EDSEL How Not To Sell A Car

 

I  am amazed people still consider Henry Ford the greatest auto maker of all time, just because he sold fifteen million Model "T"'s.  That was the same, legendary vehicle which made Time magazine’s list of the fifty worst cars of all times; “…a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day.”  But even that was topped by the unmitigated disaster that was the Ford Edsel.

The Edsel wasn’t just a car. It was an entire new line of cars, originally conceived in 1954, to compete with General Motor’s entire Cadillac division. The chief designer on the project was a young Canadian named Roy Brown (above). Years later Brown told "The New Yorker" magazine, “Our goal was to create a vehicle which would be unique…and yet somehow familiar.”

The design team took ‘front on’ photos of the 19 other cars on the road at the time and realized that from a few hundred feet away they were indistinguishable from one another. But clay models of Brown’s original grill work were so graceful and delicate the engineers questioned how much fresh air would reach the radiator and cool the engine.

So Brown created what he called the “Horsecollar” (officially known as “the impact ring”), front and center. It reminded one critic of “a vagina with teeth”. In fact, while the design still existed only in clay, a prankster taped fur in-between the front grill work which left it, according to Robin Jones, then a young Ford designer, looking like “…a hormonally disturbed cow after giving birth”. 

Kinder critics said it resembled “an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon”, or just “a toilet seat”.

Looking for the perfect name Ford hired one of the largest advertising companies in the world, Foote, Cone and Belding, (“Successful Advertising is Only a Foote Away”). They offered up 6,000 possible names (including the “Mongoose Civique” and the “Utopian Turtletop”). Growled one Ford executive, “We hired them to come up with a name. They came up with six thousand.” Finally, after months of searching in vain, they settled calling their new line of automobiles as “The Ford Edsel”.

Edsel Ford (above, left) was a civilized, cultured, talented and intelligent man who was also a skilled car maker and favorite son of old man Henry Ford (above, right). And suffice it to say that if Edsel hadn’t died of a heart attack from overwork in 1943 there would never have been a Ford automobile carrying his name because Edsel Ford knew too much about marketing to have ever allowed that. 

When Ford’s Public Relations chief, C. Gayle Warnock, was presented with the name "Edsel" he claims to have said, “We have just lost 200,000 in sales”.

They financed the Edsel with the infusion of cash they got by going public in 1957, and from the success of the new Thunderbird. But at the last minute they decided to start pinching pennies. Rather than establish a brand new production line, management chose to assemble Edsels on the same Kentucky production lines used to make Lincolns and Mercurys, and at the same time. 

The assembly line workers and plant management both saw the Edsel as an intrusion into their regular work schedules,  and the results were perfectly predictable. And the "mistakes" which slipped through the quality control were not helped by the advertising campaign.

Ford chose a mystery introduction for the Edsel. New cars were shipped wrapped in fabric, and the 1,160 brand new Edsel dealers were strictly instructed to keep the cars under wraps on their lots until “E” day, which was supposed to be Wednesday, 4  September 1957.

However, a used car dealer in Cleveland, Ohio had an unwrapped Edsel on display two days early. That got national press coverage. So much for the surprise

Meanwhile a $2 million advertising campaign ($14.5 million in 2007 dollars) began by showing only the hood ornament, or just blurry shots of speeding Edsels, and drawings of draped cars on transporters, always with the taunting tag lines, “The new Edsel is coming!” or "The New Edsel is on its way".

Finally, on Friday night, 13 September, during the premier on CBS of the “Edsel Show” - staring Bing Crosby....

...with guest stars Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope and the Four Preps...

...an announcer, spoke in warm, golden tones; “And now for the moment I'm sure you've all been looking forward to, a look at the newest member of the Ford family of fine cars ... the Edsel!" It was supposed to be the greatest advertising buildup since Moses came down off the mountain. 

But like Moses, it was all downhill from there - one stumble and slide after another.

The dealers' showrooms were full of people, but few customers. Ford had expected to sell 2 million Edsel the first year. They only sold half a million. What went wrong?

Stumble Number One was that between August of 1957 and February of 1958 American industrial output declined by 10%. During the same six months unemployment jumped by two million. Retail sales dropped 2% and so did take home pay. The recession was bad enough that it gave Democrats a majority in the House in 1958, and set up Kennedy’s win of the White House in 1960. In short, this was not the time to introduce a new line of expensive high end automobiles.

Stumble Number Two; there were a few small problems with the cars. The much ballyhooed "Vac-U Start" feature displayed a dangerous tendency to restart the car after you had turned the engine off and walked away. And the “Teletouch” push button transmission shifter, located in the center of the steering wheel, was so new and so secret that none of the dealers knew how to service it.

And then there was the famous hood ornament, featured in so many advertisements. When the big V8 engine was pulling the Edsel at over seventy miles an hour (which it easily could do) the hood ornament had a nasty tendency to come flying off and turn into shrapnel.

Stumble Number Three was that many Edsels left the factories with wrong or missing parts: wires had been incorrectly connected and an occasional transmission had been installed backwards. And many of those Edsels which did start prompted dissatisfied owners to claim that Edsel stood for “Every Day Something Else Leaks”. (Decades later, when Ford failed to respond quickly to the invasion of well made inexpensive Japanese cars, the name Ford was said to stand for “Found On Road, Dead”).

Stumble Number Four was that Ford had introduced the 1958 Edsel in September of 1957 instead of October, the standard practice at the time, so the Edsells were competing with other Ford products being sold at 1957 inventory closeout prices.

And then there was the advertising blitz; Stumble Number Five. As one observer noted, although customers had been primed to expect a “…plutonium-powered, pancake-making wonder car…” what they were being offered was a “…kind of homely, fuel thirsty and too expensive…” car." The American public simply didn't want this automobile. They didn't hate it.  They just didn't want it.

Overnight the Edsel went from wonder kid to village idiot. In 1958, while riding in a brand new Edsel, a  crowd in Peru pelted Vice President Richard Nixon with eggs. He would quip, “They were not attacking me. They were attacking the car.”

By 1961 on the Andy Griffith Show when Deputy Barney Fife bought a lemon of a used car, it simply had to be an Edsel convertible. 

The audience was laughing even before the steering wheel slowly projected itself into Barney’s face. The Edsel had become “…an agglomeration (sic) of everything the public had grown tired of…vulgar ostentation and superfluous (sic) size…”.

By November of 1959, after building 110,847 Edsels and losing $350 million ($2 and 1/2 billion in 2007 dollars), and even redesigning the "vagina with teeth" front grill,  Ford surrendered, and stopped production of the Edsel. And a legend was born.

Three years later Ford would introduce the Mustang, a car designed to fit what the customer wanted, rather than a car design looking for a customer, which was what the Edsel had been.

Today less than 6,000 Edsels survive. But until his death in 2013, Roy Brown, the designer of the “vagina with teeth”, insisted with a straight face, “The car is a complete success as far as I'm concerned." And that kind of thinking is what is wrong with Detroit, today.

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THE POPE OF NEWARK

I believe the foundation of the American economy and politics rests on contradictions. For example, it is legal for the most profitable industry in the world (oil) to skim off $ 4 billion in profit before taxes, but if an individual should protest this “depletion allowance” by refusing to pay for a $40 fill up, the police will rush to arrest them, guns drawn. The only real crime in America is to not stealing enough. 

Consider the rise and fall of Hugh Joseph Addonizio (above). When asked why, after twelve years as a respected congressman, he decided to run for mayor of Newark,  the short, bald, bullnecked blunt man they called “The Pope of New Jersey” explained, “There's no money in being a congressman, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark" Over two terms, from 1962 to 1969, Mayor Addonizio made more than a million dollars. But as usual with capitalists, that was still not enough.

At the end of February 1959, after Jewish mobster Abner Zwillman, was found hanging by the neck in his West Orange apartment - just after receiving a subpoena to testify before a grand jury -  a 60 year old Genovese crime family capo named Richie-”the-boot”- Boiardo (above) was given sole permission to plunder Newark, New Jersey. 

Richie (above) earned his moniker because he avoided wiretapping prosecutors by using public pay-phone booths. In Jersey parlance, Richie was always “in da boot”. It was a very profitable place for Richie to be.

During the late 1040's and early 1950's, Newark invested heavily in urban renewal, replacing thousands of substandard single family homes with 46 huge impersonal substandard apartment blocks. The construction of those buildings proved a gold mine for organized crime. 

These new white elephants were badly built, but the graft from their construction allowed Richie the Boot to build a "Transylvanian traditional" mansion and estate in Livingston, New Jersey. He adorned the gated entrance with a garish statue of himself astride a horse (above), towering over a row of busts of his children,  resembling, to my mind, clowns in an amusement park game ready to be shot with water pistols. And in a position of honor, at statue Richie's foot was the effigy of his eldest son Anthony, aka "Tony Boy".

Tony Boy (above) took over the family business just as a long planned Southside Sewer project was finally getting started. The primary contractor was Paul Rigo, who claimed he had founded his company after winning $65,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes. He pleaded with Richie "The Boot" to lower his required kickback to 5%, but Richie insisted, “You'll pay 10%, or I'll break both your legs.” Then Tony Boy offered a solution, 

Tony Boy set up a shell company called Kantor Supply. The subcontractors all paid their kickbacks with regular business checks. Kantor Supply would then issue invoices to match those payments. Rigo could use his construction company to launder that cash before distributing it to Richie, Tony Boy and “The Pope”, Mayor Addonizio. For this service, Rigo could keep 10% of everybody's kick, making a hell-of-a profit for himself.

There were just three problems with this gravy train express. First, there has never been honor among thieves. After all, they not only steal for a living they also steal out of habit. Secondly, Tony Boy was seeing a psychiatrist, and some of his soldiers had taken to calling him “nut case.” Another of Tony Boy's soldiers, Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo (above), even called him a “weasel”, and referred to “The Boot” as “the most treacherous fucker in the world”. And fourthly,  there was a real Kantor behind Kantor Supply. Plumber Irving Kantor took a 5% cut for running the shell company, but he was not a healthy man. And unhealthy men are prone to soul cleansing confessions. And lastly, in part because of all the graft, Newark was not a healthy city.

By 1965 Newark was half Italian and half African American, and burdened with an astronomical tax rate, thanks to all those kickbacks. The manufacturers in Newark, who had once paid middle class salaries, had moved south to find lower taxes and cheaper workers. Capitalism again. . The local unemployment rate was over 8%, and among young black men in Newark it was almost 40%. Ten percent of the city residents survived on welfare. Of the 136,000 apartments in the city, over 40,000 of which (mostly those (above)  built by Richie Boiardo ), were substandard or dilapidated. 

To make matters even worse, Mayor Addonizio had just announced a plan to replace several public housing blocks with a medical school, proving that in Newark “urban renewal” had become synonymous with “Negro removal”.   And finally, of the 1,400 officers in the police force, only 150 were African-American. This all came to a head about 9:40 pm on the evening of Wednesday 12 July, 1967

On that hot, humid night, two Newark Police Officers, John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, pulled over a taxi at the corner of 15th Avenue and South 9th Street. According to the officers, the cab had illegally passed them on the right side. According to the taxi's African-American driver, John Smith (above)  the police car was double parked. 

Half an hour later, when a crowd saw the bleeding driver dragged into the 4th Precinct station, it set off six days and nights of looting and burning that left 26 people dead, and $10 million in property damage. The root cause of the Newark Riot, said a Governor's commission, was a “pervasive feeling of corruption” in Newark. The most common phrase heard around town was “Everything in city hall is for sale.”

The Essex county prosecutor now empaneled a grand jury to investigate the new summer home Mayor Addonizio had just bought with a loan from Paul Rigo. But the minute that happened, Richie and Tony Boy were aware of it. One of Tony's soldiers, John “Big Pussy” Russo (above), bluntly warned Paul Rigo “Keep your mouth shut.” 

And when the mayor was served with a subpoena, Rigo found a note in his car which read, "This could have been a bomb. Keep your mouth shut." Not surprisingly Rigo lied to the grand jury. Then the IRS subpoenaed the books for Kantor Supply.

Caught in a three way squeeze between the mob,. the feds and the grand jury, Paul Rigo asked his lawyer to cut a deal with the feds. Almost immediately, Rigo received a phone call, telling him bluntly, “Keep the hell away from the federal building!”. When he realized there must be a leak in the prosecutor's office, Paul Rigo was on the next plane for Acapulco.

From Mexico Paul Rigo called a high powered lawyer in Washington, D.C.. and through him revealed to the feds that he had a diary, recording in code every sub contractor who paid kickbacks, when and how much, and every mobster and politician who received cash, with dates, and amounts. Addonizio (above) was dragged back to the U.S. and given a seat in front of the grand jury. This time, “The Pope” took the fifth amendment. It didn't help. Addonizio was indicted along with 11 others, for 65 counts of money laundering, extortion, tax fraud, and perjury. 

Even that didn't stop him from mounting a campaign for a third term as mayor. He would eventually lose the job, but even while on trial Hugh Addonizio won 45% of the vote.  The over taxes citizens of Newark preferred they devil they knew because they had been trained to hate blacks rather than the mobsters who were stealing from them.

The trial began with Irving Kantor, testifying from his hospital bed. The dying man recounted his phone conversations with Richie “the Boot”, and how he handed the cash over to Paul Rigo, for distribution.. Rigo testified for two straight weeks, detailing many late night meetings in empty offices. It was during one of those meetings that Rigo told Addonizio, "I don't know why in the world you ever left Washington and a nice job in Congress to come up here in this mess.” Addonizio (above) had replied, “Simple. There's no money in Washington, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark.”

The case was handed to the jury just before 5:00 pm, 22 July, 1970. They were back by midnight. Their verdict was guilty for all the defendants on all counts. Two months later the judge sentenced Addonizio and Richie the Boot to ten years in prison and $25,000 each in fines, each.

It wasn't a bad outcome for the mayor, really. Convicted of “literally delivering Newark into the hands of organized crime”, and for the bargain basement price of a million dollars, Hugh Addonizio could almost pay the fine out of petty cash. It was the tax penalties that took most of his money,  And on the bright side, after just five years,  Addonizo  was released on parole. In "retirement" he bred and raced homing pigeons. Not the sport of kings, but evidently the sport of Popes. 

Anthony “Tony Boy” Boiardo also died of a heart attack, on 20 April, 1978. Just a year later, the big mouth, Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo, was found in his bathrobe and slippers, with three bullets in his brain. He'd been killed by three members of his own crew, who shot him and then stole cash and property from his house. A day after his body was discovered and removed, the assassins broke back into the murder scene, and returned the property. But they kept the money.

In February of 1981, The Pope of Newark,  Hugh Joseph Addonizio, died at 67 years old,  On the day of his funeral, all the flags in Newark were lowered to half staff in his honor.  But they didn't put is name on the family memorial. 

The longest living of the conspirators was Richie-”the-boot”- Boiardo (above) . After Tony Boy's death he rarely left his Livingston estate, tending his tomatoes under a sign that read “The Godfather's Garden”, as Richie was convinced he had been the role model for the infamous literary and movie gangster, Vito Corleone. The Boot suffered a heart attack and died in November of 1984, at the age of 95 -  just another crook who had not stolen enough to become a hero of capitalism.  Crime, you see, does not pay. But politics does, and well enough to make it's crimes legal.

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