“When they told Sue there was no hope, she never went back to the hospital,” said Connie Earl. “She didn’t want to remember him that way. She wanted him to always be the guy who was going out to play golf.”
Connie kept up a bedside vigil. “One day he seemed to slam his hand down on the bed in frustration,” she said. “It was the only thing I saw him do.”
Harley died at 3:00 a.m. on April 10, 1969. A contingent of GM executives and designers, including Bill Mitchell, flew down from Detroit to attend his memorial service at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach. Afterward, Connie and a friend took his ashes up in a small Cessna to scatter them over the ocean. But just as they opened the door, the friend fumbled the urn and a good bit of Harley ended up inside the plane, though most of him made it to the water eventually.
Sue lived out her life in Palm Beach. She sold the house on South Ocean Boulevard in 1984 and moved into a high-rise condo, where she died on May 10, 1988, from complications due to old age. She was ninety-two, and according to family members, her last words were “Hasta la vista.” A few days later, Connie Earl went up in a small plane once more and scattered her mother-in-law’s ashes over the ocean in front of the pink house.
* * *
In the years following Harley’s death, many members of his Styling staff were asked by writers and researchers to share their memories about their time with him at General Motors. None spoke with more affection or regret than Frank Hershey. He was in his eighties, an automotive legend in his own right, and destined to be remembered as the “Father of the Thunderbird,” which had turned out to be the last car he worked on.
“I am the only classic designer left in the world,” he said, referring to the pre-Depression era of Duesenbergs, Marmons, and Pierce-Arrows, all of which he had helped design as a young man in the early 1920s, before he met Harley.
“I want to tell you one thing,” he told art historian C. Edson Armi. “I have a dream which I dream about once a week or every two weeks. I’ve been doing this for the last five or six, maybe ten, years. I dream about being back in the good old GM Styling Department. I never dream about being back at Ford. Only General Motors. And Harley Earl is there. Sometimes [Bill] Mitchell is there, but always Harley Earl.
“I didn’t know how good I was having it, if you know what I mean. I would give anything to be able to go back there and drop back into the old days. Knowing what I know now, I would never have left . . . the biggest regret of my life is that I screwed up so badly at the end. I broke a promise to Harley, and I paid dearly for it.”
On May 8, 1991, Hershey told Alexandra Earl that her grandfather “was a complicated man, and he was difficult. He was a tough guy. But I think he had his fears. Look at the responsibility he had. No wonder he bellowed once in a while. He was bellowing at himself sometimes. He had responsibility for the biggest corporation in the world, at a time when a bad design could almost break the company.”
He told her that he didn’t realize “until years later” that he had been Harley’s favorite, and was sorry that he never told his old boss how he felt about him. So finally, forty-odd years after the fact, he got it off his chest.
“Harley was a very sentimental person inside,” he said. “But he didn’t think sentimentality was a good thing to show; he thought it was unmanly. I’d like to tell him that I loved him, although he’d probably slap me if I did. I’d like to tell him that he ought to feel proud. He did a helluva job.”
* * *
In a fond editorial about Harley’s passing, the Detroit Free Press took the opportunity to eulogize what became his most recognized—though not necessarily his most important—contribution to American life.
“Fins,” the newspaper said, “were ebullient expressions of devil-may-careness, the hoisting of the flag to honor the end of the war and a hope of better days to come. They were outrageous, impractical and splendid.”
The same could be said of Harley.
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without the support of the following people: Alice Martell, my agent for more than thirty years; Hollis Heimbouch, my editor at HarperCollins for going on a decade; and Sheri Rosenberg Kelton, my manager and the newest member of Team Bill; my friends John Mettler, Bill and Nancy Cason, Michael and Deborah Rybak, Dennis McDougal, Pat Broeske, Jeff Kwatinetz, Sherman Allan, Chris Mills, Ninon Aprea, Kim Morgan, and Bryn Freedman; my sisters, Mary Kaveney, Ann Wiethucter, Kate Sundermeyer, and Martha Brooks; and my children, Matthew, Colin, and Halle. Special thanks to Christo Datini and Larry Kinsel at the GM Heritage Center and GM Media Archive for their assistance with research and photographs, and to Los Angeles realtor Richard Stanley, who was an invaluable source of information about the history of the Earl family in Hollywood as well as the classic period of American car design.
Notes
Much of the information in this book is drawn from interviews I conducted over the last four years with members of the Earl and Taft families, and with men and women who worked for Harley Earl during his later years at General Motors. Most of the quotes about his early years at GM are taken from interviews conducted by journalist Michael Lamm, the co-author (with Dave Holls) of A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design; art historian C. Edson Armi, the author of The Art of American Car Design: The Profession and the Personalities; researcher David Crippens, whose taped interviews with numerous now deceased GM designers are housed as a collection, the Automotive Design Oral History Project, at the Benson Ford Research Center at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; and automotive writer Stanley Brams.
A great deal of research material was provided by the General Motors Design Archives and Special Collection in Warren, Michigan, notably a nearly 600-page unpublished manuscript by the late George Moon, “An American Versailles: Eero Saarinen and the General Motors Technical Center—A Privilege Remembered,” and Brams’s unpublished manuscript, “The Skillful Men: An Intimate Record of the Styling Section at General Motors—1928 to 1954.” I also drew upon the reporting of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, as well as the following books: Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times, by Ed Cray; The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History, by Gregory Paul Williams; The Arsenal of Democracy, by A. J. Baime; Freedom’s Forge, by Arthur Herman; Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933, and Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933–1962, both by Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill; Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire, by Richard Bak; The Fifties and The Reckoning, both by David Halberstam; My Years with General Motors, by Alfred P. Sloan Jr.; Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius, by Vincent Curcio; Billy, Alfred, and General Motors: The Story of Two Unique Men, a Legendary Company, and a Remarkable Time in American History, by William Pelfrey; Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design, by David Gartman; The Automobile Age, by James J. Flink; Breaking the Banks in Motor City: The Auto Industry, the 1933 Detroit Banking Crisis and the Start of the New Deal, by Darwyn H. Lumley; and the website carofthecentury.com, which is curated by Richard Earl, Harley’s grandson.
The history of the Earl and Taft families is largely taken from personal correspondence and three personal narratives: The California Pioneer Family of Ariel Merrick Makepeace Hazard, by Warde Eugene Parker; The Journal of Mary Hazard, 1841–1938; and The Recollections of George W. Hazard. The latter two can be found on Ancestry.com.
PROLOGUE: DEDICATION DAY
“an architectural feat”: “The Maturing Modern,” Time, July 2, 1956, 52.
CHAPTER 1: PIONEERS
When the first loggers arrived in Michigan: Bill Loomis, “Shanty Boys, River Hogs and the Forests of Michigan,” Detroit News, April 8, 2012.
Michigan’s pine forest: Maria Quinlan, “Lumbering in Michigan,” Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Michigan.gov.
the loggers spent the entire winter: Loomis, “Shanty Boys.”
Jacob William Earl: Earl family records, interviews.
Mary Hazard was born in Detroit: The Journal of Mary Hazard, 1841–1938; The Recollections of George W. Hazard; and Taft and Earl family records and correspondence.
The city of Los Angeles: Nathan Masters, “From Plaza Abaja to Pershing Square: LA’s Oldest Park Through the Decades,” www.kcet.org.
“the first Anglo-Saxon child”: Sally Taft Teschke, “When Hollywood and I Were Babies: An Oral History by Sally Taft Teschke,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1934.
The Earls eventually followed: Michael Lamm, “Harley Earl’s California Years, 1893–1927,” Automobile Quarterly 20, no. 1 (April 1982): 39.
Their slowness wasn’t the only problem: Joel A. Tarr, “Urban Pollution—Many Long Years Ago,” American Heritage 222, no. 6 (October 1971).
“would benefit the public health”: Ibid.
“It never kicks or bites”: Vincent Curcio, Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 127.
Olds’s new Detroit factory: William Pelfrey, Billy, Alfred, and General Motors: The Story of Two Unique Men, a Legendary Company, and a Remarkable Time in American History (New York: AMACOM, 2006), 58.
“Rows upon rows of special machinery”: “The Automobile World and Its Doings,” Detroit Free Press, May 4, 1904, 35.
“build a motorcar for the multitudes”: David L. Lewis, “Henry Ford: A Fresh Perspective,” Michigan History, March–April 1996.
“As a group they were”: John B. Rae, “Why Michigan?,” Michigan History, March–April 1996, 11.
CHAPTER 2: HOLLYWOOD AND HARLEY
Trees weren’t all that Whitley had planted: Gregory Paul Williams, The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History (Los Angeles: BL Press, 2005), 62.
“a God-fearing suburb”: Ibid.
“a self-contained oasis”: Christy Borth, “Harley J. Earl: The Man Who Invented the Modern Car,” Ward’s Autoworld, June/July 1969, 34.
“We lived a country life”: Teschke, “When Hollywood and I Were Babies.”
“Hollywood was a very moderate”: Ibid.
Sally and her six siblings: Ibid.
Every June, he packed up: Earl family records and correspondence.
“The automobile is essential”: Charles L. Palmer, “The Automobile Outlook,” Harper’s Weekly 5, part 2 (1906).
changed the name of his business: Earl Automobile Works catalog, courtesy of the Earl family.
“My father made a very tough steel”: Harley Earl, as told to Arthur W. Baum, “I Dream Automobiles,” Saturday Evening Post, August 7, 1954, 17.
Harley wanted to try his hand: Michael Lamm and Dave Holls, A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design (Stockton, CA: Lamm-Morada Publishing, 1996), 86.
“Harley was sixteen and I was fourteen”: Ibid.
a chance encounter on a Hollywood street: Williams, The Story of Hollywood, 62.
“They popped up like gypsy encampments”: Ibid., 64.
They shot their short: Ibid., 65.
“We delighted in watching movies”: Teschke, “When Hollywood and I Were Babies.”
anti-movie prejudice: Williams, The Story of Hollywood, 73.
Griffith’s follow-up: Ibid., 87.
“I liked to fell over”: Stanley Brams, taped interview with Harley Earl, January 1953.
“the love of motion and speed”: Cecil B. DeMille, foreword to “Cars of the Stars and Movie Memories,” Floyd Clymer’s Historical Album no. 1 (1954).
“poor but worthy young men”: Julian Smith, “Transports of Delight: The Image of the Automobile in Early Films,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 11, no. 3 (September 1981): 59–67.
On October 8, his mother: Earl family records and interviews.
“But he fought it”: Lamm, “Harley Earl’s California Years, 1893–1927,” 40.
CHAPTER 3: THE COMPETITORS
Henry Ford was so pleased: David L. Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976), 114.
Twenty thousand workers found employment: Charles K. Hyde, “The Dodge Brothers, the Automobile Industry, and Detroit Society in the Early Twentieth Century,” Michigan Historical Review, Fall 1996, 63.
The Dodges chose not to compete: Robert L. Rosekrans, “Bandits, Bullets, Battles—Dependability Is Born Amid Violence as Old Betsy Chugs on Stage,” Dodge News, January 1964, 4–5.
The Dodge brothers became millionaires: Hyde, “The Dodge Brothers,” 71, 75–78.
“easily the greatest industrial domain”: Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford, 161.
“the king of the carriage makers”: Pelfrey, Billy, Alfred, and General Motors, 36.
“The ideal for which”: Alfred P. Sloan Jr., My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 64, 69.
“It always seemed to me”: James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 190.
“The growth in the motor vehicle market”: Ibid., 131.
“When first-car buyers returned”: Sloan, My Years with General Motors, 163.
“Mr. Ford’s concept”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 4: THE CADILLAC KID
“Perhaps the most startling local models”: Lamm, “Harley Earl’s California Years,” 42.
“seems to surpass even the wonderful creations”: “Some Class to This Body,” Los Angeles Sunday Times, May 11, 1919.
“Those were the days”: Barbara Holliday, “Harley Earl, the Original Car Stylist,” Detroit Free Press, May 25, 1969.
“When my dad came back”: Ibid.
“Dad felt he was too old”: Ibid.
“They’d come in with a Rolls Royce”: Ibid.
A onetime writer for Motor magazine: Kim Morgan, “The Roaring Road to Ruin: Wallace Reid,” SunsetGun.com, 2013.
Reid had a reputation: Ibid.
“rarely showed reserve or restraint”: Lamm, “Harley Earl’s California Years,” 44.
“Could you have lunch”: Brams, interview with Harley Earl.
“Manager Harley Earl”: “Doll Up Cars for Company,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1922.
“He once chartered”: Lamm, “Harley Earl’s California Years,” 45.
“I can make a car”: C. Edson Armi, The Art of American Car Design: The Profession and the Personalities (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 6.
“Mr. Fisher saw Mr. Earl”: Sloan, My Years with General Motors, 316.
“The idea was to approach”: Ibid., 269.
“Up until this time”: Maurice D. Hendry, Cadillac: Standard of the World: The Complete Seventy-Year History (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 131.
“The Hispano-Suiza was the apple”: Holliday, “Harley Earl, the Original Car Stylist.”
“They walked around”: Ibid.
a “prissy” kid: Ed Cray, Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 149.
“a functional, frill-less man”: “Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Dead at 90; G.M. Leader and Philanthropist,” New York Times, February 18, 1966.
“When we got to Detroit”: Holliday, “Harley Earl, the Original Car Stylist.”
“Knowing Harley, I doubt”: Hendry, Cadillac, 131.
“longer and lower than other production cars”: David Gartman, “Harley Earl and the Art and Color Section: The Birth of Styling at General Motors,” Design Issues, Summer 1994, 13.
“Happy as a boy who succeeded”: “Harley Earl, of Car Factory in Los Angeles, Home Again,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1927, 113.
CHAPTER 5: BATTLEGROUND DETROIT
“How are you getting along?”: Brams, interview with Harley Earl.
“I personally thought it was a sissy name”: Holliday, “Harley Earl, the Original Car Stylist.”
“I think you had better work”: Sloan, My Years with General Motors, 270.
“Mr. Sloan never gave orders”: Brams, interview with Harley Earl.
“I d
idn’t know how to build anything”: Holliday, “Harley Earl, the Original Car Stylist.”
“Edsel, you shut up”: David Halberstam, The Reckoning (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 100.
But the night before the planned unveiling: Richard Bak, Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 133.
“Ford could be elected President”: Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 395.
“history’s worst case of product planning”: Daniel Gross, Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time: 20 Inspiring Tales of Entrepreneurs Who Changed the Way We Live and Do Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 88.
“Detroit was macho in those days”: “Reminiscences of Frank Q. Hershey,” Automotive Design Oral History Project, Benson Ford Research Center, Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan.
“Father made the most popular car”: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 90.
“We’ve got a pretty good man”: Bak, Henry and Edsel, 111.
“I’ve got no use”: Halberstam, The Reckoning, 100.
“The new Ford automobile”: Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 450.
By June, Chevrolet had produced: Ibid., 449.
a look at “Henry’s new car”: Ibid., 459.
Henry Ford’s impromptu model change: Ibid., 458.
“The Marmon had a hollow”: Alexandra Earl, taped interview with Frank Hershey, May 9, 1991, provided by Alexandra Earl.
“But I gave up college”: Ibid.
“These were rough-and-tumble guys”: Ibid.
“Having come from California”: “Reminiscences of Clare MacKichan,” Automotive Design Oral History Project, Benson Ford Research Center, Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan, 7.
“I roared like a Ventura sea lion”: Earl and Baum, “I Dream Automobiles,” 18.
Harley was “practically suicidal”: Alexandra Earl, interview with Hershey.
1.8 million Model As: Cray, Chrome Colossus, 266.
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