The Cellini of Chrome

(See Cover)

For the nation's 77.9 million drivers, it was the week to do their Christmas window-shopping early. Detroit rolled its 1958 models and began to croon its annual siren sales song to the U.S. public. Out came a whole fleet of new cars in a blizzard of announcements promising "jet intakes," "bubble windshields," "flight-pitch transmissions," "Marauder engines"--even an ICBM look. There were downswept snouts, upswept fins and outswept taillights ; all were ablaze with dazzling colors and gleaming chrome brighter than any Christmas tree. Sighed a Detroit secretary, rapturously examining a trailerload of new 1958s; "Chrome is my favorite color."

Detroit's new .cars were not only big news to the industry and its faithful public; they were even bigger news to the U.S. economy. From Wall Street to Main Street, the hopes and fears of those fretting about a business slowdown (see Wall Street) focused around the new models and gave renewed emphasis to the old saying: "As the new cars go, so goes the new year." Exaggerated as that might be, the eagerness with which the public buys the new cars may well mean the difference between a good or a great year for U.S. business in 1958. One out of every seven U.S. workers--10.3 million in all--is dependent in some way on the auto industry. It consumes 22% of the nation's steel, 13.6% of its nickel, 62% of its rubber for tires alone, 36% of its annual radio production. A boom in autos is a boom for scores of other industries.

The automakers, who spent $1.5 billion to retool for the 1958 lines, are doing their best to make 1958 a great year. Hoping to sell at least 6,000,000 cars, they have visions of even juicier sugarplums. So many motorists have paid off the debt on their present cars that 1,000,000 more potential buyers than this year will be able to buy again in 1958--maybe even enough for a 7,000,000-car year.

What Is Style? As always, there would be complaints that Detroit's new chromium chariots are too long, too heavy, too bold, too brassy. Yet the inescapable fact, as every automan knows, is that flash, dash and dazzle--what automen call style--are the attractions that sell new cars. Those brave enough, and successful enough, to produce startling new styles that catch the public fancy, as Chrysler discovered in 1957, can suddenly boost profits from $6,000,000 to $103 million (and rise from 15.9% to 19.5% of the market) in a single year. Conservatives who fall behind, as General Motors learned in 1957, can see profit figures change from $640 million to $602 million (and tumble from 51.4% to 45.5% of the market). And the car that can combine just the right amount of change with the continuity that preserves used-car values can build up year after year until finally it leads them all.

For the first time in 21 years, Ford in 1957 headed the pack with a 45,000-car sales lead over Chevrolet at the eight-month mark. Ford earnings showed it: $229.5 million for 1957's first nine months v. $145.2 million last year. And Ford is determined to do even better in 1958.

The man who put Ford out ahead in the fashion parade and sets the style in Ford's future is George William Walker, vice president and chief of styling, a bold, extraverted artist with American Indian blood in his veins and American autos on his mind. He likes to fancy himself as a Cellini of chrome, though he is as far removed from the popular notion of an artist as a ballet dancer from a professional football player--which Walker once was. Walker admittedly does not try to design for the conservative few; he aims at what, in a curious anachronism, he calls the "shawl market." He can illustrate the kind of flamboyant luxury he thinks will make every buyer feel like a king of the road. Says he, happily recounting what he considers his "finest moment" while on a vacation in Florida: "I was terrific. There I was in my white Continental, and I was wearing a pure-silk, pure-white, embroidered cowboy shirt, and black gabardine trousers. Beside me in the car was my jet black Great Dane, imported from Europe, named Dana von Krupp. You just can't do any better than that."

For the Ladies. In explaining his theories of design, Stylist Walker is well aware of the revolution in American buying habits. Says he: "Beauty is what sells the American car. And the person we are designing it for is the American woman. Only one out of every three women in the U.S. drives, but we figure that 80% or better of all car purchases are decided on by women. A woman is naturally style-conscious from birth--in her home, her clothes, everything she does. So when she and her husband go out to buy a car, she wants beauty on wheels." In the days when the husband did the buying, and was chiefly interested in mechanical features, he was happy with plain blue or black. Now, says Walker, "it is the woman who likes colors. We've spent millions to make the floor covering like the carpet in her living room." Adds Walker: "We have the initiative, and we're going to keep it."

To keep the initiative, Ford, which spent $400 million on its new cars last year, has spent another $610 million this year to produce George Walker's ideas of beauty. There is no other choice. Throughout the industry, the competition for public favor is so keen that automen are approaching a complete model changeover every year instead of the traditional three-year cycle.

The 1958 Ford still has its tubelike rear effect and flaring, canted tail fins, but other than that it is hardly recognizable, with a honeycomb jet-intake grille, dual headlights and spreading, horizontal taillights, somewhat like those on the new Edsel (TIME, Sept. 2). There is also a new Cruise-O-Matic transmission and an 88-h.p. increase to 300 h.p. for Ford's biggest V-8 engine. Mercury, whose sharp, chrome-laden lines were too flashy last year, has been toned down. It has a bigger V-8 engine turning up 400 h.p., and a complete, new Park Lane series 9 in. longer (220 in. overall) than any other Mercury.

Ford also has a zippier (300 h.p. or more), completely restyled, four-seater Thunderbird aimed more at the family than the sports-car market. But the car Ford worked hardest on is the Lincoln, frankly aimed at knocking Cadillac from leadership of the luxury market. Longest car on the road (229 in.), the Lincoln looks like a popular version of the Continental, which now becomes the top-priced Lincoln series, has horsepower boosted to 375 h.p., and new weight distribution that makes it handle like a sports car. Says Stylist Walker: "If that Lincoln doesn't beat Caddy, I don't know which end is up."

Lazy S & Struts. But General Motors does not intend to celebrate its golden anniversary year by losing any more of the market; it spent $730 million (and will boost prices 3% to 5%) to redesign every car with the exception of the Cadillac. To win back its cherished lead, 1958's Chevrolet is all new from latticework grille to gently curving, lazy-S rear-fender lines; all cars are 9 in. longer, 4 in. wider, 2 in. lower, have optional air-suspension ride and a slight horsepower increase to 290 h.p. Two new models: a sporty Impala hardtop and a convertible, both with 280 h.p. to compete with Ford's Thunderbird. Pontiac is just as new, with revamped, rocket-ornamented body, double-barreled taillight and a bigger, 300-h.p. engine.

Even more striking changes appear in Buick and Oldsmobile, which took the worst beatings this year. Olds slipped by 62,000 cars (17.7%); Buick dropped 111,000 (25.5%) and fell into fourth place behind Plymouth. Gone are the thick rear-window struts, which G.M. stylists admitted were a flub; gone, too, is Buick's famed "porthole" trademark. The new Buick has clean fenders, a waffle-iron grille with 160 square nubs, an improved "flight-pitch" Dynaflow transmission, new air-cooled aluminum brakes and a new, high-priced ($4,663 top) Limited series. Olds got the same extensive body change, plus an improved Hydra-Matic transmission and air-suspension ride. One surprising change: for those who complain about the horsepower race, Olds has reduced its standard V-8 from 277 h.p. to 265 h.p. But just in case all the holler dies down, Olds also has engines up to 312 h.p.

The only automaker sitting tight with the winning hand it dealt itself last year is Chrysler, which is only spending a relatively modest $150 million, gambling that last year's slogan--"Suddenly it's 1960" still holds for 1958. But all Chrysler cars have modified grilles, trim and taillights, a new bubble windshield that increases visibility, and new engines with higher horsepower: up to 315 h.p. for Plymouth, 333 h.p. for Dodge, 355 h.p. for De Soto, 390 h.p. for Chrysler and Imperial.

The Classic Cars. The paramount importance of style, so evident in 1958 models, was slow to make itself felt on automakers. In the years when buying, driving and tinkering with the family car were a proud male prerogative (and when most car owners could still distinguish a carburetor from an oil filter), the big sales features were dependability and technical improvements--plus the giddy growth of the U.S. itself. Every new road opened up a new market; every new mechanical advance--hydraulic brakes, balloon tires, steel to replace wood and leather--brought the new buyers flocking to Detroit's door. The famed Ford model T went 19 years without a basic body change. For the Hollywood movie star or Wall Street tycoon who wanted something special, there was the custom-body shop. But even Designer Gordon Buehrig, who styled three classic U.S. cars--the Duesenberg J, the boat-tailed Auburn Speedster, the Cord 810--worked almost unnoticed. "The job was just a job," says Buehrig, today a Ford engineer. "We worked in a corner of the plant, and none of us thought we were working on a classic."

Not until the early '30s did Detroit's automakers realize the potential of launching new-looking models (but not too new) every year to lure more customers. Under G.M. President Alfred P. Sloan, Harley Earl set up the first full-fledged styling section, and in the process gave G.M. the style lead for more than 20 years. Earl pioneered the rounded body for mass-production cars, slanted windshields, fenders that projected over the doors, the hardtop convertible. Despite G.M.'s success others were slow to follow. Even as late as 1948, Chrysler President K. T. Keller hotly defended his high-hat, high-topped, old-fashioned cars: "There are parts of this country, containing millions of people, where both the men and the ladies are in the habit of getting behind the wheel, or on the back seat wearing hats . . ." Not until 1952, when President L. L. Colbert made Virgil Exner, who had worked under Raymond Loewy styling the new eye-catching, postwar Studebaker, director of styling, did styling come into its own at Chrysler. Ford also cared so little for style that it let its out side bodybuilders design the new models, except for the Lincoln Zephyr and the famed Continental, which were largely designed by Edsel Ford, who understood the value of good design but was unable to sell his ideas to Old Henry. When President Henry Ford II's new team took over after World War II, it realized the mistake and in 1946 hired Walker, then a freelance designer, to catch up to G.M. He quickly set the modern tone that helped head Ford back toward the top.

Nubians & Lambskin. Today an auto designer, in the words of one, "works best when draped at the edge of a turquoise swimming pool while Nubian slaves in gold sarongs serve chilled nectars in silver cups, and a blonde, streamlined masseuse works on the master's right wrist." The description is only a slight exaggeration. George Walker sits in an office fit for an Eastern potentate: a $50,000 production done in creamy-white and black, with raw silk draperies, sumptuous leather couches, a jungle of tropical plants along one end, a bank of hifi, TV, refrigerator and cabinets at the other. On the floor spreads a carpet of inch-thick black lambskin. Reported cost: $30,000. Says Walker happily: "Ain't it sexy!"

There, in command of an $11.5 million red brick styling center set in an expanse of playing fountains and shimmering pools. Style Boss Walker works at the head of a staff of 650 artists, draftsmen, modelers and engineers. Most are young (average-age: 31); all have what automen call "gasoline in their veins." Says Walker: "You just got to love cars."

Three-Year Stretch. Ford styling is not a simple matter of blue-sky daydreaming. A new model is no longer turned out in a few months. It now takes three years and thousands of sketches. First come the idea sketches, bold and sweeping, of bodies, fenders, headlights, showing the parts from every angle. When all the ideas are agreed on, they are blocked in full scale on an enormous sheet of paper. Then a model three-eighths the full-sized car is made, changed a hundred times. Finally a full-scale clay model is sculptured, complete down to the last chrome molding.

All the while, Walker helps to refine the design, shaving one-eighth of an inch here, changing a curve there. Designers may make as many as 50 sketches of a single steering wheel, spend months deciding where the heater buttons and other appointments of the car must go, more months choosing materials to complement each of 32 different outside paint combinations. The cost of supplies alone comes to $1,600,000 a year. At each step, engineers tell the stylists what they can and cannot do. Ford's designers were unable to have lower hoods until engine experts learned how to cut the height of air filters and intake silencers.

Over all the styling studios hangs a curtain of near-nuclear-plant secrecy. Ford's 15 studios have locks that can be changed in half an hour. A security force of 20 guards run by an ex-FBI agent checks every employee's badge (a different color for each division) to make sure that no one is where he should not be. Outside, the security patrol has a 60-power telescope to keep watch on a nearby grain elevator where rival spotters might lurk. All unused sketches are carefully burned; all experimental clay models smashed. Everywhere, posters exhort the stylists to keep mum about their work. Samples: "No matter where, talk with care"--"Don't foretell the future."

Seventy Suits. The man who alone can foretell the style in Ford's future is at 61 as massive (5 ft. 10 in., 222 Ibs.) in appearance as a Kodiak bear, as styleconscious as any one of the World's Ten Best-Dressed Women. "A stylist," says Walker, "has got to show style in his cars, in his home, his clothes and his person." He even smells stylish, slathering on Faberge cologne so liberally that it lingers on long after he leaves the room. He owns 40 pairs of shoes (at $60 a pair), 70 suits, once had Saks make up four "cocktail suits" (at $250 apiece) in white with blue braid, white with black braid. "I didn't wear them," grins George. "People would think I was eccentric."

At Ford, Walker is the man who sets the basic styling themes, then gives his people their heads to work out the details. He sketches the first bold lines on which all depends, and is not afraid of the fact that as one friend says: "Every time he picks up his pencil, there is $300 million at stake." When he is not busy with meetings and administrative problems, he wanders through the studios, changing a line here, suggesting a new idea there, often makes dozens of sketches a day. Gregarious and anxious to keep his temperamental underlings happy, he chats with everyone he meets, shakes hands so much that he even shakes hands with his secretary on his way in and out of his office. "I even kiss the employees' babies at our open houses," says Walker.

Hockey & Henry. From his present eminence as Ford's top stylist. George Walker can look back on a long and circuitous road to success. He was born on May 22, 1896 in a South Side Chicago apartment hotel, the son of an Erie Railroad conductor named William Stuart Walker and a Quaker farm girl from Shattuck, Okla.. who was one-quarter Cherokee Indian. Constantly migrating, first to Jersey City, then to Barberton, Ohio, finally on to Cleveland, Walker got an erratic schooling. His marks were so low that one teacher was sure he would wind up nothing more than a "hockey-playing bum." She was nearly right--except that it was football.

Until he was 27, Walker earned his living mainly by playing professional football, studied art and did commercial work on the side. He was a semipro at 15, a $40-a-week halfback on Goodyear Tire & Rubber's team at 25, later played for the Cleveland Panthers under the late great Jim Thorpe. About all Walker got out of it was a mashed nose (later straightened) and a fistful of broken fingers. Walker decided to quit and try art fulltime. "I wanted to keep my hands and my head in one piece, and not become a bum like my teachers predicted."

Setting himself up as "George W. Walker--Illustrations," he wangled a contract as art director for a Cleveland advertising company with the assignment of doling out art work. "So I gave it to myself," says Walker. "I guess I wasn't too legitimate." Legitimate or not, Walker was soon so successful that he decided to invade Detroit, where automakers were just starting to learn the possibilities of good style, moved his family (wife Freda, two children) into a small house and himself into a $35-a-month office. A few years later he had half a dozen accounts, and his first encounter with old Henry Ford. Competing for a doorhandle contract in behalf of a client, he noticed how drab all the displays appeared, quickly slipped a piece of black velvet under the chrome hardware he had designed. Old Man Ford stalked by, barely glancing at the exhibits until he reached Walker's. "I want that," he said. The moral, says Walker: "You can't sell a diamond in a matchbox. You've got to give management what management should have, and give it to management in the right setting."

"It Won't Sell." Salesman-Stylist Walker was soon well on the way to success, with contracts from Burroughs Corp., Admiral Corp., National-U.S. Radiator and such automakers as Nash and Packard. But Walker's main target was old Henry Ford. In 1935 he spent $700 in cash and $8,000 worth of time preparing a black-and-white portfolio of futuristic cars, hoping to impress the aging auto-man. "Ford opened the book and the plastic binding fell off," says Walker, who still writhes at the memory. "All the drawings fell on the floor. Old Henry didn't say a word. He just walked out of the room. Ford hated unfunctional things--and that book sure was unfunctional." Walker kept trying, but it was not until ten years later that he got his chance. One day in 1945, some Ford executives asked him to come and see the car that the engineering department had designed for 1949. One glance was enough. "I told them it looked like George Walker bending over--I was fat then--and that it would never sell."

In three months Walker was ready with his own version, and it became the first completely redesigned Ford since before World War II. In place of the familiar fenders hanging from a boxy body, everything--fenders, hood and rear deck--was neatly smoothed into one compact entity. Says Walker: "There was a lot more significance in the 1949 Ford than the fact that it was different. It had to be. But more than that, it provided the basic concept of our styling since that time. Practically all cars at that time had bulging side lines, particularly around the front and rear fenders. We smoothed those lines out and began the movement toward the integration of the fenders and body."

Taillights & T-Birds. Walker went on to style the 1950 Lincoln and all Lincolns since, the Mercury, from 1951 on, and the 1952 Ford, which gave the company even straighter body lines and the circular taillights that are now as much a Ford trademark as Cadillac's fishtail fenders. But Walker's biggest success was in 1953. At the Paris auto show, President Henry Ford II was admiring the low-slung Jaguars, Mercedes and Ferraris, when he turned to Walker and asked: "Why can't we have a sports car like that?" Walker was waiting for just such a chance; his staff had been working on a sports car for months. He made a quick transatlantic phone call, and when he and Ford got back to Detroit, a clay model of the Thunderbird was waiting. "Instead of having a sag like a Jag," says Walker, "it had a clean, straight-line treatment that was typical of other Fords at the time. We wanted to get a small, sporty car without making it look small, since the American likes a good-sized package for the good chunk of money he pays."

On the market in 1955, Ford's low-slung T-Bird scooped the industry with a combination of 120-m.p.h. speed and comfort that started a new trend in sporty personal cars. That same year Ford hired Walker as vice president at $200,000 a year, and made him chief of all styling.

One of Walker's big jobs was to style the new Edsel. His mission was to make it recognizable as a Ford product, but different enough to make it a distinctively new car. "What we wanted," says Walker, "is for millions of people to be able to say at once: 'That's an Edsel.'" Using Ford's basic horizontal styling approach. he inserted gull-winged rear fenders, and an oval, purse-mouthed grille, with the inevitable result that a new gag was coined: "It looks like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon." So far, Edsel sales have not lived up to Walker's hopes, but it will be months before he knows whether he has a lemon or lemonade.

Where To? With his 1958 models all set, Stylist George Walker is already hard at work on Ford's multimillion-dollar bets for 1959, 1960 and 1961. Next year's line will have even heavier emphasis on the crisp, forward-thrusting look that Walker introduced with the 1957 Mercury, wider grilles, a straight-down rear window, and fins that flare out and down instead of up. Ford cars will be lower in the future--possibly down to a bare 52 in. high by 1961. "But we're not going to get the public to crawl into a car and lie on their bellies to drive it," says Walker. "We try to work with the public; we don't try to push them. If something doesn't look right to the buyer, it isn't right. You can't fool people with a lot of frills on automobiles."

To some home-grown critics. Detroit's designers have been fooling the U.S. public for years. They argue that the rapid development of the foreign small-car market (estimated 1957 sales: 225,000) is a vote against ever-longer, ever-fancier Detroit designs. Actually, say the U.S. automen, it is a simple matter of economics. Though a small car costs almost as much to build as a big car, companies would produce them if the market ever demanded it. But the U.S. public still wants its cars big--like its country. "People want big things.'' says Walker. "They want big clocks, for instance. If people have a choice between a big clock and a small clock that both cost a couple of dollars, they'll get the big one every time." As for chrome, Ford has offered a stripped-down series for years, but fancier, more expensive series outsell it by a wide margin.

The Dollar Grin. Abroad, the U.S. penchant for size and splash brings on snide cracks that the American car is the symbol of American culture: a "dollar grin for all the world." But the real experts--Europe's stylists--are quick to defend the U.S. car. Italy's great Pinin Farina, who designed the beautiful Lancia Aurelia and Alfa Romeo, calls American cars the most comfortable in the world. For the U.S., with its enormous distances and comparatively cheap gasoline, the big. powerful U.S. cars are well designed. The driver who hopes to slip into 50-m.p.h. expressway traffic needs plenty of power just as he needs a big engine to run all the wonderful gadgets that make driving easier: air conditioning, power steering, power brakes, power seat, power windows. Instead of sneering. Europe's automen are starting to window-shop Detroit for exciting ideas. Such U.S. innovations as wrap-around windshields, twin headlights, bright colors, even a few tentative fins are now appearing on foreign cars.

Beauty & Function. Ford Styling Boss Walker and his colleagues know that they have gone off-the mark at times. The U.S. public is quick to tell them so, as Walker himself knows from disappointing sales of his heavily gewgawed 1957 Mercury. But he insists thaj/-the industry is on the right track--both in style and function.

In the future, the U.S. car will probably not grow any longer, nor will it get much lower. But it will be wider and roomier, with better visibility and more safety features. It will also undoubtedly become more functional. The station wagon first started out as a farm carryall, then became a tricked-up luxury for the country-club set. But today, by wedding the sedan to the wagon, Detroit's stylists have given it a new function; they have turned out a handsome auto that can be used either to haul tomatoes to market or top hats to the opera. As a result, in ten years station wagons jumped from 2% to 13% of the total market (and 20% of Ford's), and are still climbing. To Ford's George Walker, there is a double lesson in these statistics. Says he: "Without function, beauty is defeated, but without beauty, function itself is soon defeated."

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