In the basement of the farmhouse, two designers, three modelers, and a sculptor began turning Hershey’s sketches into three dimensions on a quarter-size clay model. “We would lay out ideas on the board, and Harley would come out and we’d make changes,” Hershey said. “He came out all the time.” When the strike ended in March 1946—with the union agreeing to an 18.5 percent pay increase—the work was transferred to the Styling studios, where Harley, Hershey, and Bill Mitchell agreed that Cadillac, the company’s traditional style leader, should get the first fins treatment.
With the exception of Studebaker, carmakers decided not to introduce fully redesigned new models in 1946, 1947, and 1948, but to offer instead face-lifted versions of their 1942 models, which had barely hit the showrooms when the production ban went into effect. It wasn’t a tough call. GM put the cost of reconverting its factories to passenger car production at $700 million, with a three-year timetable for reaching full capacity. The wisdom of the decision was borne out when car-starved consumers began gobbling up every made-over ’42 model the manufacturers produced, oftentimes paying extortionate fees to dealers above and beyond the company-suggested purchase price.
The hopped-up demand helped kill the Cadet because it backed up the opinion of the naysayers on the GM executive committee who had argued that the smaller car wasn’t needed and would only displace sales of the company’s larger, more profitable models. “The proposed Chevrolet lighter car project has been indefinitely deferred,” the company announced, citing its “desire to devote all of the productive facilities and available materials of the Chevrolet Motor Division to meet the overwhelming demands of the motoring public for the established line of Chevrolet vehicles.” The four Cadet prototypes Styling helped build were scrapped, and the work product “was simply locked away and forgotten . . . written out of GM’s and Chevrolet’s history,” in the words of journalist Karl Ludvigsen.
It wasn’t a time for looking back. The United States had emerged from the most violent and destructive event in human history as the most powerful nation on earth. As British historian Robert Payne wrote after a 1948 trip to America, “She sits bestride the world like a Colossus; no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations. . . . Half of the wealth of the world, more than half of the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world machines are concentrated in American hands; the rest of the world lies in the shadow of American industry.”
As Detroit’s car-making machinery roared back to life, the captains of steel, oil, rubber, and glass were licking their chops. “Never in all the history of Christendom had there been such a rich market awaiting businessmen,” said author Ed Cray.
And never had a company been in a more enviable position than General Motors. As the top industrial contributor to the war effort, the company was now the preeminent member of America’s budding military-industrial complex, with significant manufacturing assets in Great Britain and Germany, whose economies were about to receive $12 billion in U.S. aid through the Marshall Plan. In the automotive arena, GM had no serious competitor anywhere in the world. Its traditional archrival, Ford, had limped from the war a shell of its former self. Having failed to turn a profit for fourteen years, the once supreme carmaker was losing $10 million a month and hemorrhaging experienced executives, including Edsel’s longtime confidant and styling collaborator Bob Gregorie, whose abrupt resignation left the new twenty-six-year-old CEO, Henry II, without a design chief as he struggled to breathe life back into the nearly moribund company. According to Ford family biographer Richard Bak, morale at Ford “was lower than the keels of the lake carriers hauling iron ore to the Rouge.”
The atmosphere at GM was euphoric by comparison, particularly in the Cadillac division, which saw sales more than double between 1946 and 1947, with orders for 96,000 more cars than the factory was able to produce. “Cadillac fever is of epic proportions,” declared automotive writer Eugene Jaderquist, who reported that in Los Angeles the chic Sunset Boulevard nightclub Ciro’s had reserved its main parking lot for Cadillacs only, and dealerships were experiencing a new phenomenon called “the pool” in which a handful of people chipped in to buy a single Cadillac. “Ownership rests with the group as a whole, but actual use of the car rotates in whatever manner the members have been able to agree upon.” In other words, a Cadillac timeshare.
“As far as can be discovered, only Cadillac enjoys this tribute,” Jaderquist said. “Pools don’t consider the big Chryslers, Lincolns or Packards.”
In Detroit and New York, meanwhile, GM executives were discovering they could buy a Cadillac at cost from the company, drive it for a year, and then sell it for more than they paid for it. Fortune magazine reported that Cadillac’s growing popularity persuaded the corporation to pour more money into its luxury line, reasoning that “if there were going to be more customers than cars, they might as well be generous with the division that could return the most dollars per pound of steel.” At some point the decision was made to move up the introduction of the first fully redesigned postwar Cadillacs to 1948, ahead of the rest of the industry.
All of which helped create a higher-than-usual level of curiosity at GM’s Detroit headquarters about what the Cadillac styling team was doing behind their locked studio doors. The few executives who were given a peek came away with mixed opinions. President Charles Wilson liked Hershey’s fins, but Cadillac general manager Nicholas Dreystadt, predictably, did not. Dreystadt, however, soon was promoted to general manager of GM’s largest division, Chevrolet, and the man who replaced him, John Gordon, was younger and more open-minded. When Bill Mitchell invited Gordon into the studio to see a full-scale clay model, Gordon brought along Cadillac’s chief engineer, Ed Cole, who liked the fins. But Gordon wasn’t sure. He supposedly sat on an overturned wastebasket and stared at them in silence for ten minutes. Finally, he shook his head and said, “Too tall,” suggesting they cut three-quarters of an inch off the top. According to Michael Lamm, Cole stayed behind after Gordon left and agreed with Mitchell that the fins were just right. So Mitchell instructed his clay modeler “to make the far fin an inch or so taller than the one nearer the viewer. Next day, when Gordon returned, he said, ‘See, didn’t I tell you it looks better lower like that?’”
Harley was ambivalent. He had encouraged the tail fins concept from the beginning. He appreciated the creative spark that caused a young designer to look at a warplane and see nature and then translate it into the rear fender on a car. He also knew that tail fins were a big idea, which worried him a little. What if they were too much of a stylistic leap for motorists to make? He’d never forgotten the experience of the “pregnant Buick.” He was concerned, too, about his in-house audience, members of the executive committee and board of directors whose opinions would be solicited and taken into account before the car was finally approved for production.
With Harley’s idiosyncratic guidance, a consensus clay model gradually emerged. The front end featured a subtle redesign of the so-called egg-crate grille that had come to identify a Cadillac in the 1940s—wide, horizontal, with crisscrossed chrome slats that created an architectural aspect, “like a Wilshire Boulevard building,” according to Strother MacMinn, or, as Bob Gregorie saw it, “the public library in Washington, with pillars.” Harley wanted the new front end to retain that strong Cadillac identity and at the same time be “more Tiffany,” he instructed, more “jewel-like,” and either “radically elegant” or “elegantly radical.” Apparently, the design team knew how to express that in metal.
The model’s back end was the pièce de résistance. The trend in postwar car design was toward an “envelope”-style body, which eliminated the traditional “applied” (nonintegrated) fenders of the late 1930s in favor of a full-width body that encapsulated and partially concealed the wheels. To better integrate Hershey’s fins, however, the design team retained a modified version of applied fenders, which “made the back of the car look muscular,” acc
ording to Michael Lamm, “like the rear haunch of a crouching animal getting ready to leap.”
The ultimate corporate approval of the ’48 fins may have come when a group of GM executives gathered to watch two prototypes being put through their paces at the Milford Proving Grounds. As the story goes, Alfred Sloan called Cadillac general manager John Gordon to his side, squeezed his arm, and said, “Now, Jack, you have a Cadillac in the rear as well as the front.”
The whole process had been a boyhood dream come true for Hershey. He liked to tell the story of how his mother, Clara, a Detroit socialite, had purchased the third Cadillac that came off the assembly line in 1903 and how company founder Henry Leland had lent her his chauffeur to teach her how to drive it. His mother’s 1918 Cadillac phaeton was the first car he ever sketched, and when she sold it he was so upset that he made a vow to himself that he would one day design Cadillacs. Now he was.
When the styling work was finished on the ’48 models, Hershey threw a party at his farm for the entire Styling staff, and Harley was among the few who didn’t come. The mood was jubilant as they joined in the preparation of an elaborate Italian meal in the large country kitchen and consumed a copious quantity of red wine. After dinner, a small group that included design chief Julio Andrade wandered out back to an old sheep shed, which Hershey had converted into a private studio where he was doing some commercial design work on the side. “It had nothing at all to do with automobiles,” he explained later. “It was decorative brass and copper ware.”
That didn’t matter. They all knew GM had a strict policy against operating an outside business. There was only one exception to the rule: Harley had recently been granted permission to set up his own independent design company, the Harley Earl Corporation, under the provision that it would not compete directly with any GM division or subsidiary. The unique perquisite came in response to rumors, possibly spread by Harley, that Ford had approached him about becoming its head of design.
Andrade was one of the original Art and Colour team in the late 1920s, along with Hershey and a few others. For whatever reason, he ratted Hershey out on the sheep-shed design business. Shortly thereafter, Harley’s assistant Howard O’Leary called Hershey and told him bluntly, “Frank, you’re fired.” Hershey was hurt and angry but blamed himself. “I was working so hard on my own business that I wasn’t very much good to GM,” he said later, adding, “It was a stupid thing to do.”
He was still nursing his wounds a few months later when O’Leary called again and invited him to lunch at the Recess Club, a male members–only restaurant on the eleventh floor of the Fisher Building, the famed art deco skyscraper built by the brothers in 1928. “Harley feels very bad and he wants you to come back; he wants you to run his private industrial-design business,” O’Leary said, explaining that it would only be for a couple of years and then he could return to the Styling Section, where he would probably be first in line for the job of chief designer for the whole department and, eventually, for a vice presidency. Hershey was surprised and tempted, but not enough. “I just got out of bed with him,” he said. “I don’t want to get into bed with him again.”
“That was a mistake,” he said years later. “I should have taken it.”
13
Designing the Future
As Harley Earl marked his twentieth anniversary with GM in the summer of 1947, the Cadillac plant on Detroit’s Clark Avenue was gearing up to begin assembling America’s first production cars with tail fins.
Harley wasn’t focused on the ’48 models, however, or the ’49s either, because the major styling work on them had been completed. His mind was fixed on cars the public wouldn’t see until 1950 at the earliest—in particular, an experimental vehicle that was being developed in what he called his “hatchery,” a top-secret studio with blacked-out windows and a misleading sign on the door to fool any interlopers. Only a handful of his most trusted designers were allowed access.
Code-named the XP-8, the vehicle amounted to little more than a grand idea at that point, “a car to show the world the promise of the future,” as Michael Lamm put it. But Harlow Curtice, who had just been elevated to executive vice president of the corporation, believed that nobody could dream a car like Harley, so he’d agreed to finance the project to the tune of half a million dollars, or roughly ten times what he put up for the Y-job.
Harley’s stock at the company had never been higher, as evidenced by the fact that after the executive committee allowed him to set up his own design company on the side, they let him hire Bill Mitchell, Cadillac’s chief of design, to run it. Harley was earning more than $200,000 a year in salary and bonuses, with untaxed perks that included the use of company airplanes, the choice of any GM car he wanted, built to his specifications and maintained by a company mechanic, annual summer cruises to the Caribbean on Alfred Sloan’s yacht, and extended trips to Europe every spring—primarily to attend the auto shows, but Sue always went along.
The Styling Section ranked as the largest and most successful industrial-design operation in the country, maybe the world. Its roster of in-house clients now included GM’s Frigidaire home appliance division, which effectively extended Harley’s design sensibility beyond the nation’s garages and into its kitchens and laundry rooms. One team of stylists and interior specialists had just designed a new passenger train for GM’s Electro-Motive division, which manufactured diesel locomotives.
Conceived as a promotional tool, the train took two years to build and consisted of four elegantly appointed cars, each topped with a laminated glass canopy, called an “Astrodome,” the safety of which had been “tested in the windshields of thousands of bullet-swept warplanes,” according to a GM brochure. The Sky View dining car provided “all the advantages of roof garden dining,” the brochure boasted, while the Moon Glow observation car offered two cocktail lounges that were “furnished much like their counterparts in the smart supper clubs and hotels.” In addition to the interior design, the Styling team created a striking deep blue-green exterior color scheme for the diesel locomotive and four domed cars, which embarked on a barnstorming tour through 180 cities in the United States and Canada in March 1947, billed as the “Train of Tomorrow.” Nearly 6 million people either rode or walked through the train over a twenty-eight-month period.
Harley never stopped thinking about the future, and perhaps no single endeavor took up more of his attention in the postwar years than the plans for GM’s Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. His role in the project was set down in December 1944, when Alfred Sloan called him and Charles Kettering together for an 8:00 a.m. meeting in Sloan’s New York office. They needed to decide on an architect and submit their recommendation to the executive committee for approval at 9:00 a.m.
Sloan’s secretary, Alice Goodson, transcribed their conversation for posterity and her notes may have captured more than any of them intended as the three old friends discussed the future of the company they had worked decades to build. They were barely seated when Kettering blurted out, “I think there is no better candidate than Albert Kahn. Let’s just say to the committee that he’s our choice. They won’t argue. They all know Kahn. They like his work; it’s the best this country has to offer.”
Kahn was a logical choice, and a predictable one. The leading industrial architect of the day, he had built many of Detroit’s most notable structures, including the Packard plant, Ford’s Highland Park factory, the Fisher Building, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Edsel and Eleanor Ford’s mansion at Gaukler Point on Lake St. Clair, and GM’s own fifteen-story Detroit headquarters.
Agreeing that Kahn was a “marvelous” candidate, Sloan nonetheless urged, “Let’s let Harley tell us his findings.” Harley started to explain how he and an associate had consulted with deans of the leading universities noted for their architectural programs, including both Sloan’s and Kettering’s alma maters, MIT and Ohio State, respectively, but Kettering cut him off.
“You see, fellas, this is the problem to me,” he sai
d. “We are trying to find an architect when we’ve got one here who is the best in the world, and we know what his buildings are like; we work in them. I am worried we’re going to get some fancy guy who will make us pay a fortune and he will come up with fancy buildings. We don’t need fancy, Harley.”
“Ket, I don’t want fancy, dammit,” Harley responded. “I want significant. I want those fellas at Ford and Packard and Chrysler to just be bowled over when they see what we did. And I want it to be the symbol of General Motors in the future. We keep showing this building we’re in now as ‘The General Motors building’—solid, sturdy, strong, like some New York bank. But Christ, we are not a bank. We are going to be the guys who shape the future. I think these buildings should give out that feeling to the press and the customers and to our people. Don’t put ’em in a bank, Ket.”
Sloan asked if Frank Lloyd Wright’s name had come up in the discussions with the deans. It had, Harley said, “but no one had him high on the list, mostly because he is so difficult to work with. He’s a tough old bird. Maybe they thought he and I would be a bad combination. I have a reputation for being a bit opinionated and headstrong.” Sloan chuckled. “Why Harley, where would they ever get that idea?”
Harley said he favored a different local architect, Finnish-born Eliel Saarinen, who had designed the renowned Cranbrook Schools campus in nearby Bloomfield Hills, where he served as president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and headed the graduate department of architecture and city planning.
Kettering scoffed: “A fellow who did a bunch of classroom buildings at Cranbrook is not prepared to design complex laboratories. . . . Saarinen wouldn’t know beans about that kind of building inside.” Harley countered that Kahn specialized in “very traditional buildings” but the Tech Center called for “something progressive rather than older.” They went back and forth until Harley finally pushed the button that always worked with Sloan. “God, Alfie, we can’t do something that looks old today,” he said. “You wouldn’t want me to do cars like that!”
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