Father of American car design just won't fade away
The boy is 10 and last glimpses his grandfather on a sandy stroll along a Florida beach in 1969.
Even today, he holds tight the towering image.
And more than 30 years later, beyond mere memory, the grandson, Richard Earl, sees an actor in the ghostly form of his grandfather, selling Buicks in a television ad, promising that he, Harley Earl, is back to build America a better car.
Not that he hadn't already done that -- to the tune of more than 50 million cars and counting, all showing the influence of a man who some argue was the most important figure ever to emerge from Detroit.
Yet when the ads appeared, most Americans doubtlessly asked, ''Who's this Harley Earl guy?"
He's the guy who, rising to 6 feet 4 inches, bedecked in suit (sometimes white), snap-brim fedora, and two-tone shoes, defined American automotive design. He took us from the mass-produced boxes of Henry Ford to the low-slung, long-wheelbase cars that endure to this day. He convinced designers that the flow of malleable clay was a better medium with which to work car design than the rigidity of edge-imposing wood.
The hat you see in the Buick ads is a cue for the cognoscenti, a lure to learn for the unknowing. Harley Earl, promising a better car, leaving only his hat atop a fender in some ads, haunting Tiger Woods in others, has indeed come back.
Though not without some controversy.
Some thought the ads too oblique - yet the mystery has stirred debate.
And Earl supporters, Richard Earl among them, say that even as General Motors uses him in ads, the company does not want him to get too big, to shine the light of his brilliance into the company's darker corners. GM, Richard Earl says, wants Harley dismissed as just a designer. Richard says he was also an engineer.
You be the judge.
If you are not an engineer, do you figure out how to bend glass, safely eliminate the central support system of hardtop cars to make them sportier, lower the stance, and lengthen Henry Ford's boxes to turn them into sleek cruisers? Do you take the fins from a Lockheed aircraft and aerodynamically adapt them to the automobile, use fiberglass in the construction of America's first true sports car, the Corvette?
Harley Earl did these things.
He was born in 1893 in a section of Los Angeles that would later be named Hollywood. He worked for his father's carriage works, designing sleek tops to sit astride the base platforms of automobiles bought by such stars as Fatty Arbuckle and Tom Mix.
In 1927, he arrived in Detroit, where Ford first gave us the assembly line and GM president Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who lured Earl to the motor city, was matching marketing with multilevel management. Earl gave us the third leg of the stool: cars that sold on emotion, on visual appeal, on fabulous form welded to firm function.
His LaSalle, in 1927, was the first American car designed headlight to bumper by a stylist. His job at GM: head of the Art and Colour Department, the first division of an American car company devoted exclusively to design.
He brought the flowing promise of Hollywood imagination to the locked steel of Detroit industry.
Among his finest cars, in my opinion: the 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket V-8, the 1955 and 1957 models of the Chevy Bel Air, the 1959 Cadillac with its sky-creasing fins, and, of course, the 1953 Corvette.
His approach -- born of an engineer's timed heart, a stylist's careful eye for appeal, and an artist's sense of the freedom of flow -- would revolutionize the look of American automobiles.
If Ford's Model T's were the mass-produced equivalents of ticky-tacky houses on the hillside and tract suburban homes for the masses, then Earl's low-slung, chrome-emboldened, soaring-finned cars were the glistening promise of rolling adventure for the middle class.
And to those who would argue -- some at GM among them -- that he was ''just a designer," I'd say that no architect can design a home or a skyscraper without knowledge of structural integrity and that no automotive stylist can change the look of cars without knowing how to bend their glass, their steel, their chrome.
''Where would we be today if he never moved from Hollywood to Detroit?" his grandson asks. ''I always knew that Harley's story would help sell Detroit metal."
As long as Harley's story doesn't rise from the grave to frighten certain Detroit egos.
Royal Ford can be reached at ford@globe.com.
