Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  That truculence revealed as much about Henry Ford as it did about Detroit attitudes. By 1970 there were more and more indications that he was tired of running the company. There had been the possibility of his going to work in the Johnson administration as a kind of ambassador to the business community, but that had fallen through when Johnson had been driven out of office. So he had kept on at Ford, and though he refused to think of retirement, the job was clearly wearing him down. He much preferred now to travel and do business in Europe rather than in America, and he probably spent more time at the European plants than at those in the United States. In Europe he was treated like royalty (and spent much of his time with royalty and semiroyalty). Crowds might gather outside a restaurant where he was dining just to catch a glimpse of him—the personification of a great industrial empire, whose name was on a famous product. In America it was different; when he visited a factory, it was unlikely that even the local mayor would turn out, and indeed any meeting with a local official could turn quickly into a recitation of petty grievances. He seemed increasingly interested in the fact that he had a place in history, and above all in his connection to the first Henry Ford. The men around him soon learned that one of the easiest ways to win him over to a particular idea was to mention that, oddly enough, it was something that his grandfather had been interested in. He liked that. They were linked, the two of them, for they were the only two men who had run the Ford Motor Company. When he talked about the Ford Motor Company with close friends, he referred to it as a sacred trust. It had been created by his own family and handed to him in terrible shape, and he was proud of the fact that he had resurrected it and sustained it as a great and successful enterprise for a quarter of a century. His era was far less congenial to privilege and authority than that of his grandfather. It had been his contradictory duty not just to preserve and extend the best of the past but to undo the darker part of the past as well. It was important that he not look like a bigot, that he be as humane as possible in his treatment of labor. He must be a modern, enlightened businessman, alert at all times to the new social complexities required of that role. The UAW understood this about him quite well. It was sometimes said that when the union wanted more money it threatened to strike GM because GM was so shamelessly profitable, but when it wanted a social principle it threatened to strike Ford, because young Henry Ford was haunted just enough by the past to make the company vulnerable. He prided himself on having the common touch, and he did have it, an almost intuitive sense of how to talk to ordinary workers in a language they were comfortable with. But no one privy to that part of him, that role, particularly the men around him, was to mistake it for a genuine expression of self. He might be the seigneur with the common touch, but he was first and foremost the seigneur, and the terms were always his.

  He wanted strong and forceful men around him, but his relationships with them were always imbalanced: They had to earn their position with him and charm him, but he did not have to earn his position with them or charm them. Few men in American business were so spoiled. The toys were always his, and the rules were always his. Men rose and fell in his favor. He played them off against each other with skill, and it was often said of Ford that it could be a great company if half the top people there did not spend most of their time plotting against each other, usually with Henry’s encouragement. Executives watched carefully to see who had Henry Ford’s ear, who dined with him, who traveled abroad with him. Some young men coveted the chance to make those trips, the opportunity to be with the chairman in the 747 for six or seven hours, talking intimately with him; but others, more experienced at the game, warned their more junior colleagues against them. The trips, they warned, were minefields, all that intimacy over many glasses of Pommard. They tended to loosen the tongues of the younger men, not the tongue of the chairman. Even if the chairman was indiscreet, the next morning he would still be the head of the Ford Motor Company. For the company was different from other industrial firms in that the founding family still ruled. It was governed, one observer noted, by an odd combination of the most sophisticated of management techniques that the Harvard Business School could supply and a regal whimsy reminiscent of Versailles, the capriciousness of an erratic although intelligent king attended by ambitious courtiers.

  For a long time he had managed to keep his behavior as head of the company distinct from his behavior in his private life, but in the late sixties and early seventies that began to change. Perhaps it was the increasing pressures from the government, from citizens’ groups, and from labor unions; there were too many people telling him what he could not do, he said to friends, and it was simply no longer fun to be a business executive. Sometimes, he added, he felt besieged. In any case, his personal life was beginning to deteriorate.

  When he was a younger man, it had been fairly staid. In 1940, at the age of twenty-two, he had married in the class from which he had sprung. Anne McDonnell, daughter of moneyed New York Irish, one of fourteen children, was perfect for a man who wanted his social life to be an extension of his professional life and perfectly in order. No one, her friends thought, would run a great house better. She was attractive, knew the correct thing to do, and suited Henry’s station in life precisely. Theirs was a formal home. Dinner parties were often black tie. They did not see people from the company socially, or, with a few exceptions, from the auto world. They saw, as his parents before them had seen, the good and civilized people of Grosse Pointe, people like themselves. Henry and Anne were considered a lovely couple, respectful of each other, though there was a certain restraint about their relationship, as if they did not quite know each other.

  It was a servant-dominated world. (Henry’s son, Edsel, once said in an interview that the most influential person in his life was his French nanny, Zellie—a nickname taken from Mademoiselle—a statement that irritated his mother no small amount.) The rules for his children, as they had been for him were rigid. They could be seen but they would not be heard. Dinners with them were served by butlers in tailcoats, the tables beautifully set and candlelit, the food presented course by course—all of it precisely the way children do not want to eat. Henry and Anne, as leaders of the community, often went to benefits and fund-raisers.

  During the early 1960s some of Henry’s friends began to sense he was growing restless with this routine. When he went to the charity benefits that she sponsored, he managed now to signal to his buddies that he had attended under protest, that he was there in body but not in soul. “What a bunch of shit this is,” he told a friend at one affair. The friend sensed that the era of Henry Ford as the stalwart of Grosse Pointe fund-raisers had come to an end. He was engrossed every day in the work of the company, and he was bored at night. For all its incalculable comforts, his life was typically suburban. He wanted more fun and excitement. He began to feel entitled to mix with more interesting people, the most interesting people anywhere, and not just on occasion but all the time. His role model, his closest friends thought, became Gianni Agnelli of Fiat. There were parallels between the two. They had both taken over their family’s auto companies, they had both done well. But there the parallels stopped. Agnelli had fun. He was an international celebrity, not just because he owned an auto company but because he was a figure in European social circles. He had houses at all the most exclusive watering holes of Europe, saw the most sophisticated people of two continents, and was a part of the emerging world of beautiful people. Henry Ford was not part of that world. He was a social leader of Detroit and Grosse Pointe. He was tired of it.

  In the mid-1960s he fell in love with Cristina Vettore Austin. An Italian, she was beautiful, vital, exuberant, and a member of the jet set. His wife watched their increasingly public affair with mounting distaste, hoping that it would soon run its course. When it did not, when the two kept seeing each other quite openly in New York (where Cristina stayed at an apartment he paid for), Anne Ford did what was repugnant to her—she was a serious Catholic—and filed for a divorce. It was an ac
rimonious and expensive parting. Estimates placed the settlement at around $15 million. Years later, after she had married a lawyer named Deane Johnson and moved to California and was starting a new life, she told an old friend that she did not know what to do with her time.

  “Why don’t you get involved in things like benefits?” he suggested. “After all, you were so good at that in Detroit.”

  “Oh dear,” she said, with some pain in her voice. “That’s what cost me Henry.”

  Henry and Cristina were married in 1965. For a time that marriage was enjoyable. But his old life and his new life were not easily merged. When a large party was given in their honor in Detroit, all his old friends attended, and many of their new friends flew in from New York. Each group stood on its side of the room, and no one seemed eager to cross over; it was, said one person present, like a chess game where no one moves any of the pieces. His own family never accepted her. “The pizza queen,” Edith Ford, wife of Henry’s brother Benson, called her. Soon the people they saw were younger. Ford cars went to Le Mans and won there. Henry Ford was seen at the fashionable spots of Europe, being raucous, having more fun than Agnelli had ever had. It was, it now seemed, not so much that he had been restless with a woman but restless with a life.

  His first marriage had lasted more than twenty years, but his second marriage soon turned sour. He had married Cristina because he was fed up with his Detroit life. But having gained a faster one, he was no happier. The disintegration of the marriage was surprisingly quick. Within three years he was complaining openly about her. He sometimes seemed embarrassed by her and her friends. Once on a European trip he called down to the hotel room where Bunkie and Florence Knudsen were staying. “Can you come up here and have dinner with me?” he asked, somewhat plaintively. “I need you—I’ve got nothing around me but Italians.” The jet-set life, he told friends, was less fun than people thought. A lot of these people were pretty empty. In those years he was sometimes like a lonely little boy, often eating by himself in his huge Grosse Pointe house as Cristina traveled in Europe. When she was home, things weren’t much better. She had begun to grate on him. What had once pleased him about her, her willingness to break convention, her candor, now began to pall. She was too open, too exuberant, too intrusive; she wanted too much of him.

  She was no happier. She had married a jet-setter, but her jet-setter lived in the American Midwest. She had tried liking Detroit, but it was not an easy city for her. There was nothing in the city that would have drawn her there of her own accord. She had come because of a man, but when Henry Ford was in Detroit he worked very long hours and had little time for her. In Europe she had found him amusing. In Detroit he seemed less amusing. When he came home he wanted to eat simply and watch television, she complained to friends. Her life, she added, was one of exercising, walking the dogs, and going to beauty shops. She tried sculpting, with no success. She started showing up in the company of Imelda Marcos, the wife of the Philippine dictator. The Ford staff in New York complained that she was giving immense amounts of wine from the Ford apartment at the Waldorf to Mrs. Marcos and her security people. As Henry Ford with his vast power had been able to scorn conventional attitudes, now she, from her comparable position of power, was paying just as little attention.

  For someone who took his manliness as seriously, indeed as self-consciously, as Henry Ford, who liked to boast in classic locker-room style of his conquests and of the appetites of his women, it was a humiliating time. Their fights, often fueled by alcohol, were ugly. High Ford executives tried hard not to be caught between the two of them, for a business-social luncheon might end with a ride during which Cristina would start yelling, at him. “Why are you always traveling?” she once screamed at him. “Why don’t you stay home at all?”

  “Why don’t you go play with your new Greek friends?” he answered.

  He was becoming boorish in public more frequently now. In 1966 he joined a group of other leading corporate executives for a tour of Eastern Europe sponsored by Time magazine. The idea was that the businessmen would meet important officials, various diplomats, and American and foreign journalists, and come away with a more sophisticated view of the Soviet bloc—and that they would also be duly grateful to Time. From the start Henry Ford was a nuisance, behaving like a boozy sophomore. One executive had a memory of Ford drunkenly careening down the main street of Budapest shouting, “All I want is to be loved.” He seemed preoccupied not with the problems of détente but with the functions of the body. At a certain point he decided he had fallen in love with a young woman in Time’s Vienna bureau, and he insisted that she make the rest of the tour with the group. Peter Forbath, who was then the Vienna bureau chief, informed him that the young woman would not be able to go to Bucharest, for she was needed in Vienna and did not speak Rumanian. Henry Ford then threatened to cancel all of the Ford advertising in Time.

  “I think you should cancel all of your advertising in all of our magazines,” Forbath said, undaunted. Forbath and a somewhat mutinous Ford drove to the airport together, where Ford sought out Dick Clurman, who was Time’s chief of correspondents and in charge of the tour. Again Ford announced his intention of canceling his advertising.

  “That’s certainly fine with me, Henry,” Clurman answered. Ford stalked off, still quite angry.

  Ten minutes later he came back to see Clurman. “Doesn’t anyone in this damn operation care if I cancel all my advertising?” he asked.

  “Well,” said Clurman, “there’s Bob Gordon over there, and he’s in charge of advertising, and I’m sure he’d be interested. Powerless, probably, but interested certainly.”

  “Oh, the hell with it,” Ford said and stomped off. That night, however, he told Clurman he knew he had been behaving badly, that it was a valuable trip, and that he was going on the wagon.

  On another occasion, after a board meeting, he had indulged in some heavy drinking and then decided that he needed to attend to his friend Sidney Weinberg’s sex life. Weinberg was well into his seventies then. Ford had turned to a bright rising executive and pointed to Weinberg and said, “I want you to go out and get a girl for him.” The young man had looked puzzled. “Goddammit, I said go out and get a girl for him,” the chairman of the Ford Motor Company insisted.

  The young man searched until he found a more senior colleague. “What the hell do I do?” he asked.

  “You go to bed, and you hope like hell that when Henry Ford wakes up he’s forgotten about it. If he hasn’t forgotten, you tell him you looked far and wide, but there were no ladies worthy of the honor. If he doesn’t accept that, you start looking for another job.”

  That sort of dilemma, as another colleague later explained to him consolingly, was part of the special privilege of being at Ford. There were many moments like that, and they were hard on those who worked for the company.

  Ford’s drinking and carousing seemed to increase, putting even more stress on his system. He had started seeing an attractive young woman named Kathy DuRoss. She was a local girl who had had a very hard life—she had been widowed at nineteen and left with two young children when her husband was killed in an auto accident—and who did some modeling in the city. She was both strong and earthy—earthy American, unlike Cristina, who was earthy European. (“My father,” said Charlotte Ford, “falls for strong, tough cookies.”) A handful of his close friends knew he was seeing her, but others didn’t. Don Frey noticed that the company was frequently hiring a certain brunette as a model in auto shows. “Why do we keep using that same girl?” he asked a colleague.

  “Don,” was the reply, “there are some questions you just don’t want to ask and that I don’t want to answer.”

  Ford’s double life ended one night in February 1975, when a California highway patrolman saw a car swerving back and forth, pulled it over, and arrested its driver, Henry Ford, for drunken driving. In the car with him was Kathy DuRoss. The secret was out, and the marriage to Cristina was effectively over.

  In the f
inal days of the marriage there was considerable meanness displayed on both sides. Cristina, humiliated that another woman could do to her what she had done to Anne Ford, threw him out of the Grosse Pointe house, and Henry was forced to use the apartment in the Glass House, the Ford international headquarters. Unfortunately the apartment was rather small, and there was no room for his immense wardrobe. So his valet kept his clothes in a Ford van parked down in the lot and simply moved a few suits up for his perusal each day—it was somewhat as if the head of the Ford Motor Company were living out of a recreational vehicle. Henry sneaked into their house while Cristina was in Rome and took out about $2 million worth of their best antiques; she sued to keep him from selling them at Sotheby Parke Bernet. He won; he explained that he was only trying to make his holdings a little more liquid.

  His divorce from Cristina threatened to be a good deal messier than that from Anne. Cristina subpoenaed a vast variety of people who knew about her husband’s personal life and about Kathy DuRoss. But just as the case was to go to trial a private settlement was made. Each, it seemed, had a good deal to hide. The star of the trial turned out to be neither Cristina nor Henry but an inspired process server named Wylie Cossar, who explained in considerable detail how he had served the great of Detroit with their subpoenas. He had, for example, rung Kathy DuRoss’s door carrying an enormous gift-wrapped box, asked her to sign for it, and, when she did, told her she had just signed a subpoena to testify in the divorce proceedings. In the end Cristina Ford received about $16 million, almost the same amount as her predecessor, albeit for a far shorter time with Ford. Henry was now free to marry Kathy DuRoss.

  At Ford in those years he was still in charge, but more sporadically, coming and going, making a show of running the company, then disappearing, if it suited him, much to the annoyance of Iacocca and others who were actually running it. There would be bursts of energy followed by prolonged absences. Some of his top people thought it would have been better if he let go of the company completely, but he was unwilling to do that. Much admired by his executives when he was in his forties and early fifties, he now struck some of them as more of a dilettante. He no longer listened to a wide variety of voices; he would pick out only two or three men—courtiers, some of his critics within the company thought, chosen more for their social grace than their auto expertise—and listen to them exclusively. Others, less fortunate, felt cut off, for people whom Henry Ford did not listen to did not have power in the Ford Motor Company.