Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  Exner’s genius helped redefine Chrysler’s sclerotic divisions. The Forward Look Chrysler 300A, with its tautly styled and impossibly long hood concealing the largest engine produced by any Detroit manufacturer that year, was a great sales success. Two years later, its successor, 1957’s 300C, which boasted a yawning front grille and soaring fins, was hailed as an instant classic and sold even better. The Imperials, which looked a little like Exner’s old Studebakers – long, low and vaguely European, though more sculpted and chrome-laden than their transatlantic rivals – proved worthy adversaries for GM’s Cadillacs and Ford’s Lincolns. The 1959 Dodge Custom Royal, with its bullet-like rear lights and huge fins, rejuvenated the staid old Dodge marque. In a similar vein, Exner’s Plymouth Fury of 1956 adapted the chassis and body of the nondescript Belvedere hard-top saloon to create a car that could reach 124 mph. Plymouth, previously known only for sedate, ‘old lady’ cars, shoehorned a 5 litre engine under the Belvedere’s hood, improved the gearbox, reduced the doors from four to two, lowered the springs, widened the tyres and added police-type brake linings. The result was a very impressive car, developed at a fraction of the cost of GM’s Corvette. All Furys were initially sold only in off-white with gold trim, and their success and style rejuvenated the Plymouth marque. So successful was the experiment that the Fury name was still being used for Plymouths (though with decreasing relevance to the cars’ looks or performance) until the late 1970s.1

  In 1957 Exner cranked the Forward Look up a notch and introduced more rakish lines, taller fins, massively chromed front fenders and quadruple headlights under prominent chrome eyebrows. Now it was GM’s and Ford’s cars that looked lumpen and oldfashioned. Two years later, as we shall see in the next chapter, Exner’s cars were at their most expressive, rakish and influential. Shark-like tail fins were at their height, tail lights had never been more pronounced, headlamps were not only quadrupled but further accentuated with swooping chrome eyebrows, while grilles often stretched across the whole front end of the car. It seemed as if the party would never end.

  In retrospect, however, 1959 represented the high point of Chrysler’s stylistic exuberance. In 1956 Exner suffered a serious heart attack; the result was that the Chryslers for 1960 and 1961 – planned four or five years in advance – were toned-down and tepid. Exner returned to work in time to reshape the 1962 range, but his vision was derailed when Chrysler’s president, ‘Tex’ Colbert, panicked on hearing that GM’s cars for 1962 were to be significantly downsized – a Chinese whisper that turned out to be wholly wrong. Colbert demanded that Exner reduce the size and the cost of his new models late in the design process, while at the same time axeing the upmarket De Soto marque and imposing the undistinguished Valiant compact car on the revived Dodge division. Unsurprisingly, 1962’s cars, which Exner derisively termed ‘plucked chickens’, were universally hailed with a sigh of disappointment. Chrysler had lost its design edge over its Big Three competitors, and its sales dipped alarmingly.

  The corporation now needed a scapegoat, and Exner was it. Colbert had already gone, fired in 1961 in the midst of sales slumps, suppliers’ strikes and stockholder lawsuits.1 Now Chrysler, demonstrating a lack of business acumen that was to be a wearily familiar feature over the years to come, decided to fire Exner himself. Chrysler’s time in the sun was over; the firm descended once more into a slough of mediocrity from which it is only now just emerging.

  Exner devoted his remaining years to designing powerboats, while trying in vain to help revive the old luxury marques of Duesenberg, Stutz and Bugatti. His 1966 prototype Duesenberg was pre-ordered by celebrities like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, but when the principal backer pulled out, the project collapsed. At least Exner’s Stutz Blackhawk, bankrolled by New York investment banker James O’Donnell, did actually reach production in 1971. But while the Exner-designed steel body was made in Modena, Italy, by Carrozzeria Padana, under its skin the Blackhawk was really only a humble Pontiac – albeit a vastly expensive one, with options including such utilitarian features as mink carpeting, gold leaf, bird’s-eye maple and twenty-two coats of hand-rubbed lacquer. With its vast circular headlamps, upright grille and razor-edge belt-line, the Blackhawk was very much an acquired taste for the seriously rich. Elvis bagged the first one, and later bought four more, while subsequent Blackhawk owners included Wilson Pickett, Dean Martin, Elton John, Al Pacino and Paul McCartney. But its sticker price, which stood at over $43,000 by 1973, deterred most other buyers. By the time production of the car finally ground to a halt in 1987, fewer than six hundred Blackhawks had been sold. O’Donnell’s brave folly had cost him millions of dollars.

  …

  The Golden Age in America was not just about the Big Three. In January 1954 Nash merged with (or, more properly, absorbed) Hudson to form American Motors (AMC). AMC’s first president was the large and gregarious George W. Mason, Walter Chrysler’s former assistant who, despite his substantial girth, was fascinated by small cars. Mason had already inaugurated the small but stylish Nash-Healey, America’s first sports car since the war, and at the time of the merger was promoting Europeansized ‘economy cars’ (‘subcompacts’, as they would be known by the trade today), such as the Austin-made Metropolitan.1

  Mason died in October 1954, aged only sixty-three. In the ensuing years, however, AMC lived up to his reputation for brave innovation and astonishing prescience. A letter to AMC shareholders in 1959, the year of the Mini, claimed that the introduction of new compact and subcompact cars signalled ‘the end of big-car domination in the US’ – a prediction that did indeed come true, albeit a decade later. That same year, AMC announced that, as part of its research project into cars powered by alternative fuels, it would be building an electric car powered by a self-charging battery. While the Big Three concentrated on building and consolidating current market share, AMC wisely looked to the future. Unsurprisingly, when the oil crisis of the 1970s sent a seismic shock through the car industry, AMC was the first American car maker to respond with appropriate products, which had already been developed.

  The formation of AMC was not the only US auto merger of 1954. That year the venerable firm of Packard acquired the equally renowned marque of Studebaker. Packard had been founded in 1900 as a manufacturer of upmarket luxury cars, and by 1929 Packards were outselling Cadillacs by three to one. Yet the firm never recovered from the Great Depression, during which time its share of the luxury car market fell from 10 per cent to 2 per cent. And after the war Packard squandered its premium heritage, and its savings, by completely failing to anticipate the market: instead, it tried to sell cheap cars, a market with which neither its engineers nor its dealers (nor, as it turned out, its customers) were familiar; it persisted with restyled 1942 models long after their sell-by date; and it tried, but failed, to break into the lucrative taxicab market, over which the Big Three had a stranglehold. By 1954 Packard had irretrievably diluted its pre-war image as a luxury car maker and found itself losing market share, profile and reputation.

  Studebaker, too, had almost gone under during the Depression. The company’s charismatic president, Albert R. Erskine, had assumed the recession would be brief. In 1928 he had boldly bought the bankrupt firm of Pierce-Arrow of Buffalo, best known for its luxury cars and filmstar customers; and even at the height of the Depression he not only bought the struggling White Motor Company but also continued to pay out huge dividends to Studebaker shareholders. In 1933 Erskine launched a new luxury Pierce-Arrow model, the streamlined Silver Arrow, priced at an astronomical $10,000 in the year of Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was hardly a surprise that only five Silver Arrows were sold – nor that the disaster would take Studebaker down with it. The firm duly went bust, and Erskine tragically committed suicide. Two years later the banks managed to refloat Studebaker’s corpse, but the company was never to be quite the same again.

  Studebaker did enjoy a brief respite in its fortunes during the Second World War, when it produced a range of successful military vehicles for the US
Army. By 1950 the firm had also managed to carve out a niche reputation as the manufacturer of radical, ‘European’ cars designed by the already legendary Raymond Loewy and the rising star of auto design, Virgil Exner.

  Loewy had been born in Paris in 1893 and had received the Croix de Guerre for his wartime service after 1914. In 1919 he emigrated to America, owning only the French officer’s uniform he stood up in, and became a window dresser for Macy’s department store in New York. In the late 1920s he moved into design; his first big break was the commission to redesign the Gestetner duplicating machine, and by 1930 he was successful enough to open offices in London and New York. Thereafter Loewy applied his talents to Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives, Greyhound buses, Coldspot fridges and cigarette packets (the classic Lucky Strike logo was his invention). In 1936 he also began work as a consultant for Studebaker, and designed the company’s new ‘lazy S’ logo, as well as its new car ranges.

  The much-fêted alliance between Packard and Studebaker of 1954, however, did not possess the strength of AMC. It was more a case of two castaways clinging to each other as the waters rose. Thus, as America’s Big Three entered into their Golden Age, Studebaker slithered down the slipway to oblivion. The Loewy/Exner Starlight may have been the incarnation of European sophistication, but it also helped Studebaker to a new sales low as the firm’s US market share dipped below 3 per cent. The new Studebaker-Packard corporation proudly rebuffed offers of merger from AMC, but in 1959 the historic Packard marque was terminated and Studebaker-Packard became simply Studebaker. The irascible Loewy, meanwhile, was brought back to design the new Avanti. But Loewy’s distinctly odd-looking, goggle-eyed car was not a success, and what little chance the model had was scuppered by serious production delays. Unveiled in 1962, the Avanti was not delivered to dealers until the following year; even when it was picked as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, the ultimate accolade for fast American cars, on the day of the race Studebaker could not even supply one working car and had to substitute a Lark family compact – a highly public mistake that made Studebaker the laughing stock of the motor industry. The 1964 Avantis were the last of the line, although for years cars continued to be made by enthusiasts from left-over spare parts.

  Following the demise of the Avanti, Studebaker relied on the ungainly, lumpish Lark compact for most of its income, and was predictably disappointed. In an effort to reverse plummeting sales, the firm also appointed a new president. Youthful, burly ex-marine Sherwood Egbert was determined to make Studebaker more competitive and called upon his friend, industrial designer Brooks Stevens, to revamp the Lark. Milwaukee-born Stevens had developed his drawing skills while stricken with polio as a child, and the home furnishings business he created in 1934 (the year in which he also became a founder member of the Industrial Designers Society of America) had already made him enough money to open his own automotive museum in Mequon, Wisconsin.

  Stevens attempted to apply Alfred Sloan’s concept of planned obsolescence – ‘instilling in the buyer’, as he put it, ‘the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary’ – to Studebaker’s corporate strategy. His 1962 Lark had a less stubby body, streamlined side panels, a modernized interior and a large, Mercedes-like grille, added to what was now a far more purposeful nose – all achieved on a minuscule budget. Stevens worked the same magic again in 1964, creating a squared-off, Fiat-like car which the company rebranded in a variety of guises (Challenger, Commander, Daytona and Cruiser), having sensibly dropped the Lark badge. But not even Stevens’s artifice could save the ailing company. In 1962 Egbert was diagnosed with cancer, and he resigned as president in November 1963.1 A month after his resignation, Studebaker closed its historic plant in South Bend, Indiana; three years later it shut its one remaining factory, in Hamilton, Ontario, and Studebaker disappeared altogether.

  Brooks Stevens lived until 1995. He is best known today not as the designer of the last Studebakers but of the classic Wienermobiles of the late fifties, bizarre promotional vehicles that used a conventional car chassis (in Stevens’s case, the chassis of a Willys Jeep) to support a giant Oscar Mayer wiener sausage. By the 1980s, in fact, Stevens’s Mequon museum site was being employed as the production centre for the entire Wienermobile fleet.

  ‘From Studebaker to Wienermobile’ could easily serve as the subtitle of a history of the car industry in the second half of the twentieth century. For, as we shall see, the hopes and dreams embodied in the Golden Age of the motor car turned out to be as long-lasting as yesterday’s hot dog. How and why the West’s motor manufacturers squandered the impressive achievements of this glittering era comprises one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history. But before the decline came one last outburst of outstanding achievement: the models of that annus mirabilis, 1959.

  1 Admittedly, this was only after crippling strikes in the winter of 1945–6 had brought production at GM, Packard, Chrysler and Nash to a halt.

  1 From 1954 all of the Big Three began to use two-tone colour schemes for their whole range of models.

  2 Drexler hymned ‘that quality of animation which makes the Cisitalia seem larger than it is’. But only 170 examples were ever built.

  1 By 1970 this amounted to two million visitors per year.

  1That same year, work finally began on Britain’s motorway system, in the shape of the Preston bypass (later part of the M6), the London end of the M1 and, rather oddly, the Ross Spur in Herefordshire (now the M50). The initial sixty-mile stretch of the M1, from Watford to Rugby, opened in 1959.

  1 His favourite was the streamlined Lincoln Zephyr in which he drove around Europe in the summer of 1938.

  1 For the wartime US air force ‘XP’ denoted an experimental fighter type, but by 1949 the code was being used for ‘Experimental Pursuit’ jets, such as the Sabre XP-86.

  1 In 1956 Studebaker inexplicably rebranded the whole Starlight range as the Hawk, a mundane name that prevented the car maker from being able to cash in on the space craze of the post-Sputnik years.

  1 Stephen King cast a 1958 Fury as the star of his horror novel Christine of that year.

  1 Colbert later faced serious allegations of financial impropriety, which included profiting from his wife’s shares in Chrysler suppliers.

  1 The Metropolitan’s engine boasted only 1200cc (it was replaced by a heftier 1489cc version in 1957) and its styling was distinctly European; AMC sold ninety-seven thousand of these curious cars before production was discontinued, perhaps prematurely, in 1961.

  1 Sherwood Egbert died in 1969, aged only forty-nine.

  9

  Zenith

  Nineteen fifty-nine, in the words of cultural historian Fred Kaplan, was the year ‘when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life … when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it – when the world as we now know it began to take form’. The Russians’ Lunik 1 spacecraft became the first man-made object to break free of earth’s orbit. (Later that same year, Lunik 2 managed to crash-land on the moon.) A Boeing 707 made the first non-stop air crossing of the Atlantic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s revolutionary Guggenheim Museum was opened on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Dave Brubeck issued his jazz album Time Out, whose classic track ‘Take Five’ came to symbolize the age. Senator John F. Kennedy launched his presidential campaign; Fidel Castro’s advance prompted President Batista to flee Cuba; and Tibet rose up against Chinese rule.

  It was also the year when the Golden Age of the Car reached its apogee, the zenith of the automobile. New models demonstrated an awareness of the demands of the consumer and of the primacy of engaging, contemporary styling. Superhighways were being built across the developed world. And oil had never been so cheap. Just a decade later, Western consumers were looking back to this era of plenty, confidence and innocent with nostalgia and regret.

  The jet-age symbolism of the cars of America’s 1959 model year was unmistakable. Chrysler’s ’59 De Sotos were
advertised as ‘personal flying machines’, with ‘flight-styled instrument panel’, which consumers were asked to ‘pilot’. The tail of the Cadillac Eldorado of that year was dominated by vast, circular finials which were shaped like jet-plane air intakes – but which actually did nothing. Buick’s Electra boasted huge, canted wings which swept forward to shelter diagonally stacked headlamps. And Harley Earl’s Motorama concept car of 1959, the Firebird III, incorporated no fewer than seven wings and tail fins, substituted a joystick for the steering wheel, and featured a double bubble canopy which looked as if it were out of a jet fighter or a science-fiction movie, as well as cruise control, air conditioning, aircraft-style air-drag antilock brakes, an ‘ultra-sonic’ key which signalled the doors to open, and an automated guidance system to avoid accidents. Driving this futuristic concept vehicle was the nearest Earl would ever get to flying an aircraft.

  Harley Earl’s 1959’s Cadillacs represented the ultimate in Golden Age confidence. The great styling race between Detroit’s Big Three had reached its height, and the Cadillacs resembled futuristic rocket ships for Dan Dare or Flash Gordon, with massive rear fins which stood 42 inches above the ground. The luxury brand’s flagship model, the Eldorado Brougham, was hand-made by Pininfarina in Turin and cost more than the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

  The biggest fan of Earl’s Golden Age Cadillacs was Elvis Presley. As soon as he could afford it, Elvis bought himself a pink and white 1955 Cadillac, and soon afterwards presented a similarly coloured Cadillac Fleetwood 60 to his mother. ‘I don’t want anybody in Hollywood to have a better car than mine,’ he declared, adding: ‘A Cadillac puts the world on notice that I have arrived.’ Thereafter Elvis acquired a long line of customized Cadillacs, ending with a 1977 Seville. His 1956 Eldorado was supplied with white pleated leather upholstery and purple-dyed moutonfur carpets. Although he never seems to have bought one of the classic Cadillacs of 1959, Elvis’s 1960 Series 75 Fleetwood Limousine more than made up for this omission. Gold-plated inside and out (24-carat gold leaf was applied internally to the phone, shoe buffer, refrigerator and ten-disc automatic record player, TV and tape deck, and externally to the car’s hubcaps, wheel covers, headlight rims and front grille); the forty coats of exterior paintwork incorporated real pearls, diamond dust and oriental fish scales; the cabin floor was carpeted in white fur, and gold lamé drapes were used to cover the back windows and to separate the front and back seats. A Judy Holliday film of 1956 had cast the eponymous Solid Gold Cadillac as America’s ultimate status symbol; now Elvis possessed almost exactly that. RCA Records even sent the car itself on tour, attracting huge crowds. Today Elvis’s Fleetwood sits smugly in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.