Fins
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With a base price of $1,789, the Rambler was the lowest-priced car made in America, and arguably the least alluring—plain and plump, with none of the glittering jewelry that buyers had come to expect from Detroit. But the indefatigable Romney spun the car’s frumpiness into an asset, calling it “an automobile for the American people that appeals as much to their native intelligence as their ego.”
The Rambler got an unexpected promotional boost when a pop music group called the Playmates released a novelty record titled “Beep Beep,” which rose to number four on the pop charts on its way to selling more than a million copies. For anyone who’d heard Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” the song told a familiar story, but with a twist:
While riding in my Cadillac, what to my surprise,
A little Nash Rambler was following me, about one-third my size.
The driver of the Rambler beeped his horn to pass, but the Cadillac owner sped up to prevent him. They were doing 120 side by side when the Rambler suddenly sped away, with the driver hollering out his window:
“Hey, buddy, how do I get this car out of second gear?”
“Beep Beep” was an apt metaphor for the state of the auto industry in 1958. As Detroit struggled to sell its big cars in the midst of an economic downturn, more than 430,000 small, inexpensive foreign cars were shipped into the United States, nearly a quarter of them Volkswagens. Henry Ford II and Chrysler chairman K. T. Keller initially sneered at the invaders, with Ford calling them “little shit boxes” and Keller harrumphing, “Chrysler makes cars for people to sit in, not piss over.”
The VW quickly became the top-selling import, “rolling over France’s Renault Dauphine like the Wehrmacht routed the French army,” in the words of one writer. Despite its peculiar buglike appearance, its noisy, rear-mounted, 57-horsepower engine, and its dark connection to the Third Reich, the affectionately nicknamed Beetle found favor with white middle-class suburbanites, especially housewives, in the market for an affordable second family car.
“There is no longer any doubt about it,” Road & Track magazine said in October 1956, “the little ‘people’s car’ has done what no other import has ever been able to do. It has gained an unmistakable wheel-hold in the garages and hearts of the American car-buying public.”
With no national advertising, Volkswagen relied on word of mouth and the kindness of reporters who were unable to resist a story about a plucky little car that could. For every writer who said the Beetle was ugly and underpowered, two touted its low cost ($1,495), fuel efficiency (35–40 miles per gallon), and engineering. Popular Mechanics went so far as to drive a VW into a lake to test the claim by some owners that the passenger compartment was so tightly sealed the car could actually float. It did.
“This German car has amazing performance and roadability,” wrote the magazine’s test driver, who pronounced it “a thoroughly practical, dependable, economical and worthwhile car for anybody interested in low cost transportation.”
Fortune praised the VW for its static styling and lack of flash, calling it “an utterly honest car.” On college campuses and high school parking lots, students staged “Beetle stuffings” to see how many people could be crammed into a VW passenger compartment and trunk. A high school in Oregon set a record for thirty-three, but that didn’t last long. Bad Beetle jokes proliferated. In one, a donkey asks a VW, “Hey, what are you?”
“I’m a car,” the VW replies. “What are you?”
“In that case,” says the donkey, “I’m a horse.”
In a remarkable turnabout, Americans were talking about a car conceived by Adolf Hitler with the same affection they’d once reserved for Henry Ford’s Model T; the Beetle had become the postwar Tin Lizzie.
Harley had seen the small-car revolution coming even before Volkswagen opened its first U.S. sales office in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in late 1955. Looking down from his office window, he noticed the increasing number of European imports that were beginning to appear in the staff parking lot, mostly sports cars at first, then more and more small four-passenger sedans. The owners obviously weren’t college students; they were young professionals, some no doubt married with kids. He concluded that the typical two-car family of the future would have a small car sitting in the driveway next to a standard-size coupe or sedan. To help make that point to the executive committee, he arranged a photo shoot on the large patio next to the Styling Auditorium, with more than thirty staffers standing next to their vehicles.
After the pictures were taken, the owners lined up their cars and began a procession around the complex, drawing people in the buildings to the windows. Then one impatient driver decided to pass another, and the parade instantly turned into a road race that would be remembered by participants and spectators alike as “the Styling Grand Prix.” But Harley’s photos didn’t convince the division managers that the company needed to jump into small-car production in a big way, as he had hoped. Only Chevrolet general manager Ed Cole, his collaborator on the Corvette, expressed any interest in exploring the development of an American small sedan. Instead, GM began importing Opels and Vauxhalls from its European subsidiaries.
With Volkswagen and American Motors cast as modern-day Davids doing battle with Detroit’s three Goliaths, it didn’t take long for industry writers and critics to begin questioning the practice of annual model change. “Detroit thinks this year’s car is guaranteed to become so unstylish in four years that you won’t be able to stand the sight of the thing,” wrote journalist John Keats, whose caustically humorous 1958 bestseller The Insolent Chariots characterized the industry’s latest offerings as “not reliable machines for reasonable men, but illusory symbols of sex, speed, wealth and power for day-dreaming nitwits.”
Harley may have sown the seeds of an antistyling narrative inadvertently with a comment he made to Industrial Design magazine in October 1955. “Our big job [as car designers] is to hasten obsolescence,” he told writer Jane Fiske Mitarachi. “Since 1934, the average car ownership span has gone from five years to two years. When it is one year, we will have a perfect score.”
Though few if any of his fellow automobile designers would have disagreed that their work was aimed at getting people to buy new cars more often, many were surprised that he had stated it so bluntly. Given that he was the man who invented the system that made annual model change possible, it appeared to critics that he had let the proverbial cat out of the bag. Hastening obsolescence sounded like a bad thing for consumers.
Industrial designer Brooks Stevens subsequently coined the term “planned obsolescence” in a speech to the Minneapolis Advertising Club, explaining that it was the logical result of the consumer’s natural desire “to own something a little new, a little better and a little sooner than is necessary” and the manufacturer’s “duty to engage in continual research and product development to provide the market with the best and the newest.”
Unfortunately, planned obsolescence sounded even worse than hastened obsolescence, more intentional, and Stevens’s version caught on as a derogatory term that suggested the big companies were making chumps of their customers. GM pushed back. The issue was “widely misunderstood,” a top executive told the New York Times, explaining that its annual model change actually was an example of “dynamic obsolescence” because “we obsolete our products by making them better.” Critics countered that styling change didn’t make cars better, it just made them look different.
Harley must have been amused by the debate. After all, Americans were in love with automobiles—with the idea of them—long before the Duryea brothers and Ransom Olds rolled their first gas-powered buggies out onto the streets and, in GM’s terminology, obsoleted the horse. That love of cars had fueled the creation of hundreds of companies that built thousands of factories that employed millions of workers who produced history’s greatest economy and won a world war. So he thought the idea that GM or any other company could bamboozle Americans into buying cars they didn’t want or need was as nonsensical as
it was naïve.
He likewise scoffed at the notion that tail fins had been foisted on unsuspecting car buyers, as critics like Raymond Loewy and John Keats seemed to believe. The plain truth was that Frank Hershey had sketched a picture that blended an ingenious fighter plane with a beautiful sea creature; the GM Styling staff then turned his drawing into the rear fender of a Cadillac; and car buyers responded enthusiastically to changing versions of it for ten years, or tail fins would have disappeared. That’s the way car styling worked, with designers constantly trying to anticipate what Americans would want their automobiles to look like three years in the future. And every stylist knew that a lot could happen to affect the consumer’s buying habits between the day a design was approved and the day the finished car rolled off the assembly line. It wasn’t a job for the faint of heart. As Harley once said, only half joking, “I’d rather try crossing a river on a path of bobbing soap cakes than make predictions about the car of tomorrow. The footing would be far safer.”
The Edsel was a perfect case in point.
Preceded by weeks of ads featuring a blurry image of a mystery car and the headline “The Edsel Is Coming,” the first new brand of American automobile introduced since 1938 arrived in showrooms on September 4, 1957—“E-day”—carrying a lot of expectations.
The Ford Motor Company had spent a reported $250 million developing the car and establishing a separate Edsel division, which would offer eighteen different models in ninety possible color combinations through a network of nearly 1,200 exclusive new dealerships. Edsel executives boldly predicted sales of at least 200,000 cars in the 1958 model year and were privately holding out hope for 300,000.
“The smart money both in and out of Detroit is solidly behind Ford’s new Edsel,” said automotive writer Eugene Jaderquist. “It’s about as sure to succeed as a straight flush in a two-handed stud game.”
In a filmed address to his troops the week of the launch, Ford chairman Henry Ford II called the Edsel “the only truly new car on the American road,” and added, “From a more personal perspective, I believe the car accurately represents the ideals and principles of automobile styling which were so strongly held by my father, in whose honor it is named.” Behind the scenes, however, his mother, Eleanor, Edsel’s widow, and other members of the Ford family were appalled that his name had been chosen over eighteen thousand other suggestions and as a result would be “spinning on hubcaps.” A public relations representative from the company went to see Eleanor at Gaukler Point to smooth things over, but she refused to speak to him.
A lot was riding on the Edsel’s succeeding. The company’s research indicated that when Ford owners moved up to a medium-priced car, only 26 percent of them chose the company’s sole medium-priced offering, the Mercury, while the rest most often switched to a Pontiac, Oldsmobile, or Buick. In contrast, 82 percent of Chevrolet owners stayed within the GM family when they traded up. In interviews with 1,600 car owners in Peoria, Illinois, and San Bernardino, California, researchers were surprised to hear 88 percent of them say they didn’t like GM because it was too big while at the same time 80 percent said they liked GM cars. And a surprisingly high number said they thought the Oldsmobile was the most attractive GM car and put the Buick down as a close second.
As a result, the Edsel was priced, engineered, and styled to appeal specifically to traditional Buick and Olds customers—young executives with families on their way up the corporate ladder. The company set the Edsel’s debut for September 4, a month ahead of the competition, to maximize attention, and launched a $10 million marketing campaign that included an hour-long CBS television special called The Edsel Show that starred four of the most popular entertainers of the era—Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and Louis Armstrong. Saturation TV commercials highlighted the car’s two most distinctive features, an oddly elliptical vertical grille and a “Teletouch” transmission, which operated electronically when the driver pushed buttons located in the hub of the steering wheel. If you watched television, listened to the radio, or read the newspaper in the summer of 1957, it was hard not to know the Edsel was coming. “Barring war or depression, the Edsel’s pushing, brawling entry into the U.S. car market should be a first-class show,” wrote the ever enthusiastic Eugene Jaderquist.
Instead, it was an embarrassment. Thousands of customers came to the shiny new Edsel showrooms the first day, looked, and walked away. The push-button transmission seemed like an impractical gimmick that was bound to break. The unorthodox grille was described variously as looking like a horse collar, a toilet seat, a vagina, or “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.” Aside from that and its lack of tail fins, an Edsel didn’t look much different from a ’58 Oldsmobile or Buick, which the GM Styling staff thought were the two ugliest cars they’d ever designed.
Within a month, Edsel dealerships began to fail. On November 27, the only one in Manhattan closed. By January 1958, it was clear to industry experts that the Edsel was doomed. In fact, by one account, it had been dead on arrival. At a celebratory dinner dance on the eve of E-day, Ford division general manager Robert McNamara supposedly told Fairfax Cone, the head of the big ad agency that had hired additional staff to handle the Edsel account, that Ford had already decided to “phase out” the car. “Of course, you are going to have to lay all these people off,” he said.
The debacle would go down as one of the most costly blunders in manufacturing history for reasons that seem clear in hindsight. The research that led to the Edsel’s creation was conducted between 1955 and 1956, when car sales were booming. But by the time the first Edsels emerged from the factory, priced between $3,000 and $4,000, a recession had made buyers more cost-conscious and large shipments of inexpensive foreign imports were being deposited onto the docks of New York Harbor. A grille that wasn’t the butt of jokes or a name that didn’t need to be explained probably would not have made any difference in the outcome. The Edsel division sold only 62,000 cars in its first year, almost 140,000 short of management’s prediction.
The U.S. economy began to recover in May 1958, but the damage had been done. GM barely managed to sell 2 million cars that year, down from 4.7 million in 1955. And to the surprise of no one on the design staff, the company’s two biggest losers were Oldsmobile and Buick. The latter fell to sixth place, with its worst sales performance since before the war. Cadillac sales were the lowest in four years. Chrysler fared worse, with sales dropping by nearly 50 percent, indicating that perhaps the Forward Look’s moment had passed. It turned out that the cars were plagued by engineering problems. At the same time, American Motors doubled its market share on the strength of the Rambler, and foreign imports gained an 8 percent share of the U.S. market.
All the controversy and criticism marred what should have been Harley’s victory lap as he neared his mandatory retirement date in November. Still, he seemed sanguine about the approaching transition. If he was disappointed to be going out on a down note with the ’58 models, he didn’t show it. Whatever hurt or anger he may have felt about the staff insurrection, he appeared to have dealt with it and moved on. He was never one to dwell in the past; only the future mattered to him. Besides, the uprising had proven beyond a doubt that his handpicked successor was up to the job; Bill Mitchell had handled a difficult situation as well as any experienced chief executive could. He’d acted decisively and executed beautifully. The 1959 cars, produced under the duress of a drastically shortened time line, were a credit to the design teams. The department was in good hands going forward.
Harley’s own corporation looked to be in good shape as well. He’d moved the industrial-design firm to a 10,000-square-foot office building he built on Mound Road just south of the Tech Center. Touted in a press release as “the most modern design studio in the world,” it boasted contracts with U.S. Rubber, Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), and Westinghouse, and it employed at least a dozen designers under the direction of his sons Jim and Jerry, with Harley functioning primarily as the landlord, leasing the b
uilding to them.
Harley and Sue seemed to be set for life. In addition to income from the design company, his GM stock, and a consulting contract with the company that would pay him a million dollars over the next fifteen years, they’d built up a portfolio of real estate holdings thanks to Sue, who had proven to be an astute investor.
Over the decades, the former sweethearts from Hollywood High, a rancher’s daughter and a carriage maker’s son, had forged a formidable domestic partnership, the kind that was held up as the ideal in those days. In exchange for his putting in however many hours it took to provide them with an enviable standard of living, she did practically everything for him except pick out his wardrobe.
“She managed the household so no matter how vexing the day, he came home to a warm, well-run house, was served a good dinner, and stored up energy for the next day’s hassles,” said her daughter-in-law Connie. “She handled all their social arrangements, being careful that they did not impinge on his work schedule. She was also very attuned to the social complexities of the auto industry hierarchy and helped him maneuver through the corporate world.” Indeed, at a fancy industry dinner shortly after the war, Sue sat next to Henry Ford II, who was known to be looking for a new Styling chief, and schmoozed with him the entire evening, making sure everyone in the room noticed. She delighted in taking credit when the executive committee subsequently offered Harley the long-term contract that allowed him to start the outside design company and gave him the million-dollar postretirement consulting contract. Harley never disputed that her dinner performance had done the trick.
It was Sue who decided they would retire in Florida, where they had vacationed in the winter for years. She couldn’t wait to be done with Detroit weather, and she didn’t want to go back to California because “the water there is too cold.” So she purchased a modest two-bedroom house at 995 South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach, just north of “Millionaire’s Row” (now “Billionaire’s Row”). It was right on the sand, across the road and around the bend from the Marjorie Merriweather Post estate (now Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago). Sue had the house painted pink, her favorite color.