Edsel Page 5

  Crown Prince to wrest control of the company from the palsied hands of its founder. Tall and lanky when he rose to shake my hand, Bugas exhibited a rough frontier charm that might not have been all artifice, helped along by frank dark eyes slanting away from a nose like the prow of an icebreaker and a shy smile that showed no teeth. My instincts in the presence of so much self-effacement were the exact opposite of what they might have been half my life before. In an old-style gunfight I’d have picked him as my first target.

  It was a tankful of sharks, and yet as we took our seats I felt a buoyancy in the party, as if I’d walked in on some kind of celebration. That was close to the truth. The third-quarter sales figures were in and I learned from their conversation that Ford had tied Chevrolet for the first time since 1929. The company there assembled had inherited a firm whose employees were still paid in cash by Dickensian clerks in green eyeshades and sleeve garters and in eight short years had parlayed it into a world player in the same class with U.S. Steel and Standard Oil of New Jersey.

  Ford emptied his glass and banged it down. As if it were a gavel, the others ceased their talk of figures and quotas and looked to the Chief, a name I would come to call him myself, and that had been conferred upon him by his brothers when they were still children. Bugas, the erstwhile G-man, detected a secondary significance to the gesture and signaled the waiter, who replaced the empty glass with another filled to the rim with amber liquid.

  “Are you a drinking man, Mr. Minor?” Ford asked suddenly.

  I sorted through my options. For all I knew his glass contained ginger ale, and I remembered his grandfather’s stand on any substance or activity that gave pleasure to the partaker. On the other hand, although my host’s condition was difficult to gauge, it was pretty clear from the way big Mead Bricker had been forced to steady himself against the partition when he stood to take my hand, and from a general ferment in the air of the booth, that this was no gathering of teetotalers. I plunged. “Scotch and water.”

  The mood at the table lightened perceptibly. I’d passed a test of some kind. Ford said, “Single malt? They have an excellent selection here.”

  “Oh, any kind. That iodine they smuggled out of Canada scorched off most of my taste buds twenty years ago.”

  Bricker laughed boozily. Davis slid away from him half a foot and adjusted his glasses. “You’re that Connie Minor,” he said. “I used to read your column. At home, of course. If the old man found a copy of the Banner anywhere on Ford property he’d track down whoever brought it in and fire him on the spot.”

  My drink arrived, giving me an excuse not to comment. A quick look from Zed had informed me that even a derogatory comment about Old Henry would be a violation.

  “What do you think of our E-car?” Ford asked when the waiter had left. He was looking at me.

  “E-car?”

  “The Edsel.” Zed’s tone was a murmur.

  My mind clawed for the connection. Edsel. edseledseled-sel Edsel Ford. Henry’s son. Henry II’s father. Hank wants to name it after his father. Suddenly I tasted summer squash boiled with butter. It had been one of the more palatable dishes served at Fairlane that day I’d sat next to Edsel, who had made less of an impression on me than the squash.

  “It has snazzy lines,” I said. “That pushbutton transmission alone should sell millions. The grille is interesting.”

  Bricker drank. “That’s Jack Reith’s baby. Brought it back from Paris along with one of those little Eiffel towers and a complete Apache dancer’s outfit.”

  “I’m not worried about the grille so much as the name,” Davis said. “Cars named after people don’t sell. Ask Kaiser about the Henry J. Anyway, Hank’s father disliked the name enough not to give it to any of his sons.”

  “I liked ‘Andante con Motor.’” Bricker drank.

  “Oh, lay off that, Mead. We got that one from Marianne Moore, the poet,” Davis told me. “She also suggested ‘Utopian Turtletop.’ I don’t know whose idea it was to consult her to begin with. Poets can’t make a living off their own racket, let alone sell cars.”

  Bugas had remained silent, seated erect with his forearms resting on the table as if it were his old desk at the Bureau.

  His open eyes hadn’t left my face since our introduction. “Maybe Connie has some ideas in that direction. He’s the writer.”

  Four more pairs of eyes joined his, Ford’s over the top of his glass.

  I sampled my Scotch and set it down gently. “I’d rather not.”

  “Why not?” Bugas. “We’re all friends here.”

  “Speak for yourself, John.” Bricker. “Personally I hate Jack’s guts and the box they came in.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Mead.” Davis’ tone was gentle.

  “Nobody blames advertising when a product fails,” I said. “It’s too much of an abstraction. They’ll say it’s the grille or the hood ornament or the oddball name. The Henry J didn’t fall on its face because of what it was called. The promotion was dull; also it rusted when you gave it a wet look. If the campaign sinks the car I’ll take the heat, but I don’t want people saying it didn’t float because Constantine Minor named it after his aunt’s cat. A thing like that sticks to you.”

  Bricker emptied his glass. “That’s just chickenshit. Where’d you find this guy, Izzy?”

  I decided I didn’t care for the large florid production executive. You found his kind on every playground, goading the smaller boys into jumping off the top of the slide. They were never around when the ambulance came.

  “There’s nothing chickenshit about it. We’re not paying him to take our risks.” Ford put down his drink untasted; a rare event, as I was to learn. “What do you want out of this campaign, Connie?”

  It might have been the Scotch or the surroundings, laced as they were with testosterone. It might have been the gradual realization that I wasn’t going to be fed, that there was to be no food, that a lunch date with Hank the Deuce meant catching a sandwich on the way over to soak up the bill of fare unless you wanted to lose the rest of the day. Most likely it had to do with being as old as the century and too tired to answer every question as if it were part of a job interview. Whatever it was, I said what I’d been saying to the mirror over my bathroom sink since the day I met Israel Zed and accepted his offer.

  “I want out.”

  “Out?” His eyebrows lifted, raising the top half of his face away from the heavy bottom half. “You mean out of the account?”

  “Out of advertising. I’m a journalist, Mr. Ford, or I was before I backed the right horse in the wrong race. I wrote about bootleggers until no one wanted to read about them any more and every time they saw my byline they thought they were going to get another dose. At the age of thirty-three I couldn’t get arrested in the newspaper business. The only writing jobs I’ve been able to get in twenty years are the ones you skip past to get to the stuff you bought the magazine to read. I’m sick of it and I need out, but I’m too old and mean to leave with my tail between my legs. If I can put the Edsel in a million driveways I’ll have knocked it down, kicked it in the ribs, and tramped it to death. If I can’t—hell.” I drank. My ice cubes had begun to melt, gone as soft as my hopes of making a good impression.

  “Eleven.”

  The other men seated in the booth looked at Ford, waiting for the other shoe. It had started to dawn on me that despite his apparent lack of presence the scion of Detroit’s First Family was developing an imperial style light-years removed from the shirtsleeved, chaw-in-the-cheek approach associated with his predecessor. He spoke slowly, rotating his glass between his big meaty palms.

  “One thing I brought back from Europe along with my uniform and a couple of souvenirs was a massive erection. So did everyone else I fought with over there. We’re most of us fathers now, and by the end of this decade we’ll have swollen the population by about thirty-five million. The eggheads I’ve brought into the fold tell me we’ll need to sell eleven million E-cars if we’re to be noticed at all i
n the crowd. If Connie can do that, I’ll purchase the Free Press and present it to him personally.”

  “A letter of introduction will do,” I said after a moment. “There’s too much desk work in owning and running a paper. You have to be nice to lawyers.”

  Ford guffawed. His voice was light and slightly high-pitched and it drew attention from some of the other tables. I was pretty sure he was drunk. In that bracket it’s sometimes hard to tell. It doesn’t seem to do much for them in the way of having fun.

  The outburst was over quickly. The air in the booth seemed clearer. The party relaxed. “Has Izzy been keeping you hopping?” Ford asked.

  Zed answered. “I thought it best we keep Connie out of the day-to-day until we had something more concrete to show him than sketches. The less time he spends among the general population the fewer questions get asked.”

  “Well, we have to put him to work. I just got through cleaning out the deadwood from the old days. I didn’t do it to make room for my own. How much do you know about cars, Connie?”

  “If you don’t put gas and oil and water in them from time to time they don’t go.”

  “Get him into Rouge,” he told Zed. “It’s how I learned the business and I guess it’s good enough for him too. Let him slam doors. Let him operate a welding torch if he wants. By the time he’s through I want him to be able to disassemble and reassemble a new car off the line blindfolded. He can’t sell a product he doesn’t know anything about.”

  “I’ll start on his clearance right away.”

  “Don’t bother.” Ford undid his lapel pin, the company emblem circled in gold, and skidded it across the table. I caught it before it could fall off the edge. “That will get you in anywhere. Take good care of it. It belonged to my grandfather. It’s the only thing the old bastard ever gave me besides a bellyful of grief and it’d be a shame if you flushed it down the shitter.”

  7

  IT TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO make a madman into an eccentric. Once that point is reached, it takes a lot of madness to make the eccentric back into a madman. Henry One had had plenty of both—money to burn and insanity by the long ton. In the beginning his friends called him Crazy Henry because the boyhood sight of a steam thresher wheezing down a country road had convinced him that man need not be dependent upon the whims of an animal with a brain the size of a walnut to get him around, and again he had been called Crazy Henry by his enemies when in the darkness following Pearl Harbor he had promised to produce a bomber a day in his Willow Run aircraft plant. Later, when his grandson unleashed his hand-picked Whiz Kids upon a crumbling auto company whose employees were paid in cash because its puritan founder had discovered that Ford paychecks were being redeemed in saloons and whorehouses, his own family had begun calling him Crazy Henry and shunted him into the shadows. There, deprived of an outlet for his fantastic dementia, he perished.

  Genius or lunatic, Henry had possessed both the energy and the wherewithal to translate the megalomania of every child’s egocentric wish-dream into the dizzying world-within-a-world of River Rouge.

  When you stepped out of the relative quiet of the Administration Building and waded across the narrow strip of marsh behind it, you jumped a fence onto an insane farm where rubble grew like wheat and ashes flew like chaff; where stacks stood in dense rows like cornstalks and the lowing of noon whistles and diesel horns made you think of crazed livestock. Somewhere in that graysward of brick and slag, 63,000 men and women slammed doors, ran forklifts, tugged levers, poured steel, raised and lowered blocks, stacked crates, sprayed paint, stoked coal, placed calls, pulled chains, pushed buttons, threaded wires, turned screws, caught rivets, twirled knobs, pounded keys, tightened nuts, swept, polished, examined, tested, discussed, scribbled, cranked, pedaled, stamped, and watched the clock; but you could wander that vast compound of whizzing belts, throbbing locomotives, belching chimneys, and gliding ships and never lay eyes upon a single living organism. I had been there before, although not as a Ford employee, and every time I went I’d felt like a character in one of those post-apocalypse tales in Amazing Stories, abandoned in an extinct civilization whose machines mindlessly continued to perform their functions years after their last human benefactor had gone to his reward. There was a heart-sickening perpetuity about the place that convinced you of your own obsolescence.

  Lord knew, I was familiar with all the numbers. Researching Rouge for “Detroit the Dynamic,” I had discovered that 100 miles of railroad wound through that self-contained kingdom like some throttled-up version of a child’s tabletop train layout, transporting 25,000 tons of ore per trip from the docks where great ships registered to Ford put in to Ford’s own steel mills and coke ovens—manned, along with Ford’s glass plant and paper mill, by the owners of the 22,000 Fords provided for in the employee parking lot; but statistics scarcely prepared the first-time visitor for either the magnitude of the complex or its realization of Henry’s flagrant dream of total autonomy. Raw iron came in one end and chugged out the other molded into the shape of shiny new cars. In between was chained chaos. I had accompanied Charlie Chaplin on a tour of the place guided personally by the owner, and watched them try to communicate by sign language against the horrendous din. The result had been Modern Times, Chaplin’s unfunny paean to industry gone stark raving nuts at the expense of humanity. This was River Rouge at its brain-numbing peak, before Antitrust rolled up its meddlesome sleeves and began hacking away at the dream, downsizing it to mortal proportions and divvying it up among the carrion birds which for decades had circled the sky over Ford Country, searching for the odd open wound or exposed bit of entrail to pluck at and thus begin the feeding frenzy. The feast would continue, joined by the heirs to the Carnegies and the Duponts and all the other natural enemies from Ford’s Paleozoic period, but in that dank early winter in the middle of the middle decade of the twentieth century the vision was still largely intact, and gray in the shadow of the hatchet-faced former machinist’s-apprentice whose lapel pin I now wore.

  Tours of Rouge had been a fixture almost since its inception, when a harried foreman had complained to Henry that the VIP visits he had been conducting were disruptive to the workers; his response was to make the visits a regular feature, open to the public, until the workers no longer noticed them. By then, of course, the old Yankee found there was profit in spectacle, and the tours became permanent, followed by the construction of the Ford Rotunda with its exhibits delineating the history of the world beginning with Henry’s backyard in Dearborn, which in turn had led to Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, those twin monuments to American industrial ingenuity, complete with the first tiny Ford plant, the workshop where Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb and the gramophone, and the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. And Dearborn became a sort of popup Modern Testament, the Gospel According to St. Henry, admission one dollar (children 12 and under, fifty cents). The whole thing was a seamless combination of reality and mythology constructed along the lines of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, with the object of elevating the robber barons of the Industrial Revolution to the status of authentic American heroes; which, if the truth be told, they were, possessing all the concomitant scoundrelly attributes of a Wild Bill Hickok or an Ethan Allen. There is no quality control on God’s assembly line.

  Entering the Rotunda the morning after my meeting with the Deuce, I transferred the magic pin from my buttonhole to a side pocket. I wanted to make my first salaried visit incognito with the rubes, who that day comprised a young couple still admiring each other’s wedding band, a mixed group of grayheads wearing comfortable clothes and walking shoes, and a gaggle of pre-pubescent girls in green rompers bookended fore and aft by nuns in black habits. I was in line waiting my turn inside the door when a hand touched my arm.

  “Mr. Minor?”

  I turned to face a thirty-year-old model in a blue blazer and pleated skirt like stewardesses wore, only without an emblem of any kind. Her hair was black, brushed behind her ears, and she had gray eyes, a color t
hat fascinated me, coming as I did from a muddy-eyed race. Her lips were painted fire-engine red, not my favorite shade by a long shot but serviceable on her, and she bad high cheekbones that gave her face an Asian cast, although her skin was pale to the point of translucence. There was about her a certain quiet confidence in the impression she was making, slightly ameliorated by a youthful self-consciousness that saved her from conceit, and I had been acquainted with her for several minutes before I realized she had a withered left arm. A skillful tailor had cut that sleeve short and full to soften the contrast, but when she gestured with it I noticed that it was at least six inches shorter than its mate, with stunted fingers and a pudgy palm like a child’s. And I knew without thinking about it that she was a victim of polio, the disease that had crippled a President and threatened to slap great gaping holes in a generation.

  “I’m Janet Sherman, Mr. Zed’s personal secretary. He asked me to escort you on your tour of the plant.”

  I shook her good hand, cool and smooth, the nails painted red to match her lipstick but trimmed short like any good typist’s. “How did you recognize me?”

  “Mr. Zed described you.”

  “I won’t ask how.”

  “Would you like to start here and look at the exhibits? This is where the regular tour begins.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve seen the first car Ford built. It doesn’t look the same without Henry sitting in it.”

  “In that case I guess we can dispense with the ride on the miniature test track. It’s thrilling but hardly edifying. Is there a particular place you want to see?”

  “The whole schmeer.”

  “Everything?”

  “Well, skip the test track. I rode through a machine-gun battle once and every trip since has been anticlimactic. Let’s start with the hot steel.”