Business Adventures

by John Brooks

  The man charged with mobilizing an Edsel sales force along these exacting lines was J. C. (Larry) Doyle, who, as general sales-and-marketing manager of the division, ranked second to Krafve himself. A veteran of forty years with the Ford Company, who had started with it as an office boy in Kansas City and had spent the intervening time mainly selling, Doyle was a maverick in his field. On the one hand, he had an air of kindness and consideration that made him the very antithesis of the glib, brash denizens of a thousand automobile rows across the continent, and, on the other, he did not trouble to conceal an old-time salesman’s skepticism about such things as analyzing the sex and status of automobiles, a pursuit he characterized by saying, “When I play pool, I like to keep one foot on the floor.” Still, he knew how to sell cars, and that was what the Edsel Division needed. Recalling how he and his sales staff brought off the unlikely trick of persuading substantial and reputable men who had already achieved success in one of the toughest of all businesses to tear up profitable franchises in favor of a risky new one, Doyle said not long ago, “As soon as the first few new Edsels came through, early in 1957, we put a couple of them in each of our five regional sales offices. Needless to say, we kept those offices locked and the blinds drawn. Dealers in every make for miles around wanted to see the car, if only out of curiosity, and that gave us the leverage we needed. We let it be known that we would show the car only to dealers who were really interested in coming with us, and then we sent our regional field managers out to surrounding towns to try to line up the No. 1 dealer in each to see the cars. If we couldn’t get No. 1, we’d try for No. 2. Anyway, we set things up so that no one got in to see the Edsel without listening to a complete one-hour pitch on the whole situation by a member of our sales force. It worked very well.” It worked so well that by midsummer, 1957, it was clear that Edsel was going to have a lot of quality dealers on Introduction Day. (In fact, it missed the goal of twelve hundred by a couple of dozen.) Indeed, some dealers in other makes were apparently so confident of the Edsel’s success, or so bemused by the Doyle staff’s pitch, that they were entirely willing to sign up after hardly more than a glance at the Edsel itself. Doyle’s people urged them to study the car closely, and kept reciting the litany of its virtues, but the prospective Edsel dealers would wave such protestations aside and demand a contract without further ado. In retrospect, it would seem that Doyle could have given lessons to the Pied Piper.

  Now that the Edsel was no longer the exclusive concern of Dearborn, the Ford Company was irrevocably committed to going ahead. “Until Doyle went into action, the whole program could have been quietly dropped at any time at a word from top management, but once the dealers had been signed up, there was the matter of honoring your contract to put out a car,” Krafve has explained. The matter was attended to with dispatch. Early in June, 1957, the company announced that of the $250 million it had set aside to defray the advance costs of the Edsel, $150 million was being spent on basic facilities, including the conversion of various Ford and Mercury plants to the needs of producing the new cars; $50 million on special Edsel tooling; and $50 million on initial advertising and promotion. In June, too, an Edsel destined to be the star of a television commercial for future release was stealthily transported in a closed van to Hollywood, where, on a locked sound stage patrolled by security guards, it was exposed to the cameras in the admiring presence of a few carefully chosen actors who had sworn that their lips would be sealed from then until Introduction Day. For this delicate photographic operation the Edsel Division cannily enlisted the services of Cascade Pictures, which also worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and, as far as is known, there were no unintentional leaks. “We took all the same precautions we take for our A.E.C. films,” a grim Cascade official has since said.

  Within a few weeks, the Edsel Division had eighteen hundred salaried employees and was rapidly filling some fifteen thousand factory jobs in the newly converted plants. On July 15th, Edsels began rolling off assembly lines at Somerville, Massachusetts; Mahwah, New Jersey; Louisville, Kentucky; and San Jose, California. The same day, Doyle scored an important coup by signing up Charles Kreisler, a Manhattan dealer regarded as one of the country’s foremost practitioners in his field, who had represented Oldsmobile—one of Edsel’s self-designated rivals—before heeding the siren song from Dearborn. On July 22nd, the first advertisement for the Edsel appeared—in Life. A two-page spread in plain black-and-white, it was impeccably classic and calm, showing a car whooshing down a country highway at such high speed that it was an indistinguishable blur. “Lately, some mysterious automobiles have been seen on the roads,” the accompanying text was headed. It went on to say that the blur was an Edsel being road-tested, and concluded with the assurance “The Edsel is on its way.” Two weeks later, a second ad appeared in Life, this one showing a ghostly-looking car, covered with a white sheet, standing at the entrance to the Ford styling center. This time the headline read, “A man in your town recently made a decision that will change his life.” The decision, it was explained, was to become an Edsel dealer. Whoever wrote the ad cannot have known how truly he spoke.

  DURING the tense summer of 1957, the man of the hour at Edsel was C. Gayle Warnock, director of public relations, whose duty was not so much to generate public interest in the forthcoming product, there being an abundance of that, as to keep the interest at white heat, and readily convertible into a desire to buy one of the new cars on or after Introduction Day—or, as the company came to call it, Edsel Day. Warnock, a dapper, affable man with a tiny mustache, is a native of Converse, Indiana, who, long before Krafve drafted him from the Ford office in Chicago, did a spot of publicity work for county fairs—a background that has enabled him to spice the honeyed smoothness of the modern public-relations man with a touch of the old carnival pitchman’s uninhibited spirit. Recalling his summons to Dearborn, Warnock says, “When Dick Krafve hired me, back in the fall of 1955, he told me, ‘I want you to program the E-Car publicity from now to Introduction Day.’ I said, ‘Frankly, Dick, what do you mean by “program”?’ He said he meant to sort of space it out, starting at the end and working backward. This was something new to me—I was used to taking what breaks I could get when I could get them—but I soon found out how right Dick was. It was almost too easy to get publicity for the Edsel. Early in 1956, when it was still called the E-Car, Krafve gave a little talk about it out in Portland, Oregon. We didn’t try for anything more than a play in the local press, but the wire services picked the story up and it went out all over the country. Clippings came in by the bushel. Right then I realized the trouble we might be headed for. The public was getting to be hysterical to see our car, figuring it was going to be some kind of dream car—like nothing they’d ever seen. I said to Krafve, ‘When they find out it’s got four wheels and one engine, just like the next car, they’re liable to be disappointed.’”

  It was agreed that the safest way to tread the tightrope between overplaying and underplaying the Edsel would be to say nothing about the car as a whole but to reveal its individual charms a little at a time—a sort of automotive strip tease (a phrase that Warnock couldn’t with proper dignity use himself but was happy to see the New York Times use for him). The policy was later violated now and then, purposely or inadvertently. For one thing, as the pre-Edsel Day summer wore on, reporters prevailed upon Krafve to authorize Warnock to show the Edsel to them, one at a time, on what Warnock called a “peekaboo,” or “you’ve-seen-it-now-forget-it,” basis. And, for another, Edsels loaded on vans for delivery to dealers were appearing on the highways in ever-increasing numbers, covered fore and aft with canvas flaps that, as if to whet the desire of the motoring public, were forever blowing loose. That summer, too, was a time of speechmaking by an Edsel foursome consisting of Krafve, Doyle, J. Emmet Judge, who was Edsel’s director of merchandise and product planning, and Robert F. G. Copeland, its assistant general sales manager for advertising, sales promotion, and training. Ranging separately up and down and ac
ross the nation, the four orators moved around so fast and so tirelessly that Warnock, lest he lose track of them, took to indicating their whereabouts with colored pins on a map in his office. “Let’s see, Krafve goes from Atlanta to New Orleans, Doyle from Council Bluffs to Salt Lake City,” Warnock would muse of a morning in Dearborn, sipping his second cup of coffee and then getting up to yank the pins out and jab them in again.

  Although most of Krafve’s audiences consisted of bankers and representatives of finance companies who it was hoped would lend money to Edsel dealers, his speeches that summer, far from echoing the general hoopla, were almost statesmanlike in their cautious—even somber—references to the new car’s prospects. And well they might have been, for developments in the general economic outlook of the nation were making more sanguine men than Krafve look puzzled. In July, 1957, the stock market went into a nose dive, marking the beginning of what is recalled as the recession of 1958. Then, early in August, a decline in the sales of medium-priced 1957 cars of all makes set in, and the general situation worsened so rapidly that, before the month was out, Automotive News reported that dealers in all makes were ending their season with the second-largest number of unsold new cars in history. If Krafve, on his lonely rounds, ever considered retreating to Dearborn for consolation, he was forced to put that notion out of his mind when, also in August, Mercury, Edsel’s own stablemate, served notice that it was going to make things as tough as possible for the newcomer by undertaking a million-dollar, thirty-day advertising drive aimed especially at “price-conscious buyers”—a clear reference to the fact that the 1957 Mercury, which was then being sold at a discount by most dealers, cost less than the new Edsel was expected to. Meanwhile, sales of the Rambler, which was the only American-made small car then in production, were beginning to rise ominously. In the face of all these evil portents, Krafve fell into the habit of ending his speeches with a rather downbeat anecdote about the board chairman of an unsuccessful dog-food company who said to his fellow directors, “Gentlemen, let’s face facts—dogs don’t like our product.” “As far as we’re concerned,” Krafve added on at least one occasion, driving home the moral with admirable clarity, “a lot will depend on whether people like our car or not.”

  But most of the other Edsel men were unimpressed by Krafve’s misgivings. Perhaps the least impressed of all was Judge, who, while doing his bit as an itinerant speaker, specialized in community and civic groups. Undismayed by the limitations of the strip-tease policy, Judge brightened up his lectures by showing such a bewildering array of animated graphs, cartoons, charts, and pictures of parts of the car—all flashed on a CinemaScope screen—that his listeners usually got halfway home before they realized that he hadn’t shown them an Edsel. He wandered restlessly around the auditorium as he spoke, shifting the kaleidoscopic images on the screen at will with the aid of an automatic slide changer—a trick made possible by a crew of electricians who laced the place in advance with a maze of wires linking the device to dozens of floor switches, which, scattered about the hall, responded when he kicked them. Each of the “Judge spectaculars,” as these performances came to be known, cost the Edsel Division five thousand dollars—a sum that included the pay and expenses of the technical crew, who would arrive on the scene a day or so ahead of time to set up the electrical rig. At the last moment, Judge would descend melodramatically on the town by plane, hasten to the hall, and go into his act. “One of the greatest aspects of this whole Edsel program is the philosophy of product and merchandising behind it,” Judge might start off, with a desultory kick at a switch here, a switch there. “All of us who have been a part of it are real proud of this background and we are anxiously awaiting its success when the car is introduced this fall.… Never again will we be associated with anything as gigantic and full of meaning as this particular program.… Here is a glimpse of the car which will be before the American public on September 4, 1957 [at this point, Judge would show a provocative slide of a hubcap or section of fender].… It is a different car in every respect, yet it has an element of conservatism which will give it maximum appeal.… The distinctiveness of the frontal styling integrates with the sculptured patterns of the side treatment.…” And on and on Judge would rhapsodize, rolling out such awesome phrases as “sculptured sheet metal,” “highlight character,” and “graceful, flowing lines.” At last would come the ringing peroration. “We are proud of the Edsel!” he would cry, kicking switches right and left. “When it is introduced this fall, it will take its place on the streets and highways of America, bringing new greatness to the Ford Motor Company. This is the Edsel story.”

  THE drum-roll climax of the strip tease was a three-day press preview of the Edsel, undraped from pinched-in snout to flaring rear, that was held in Detroit and Dearborn on August 26th, 27th, and 28th, with 250 reporters from all over the country in attendance. It differed from previous automotive jamborees of its kind in that the journalists were invited to bring their wives along—and many of them did. Before it was over, it had cost the Ford Company ninety thousand dollars. Grand as it was, the conventionality of its setting was a disappointment to Warnock, who had proposed, and seen rejected, three locales that he thought would provide a more offbeat ambiance—a steamer on the Detroit River (“wrong symbolism”); Edsel, Kentucky (“inaccessible by road”); and Haiti (“just turned down flat”). Thus hobbled, Warnock could do no better for the reporters and their wives when they converged on the Detroit scene on Sunday evening, August 25th, than to put them up at the discouragingly named Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel and to arrange for them to spend Monday afternoon hearing and reading about the long-awaited details of the entire crop of Edsels—eighteen varieties available, in four main lines (Corsair, Citation, Pacer, and Ranger), differing mainly in their size, power, and trim. The next morning, specimens of the models themselves were revealed to the reporters in the styling center’s rotunda, and Henry II offered a few words of tribute to his father. “The wives were not asked to the unveiling,” a Foote, Cone man who helped plan the affair recalls. “It was too solemn and businesslike an event for that. It went over fine. There was excitement even among the hardened newspapermen.” (The import of the stories that most of the excited newspapermen filed was that the Edsel seemed to be a good car, though not so radical as its billing had suggested.)

  In the afternoon, the reporters were whisked out to the test track to see a team of stunt drivers put the Edsel through its paces. This event, calculated to be thrilling, turned out to be hair-raising, and even, for some, a little unstringing. Enjoined not to talk too much about speed and horsepower, since only a few months previously the whole automobile industry had nobly resolved to concentrate on making cars instead of delayed-action bombs, Warnock had decided to emphasize the Edsel’s liveliness through deeds rather than words, and to accomplish this he had hired a team of stunt drivers. Edsels ran over two-foot ramps on two wheels, bounced from higher ramps on all four wheels, were driven in crisscross patterns, grazing each other, at sixty or seventy miles per hour, and skidded into complete turns at fifty. For comic relief, there was a clown driver parodying the daredevil stuff. All the while, the voice of Neil L. Blume, Edsel’s engineering chief, could be heard on a loudspeaker, purring about “the capabilities, the safety, the ruggedness, the maneuverability and performance of these new cars,” and skirting the words “speed” and “horsepower” as delicately as a sandpiper skirts a wave. At one point, when an Edsel leaping a high ramp just missed turning over, Krafve’s face took on a ghastly pallor; he later reported that he had not known the daredevil stunts were going to be so extreme, and was concerned both for the good name of the Edsel and the lives of the drivers. Warnock, noticing his boss’s distress, went over and asked Krafve if he was enjoying the show. Krafve replied tersely that he would answer when it was over and all hands safe. But everyone else seemed to be having a grand time. The Foote, Cone man said, “You looked over this green Michigan hill, and there were those glorious Edsels, performing gloriousl
y in unison. It was beautiful. It was like the Rockettes. It was exciting. Morale was high.”

  Warnock’s high spirits had carried him to even wilder extremes of fancy. The stunt driving, like the unveiling, was considered too rich for the blood of the wives, but the resourceful Warnock was ready for them with a fashion show that he hoped they would find at least equally diverting. He need not have worried. The star of the show, who was introduced by Brown, the Edsel stylist, as a Paris couturière, both beautiful and talented, turned out at the final curtain to be a female impersonator—a fact of which Warnock, to heighten the verisimilitude of the act, had given Brown no advance warning. Things were never again quite the same since between Brown and Warnock, but the wives were able to give their husbands an extra paragraph or two for their stories.