Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  At GM, the conglomerate’s chief designer, Harley Earl, reigned supreme, his cars epitomizing the confident, masculine excesses of the automobile’s Golden Age. In 1958 he was appointed a company vice president, the first designer in the car industry ever to rise to such exalted rank. He undoubtedly deserved the accolade; assisted by GM’s formidable publicity machine, he had made GM’s annual model upgrade into a time of national celebration and media frenzy, akin to a major public holiday. In many ways the Golden Age of the Car was also the era of Earl.

  Born in 1893, Harley Earl was the son of a Californian coachbuilder, who by his mid-twenties was already designing his own cars, customizing vehicles for the likes of film stars Fatty Arbuckle and Tom Mix. (The car Earl rebuilt for western star Mix featured a real leather saddle fixed to the roof and the monogram ‘TM’ inscribed all over its body.) In 1919 his promising business was bought up by Cadillac, and Earl became a GM employee. Eight years later, as the first head of GM’s new Art and Color Section, Earl was allowed to style GM’s cars, and was soon transforming the range from a series of utilitarian-looking vehicles into objects of wonder and envy.

  Success did not come overnight for Earl. While his Series 303 La Salle of 1927 borrowed its lines from contemporary Hispano-Suizas – bringing, as historian David Gartman has put it, ‘the look of the hand-crafted luxury classics to the factory-produced vehicle’ – his first truly radical design, unveiled two years later, was justifiably derided as ‘the pregnant Buick’. The highly competitive Earl reacted by denouncing Buick for altering his section’s design without his consent.

  By the mid-1930s, however, Earl had succeeded in making GM’s cars both distinctive and stylish. From 1937, too, he was permitted to work out his more advanced ideas using a series of one-off concept cars. The first, the Buick Y Job, was a low, twoseater sports convertible which piled on the chrome and did without customary running boards (as the Traction Avant had already done) to make the car look longer and leaner – an idiom that Earl soon applied to the whole General Motors range.

  Many observers could not understand how he did it. Earl could not draw, and rarely talked to GM’s engineers. Indeed, he was abysmal at almost all workplace relationships; he preferred instead to act like a Hollywood director, barking out orders rather than consulting colleagues. A quick-tempered, macho bully, who used his burly frame and great height (he was six feet five inches tall) to intimidate his colleagues, he terrified and tyrannized his immediate staff. Anyone who dared to criticize his judgement was publicly branded a ‘fairy’ or a ‘pantywaist’. While Earl built Art and Color into a large division – in twenty years he increased its payroll from fifty to 1,400 – the section’s staff turnover rates under his headship always remained alarmingly high.

  The permanently tanned Earl was also very conscious of his public image. He liked to appear in freshly laundered white linen suits, and kept a large wardrobe of clothes at his office that replicated the one at home, enabling him to change into identical fresh clothes whenever he wanted. And he ensured that he always kept well away from public speaking, at which he recognized he was very poor.

  The key to Earl’s success was not so much his brash, intuitive genius as his excellent relationship with Alfred P. Sloan. GM’s chairman treated Earl almost like a son; basking in the great man’s favour, Earl was virtually unassailable. Each month he would spend a month with Sloan on his yacht, going over the latest designs. When he returned to Detroit, there was never any argument: Earl’s decisions, implicitly backed by the company’s president, were final.

  Earl used clay, rather than the traditional wood and metal, models to design his cars, allowing him to achieve more rounded and streamlined shapes. He was also helped by US Steel’s introduction in 1934 of far larger sheets of metal, which enabled him to replicate his clay models in metal, achieving a continuity of line and a unified look that had previously been impossible. His designs often used well-balanced, prominent trunks to counterbalance his increasingly long hoods, and made great play of chrome brightwork to give, as he put it, ‘the look of money’. The recent introduction of unitary monocoque construction, which gave the car greater strength and stability, enabled Earl to make his cars not only longer but also lower, in the manner of Flaminio Bertoni’s innovative Citroën.

  Harley Earl is forever linked with the befinned excesses of motoring’s Golden Age. His first tail-finned cars appeared in 1948, as part of his long, low Futuramic range. The ’48 Cadillacs consciously borrowed their pronounced fins from the twin-boom configuration of the legendary piston-engined wartime fighter, Lockheed’s P-38 Lightning – whose designer, Clarence Johnson, had in turn had taken the P-38’s combination of twin boom and central nacelle from Fokker’s groundbreaking G1 fighter of 1937. (During the war, Earl actually visited a nearby USAAF base, Selfridge Field, in order to examine the P-38 at close quarters.) In 1949 Earl displayed a whole range of tail-finned autos at GM’s first Motorama, an in-house motor show where next year’s models were displayed alongside Earl’s cherished ‘dream cars’, the test-beds for future GM designs. Star of the first Motorama was Earl’s Le Sabre XP-8 concept car, which borrowed both fins and title from the jet aircraft industry.1 The Le Sabre was an unashamed homage to North American Aviation’s contemporary swept-wing F-86 Sabre jet, with the latter’s turbojet engine reflected in the Le Sabre’s giant, cyclopean central headlight.

  From 1949, Earl’s cars became increasingly innovative, and outrageous. The vast grille he introduced to the whole GM range was soon tagged the ‘dollar grin’ by European motoring journalists, while his 1951 Pontiacs boasted a tripartite grille-fender that gloried in its mass of chrome. His ‘hard-top convertibles’, long, twodoor models with no side pillars to support the roof, looked immensely sophisticated. (They were also, however, very vulnerable in the event of a rollover.) The panoramic windshields of his Cadillacs grew so large that the resited A-pillars created a blind spot for any driver looking sharply left. And in 1957 he ensured GM was the first car maker to fit quadruple headlights, which he introduced into the 6 litre, four-door Cadillac Eldorado.

  The Eldorado carried all the hallmarks of Earl’s Golden Age styling. A low-production convertible, the luxury Eldorado was first released in 1953; during the rest of the decade, the innovations that Earl introduced with the Eldorado tended to percolate down to other Cadillac models and GM divisions a year or so later. The ’53 Eldorado was based on a concept car of the previous year, which had been built to Earl’s specifications to mark Cadillac’s fortieth anniversary. The Eldorado was available in only four colours – Aztec Red, Alpine White, Azure Blue and Artisan Ochre – and was twice as expensive as its convertible Cadillac cousins. With its wraparound windshield, interrupted belt-line and massive chrome fender studded with giant, shell-case projections, the Eldorado was Harley Earl’s most characteristic and influential design. The fender’s aggressive protrusions were soon nicknamed ‘Dagmars’ after a notorious TV personality of the time (played by Virginia Lewis) whose principal asset was her pronounced embonpoint. Dagmars spread from GM to all US car makers and endured for a number of years; the last car to be ‘Dagmarred’ was the 1961 Lincoln Continental. It is perhaps not coincidental that when the American toy maker Mattel launched its Barbie doll in 1959, her breasts appeared to be derived from the Dagmars on Earl’s classic Eldorados.

  The General Motors of the 1950s was not just about Dagmarred Cadillacs. When Oldsmobile’s wood-panelled station wagon was introduced in 1940, station wagons were considered as ungainly, lumbering homes on wheels, and this sector accounted for a mere 1 per cent of the US car market. Car makers did not like them because the timbered construction of the rear could not be adapted easily to the assembly line, and they were consequently expensive to make. Oldsmobile’s new car, however, revolutionized this dormant product category. Its six-cylinder engine guaranteed good acceleration, while its Hydra-Matic automatic suspension provided a smooth ride. Its wooden struts were applied, rather than made integ
ral to its construction, allowing the car to be built wholly on the assembly line. (By the late 1950s station wagons’ front doors were often entirely wood-free, mirroring those of a normal sedan.) Families liked them, as they seemed to be an extension of the home. Sensing an opportunity, Ford followed GM’s lead, and by 1955 had snatched 47 per cent of this rapidly growing market sector – sufficient for the manufacturer to be dubbed ‘the nation’s wagon-master’ by the motoring press. Ford even made a sporty station wagon-cum-pickup, the Ranchero, in 1957. It would be thirty more years, however, before this prescient idea was to blossom into an international phenomenon.

  Far more characteristic of Harley Earl’s design philosophy than Oldsmobile’s station wagons was his groundbreaking Chevrolet Corvette of 1953. Named after the small naval vessel made famous in the Second World War, it was a rakish, twoseat convertible with a wraparound windscreen and a light, glass-fibre body, which Earl intended as an American rival to the British sports cars that were then taking the US by storm. Unfortunately, the first-generation Corvette failed to live up to the promise of Earl’s stylish body. Neither its engine nor its transmission was suitable for a premium sports car. (For some reason, Chevrolet had fitted a twospeed Powerglide automatic gearbox instead of the manual gear change usual for sporty cars.) These factors, together with its mediocre steering and brakes, ensured that its performance proved very disappointing. It was then that the man subsequently tagged ‘the Father of the Corvette’, Zora Arkus-Duntov, came to the rescue.

  Arkus-Duntov had had a colourful life before he arrived at GM. Born in Belgium, of Russian Jewish parents, his mother divorced his miningengineer father when Zora was young, but then proceeded to live with her new partner (Josef Duntov, another mining engineer) and her exhusband in an intriguing ménage à trois, hence Zora’s double-barrelled surname. In 1927 the family moved to Berlin, where Zora, having graduated from the Charlottenburg Technological University in 1934, worked as a mechanical engineer, as well as being, in his spare time, an amateur motorcycle racer. When war broke out in 1939, the Arkus-Duntovs (who had miraculously escaped internment or execution in Germany) fled to France, where Zora joined the French air force. On France’s surrender in 1940, he obtained exit visas from the Spanish consulate in Marseilles for his whole family. His new wife, Elfi, who was still living in Paris, made a dramatic dash south to join her husband in her MG, just ahead of the advancing German armies, while Zora and his brother hid in a Marseilles brothel. Zora then conducted the entire family, including his parents, to Portugal and thence by ship to New York.

  Arriving in New York, the Arkus-Duntov brothers set up a factory making parts for military and civilian vehicles. This went bankrupt after the war, prompting Zora to move again, this time to Britain, where he helped the niche, Clapham-based sports car manufacturer Allard race its cars at Le Mans in 1952 and 1953. (Zora also returned to continental Europe in 1954 and 1955 to register Le Mans class victories at the wheel of a Porsche.)

  Returning once more to the US, Zora saw the new Corvette prototype at 1953’s Motorama. While impressed with Earl’s fibreglass body, he correctly judged the car’s mechanics to be underwhelming. He wrote to Chevrolet’s chief engineer, Ed Cole, offering to work on the car, supplementing his offer with a relevant technical paper on motor car speed. Chevrolet was impressed and in May 1953 Zora started as an assistant staff engineer.

  Arkus-Duntov made a big difference in Detroit. He upgraded the Corvette’s engine, introducing a compact V-8 with a high-lift camshaft and fuel injection. His revamped Corvette soon became the class leader, able to challenge Jaguar, Ferrari and Porsche imports, commanding encouraging home sales, and performing well on the racetrack. Zora himself drove up Pikes Peak in a Corvette in 1956, in order to demonstrate its enhanced performance to the nation’s media, and later that year took a Corvette to Daytona Beach and reached a record 150 mph for a flying mile. Despite GM’s official prohibitions, Zora continued racing Corvettes well into the 1960s. He retired in 1975, but, aged eightythree, still took part in the roll-out of the millionth Corvette in 1992 and drove a bulldozer at the groundbreaking ceremony for the National Corvette Museum.

  The initial failure of the Corvette demonstrated that Harley Earl did not have everything his own way in the mid-fifties. And in 1955 GM’s design supremo found himself beaten at his own game by a rival stylist, one whose employers had for two decades been written off as manufacturers of stodgy, oldfashioned, middle of the road automobiles.

  Born in Michigan in 1909 (as Virgil Anderson) to an unmarried mother, and adopted two years later, Virgil Exner majored in fine art at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, the home of Studebaker, until financial worries and his inherent impatience led him to drop out in 1928 after only two years of study. After working for a local art studio, Exner was hired by Harley Earl to work in the Pontiac division of GM, and in 1938 he got his big break, joining Raymond Loewy’s already legendary industrial design firm. There, among other projects, he worked on Studebaker cars and, from 1942, on the DUKW and Weasel amphibious trucks made by GM. In 1944, though, Exner fell out with the gifted but mercurial Loewy. By then, Loewy’s high-handed manner had also alienated one of his principal clients, Studebaker. As a result, the Indiana car maker promptly hired Exner as their in-house chief styling engineer, infuriating the temperamental Loewy.

  Exner was no retiring genius, and could be as difficult as the notoriously short-fused Loewy. Rake-thin, but blessed with filmstar good looks, he was flashy and flamboyant in the manner of Harley Earl – but, thankfully, without Earl’s bullying manner. Like Earl, he sported a permanent tan, which contrasted with his habitual shiny silver suit and his grey hair – a look that inspired his staff to call him (not entirely benignly) ‘the chrome-plated man’.

  Exner’s greatest stylistic triumph at Studebaker was the 1947 Starlight: a low, European-styled, twodoor coupé, whose compact, squared-off elegance was light years ahead of its US rivals. Starlights had pillar supports for the roof, while the hard-top version was confusingly called the Starliner – an odd name for such a compact car.1 The Starlight/Starliner received the backhanded compliment of having its lines plagiarized by Ford in 1952 for their Crestline and smaller Lincolns, and by GM for their 1953 Oldsmobiles. Indeed, by 1954 both GM and Ford were aping Exner’s squared-off body shape for all their divisional ranges. The 1957 Buick Roadmaster coupé, for example, looked just like the Starlight’s stablemate. By that time, though, Exner was long gone.

  The retirement in 1949 of Exner’s corporate benefactor, Roy Cole, made Exner very vulnerable at the struggling Studebaker, and the designer started to look further afield. Having been promised a job as chief stylist at Ford, an offer that was then crudely withdrawn (Ford gave the job to the more malleable but more pedestrian George Walker), Exner stomped off to Chrysler. This in turn encouraged Raymond Loewy publicly to take the credit for the whole Studebaker Starlight concept, justifiably enraging Exner.

  The US motor industry thought it had seen the last of Exner. Chrysler was notoriously run by engineers, not stylists or marketing men, and its cars were lumpy and oldfashioned compared with their equivalents at GM or Ford. Chrysler certainly led the field in terms of engineering innovation. The firm – now, since Chrysler’s death, led by Walter Chrysler’s former right-hand man, the engineer K. T. Keller – was the first to introduce disc brakes (in 1949), power steering (in 1951), hydraulic shock absorbers (1952) and the alternator (1960). But it was also, notoriously, a company run by old men; following Keller’s retirement in 1950, almost all of Chrysler’s senior executives were in their sixties or seventies. And most of them were still plagued by the memory of the failed Chrysler Airflow of 1934, and cited the disaster as an example of what would happen if designers were allowed to take charge (although, as we have seen, the Airflow was a product of the firm’s engineers rather than its stylists). Compared with GM and even Ford, Chrysler’s styling department was tiny. Everyone was therefore surprised when Exner joined Chrysler, and eve
n more so when the designer was allowed not only to enlarge the firm’s styling department but also to assume more and more responsibility for the finished models.

  Exner soon showed what he was capable of with the K-310 concept car of 1952. Two-tone bodywork emphasized the long, low, lean lines of this radical design, which featured large, circular headlamps and, at the rear, ‘gun-sight’ (or ‘microphone’) tail lights, which projected on stalks. The Chrysler Special and De Soto Adventurer concept cars of 1952–4 developed Exner’s vision still further, incorporating elements from contemporary Jaguars and Ferraris. And Exner’s sporty, twoseater Dodge Firearrow concept series of 1953–4 prefigured the Ford Thunderbird of 1955, with plain bodywork and eccentric grilles suggesting power and speed. It was while driving a Dodge Firearrow that racing driver Betty Skelton set the women’s land speed record in 1954 when she topped 143 mph at Chrysler’s proving grounds.

  By 1955 Exner felt confident enough to apply his design concepts to mass-production models, and in that year his Forward Look cars hit the salerooms. The Forward Look involved a complete redesign of the whole Chrysler range, from the economy Plymouths to the top of the range Imperials (now constituting a stand-alone marque). Cars were comprehensively restyled in the low, compact and distinctly European idiom Exner had pioneered with his concept cars, complete with tail fins, eyebrowed headlamps, two-and even three-tone colour schemes, and gun-sight tail lights (initially used only for the Imperials but soon applied to all the divisions’ products). The Forward Look brand’s ‘arrow’ logo (devised not by Exner himself but by Chrysler’s advertising agency, McCann Erickson) was applied to all new Chrysler Corporation cars for the next six years. And it worked: Exner’s Forward Look models of 1955 nearly doubled the firm’s sales over the previous year.