Noting that the automobile “has become so potent a force that it is very nearly the symbol of American thought and morals to people who don’t know us,” Loewy argued that the major companies and their stylist minions were destroying America’s hard-won image around the world. “Nothing about the appearance of the 1955 automobiles offsets the impression that Americans must be wasteful, swaggering, insensitive people. Automotive borax offers gratuitous evidence to people everywhere that much of what they suspect about us may be true. Our values are off beat, our ostentation acute, if the 1955 automobile is any reflection of ourselves and our taste.”
The article descended into a series of rhetorical questions through which Loewy laundered his opinion: “Is it responsible to camouflage one of America’s most remarkable machines as a piece of gaudy merchandise? . . . Is it possible that they don’t know the merchandise is gaudy? . . . Aren’t manufacturers doing disservice to this country if they mass-present the automobile in such misleading vulgarity? . . . Aren’t they depressing the level of American taste by saturating the market with bad taste? . . . Is it necessary? . . . Are we proud of them? . . . What do you think?”
While not disagreeing with Loewy about the trend in styling, Harley’s young designers thought the article read like a howl of frustration from a man whose work, though often critically acclaimed, had never moved the American public the way the ’55 Chevy had. After all, those jukeboxes weren’t playing any hit songs about Studebakers.
16
Glory Days
The General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, was officially completed on September 19, 1955, nearly eleven years after Alfred Sloan, Charles Kettering, and Harley Earl met in Sloan’s office to discuss the selection of an architect.
With Kettering now retired, Sloan soon to follow, and Eliel Saarinen, the original architect, five years deceased, Harley was in a sense the last man standing of the group that had posed for photographers at the ceremonial groundbreaking. He had successfully pushed for Saarinen’s son and business partner, Eero, to be awarded the contract to relaunch the project after Eliel retired due to ill health in 1948. The younger Saarinen had expanded and improved on his father’s plan and brought the job in at an estimated cost of $125 million, to the satisfaction of everyone except, of course, Boss Ket.
For months the classified advertising sections of the Detroit newspapers had been filled with notices for hundreds of job openings at the Tech Center—for stenographers, custom automobile painters, metal experimental body builders, body draftsmen, senior layout and engineering artists. In anticipation of more than four thousand new workers who were expected to be coming into their community, Warren residents recently had approved a reorganization of their municipality into a full-fledged city.
For Styling staffers accustomed to working in the tight corners of the Argonaut Building in downtown Detroit, arriving for the first time at the Tech Center felt a bit like landing on another planet. “We were awestruck,” said Bernie Smith. “The place went on forever.” The complex was vast, encompassing eleven miles of roads, 85 acres of parking, and 155 acres of landscaped lawn with shaded pedestrian walkways, all bounded by a broad perimeter of thirteen thousand newly planted trees that company literature promised would grow into “a virtual forest, a green belt that will protect it from encroachment of highways or buildings.”
In keeping with Kettering’s original idea for a “campus of thought,” Eero Saarinen grouped the offices, laboratories, and technical shops for the Styling, research, engineering, and manufacturing staffs in separate clusters along three sides of the central lake, like individual schools within a university, each with its own administration building. According to the architect, the center was “designed at automobile scale and the changing vistas were conceived to be seen as one drove around the campus.”
The school of Styling was hard to miss. The reflective aluminum dome of the auditorium was the first thing people saw as they came through the main gate on Mound Road. The Styling administration building had a lemon-yellow-glazed brick end wall and Bird in Flight, a twenty-foot bronze abstract by French sculptor Antoine Pevsner, positioned at the entrance. In the lobby, a two-level suspended stairway of white terrazzo was set against a black-glazed brick wall, making it appear to float in the air as it rose from a reflecting pond. “It was just startling to me,” said Bernie Smith. “I didn’t have words to describe it. I felt like I had died and gone to designer heaven.”
Architectural design critics and scholars were effusive. “A dazzling demonstration of what a glamorous American modernism could be,” one of them wrote after a visit to the main research building, where suspended slabs of emerald-pearl Norwegian granite formed a grand spiral stairway in the center of the lobby:
Shimmering reflections and sensuous textures contributed to the theatrical scene, creating the unlikely but undeniable effect of ennobling the General Motors researchers as they descended to greet their waiting visitors or ascended to their studios. The experience was like a performance, and the spaces seemed to have more in common with the grand foyers of European palaces or opulent opera houses than they did with the mundane waiting rooms of a midwestern automobile manufacturer.
Here, as in the nearby Styling dome, where a perfectly proportioned circular disk of modulated light . . . floated above the viewing area, transforming the cars into movie-stars or objects of veneration in a sacred space, the architects seemed to take their cue from Hollywood, with its aura not only of visual luxury but also of glamour and make-believe.
Clearly, Saarinen had created his midcentury modern masterpiece with Harley looking over his shoulder and talking in his ear. In fact, as staffers explored their new surroundings, they wondered if the entire complex had been erected as an unstated monument to Styling. That would explain Harley’s office. The 1,225-square-foot space was located directly above the lobby at the northwest corner of the administration building, with glass outer walls on two sides providing a commanding view of the Styling dome, lake, and fountains—indeed, of the entire complex. The original plan was for the Styling staff to create the interior, but Saarinen asked to do it as his final design at the center, and Harley agreed.
The result was an executive office like no other in the world, composed of soft curves rather than straight lines and right angles. The interior walls were covered by a serpentine spline of cherrywood slats that resembled the front of an old-fashioned rolltop desk, except vertical, and undulated the length of the room, enveloping a cantilevered, curvilinear cherrywood desk and several seating areas, creating the impression that the room was itself a sculpture, with the furniture, walls, and glass flowing together as if to form the passenger compartment of a car. From the driver’s seat, Harley could look out the panoramic windshield and with the touch of a finger control the lights, curtains, music, television, temperature, and telephone.
“No officer of the corporation before, at that time or since has ever sat behind a more remarkable desk or overlooked so grand an empire,” said interior studio chief George Moon. “It was the throne room for the man who was at that time the king of this industry.”
The Harley Earl Suite, as it was called, included a bathroom with a shower and a large closet in which Harley kept a full wardrobe—dozens of suits, shirts, ties, pairs of socks and shoes, in a full range of colors—because he liked to freshen up and change clothes at midday in preparation for his afternoon meetings and visits to the design studios.
When he wasn’t traveling, he usually ate lunch in his private dining room on the third floor of the Styling building, adjacent to a cafeteria for the general staff and an executive dining area for the studio chiefs and department heads. Saarinen’s original decor in Harley’s private dining room was of a piece with that of the executive room—light, monochromatic, and elegantly modern, with rare gray-green English harewood wall panels and natural beige Berber wool carpeting. Shortly after the move-in, however, Harley asked George Moon and his interior department
to come up with something less low-key.
They spent eight weeks producing “an infinitely detailed model,” Moon recalled. “There was nothing to be spared, to be left to the imagination; nothing was too good for this model. We created dishes, flatware, lighting—all in correct scale.” They unveiled it to the boss with typical Styling flair, inviting him into a darkened room where the model sat on a revolving turntable set at his eye level and then slowly dialing up the model lights.
“Fellas, that’s great,” he said, chuckling at the drama of their presentation. “I want it built just like that, no changes. If anyone wants to change one item, you send them to me.” Moon took that to mean he’d been given “an unbudgeted, Priority One” assignment. “I’d dare say we were to spend more on that four hundred square foot space than any space, anywhere . . . within General Motors.”
It would become known as the Blue Room for the deep-blue silk wall covering and the matching upholstery of dining chairs created by the famed Danish designer Finn Juhl. Moon and his team developed a six-sided, solid teak dining table that measured 10 feet across, with two settings per side, including a “host seat” from which Harley could electronically summon the waitstaff, control the music, lights, and curtains, and rotate the large lazy Susan in the center of the table. Reflector lights concealed in a centerpiece of green plants illuminated a dropped, gently arched ceiling of brushed aluminum that created the feeling of an umbrella over the table and gave the room a “sort of night club expectancy and intimacy,” said a writer from Interiors magazine. “It was a fantasy world befitting the man at the center of General Motors’ industrial Versailles,” said another writer.
As a final touch, Harley hung blue-tinted portraits of Sloan, Kettering, and Harlow Curtice on the fabric wall. They were perhaps the only GM executives to whom he felt truly subordinate. But since they didn’t have offices in the Tech Center, he was—literally and figuratively—the biggest man on the thought campus, and as the complex quickly became GM’s primary corporate showcase, a parade of notable personages beat a path to his glass door, hoping for a private tour of the auditorium and studios and maybe even an intimate lunch in the Blue Room. “No room in all of the General Motors Technical Center saw more visitors,” said Moon.
Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the first, followed by Gary Cooper and his wife, Spencer Tracy, Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Stewart, Walt Disney, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and many more. For a lucky few, the visit included the presentation of a personalized car. Air Force general Curtis LeMay, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command and a friend of Harley’s from his prewar days as the commander of Selfridge Field, was given a blue Cadillac convertible with white leather seats and four chrome general’s stars on each door. Harley’s friends the Duke and Duchess of Windsor received a new Cadillac limousine every year, either a deep wine or burgundy color, with the House of Windsor crest embroidered on the backs of its beige wool broadcloth seats and its roof raised six inches to accommodate British royal headwear. Dale Robertson, the star of the Buick-sponsored TV series Tales of Wells Fargo, was given a white Roadmaster convertible outfitted with hand-tooled natural saddle leather seats, pony-skin floor covering, a pair of .30 caliber carbine rifles mounted on the center console, and a matching set of ivory-handled Colt .44 revolvers fastened to the doors. (Robertson sold the car after the series was canceled in 1962.)
Such expensive perquisites were not restricted to visiting dignitaries and celebrities. When Chevrolet studio chief Clare MacKichan was recovering from an illness in late 1955, Harley arranged a surprise makeover on his Corvette as a get-well gift. MacKichan returned to find the car repainted metallic blue, “with white racing stripes which ran over the hardtop and came down the back,” matching metallic blue upholstery, a blue convertible top, and a set of expensive Dayton wire wheels. According to MacKichan, he blew the Corvette’s engine downshifting shortly thereafter, and Ed Cole, Chevy’s newly named general manager, told his chief engineer, “Why don’t you take Mac’s car and put that [new] engine in it? And while you’re at it, put in the new four-speed transmission, and the fuel injection, too.”
MacKichan and his fellow design chiefs operated in a bubble of privilege even off campus, where their distinctly decorated cars and generous expense accounts guaranteed them special attention wherever they went to blow off steam from the pressure that built up at work. They were the princes of Motor City, received as royalty at the Recess Club, the Rathskeller, and Topinka’s on the Boulevard, where Buick studio chief Ned Nickles held court nightly from his reserved corner table, picking up the tab for any senior Styling staffer who might stop by.
“It was like Mad Men,” eighty-eight-year-old Bernie Smith recalled in a recent interview. “The places were all dark and served good drinks. All the designers I knew back in those days were heavy drinkers or heavy smokers, or both. We’d go to a little cocktail lounge called Hintz’s down on Van Dyke Street and have a two-martini lunch. My boss Art Ross had two or three ladies on the side. He would go out to dinner around five and come back around eight or nine, three-fourths gone and all wound up with all these ideas driven by drink, and expect us to stick around when all we wanted to do was get out of there.”
Alcohol contributed to the early retirement of Howard O’Leary, and Bill Mitchell’s booze-fueled exploits were legendary. Among the most famous was the time he went missing from a party at George Moon’s house and was found the next morning stuck fifty feet up in a tree. The police and fire department were called to get him down.
Harley was a big believer in parties as morale boosters. He let each design studio throw its own annual celebration at the restaurant or hotel of its choice, and the studios competed to see who could spend the most money. He hosted a Christmas party in the Styling Auditorium for the broader staff, handing out big boxes of candy to every employee, with purses and perfume for the women. He threw a picnic in the summer, with softball games pitting the metalworkers against the wood shop and the designers against the sculptors. There was a rodeo one year, with steer bulldogging and a Wild West show starring Harley in an elaborate silk cowboy outfit. It was at these events that the staff saw his other side—softer, relaxed, playful. Staffers who interacted with him frequently were surprised that he recognized them out of context, even if he didn’t have their names down pat. “He always called me Ernie,” said Bernie Smith.
When the Tech Center formed an intramural softball league and began playing games in a vacant field across Mound Road, “Harley went out and hired some pro ballplayers to come and work at various places in the shops,” recalled designer Dick Ruzzin. “With them playing on our team, design won all the time. He did that with the bowling team, too; hired semipro or pro bowlers. He had a strong competitive spirit that was strategically organized. Whatever the task, he would lay his grid over it and boom!”
Prior to the opening of the Tech Center, the Styling staff consisted almost entirely of men. There were no female designers, clay modelers, or layout artists, only secretaries, stenographers, and “mail girls.” The situation was mirrored throughout corporate America at that time, and the auto industry was especially male dominated. So it came as a shock when Harley announced in the summer of 1955 that Styling had hired seven young women fresh out of Pratt Institute’s school of industrial design to work alongside the men as full-fledged GM designers. Equally shocking was the unprecedented publicity blitz that preceded their arrival. Dubbed the “Damsels of Design,” they were paraded before the press, photographed half to death, and encouraged to talk to reporters, something that no male designer had ever been allowed to do.
“The day we arrived, somebody told us, ‘We’re taking you up to see Harley Earl,’” recalled Ruth Glennie, who’d driven to Detroit directly from Pratt with her classmates Sue Vanderbilt and Jan Krebs. “We asked, ‘What should we say to him?’ and they replied, ‘You just say, ‘Yes, Mr. Earl.’” At their first meeting, Harley told them that a car “is like a house” and their job would be to think
about “what you can do there, everything you react with inside the car, how you can make it better, safer.”
“Yes, Mr. Earl,” they said, not fully understanding what he meant. A GM press release explained why they’d been hired, and it had nothing to do with gender parity in the workplace. “Not too many years ago, the woman’s influence on automobiles was limited to a stern voice from the back seat,” it began. “Today, besides sharing the driver’s seat with men, women cast the deciding vote in the purchase of seven out of ten cars.”
“We simply lucked out when Harley got it into his head to use us as a sales ploy,” Sandy Longyear chuckled. “He was sitting around thinking, ‘How can I get women to buy these cars?’”
Not that any of them complained, even though the “damsels” moniker and much of the news coverage made them cringe. “We were given a marvelous opportunity; you’d have to be stupid not to realize it,” said Glennie. “We were very well paid. Five thousand dollars a year was unbelievable at that time. It was three times what I could make as a draftsman, and the same as the men because Michigan law said you could not discriminate.” Longyear pointed out that they were actually “discriminated for, because we could eat in the executive dining room and men at our level could not.”
Five of the women were assigned to the auto design studios and two went to Frigidaire design. Harley placed Sue Vanderbilt in the Cadillac studio, and because she proved particularly poised he often chose her to greet famous visitors and show them around in his stead. Though she wasn’t related to the robber-baron family, he thought her name impressed. An article in the New York Mirror later described her as “slim, trim, with large brown eyes, reddish brown hair and the dimpled face of a little girl.” It didn’t mention that she first felt an affinity for industrial design while sitting at her father’s workbench in the family garage. “Pounding nails into a block of wood at about age six was the beginning of a special respect for tools and materials from wood to metal,” she recalled. When she went to sign up for a mechanical drawing course in college, she was told it wasn’t open to women. “Women don’t do that; they don’t take mechanical drawing,” an administrator said. To which Vanderbilt replied, “Then why is a woman teaching it?” She turned out to be the only female student in the class.
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