by John Brooks
That evening, there was a big gala for one and all at the styling center, which was itself styled as a night club for the occasion, complete with a fountain that danced in time with the music of Ray McKinley’s band, whose emblem, the letters “GM”—a holdover from the days of its founder, the late Glenn Miller—was emblazoned, as usual, on the music stand of each musician, very nearly ruining the evening for Warnock. The next morning, at a windup press conference held by Ford officials. Breech declared of the Edsel, “It’s a husky youngster, and, like most other new parents, we’re proud enough to pop our buttons.” Then seventy-one of the reporters took the wheels of as many Edsels and set out for home—not to drive the cars into their garages but to deliver them to the showrooms of their local Edsel dealers. Let Warnock describe the highlights of this final flourish: “There were several unfortunate occurrences. One guy simply miscalculated and cracked up his car running into something. No fault of the Edsel there. One car lost its oil pan, so naturally the motor froze. It can happen to the best of cars. Fortunately, at the time of this malfunction the driver was going through a beautiful-sounding town—Paradise, Kansas, I think it was—and that gave the news reports about it a nice little positive touch. The nearest dealer gave the reporter a new Edsel, and he drove on home, climbing Pikes Peak on the way. Then one car crashed through a tollgate when the brakes failed. That was bad. It’s funny, but the thing we were most worried about—other drivers being so eager to get a look at the Edsels that they’d crowd our cars off the road—happened only once. That was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. One of our reporters was tooling along—no problems—when a Plymouth driver pulled up alongside to rubberneck, and edged so close that the Edsel got sideswiped. Minor damage.”
LATE in 1959, immediately after the demise of the Edsel, Business Week stated that at the big press preview a Ford executive had said to a reporter, “If the company weren’t in so deep, we never would have brought it out now.” However, since Business Week neglected to publish this patently sensational statement for over two years, and since to this day all the former ranking Edsel executives (Krafve included, notwithstanding his preoccupation with the luckless dog-food company) firmly maintained that right up to Edsel Day and even for a short time thereafter they expected the Edsel to succeed, it would seem that the quotation should be regarded as a highly suspect archaeological find. Indeed, during the period between the press preview and Edsel Day the spirit of everybody associated with the venture seems to have been one of wild optimism. “Oldsmobile, Goodbye!” ran the headline on an ad, in the Detroit Free Press, for an agency that was switching from Olds to Edsel. A dealer in Portland, Oregon, reported that he had already sold two Edsels, sight unseen. Warnock dug up a fireworks company in Japan willing to make him, at nine dollars apiece, five thousand rockets that, exploding in mid-air, would release nine-foot scale-model Edsels made of rice paper that would inflate and descend like parachutes; his head reeling with visions of filling America’s skies as well as its highways with Edsels on Edsel Day, Warnock was about to dash off an order when Krafve, looking something more than puzzled, shook his head.
On September 3rd—E Day-minus-one—the prices of the various Edsel models were announced; for cars delivered to New York they ran from just under $2,800 to just over $4,100. On E Day, the Edsel arrived. In Cambridge, a band led a gleaming motorcade of the new cars up Massachusetts Avenue; flying out of Richmond, California, a helicopter hired by one of the most jubilant of the dealers lassoed by Doyle spread a giant Edsel sign above San Francisco Bay; and all over the nation, from the Louisiana bayous to the peak of Mount Rainier to the Maine woods, one needed only a radio or a television set to know that the very air, despite Warnock’s setback on the rockets, was quivering with the presence of the Edsel. The tone for Edsel Day’s blizzard of publicity was set by an ad, published in newspapers all over the country, in which the Edsel shared the spotlight with the Ford Company’s President Ford and Chairman Breech. In the ad, Ford looked like a dignified young father, Breech like a dignified gentleman holding a full house against a possible straight, the Edsel just looked like an Edsel. The accompanying text declared that the decision to produce the car had been “based on what we knew, guessed, felt, believed, suspected—about you,” and added, “YOU are the reason behind the Edsel.” The tone was calm and confident. There did not seem to be much room for doubt about the reality of that full house.
Before sundown, it was estimated, 2,850,000 people had seen the new car in dealers’ showrooms. Three days later, in North Philadelphia, an Edsel was stolen. It can reasonably be argued that the crime marked the high-water mark of public acceptance of the Edsel; only a few months later, any but the least fastidious of car thieves might not have bothered.
DECLINE AND FALL
THE most striking physical characteristic of the Edsel was, of course, its radiator grille. This, in contrast to the wide and horizontal grilles of all nineteen other American makes of the time, was slender and vertical. Of chromium-plated steel, and shaped something like an egg, it sat in the middle of the car’s front end, and was embellished by the word “EDSEL” in aluminum letters running down its length. It was intended to suggest the front end of practically any car of twenty or thirty years ago and of most contemporary European cars, and thus to look at once seasoned and sophisticated. The trouble was that whereas the front ends of the antiques and the European cars were themselves high and narrow—consisting, indeed, of little more than the radiator grilles—the front end of the Edsel was broad and low, just like the front ends of all its American competitors. Consequently, there were wide areas on either side of the grille that had to be filled in with something, and filled in they were—with twin panels of entirely conventional horizontal chrome grillwork. The effect was that of an Oldsmobile with the prow of a Pierce-Arrow implanted in its front end, or, more metaphorically, of the charwoman trying on the duchess’ necklace. The attempt at sophistication was so transparent as to be endearing.
But if the grille of the Edsel appealed through guilelessness, the rear end was another matter. Here, too, there was a marked departure from the conventional design of the day. Instead of the notorious tail fin, the car had what looked to its fanciers like wings and to others, less ethereal-minded, like eyebrows. The lines of the trunk lid and the rear fenders, swooping upward and outward, did somewhat resemble the wings of a gull in flight, but the resemblance was marred by two long, narrow tail lights, set partly in the trunk lid and partly in the fenders, which followed those lines and created the startling illusion, especially at night, of a slant-eyed grin. From the front, the Edsel seemed, above all, anxious to please, even at the cost of being clownish; from the rear it looked crafty, Oriental, smug, one-up—maybe a little cynical and contemptuous, too. It was as if, somewhere between grille and rear fenders, a sinister personality change had taken place.
In other respects, the exterior styling of the Edsel was not far out of the ordinary. Its sides were festooned with a bit less than the average amount of chrome, and distinguished by a gouged-out bullet-shaped groove extending forward from the rear fender for about half the length of the car. Midway along this groove, the word “EDSEL” was displayed in chrome letters, and just below the rear window was a small grille-like decoration, on which was spelled out—of all things—“EDSEL.” (After all, hadn’t Stylist Brown declared his intention to create a vehicle that would be “readily recognizable”?) In its interior, the Edsel strove mightily to live up to the prediction of General Manager Krafve that the car would be “the epitome of the push-button era.” The push-button era in medium-priced cars being what it was, Krafve’s had been a rash prophecy indeed, but the Edsel rose to it with a devilish assemblage of gadgets such as had seldom, if ever, been seen before. On or near the Edsel’s dashboard were a push button that popped the trunk lid open; a lever that popped the hood open; a lever that released the parking brake; a speedometer that glowed red when the driver exceeded his chosen maximum speed; a single-dial control
for both heating and cooling; a tachometer, in the best racing-car style; buttons to operate or regulate the lights, the height of the radio antenna, the heater-blower, the windshield wiper, and the cigarette lighter; and a row of eight red lights to wink warnings that the engine was too hot, that it wasn’t hot enough, that the generator was on the blink, that the parking brake was on, that a door was open, that the oil pressure was low, that the oil level was low, and that the gasoline level was low, the last of which the skeptical driver could confirm by consulting the gas gauge, mounted a few inches away. Epitomizing this epitome, the automatic-transmission control box—arrestingly situated on top of the steering post, in the center of the wheel—sprouted a galaxy of five push buttons so light to the touch that, as Edsel men could hardly be restrained from demonstrating, they could be depressed with a toothpick.
Of the four lines of Edsels, both of the two larger and more expensive ones—the Corsair and the Citation—were 219 inches long, or two inches longer than the biggest of the Oldsmobiles; both were eighty inches wide, or about as wide as passenger cars ever get; and the height of both was only fifty-seven inches, as low as any other medium-priced car. The Ranger and the Pacer, the smaller Edsels, were six inches shorter, an inch narrower, and an inch lower than the Corsair and the Citation. The Corsair and the Citation were equipped with 345-horsepower engines, making them more powerful than any other American car at the time of their debut, and the Ranger and the Pacer were good for 303 horsepower, near the top in their class. At the touch of a toothpick to the “Drive” button, an idling Corsair or Citation sedan (more than two tons of car, in either case) could, if properly skippered, take off with such abruptness that in ten and three-tenths seconds it would be doing a mile a minute, and in seventeen and a half seconds it would be a quarter of a mile down the road. If anything or anybody happened to be in the way when the toothpick touched the push button, so much the worse.
WHEN the wraps were taken off the Edsel, it received what is known in the theatrical business as a mixed press. The automotive editors of the daily newspapers stuck mostly to straight descriptions of the car, with only here and there a phrase or two of appraisal, some of it ambiguous (“The difference in style is spectacular,” noted Joseph C. Ingraham in the New York Times) and some of it openly favorable (“A handsome and hard-punching newcomer,” said Fred Olmstead, in the Detroit Free Press). Magazine criticism was generally more exhaustive and occasionally more severe. Motor Trend, the largest monthly devoted to ordinary automobiles, as distinct from hot rods, devoted eight pages of its October, 1957, issue to an analysis and critique of the Edsel by Joe H. Wherry, its Detroit editor. Wherry liked the car’s appearance, its interior comfort, and its gadgets, although he did not always make it clear just why; in paying his respects to the transmission buttons on the steering post, he wrote, “You need not take your eyes off the road for an instant.” He conceded that there were “untold opportunities for more … unique approaches,” but he summed up his opinion in a sentence that fairly peppered the Edsel with honorific adverbs: “The Edsel performs fine, rides well, and handles good.” Tom McCahill, of Mechanix Illustrated, generally admired the “bolt bag,” as he affectionately called the Edsel, but he had some reservations, which, incidentally, throw some interesting light on an automobile critic’s equivalent of an aisle seat. “On ribbed concrete,” he reported, “every time I shot the throttle to the floor quickly, the wheels spun like a gone-wild Waring Blendor.… At high speeds, especially through rough corners, I found the suspension a little too horsebacky.… I couldn’t help but wonder what this salami would really do if it had enough road adhesion.”
By far the most downright—and very likely the most damaging—panning that the Edsel got during its first months appeared in the January, 1958, issue of the Consumers Union monthly, Consumer Reports, whose 800,000 subscribers probably included more potential Edsel buyers than have ever turned the pages of Motor Trend or Mechanix Illustrated. After having put a Corsair through a series of road tests, Consumer Reports declared:
The Edsel has no important basic advantages over other brands. The car is almost entirely conventional in construction.… The amount of shake present in this Corsair body on rough roads—which wasn’t long in making itself heard as squeaks and rattles—went well beyond any acceptable limit.… The Corsair’s handling qualities—sluggish, over-slow steering, sway and lean on turns, and a general detached-from-the-road feel—are, to put it mildly, without distinction. As a matter of, simple fact, combined with the car’s tendency to shake like jelly, Edsel handling represents retrogression rather than progress.… Stepping on the gas in traffic, or in passing cars, or just to feel the pleasurable surge of power, will cause those big cylinders really to lap up fuel.… The center of the steering wheel is not, in CU’s opinion, a good pushbutton location.… To look at the Edsel buttons pulls the driver’s eyes clear down off the road. [Pace Mr. Wherry.] The “luxury-loaded” Edsel—as one magazine cover described it—will certainly please anyone who confuses gadgetry with true luxury.
Three months later, in a roundup of all the 1958-model cars, Consumer Reports went at the Edsel again, calling it “more uselessly overpowered … more gadget bedecked, more hung with expensive accessories than any car in its price class,” and giving the Corsair and the Citation the bottom position in its competitive ratings. Like Krafve, Consumer Reports considered the Edsel an epitome; unlike Krafve, the magazine concluded that the car seemed to “epitomize the many excesses” with which Detroit manufacturers were “repulsing more and more potential car buyers.”
AND yet, in a way, the Edsel wasn’t so bad. It embodied much of the spirit of its time—or at least of the time when it was designed, early in 1955. It was clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning—a de Kooning woman. Few people, apart from employees of Foote, Cone & Belding, who were paid to do so, have adequately hymned its ability, at its best, to coax and jolly the harried owner into a sense of well-being. Furthermore, the designers of several rival makes, including Chevrolet, Buick, and Ford, Edsel’s own stablemate, later flattered Brown’s styling by imitating at least one feature of the car’s much reviled lines—the rear-end wing theme. The Edsel was obviously jinxed, but to say that it was jinxed by its design alone would be an oversimplification, as it would be to say that it was jinxed by an excess of motivational research. The fact is that in the short, unhappy life of the Edsel a number of other factors contributed to its commercial downfall. One of these was the scarcely believable circumstance that many of the very first Edsels—those obviously destined for the most glaring public limelight—were dramatically imperfect. By its preliminary program of promotion and advertising, the Ford Company had built up an overwhelming head of public interest in the Edsel, causing its arrival to be anticipated and the car itself to be gawked at with more eagerness than had ever greeted any automobile before it. After all that, it seemed, the car didn’t quite work. Within a few weeks after the Edsel was introduced, its pratfalls were the talk of the land. Edsels were delivered with oil leaks, sticking hoods, trunks that wouldn’t open, and push buttons that, far from yielding to a toothpick, couldn’t be budged with a hammer. An obviously distraught man staggered into a bar up the Hudson River, demanding a double shot without delay and exclaiming that the dashboard of his new Edsel had just burst into flame. Automotive News reported that in general the earliest Edsels suffered from poor paint, inferior sheet metal, and faulty accessories, and quoted the lament of a dealer about one of the first Edsel convertibles he received: “The top was badly set, doors cockeyed, the header bar trimmed at the wrong angle, and the front springs sagged.” The Ford Company had the particular bad luck to sell to Consumers Union—which buys its test cars in the open market, as a precaution against being favored with specially doctored samples—an Edsel in which the axle ratio was wrong, an expansion plug in the cooling system blew out, the power-steering pump leaked, the rear-axle gears were noisy, and the heater emitted blasts of hot air when it was tu
rned off. A former executive of the Edsel Division has estimated that only about half of the first Edsels really performed properly.
A layman cannot help wondering how the Ford Company, in all its power and glory, could have been guilty of such a Mack Sennett routine of buildup and anticlimax. The wan, hard-working Krafve explains gamely that when a company brings out a new model of any make—even an old and tested one—the first cars often have bugs in them. A more startling theory—though only a theory—is that there may have been sabotage in some of the four plants that assembled the Edsel, all but one of which had previously been, and currently also were, assembling Fords or Mercurys. In marketing the Edsel, the Ford Company took a leaf out of the book of General Motors, which for years had successfully been permitting, and even encouraging, the makers and sellers of its Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Pontiacs, and the higher-priced models of its Chevrolet to fight for customers with no quarter given; faced with the same sort of intramural competition, some members of the Ford and Lincoln-Mercury Divisions of the Ford Company openly hoped from the start for the Edsel’s downfall. (Krafve, realizing what might happen, had asked that the Edsel be assembled in plants of its own, but his superiors turned him down.) However, Doyle, speaking with the authority of a veteran of the automobile business as well as with that of Krafve’s second-in-command, pooh-poohs the notion that the Edsel was the victim of dirty work at the plants. “Of course the Ford and Lincoln-Mercury Divisions didn’t want to see another Ford Company car in the field,” he says, “but as far as I know, anything they did at the executive and plant levels was in competitive good taste. On the other hand, at the distribution and dealer level, you got some rough infighting in terms of whispering and propaganda. If I’d been in one of the other divisions, I’d have done the same thing.” No proud defeated general of the old school ever spoke more nobly.