Non Fiction Book Reviews #312

HARLEY EARL

by Stephen Bayley

Harley Earl was born on November 22, 1893 in Hollywood, California. His father, J. W. Earl, was a local coach builder, making wagons, carriages, and racing sulkies for the Mexican farmers and ranchers of the area. He had been doing this since 1889 and had become prosperous. In 1908 Earl senior was aware of the potential of the private car and changed the name of his company to the Earl Automobile Works. Its business was making the exact kind of bolt-on accessories that Harley Earl would eradicate from the automobile trade when he provided in the new mass-produced cars every option and appliance that could be dreamed of. By 1911 movies were being made in Hollywood. And in that same year the Earl Automobile Works began to offer whole custom-made bodies for cars and trucks. Earl Automobile Works also provided fuselages for the aviation company Glen L. Martin Company. Eventually the custom-made bodies began to supersede the accessories as the main point of the Earl company's business, as the first generation of film stars had the money to spend and demanded special treatment for their newly acquired cars. Due to a sports injury Harley Earl left Stanford University and took control of Earl Automobile Works. By 1918 the first entire cars built by the Earl Automobile Works began to appear in the Los Angeles Auto Show. Harley Earl's name was first seen in the papers in 1919 when reporters from the Los Angeles Times announced their astonishment at his sensational designs. More orders were brought in including those from Fatty Arbuckle and Tom Mix and other film stars. These customized cars were the first of the "streamlined" elements that would dominate Earl's career. One of the Earl company's most important customers was Don Lee, the Cadillac distributor on the West Coast for whom the company did a lot of accident repairs as well as some custom bodywork in the shop. At this stage of the motor industry distributors like Don Lee were more than just retail outlets, they were the medium through which cars were translated to the customer. In 1919 Don Lee bought the Earl Automobile Works and in so doing acquired Harley Earl. This acquisition gave to Don Lee America's first professional car stylist. It gave to Harley Earl direct access to top management in Detroit and direct access to Lawrence P. Fisher, president of the Cadillac Division of Alfred Sloan's new conglomerate, General Motors. Fisher was very impressed with Earl's work and hired him taking him to Detroit. The twenties ws a period of hectic and fundamental change in the automobile industry, when the business of making cars altered even more than it had in 1908 when Henry Ford introduced the Model T. During the twenties car ownership in America tripled to about twenty million. By about 1922 the majority of Americans were bringing in their old car as a down payment on a new car. Sloan, of General Motors, realized that to get the customers to buy a new car the new cars would have to look different. In the pursuit of fresh dollars "styling" became the key. Sloan had thought about styling in 1921, and by 1926 the idea that appearance might actually affect sales was ripening in his mind. It was just at the time of Sloan's musings that Lawrence Fisher had discovered Harley Earl. Harley Earl was hired and his first GM car, appeared in March 1927 under the brand new name of La Salle and immediately it caused a sensation. His design for the new La Salle was state-of-the-art showmanship. On June 28, 1927, Alfred Sloan announced that he was establishing a special new department: the Art and Color Section. Thirty-four-year-old Harley Earl was invited to head it. This would be Earl's domain for the next thirty years. The new section began with fifty people --it was to grow to fourteen hundred people-- and ten of the fifty were designers whom Earl was to train to interpret dreams of style for people. Earl made one major innovation in design practice which changed the shape of cars forever. He introduced the custom shop technique of using sculptors' modeling clay over wooden armatures. The use of this flexible material gave him the opportunity to create unified shapes. Although Art and Color's first car, the 1929 Buick Silver Anniversary car (also known as the pregnant Buick) was a lemon, it gave Sloan the idea to introduce planned obsolescence. The failure of the Buick helped make the huge successes that followed possible. It taught Earl to moderate the tempo of change in appearance so that he led the public. In 1934 U. S. Steel introduced a high-speed strip mill which was providing sheet-metal in 88-inch widths. This meant that there was enough metal to play when it came to fabricating wild new shapes for Earl's dream cars. In 1937 Art and Color Section became Styling. Styling's first job was to invent dream cars to act as tests for new ideas and test the public's taste. The first dream car was Harley Earl's "Y" Job that became his personal car. The Second World War brought stagnation to car design. When Harley Earl's team viewed Lockheed's P38 Lighting it was to inspire the Styling division in the fifties. The P38 had twin tail booms. The 1949 Cadillac was the first car to have fins and it became Cadillac's best ever sales. The other car manufactures soon copied the design. The fin was one of the first elements in the idea race of the fifties, the constant search for visual innovation to give the customers what Earl called visible receipt for their dollars. The tail fin became identified with prestige and large amounts of disposable dollars. The fifties was one of the best times for GM and Harley Earl. By 1954 there was forty-seven million passenger cars registered in the United States. General Motors had five divisions and it was Harley Earl's job to differentiate between each direct product level. Earl supervised five car design studios, one for each General Motors division, was well as twelve special studios. He conducted the design process with a mixture of discretion, emotional violence and audacity. The first significant dream car of the postwar years was the astonishing Le Sabre XP-8 and other dream cars would follow. Earl's dream cars had had the effect of bringing forward the public's taste for change in styling features. For Earl, the successful creation of ever more dynamic obsolescence was the greatest challenge to the practicing designer. In 1952 Harley Earl invented the Motorama which he envisioned would bring the car into the theater of life. The Motorama was a great way to study the public taste. In 1958 Harley Earl was being paid $130,000 plus benefits. General Motors announced his retirement on December 1, 1959 after thirty-two years of service. In his time with GM he had become the leader of American automotive styling and had made the American automotive industry the most powerful consumer force known before or since. Soon after his retirement Earl stood to make millions in a state-of-the-art contract with GM which restrained him from consultancy with any of the corporation's rivals. Harley Earl had had his own design consultancy since 1945. Harley Earl Associates, which merged with Walter B. Ford Design Associates in 1964 to become Ford and Earl, that was an operation which freed him to work beyond the very few aesthetic limitations GM had imposed. Earl concentrated on carpet-sweeper. airplane interiors, plumber's showrooms, earth movers, and biscuits. Harley Earl died in 1969. His career was one of the most remarkable of any designer and his influence far outshines his peers.

(c) copyright 2009 by William Tienken