Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  As Harley’s days drew down at GM, he mostly worked through Mitchell, keeping tabs on certain projects from a distance, telling his soon-to-be successor what he thought and trusting Mitchell would pass those opinions on to the design teams as he saw fit. He took particular interest in the development of Chevrolet’s upcoming rear-engine compact car, which Ed Cole had named the Corvair, and the revived Motorama, which was to be scaled back to just two exhibitions in 1959, in New York and Boston.

  At a ceremony in the Styling lobby, with Alfred Sloan looking on, Harley presided over the unveiling of a portrait he’d commissioned in honor of his corporate mentor “whose genius conceived this industrial campus,” according to the inscription. The portrait still hangs on the wall in the lobby.

  When the studios completed their work on the ’59 cars, he circled them on the patio and gathered all the designers together for his annual pep talk. Since everyone knew it would be his last, staffers from other departments and buildings came to listen.

  “How many of you guys are under thirty years old?” he asked the designers at one point. Hands went up. “I’d like all of you guys to step over here to my left. And all you others step over here to my right.

  “Now, you guys on my left are the creators,” he said. “You come up with most of the new creative ideas. And you guys over here on the right are the finishers; you know how to turn those ideas into a workable design.”

  He seemed to be saying, in his inimitable way, that both groups were necessary to a successful design operation. Some of the older men wondered whether he was telling them they were over the hill creatively, while a number of the younger designers thought he was saying he understood what happened with the ’58 models and he should have listened to them more.

  His last official appearance was at the presentation of the ’59 cars to the board of directors and members of the executive committee under the lights in the Styling Auditorium. He dragooned several of the women designers into service as car show models, to open doors and explain interior features to gray-haired men “with names like DuPont and Firestone,” Ruth Glennie recalled years later. “I remember that they really had Mr. Earl on the hot seat about the fins. They kept asking him, ‘Why do they have to be so high? Why do you have them at all?’ We were shocked because we’d never heard anyone talk to him that way.”

  Harley’s chief inquisitors that day were Frederic Donner, who’d recently been elected chairman of the board, and John Gordon, who’d just been named president and chief executive officer, replacing Harlow Curtice, who was retiring. The two longtime GM executives had risen through the ranks in the company’s New York headquarters, where they’d established reputations as fervent cost cutters and earned the joint sobriquet “Donner and Blitzen.” The New York Times later described Donner, an accountant, as a “bean counter” in a headline and characterized Gordon, in his obituary, as an executive “who worried about saving fractions of pennies.”

  Not surprisingly, neither man had any love for Harley and his expensive operation. Gordon’s bad feelings dated back to 1946, when as the newly named general manager of the Cadillac division he instructed Bill Mitchell to lower Frank Hershey’s original P-38-inspired rudder-style fins on a clay model by three-quarters of an inch. He didn’t learn until it was too late that Mitchell had tricked him into thinking they had.

  Throughout his four-year tenure at Cadillac, Gordon objected to the tail fins to no avail. They were too popular with the public and he had too little clout on the executive committee for Harley to pay him any mind. Gordon had stewed ever since. Now he was getting his last licks in.

  The cars in the auditorium that day were Styling’s response to Virgil Exner’s Forward Look cars, which Chuck Jordan had first seen on Mound Road in the summer of 1956. They all featured clean lines, razor-thin, pillar-free rooflines, and dramatic tail fin treatments. But the Cadillac stood out from the rest in its breathtaking audacity: 7 feet wide, 19 feet long, weighing more than 5,000 pounds, with fins rising sharklike from the rear fenders to a height of 42 inches, as sharp-edged and pointed as chef’s knives, embedded with twin bullet-shaped taillights.

  “We probably overcooked the design,” said Chuck Jordan. “Still, it was tame compared to what it could have been. I can remember when the fin on the clay model was higher than the coupe roof.” Jordan and designer Dave Holls acknowledged later that their design was in part a declaration that nobody was going to out-fin Cadillac. “It was our year of total excess,” said Holls.

  By the time the public got a look at the ’59 lineup, Harley and Sue had sold their house in Grosse Pointe Farms and decamped to Palm Beach, where they could step out of their home and wade into the warm ocean or stroll down the beach for lunch at the tony Bath and Tennis Club. In the afternoon Harley played golf at the Everglades Club, one of the oldest and most exclusive private clubs in the country, while Sue engaged in competitive canasta and dime-a-point bridge in the clubhouse with her friends. Harley bought her a ’59 Pontiac Bonneville convertible and had the shop at the Tech Center paint it pink and reupholster the interior in pink and white with maroon carpets and a plum-colored dashboard. They eventually replaced the so-called Pink Lady with a Corvette that matched Harley’s, except his was electric blue and hers was pink.

  A glamorous and popular couple, they were invited to most of the town’s myriad charity balls, and though they rarely went, they always sent a check. Their social life consisted mostly of dinners with friends, and they were usually home by eleven o’clock.

  It was a languid, luxurious life, punctuated by summer vacations in Europe, sometimes with a grandchild or two in tow, and fall trips back to Detroit, during which Harley spent time duck hunting in Canada and visited the Styling studios at the Tech Center as part of his consulting agreement. Bill Mitchell took him around to see what each design team was doing. “He never criticized the cars,” Dave Holls recalled. “It was mostly like seeing his old friends and all that, and he was as nice as he could be.” During one such visit, however, the news that Harley was about to enter the Pontiac studio provoked an unexpected reaction. Designer Sparky Bohnstedt, who had been brutally fired by Harley several years before and had only recently returned, bolted from the room to avoid coming face-to-face with him again.

  “I looked around and Sparky was gone,” said Bill Porter. “I asked somebody where he was and they said, ‘He’s back in the men’s room puking his guts out.’ The guy was a famous bomber pilot and the mere mention of Harley’s name made him vomit.”

  On November 19, 1959, General Motors—indeed, the entire car industry—was rocked by the news that Harlow Curtice had shot and killed one of his best friends, former GM executive Harry Anderson, in a hunting accident on Saint Anne’s Island in Ontario, Canada. According to news accounts, the two recent retirees were sitting side by side in a blind when Anderson unexpectedly stood up just as Curtice swung around to fire at a flight of ducks passing overhead. The shotgun blast “tore away the top of Anderson’s head,” according to one newspaper account. Curtice would never recover emotionally. He died three years later, a broken man.

  The incident added a sobering coda to GM’s most productive and colorful decade. With Sloan, Harley, and Curtice gone, the reign of the bean counters had begun, and one of the first orders of business was to get rid of the fins and the heavy chrome. The Styling staff was all for it. They’d become embarrassed by the leading role they’d played in what designer Dick Teague dubbed “the Golden Age of Gorp.”

  “People always ask me why we did those [1959] fins, and I say, ‘It was the right thing to do at the time,’” Chuck Jordan said. “It got us out of this stale state we were in, and got the blood circulating. The ’59 was like letting a tiger out of the cage and saying, ‘Go!’”

  Within two years, fins had disappeared from all GM cars except the Cadillac. Bill Mitchell argued for lowering—but not blunting—the Cadillac’s fins gradually over a period of several years rather than lopping them off abruptly. Aft
er eleven years, they had become the defining design feature of the car, and loyal Cadillac customers still expected them.

  By 1965, fins had vanished from the automotive landscape, but they remained embedded in the national psyche. For better or worse, the ’59 Caddy tail fin would endure as perhaps the defining single image of the 1950s in America.

  The new decade brought a sea change to the industry, with Harley’s “longer, lower, and wider” precept giving way to smaller, cleaner, and—albeit begrudgingly—safer. As American Motors’ Rambler became the nation’s fourth-best-selling car, the Big Three finally introduced small four-passenger sedans in 1960—the Chevrolet Corvair, the Ford Falcon, and the Plymouth Valiant. The Corvair was named Motor Trend’s Car of the Year for its revolutionary rear-mounted, air-cooled engine, its trans-axle, and four-wheel-independent suspension, but it sold only moderately well, averaging about 250,000 cars a year for the first three years.

  Chevrolet introduced a sleek new Corvair coupe for the 1965 model year. Car and Driver magazine said it was “undoubtedly the sexiest looking American car and possibly one of the most handsome in the world.” But the restyled Corvair collided with a new book written by a thirty-one-year-old Harvard Law School graduate named Ralph Nader.

  Titled Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, the book alleged that a design defect in the suspension system of the 1960–63 Corvairs had led to rollovers that caused numerous serious injuries and deaths. Corvair sales dropped by nearly 90 percent over the next two years as customer lawsuits piled up and news coverage drove Nader’s book to the top of the bestseller lists, launching his career as a consumer advocate.

  But only the first chapter of Unsafe at Any Speed dealt with the Corvair. The rest was a broad indictment of the industry, General Motors, and even the automobile itself. As Nader wrote hyperbolically in the book’s opening sentence, “For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.”

  With a muckraker’s zeal, he attacked the big companies for allowing styling decisions to take precedence over engineering and safety considerations, noting that “styling changes added on average about $700 to the consumer cost of a new car, compared to an average twenty-three cents per car spent on safety.”

  He cited a study based on accident and autopsy reports of more than 200 pedestrian fatalities in New York City during 1958 and early 1959, showing that the victims’ bodies had been “penetrated by ornaments, sharp bumper and fender edges, headlight hoods, medallions, and fins.”

  Saying that the ’59 Cadillac tail fin “bore an uncanny resemblance to the tail of the stegosaurus, a dinosaur that had two sharp rearward-projecting horns on each side of the tail,” Nader listed the gory details of the carnage they’d inflicted. A California motorcyclist had hit the rear bumper of a Cadillac stopped in traffic and was “hurled onto the tail fin, which pierced his body below the heart and cut him all the way down to the thigh bone in a large circular gash.” A nine-year-old girl was riding her bicycle near her home and bumped into the tail fin of a parked 1962 Cadillac, “which ripped into her body below the throat,” causing her to die of a “thoracic hemorrhage.” A thirteen-year-old Chicago boy was chasing a fly ball on a summer day when he “ran into a Cadillac fin, which pierced his heart and killed him.”

  In February 1966, shortly after Unsafe at Any Speed was published, Alfred Sloan died of a heart attack at the age of ninety. Perhaps it was a mercy that he didn’t live to see the company dragged over the coals during the resultant Congressional hearings into auto safety and to hear GM chairman James Roche apologize to Nader for the company’s hiring of private investigators to dig up compromising information about his private life.

  On September 16, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Act, which both houses of Congress had passed unanimously, requiring the establishment of new vehicle safety standards, and the creation of a new agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), to enforce them and supervise safety recalls. “In this century, more than one and a half million of our fellow citizens have died on our streets and highways; nearly three times as many Americans as we have lost in all our wars,” Johnson said. “I’m proud at this moment to sign these bills—which promise, in the years to come, to cure the highway disease, to end the years of horror and give us years of hope.”

  The auto safety legislation spurred by Nader’s book has been credited with saving 3.5 million lives in the ensuing years, and the Unsafe at Any Speed episode ranks as perhaps the worst public relations disaster in GM’s history. When the last Corvair came off the production line at the Willow Run plant on May 14, 1969, network newscasts covered the story, noting Nader’s role in the car’s demise and comparing it to the Edsel.

  (Three years later, the NHTSA released the results of a two-year study that concluded: “The handling and stability performance of the 1960–1963 Corvair does not result in an abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover and it is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles, both foreign and domestic.”)

  * * *

  Detroit suffered a devastating blow to its image in July 1967 when the city’s implacable racial problems hit the front pages of newspapers around the world.

  In response to the Black Bottom race riots of 1943, the city had launched a postwar urban renewal project on the Lower East Side that critics quickly branded “Negro removal.” Five thousand buildings were demolished, supposedly to eliminate blight but also to make way for a network of new federally funded highways, including the Edsel Ford and Walter Chrysler freeways, that cut through Black Bottom and Paradise Valley and obliterated them. A lack of low-cost replacement housing forced thousands of the city’s poorest black citizens into neighboring Virginia Park, a predominantly Orthodox Jewish community, setting off a wave of white flight.

  It was there, on July 23, that an early-morning police raid on an unlicensed bar on Twelfth Street, the main commercial thoroughfare of the new black ghetto, set off a rash of looting, gunfire, and arson that quickly overwhelmed the city’s police and fire departments, prompting Governor George Romney to call up the Michigan National Guard. President Johnson sent in 4,700 troops from the U.S Army’s 102nd and 87th Airborne Divisions. “Troops Seal Off Nests of Snipers; Death Toll Grows; Copters Called In,” blared a banner headline in the Detroit Free Press, as TV newscasts all over the country showed pictures of rioters chanting “Burn, baby, burn,” and tanks rumbling through streets with paratroopers under the command of Lieutenant General John Throckmorton following behind, armed with M-16 rifles and fixed bayonets.

  By the time order was restored after five days, the official tally of damage stood at forty-three deaths, at least a thousand injuries, more than two thousand arrests, and nearly seven hundred businesses burned to the ground.

  Detroit never recovered. White flight doubled in 1967, to over 40,000, and then doubled again in 1968. And the city once hailed as the “Paris of the Midwest” and the “Arsenal of Democracy” eventually came to be defined by stark photos of the abandoned Packard plant—a hollowed-out husk, weed-choked and strewn with rubble, the industrial age version of a Roman ruin.

  * * *

  In late March 1969, Harley Earl sat in a large carved oak chair at the Country Club of Detroit in Grosse Pointe Farms, where he and Sue maintained a membership and always stayed when they came back to town. He was giving a sort of lion-in-winter interview to Barbara Holliday of the Detroit Free Press, and at seventy-five, he looked every inch the elder statesman of automobile styling. “Just in from shooting ducks on Walpole Island, he was impeccably dressed in a Navy blue jacket, gray slacks, handsome white shirt with a tiny blue windowpane check and an expensive-looking blue tie,” she observed.

  He was in town for one of his biannual visits to the design studios, he told her. “I’ve learned to be a good consultant,�
�� he chuckled. “I don’t suggest unless they ask me. But I get a look at what’s coming out in the next two or three years and I can’t wait.”

  For the better part of two hours he entertained her with stories of growing up in the rustic hills above Hollywood, designing expensive car bodies for silent movie stars, and coming to Detroit on the train to work for Alfred Sloan and the legendary Fisher brothers.

  “Right now people are wondering what to do,” he said near the end of their conversation. “Cars are getting so safe you can hardly use them. But it will be interesting to see how many lives they save with these new devices. I’m definitely for safety, but I’d start over with the fundamentals. Get some of the space program scientists and have them build some fundamental safety features that will really help to sell, that aren’t just window dressing.”

  As they got up to go, he told her, “Mr. Sloan made this [consulting] deal with me until I’m 80. It was quite a compliment. What could I do at 80? These days I go duck hunting, fish for marlin off the shores of Bimini, go deer hunting—all the things I didn’t have time to do when I was working.”

  Several weeks later, a day after he and Sue had dinner in Palm Beach with Bill Mitchell and his wife, Harley suffered a massive stroke. Sue’s longtime English housekeeper, Iris Ashton, heard him fall in the bedroom and found him lying on the floor with his eyes open but unable to speak or move. He remained silent and motionless in the hospital for several weeks. One doctor compared what he was experiencing to that of a person floating in a dreamlike state at the bottom of a swimming pool: perhaps seeing vague shapes and hearing muffled sounds but with no ability to communicate, and not likely to ever get better. Another doctor used the word “vegetative.”