned, there’s no such thing as too much chrome. “He thought the more chrome a car had, the more expensive it looked,” said designer Chuck Jordan.

  “He called it ‘entertainment,’” said designer Bernie Smith. “The need for entertainment was high on his priorities in car design. He’d say, ‘It feels like you need something of interest over here. The customer needs some entertainment. It looks too plain; you have to get something going on.’ Chrome was a great entertainment device to draw attention to an area.”

  Despite the commercial and critical success of the ’55 Chevy, Harley pushed for more chrome during the subsequent face-lifts, insisting on heavier bumpers and more side trim on the ’56 and ’57 models, replacing the understated Ferrari-style grille with wider, thicker grilles that looked “more Cadillac.” He introduced tail fins the first year, heightened them the next, and festooned the rear quarter panels with a fantail-shaped expanse of chrome and brushed aluminum, until the crisp clean lines of the ’55 were cluttered with “entertainment.”

  “The ’55 Chevy was a real designer’s car; we all loved it,” Smith lamented. “As designers, we didn’t like the ’57,” said Chuck Jordan.

  Perhaps no one disliked Harley’s devotion to chrome more than Bill Porter, who had joined the staff armed with an undergraduate degree in fine art and painting, a master’s in industrial design, and a firm belief that GM Styling had become “the center of evil, vulgar and overstated design.”

  In Porter’s opinion, the problem had begun with Harley’s Le Sabre. “It was as if he took a collection of airplane parts, put them in a box, poured in some glue and shook it up,” he said. “I thought his application of aircraft imagery to automobile design was wasteful and inappropriate. Cars are not airplanes. But Le Sabre took everybody by storm, and once you did that you had a whole new design vocabulary. It was a vulgar vocabulary and it was coming from Harley Earl. For some reason or other, he had this dichotomy in his personality. He’d hire top people and at the same time have them doing the most vulgar and awful bombs-and-fins in the production studio. I felt I had to do something about it. I was idealistic. There were other guys who felt the same way.”

  None of the young Turks expressed those feelings to Harley, however, not even Bill Mitchell, who admitted years later, “We were putting on chrome with a trowel in the 1950s.” They said nothing at the time because they all knew what happened to people who broke Rule Number One. “[Harley] was a terrifying
figure,” said Porter. And besides, they knew it was unlikely that anything they said would have persuaded him to change what he was doing. He didn’t give a damn what a bunch of junior designers thought. GM was leading and all the other companies were following. The marketplace was telling him that chrome and bright colors were what midcentury Americans were looking for in their automobiles and, by god, he was going to keep giving it to them.

  So he continued to order up more decorative entertainment, and because he did, Ford, Chrysler, Studebaker-Packard, and American Motors did, too, until even the little Nash Rambler sported a heavy chrome grille as garish and awkward-looking as a teenager’s new set of braces.

  The creative fissure that had opened between Harley and his younger designers was an underlying theme of an article that appeared in the Atlantic in April 1955. Titled “Jukebox on Wheels” and written in the first person by longtime Studebaker styling consultant Raymond Loewy, it was an acid-tongued takedown of the current state of American automobile styling. Loewy didn’t mention Harley or GM by name, but he didn’t need to.

  “Every really creative and imaginative stylist and many engineers I know seem to be frustrated in their work today,” he wrote. “Designers today are briefed to ‘give the public what it wants,’ and ‘what the public wants’ is being translated into the flashy, the gadgety, the spectacular.”