Findom's Wily Impresario

It's thanks to Chuck Jordan that automobile tail fins became so flamboyantly oversized

By PAUL INGRASSIA

Tail fins. They were an automotive design statement that, even today, remains an enduring icon (as in, "What were we thinking?") of mid-20th-century America. Their memory was invoked last week by the passing of Chuck Jordan at the age of 83.

Mr. Jordan was General Motors' vice president of styling in the late 1980s, hardly the glory years of GM design. But early in his career, as the styling chief of GM's Cadillac studios, he played a key role in helping Cadillac reach the heights, as it were, of findom With GM now recovering from bankruptcy, this tale of tails shows that even the company's dominant days had certain challenges.

The first tail fins were the brainchild of Harley Earl, the father of automotive design and the styling chief at GM for three decades, from the late '20s to the late '50s. Mr. Earl was a brilliant but imperious man whose underlings always called him "Mr. Earl," slurred into one word as "Misterl," but never "Harley." He was enamored of aerodynamics and aircraft.

During World War II Mr. Earl had visited Selfridge Air Base near Detroit for an up-close look at the Lockheed P-38. It was a versatile fighter plane with twin fuselages, sort of like a catamaran, and two fins protruding upward from the end of its twin tail.

Pleased with what he saw, Mr. Earl ordered fins mounted on the tails of GM's 1948 Cadillacs. They were modest little things: finlets, as it were. Even so, "as soon as the '48 model appeared, the protests began to roll in," Fortune magazine later reported. "In desperation, the company hurried up designs on a finless rear fender." But before GM could de-fin the designs, public opinion began to change. People liked the fins, and they stayed.

There things might have stayed, fin-wise, if not for the smallest of Detroit's Big Three car companies, Chrysler. It had a reputation for engineering excellence but boring design. So the company lured Studebaker's styling chief, Virgil Exner, a talented man who had worked under Mr. Earl at GM early in his career.

When Mr. Exner arrived, Chrysler's U.S. market share, traditionally about 20%, had shrunk to about 13%. So he took to the drawing board. The result: Chrysler's 1955 cars looked like nothing else on the road.

They had bushy-browed "Frenched" headlights, as the design was called, and big tail fins that pointed to the sky. Chrysler dubbed it "The Forward Look." The company's market share quickly jumped to 18%, confounding not only GM but government trust-busters, whose allegations that GM was a monopoly were undermined. In the first two months of 1955, Chrysler's earnings outstripped its net income for all of 1954.

Emboldened, Mr. Exner added even bigger fins to Chrysler's tails in 1956 and in 1957, when the company touted its styling with the memorable slogan "Suddenly, It's 1960!" Mr. Exner was honored by the Harvard Business School. Tail fins "reflect the growing artistic taste of the American consumer," he proudly declared. Well, they reflected something, if not exactly that.

Meanwhile, in the late summer of 1957, rumors spread around Detroit that Mr. Exner would unveil still more styling magic on Chrysler's 1958 models. So a Cadillac designer decided to do some sleuthing. His name was Chuck Jordan.

Mr. Jordan took a lunch-hour ride one day up Mound Road, a major thoroughfare north of Detroit. As he passed a Chrysler facility, he spotted some cars parked in a grassy field behind a fence. He drove in, peeked through the fence and spotted the biggest fins yet.

The young man tore back to the GM Technical Center, which housed the company's styling studios, and ran into the office of Bill Mitchell, the No. 2 man on the design staff. "You've got to see what I just saw," Mr. Jordan sputtered, as he recalled when I interviewed him a couple of years ago. "You won't believe it." Mr. Jordan, Mr. Mitchell and another colleague piled into a car and drove back up to the Chrysler field. The sight at the site confirmed that GM was about to get out-finned.

It was way too late to change GM's 1958 designs, which were rounded shapes laden with Harley Earl's favorite material: chrome. Even changing Cadillac's 1959 styling would be a stretch, especially under the circumstances. Mr. Earl, nearing retirement, was touring GM's facilities in Europe. Revamping the designs in his absence could cost Messrs. Mitchell and Jordan their jobs.

So Mr. Mitchell devised a compromise. He ordered the development of alternative 1959 designs with big fins for virtually all GM cars, with the biggest fins reserved for Cadillacs, and had them displayed next to the designs Mr. Earl had approved. When Mr. Earl returned, he surveyed the scene and stalked into his office, saying nothing for three days, before finally nodding approval.

Mr. Jordan's work on the new Cadillacs wasn't done. At one point, after sculpting a full-size clay model, he stepped back and realized the fins actually were taller than the roof of the car. So he downsized the fins a bit, hard as that is to believe when viewing the cars today.

When the 1959 Cadillacs debuted they sported the biggest tail fins ever, and more. The side panels looked like jet fuselages. The rear tail lights resembled jet-engine exhaust portals. The longest model was 3 feet longer than GM's now-departed Hummer H2. "No second looks will be necessary to identify Cadillacs for 1959," said Motor Life magazine. No kidding. GM's market share bounced back.

Decades later, Mr. Jordan confessed that the 1959 Cadillacs looked "cartoonish." His favorite fins, he told me, were the shorter (but still substantial) ones on the 1960 models. Fins disappeared entirely from American cars in 1964.

They're still a wonder to behold, however, when viewed in the metallic flesh. Some of the best-preserved specimens can be found in the General Motors Heritage Center. Ironically, it's just off Mound Road north of Detroit, not far from where Chuck Jordan made his fateful discovery in that long-ago summer of 1957.