Chapter 58
“[C]ars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals,” wrote the French semiotician Roland Barthes. “I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed . . . by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” When Lee Iacocca of the Ford Motor Co. introduced the Mustang to the world at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, it was as if a Merlin of motoring had waved his wand and produced out of an ether of gas and steel a two-seater sports car with an incantation that sounded like the growl of its V-8 engine.
The debut of the vehicle at the fair, with its long hood and short rear deck, touted as “the car that dreams are made of,” was of course more planning than providence. Iacocca, the vice-president and general manager of the Ford Division, had been instrumental in designing the Lincoln Continental Mark III and the Ford Escort and in bringing the Mercury brand back from the dead in the late 1960s, with the Cougar and Marquis models. But the Mustang would define him in a way Noah Webster couldn’t have improved on.
Handed $45 million out of the $75 million he requested to develop a “workingman’s Thunderbird” by a Henry Ford II still skittish after hemorrhaging a quarter of a billion dollars on the doomed, departed Edsel, Iacocca broke the speed limit in bringing the car from paper to production in roughly eighteen months. Borrowing popular features from competitors, like Chevrolet’s Corvair Monza bucket seat and floor shift interiors, he settled on “Mustang” instead of the favored “Torino,” the Italian name for the city of Turin, which shared a linguistic pedigree with the Fiat and Alfa Romeo brands that were headquartered in the northern Italian cultural center. When the moniker lost its allure after it was pointed out that Henry Ford II was dallying with an Italian divorcee, the chief alternative, “Cougar,” was re-examined, along with other animal appellations such as “Bronco,” “Puma,” “Cheetah,” and, of course, “Mustang,” the eventual victor.
Ford Motor Company
Iacocca still needed to ensure the Mustang would never be spoken in the same breath as the Edsel, which cost Ford $250 million to $350 million overall and became an enduring synonym for “flop” the way Titanic did for “disasters” and “hubris.” With the upcoming world’s fair in New York projected to draw 70 million (an attendance figure not actually reached until Expo 2010 in Shanghai), Iacocca had decided early on to unveil the car that would weigh less than 2,500 pounds and retail for under $2,500 at the Ford Pavilion with a speech that discoursed on the developing market of the baby boom driver. The public relations activation dovetailed with the Mustang’s appearances on the covers of Newsweek and Time magazines.
But in many ways those promotions ran a distant second to the marketing reach of the pavilion itself. Visitors to the building (some estimates put the total figure at close to 15 million) rode an escalator (an invention famously debuted at Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1900 by Otis Elevator Co.) into the Disney-designed Magic Skyway pavilion (one of four WED Enterprises conceived for the fair, including Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for the State of Illinois, Progressland for General Electric Co., and “It’s a Small World” for PepsiCo Inc.) past a Mustang on a raised platform. Close to the ride queue was a Disney-fashioned “animated orchestra,” constructed of Ford automobile parts.
Once they’d ascended the escalator, 4,000 guests per hour could climb inside any of 160 Ford convertibles, a fleet that included a dozen gleaming Mustangs, set on a conveyor belt. (Ford waxed and polished every car between each ride-through and replaced the interiors every month.) Receiving what was essentially a test drive, they tuned their car’s radio to any of four languages to narrate their upcoming experience, which would be a journey, as Henry Ford II put it in his sound bite for the experience, “a dark and distant yesterday to a bright and promising tomorrow.” For the next twelve minutes, the riders were pulled slowly along a conveyor belt where they heard and watched the animatronic-filled story of man’s progress from T. rex to the Thunderbird, as it were.
Officially available to consumers four days after its debut at the world’s fair, the Mustang sold more than 22,000 units its opening weekend and more than 100,000 in its abbreviated first year. Since then, the car has appeared in films and on TV shows more than 3,300 times in the past fifty years, including an appearance in 1964’s Goldfinger. In 1999, on the Mustang’s 35th anniversary, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the original model. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of its debut at the New York World’s Fair, more than nine million Mustangs had been sold.