Chapter 14: Prometheus
My brief stay at Wayne State gave me an introduction to mythology that everyone pursuing a career in a creative field should have. All cultures on Earth have an ancient system of beliefs to explain unseen forces in nature that govern what we can observe but cant otherwise explain. On the surface these belief systems seem very different but the major underlying themes are so similar from pole to pole that its spooky.
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, saw so many similarities in these underlying mythological themes that he concluded they had to be rooted in a common genetic pool of human consciousness. He called that common pool of knowledge the supra conscious. He gave each major theme a name and collectively labeled them archetypes.
In my experience with the auto industry I saw the same archetypes.
According to Greek Mythology all of creation started with Chaos. From Chaos came Uranus (the sky) and Gaea (the earth), the first male and female entities in the universe. Their son Cronus (Father Time) castrated his father with his mothers help and got it on with his mother (yes, Father Time was the first motherfucker). Their union gave birth to the Titans. The Titans were the first order of beings with the power to think, to act, to create and to destroy at will.
The Titans gave way to the gods, five of whom were swallowed by Cronus who feared that one of them would overthrow him. Zeus escaped with the help of his mother Rhea, who was also his sister, and freed his older brothers and sisters by causing Cronus to regurgitate them. He banished his father, married his sister Hera and divided the universe between himself and his brothers Hades and Poseidon. Hades became lord of the underworld. Poseidon got dominion over the seas. Zeus became head honcho of the heavens, the land and the other gods with his world headquarters at the summit of Mt. Olympus. He was smart enough to let a few Titans stick around in subservient roles.
According to one story Zeus chose an impulsive Titan called Epimetheus to make all the mortal creatures of the earth. These creatures included a weak, slow, thin-skinned, clawless, wingless, fangless and furless critter called man. The fatal flaw in man was the order in which Epimetheus created him. In keeping with his creators name, which means afterthought, Epimetheus created man last. Lacking the natural gifts that Epimetheus had already given to the other creatures of the world to protect himself against savage beasts and the natural elements, man was helpless without divine intervention.
Prometheus, the brother of mans creator saw the problem and the solution. His name, by the way, means forethought. To clean up his brothers mess he had to resort to drastic measures. He stood man upright, gave him intelligence and took fire from the sun, which the craftsman god Hephaestus used to make everything of value, and gave it to man. For appropriating the fire, Zeus punished Prometheus severely.
Even the gods had to have rules, although they didnt always obey them. One of those rules was that a gift of the gods could not be taken back. Zeus couldnt kill Prometheus because, like the gods, Titans were immortal so he lashed him to a rock and sent an eagle to pluck out his liver. When his liver rejuvenated the eagle would sweep down and pluck it out again.
Physical torture wasnt enough. Zeus then ordered Hephaestus to create Pandora, the first woman, as a bride for Epimetheus, mostly to piss off Prometheus. Pandora was a knockout. You can safely guess that she was just the sort of woman Prometheus would go for in a big way.
Zeus threw a big wedding party and presented Pandora with a beautiful box into which all of the gods had placed a gift. The box was the gift of gifts, because, like Pandoras name, it contained all gifts. Zeus told Pandora not to open the box. He should have told her why. Not all gifts are good. Naturally, Pandora opened the box and thereby let loose all of the evils that plague humanity to this day.
If the story of Prometheus combined with the story of Pandora sounds to you bit like the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit, youve got a good idea where Jung got the notion of archetypes. Similar stories appear in other cultures with no historical connection. The essential message is the same; as long as you do what the gods tell you to do, no matter how unreasonable it might seem, no harm will come to you. If you forget your place and step out of line the gods will punish you.
From time to time a mortal would get the idea that he could cross the gods or aspire to be one of them. Some of these mortals were great heroes. Others were bigheaded louts. They were all shot down in flames. The worst offenders were sent to a place called Tartarus where they were subjected to fiendish psychological torments for eternity.
Tartarus is where a man named Tantalus was made to stand in a pool of water with the branch of a fig tree ladened with fruit hanging over his head. Every time he reached for a fig the wind would blow it just out of his reach. When he bent down to drink the water it would recede. Tantalus was thus in a state of perpetual hunger and thirst with his salvation always in sight but forever denied to him.
Another famous resident of Tartarus was Sisyphus. When he angered the gods they forced him to roll a heavy rock up a hill. Whenever he got near the top the rock would roll back down to the bottom and he would have to start over again. Cant you just see him almost making it?
The auto industry has its Titans, gods, heroes and bit players. In the beginning clay modelers see more chaos than order in their work. The more they learn the more patterns they see in planning, styling, engineering, manufacturing and marketing because the same ones persist throughout their careers or recur periodically in signature reincarnations.
Modelers, like Prometheus, Hephaestus and the mortals of Greek mythology learn that the gods are as fallible as we are. They are immortal in the sense that they never have to worry about the necessities of life no matter what they do or dont do. They squabble among themselves for petty reasons and make thoughtless decisions that have terrible consequences for the mortals in their domain. They breed with their own in the form of nepotism and they pick favorites to excel who dont always merit their special attention. They sometimes impose rules that shouldnt exist or cant be obeyed. They frequently break rules that should never be broken and they routinely disregard rules of all kinds that they require their mortal playthings to live by.
These are archetypes that apply to auto companies across the board.
The gods of the auto industry are, of course, the top executives and the people in the pipeline with the right background and connections to become top executives. The Titans are the old hands who can do amazing things that the executives cant. The heroes are the workers favored by the gods for any number of reasons.
Felix DeRose was an American Motors hero. So was Chuck Beudreu. Both of them had a way of producing clay surfaces that looked so clean and even that they dazzled the eye. In most other respects our skill level was close to even. In some ways I was ahead of them. Felix still had trouble with some of the technical aspects of the job and Beudreu did more work than necessary to zero in on an optimum design. Nevertheless, what Felix and Beudreu both had was enough to put them ahead of me overall in the eyes of management and in my eyes as well.
Only two other modelers in the studio had that elusive touch that I lacked, Jerry Pietila, who was one of our two Leaders, and Chuck Clayton. Chuck Clayton and I were working on a job about six months after I was hired when he pulled me over to a workbench with the steel I was using. He sharpened it on a fixture that held a long metal file fixed at a right angle to a platform and handed it back to me.
Try it now, he said, pointing to a nearby clay model in the rough.
I stoked the steel across the clay the way I always did. The result was better than I had ever achieved. I was flabbergasted. Why hadnt Tom Beaubian or less Jacobs shown me that at Ford? I looked at the steel. I looked at the clay, then back at the steel. I looked at Chuck Clayton.
My expression must have said what I was thinking.
Chuck grinned. You go for years thinking that some guy is better than you and all hes got is a sharp steel.
At that moment I knew that I was closer than Id thought I was to being the equal of anyone in the studio. I marveled at how something as simple and basic as the way Chuck Clayton showed me how to sharpen my steels could have gotten past me for so long. The answer was in the clay.
American Motors used the same kind of clay that Ford used. To get the look on Ford clay that separated Felix DeRose, Chuck Beudreu, Chuck Clayton and Jerry Pietila from the rest of the modelers, the steel had to have the kind of cutting edge that their steels had. When you used Chrysler clay, steeling the surface was only the first step in preparing it for Di-Noc, the thin vinyl material used to simulate paint. After you steeled the clay you had to go over it with a plastic tool called a slick. The clay shows at Chrysler were done with slicked surfaces the way Paul Schiloff had shown us in his school.
Had I worked with Ford clay first or if someone at Ford had shown me what Chuck Clayton did, the difference between AMs heroes and me would not have existed. This wasnt so much a shortcoming on my part as it was a flaw in the system. The Leaders should have taught everyone who used Ford clay how to sharpen a steel for the best results. They should have drilled them on it as a matter of company policy the way an Army Drill Sergeant teaches all Basic trainees how to march in cadence. It should not have been a carefully guarded secret.
I found that I couldnt pass on Claytons steel sharpening tip because I couldnt figure out a way to approach the other modelers in the capacity of a teacher without the blessings of higher authority to back me up. Several modelers had started their careers when I did but because I was the Companys first new hire in three years who hadnt worked continuously in the field they all had at least thee more years on the job than I had.
While I was looking for work, selling insurance, ducking bullets, going to school and working for nothing as a security guard and a high-low driver, they were at American Motors making clay models. All of them felt, as I did before Clayton showed me the steel-sharpening trick, that they already knew the basics. In terms of getting a result that was indistinguishable from the heroes when they applied the turpentine-alcohol wash to finish it off, they were correct. In terms of getting the best possible finish without the wash, they were wrong. The best finish could be achieved only without applying the wash.
Felix DeRose had the right idea about show biz. It was one thing to do splendid work and another thing to get the recognition for it on a level high enough to translate into a bigger paycheck. When Felix approached a job he did it with the words and body language of a master whether or not he had a clue about how to do it. If he struggled, you always got the impression that it was the fault of the stylist for not explaining himself well or for submitting a proposal that couldnt be done. The clever part about his act was that he left those impressions without giving those excuses. He just looked like he always knew what he was doing.
The senior Leader, Russ Franz, who could have made a living as a stand up comic, did the same thing in his own unique style. When he reached a point where he could go no further he simply turned the job over to someone else with instructions like, I did the hard part. All you have to do is clean it up. The hard part: was rouging the model in so that it could be cleaned up. Russ didnt always do that. He didnt know how.
Jerry Pietila, Chuck Beudreu, and Chuck Clayton didnt have to fake it because they really did know what they were doing. I noticed, though, that all of them as well as the other strong modelers in the studio made some of the same mistakes repeatedly.
Garry Guichard, a stylist that I got to know and to respect immensely for his talent, his personality and his brains showed me something that all of the modelers missed. He called it the 3-D cut. It was a technique he developed on his own to make sure that a line he drew on the clay in one view worked well with the same line in a perpendicular view. He would cut a deep side view line, for instance, on the trailing edge of a C-pillar then cut another deep line in the rear view. The cuts intersected at the trailing edge in both views. Once you raked the clay down to that intersection you could see exactly where you stood to home in quickly on the optimum line in all views.
Most of the modelers kept the stylists as far away from their tools and their jobs as they could. They would let them apply tape to their surfaces and draw shallow knife lines but that was it. I let Garry do whatever he wanted to do because he approached his work with forethought and respected what I needed to do to get the job done. Gary was unusual.
In my entire modeling career I encountered no more than a dozen stylists who thought out the consequences of their actions as well as Garry did before they took them. None of those designers ever made it to the top for the same reasons that forward-thinking modelers and engineers had trouble moving up in the ranks. You cant see thought. You cant predict innovation. You cant control what you cant see and cant predict.
All of the stylists and modelers had strengths and weaknesses. Depending on what you saw as most important you might see strength where someone else would see weakness and vice versa. Thats why some stylists and modelers worked better together than they did with others. Jerry Pietila, Chuck Beudreu and Felix DeRose made all of the stylist happy because they did what they were told when they were told to do it. They didnt need a good sketch to make a good model. They worked quickly, dependably and well. Most importantly, you could see everything they were doing from hour to hour and it always looked great.
The way I saw it, Chuck Clayton, Jessie Bongcompagno and Phil Campbell were the equals of Jerry Pietila and Chuck Beudreu. They were better than Felix and much better than Russ. The only things holding them back were their thoughtfulness before tearing into a project and their slower pace. A slower pace did not mean that they did less than they could have if they worked at a faster pace. Because they thought about what they were doing before they started they made fewer unrecoverable miss-steps. They simply didnt have to work up a sweat to reach a deadline in good order with time to spare. Phil, Jessie and Chuck Clayton were my clay modeling heroes at American Motors.
My stylist heroes were Gary Guichard and Stan Johnson.
Stan was in his mid-forties. He collected old Life Magazines, which he appreciated for their wonderful photographs, drawings, articles and their historical perspective. He thought that the most educational aspect of the magazine was the blatant racism that poured out of the pages of that cultural icon of mainstream American journalism for most of its history.
If anybody really wants to know about racism, Stan once said, the best way to do it is to look though my collation of Life Magazines.
Stan hated racism. He hated the fact that he was a part of it whether he wanted to be or not by virtue of the privileges he got just because of his color. He was single. He lived in a black neighborhood of Detroit. Once, his apartment was burglarized. Some of the people in the studio tried to make a racial issue out of it. Stan didnt see it that way. He wasnt the only one in his apartment building who had been burglarized. He saw his black neighbors and himself on the same side.
It helped that I liked Gary and Stan a lot as people. But one of the reasons that we hit off so well is that we all liked to challenge old assumptions and explore new ideas. On the job it meant that I got a better chance with them to experiment than I otherwise would have. In the process we all learned why some techniques worked better than others in achieving the best results in the shortest time.
First, the proportions had to be right within the bounds of feasibility. To understand that principle, just try to imagine a beauty contestant with the proportions of a spider monkey. Then came the graphic elements. Picture the beauty contestant with an eye in the middle of her forehead and a bone through her nose. Finally, the surfaces (the beauty contestants skin) had to be flawless. Each element had to be put in place with the other elements in mind. That was a bad way for the artist to look good from the outset. It was the only way for the art to look good at the end.
Working closely with Gary and Stan I became increasingly aware that I was quickly gaining ground on my heroes as well as AMs heroes in every phase of the clay modeling craft. Given the freedom I had to work one-on-one with the stylists and engineers, that was easy. The top guns were already in top form, mostly repeating what they already knew. Meanwhile, I was mastering the skills that set them apart. Looking ahead, I could see that the only way to do better was to take the entire profession to another level. Thats what I aimed for.
It bears repeating that the American Motors stylists were as good as any in the profession. With the exterior designs of the Gremlin, the Hornet, the Pacer and the Matador they were stuck with proportions that no one could rescue. When they got the rare opportunity to do what they wanted to do the results were invariably outstanding. The first Javelin is a good example. Most of the other good examples ended up in the clay mixer.
Gary and a stylist named Roger Naulph designed a couple of grills for a Hornet that were the coolest grills Id ever seen. Phil Campbell modeled one of them. I modeled the other one. Both models got rave reviews from everyone except Dick Teague. Both of them ended up in the clay mixer.
The clay mixer, by the way, was an antique machine that softened the clay by grinding it in a confined space with a giant screw. It softened lots of clay quickly but whipped up so many air bubbles that it was impossible to get a good finish with it. American Motors used it because the company did not want to spend the money for huge ovens like the ones that Ford used in their exterior studios.
We were supposed to use the mixer for loading up a buck and roughing in a model. We used old clay in the mixer. Fresh clay went into small ovens for use on final surfaces. Jerry Pietila strictly enforced the rule for himself and all of the modelers working for him except Felix DeRose and Chuck Beudreu. They ignored him and got away with it. It was one more of those little things that kept them looking good.
The clay mixer protocol is not just an example of penny wise and pound-foolish American Motors policies. It shows how some modelers could get an edge on others by violating the rules. It was often physically impossible for all of us to get the amount of clay we need from the ovens. Felix and Beudreu could do it because they were stars. Thats not a nock on the modelers; its a comment on the rules.
Hall of Famer Al Kailine commented on those special rules during a televised baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and the Kansas City Royals when George Brett took a good pitch on a 2-2 count for a ball. Half kiddingly, George Kell, another Hall of Famer, asked Kailine if it would have been a strike if anther player had been at bat.
Without hesitation Kailine said, You bet.
Kell asked Kailine whether he got calls like that when he was playing well. Kailine told him that he did and Kell admitted that he did, too. They agreed that it wasnt so much because the umpires favored the stars. It was because they sometimes doubted themselves when a player of Bretts caliber with a reputation for having an exceptionally good eye at the plate looked at an easy pitch that he should have swung at.
This is where I was coming from when I said that I had to take the entire modeling profession to another level. Close wasnt going to do it for me in everyones opinion. I had to do something that broke new ground in a big way that was too important and too obvious for anyone to miss.
Stan Johnson gave me my first chance.
We were doing two front ends of a Hornet at the same time. According to the standard industry practice of modeling half of a car to the centerline, I modeled one of Stans proposals on the drivers side and another proposal on the passenger side. When we got to a point where one side clearly looked more promising than the other we put that proposal on both sides.
Invariably, the result was disappointing. In the process of balancing the proportions across the centerline we had to make so many changes in all views that we lost both sides and gained nothing. After weeks of going through this nonsense I decided to see if I could figure out why so many great designs went bad on us. While Stan accepted it as a normal part of the design process, I couldnt shake the feeling that I was letting him down, that I was doing something wrong.
The next time we had two good sides going and were ready to mirror the best side, I asked Stan to wait until I checked some points. Stan agreed. Normally, I would have gotten a load of crap about putting the cart before the horse. This was supposed to be the exploratory stage of design where a good, down and dirty sketch model was the goal. Thats why Jerry Pietila, Felix DeRose, and Chuck Beudreu were prized so highly. They roughed in those surfaces very quickly giving the stylist rapid feedback on whether or not he was going in the right direction. I already knew that they were creating illusions that wouldnt necessarily hold up in the long run. Thats what gave me the idea to take the points.
Instead of wiping out one side and replacing it with the other, I balanced the favored side on a corresponding point across the centerline. Right away I saw what kept getting us into trouble. The only way to balance the entire front end was to change the proportions that we liked so much. When the proportions changed so did the design. I showed Stan my discovery. He caught on right away and we tried the same balancing act with the other side. That side had problems, too, but we could make it work. Thats the side we balanced.
From then on we could do two sides and make many changes that we knew would work when we balanced the best side. Ten or fifteen minutes of preparation saved weeks of fruitless effort. We completed the model months ahead of schedule with much more time to perfect the surfaces because knowing where we were at every stage of development allowed us to contain feasibility issues as they occurred. Instead of getting to the end only to find that we had built in a problem that couldnt be corrected, when we were finished, we were really finished.
Youd think that a breakthrough like that would win me beg points with my Supervisor, the Leaders and the Studio executive. It didnt. All they saw was the time I wasted taking points when I could have been sketch modeling. They saw how long it took for me to do a good sketch model. They saw me wasting time on making my surfaces too good too early when I could have been making more of the down and dirty kind. The down and dirty kind had teeth marks that looked great in the rough because they gave the model an even texture and hid the flaws. I smoothed my surfaces early on to expose the flaws. They saw the flaws.
Gary, Stan and a few of the modelers saw the method in my madness. That wasnt enough to lift my status in the studio from what it was when I first set foot in the place. I saw that clearly with Chuck Beudreu when I was tying to center a tailpipe within a clearance zone on a Matador.
Early in 1974 American Motors switched from the aircraft measuring system, which had been standard in the automotive industry, to the metric system. The transition wasnt easy because we made the mistake of trying to convert inches and tenths of an inch into centimeters and millimeters. By reading between the increments of the scales we were used to, we could get within one one-hundredth of an inch, which was less than a quarter of a millimeter but the only translators we had broke down inches the way a standard ruler does, in halfs, quarters, eights, sixteenths, etc. Therefore, anytime a measurement had to be taken there was always an issue of whether the person taking it was doing it right.
The closest I could come to centering the tailpipe was one millimeter. I asked my friend Chuck Beudreu, who was standing nearby, if he could help me. Being the all-around good guy he was he did. What happed next was so weird that I wont even try to explain it.
Chuck presumed to give me basic measuring lessons. I wasnt offended because for all he knew, thats why I was having so much trouble getting closer than one millimeter. It actually made me feel better to see that he was also struggling, probably because the pipe was slightly out of round. The weird thing was when he decided that he had come as close as humanly possible
He was off by two millimeters.
I dont believe that Chuck ever gave that incident another thought. I thought about it often. I still do. He measured my one-millimeter deviation himself and concluded just as I had that it wasnt close enough. Yet, his adjustment to my work that resulted in a two-millimeter deviation was not only satisfactory to him, it was the best possible result.
If this is how Beudreu judged my work when subjective judgment was not an issue, what was going on in the minds of people who werent my friends when a subjective judgment was the only one they could make? It was a scary question. Was this how Bob Nixon, my supervisor Chuck Hosper and Jerry Pietila, the Leader I worked for most often, judged my work? Were they, too, using mental scales that overruled the real ones?
The question got scarier when Jerry ODonald and I modeled half of a car for Gary Guichard that everyone had given up on. The Studio Exec, the Supervisor, the Leaders and the stars all said that it was impossible because we didnt have enough information or enough time. With a supreme effort to fill in the missing blanks and to work as smart as we could in addition to working as hard as we could, we pulled it off.
When Bob Nixon came in the next morning and saw what Gary, Jerry and I had done he was stunned. You know, he said to no one in particular, its amazing how this thing pulled itself together.