|
Even if you know nothing about cars, and your only exposure to American automobiles is TV and movies, you probably recognize this shape. It's been featured on everything from T-shirts to postage stamps, a quintessential icon of Fifties Americana in all its grandeur and absurdity. It is, of course, the 1959 Cadillac.
The '59 Cadillac emerged from a seismic shift at General Motors, and it marked the transition between two very different eras in automotive design. This is its story, and the story of the people who brought it to life.
THE SCION
For more than thirty years, Harley J. Earl held ultimate authority over all of General Motors' automotive designs. Unlike his successors, he did not rise through the ranks -- the styling section was created by visionary GM president Alfred P. Sloan specifically for Earl to run. Harley Earl had come to Detroit in 1926 to design the LaSalle, Cadillac's new "companion make." The results had been so commercially and aesthetically successful that Sloan conceived an "Art & Colour" section that would extend Earl's talents to the entire GM line. It took several years for Sloan's plan to be fully realized, but by the beginning of World War Two, GM Styling had around 100 employees, with separate studios for each division. By 1959, it would have more than 1,000. Earl's tenure at GM had its rough spots in the beginning, but by the time Sloan named him a corporate vice president in September 1940, the power of the man almost everyone called "Misterl" was unquestioned.
Harley Earl hired 23-year-old designer William L. Mitchell in December of 1935. Their initial meeting set the tone for the relationship that would follow. Mitchell, waiting for his interview with Earl's assistant, Howard O'Leary, struck up a conversation with a towering, nattily dressed man who was wandering through the Art & Colour studios with a friend. They chatted for nearly half an hour before Mitchell realized the man with whom he'd been talking was Harley Earl himself. It was a natural mistake, since Earl, with his football linebacker's frame and flamboyant fashion sense, didn't look like anyone's idea of a GM executive. Earl was impressed with the young man, and Mitchell was quickly hired. By 1937 Earl had made him the head of design for Cadillac.
From 1941 until 1981, all Cadillacs were powered by V8 engines. In 1959, the standard engine was 390 cubic inches (6.4 L), making 325 gross horsepower (242 kW). Eldorados had a "Q-code" engine with three two-barrel carburetors, upping the ante to 340 hp; that engine was optional on other Cadillacs for an extra $133.40. Linked to the standard four-speed, Controlled Coupling Hydramatic transmission, either engine could propel the two-and-a-half-ton Cadillac from 0-60 mph (0-97 kph) in a shade over 10 seconds, with a top speed of around 115 mph (185 kph). Thanks to the efficient engine and tall gearing, fuel economy -- though hardly good -- was no worse than many smaller contemporary cars, around 13 mpg (18 L/100 km) overall, approaching 17 mpg (13.8 L/100 km) in steady freeway cruising.
A sign of Earl's regard for Mitchell was the fact that in 1949, Earl drafted Mitchell to run his outside design company, the Harley Earl Corp. (HEC). It was not an assignment Mitchell relished, but he later credited it for honing his abilities as an art director, pitching and selling concepts to clients. Earl sweetened the pot for his protégé by giving Mitchell 10% of HEC's gross income, a tidy sum that considerably exceeded Mitchell's GM salary. Earl brought Mitchell back to General Motors in June 1953, promoting him to director of styling and informing him that he would be Earl's successor as vice president.
THE REIGN OF MISTERL
Still, in 1953, Earl was not ready to relinquish power just yet. In his final decade at GM, that power was at its height. By then, Earl had the support not only of chairman Alfred Sloan, but also of new GM president Harlow Curtice, who had been Earl's friend since Earl helped him resuscitate Buick in the mid-1930s. Earl's leadership of Styling could fairly be called enlightened despotism. He was brilliant and tyrannical, commanding loyalty through a combination of charisma and fear. One of his favorite tactics was to lecture his employees in his office, where his specially constructed, massive desk put him at eye level with his visitors even while he was seated. Earl could be supremely charming one moment, then a barking autocrat the next. He brooked no disagreement with his aesthetic judgment.
Earl's aesthetic for cars could be summarized as longer, lower, wider. Like many designers of his generation, he was fascinated by aircraft design and streamlining. He was never particularly concerned with actual aerodynamics, but he was always interested in sleekness and unity of form. During his long career, Earl had presided over a visual unification of the automobile. Upright radiator shells gave way to styled grilles; fenders swelled and melted into hoods and doors; flat windshields were replaced by curved glass. The cars of 1930 were clearly machinery, designed by engineers and merely decorated by stylists. The cars of 1955 were first and foremost the work of artists, and the function of the engineers was to realize the stylists' whims. You could almost forget that the automobile was a mechanical object at all, so artfully was the actual machinery concealed beneath artfully draped sheet metal and shining chrome.
Ceci n'est pas un De Ville. Cadillac did not offer four-door convertibles by the 1950s, nor was there a two-door convertible de Ville until 1964. The badging gives the game away: this car is a converted Sedan de Ville, probably the six-window version. It is as large as it looks; standard Cadillacs were a mammoth 225 inches (5,715 mm) long, riding a 130-inch (3,302-mm) wheelbase. Even bigger were the Fleetwood 75 limousines, which were 244.8 inches (6,218 mm) long on a 149.75-inch (3,804-mm) wheelbase, and the stretched commercial chassis, used for hearses, stretch limousines, and ambulances. The ECTO-1 from Ghostbusters was a '59 commercial-chassis Cadillac.
Chrome was a particular obsession of Earl's, as it was for many stylists of the era. Although Europeans sneered at the gleaming brightwork of the typical American car, chrome trim was a primary signifier of opulence to the buying public. A bottom-of-the-line Chevrolet 150, a kind of car most often found in police or taxi livery, had almost no brightwork at all; a full-flight Buick Roadmaster could blind passerby with its glittering trim. GM stylists of the 1950s had many stories about Earl telling them to go back and add more chrome to an already heavily decorated design.
Monomaniacal as it was, Earl's leadership made GM the pacesetter for automotive style. Earl always claimed he only followed his own tastes, but he had a remarkably good feel for the public mood. There were occasions when GM's competitors outpaced them in some area, but in most cases, the lapse was a result of internal resistance to Earl's innovations. When Lincoln's Zephyr debuted with flush-mounted headlamps in 1936, it scored a styling coup only because GM executives had been resisting Earl's plans for the same feature since 1933. More often, it was General Motors that led the way, forcing the competition to scramble to catch up with features like pillarless hardtop roofs and tail fins.
Earl was always aware that he had to walk a fine line, anticipating where public taste was headed without becoming too radical for the average buyer. He was hesitant, for example, about tail fins, which first bowed on the 1948 Cadillac. When Frank Hershey presented his be-finned clay model, Earl ordered him to take the fins off, fearing they might be too much for Cadillac customers. It was only after GM president Charlie Wilson and new Cadillac chief engineer Ed Cole decided that they liked the fins that Earl embraced them.
You could indeed buy a pink Cadillac in 1959; the color was officially called Persian Sand Metallic, although this appears to be a somewhat more vivid hue. Note the rear bumper grille, which repeats the texture of the front end. The trunk is every bit as massive as you would expect.
THE FORWARD LOOK
The problem with a strategy based on calculated risks is that there is always a chance that one of your competitors will be more brazen, and that is precisely what happened to GM in the late fifties.
One morning in August 1956, GM stylist Chuck Jordan happened on a fenced-off lot filled with brand-new, 1957 Chryslers. Chrysler's styling chief, Virgil Exner, had already revived that company's fortunes with his "$100 Million Look" in 1955, which gave their previously dull and boxy cars stylistic parity with GM. Now, Exner leaped ahead with an even bolder design direction. Where GM cars were bulky and fat looking, the new Chrysler products were clean, wedge-shaped, and more low-slung than even Harley Earl had dared. Chuck Jordan went back to the office and got Bill Mitchell, so that he could see them, too. By that afternoon, much of GM's senior design staff had driven over to the lot to look through the fence. They were deeply shaken -- they realized they had just lost their styling leadership.
The theme of Chrysler's ad campaign for 1957 was "Suddenly it's 1960," and they weren't far wrong. Compared to the '57 Chevy, the new Plymouth was almost six inches lower, with a rakish quality that even the casual observer couldn't miss. The new styling, known as "The Forward Look," threw GM for a loop. Chrysler design chief Virgil Exner, who had begun his career at GM, was always proud that he had finally topped his old boss.
At that time, GM Styling was wrapping up the 1958 designs and starting work on the '59s. Although the '58s were chrome-encrusted than ever, their underlying shapes were still essentially the same, pudgy-looking forms GM had been selling for a decade. Harley Earl's mandate for the '59s was more of the same. In the light of the new '57 Chryslers, that direction suddenly seemed openly embarrassing. There were rumbles among the designers that if something weren't done, GM would be dead in the water stylistically.
THE MUTINY
It was Bill Mitchell who finally made the decision. Earl was traveling in Europe, and largely out of contact; in his absence, Mitchell was in charge. Mitchell had sworn that he would never let Earl down, but he had his own future to think about. He gathered together the senior designers, and they agreed to formulate a new styling direction, abandoning everything that Earl had dictated for the '59 cars. Mitchell enlisted the support of the divisional managers, and of Harlow Curtice, who regularly stopped by to see the new cars. All of the new designs were sleeker, crisper, and thinner, taking their lead not from Harley Earl, but from Mitchell and, indirectly, from Virgil Exner.
No one expected Misterl to be happy when he returned from Europe, and many feared the inevitable explosion. For a man of Earl's ego and temperament, a rebellion of such magnitude was unimaginable. As it happened, Earl was so staggered that he wandered around the studios for days, not saying a word to anyone. Earl ordinarily didn't hesitate to fire anyone for any reason, but this time it would have meant a purge of his entire senior staff, including Mitchell, his favorite son and heir apparent. Moreover, Harlow Curtice, Earl's chief patron since the retirement of Sloan earlier in the year, had already sided with the mutineers. Earl was outmaneuvered. Finally, he grudgingly threw his support behind the new direction.
This view of a 1958 Pontiac Star Chief shows off its jukebox excesses. Contemporary Buicks and Oldsmobiles were even worse, and sales tumbled precipitously.
As the hastily revamped '59s took shape, Earl's position was further eroded by the commercial failures of his 1958 models. The portly, over-decorated '58s emerged at the worst possible time, just as the United States fell into a recession that sent buyers fleeing from ostentatious cars. Buick and Pontiac suffered particularly nasty declines in overall volume. Other manufacturers fared little better that year, but it was still a harsh awakening for a man who'd built his career on anticipating public tastes. Earl's day was almost over.
CHROMIUM APOGEE
Once Mitchell and Earl were again allied, however reluctantly, the new rallying cry in the Styling offices became INNOVATE, OR YOU'RE ALL FIRED. The desire to one-up Virgil Exner was as much a matter of pride as of business necessity, particularly since Exner had once been one of them; he had begun his career in GM's Pontiac styling studio in the 1930s. In such a climate, no idea was too weird to consider, from triple tail fins to cyclopean centralized headlamps. As outré as some of the final '59 designs became, they were less grotesque than many of the concepts that didn't make it. The individual designers knew that if their ideas weren't sufficiently outrageous, their jobs were on the line.
This is a 1960 model, not a '59, but the curved A-pillars are the same, necessitated by the wraparound windshield that Harley Earl loved so much. The pillar's "dogleg" extends well into the door openings, and countless passengers have cracked their knees on them. Despite its prodigious size, a Cadillac of this vintage is not an easy car to get into or out of gracefully.
Styling had long been in the driver's seat when it came to new designs, but the development of the 1959 models was further complicated by the cost accountants. The '58 cars had had all-new bodies. Typical GM practice was to use a body shell for at least two years (with modest facelifts and trim changes) to amortize the tooling costs. The new direction for the '59s demanded yet another set of all-new bodies. That was expensive even for GM, and there was a push for cost-saving measures. The most significant of these was that there was to be greater sharing of body shells than ever before. For around 20 years, Chevrolets and Pontiacs had shared a smaller corporate "A-body," while low-line Oldsmobiles and Buicks used the larger B-body shell, and big Buicks and Cadillacs used the full-size C-body. For 1959, the A-body was abandoned, and all Chevrolet, Pontiac, Olds, and Buick models shared the B-body. On paper, Cadillac retained its separate C-body, but it was now essentially just a stretched B. Furthermore, all five makes now had to share the front doors originally designed for Buick's big sedans, further eroding their individuality.
This is a 1960 Eldorado Seville hardtop. Despite its toned-down tail fins, it is largely similar to the '59 hardtops, showing off the sleek lines and canopy-like pillarless roofline. Note the extremely small roof area, which isn't much bigger than a coffee table.
The '59s were GM stylists' first confrontation with what would grow to be a crippling problem in the years to come: how to make five variations of the same body shell look different enough that the buyer of a $5,000 Buick would not be dismayed by her car's commonality with a $2,500 Chevy. The stylists were under some pressure from division heads to retain the established visual identity of each brand. At Chrysler, Virgil Exner had essentially been able to start from scratch; Chrysler sales were so moribund that there was nowhere to go but up. Despite the losses of '58, GM still controlled around half the U.S. market, and so they had to be cautious about alienating their existing customers.
THE '59 CADILLAC
No division was quite as worried about that prospect as Cadillac. In the 1950s, Cadillac was firmly established as the most prestigious car made in America. Packard, Cadillac's traditional rival, was finished by 1958, Lincoln and Imperial were also-rans, and neither Mercedes nor Jaguar had enough presence in the U.S. to impress the hoi polloi. Owning a Cadillac was a badge of achievement to which many aspired. Those who managed it were rewarded with high quality, excellent performance, and remarkably high resale value. To maintain those qualities, Cadillac had to walk a razor's edge between design leadership and styling continuity. Each year's model needed to be recognizably different from the last's, without making its predecessor obsolete. Born of these contradictory pressures, the '59 Cadillac emerged as a delirious mixture of the familiar and the outlandish. Few of its individual styling cues were truly new, but even those recognizable elements were turned up to eleven.
The most significant change -- and the least controversial -- was that the '59 was lower and slimmer-looking than the '58. Overall height dropped by around three inches, model for model, but the beltline and hood were lower, too. The '59 Cadillacs were as much as eight inches longer than their predecessors, and just as heavy, but they looked lighter. The bulbous shapes that had previously characterized Cadillac styling were gone for good.
Also gone were Cadillac's traditional domed roofs and thick roof pillars. There were now four basic roof shapes for Cadillacs sedans and coupes. All were pillarless hardtops, with vastly more glass area than before. Sedans were offered with either a sleek, six-window roofline with a steeply curved backlight, or a four-window design with a nearly flat, cantilever roof, extending back past the C-pillars. Coupes had a swoopy, curvaceous greenhouse, more befitting a fighter plane than a luxury car. All of these variations retained Earl's beloved wraparound windshields, which offered panoramic visibility, but bruised many an unwary knee with their obtrusive "dogleg" A-pillars. The fourth and final roof design, offered only on the limited-edition Eldorado Brougham sedan, had a much more conservative curved windshield and straight C-pillars, giving a sharply creased roofline, foreshadowing the more restrained styling of sixties Cadillacs.
Cruise control was a novelty in the late 1950s. Cadillac first introduced it on the 1957 Eldorado Brougham, and it was a $97 option on most '59 Cadillacs. The teering wheel wrapping is not stock.
The wonderfully named "Autronic Eye" was a headlight control system, introduced on Cadillacs in 1952. It cost $55 on '59 Cadillacs. The photocell detected the lights of oncoming cars at night and automatically dimmed the high beams. Its vacuum tube controls often failed, but it evolved into the more reliable Twilight Sentinel system, which could also automatically turn on the headlights at dusk.
Looking only at the basic shapes, the '59 Cadillac was a sleek and attractive car, but its overwrought detailing was hard to ignore. Again, few of the elements were truly new. Dual headlights had debuted two years earlier on the 1957 Eldorado Brougham. The heavy-lidded fender ridge above each light cluster was an evolution of previous years, as were the 'cleats' on the traditional eggcrate grille. Even the massive 'afterburner' nacelles in the rear bumper were just exaggerated versions of the '57-'58 design, although the pods now contained only the backup lights, not the exhaust outlets, as they had before. Finally deleted was a long-standing and somewhat tacky Cadillac feature, the massive front bumper guards popularly known as "Dagmars," after a buxom TV personality of the era.
The truly essential feature was, of course, the fins. 1959 was the eleventh year of the tail fin for Cadillac, and they had already become quite prominent. The new design, generally credited to stylist Dave Holls, took them a step further. The fins of the '57-'58 cars were basically a kick-up of the rear fenders, and didn't carry much additional decoration. On the '59s, Holls moved the twin taillights, which previously were mounted at the base of the fins, to the middle of their span. The crowning touch was the twin, bullet-shaped taillight lenses, which were pure Buck Rogers. Without the tail fins, the '59s would still have been grandiose and ridiculous, but the fins took the design completely over the top.
Tail fin evolution. This is a 1957 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special. Note the twin taillights, which seem to emerge from a tube-like bulge in the rear fender. The '57 has the rear bumper nacelles that would become so prominent on the '59, although here they contain the exhaust outlets; the backup lights are on the rear edge of the decklid. Running the exhaust through the bumper tips was a common GM styling trick in this era. It looked neat, but it promoted severe corrosion.
This is the tail of a '59 Eldorado. The Eldorado can be easily distinguished from lesser Cadillacs by the chrome trim, which follows the outline of the side sweep; Series 62 and de Ville models have a single chrome strip, running horizontally along the center of the fender line. Normal Eldorados were offered both as a convertible -- the Biarritz -- and a hardtop coupe, like this one, which was called Seville. Both cost about $2,000 more than a comparable de Ville, but came standard with most of the de Ville's optional extras, including the problematic air suspension. A third Eldorado model was the very rare, four-door Eldorado Brougham, built by Italy's Pininfarina. It listed for a staggering $13,075, more than twice the cost of a well-equipped Sedan de Ville. Only 99 were built.
REQUIEM
The '59 Cadillac and its GM siblings met with a mixed reception from the public. Sales were up very slightly over 1958, although still not as good as 1956 or 1957. Although many critics liked the new Caddy's lines, even the most enthusiastic confessed doubts about the fins. GM had inarguably reclaimed its lead in styling innovation, but even within the corporation, many felt they had gone overboard. Contemporary social critics like Vance Packard and John Keats had already characterized Detroit products as "insolent chariots," and the '59s proved their point.
The 1959 models would be Earl's swan song. It's hard to say how much he directly influenced the gimmicky excesses of these cars, but although the basic concepts were no longer his, their execution still reflected many of Earl's obsessions. Once he was gone for good, the jet-intake bumpers, fighter-canopy wraparound windshields, and rocket-exhaust taillights would quickly fade. Even the tail fins would gradually recede, although Cadillac retained their vestiges well into the 1980s.
In the end, Earl was not forced out, nor was he fired. GM's mandatory retirement age was 65, which Earl reached on November 22, 1958, about five weeks after the 1959 Cadillacs went on sale. On December 1 of that year, as Earl had promised him, Bill Mitchell took his place behind his mentor's oversize desk. As a parting gift to their former boss, the Styling staff designed and built a customized roadster for Earl, the last in a string of custom cars made for his personal use. Earl and his wife Sue packed up their things, and left Detroit for West Palm Beach, Florida, and a quiet retirement. The Harley Earl Corp., now called Harley Earl Associates, remained in business under the leadership of Earl's sons, Jim and Jerry, but Earl would do no more design work. He died of a stroke on April 10, 1969.
Bill Mitchell quickly set to work moving away from the glitz and glitter of Earl's final years. The 1959 bodies were carried over into 1960, but their more eccentric styling cues were toned down or deleted. For 1961, they would be redesigned again, becoming slightly smaller, crisper, and more tasteful, but also far less dramatic.
The 1960 Cadillac's fins were notably more restrained than the '59s. Their height gradually decreased throughout the early sixties, and by 1965 the top edges of Cadillac's rear fenders were completely horizontal.
Harley Earl represents something of a conundrum to the cultural historian. Calling him an artist is problematic, because during most of his GM career he neither drew nor sculpted. Giving him sole credit for GM's designs would be a disservice to the hundreds of designers and craftsmen who actually shaped those cars. Indeed, many would be reluctant to even accept mass-market consumer products like automobiles as works of art. Still, every one of the more than 40 million cars GM produced during Earl's tenure was designed under his direct supervision, and all bore his unmistakable stamp. If we measure Earl in terms of his impact on the American aesthetic, he towers over figures like Norman Rockwell or Frank Lloyd Wright. Even if you dismiss these cars -- or any cars -- as crude products of a decadent and wasteful consumer culture, their significance is inescapable.
We suspect that far in the future, when histories are written of the American century, the familiar shape of the 1959 Cadillac will still be as definitive a symbol of its era as Leutze's painting Washington Crossing the Delaware is of the Revolutionary War. It may not be great art, but it is immortal.
# # #
NOTES ON SOURCES
Our primary sources for this article were Michael Lamm, "GM's Far-Out '59s: When Imagination Ran Rampant," Special Interest Autos #125, September-October 1991, pp. 41-47; Dave Holls and Michael Lamm, A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design (Stockton, CA: Lamm-Morada Publishing Co. Inc., 1997), pp. 172-187; Dave Crippen's interview with Bill Mitchell for the Benson Ford Research Center ("The Reminscences of William L. Mitchell," David R. Crippen, August 1984, Automotive Design Oral History, The Benson Ford Research Center, http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Design/Mitchell/mitchellinterview.htm, accessed 16 July 2008); and John Barach's Cadillac History pages (date unknown, Motor Era, http://www.motorera.com/cadillac/index.htm, accessed 16 July 2008). We also consulted Jim Whipple, "Car Life 1959 Consumer Analysis: Cadillac" ( Car Life, May 1959) and Arch Brown, "1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz: Nothing Exceeds Like Excess" ( Special Interest Autos #88, August 1985), both of which are reprinted in R.M. Clarke, ed., Cadillac Automobiles 1949-1959 (Brooklands Books) (Cobham, Surrey: Brooklands Books Ltd., 1970).
|
Not to quibble with a super article, but the 48 Caddys did not have tail fins. Caddy called these adolescent bumps "upsweeps" and they were inspired by the P-38 fighter plane. As the article goes on to explain, it was really Exner and MoPar that introduced tail fins. A few cars of the 40s had tiny, chromium fins atop tail light assemblies but these were afterthoughts, not major styling cues.
The 1960 Caddy may have had smaller, more modest fins, but they were lower and sharper-tipped than the '59s. The 60s' fins became notorious for their danger to anyone who might collide with them. At least one child died after he ran his bike into the back of '60, and policeman's horse was mortally wounded after a Caddy stopped short and the horse impaled himself.