With Torino as the working name, and a vault of photographs and video from the test run at Romeo to work with, JWT’s creative staff started concocting newspaper and magazine ads.
BRAND NEW IMPORT . . . FROM DETROIT
Scusi, Signori, may I introduce my Torino. Inspired by Italy’s great road cars but straight from Detroit. Bucket seats of GT design. I could have floor mounted 3 speed shift. I could have . . .
What price is this eleganza de Italia?
Only 1,478,000 lire.
(There it was, forty-eight years before the Chrysler ad with Eminem and the Diego Rivera murals and the Joe Louis fist and the black choir at the Fox Theater, a first iteration of “Imported from Detroit.”)
Another ad:
TORINO BY FORD
It looks like one of the great Italian road cars—with a price to match—but don’t be misled. Torino is built in Detroit—a small luxury car that also happens to be small in price. Its style may speak with an Italian accent, but it is pure American in the way it translates economy into pleasure, savings into comfort, thrift into luxury.
All destined for the dustbin of advertising history.
In his later remembrances, Lee Iacocca might have taken a certain satisfaction in recounting how the Torino name was ditched, considering his less than bosomy relationship with HF2. As the Torino campaign was being prepared, Iacocca received a call from one of Ford’s public relations men, who told him they would have to pick another name for the car because the Deuce was “in the midst of divorce and keeping company with Cristina Vettore Austin, an Italian jet-set divorcee he had met at a party in Paris. Some of his underlings felt that giving the car an Italian name would lead to bad publicity and gossip that would embarrass the boss.”
At JWT, John Conley, one of the forward planners in the Tomb, was a resident expert on brand names, the ad man who had helped Ford come up with the name Falcon. Now, with Torino off the boards, he went to the Detroit Public Library and spent several hours poring through books in search of something suitable. He emerged with Bronco, Puma, Colt, Cheetah, Cougar, and Mustang. Back where they had started. A prototype sports car that Iacocca and his team had conceived two years earlier—a two-seater, but in the lineage that led to the T-5—was named Mustang 1. That earlier version was meant to evoke the warplane; now the image was of a wild horse. In making the case to Iacocca, Laurie and Conley and the J. Walter Thompson men said “Mustang” “had the excitement of wide open spaces and was American as hell.”
There is a story told by Walter Murphy, the Ford Division’s in-house public relations man, about how Iacocca sold the name to HF2: On the night before Iacocca was to make another key sales pitch on the new car, he met one last time with the planning group at the Fairlane Room. “What I need are some fresh grabbers for my meeting tomorrow with Henry at the Glass House,” Murphy recalled Iacocca saying. Some suggested he lead off with the new name. Others suggested he should emphasize that the car would “kick GM’s Monza square in the balls.” At that point Iacocca closed his research binder and declared that he had figured out his pitch.
The next morning, in Murphy’s account, Ford was “stretched out in his leather chair, fingers clasped upon his expanding belly.” “What have you got, Lee?” he asked.
Partway through his pitch, Iacocca came to the line that had crossed his mind at the planning meeting, a line that made him close his binder and say he was ready. “Now this little pony car, the Mustang, would give an orgasm to anyone under thirty,” he said.
Ford “sat upright, as if jabbed by a needle.”
“What was that you said, Lee?”
Iacocca repeated the orgasm line.
“No, not that crap,” Ford said. “What did you call the car?”
“It’s the Mustang, Mr. Ford.”
It is wise to consider the reliability of that account in the context of who was telling it: a lifelong public relations man. But it sounded like Iacocca and it sounded like Ford. So did another version told by Donald Frey, the product planning manager, who remembered Ford telling him before the meeting, “Frey, I’m tired of your fucking car. I’m going to approve it . . . and it’s your ass if it doesn’t sell well.”
Chapter 15
* * *
HOUSES DIVIDED
GEORGE ROMNEY, HAIR SLICKED BACK from his broad forehead, his tanned mug exuding executive-class prosperity, came to Grosse Pointe ready to hit the streets as a protester. Earlier that summer at the end of the Walk to Freedom, mention of the governor’s name had been greeted with a ripple of boos in Cobo Hall, even though he had issued a proclamation honoring the event and had sent a delegation to represent him. That was on a Sunday, the one day of the week he did not make public appearances, citing his religious beliefs as a Mormon. Now it was Saturday, and there was another civil rights march, this one in support of open housing, and he was there. This time the marchers were not rolling down Woodward Avenue by the tens of thousands but strolling from a shopping center through the leafy side streets of the region’s most exclusive suburban enclave, home to Henry Ford II and William D. Laurie of J. Walter Thompson and other members of Detroit’s ruling elite. No more than 250 marchers participated, about the size of the crowd watching from the sidewalks in a less than welcoming manner. The organizers did not even know Romney would appear. “I came because I believe any American should have equal rights with any other American,” he said. “There is an excessive amount of discrimination in housing. Some practiced in this particular part of the state is particularly reprehensible.”
The practice he alluded to was known as the Grosse Pointe point system, a real estate contrivance that held the dubious distinction of being the Detroit area’s most egregious form of discrimination in a realm of human interaction that proved to be the most stubbornly segregated. Determined to control who was allowed to live there and to keep out “undesirables,” the Grosse Pointe Brokers Association in 1945 devised a system that involved hiring a private investigator to probe the background of prospective homebuyers and then having a secret three-member panel rate them on a point scale based on occupation, country of origin, appearance (including level of “swarthiness”), education, and whether their “way of living” was sufficiently “American.” WASPs were basically in free, if they had the money, while blacks, Asians, and Mexicans were not even scored; they had no chance whatsoever. The system was also rigged against Jews, who had to score more points than people of Greek and Italian descent, who had to score more than Poles and other East Europeans, though it was rare for any of them to make the cut, aside from a few wealthy mobsters like Tony Giacalone. The Grosse Pointe point system persisted for fifteen years, until it was challenged in court and by the state administration of G. Mennen Williams, a liberal Democratic governor, in 1960, but the remnants of it were still evident three years later when Romney came to join the protests.
As historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has astutely noted, Romney could be “willful, bad-tempered, blustery, moralistic, inarticulate, self-aggrandizing, and self-contradictory,” but he also showed foresight, courage, and persistence in dealing with civil rights, especially considering the context of his public and private circumstances. His rise from the corporate world to Republican politics paralleled the ascent of Barry Goldwater and a conservative movement that opposed the use of laws and government regulations to ban discrimination and enforce racial equality. In his private life, Romney remained unflinchingly devoted to the teachings of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and served as president of the Church’s Detroit stake, but he spoke out against the Mormon practice of denying the priesthood to blacks and worked for decades to improve the institution’s civil rights image.
Since arriving in Detroit in 1939 at age thirty-two, George Wilcken Romney, born to Mormon parents living in a church colony in Mexico, had never been your average Motor City executive, though he fit the mold in some ways, living in Bloomfield Hills and sending his sons to the exclusive Cranbrook Schools. His religion tended to
separate him, but so did his decisions as a car guy and his activities in the civic sphere. His support of civil rights extended back to World War II, when he worked as chief spokesman for the Automobile Manufacturers Association and expressed his distaste for segregated public housing in Detroit’s defense industry, an issue that served as the backdrop for the 1943 Detroit riot. As an executive at American Motors Corporation, where he became president in 1954 and bucked the Big Three by manufacturing smaller and more fuel-efficient cars, he also endorsed the goals of the Fair Employment Practices Act and headed up a civic committee seeking more funding for Detroit public schools. During his gubernatorial campaign in 1962, he ventured into black precincts in Detroit at the side of Rev. A. A. Banks, the prominent Republican minister of Second Avenue Baptist, and gave a strong civil rights speech at an event sponsored by the Trade Union Leadership Council, the progressive African American wing of the UAW. Some critics asserted that his stance was more political than moral, just as some believed that his push for small cars was as much a matter of pragmatic necessity as environment-conscious philosophy. Certainly there was some of both. But in the end he might have lost more votes than he gained, and he took his campaigning in the black community only so far. A memo from Charles M. Tucker, a black campaign aide, noted that he won only a “fractional rise in the Negro vote” and that “too much solicitude on the part of Mr. Romney for Negro support could have reduced the enthusiasm for him in such places as Dearborn and like areas.”
After winning the election and gaining national notice as a rising Republican star, he continued his civil rights push by galvanizing support for a new Michigan constitution that created a bipartisan civil rights commission and included an equal rights clause prohibiting discrimination “because of religion, race, color, or national origin.” His first public appearance as governor, on January 3, 1963, two days after his inauguration, was in Detroit at the Metropolitan Conference on Open Housing, where he called open-housing laws crucial to the furthering of civil rights: “Housing discrimination in Michigan admittedly is a massive problem and clearly the core of the problem is discrimination based on race.” The two previous Democratic governors, first Williams and then Swainson, had attempted to outlaw blatant discriminatory practices such as the Grosse Pointe point system through a state Corporation and Securities Commission regulation known as Rule 9 that prohibited “unfair dealing” by real estate brokers. When that regulation was struck down by the state supreme court in February 1963, Romney pushed the legislature to enact a version into law, and when that failed Michigan’s attorney general, a Democrat, ruled that the new Civil Rights Commission would have the power to enforce civil rights in private housing.
When President Kennedy delivered his prime-time speech on June 13 outlining the administration’s proposed civil rights legislation, Romney was among those Republicans who praised him and promised his support. “There is no question where the people of Michigan stand on this great moral and civic issue,” the governor noted in a letter to the president that also served as a form of self-congratulation. “Through action at the polls on April 1, 1963, they have given unprecedented voice to the most comprehensive, exhaustive, and clearest expression of belief in the basic human rights of all people ever expressed by the people of any state of which I am aware.”
If Romney was correct in boasting about his state’s firm moral stand on civil rights, the archive holding his papers at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library shows just how far from unanimous that feeling was in his state and elsewhere. Four thick folders there contain letters he received from former supporters regarding the Grosse Pointe march and other civil rights issues. The vast majority of them would be characterized as hate mail.
One of his early correspondents was E. V. Hogge, who lived on Riverdale Drive in Detroit and spiced his diatribe with a bitingly sarcastic jibe about upper-class hypocrisy: “Now that the people of Michigan have elected you and are going to supply you with a Governor’s mansion, which some white people also helped pay for, then it stands as a fact that your mansion in the silk stocking unintegrated community of Bloomfield Hills will be vacant for extended periods of the year. Perhaps you will strike the first blow for integrated housing by leasing your home to needy colored for a nominal fee. Or perhaps even better, donating it as a welfare shelter for the indigent colored. With its vastness, it could accommodate very many.”
A. B. Gilchrist, who provided no return address, clipped an Associated Press account of Romney’s appearance at the Grosse Pointe open-housing rally and typed above the headline, “Politics!! But this won’t get you the negro vote. You are a ‘dead duck’ for 1964.” E. G. Brennan, who lived on Parkside Drive on the edge of the all-white Detroit Golf Club, called Romney “the worst version of a double crosser,” and added, “I voted and worked for you and the new Constitution and regret it exceedingly. Your version of the Rule Nine and Civil Rights suits me no better than the Democratic one. The negroes’ hocus-pocus will ruin this country. If you are trying to gain voters, you are self-defeating, because the whites have more votes, and we are not going to take this lying down. Walter Reuther does not speak for labor, nor will me-tooism conquer.” The slap at Reuther, whose UAW leadership was far in front of its rank and file on civil rights, presaged a divide that would grow wider year by year. Brennan closed his letter with a line that underscored a companion development: the future popularity of a southern demagogue in Michigan presidential primaries. “Yours for Gov. Wallace,” he signed off.
The mail on August 1, 1963, brought a letter from Don E. Bruner, a lawyer in Albany, Georgia, battleground of one of the early civil rights campaigns. Bruner was aghast at the news that Romney had spoken at a memorial service for Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist who had been murdered in Mississippi hours after JFK’s prime-time civil rights speech. Bruner also happened to be a Mormon, an affiliation that permeated his comments to Brother Romney: “We southern Mormons find it difficult to believe that any Mormon Elder could ever advocate integration and subsequent amalgamation of the races. We, as southerners, viewed your rise in national politics as possible fulfillment of the prophecy made by the Prophet Joseph Smith concerning the constitution of the United States. In essence, the prophecy stated that the constitution would hang by a thread, and if it were saved, it would be by the Mormon Elders. Many of us felt that you perhaps were that Elder to fulfill the prophecy. But after Evers . . . we feel that you have deserted the teachings of your Church, of which you are a holder of the Melchizedek Priesthood, in a cheap effort to further your political career. How many Negro Priesthood bearers do you have in your Ward? All of this, Brother Romney, presents manifold the opportunity for mixed marriages and of white children who are forced to give up all their endowments in the church that their one white parent entitled them to because they have some small part of Negro blood in their veins.”
Many of the letters elicited responses from the governor’s staff, but that one he answered personally. “Dear Brother Bruner,” Romney wrote back. “You will find that the first section of the Doctrines and Covenants makes it clear that the revelations of the gospel were for all. Furthermore, the Book of Mormon makes it clear in several places that God is no respecter of persons and that his plan of salvation is for the people of all colors, both black and white. I am fully aware of the Church doctrine, and I know nothing in our Church doctrine that denies negroes or anyone else full rights as American citizens.”
• • •
Houses falling and rising. On August 2, the day after Romney’s Mormon exchange, work crews were hauling debris from the final demolition of the Gotham Hotel, a Detroit institution that would never be replaced. John White, the owner, was on his way to prison on federal gambling charges, broken and sick. That same day another pile of rubble was cleared from a lot where once stood the Lansing, the first apartment building in Detroit to house black tenants back in 1930. By the time of its demise in the summer of 1963, the six-story structure ha
d become a hangout for prostitutes and drug users. That night, on Woodward Avenue, crowds poured into Berry Gordy’s new pride and joy, the restored Graystone Ballroom, to hear a big Motown dance concert featuring Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and Martha and the Vandellas. And across town at New Bethel Baptist, C. L. Franklin convened another meeting of his Detroit Council for Human Rights, the umbrella group that staged the Walk to Freedom. The police shooting of Cynthia Scott had discombobulated the dynamics of race in the city. Any communal black and white sensibility resulting from the June 23 rally had dissipated, and the prevailing feeling was again us versus them.
Now came reports that police were using a passive-aggressive tactic to respond to the black protests. “Prostitutes Run Wild on John R at Canfield,” blared a headline that week in the Michigan Chronicle. The article began, “Is the Detroit Police Department using the Cynthia Scott protests as a pretext to permit wholesale prostitution to pollute Negro communities? This is a major question which Detroit must consider and face immediately and a consequential problem to which official attention must be paid.” One night that week, a reporter stood at the corner of John R and Canfield at midnight, right outside the Flame Show Bar, and observed “a market traffic jam” as eighteen prostitutes worked their trade. “In minutes . . . prostitutes were picked up by motorists, all of them white, and whisked off into the night. The pickups, accompanied by loud and obscene verbal exchanges between the prostitutes and customers, disrupted traffic, flared tempers and brought chaos to the brightly lighted area.” The word was that vice cops were now reluctant to arrest the prostitutes. The whore car was nowhere to be seen. If blacks did not like what happened to St. Cynthia, the police seemed to be saying, this is what they would get. Franklin and others at the Detroit Council for Human Rights meeting complained that the powers that be, from the Romney regime in Lansing to the Cavanagh administration in Detroit, were negligent, not doing enough to investigate the shooting and respond to their demands for remedial action.
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