Thinking Small (42 page)

At the time, the ad agency standard was to departmentalize work as much as possible. The accounts department acquired and decided on the companies and campaigns. On another floor, the copywriter received his or her account name and the “angle” that was to be used, an angle usually derived from research purchased from polling companies and focus groups. The copywriters would come up with the copy, then send it to another floor where the art department would
give it images. This system was highly comparable to the automobile assembly line, and the process had been honed to the point where the guy putting the doors on, so to speak, wouldn’t even talk to the guy designing those doors, or the person who had crafted them—it was all unnecessary. And it all worked well enough. But it wasn’t good enough for Bill.

DDB wouldn’t have any such floors. Bill wanted the agency to be a place that nurtured interaction, relationships like the one he and Rand had started and that he and Gage were cultivating. That meant doing away with certain departmental walls and allowing for more communication. Bill realized that juices flow when there is trial and error and messiness and moments of transcendence, things that come from two people interacting in a room, so he
put the copywriter and the art director together as a team. It was a simple move, but until Bill, it had never been done before, and the very idea of it—common as it might seem to us now—was considered strange (at best). As Robert Gage described it:
“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, and then to
another.”
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In this way, every ad was about “the combination of the visual and the words coming together and forming a third bigger thing.” If the writer and the artist interacted, then the copy and the image of the ad would ultimately interact on the page, creating a stronger finished piece. They would use research. They would have their own offices and desks.
Reason would certainly have its place, but they wouldn’t keep churning out different sizes and shapes of that same happy-world ad that was so common. “Logic and overanalysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea,” Bill said. “It’s like love—the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.”

Thus, Bill developed a philosophy of sorts, a philosophy that resulted in a totally new structure, much like Nordhoff’s presence was changing the Volkswagen factory during those same years. And if industry was a matter of technical innovation and efficiency, then media (at least as DDB saw it) was a matter of translating that innovation into a language that the everyday customer could understand. Bill’s philosophies were ultimately shifting the very
founding dynamics of advertising, just as Nordhoff was attempting to redefine what it meant to be a German business. If it worked, it would be revolutionary.
If.

At the beginning
of 1947, Porsche was still in a lonely Dijon cell, and so was his son-in-law, Anton. They were still being held without trial, without any clear charges, and the rest of the Porsche family was still trying in earnest to get them released. In the months since Ferdinand and Anton had been transferred into their solitary, cold, medieval cells, Ferry and Louise and Rabe had continued their convoluted negotiations with the French. In the spring of 1947, a deal was finally struck: The French authorities would let the two men go, but only if they were paid 500,000 francs for each man.

This felt like an impossible sum in 1947—such money simply could not be found in one lump sum, especially given the conversion rate. But it was the only option, and necessity tends to have its way. Amazingly, they managed to make the deal and scrape the funds together in July, thanks to the help they received from friends and colleagues living in France. A French Grand Prix driver named Raymond Sommer and a French automotive journalist named Charles Faroux helped to get messages to and from Ferdinand and his family. They also got food packages to Porsche and Anton and helped in the negotiations for their release. Once the French had agreed to let the men go on bail, other automotive men helped Ferry secure a large contract to make a car for Italian tycoon Piero Dusio. He commissioned Ferry and the Porsche team to design an all-wheel drive Formula One racing car, the Cisitalia
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360 (and it turned out to be a very beautiful car indeed). The contract paid about $62,000 in today’s terms, but at the time that was more than enough to cover the one million francs that constituted the bail. Even so, it was impossible for Ferry to get those funds transferred to France by himself, so the French Grand Prix driver Sommer served as the middleman and the Italians and French worked together to
finally get the money delivered. It was less bail than ransom, really, as there had been no trial and Porsche and Anton had been held illegally the whole time. Even today, the details about this imprisonment are still murky, as the French files of those years have yet to be released. But such things didn’t matter to the Porsche family: at that point, all they wanted was to get Ferdinand and Anton home again.

On August 1, 1947, well over two years after the end of the war, Porsche and Piëch were released. But Porsche emerged a broken man. All that exuberance and fierceness that had so characterized him before the war was lost, and it was clear that he would not resume his running of their company; those responsibilities would stay with Louise, Ferry, and Rabe, though for now Porsche would remain the company’s figurehead. Now that they were all back together as one family, there were many things to be done. One such order of business was how to deal with the Volkswagen plant.

By early 1948, with Nordhoff managing the factory and with cars being produced and sold, it had become clear that a new agreement needed to be reached between Porsche and Volkswagen; it was his car they were selling after all, and it had come from the Porsche family firm. The old contracts that had been decided on between the Porsche family and the company in 1943 were completely outdated. Thanks to Louise, Ferry, and Rabe, the Porsche firm had done well in the years since the war. It now had over 300 employees, and many contracts abroad. Ferry had also been working on a new kind of car, and he needed to get things settled with Volkswagen before he could proceed in producing it. Upon being contacted by Ferry, Heinrich Nordhoff made immediate plans to go to Austria and speak with the Porsche family. They had to meet in Austria because Ferdinand Porsche was still not allowed to enter Germany. It would be 1949 before the Allies would allow him to return.

Ferry needed cash because the car he’d just designed was the remarkable Porsche 356, and he wanted to produce it, as the
idea for the car had finally jelled in his mind while he was working on the Cisitalia project. The 356 Roadster (known as No. 1, and receiving its permit on June 8, 1948) had an aluminum body, was 35 hp, and could go about 85 mph. It was based on the Volkswagen platform, sharing its flat-four engine, gearbox, and suspension system, but the 356 was given a sportier shape and line. It was the first sports car in the way we think of sports cars today, not necessarily built only for the racetrack but for people to drive on the autobahns and streets. It was also the first car of what is today the very respected and elite Porsche brand. It was a landmark in Porsche history, and it is telling that the decision to proceed with production of the car came from Ferry, not from his father. Ferdinand Porsche had designed a car to be built in the factory in Wolfsburg under Nazi control. Now Ferry had taken that design, mixed it with other ideas his father had for making a race car, and turned it into one the Porsche company would produce on its own. When Ferry first showed the design and roadgoing chassis of the 356 to his father in February 1948, it’s easy to imagine that he was nervous in the way only a son can be, a feeling mixed with excitement, but also frustration and fear.

Porsche looked at the car long and hard. The two men walked around it together quietly, both of their eyes alight. There wasn’t a thing about it he would change, Ferdinand Porsche finally told his son: “If I’d created it myself,
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this is exactly how I would have wanted it.” It’s hard to imagine a greater compliment for a son, or one more fitting for that particular moment, a moment when the elder Porsche was clearly handing over the reins to his talented heir. In his father’s absence, Ferry had shown that he could stand on his own.

Thus when Nordhoff, Ferry, and Ferdinand met at the edge of Austria near Berchtesgaden in the late summer of 1948 to discuss where things stood between Volkswagen and Porsche, it was Ferry (with the guiding help and advice of his sister, Louise) who was essentially in charge. And yet it was the presence
of the elder Porsche that set the mood of the meeting. Nordhoff, the man who had criticized Porsche’s Volkswagen design many years ago, was now both humble and filled with words of praise. The little car was the center of both men’s existence; Porsche had given it birth, the British had adopted it for a while, and now Nordhoff was steering it toward the new international commercial world that was beginning to emerge. It seemed the old was indeed giving way to the new, and while change is often subtle, this was a moment when the very near past and the present were in stark contrast, a break highlighted all the more by the fact that Nordhoff and the Porsches met near Berchtesgaden, a beautiful Alpine village where Adolf Hitler (just years before) had occupied his famed mountain home.

That meeting in the Alps was only a preliminary one, arranged more of out of respect for Porsche than of out of a sense of business. A few months later, Ferry would travel alone to Bad Reichenhall, a spa town in upper Bavaria, leaving his father at
home, and meet with Nordhoff and their respective lawyers to sign the final plan. Ferry liked Nordhoff, and he would later write in his autobiography that the meeting had been easy: The two men immediately saw eye to eye. Indeed, Ferry and Heinrich were not strangers. They knew each other from the days of the war, as they had both been part of the small and elite German automotive world. Both had seen the Nazi machine up close, and both were keenly aware of the new conditions they now found themselves in, and they wanted to make the best of them.

In that sense, they both understood that the Volkswagen company and the Porsche company needed each other in order to be strong, and they each respected what the other man was bringing
to the table. Together they decided that the Porsches would not build cars for any company that might be likely to come into competition with the Volkswagen, which was an essential point for Nordhoff. The Porsche patent for the Volkswagen—and the patents for its parts—could be used by the company in Wolfsburg free of charge. In turn, the Porsches would get royalties on every VW that Wolfsburg made and sold: In effect, VW would become Porsche’s biggest client. The Porsche company, and any cars it made, were also entitled to use any of the Volkswagen service centers and chains. This would be a big incentive for the emerging Porsche firm in coming years as the Porsche 356, the car that Ferry created using his father’s original Volkswagen design, was soon to be presented and sold. In an unshakable way, the original Volkswagen and the original Porsche would always be a bit like brother and sister, each eventually starting families of their own. (The 356 would soon lead to the Porsche 911, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful cars in the world, a car that, like the 356, was strongly modeled on Ferdinand Porsche’s original VW design.) The sweet but sleek 356 was presented in its first auto show in Geneva in 1949. A new generation was emerging now, and in the tradition of innovation, the Porsches were again creating something the European world had never seen.