Chapter 50
In 1953, General Motors Company LLC wheeled out the Corvette concept car at its Motorama auto show in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Staged by GM from 1949 to 1961, the Motoramas were miniature car shows geared to rev up consumers’ imaginations with exhibits of both current and concept cars it would rarely build.
But the Corvette was such a hit with the 1.4 million attendees that GM immediately began production of the $3,500 car. Conceived by GM’s legendary head designer Harley Earl, who had made his bones in the auto industry with his work on the Buick LeSabre, the two-seat sports car debuted with a red interior and a white, all-fiberglass body, along with an optional AM radio and heater.
To give the Corvette an air of a golden egg out of reach of the lumpen, GM marketed the car by invitation only to a select group of customers. Even with a marketing base feeling superior by virtue of having access to a desirable consumer good others didn’t, just a fraction of the 300 Corvettes GM built in 1953 were sold. Even after jettisoning the invite-only approach, 1954 sales still struggled. By the start of 1955, GM had built around 3,600 of the 10,000 Corvettes it had planned, with almost a third of those remaining unsold. The awful truth was that the car was slow as it was sleek, with a crippled tortoise of a 150-horsepower engine.
GM would have put the Corvette down the way Ford Motor Co. did the Edsel, except Ford had introduced the 1955 Thunderbird at the 1954 Detroit Auto Show.
Copyright 2017 General Motors LLC. Used with permission, GM Media Archive
The car might have stalled had it been called something as sawblade-on-metal sounding as Edsel. While 5,000 names were weighed (a catalog of labels including “Hep Cat,” “Beaver,” and “El Tigre”), Ford stylist Alden Giberson came up with “Thunderbird.” For his effort, he was paid $95 and a pair of pants from Saks Fifth Avenue. Sales soared as much as the Thunderbird of legend, with Ford receiving more than 3,500 orders in the first ten-day selling period. Before long, the rocket on wheels with power-operated seats and a 292-cubic-inch V-8 engine was ingratiated in popular culture: House of Worsted-Tex Inc. Corp. marketed outerwear themed around Thunderbird, and The Powercar Co. of Connecticut sold the Thunderbird Junior, a mechanically operated version of the car for kids.
The automotive gauntlet thrown, GM appointed Belgian-born, Russian-raised designer Zora Arkus-Duntov head engineer for Corvette. Installing a succession of ever-more-potent engines—a 195-horsepower engine on the 1955 Corvette, a 240-horsepower engine on the 1956 Corvette, and a 283-horsepower engine on the 1957 model—the Corvette began setting speed records on the racing circuit, eclipsing even the Thunderbird (which Ford scrapped in 2005 at age fifty), the 1.5-millionth Corvette came off the production line in 2009, in due course immortalized in the television show Route 66 and Prince’s classic “Little Red Corvette.”
Motoramas formed a bejeweled crown for GM, one embedded with gems of Corvettes and Firebirds. The shows were to automobiles what the Venice Biennial is to art.
Progressing from Industrialist Luncheons held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in the 1930s, where GM touted its latest cars, the Motoramas in their first two years were dubbed, respectively, Transpiration Unlimited and Mid-Century Motorama, and held at the Waldorf. Suspended from 1951 to 1952 because of the Korean conflict, the show started up again in 1953, when the “Motorama” name permanently adhered for once and all. The glamorous extravaganzas typically started in New York at the Waldorf, and moved onto several cities afterward, such as Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and were often choreographed by the brother and sister team of Richard and Edith Barstow, who had once staged Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circuses. (Richard also arranged the dance numbers in Judy Garland’s A Star is Born.) “The world is little, people are little, human life is little,” Willa Cather wrote in The Song of the Lark. “There is only one big thing—desire.” Desire was what GM was selling just as much as Buicks and Cadillacs, with crack-pipe dreams of cars that would never be, which, like Poseidon’s chariot, consumers might one day steer across seas of asphalt and concrete.
Cars that would never be, like the 1950 Mid-Century Motorama’s Cadillac Debutante, a $35,000 convertible upholstered in leopard skins sporting a 24-karat gold instrument panel. A Detroit furrier was hired to source the upholstery, which sheathed part of the front and rear seat backs, as well as the upper side panels, and the floor. Of the 187 leopard skins the furrier obtained in Somaliland, just 14 were deemed good enough for this particular Debutante. The exterior was painted Tawny Yellow Buff to match the “Wild Kingdom” interior, with a patina of minuscule moon-shaped fish scales, made from actual fish scales liquefied down to a pearly core.
Cars that would never be, like the 1953 Motorama’s Pontiac Parisienne. Looking like a car that Tiffany’s built, it was painted a magician’s-cloak black with recessed silver streaks thrusting forward on the hood like a seraph’s spears. Resting on front seats that were upholstered in “Roulette Pink” cowhide was a French poodle dyed powder-blue.
The Motoramas cost the company roughly $5 million each year to produce but were deemed “GM’s top salesman,” with 2.3 million attending the 1956 show alone and more than 10 million overall during its reign. The Motoramas were GM’s bling dynasty of exhibitions, a golden past the company yearns for when they see consumers today walking past their offerings like they were ignoring a panhandler.