Fins
Page 4
Some of the community’s anti-movie prejudice was allayed by a young actor’s real-life act of heroism one morning in 1914 when a truck collided with the tram on Hollywood Boulevard and the truck driver’s leg was severed. Witnesses said the man surely would have died if Lon Chaney had not ripped off his own shirt and used it as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
From the beginning, the sober citizens of Hollywood stood little chance of fighting off the advance of the studios. With the country’s hunger for motion pictures beginning to rival its appetite for motor vehicles, holding back the march of progress, of technology, proved impossible. The Nestor Film Company became Universal studios and the Lasky Company grew into Paramount. And as the studio buildings went up, the pepper trees along Hollywood Boulevard came down and the citrus groves started to disappear.
The Birth of a Nation marked Hollywood’s official passage from sleepy hamlet to motion picture capital. D. W. Griffith’s three-hour post–Civil War epic was shot in 1914 on a then monumental budget of $110,000. The director ordered the construction of an antebellum town and slave quarters on vacant land at the head of Hollywood Boulevard and hired hundreds of white actors in blackface to play slaves. Decidedly racist but undeniably a technical and artistic masterpiece, the film went on to earn an astonishing $18 million, an amount that no film would surpass until Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.
After that, motion picture money rained down hard on Hollywood, with predictable results. Griffith’s follow-up, Intolerance, was filmed at a then mind-boggling cost of $1.9 million, which allowed him to hire Italian artisans to create a facsimile of the ancient Babylonian palace of Belshazzar and to stage 3,500 extras along three full blocks in the center of town for a single scene. The extras were paid a previously unheard-of two dollars a day. During the production, a British actor playing the role of Jesus Christ became involved in a sex scandal with a fourteen-year-old girl and was deported back to England.
The loosening of morals that accompanied the motion picture invasion surely troubled J.W., who served as a governing member of Hollywood’s Methodist church. At the same time, however, the increasingly extravagant productions were the best thing that ever happened to his business. When DeMille and Griffith needed Roman chariots, Napoleonic carriages, stagecoaches, or covered wagons, they turned to Earl Automobile Works, which soon had several hundred craftsmen on the payroll and no meaningful competition anywhere on the West Coast.
Working part-time in the body shop while attending nearby University of Southern California, Harley got to know some of his father’s new motion picture clients, including DeMille, who quickly took a liking to him. The director was then in his early thirties and no doubt sensed a kindred spirit in the nineteen-year-old, a fellow showman in the making. It was impossible not to notice Harley. At six foot five, he was almost freakishly tall for the time, with piercing blue eyes and a manner of speaking that combined country colloquialism with a Jimmy Stewart–like stammer to charming effect. Instead of saying he was surprised, he might say, “I liked to fell over.” And he could cuss a blue streak when he wanted to, which was most of the time.
Harley’s size combined with his fierce competitive streak to make him a standout on the track team at USC, where his exploits—including a pole-vaulting record and a legendary errant hammer throw that caused spectators to dive for cover when it sailed beyond the field and into the grandstand—attracted the attention of the local press, giving him his first taste of celebrity.
Harley idolized DeMille and studied the way he carried himself. He admired the director’s panache, his confidence and sense of personal style, which often extended to wearing jodhpurs and carrying a riding crop while making a film. Harley, too, was a bit of a peacock, with a flair for the dramatic. But what bound the two men together ultimately was their shared love of automobiles. Like many early filmmakers, DeMille viewed them metaphorically, not as self-propelled conveyances but rather as expressions of mankind’s dreams and desires. It didn’t escape him that the motion picture and the motorcar were born in the same year, 1895, and the subsequent rise of both industries reflected, as he put it, “the love of motion and speed, the restless urge toward improvement and expansion, the kinetic energy of a young, vigorous nation.”
In some of the earliest motion pictures, automobiles drove the narrative, literally and figuratively. Biograph’s 1903 short Runaway Match, for example, depicted a young couple fleeing from a suburban mansion in a hired car and racing to the church pursued by the bride-to-be’s angry father in a chauffeur-driven limousine. In the decade that followed, dozens of “elopement” films showed “poor but worthy young men demonstrate their adaptability and vitality by hiring or borrowing motorcars in order to carry off the daughters of rich men,” according to a scholarly study of American films before 1921, published in Michigan Quarterly Review. In these films, “the motorcar itself has inspired temptation, freedom, status and a new identity,” the author wrote, noting that the title Runaway Match “reminds us of the match between what would become Hollywood and Detroit.” Harley and DeMille were the embodiment of that match, and their friendship honed Harley’s view that the automobile business was really just another form of show business.
Harley took a break from Earl Automobile Works in 1914, when J.W. sent him off to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, ostensibly to study law. He joined a fraternity and the rugby team, but his school year was interrupted. On October 8, his mother, Abbie, was coming out of gallbladder surgery in the hospital when suddenly she began coughing up copious amounts of blood from a clot that had developed in her lung. Within minutes, as J.W. looked on helplessly, she died. It was their son Billy’s sixth birthday. She was forty-one.
Harley returned to Stanford after his mother’s funeral but his mind was not on academics. In the course of a rugby game, he was badly cleated in the leg by an opposing player and the wound became infected, eventually developing into blood poisoning. Stanford put him on a train back home, where his condition worsened to the point that doctors were talking about amputating his leg. “But he fought it and wouldn’t let them,” his sister, Jessie, recalled decades later. “He came out of it all right but he lost practically a whole year.”
When his leg healed, he took another stab at Stanford, but once again troubling news from home distracted him from his studies. Business was still booming at Earl Automobile Works, but barely two years after Abbie’s death, J.W. was about to remarry. The bride-to-be, Nellie Mae Black, was a thirty-five-year-old widow who had traveled throughout South America with her late spouse and never tired of talking about it. According to Harley’s siblings and cousins, she was jealous of J.W.’s relationship with his children, especially eight-year-old Billy, whom she treated badly.
That clinched it for Harley, who doted on his baby brother. He dropped out of Stanford short of a degree and returned to Hollywood determined to help his father and family. He went back to the family business with a new energy and, thanks in part to Cecil B. DeMille, a clear-eyed view of his future.
He had pictures of cars in his head. He saw them in his dreams.
3
The Competitors
America’s carmakers turned out nearly two million vehicles in 1919, enough to make automobile manufacturing the nation’s number one industry, employing 651,000 people with wages topping $2 billion.
The person most responsible for those numbers was Henry Ford, whose Model T accounted for more than half of new car sales and as much as two-thirds of all cars on the road. At the dawn of the 1920s, Ford was the most important figure in the American industrial landscape, and not just because of his car.
In the years since he tested his first hand-built vehicle on the streets of Detroit, the former Michigan farmboy had transformed manufacturing. Building on Ransom Olds’s idea of a factory production line that passed in-process vehicles from workstation to workstation, Ford had overseen a years-long development of a motor-powered chain conveyor belt at
his sixty-acre Highland Park plant that moved chassis and body assemblies ceaselessly from worker to worker as a synchronized system of tributary conveyors fed component parts and subassemblies into the flow, resulting in an uninterrupted stream of completed cars rolling off the end of the mile-and-a-half-long line at the rate of one every twenty-four seconds.
Launched in 1914, the so-called endless chain assembly line was a breathtaking technological breakthrough that gave the Ford Motor Company a huge advantage over its competitors. It cut the company’s per-car production time by more than 90 percent, increased output tenfold, and made possible a price cut from $780 to $360. Henry Ford was so pleased with the achievement that he pledged to give everyone who purchased a Model T in 1915 a rebate if the company sold more than 300,000 cars. At year’s end, 308,313 customers received rebate checks totaling $15 million. The following year, 1916, the Highland Park plant produced 734,800 cars.
Ford knew from the start that his employees would likely resent the new production process. Up to that point, cars had been built by teams of skilled workers and craftsmen, with each team responsible for at least whole sections or component systems, if not entire vehicles. But the endless chain concept, in which each line worker performed a single repetitive task, would not only end the “organic unity of labor,” it would also put management in complete control of the pace of production, making workers, in effect, slaves to the relentless line.
So, in an effort to head off resistance from the factory floor, Ford announced that the company would begin paying workers $5.00 a day for an eight-hour shift. That amounted to more than double the standard industrial wage in America ($2.34 for a nine-hour shift) and equaled the weekly wage for a factory worker in England.
The new compensation policy and mass-production method—quickly dubbed “Fordism” by its critics—had an immediate and profound effect on the industry. To compete on price, other carmakers were compelled to adopt Ford’s practices, at great cost. Some companies went out of business; some managed to survive only by merging with others. Pioneering automotive names such as Duryea, Chalmers, Biscoe, Maxwell, and Winton passed into history as the number of U.S. automakers dropped from over 300 to less than 100.
At the same time, masses of unskilled workers from all over the United States, particularly the rural South, streamed into Detroit, doubling the population to nearly one million between 1914 and 1919, making it the fastest-growing city in the country. Twenty thousand workers found employment at the Dodge plant in Hamtramck, four miles from Highland Park, after brothers John and Horace began making their own cars in 1914. Hailed by the Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record as “the two best mechanics in Detroit,” the Dodges adopted many of Ford’s mass-production methods, but not the five-dollars-a-day pay policy, preferring a piece-rate system. They operated their factory in a somewhat more humane fashion than Ford’s, however, running the assembly line at a slower pace. They also maintained a free clinic on the premises with a full-time medical staff on duty around the clock, and even provided workers with cold beer on hot summer days.
The Dodges chose not to compete with Ford on price. Their debut offering was an $800 five-passenger touring car that featured the first-ever all-steel body and quickly earned a reputation for durability, thanks to the U.S. Army. During an expedition against Mexican bandit Pancho Villa in 1916, three Dodge touring cars participated in America’s first motorized military action when they carried a young army lieutenant named George S. Patton and fourteen other soldiers on a daring raid against a small contingent of Villa’s forces in Chihuahua. The running gun battle resulted in the death of three of Villa’s men, whose bodies Patton supposedly strapped to the hoods of the cars and drove back to the headquarters of his commander, Brigadier General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. The general was so impressed with the vehicles’ performance in battle that he subsequently requisitioned 250 of them for his staff officers to use on the battlefields in France during World War I, though he chose a Cadillac as his own official vehicle.
Weirdly, Villa died driving a Dodge seven years later when assassins riddled his roadster with bullets. The car survives to this day, bullet holes and all, on display at the Museo Histórico de la Revolución in Chihuahua.
The Dodge brothers became millionaires many times over and spent their nouveau riches as if trying to erase the memory of their boyhoods mired in barefoot poverty. Horace commissioned a 243-foot yacht, the largest private vessel on the Great Lakes; John built a $4 million Grosse Pointe mansion that boasted 110 rooms and 24 baths. They bought their way into Detroit high society by making large donations to the symphony orchestra and the state Republican Party, despite their hard-earned reputations for drunken, boorish behavior. John once forced a saloonkeeper to dance on the bar at the point of a pistol, smashing dozens of glasses against the mirror during the terrified man’s performance. On another occasion, he and a companion attacked a prominent attorney who had two wooden legs, knocking him to the ground and kicking him viciously.
The Dodge brothers never came close to threatening Ford’s preeminence. The Hamtramck plant produced 144,000 cars in 1920, the year both brothers contracted influenza while attending the National Auto Show in New York. John died a few days later at age fifty-five, but Horace remained chronically ill and despondent about his brother’s death, until he died of cirrhosis of the liver eleven months later at age fifty-two.
In the face of fast-rising Fordism, the Packard Motor Company, too, chose not to compete head-on with Ford, but rather to stick with the artisanal style of production practiced in Europe, where motor cars still were made almost exclusively for the wealthy. At Packard’s 3.5-million-square-foot plant on Detroit’s East Grand Boulevard—considered one of the wonders of the industrial age when it opened in 1903—teams of skilled mechanics and craftsmen continued to assemble cars largely by hand, incorporating beautifully sculpted bodies from the most prestigious coach builders in the country and lustrously finishing them with ten to twenty coats of hand-applied paint in rich colors that helped make every Packard a memorable work of art.
With the introduction of its Twin Six (twelve-cylinder) model in 1915, Packard firmly established its reputation as Detroit’s premier producer of luxury automobiles, ranking alongside Peerless Motors of Cleveland, Buffalo-based Pierce-Arrow, and Britain’s Rolls-Royce. Priced between $2,750 and $5,000, the 400-horsepower Twin Six was hardly a car for the multitudes. The doomed Russian czar Nicholas II was among the worldwide upper-class clientele that snapped Twin Sixes up as fast as they came out of the factory. Which was not very fast. Even with eleven thousand workers, the Packard plant produced only thirty-five thousand Twin Sixes between 1916 and 1923. During the same period, Ford manufactured nearly seven million Model Ts.
Obviously, Henry Ford didn’t lose any sleep over Packard or Dodge, or any of the other smaller manufacturers. While they were making thousands or tens of thousands of cars a year, he was thinking in terms of millions. The astonishing breadth and scope of his ambition could be seen in the new manufacturing facility he launched in 1920 on two thousand acres of bottomland at the confluence of the Rouge and Detroit Rivers in Dearborn. The Rouge River plant, or “the Rouge,” as it came to be known, was the linchpin in Ford’s plan to become totally self-sufficient in all aspects of carmaking. Toward that end, he acquired hundreds of thousands of acres of forests, iron mines, and limestone quarries in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin; coal mines in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; and a rubber plant in Brazil. The company’s own railroad and its fleet of Great Lakes freighters transported the natural resources to the Rouge, where 120 miles of conveyors fed it all into separate plants for making iron, glass, sheet metal, radiators, tires, transmissions, and engine blocks.
With 15 million square feet of floor space and more than eighty thousand employees, the Rouge’s various plants eventually manufactured virtually every part that went into making the Model T, leading automotive historian David L. Lewis to call Ford’s
monster facility “easily the greatest industrial domain in the world, without parallel in sheer mechanical efficiency.”
The massive industrial enterprise also produced one of the largest personal fortunes on earth. Henry Ford’s approximately 55 percent share of the company’s stock (the remainder was held by his wife, Clara, and son, Edsel) paid him annual dividends averaging $39 million, and his net worth was estimated at $1.2 billion. Not even John D. Rockefeller was richer.
By the early 1920s, the Ford Motor Company was approaching monopoly territory with an estimated 62 percent market share while its closest competitor, General Motors, held a mere 12 to 15 percent share. GM was the brainchild of William C. Durant, a charismatic businessman who turned to auto manufacturing in the early 1900s after building his Durant-Dort Carriage Company, based in Flint, Michigan, into the largest vehicle manufacturer in the United States. A multimillionaire at age forty, he was hailed as “the king of the carriage makers.”
Billy Durant was no less ambitious than Henry Ford. He, too, was a proponent of mass manufacturing and a firm believer in controlling every aspect of the process through ownership of key suppliers. But unlike Ford, whose company was based on producing a single, unchanging vehicle at the lowest possible price to consumers, Durant envisioned a car company that offered an array of makes and models at various prices. Toward that end he’d cobbled together a collection of formerly independent companies, beginning by taking over Buick in 1904 and then adding Oldsmobile, Oakland, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and half a dozen others that would not survive (Marquette, Ewing, Welch, Rapid, Sheridan, and Scripps-Booth). The auto “divisions” operated autonomously within the GM corporate structure, with their presidents reporting directly to Durant.