Books in Brief: Harley Earl and the Dream Machine

Harley Earl and the Dream Machine, by Stephen Bayley (Knopf, 128 pp., $20)

Harley Earl (1893-1969) was the father of the tailfin. General Motors lured him to Detroit from California, where he had been customizing cars for the stars, and made him head of its Art and Color Section. Between 1937, when he created the Buick Y-Job—a prototype similar to the Cord of a few years before, with concealed headlights, a power convertible top, wraparound bumpers, and flush door handles—and 1959, when he retired, Earl turned out dozens of designs for the massive, chromed cruisers remembered today chiefly for the way in which they went beyond the bounds of good taste. He created whitewalled behemoths with names like Roadmaster, Torpedo, Strato Streak, and Eldorado Seville Brougham. He was the first mass designer to create excitement for next year’s model. He lowered and lengthened cars, and stuck on tailfins as a kind of tribute to Lockheed’s P-38 fighter plane. Such autos were not styled for the fainthearted; Earl designed powerful machines for lords of the earth. Yet he also believed, “You can design a car so that every time you get in it, it’s a relief—you have a little vacation for a while.” Mr. Bayley, an English journalist, has a real understanding and appreciation for all this, although he sometimes gets carried away: “The first significant dream car of the postwar years was the astonishing LeSabre XP-8, a phallic jelly-mold of a car with aeroplane nozzles and details, which Earl named after the F-86 Sabre jet serving the U.S. forces. Earl, regardless of what the sociologists said about cars displaying your sexual fears, steered this awful tool around Grosse Pointe as his personal transport, leaving friends and colleagues at country clubs throughout Michigan astonished at his style.” Like a king of old, Earl could advise spectators to look on his works and tremble. His life work needs no apology. It may be difficult to realize in the age of the Toyota, but giants roamed the earth in those days.

Harley Earl and the Dream Machine, by Stephen Bayley (Knopf, 128 pp., $20)

Harley Earl (1893-1969) was the father of the tailfin. General Motors lured him to Detroit from California, where he had been customizing cars for the stars, and made him head of its Art and Color Section. Between 1937, when he created the Buick Y-Job—a prototype similar to the Cord of a few years before, with concealed headlights, a power convertible top, wraparound bumpers, and flush door handles—and 1959, when he retired, Earl turned out dozens of designs for the massive, chromed cruisers remembered today chiefly for the way in which they went beyond the bounds of good taste. He created whitewalled behemoths with names like Roadmaster, Torpedo, Strato Streak, and Eldorado Seville Brougham. He was the first mass designer to create excitement for next year’s model. He lowered and lengthened cars, and stuck on tailfins as a kind of tribute to Lockheed’s P-38 fighter plane. Such autos were not styled for the fainthearted; Earl designed powerful machines for lords of the earth. Yet he also believed, “You can design a car so that every time you get in it, it’s a relief—you have a little vacation for a while.” Mr. Bayley, an English journalist, has a real understanding and appreciation for all this, although he sometimes gets carried away: “The first significant dream car of the postwar years was the astonishing LeSabre XP-8, a phallic jelly-mold of a car with aeroplane nozzles and details, which Earl named after the F-86 Sabre jet serving the U.S. forces. Earl, regardless of what the sociologists said about cars displaying your sexual fears, steered this awful tool around Grosse Pointe as his personal transport, leaving friends and colleagues at country clubs throughout Michigan astonished at his style.” Like a king of old, Earl could advise spectators to look on his works and tremble. His life work needs no apology. It may be difficult to realize in the age of the Toyota, but giants roamed the earth in those days.