In 1933, General Motors (GM) considered eliminating its Pontiac division. Sales had fallen 80% since the stock market crash four years earlier, and it didn't seem likely that this trend would be reversed anytime soon. So Harley Earl, the head of the company's styling department, dispatched one of his designers to look at the mock-up of the new model prepared by the division's engineers.
XTold that it looked exactly like the 1932 car, Earl put his group into high gear and within two weeks they came up with a revised design that doubled sales that model year — and saved the Pontiac nameplate for more than 60 years.
Earl (1893-1969) went on to change the way Americans looked at and bought cars. As William Knoedelseder points out in "Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit":
"Earl practically invented the profession of automobile styling. He introduced art into the rigid mechanics of mass automobile manufacturing and thereby changed the game forever."
In a sense, Earl was born to the job. He grew up in Southern California where his father, J.W. Earl, ran a business building horse-drawn vehicles. In 1908, J.W. started Earl Automobile Works.
Harley soon developed a way to customize factory-built cars by repainting them other than the standard manufacturer-offered colors, by adding wire wheels and generally doing what he called "dolling them up."
His reputation spread and movie stars soon became regular customers. Mary Pickford, Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle were regular customers. Word of his designs spread beyond Tinseltown, and he was visited, in late 1925, by Lawrence Fisher, one of the brothers of Fisher Body.
At the time, Lawrence was head of GM's Cadillac division. Impressed by what he saw, he asked Earl to design the LaSalle, a new nameplate that the company planned to introduce in the 1927 model year. He did and it was met with rave notices. This inspired Fisher and GM CEO Alfred Sloan to offer Earl a job at first designing Cadillacs — but fully intending to expand his purview to the entire corporate line.
Previously, changes to cars' designs were almost exclusively a function of engineering improvements, not style. Earl's appointment changed that — but not without a fight. Engineers fought him tooth and nail. In fact, they once adjusted Earl's design of a special anniversary edition Buick without his knowledge. He would have none of it.
Knowing What Movie Stars Liked
Asked in a phone interview with IBD to name Earl's most important trait, biographer Knoedelseder said:
"His determination. His fierceness. When you have an idea that no one else has and you want to push it through, you have to be relentless and fierce. He had a really good idea of what Americans wanted, and I think he got it growing up in the world where motion pictures were made. He knew what movie stars liked and he knew Americans liked what movie stars liked."
And what was that? "Longer. Lower. Wider. Sleeker. That's what he thought cars should be. A greyhound, he used to say, is more attractive than a bulldog."
One reason car designs stayed relatively unchanged in the pre-Earl era is the high cost of retooling production lines. "Earl came up with a way to change the look of the cars without bringing down the corporation because of multimillion-dollar retooling costs," Knoedelseder said.
From Concept To Reality
Earl and his staff in GM's Art and Color group were asked to design a new Cadillac for the Chicago World's Fair, whose theme was "A Century of Progress." Called the Aerodynamic Coupe, the auto featured a V-16 engine (the first for an American passenger car), a sloping fastback rear and the absence of running boards.
It was intended to be the first-ever concept car, an automobile not intended for mass production. Instead a concept car was envisioned exclusively for car shows around the country, to whet the public's appetite for what the future held. But it proved so popular that it went into production for the 1936 model year.
Auto historians, Knoedelseder says, credit the Aerodynamic with ushering in the modern era of American car design. "It showed GM staff how much Harley and his staff could accomplish if given free rein."
In 1938, Earl's team designed what he labeled the Buick Y-Job. Among its now-standard features: a power convertible roof, power doors and windows, and retractable headlights. This proved the first true concept car in that it never went into production. But it didn't become a museum piece, either. Earl kept it for himself and began driving it to and from work every day. So it may also hold another distinction: the world's first vanity car.
Though his department created many forward-looking cars, Earl wasn't a traditional hands-on designer who drew styles he wanted. Nor could he always communicate his desires to his large staff. Knoedelseder thinks this might be because Earl was dyslexic.
"Dyslexics (sometimes) have trouble communicating because they see things from a different perspective. His way of creating was to say, 'I want to see everything, and when I see what I like I'll know.' He might look at a 100 drawings of a taillight. That's how he operated."
But he was open-minded. Bernie Smith, who worked for him and was responsible for the designs of the concept cars that GM put on display at the 1965 World's Fair, told IBD: "The best part of working for him is that he was very receptive to new designs and was willing to break down barriers."
Harley Earl And The Next Big Thing
The next big thing came after World War II. The war over, the auto companies returned to making cars in a market where demand often exceeded supply. GM decided to redesign its top-of-the line Cadillacs, figuring it could make more profit on the popular luxury car, and was the first off the line ahead of the rest of the business, with — wait for it — tail fins.
GM CEO Sloan liked the fins so much that he told the Cadillac division head, "Now you have a Cadillac in the rear as well as the front."
At first, the public seemed perplexed by the tail fins. Alarmed by falling sales, dealers called GM headquarters to insist the change was too radical and that something be done. But as the cars began appearing, perception changed and the fins became popular with the public — and every other American company.
But had the public consciousness not changed, Earl "would have been willing to give (the fins) up," Knoedelseder said. "He always knew the public had the final say. American buyers didn't like big wrenching changes, so if he saw them reacting negatively, he'd say, 'OK. That's it. We'll go on to something else.' "
But he was right far more often than not. In fact, his stock had risen so high that his style group's purview was expanded to include GM's Frigidaire home appliance division, and Earl even designed a locomotive for the company's Electro-Motive Division.
Competitors who at first scoffed at the idea of a style department soon opened their own, which in part prompted Earl to arrange with GM to offer scholarship grants to two well-known design schools, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the Art Center School in L.A., both of which added automobile design courses. He also started a school in Detroit, with classes held in the GM facilities.
Still, it came as something of a shock when Earl hired seven women, graduates of Pratt Institute, to join the testosterone-filled world of GM's Art and Color Division.
Damsels Of Detroit
"Research showed that women inordinately influenced which car a couple bought," Knoedelseder said. "So they made a big deal of hiring these seven women from Pratt, calling them the Damsels of Detroit.
"They really liked him and didn't see him as exploiting or taking advantage of them. They were making $5,000 a year, the same as the men.
"Still, he was a man of his time. He assigned them to work on car interiors. Not one of them got to work on car exteriors. One of them, Susan Vanderbilt, worked on safety and literally went out to junkyards to see what happens (to cars) in accidents. GM didn't want to play that up, that cars were dangerous."
Harley Earl's Keys
Created the concept of an automobile styling department.
Overcame: The creative blocks endemic in any artistic endeavor and resistance from automotive engineers.
Lesson: Be relentless in pursuit of ideas you believe in.
"I sometimes wander into their quarters, make some irrelevant or even zany observation and then leave. ... First-class minds will seize on anything out of the ordinary and race off looking for explanations or hidden meanings. That's all I want them to do. Start exercising their imaginations. The ideas will soon pop up."
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