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carefully,

.

)-

ong before the automobile became our prime means of transportation, the im-
portance of being seen in one was already well established. When the huff-
ing, wheezing progenitor of the new century first raised dust clouds on Main
Street, concerns about asphyxiation over-rode those of sunburn. The controversial
"motorists" in their open-air driver's seats were little more than dandies out to be seen
in their new toys.
Still, it was the start of America's long-standing love affair with mobility and style.
We have never loved cars per se. We loved where they could take us and what they
would say about us when we arrived. One of the early masters of those emotions was
Harley Earl. He had learned his art under the tutelage of his father at the Earl Auto-
mobile Works in Los Angeles. His specialty was creating custom-bodied automotive
statements for the young lions of Hollywood. His look was streamlined, long and
low; and it cast the die for the next half-centuty of American car design.
Soon General Motors' flamboyant director Lawrence Fisher convinced Earl to join
him at GM's Detroit headquarters. From there, the designer played our automotive
passions like a concert master. Before 1920, virtually every car was a soft-top to some

most important car in the post-war ear.
l
brilliant founder of Ita design, have credited as the single
Once again, being seen became the raison d'etre of folding roofs. You could pack the seats
Everybody's convertibles folded with the flick of two latch-
f
and ride the gunwales o
es and the push of a button. They were almost weatherproof.
Harley Earl continued to oversee this brave new world from his office at GM's Art & Color;
but he had found his heir and spiritual second— Bill Mitchell— at a Connecticut road race in
the late 1930s. Under Mitchell, GM's long, low bodies grew even more dramatic. the roof fold-
ed and left the wraparound windshield standing alone above the sweep of anodized aluminum
and a spear of chrome.
Cars also got bigger. Make that Huge. Convertibles became vast, decadent pools of leather
and chrome. Our little speedboats had become vast land yachts. Earl retired from GM in 1959,
after uttering the famous line, "My favorite color is chrome." Indeed, there was little room left
on GM cars to apply paint
Harvey Earl would die a decade later. Mitchell continued enforcing his mentor's contention
that even the fantasy, the mere look, of the convertible, could be enough for many drivers. The
spectacularly successful American "hardtop" became every marketing department's dream come

From the earliest "open-air motoring" on dirt roads, through the coin-
promise of the sunroof, to today's hot Miata, automakers have n
our love of wind-blown hair and sunburned noses. By Lawrence rane

K

degree, but the body forms were little more than enclosures for the seats. Earl was one
of the first to realize that an auto body could be much more— that it could express the
individual style whims of the consumer.
Even after Dodge introduced the first solid-steel roof in 1923, making motoring tru-
ly weatherproof, Americans continued to be charmed by the romantic fantasy of the
open air. In fact, Earl played on this fantasy when he created the first faux convert-
ibles those fake padded and detailed cloth coverings for the solid roof
Another Earl innovation was the convertible that looked like a topless roadster. His
electric-powered, completely disappearing top was first seen in 1938 on Buick's "Y"
job, the embodiment of yet another Earl concept— the custom dream car. That year,
there was only one of them, and it was his. He shipped it all over the country so it could
be seen; and he could be seen in it.
The easy-to-use disappearing roof was not an idea exclusive to Americans. Euro-
peans, too, were trying to make the convertible more practical. Paris coachbuilders
Figoni and Falasche designed disappearing roofs with metal covers on the baroque,
exclusive roasters being built for Talbot Lago, Bugatti and Delahaye. Peugeot even
built a series of roadsters with retractable metal roofs after a design by a Paris dentist
named George Paulin. (Twenty years later, Ford's Skyliner was an improved version
of the same idea.)
All through the thirties, everyone made convertible versions of family cars. There
were cheap roadsters, nearly weather-fight cabriolets (a French word that described
a ride in an open coach of over a terrible country road), and phaetons, which were real
family-sized convertibles that appealed to those who missed the view from their fa-
ther's Model T. Back home, Henry Ford tried a bit of cross-pollination with his ex-
quisite 1941 Lincoln Continental convertible, a limited financial success that has since
been recognized as an important classic.
The late Forties brought a new problem to the car industry: they couldn't make con-
vertibles fast enough. The generation that had just won the biggest war in history was
inspired to achieve great things back home, and a car became the first visible sign of
success. Caretakers could afford to risk even more innovation. Legendary industrial
designer Raymond Loewy created the radically elegant little Studebaker Champion
that changed the life of a kid in Bradford, Pa.; and Henry Ford II gave us the '49 Ford,
which both Bruno Sacco, the chief designer at Daimler Benz, and Georgetto Guigaro,

true. But it was still the real convertibles that brought customers into the showrooms. Every-
thing, even the new econoboxes like Chevy's Corvair and Ford's Falcon were available as rag-
tops. Lee Iacocca's fabulous Mustang was quickly offered as a convertible (but it too got the
padded-roof treatment for the pretenders).
By the end of the sixties, visual displays of success marked you as a reactionary, and folding
roofs were clear signs of conspicuous consumption. At 10:12 a.m. on April 21, 1976, Cadillac sent
the last American convertible off the assembly line. It was a 500-cubic-inch El Dorado finished
in pearl white. Harley Earl would have loved it
But the convertible was temporarily banished as politically incorrect Those who still chose
opulence could order a padded steel replica of what a convertible might have looked like with its
roof up, then tint the windows so no one could see who they were.
The culture evolved, and doing well became socially acceptable again. Enjoying the fruits of

Lawrence Crane, of Ann Arbor, still craves the joy of convertible driving.

STYLE • SUMMER 1993.

61