Cadillac Series 62

The 1959 Cadillac was the epitome of American automotive elegance taken to the illogical extreme. If you believe in the principle “less is more” and “form should follow function” then the ’59 Cadillac may strike you as some evil alien life-form, as appealing as fungus, as pleasant to the eye as a sharp spike. But if, on the other hand, you believe the objective of a car is to please its driver, to send her or him off into the distance affixed with a smile, then the Cadillac that arrived in showrooms for the 1959 model year was a very big success indeed.

The Cadillac of car designers

One cannot, of course, discuss the design of the 1959 Caddy, or any other General Motors car built between 1930 and 1960, without first speaking of Harley Earl, the man who,practically single-handedly, invented automotive styling. At the direction of the forward-thinking Alfred P. Sloan, he created  the GM Art & Colour Section, which marked the first time any auto manufacturer officially institutionalized and recognized  the importance of styling in selling its wares. Before Earl retired in 1959, his power and status  within General Motors and the American car industry as a whole reached unparalleled levels. If you wanted to learn what American cars were going to look like in the near future,  you had but ask one man–Harley Earl.

As is fitting for the man who turned auto designing into show business, Earl was born in Los Angeles, the first city built for the automobile, and he started his career in Hollywood, the world’s dream factory. The year was 1893, and Earl’s father, J.W. Earl, was in the carriage trade–more precisely, he built and repaired carriages. Harley Earl grew up in the business, and, though his father once sent  him off to Stanford to become a lawyer, the effort didn’t take, and the younger Earl returned to the family business.

By that time (1914), his father had sensed the future and changed the name of his company,  from the Earl Carriage Works to the Earl Automobile Works. At first,  the company did little more than customize existing automobile bodies, an endeavor that was fired by the legion of nouveau riche Hollywood movie stars who worked within a stone’s throw of the Earls’ business.

Customizer to the movie stars!

Though they weren’t “coach built” in the conventional sense, some of these customized cars did gain a significant amount of attention, and that attention brought out even more movie stars. The Earl company, and its successor, the Don Lee Coach & Body Works, produced custom coachwork for the likes of  Anne May, Pauline Frederick, Jack Pickford, Mary Miles Minter, and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.

Don Lee, who had acquired the Earls’ company, was a famous Los Angeles area Cadillac dealer, and his success peddling coach-built Cadillacs brought Earl’s designs to the attention of Alfred P. Sloan. The General Motors president  employed Earl to style the company’s then-upcoming La Salle line, which was meant to fill the niche between Cadillac and  Buick, and the car, launched in 1927 was a stupendous success. The one-time assignment for the La Salle then turned into a lifetime career, when on January 1, 1928,  Sloan installed Earl as the official head of GM styling.

Through the years,  Earl’s ability to   wield influence with Sloan and to  develop a good design  made him a very powerful man in Detroit. Before his first decade at GM was finished, he had established General Motors as the styling leader of the American automotive industry. And he, of course, influenced what General Motors styling would be.

Facilitator of auto designers

Though not talented with airbrush, pencil,  or clay, Earl proved to be a fabulous manager and developer of stylists. His early work with Chevrolet helped establish that model  as the low-priced segment leader, zooming right past Ford in the process. Through the Thirties, he was able to create and perpetuate distinct personalities for  Buick, La Salle, Pontiac, Oldsmobile,  and Cadillac, despite the fact that the divisions often shared basic body structure. And the concept cars that emanated from the GM styling studios under his directive included such memorable work as the Wildcat, Buick Y-Job, Le Sabre,  and Chevrolet Corvette.

As a great comedian is often a better selector of jokes than a writer of them, Earl was a much better selector of fine designs than he was a creator of them. But in the overall scheme of things, that was a much more important talent to General Motors and the business  than the ability to draw pretty pictures.

Earl also persuaded innovative thinking, at least within the boundaries that he imposed. Enamored of aircraft design, he arranged to have main members of his design staff get a sneak peek at the then-secret P-38 fighter plane. The aviation influence went on to encourage  GM’s designs through his length of service at the company.

Excessive car, but properly scaled

The unquestioned exemplification of Earl’s design philosophy was the 1959 Cadillac, which brought excess to a competely new level. One of the most  astonishing aspects of the ’59 Cadillac was that, despite its awesomely massive size, it never looked clumsy, no matter the angle. Although some parts of it are baroque in the extreme–the huge tailfins, the “jet exhaust” rear bumper treatment–the entire car has a gracefully inevitable shape. Long and low, it wears its enormous size very, very well.

How extended  was it?

At 20 feet, it was longer than today’s lengthiest Cadillac version by almost a yard. It featured both an expansive tail  and an expansive hood l that served to make the passenger space seem small in comparison, but, in reality, none of the car’s six passengers suffered for lack of space. And none suffered for the absence of amenities either. The ’59 Cadillac offered such seemingly “modern” features as power-operated windows, automatic headlight dimming , central door locking, power-actuated seats, and remote trunk release. It should go without saying that the Cadillac offered niceties like power  brakes, power steering and a Hydra-Matic automatic transmission.

Offering the power to haul all this luxury around was a mammoth 390 cubic inch overhead valve V-8 engine. With a zenith output of 325 horsepower at 4800 rpm, the engine rarely had to work hard in day-to-day traffic, but when called upon it could hustle the Cadillac up to 110 miles per hour.

Comfortable Cadillac–what else?

Handling in the sports car sense was defnitely not the model’s strong suit, but the rigid cross-braced X-frame and coil spring suspension made certain that the passengers rode in serene comfort. And the car was responsive both to throttle and to its rapid power steering.

Perhaps even by Fifties benchmarks,  the Cadillac was too garish for some. For the  Cadillac Series 1960‘s model year, GM stylists trimmed the fins, gave the car a tonier look, and removed the bullet-red turn signals. But as the car that spoke for Earl’s  whole career and for the exuberance of post-World War II America, the 1959 Cadillac had no equal.

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