Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  Harley wasted no time turning Styling’s new home into a secure fortress. Each of the studios was kept locked at all times, and staff members were given keys only to their own studio, the idea being to prevent not only spying by other companies but also unauthorized creative cross-pollination among design teams, who were forbidden to even discuss their work with one another for fear it would lead to a creeping homogeneity, a visual sameness among the divisions. Sloan and Harley believed that GM cars needed to be so distinct from one another and the competition that a twelve-year-old kid would be able to tell from a block away whether it was a Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, or Cadillac coming down the street.

  Internal security was strictly enforced, with elevators stopping only on the eighth and eleventh floors, so that staffers who worked on the middle two floors had to enter and exit on the eleventh, where Harley stationed a “timekeeper” who took down names and had the authority to inspect packages and briefcases coming in or going out. Only Harley, with his master key, could enter any studio any time he wanted. Only he could take a sketch from the Pontiac studio over to the Buick studio and say, “I think you should try something like this.” He was the only one who knew what everyone was doing.

  Harley came through each studio regularly, if not every day, with no notice except for a phone call from a staffer in another studio warning that he was on the floor, in the hallway, headed in their direction. Then they’d hear his key in the lock, the design chief and his assistant would scramble to meet him at the door, and everyone else would look like they were busier than they’d ever been in their lives. Designer Gene Garfinkle described a typical Harley drop-by. “There would be guys drafting lines with the width of a 2H pencil—tenths of a millimeter wide on a full size drawing—and Earl might have been in the studio three nights before and asked if that fender line could be lowered a little. And as soon as he had that studio door open, I mean, you could hear his voice: ‘I thought I told you to lower that line.’ He could see it from 40 feet away. He knew exactly where that line was supposed to be; that was the sort of sensitivity he had.”

  Sometimes Harley would just wander through, looking over shoulders, examining sketches, checking progress on clay models, striking fear into their hearts without saying a word. If he did speak, it was either to the staff as a group or directly to the chief designer; he never addressed lower-ranked staffers individually. “It was like a caste system,” said Strother MacMinn. “Even if the designer in question was standing right there, he’d say [to the chief designer], ‘Ask him why he did that. Ask why he put this line on the side of the car?’ It was as if you did not exist.”

  Harley’s overall responsibilities were expanding rapidly. Sloan named him to the company’s new Engineering Policy Group, a committee composed of a dozen or so of GM’s highest corporate executives and board members. “It will give you more authority when you talk to the presidents of these different divisions,” Sloan told him. Chevrolet added trucks to his client list and Opel, GM’s German subsidiary, sought his help in developing a mini-car with a 75-inch wheelbase.

  His staff had grown to nearly two hundred at a time when the design departments at Ford and Chrysler employed no more than fifty between them. The Styling Section now included an interior department that focused on developing durable and attractive new fabrics and materials for dashboards, floor coverings, headliners, and upholstery, with the stated aim of fashioning passenger compartments as “harmonious and comfortable as a living room.” Styling’s color department had teams of experts that researched fashion trends and conducted extensive field surveys to track shifting color preferences among car buyers in all sections of the country. Their findings were regularly incorporated into a large wall map that showed a clear connection between color choices and climate, with black, dark grays, maroons, and dark blues favored in New England states, while lighter colors predominated in the South and California. The research also showed a correlation between color preferences and the economy.

  “During periods of reduced business activity, people seem to prefer dark colors, and they swing to lighter hues with the return of good times,” Harley said in a GM press release. Deep in the Depression, for example, black cars were the most popular. But as the economy gradually rebounded between 1933 and 1937, color choices lightened in lockstep with the improving public mood. “Certain gunmetal shades [of gray] have gone as high as thirty-five or forty percent of the total production,” he said. “This is quite significant because at no time in the history of painting automobiles has any color assumed so big a proportion of the total output.” Hinting at brighter days ahead, “Colors that have aluminum powder added to them, creating a somewhat metallic effect . . . have been growing in popularity steadily.”

  Styling’s clashes with division engineers decreased sharply after Harley staged what Alfred Sloan called “a dramatic demonstration” in the Styling Auditorium. Tired of constantly hearing it was structurally impossible to lower a car body to his specifications, Harley brought a Cadillac onto the stage and, in front of an audience that included the division presidents, chief engineers, and several members of the board of directors, he instructed two assistants to lift the body off the chassis. Donning protective masks, the men then cut the frame apart with acetylene torches and quickly welded it back together in such a way that the passenger compartment would sit cradled between the axles rather than on top of them. When the body was lowered back onto the chassis, it sat four inches closer to the floor than the unaltered car. “They had proved a point,” Sloan wrote in his memoir. “Not only could the body be lowered but, in its position, it looked one hundred percent better.”

  Harley had done more than prove a point; he had finally won the grudging respect of GM engineers. They may not have liked him any better than before, but his little display of showmanship told them that he knew what he was doing and had the full backing of upper management, so it was not in their interest to keep fighting him.

  The result was nothing short of a sea change. Aesthetics finally began to drive the design process as the engineers acceded to the stylists’ artistic visions by moving the engines forward, lowering the body profiles, and facilitating the development of a rear deck large enough to accommodate an integral trunk compartment that would hold a spare tire and luggage. The lowered bodies eliminated all rationale for vestigial running boards, which were relics from the days when passengers had to step up into carriages set high enough off the ground to navigate unpaved, rain-rutted roads.

  Harley forced his body engineers “to explore areas beyond what they considered to be feasible; that was part of his technique,” said Strother MacMinn, citing as an example the creation of what Harley called the “suitcase fender.” As drawn on paper and sculpted in clay, “the front well is very rounded and encases the wheel thoroughly. And as it goes back, it trails behind the wheel and goes downward on a slight angle, and when it gets to the limit of its length, where the door is, it drops vertically.” The engineers found it almost impossible to stamp that form in sheet metal in one piece, but Harley insisted on the design and pushed them to find a way to make it happen. “So they stamped it in three pieces and hand welded it,” MacMinn explained. “Which was acceptable to Cadillac engineering because they had a large number of craftsmen in the depths of the Depression and they wanted to keep them employed. So they were able to keep them fed, which was a good thing for loyalty and the development of the product, and it was a fender form that nobody else could imitate.”

  “It was his insistence on doing these things that brought them about,” said Clare MacKichan. “They didn’t happen because some inventor had this idea. He wanted that to happen. And what he wanted, he got. And in doing it, he developed a very inventive group of engineers.”

  Harley still had to sell Styling’s ideas to the division chiefs, however, and they weren’t always receptive. At a meeting with Chevrolet executives, he presented a front-end design featuring headlights that were “faired-in”
(streamlined) to the fenders rather than mounted separately on stanchions, which would have been a first for an American car. But the Chevy boys didn’t buy it.

  “There was Sloan, there was Knudsen, the Fisher brothers, and O. E. Hunt, the chief engineer, and I thought, ‘My God, wow!’” designer Bill Mitchell recalled. “O.E. was negative on that light in the fender because he said, ‘If you bump the fender, you’d throw the headlight out of kilter.’ Earl stood up, his belt buckle [level with] O.E.’s mouth—he’s that tall. And he looked down—he’d always look down at him—and he said, ‘O.E., why don’t you call me a son of a bitch? I could understand that.’ And he walked out of the studio quietly, and broke up the meeting.”

  Mitchell, who was just twenty-three at the time, couldn’t believe that anyone would dare to walk out on Sloan and Knudsen. “Oh, [Harley] was powerful,” he said. “God, I admired him. He’d just knocked the tar out of anybody.”

  Harley’s reputation within the industry grew as gifted designers left GM and went to work for other automakers, taking with them techniques they’d learned in his employ, tales of his temper, and portfolios stuffed with drawings that had failed to please him. Art and Colour alums Tom Tjaarda and Bob Gregorie worked in tandem on Edsel Ford’s 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, which caused a sensation at the New York Auto Show with its aerodynamic “streamline moderne” styling. Gordon Buehrig designed the classic 1936 Cord 810 at the Auburn Automotive Company from sketches he had done several years before for one of Harley’s periodic intramural competitions. Harley had tasked five design teams with producing a quarter-scale clay model of a futuristic four-door sedan, with an expenses-paid, weeklong, chauffeur-driven trip to the Chicago World’s Fair as the prize. Buehrig’s team, working from his sketches, submitted a model with a front end that featured hidden headlights and an unadorned coffin-shaped nose with low horizontal louvers but no grille. Buehrig said later that he was trying to show that, contrary to what Harley preached, the grille or “face” was not necessarily the most important part of a car’s design.

  It was not a winning strategy. In a straw vote among the teams, the Buehrig model came in first. But the panel of official judges, which included Harley and several of the Fisher brothers, ranked it last. Now, however, the car inspired by that rejected model was being heralded as a groundbreaking objet d’art, its blunt, grille-less coffin nose, horizontal hood louvers, and first-ever retractable headlights causing one automotive writer to rhapsodize, “For sheer taste, for functional correctness and for beauty, the 810 Cord is the best design the American industry has ever produced.”

  For a man as competitive as Harley, that had to sting, although he may have found some solace in the fact that the Cord was plagued by mechanical problems resulting from its being rushed into the marketplace, and its financially strapped manufacturer, Auburn, discontinued it in August 1937, having produced only 2,320 of the now legendary cars.

  Still, the fact remained that GM Styling didn’t produce anything as exciting as the Cord or the Zephyr in 1936 and 1937. So Harley had something to prove in 1938.

  For that model year, Cadillac was looking for a makeover on its Sixty series, which had been introduced two years earlier as an entry-level luxury sedan, priced at the low end of the Cadillac line, just a few hundred dollars more than the top-of-the-line Buick. With its good looks, new V-8 engine, and more affordable price, the Sixty had proven enormously successful, accounting for more than half of Cadillac’s production and helping to drive up the division’s sales by 254 percent.

  Cadillac general manager Nicholas Dreystadt wasn’t as focused on styling as his predecessor, Larry Fisher, and he was far more conservative. All he wanted was a face-lifted Sixty that would attract more first-time luxury buyers. Harley had something more ambitious in mind, however. Eager to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the Zephyr and the Cord, he and Bill Mitchell, whom he’d just promoted to chief designer for the Cadillac studio, came up with a prototype Sixty Special that featured a new body that sat three inches lower than any previous Cadillac (but with no less headroom), a first-ever rear-hinged, front-opening “alligator” hood, an extended curvilinear coupe-style rear deck never before seen on a sedan, and long suitcase fenders that were sculpted with trailing knife-blade edges that Mitchell likened to the look of “creased pants.” They slimmed down the traditionally bulky roof pillars and upper doorframes, allowing for more glass area and greater visibility, and banded the side windows with thin chrome strips that foreshadowed the “hardtop” look that would dominate the industry in the decades to come. They opted for minimal chrome body trim and, in another first for an American production (noncustom) car, eliminated running boards, making it possible for the body to be extended out almost to the width of the wheels, thereby providing extra interior room and comfort for up to six passengers.

  The prototype looked so unlike previous Cadillacs that some executives were concerned that they had gone too far. “I remember they had it all finished and were showing it in the auditorium and had the board and all the division heads there,” said Frank Hershey. “Harley had to sell it to the board of directors, and he wasn’t getting very far.”

  Dreystadt was among those who worried aloud that the new look was too radical for traditionally conservative Cadillac customers. “Sloan was supposed to be there, too, but he wasn’t for some reason,” Hershey recalled. “They all knew, though, that Sloan and Knudsen liked it.” The executives hemmed and hawed until Harley, in exasperation, played his trusty hole card. “Earl turned, put his hands on his hips, looked down at everybody and said, ‘Well, goddammit, gentlemen, what will I tell Mr. Sloan when he asks me?’ And that sold it in five minutes.”

  The Sixty Special quickly became Cadillac’s bestselling model, and over the next few years proved to be arguably the most stylistically influential car of the era. Still, Edsel Ford managed to score points against Harley in 1938. His restyled Lincoln Zephyr featured not only the in-fender headlights that Harley had failed to sell to his division chiefs but also the first-ever horizontal grille. By simply turning the ’36 Zephyr grille on its side and moving it down below the nose of the car to the so-called catwalk area between the headlights, Edsel’s designers forever changed the face of the American automobile.

  Harley and Frank Hershey were in Paris for the annual auto show when Hershey first saw the new Zephyr, which was making its debut at the event. He hurried back to their hotel to show pictures of the car to the boss, who studied them for a moment and said, “Aren’t they god-awful?” Hershey didn’t think so, and he was sure Harley didn’t either. “He wasn’t going to admit that Ford got one up on us.”

  Harley one-upped the entire industry the following year when he unveiled a singular car that was not intended for public sale and didn’t even have a proper name. Technically, it was a Buick. Harlow Curtice had provided the chassis and design budget, and Buick’s chief engineer, Charlie Chayne, was part of a small team that worked on it for eighteen months in a separate secured studio. They dubbed it the “Y Project” in an ironic nod to the experimental “X Projects” that proliferated in the automobile and aircraft industries, but Harley kept referring to it as the “Y-job,” and the name eventually stuck. It was to be his personal car, after all.

  “I just want a little semi-sports car, a kind of convertible,” he told the team at the outset, though he soon decided the Y-job would be a “boattail,” a body style defined by a rear deck that tapered to a prow point and long popular among wealthy custom car aficionados. Edsel Ford and Packard design chief Ed Macauley drove boattail roadsters created by their styling staffs; Errol Flynn and Marlene Dietrich tooled around Hollywood in limited-production Auburn Speedsters, the most flamboyant of the boattail breed.

  The Speedster was Harley’s kind of car—low-slung, with a long, narrow hood that radiated power, four chrome exhaust pipes snaking out of the engine compartment into the front fenders, and a raked V-type windshield that made it appear to be speeding even when standing still. D
esigned by Gordon Buehrig, it was a car that demanded to be noticed. But it was also a car of the past, with a vertical grille and headlights mounted on stanchions—beautifully designed, classic, and outdated. The Indiana-based Duesenberg-Auburn-Cord Company sold fewer than two hundred Speedsters between 1935 and 1937, when it went out of business.

  Harley wanted the Y-job to be a car of the future. Toward that end, he pushed the team relentlessly to come up with styling and mechanical features that hadn’t been seen or even imagined before, a process so arduous and frustrating at times that they began calling it the “Why job.” But the result was a masterpiece of innovation.

  Completed in late 1938 at a cost of about $50,000 (twenty times the purchase price of a Speedster), the Y-job boasted a long list of firsts that included a power-operated soft top that stowed beneath a hinged rear-deck panel, power windows, push-button outer door handles, retractable headlights that opened and closed like human eyelids at the turn of a dashboard switch, and front fenders that flowed back through the doors. Between its broad horizontal grille and tapered tail, the car stretched more than 17 feet yet stood only 58 inches high at the top of the windshield (the same as the Speedster). Harley looked like a giant standing next to it. That he could climb in and out with ease was a testament to the underlying engineering. The glossy black finish seemed at odds with his love of bright colors, but it lent a look of sophistication that other sports cars lacked. The Y-job was an exquisitely tailored tuxedo to the Speedster’s flashy Hawaiian shirt.

  At some point in the design process, Harley discussed with Sloan and Harlow Curtice the idea of giving the Y-job a broader purpose, of using it as the basis of an ongoing program to test styling concepts with consumers far in advance of production. Most car buyers didn’t know exactly what they wanted until they saw it sitting in front of them; that’s why millions of them packed the auto shows every year. But if the Y-job and other GM “cars of the future” toured the show circuit, Harley reasoned, then attendees could see what might be available several years down the road and the company could log their reactions before it spent tens of millions of dollars retooling factories to build a car, or thousands of cars, the public might reject.