As the sole women in their respective design studios, the “Pratt girls,” as they called themselves, naturally bonded. Vanderbilt shared a two-bedroom house with Glennie, Krebs, and Dagmar Arnold. Longyear moved in when Krebs moved out to be closer to her boyfriend, who lived downtown. They were young and on their own, making great money in a glamorous profession they had trained for, and they loved cars. Longyear dropped more than $3,000 on a black Corvette with red seats. They were not damsels in distress hoping for a man to rescue them. “We were all saving each other,” said Glennie. And they didn’t see themselves as gender pioneers in the workplace.
It didn’t take them long to figure out what Harley had meant when he told them they should think of a car as a house. It turned out that they were tasked with designing the interiors of the cars and excluded from working on the exteriors, which was solely the purview of their male counterparts. In the Styling hierarchy, exterior design outranked interior design. The women were being kept in the house. Longyear said she bristled when she heard Harley say, “To really be good, a designer has to have gasoline in his blood.”
Interviewed decades later, however, neither she nor Glennie nor Vanderbilt expressed any resentment toward their male coworkers, and they insisted that GM management had not treated them “any differently than the men.” For their part, most of the men accepted the newcomers as fellow professionals, even though they weren’t used to working with women. Some tried to modify their typical male behavior out of deference to what they assumed were female sensibilities. They weren’t always successful. When Buick division managers were first shown the model of an all-black interior for a sporty new model, marketing director Rollie Withers looked at the floor-mounted stick shift topped with a bright red knob and declared, “I like everything but that horse’s cock sticking up in the middle there.” Realizing in that instant that Peggy Sauer, a designer, was sitting across from him and beginning to blush, Withers dug himself in deeper by blurting out an apology: “Oh, shit. I’m really fucking sorry.” Everybody laughed, Sauer included.
Bill Mitchell, Harley’s director of design, found nothing funny in the situation, however. “No woman stylist will ever be photographed standing next to one of my cars,” he hissed to his male colleagues. As an unabashed misogynist and the number two person in Styling, Mitchell could have made life hell for the women, but he was held in check by his devotion to Harley, who had promised him the vice presidency when he retired in two years. So Mitchell decided to bide his time.
For her part, Sue Vanderbilt had nothing but praise for Harley. “In spite of stories that you hear, Mr. Earl was always a gentleman with the women, and more a father figure maybe than a boss. And he loved having all the girls around and having his picture taken with them. He commanded a great deal of respect, and whatever he said, we did.”
Even if they didn’t like it, as was the case with their first big assignment, the so-called femme cars. As a GM press release explained, “Mr. Earl gave them a free hand to choose special colors and interiors for ten GM hardtops and convertibles—without male guidance. The result was a feminine fashion show that bubbled with originality.”
“It was really a publicity stunt sort of thing that forced us to scratch our heads about what was supposed to be feminine in a car,” said Ruth Glennie. “Was it more spaces to store things?”
Harley’s original idea was for the femme cars to be featured in the Motorama shows, but the decision was made to mount an additional showing in the Styling Auditorium. The “Spring Fashion Festival of Women-Designed Cars” was open only to the “women of the press,” who covered it accordingly. “The setting was a veritable symphony of spring with 90 canaries making music and twice that many potted white hyacinths filling the air with fragrance,” wrote Jessie Ash Arndt, the “women’s editor” of the Christian Science Monitor, who praised Ruth Glennie’s “Fancy Free” Corvette for its seats with a “pinched waist” and umbrella “tucked away in an ingenious pocket”; Sandy Longyear’s Pontiac Bonneville “Polaris” for its picnic supplies compartment between the front seats and the “sportable” radio that could be lifted out of the dashboard; and Sue Vanderbilt’s “Saxony” Cadillac convertible equipped with a Dictaphone.
Harley made an appearance at the show. “I don’t know why the ladies shouldn’t be represented in this designing of cars,” he told the women. “So many talented girls are entering our field of design that in three or four years women may be designing entire car exteriors.” But as if to reassure the Bill Mitchells of the world, the last line of a GM press release about the event quoted Harley as saying, “We’ll never let women designers offend men’s tastes, because it’s still the men who pay—most of the time.”
Sue Vanderbilt was the only one of the women who spent more than a few years at GM, logging nearly thirty. Reminiscing about her damsel days years later, she lamented that Harley’s progressive move to hire the first generation of female industrial designers had not worked out as they all hoped and none of the Pratt girls ever got to design the exterior of a car. “We’ve had a misconception about interior designers, [that] you just select fabrics and sew things together, as interior ‘decorators’ do,” Vanderbilt said. “But there’s a lot more to it than that, and that’s what we tried to tell the press over and over again. We weren’t there just to decorate. Unfortunately, the projects that were publicized were ‘decorating.’ We did not have a chance to redesign an instrument panel. We just suggested color.”
Change was afoot in 1956. The Motorama featuring the femme cars drew 2.5 million attendees, but the record cost of more than $10 million to send scores of people and 115 tractor-trailers traipsing around the country for four months had the corporate financial folks questioning whether it was an efficient use of promotional funds compared with national TV advertising. There was talk of cutting back or even killing the annual show. Alfred Sloan’s retirement in April left Harley without his staunchest supporter. On May 16, the morning of the Tech Center dedication, Harlow Curtice revealed to reporters that the company was experiencing a significant falloff in sales from the record performance of 1955. And as Harley led a group of VIPs through the Styling Auditorium and design studios that afternoon, he didn’t realize that long-simmering creative tensions between him and the staff were about to boil over and threaten his thirty-one-year reign.
17
Insurrection
As Cadillac assistant design chief Chuck Jordan drove past the Plymouth plant on Mound Road, a few miles from the Tech Center, he spotted cars parked tightly together behind a cyclone fence in a field off to his right. He couldn’t make them out clearly because they were partially obscured by the overgrown grass and the August afternoon sunlight reflecting off their windows. He pulled over to get a better look.
What he saw when he got close enough thrilled him and unnerved him at the same time. “There were all these ’57 Plymouths backed up against the fence and all I could see were fins,” he recalled. They were taller than the tail fins on any Cadillac, rising nearly as high as the rooflines. “But it was more than fins,” he said. “The cars were really sleek and lean and they had that simplicity and dash that our cars didn’t have.”
Jordan had taken a lunchtime drive to collect his thoughts on the growing dissatisfaction among the GM design staff. Few were proud of the ’57 models that were about to be shipped to dealers, and some were downright embarrassed by the work they’d just completed on the ’58s.
They blamed Harley Earl. He seemed stuck in the past, fixed on gross images of bombs and bullets and still talking about headlights set close together and centered Le Sabre–style in the nose of the hood, as if the ’55 Chevy Bel Air had never happened. It made no sense. They were surrounded by perhaps the largest collection of exquisite, cutting-edge modern design in the world—from dancing water fountains to floating staircases to office furniture sculpted by European masters—yet none of it seemed to be reflected in the cars they were designing. The incongruity between the w
ork and the workplace was jarring.
Every studio had a Harley story to tell. At one point, when the Pontiac design team failed to execute a design to his liking, he abruptly swapped them with the Oldsmobile team “to shake things up.” He then browbeat the Pontiac conscripts into festooning the rear quarter panel of the ’58 Oldsmobile with chrome “speed lines” that resembled staves on a page of sheet music, inspiring some wag in the studio to cut out black musical notes and pin them to the clay model in an act of mockery. The rear end wound up with no visual relationship to the front, which wasn’t surprising, given that they’d been designed by two different groups of people. It was just that sort of bifurcation in the design process that Alfred Sloan originally hired Harley to fix.
In the Buick studio they’d developed two wildly divergent ideas for the rear quarter panel of the ’58 Buick Special. One was an update of the “sweep spear” side trim that first appeared on the ’49 Roadmaster, consisting of a thin chrome molding that ran the length of the front fender, dipped down across the door, and then curled up around the rear wheel well. The other was a thick oblong configuration of chrome and stainless steel that was fully five feet long and featured a forward-pointing chrome tip shaped like the business end of a spade.
As they broke for lunch one day, someone pinned a detailed, airbrushed rendering of each design on an actual-size side view of the car. While they were out, Harley stopped in to look around and saw the two designs tacked one above the other.
“You know, boys, I think you’ve finally got it,” he said when he returned unannounced later that day. It took a moment for them to understand what had happened: he thought the two renderings he’d seen earlier were actually a single design, with the spade positioned over the spear, which would cover most of the quarter panel with chrome. Looks were exchanged and eyes rolled, but no one corrected his impression, and when he instructed them to add the misbegotten combination to the clay model, it seemed to confirm what some had suspected for months—the legendary Harley Earl at long last was losing it.
Chuck Jordan’s mind was racing as he hurried back to the Tech Center. Harley was on one of his extended trips to Europe and wouldn’t return for at least three weeks. When he did, of course, he would immediately conduct a command inspection of their progress on the ’59 design program, which he had practically dictated and none of the staff particularly liked. It would not be pleasant. Everything they’d been working on since he left looked heavy and cumbersome compared with what he had just seen. He went straight to Bill Mitchell, whose office shared the undulating wall with Harley’s. “Bill, you better come down and look at what the Plymouth guys are doing for ’57,” he said.
“The word got around in a matter of minutes,” said Bernie Smith. “We all hopped in our cars. There wasn’t a single designer who didn’t go down there. There were probably thirty of us in half a dozen to a dozen cars.”
They rolled up in a caravan, walked over to the fence, and looked out onto a field of fins. They “shot up out of the grass,” said Dave Holls. “The cars [had] absolutely razor-thin roofs and wedge-shaped bodies, and it was just unbelievable. We all said, ‘My god, they blew us out of the tub.’”
It was a sobering moment. They were accustomed to being number one. GM had led the industry in styling for their entire careers—indeed, since they were boys drawing pictures of cars in the margins of their schoolbooks. The company’s postwar dominance had led to an atmosphere of arrogant complacency, a feeling among the designers that they were “so far ahead of Ford and Chrysler that we weren’t even breathing close to them,” said Holls. “[We] could almost trot along and stay ahead.”
Not anymore, apparently. The cars parked in the field were the most dramatic examples yet of Chrysler Corporation’s so-called Forward Look, a $500 million restyling of its five divisions—Plymouth, Dodge, DeSoto, Chrysler, and Imperial—begun two years earlier under the direction of styling vice president Virgil Exner. A gifted designer, “Ex” had been one of Harley’s earliest protégés in the Art and Colour Section until he went to work for Studebaker in 1938. Harley supposedly cried when he left.
To the men at the fence, the most radical aspect of Exner’s Forward Look was how the through-line of the fender rose steadily from front to rear, reaching its highest point at the tail end of the car. That violated one of Harley’s cardinal rules, which held that the fender line should always hit its high point at the base of the A-pillar by the windshield and then slope gently all the way to the back. The industry had been doing it Harley’s way for decades, and they’d never seen it done differently, until now. Exner’s rising fender line gave the cars a unique wedge profile and made the upswept tail fins look even taller than they were.
“That woke everybody up,” said Bernie Smith. They realized that while they’d been busy fashioning chrome accouterments, the industry’s perennial third-place finisher had blown past them, and they would be trying to catch up for the next two years.
Back at the Tech Center, Jordan and Mitchell agreed that they needed to act fast; they couldn’t wait for Harley to return. There was nothing they could do about the ’58 models; that transport truck was too far down the road to turn around. Mitchell decided the best course of action was to continue working on the ’59 design program that Harley had approved and at the same time launch an entirely new effort in every studio so they would have an alternative to show him when he walked in the door. It was a gargantuan undertaking, and one fraught with peril. They were, after all, about to mount a mutiny against a man who fired people for walking funny.
As the director of the department, Bill Mitchell drew the dirty job of breaking it to the boss. The whole place was on tenterhooks the morning Harley returned. As planned, Mitchell intercepted him in his office, told him what they’d all seen down on Mound Road, and then took him there to see for himself. Finally, Mitchell accompanied him into every studio to show him the progress on the pre- and post-fence designs. Harley mostly nodded and listened. The staff had never seen him at a loss for words, so it was impossible to get a reading on what he was thinking. He was quiet—too quiet, they thought.
Afterward, Mitchell made the rounds of the studios by himself, saying only, “The boss agrees that we’re doing the right thing; we need to change course and go in a new direction.” Still, the staff waited nervously for Harley’s reaction—the inevitable shouting, the profanity, the firings. To their astonishment, it never happened. Instead, “We didn’t see as much of him after that,” said Smith. “And when he did come into the studio it was almost always with Mitchell, who did most of the talking.”
Relieved and reenergized, they threw themselves into the new ’59 design program, hoping they’d drawn their last Dagmar. The Cadillac team had no intention of trimming down their trademark rear fender treatment, however. Chuck Jordan and Dave Holls set to work on the tail fin to end all tail fins.
18
Not Fade Away
J. W. Earl died on January 6, 1957, three weeks shy of his ninety-first birthday. General Motors announced his passing in a press release, calling him “an early California automotive pioneer.” Survived by his wife Nellie, seven children, twelve grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren, the former Michigan lumberjack was buried in Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles near his first wife, Abbie, Harley’s mother.
J.W. had never made it to the GM Technical Center for a tour of the Styling dome and Harley’s office, but he did attend the 1956 Motorama when the show stopped in Los Angeles. He wore his trademark white shirt, tie, suit, and vest, and he was grumpy with reporters who bugged him with their questions about his son, the famous car designer.
The ’56 show turned out to be the last of Harley Earl’s traveling extravaganzas. Television advertising had exploded, growing from $12.3 million in annual billings at the beginning of the decade to $1 billion in 1955, with cars ranking as the most advertised consumer product. The annual road show had become an anachronism, the twentieth-century equivalent of a wago
n train creaking across the prairie.
While GM managed to maintain its industry lead in 1957, Ford outsold Chevrolet for the first time since 1949, and Chrysler’s new, amply finned Forward Look Plymouth knocked Buick out of third place. With the Big Three automakers experiencing a 30 percent drop in sales, a recession was all but certain.
American Motors emerged as one of the few bright spots in the sales picture. On the brink of bankruptcy, the number four carmaker bounced back with the Rambler American, which it introduced at the 1958 Chicago Auto Show as “the one car that the modern American demands.”
Offered only as a two-door sedan, the Rambler was more than two feet shorter and half a ton lighter than the standard-size Chevrolet, Ford, or Plymouth, which made it “easier to park, garage and maneuver in traffic,” according to the company’s eight-page promotional brochure. American Motors chief executive George Romney dubbed it a “compact” car to avoid calling it “small,” and played up its greater fuel efficiency by constantly referring to competitors as “gas guzzlers.” Long the industry’s lone voice crying out about big cars and their bad gas mileage, Romney gave a speech to the Motor City Traffic Club of Detroit in 1955 called “The Dinosaur in Our Driveway.” He complained, “Cars nineteen feet long and weighing two tons are used to run a 118-pound housewife three blocks to the drugstore for a two-ounce package of bobby pins and lipstick.”
Fins Page 23