Edsel (6 page)

B
ERMAN’S CHOP HOUSE
,
LOCATED IN
D
ETROIT’S
Times Square between Clifford and Grand River, was held over from an era when men snipped the ends off their cigars with silver clippers attached to platinum watch chains and women wore whalebone and kept their mouths shut; a patriarchic, oiled and pomaded barbershop of a time hewn of dark oak and polished brass, sunken with the
Lusitania.
The interior was a tall box that looked and smelled like a humidor, wood-paneled, leather-studded, and hung with red velvet. Most of the light in the room came secondhand off the surfaces of the crystal chandeliers and the copper plating back of the bar. The few women seated at the tables had the look of guests, as of a men’s club whose Old Guard had died off sufficiently for it to declare Ladies Night. You could order anything you liked from the leather-bound menu as long as it was beef, chops, fish, or salad. If you wanted dessert, there was Carl’s around the corner.

The maître d’, fortyish and appropriately effeminate, with an advancing forehead and lively violet eyes, had apparently been briefed, for he took no notice of my open-necked knit shirt and zipper jacket when I told him the party I was meeting and conducted me through a sea of business suits and striped ties to a corner booth. Israel Zed was standing there as if he’d been waiting in that position right along, large in gray worsted with a shadow stripe and the ubiquitous black cap. He took my hand and turned me toward the table. “Mr. Ford, Connie Minor.”

It would be some time before I learned that one didn’t “have lunch with Mr. Ford,” in the usual sense of the phrase.

Intimate, one-on-one meetings with the Boy King—he was thirty-seven at the time I met him, but the youthful title would remain as long as the gaunt gray ghost of Henry the First continued to stride through the offices, showrooms, and assembly plants of the company he founded—were nonexistent, for he was inseparable from the three men who shared the booth with him that day. For a terrible moment I was paralyzed by the sudden realization that I had no idea which of the four was my new employer. Zed made no indication by look or gesture, and although I had seen Ford’s face hundreds of times in newspaper photographs and in newsreels, I was at a loss to identify his remarkably ordinary features in person.

Ford solved the problem for me by lifting himself slightly and extending a large fleshy hand. That description implies more physical activity than was actually employed. I was pretty sure that despite the impression of rising, his buttocks never left the leather seat, and the proffered hand barely cleared his side of the table so that I had to reach all the way across to grasp it. His grip itself was neither weak nor strong; it wasn’t there. The sensation was as of plunging my hand into a feather pillow. He was a large soft bear of a man with thick dark hair parted on one side, baby-fat cheeks, and small light eyes that never gave the impression of making contact even when they were looking right into mine. I remembered my one meeting with his grandfather, five volcanic minutes alone with the stolid Yankee energy in that lean old frame, the hard, searching glitter in those deep-set eyes, and I understood the reasoning behind the rumors of a secret adoption in the family. There in the grandson’s presence I couldn’t recall ever having met a man who had so little effect on me. And potentially that made him as dangerous as anyone I’d known since Frankie Orr.

Other introductions followed. I shook hands with beefy Mead Bricker, gray, bespectacled Jack Davis, Ford’s allies from the days when bully-boy Harry Bennett ran the company with his army of strikebreakers and Svengali-like influence over Old Henry, and John Bugas, the former FBI bureau chief whom Ford had lured over from government service to turn Bennett’s corporate spies and enable the

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 push-button 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 in 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.”

I
T 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.