Cowboy star Tom Mix had an income of $17,500 a week and a reputation for profligacy that put his peers to shame. The former ranch hand rarely ventured into public view without donning his signature high-peaked white felt Stetson and full cowboy regalia, and he wanted a car that lived up to his image. So he asked Harley to rustle him up a white roadster with a silver-studded western saddle designed into the hood. None would call it classy, but the car served Mix’s purpose. “They use them for publicity, you know,” Harley once said in an attempt to explain his famous customers’ idiosyncratic styling choices. (Twenty years later, Mix was at the wheel of his prized yellow Cord convertible when it ran off the road and flipped over on a stretch of Arizona highway. A suitcase filled with cash and jewelry dislodged from the backseat and struck him in the head. He reportedly climbed from the wreckage, took two steps, and dropped dead from a broken neck.)
Publicity cut both ways, of course. Comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose million-dollar-a-year studio contract made him the highest-paid performer in Hollywood, ordered three cars from Harley, including a Pierce-Arrow-based seven-passenger touring car with a frame cast in bronze, an iridescent blue-purple paint job, and white tires that measured four feet in diameter. Like its owner, the car was outsized—seven feet high, with a 168-inch wheelbase and an 825-cubic-inch engine. The gray leather interior had inlaid mahogany cabinetry and a secret compartment under the rear footrest for hiding now federally prohibited alcohol. But it did not contain, as was rumored at the time, a bathroom.
The Arbuckle Pierce-Arrow took nearly a year to complete—six weeks just for the twenty-one coats of paint—but it quickly became the most talked-about car in Hollywood, if not America, and Harley made sure the name of its designer appeared in the captions of newspaper photographs. “I guess altogether Arbuckle must have sold 100 cars for me,” he recalled later. (Arbuckle had to sell the car to help pay his legal bills when he was charged with manslaughter in the death of actress Virginia Rappe, who died of a ruptured bladder following a wild party in his San Francisco hotel suite. After three sensational trials, the comedian was acquitted in April 1922, but the scandal killed his career.)
Actresses Pauline Frederick, Ann May, Blanche Sweet, Viola Dana, and Mary Miles Minter soon joined Harley’s client roster, as did Wallace Reid, the silent screen’s reigning heartthrob. A onetime writer for Motor magazine and an aspiring race driver, Reid starred in four car-racing movies between 1919 and 1921—The Roaring Road, Double Speed, Excuse My Dust, and Too Much Speed. He owned a series of high-powered, high-priced cars, including several Marmons, a Duesenberg, two McFarlans (known as “the American Rolls-Royce”), and a sleek Stutz that sported a robin’s egg blue paint job and a horn that sounded out “Yankee Doodle.”
Reid had a reputation for reckless driving. After a night of drinking in 1915, he totaled his Marmon when he crashed into a car carrying a family of five on the Pacific Coast Highway, killing the father and seriously injuring the mother and one child. His passenger, movie producer and director Thomas Ince, sustained a broken collarbone and internal injuries. Suffering only minor injuries, Reid was jailed and charged with manslaughter, but D. W. Griffith bailed him out and a grand jury ultimately failed to indict him. Eight years later, at the age of thirty-one, Reid died from the effects of alcohol and morphine addiction.
All in all, they were a young and fast crowd that brought a lot of excitement and attention to Harley’s business. But his most valued celebrity patron continued to be his old friend and show business mentor, Cecil B. DeMille, for whom he designed a body for a Locomobile chassis the director had purchased for $12,500. Favored by East Coast aristocracy, Locomobiles were considered the best-built cars in America, each one made to order by a team of six highly trained mechanics that went through the company’s factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, selected the needed parts, and then assembled it by hand. DeMille’s chassis originally was intended for a Locomobile the U.S. Army ordered for General Pershing to drive in France, but World War I ended before the chassis and body were joined. Although DeMille famously maintained a fleet of vehicles, he made sure everyone in Hollywood knew the Earl-designed Locomobile was his favorite, proudly driving it along Sunset Boulevard every day on his way to and from the studio.
In the first year of running his own operation at Don Lee, Harley oversaw the design of three hundred car bodies. His reputation spread beyond California as the dealership began exhibiting his works at auto shows around the country, where the cars were noted for their “raked” windshields, side-mounted extra wheels, and bright two- and three-tone paint jobs. His designs “rarely showed reserve or restraint,” according to automotive historian Michael Lamm. “What they did show was a certain sporting flair and a lot of good-humored self-confidence which was a fairly accurate mirror of the designer himself.”
Life was good for Harley and his wife, Sue. They were building a country English-style house on a hilltop lot they bought from DeMille, whose gated mansion was a few hundred yards down the street. They became members of the Los Angeles Country Club, where Harley played golf several times a week, for pleasure and business. In the winter of 1922, he got a phone call from Andy Baldwin, a fellow club member who had been a classmate of his at Stanford.
“Could you have lunch and play golf at the club the day after tomorrow?” Baldwin asked. “I have a competitor of yours coming out from the East.”
“Fine. Who is it?” Harley asked.
“You’ll see,” Baldwin replied.
Baldwin introduced him to his mystery guest at the clubhouse two days later. It was Fred Fisher. “Well, I liked to fell over,” Harley recalled. “Competitor! I had this little hole-in-the-wall with about 400–500 men and he was, of course, the head of the fabulous Fisher brothers.”
Fred and his brothers had turned a $30,000 loan from their uncle into the world’s most successful coach-building company, with more than sixty plants now producing nearly half a million car bodies a year for General Motors. He and Harley played golf together several times a week for the duration of Fred’s five-week winter vacation, and continued the practice every year for the next three years.
Harley and Sue completed their house and bought the lot next door for her parents to build a home. Sue gave birth to their first child, a boy they named William Orville after Harley’s little brother. And business continued to boom, as the dutiful Los Angeles Times reported: “Manager Harley Earl of the Don Lee Coach and Body Works has increased his force in the paint and top departments and is now in a position to handle sixty per cent more business.”
In the summer of 1925, Don Lee placed an order with the Cadillac factory in Detroit for 100 chassis. The plan was to use them with a series of five-passenger sedan bodies that Harley would design. But the unusually large order attracted the attention of Cadillac’s new president, Lawrence P. Fisher, who decided that before he shipped that many chassis to the West Coast he wanted to go out there and see what was going on.
The Fishers were a tight-knit band—fiercely loyal to one another and devoted to their widowed mother, sober, conservative, fervently Catholic, and faithfully married. Except for Larry. The fourth-oldest, he was the gregarious fun-loving Fisher, a committed bachelor known for his sartorial flamboyance (compared to his dark-suited, homburg-wearing brothers at least), his raucous nights on the town, and his lavish, sometimes days-long parties at his 22,000-square-foot waterfront mansion, Gray-haven, which had a boathouse big enough to entirely enclose his 110-foot yacht. He was, in modern parlance, a player. As an unidentified Fisher family friend told Michael Lamm, “He once chartered a couple of private railway cars, loaded them with champagne and broads and went off to Chicago for a big hairy weekend. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
At the same time, Larry was perhaps the brightest and most capable of the brothers. As head of the Cadillac division, Fisher faced a pressing problem in 1925: Packard had just blown by Cadillac to become the bestselling luxury car in America. He believed the reas
on was styling. Why else would Packard, with no better engineering and a much higher price, be outselling his brand by a margin of two to one? He shared Alfred Sloan’s opinion that under the aegis of Fisher Body, GM cars had become stodgy-looking, unimaginative, and boring.
Fisher’s trip to California that December turned out to be one he would never forget. For starters, Don Lee and Harley Earl set up a series of social events and parties in his honor that featured an ample supply of bootleg booze and beautiful starlets. At one such soiree, Harley and Fisher were drinking and talking about automobile styling when Harley supposedly boasted, “I can make a car for you, like your Chevrolet, look like a Cadillac.”
That wasn’t exactly the solution to Fisher’s problem; he needed a Cadillac that looked like a Packard. But he liked Harley’s cocksureness. “If you can do that,” he replied, “you’ve got yourself a job.”
A subsequent visit to Don Lee Coach and Body Works convinced Fisher that Harley could indeed do what needed to be done. He was particularly impressed with Harley’s use of modeling clay to build full-scale models of cars that were painted and trimmed in such detail they looked as if you could open the door, climb in, and drive off. In all his years in coach building, Fisher had never seen anything like them.
Fisher came back from California with a glowing report on Harley’s operation. In addition to the clay modeling, “Mr. Fisher saw Mr. Earl lengthen a wheelbase by cutting the frame and inserting an extra piece,” Alfred Sloan recalled in his memoir. “The result was a long, low custom body that pleased many famous screen personalities.
“Also [Mr. Earl] was designing the complete automobile, shaping the body, hood, fenders, headlights, and running boards and blending them together into a good looking whole. This, too, was a novel technique.”
GM’s Cadillac division was on track to introduce a new car in 1927, the LaSalle, named after the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The car was envisioned as a smaller, lighter Cadillac that would appeal to a younger buyer. Powered by a 75-horsepower, 303-cubic-inch V-8 engine, the “blood brother to the Cadillac” would be priced between $2,500 and $2,700, which placed it strategically between the lowest-priced Cadillac and the highest-priced Buick, where it was expected to compete directly with the Packard Six. The only thing that hadn’t been settled on was the body. As Sloan described it, “The idea was to approach the design with a new concept in mind: that of unifying the various parts of the car from the standpoint of appearance, of rounding off sharp corners and lowering the silhouette. We wanted a production automobile that was as beautiful as the custom cars of the period.” But GM’s in-house body men had fallen short.
“Up until this time, Fisher Body Division had been the absolute dictators of body design and zealously guarded their prerogative,” recalled Ernest Seaholm, Cadillac’s chief engineer from 1921 to 1943. “Theirs was a simple approach—a full-size line drawing on a blackboard, take it or leave it.”
For the first time, Alfred Sloan and Larry Fisher chose to leave it. With Sloan’s approval, Fisher called Harley in Los Angeles just before Christmas and asked whether he’d like to try his hand at designing the new line of cars. Fisher had already taken the liberty of calling Don Lee and arranging for Harley to take a three-month leave of absence from his duties at Lee’s Coach and Body Works.
On January 6, 1926, Harley boarded a train for his first trip to the car capital. When he arrived, he was taken to a body shop in the back of the Cadillac factory on Clark Avenue and introduced to the team of men Fisher had assigned to help him—two Cadillac “body engineers” and a master woodworker and clay modeler. Ninety days was not much time to design a new line of cars, so Harley turned for inspiration to a Spanish-French luxury car that cost six times what GM planned to charge for the LaSalle.
“The Hispano-Suiza was the apple of my eye,” he told the Detroit Free Press later. “All the chic people who appreciated cars drove Hispanos.” He borrowed heavily from the car’s design, particularly the front end with its distinctive radiator and winged hood ornament, admitting, “I stole a lot of stuff. You could tell I was looking at a Hispano.”
Working from sketches, he came up with a single design for four different body types—a roadster with a rumble seat, a convertible coupe, an open touring car, and a sedan—and built a full-size clay model of each, forgoing his signature bright colors in favor of basic black.
On the day of the unveiling, Fred and Larry Fisher came to the Cadillac plant to look at the models first. They returned later with Alfred Sloan, who had come from GM’s New York headquarters, where he spent most of his time, and other members of the GM executive committee, including Charles Kettering. Harley stood off to the side and watched nervously while the group examined the work and talked in low tones. As he recalled the scene, “They walked around and around the models and finally Mr. Sloan said to the Fishers, ‘Get Earl over here so everyone can meet him.’ Then he said, ‘Earl, I thought you’d like to know that your design has been accepted.’
“I was just like a quarterback who has just thrown a pass for a touchdown. It gives you a sense of confidence you’ve never had before. Mr. Sloan said, ‘Larry, I think we should send Mr. Earl to the Paris Auto Show.’ Fisher replied, ‘Mr. Sloan, I already have his ticket.’”
Sloan sailed to Europe with Earl, and by the time they got to Paris the two men had bonded, which was surprising given that they seemed to have so little in common. Having attended prep school at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in only three years, Sloan was the quintessential nerd, a “prissy” kid who grew into a prissy adult, in the words of one biographer. The New York Times described him as “a functional, frill-less man” who rarely drank, seldom socialized, never played golf or engaged in any sports because he thought they were “a waste of a man’s time,” and often ate lunch alone in his office, consuming “a homemade sandwich, which he had brought with him, neatly wrapped in paper, in his coat pocket.” He was cautious, solemn, and reserved to the point that his GM colleagues nicknamed him “Silent Sloan,” and the closest he ever came to swearing was occasionally blurting out the euphemism “horse apples.” He had a genius for organization but nary an artistic bone in his body. No one ever called him a showman.
Sloan did have one thing in common with Harley, however. He, too, was a dandy, though his sartorial style was as different from Harley’s as the East Coast was from the West. The New York Times noted that Sloan’s daily business attire consisted of “a dark, double-breasted suit, a high starch collar, conservative tie fixed with a pearl stickpin, a handkerchief cascading out of his breast pocket, and spats.”
After Paris, Harley returned to Los Angeles and resumed his duties at Don Lee Coach and Body while GM began the tooling, manufacturing, and assembly processes that would turn his clay models into the real thing. A month later, in May 1926, he was out on the golf course when he was told there was a phone call for him in the clubhouse, from a Mr. Sloan in New York.
Sloan had Fred and Larry Fisher in his office and they wanted to know if Harley would be interested in consulting on the design for the 1928 Cadillac and maybe even GM’s other divisions. If so, they’d like him to come to New York for discussions at his earliest convenience. Earl was on the train the next day. Four days later in Sloan’s office, Sloan and the two Fishers broached the idea of establishing a corporate styling department at GM, with him in charge. What did he think of that? “I think it’s a great idea,” Harley replied. “Then we’ll do it,” Sloan said.
Despite the understanding that Harley would be joining the GM organization, they initially played it publicly as another temporary consulting assignment with Cadillac. Back in Los Angeles, Harley asked for and was granted a six-month leave of absence from Don Lee Coach and Body Works, and the company clearly expected him to return at the end of that time. He would be gone at least until November, reported the Los Angeles Times, which couldn’t resist
engaging in a little local boosterism. “Earl will not admit that Detroit can equal Los Angeles as a place to live, but he does admit that his work at the Cadillac factory . . . is interesting in the extreme,” the newspaper reported, adding, “But they are betting at Don Lee’s that he will head back for Los Angeles when snow begins to fly in Detroit streets.”
Harley had no intention of ever going back to his “little hole-in-the-wall.” In June, he boarded the California Limited with Sue and Billy. They posed for a family picture on the train’s rear platform, waving goodbye to Los Angeles. It had been nearly three-quarters of a century since his Detroit-born grandmother, Mary Hazard Taft, crossed the country in a covered wagon, a difficult, dangerous journey that took eighteen months. The Earl family made the trip back in three days, in the comfort and security of a Pullman sleeper and club car. When they arrived at Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, they were driven directly to their new home—Larry Fisher’s luxurious penthouse suite at the Whittier Hotel, overlooking the Detroit River and Canada beyond.
Harley spent the next six months in the relative seclusion of the Cadillac experimental body department on Clark Avenue, several miles from GM headquarters, working with Cadillac’s executives and body engineers on the design of the 1928 models. “When we got to Detroit, [Larry] Fisher told them, ‘Write it all down for him, every detail, and tell him to interpret what we say,’” Harley recalled. “That was rather like saying to an architect, ‘Here, fellow, you’ve just fallen into some money. Start building your dream.’”
It was too late in the process for Harley to have any real impact on the body design for the 1927 Cadillac models, which were set to debut at the New York Auto Show in January. But Fisher showed him the sketches anyway and asked, “What can we do with these cars?” Harley responded, “Let’s paint them up so they look like something. Put a lot of color and some wire wheels on them and doll them up.”
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