Master Of Style

How Harley Earl Changed the World

- Alan Paradise

It was just another bleak late winter’s day in Detroit. The year was 1927 and a brash Californian had come to General Motors to bring style to an otherwise utilitarian automotive industry. Shorty thereafter, the 33-year-old would forever change the way the world felt about owning a car.

Perhaps second only to Henry Ford, no one in the American automotive history is as important as Harley J. Earl. His talents and vision literally shaped the entire automotive landscape. While Ford created the assembly-line approach for a nation on the move, Earl brought form and beauty to mechanical function. He developed a formula that demanded General Motors give equal weight to design, and in the process developed the idea of what the automobile said about its owner’s personal image. Within a few model years, Earl’s influence had transformed the car from something you needed to have into something you deeply wanted.

Earl was a giant of a man, standing 6-foot 4 inches. Always impeccably dressed, he came from Hollywood with a reputation as the coach designer to the stars. Everyone from Tom Mix to Fatty Arbuckle drove down Sunset Boulevard in a Cadillac chassis covered with Harley Earl custom-made bodies. Not far removed from his college days at Stanford University, he had a unique vision and understanding for turning four-wheel machinery into moving pieces of art.