Another Fine Mess Read online

  And of course there were Model Ts wherever you looked. It was quite emotional to set eyes on the actual fifteen millionth T, the one I’d seen grey-haired Henry driving out of the factory. And quite surprising to find out that when you weren’t looking at it in black and white, it was dark green. More compelling still were the fleet of Ts that puttered up and down the Greenfield avenues, each with a man in a derby hat and a waistcoat behind the wheel, and a couple of fleshy visitors in the back. The smooth assurance of their progress, relative as it was, seemed an affront to my travails. At least until I asked a guy in a straw boater about the maintenance regime, and he rolled his eyes. ‘Three full-time mechanics working on thirteen cars. Can you believe that?’ I told him I could. It struck me, a thousand miles and five breakdowns too late, that if a vehicle struggles to complete a fairground joyride, you probably shouldn’t try to drive it across an immense continent.

  The museum proper paid lavish tribute to the motor vehicle’s starring role in the twentieth century. I went aboard the actual Alabama bus in which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955, thereby catalysing the civil-rights movement. I gawped at the very Lincoln that JFK was shot in, and the fixed roof someone had subsequently bolted on to it (‘Better late than never,’ I whispered to Marshall). I spent twenty minutes on an arcade-style Model T driving simulator, waiting in vain for my mastery to be rewarded with wild acclaim.

  Henry’s Universal Car was precisely thus rewarded, by a sprawling, multi-media celebration introduced with a hall-of-fame-style plaque:

  The Model T Ford transformed the world, reordering the nature of cities and countryside, work and leisure by demonstrating the broad appeal of automobility. Henry Ford adopted and extended assembly-line techniques to reduce the car’s price by nearly 60 per cent while improving its quality. The Model T became a universal symbol of the capacity of modern engineering to transform luxuries into mass commodities.

  I read these heady words and understood why I was surrounded by old people. That final sentence paid tribute to Henry and his Greenfield Village posse, and recaptured the boundless, revolutionary excitements of their age. What a time to be alive! Life-changing domestic upgrades that were beyond the average American’s wildest dreams at the start of the T era had become commonplace at its conclusion. By 1930, 70 per cent of US homes were electrified; more than half had a radio; 40 per cent had a telephone; 45 per cent a car. There were a million domestic refrigerators. For fifty years, the big-ticket innovations just kept coming, all breathlessly hailed. I was especially taken by a poster advertising a demonstration of Edison’s phonograph at Friedrich’s Music Hall in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in 1878: ‘It Will Talk, Sing, Laugh, Crow, Whistle and REPEAT CORNET SOLOS.’

  Being both quite young and extremely capable, Peter Nikolajevs offered some hope for America’s future. And, much more importantly, for mine: on the short drive to his trim little suburban house in Dearborn, the T’s engine knock amplified horribly, a Gatling gun firing empty tin cans. Peter was the latest white knight I had summoned through the MTFCA, a diagnostic-equipment programmer at Ford with a cheery wife, two small kids and a lovely red Model T, shoehorned into a compact garage amongst much brightly coloured juvenilia. We shook hands, rearranged things and heaved the T inside. ‘Take the hood off and pull up the floorboards,’ ordered Peter, and so it began again.

  In the following hours I held a torch while Peter removed the cylinder head from above, and the oil pan from below. While he worked, Peter told me that he’d fallen for Ts at the age of eight, when he encountered one on display at a local fair. ‘If you can start it, you can have it,’ the owner had smirked as young Peter fruitlessly heaved the crank handle. But the die was cast, and with a very Edisonian sense of resolve – ‘Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits,’ history’s most prolific inventor once said – Peter spent the following five years doing odd jobs and collecting can deposits, saving up $2,500 and buying his first T.

  ‘Well, it’s nice at least to have a simple answer.’

  Night had long since fallen when Peter emerged from beneath the car with a piston connecting rod in his oily hands. Even I could see what was wrong: the layer of shiny, soft metal that covered its contact surface had been almost completely chipped off. I had intended to furnish you with a full history of the tin-based alloy known as Babbitt, but given the endless grief its uselessness would cause me, I’m afraid I can’t face it. Take that, long-dead Isaac Babbitt of Taunton, Massachusetts.

  Peter measured the rod with great care, while I dredged out the chunks, slivers and snow-dome flakes of Babbitt that had dispersed themselves around the oil pan and elsewhere. A replacement rod was ordered; it would take two days to arrive. Then, having filthied one family’s sink, I took an Uber back to Grosse Pointe and decorated another’s shower with tin-based fairy dust.

  I went full Ford in the next forty-eight hours. The family still dominates Detroit: beyond all the corporate headquarters and the River Rouge plant, where 6,000 workers now build F150s, their name is writ large across the umpteen schools and medical centres they’ve endowed over the years, and the city’s NFL stadium, whose incumbent team, the Detroit Lions, they own. First up was Henry’s pile, Fair Lane, a squat, stolid manor house he built in a quiet corner of Dearborn, on the banks of the Rouge River, in 1915. My Uber driver took me there through the centre of Dearborn, which in fitting tribute to Orville Hubbard, its fanatically racist former mayor, is now home to the largest Muslim community in the US. The most obvious city-wide legacy is the shawarma, a keenly priced and dependably delicious kebaby wrap thing that has established itself as the favoured lunch option across Detroit. I had several. Somewhere in the town stands a billboard which states, in Arabic, ‘Donald Trump can’t read this, but it scares him anyway.’

  My driver – an Iraqi, as it happens – dropped me off by an empty visitors’ car park. Under cadaverous skies, Fair Lane looked dreary and grim with its dumpy grey towers and mean windows, more like a squashed Colditz than the home of the world’s richest man. As simple souls, Henry and Clara would gladly have stayed on at their modest downtown mansion, but the public hysteria unleashed by the $5 day made that untenable: for a weary year, the Fords had to run a doorstep gauntlet of fans and journalists. Fair Lane, dour and forbidding, hardly looked like a labour of love. I can’t imagine what persuaded Henry to site his home on the banks of the river his granddad had frozen to death in.

  Anyway, the younger Fords waited five whole years after Clara’s demise before donating the place to the University of Michigan, and I wasn’t upset to find the house closed. Henry’s true passion expressed itself in a mighty riverside outbuilding: how convenient to have Thomas Edison on hand to design your own hydroelectric plant, and how typical that it put out enough juice to power the entire city of Dearborn.

  What a contrast with his son Edsel’s suave, high-tech home, built about as far away from his dad’s place as he could get: 24 miles east on the shores of Lake St Clair, or just a short hop from Marshall’s house in the passenger seat of his German au pair’s Jeep. Designed to suggest a homely cluster of Cotswold cottages, the innards of Ford House combined aesthetic sensitivity, period innovation and gigantic wealth in a manner that caused our tour group to glide through the rooms on a rolling coo of approval.

  A formative trip to Europe endowed the young Edsel with a taste for furniture that was much older than anything his homeland had to offer, design that was much newer, and art that was much better. He came back with a lot of Chesterfield sideboards and Elizabethan panelling, and the entire main staircase from Lyveden House in Northamptonshire, apparently in settlement of a gambling debt. On the walls were copies of the Renoirs and Van Goghs that today sit in the Detroit Institute of Arts, some worth over $100 million a pop. There was a fabulous art deco study, all circular wood and uplighters. And so many innovative comforts and luxuries: a refrigerated fresh-flower room, a centralised vacuum system and an extraordinary network of hidden
hoses connected to an organ concealed in a cupboard, allowing the imprisoned musician’s output to be piped around the home. How curious that all this extravagance was paid for by the utilitarian Model T.

  And in that contrast, we find the root of Henry’s famously difficult relationship with his only child. When the young Edsel cut off a fingertip in the family’s home workshop, his father was infuriated by his clumsiness. After giving Edsel a seat on the board, he took every opportunity to undermine him: discovering his son was responsible for a new office block taking shape in the corner of Highland Park, Henry ordered construction to be halted at once, and let the half-built hulk stand for years as a lesson. He made Edsel president of the company, gave him his own marque to play with (Lincoln) and a vast salary, then resented him for not having worked for any of it. Edsel, in turn, seems to have delighted in winding up his stern and abstemious father. He smoked, and liked a drink. (Once, when Edsel was abroad, Henry sent a team of heavies round to smash up his liquor cabinet.) He commuted to work in a speedboat fitted with a 600hp aeroplane engine, and bought the first MG imported to the US. In 1935 he was voted the best dressed man in America, beating Fred Astaire. He commissioned Diego Rivera, a Mexican communist, to paint twenty-seven epic murals of workers at the River Rouge plant. He won a staircase at cards.

  The battle between father and son was the battle between form and function, horny-handed hard work and pencil-chewing contemplation, old and new. A plaque in junior’s honour highlighted the void: ‘Edsel Bryant Ford – automobile stylist, patron of the arts, benefactor of polar exploration, philanthropist, gentleman.’ He was the highfalutin liberal elitist to Henry’s plain-spoken Midwestern everyman. No one ever saw Henry with a book, and his favourite song was a folk tune entitled ‘Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder?’ After Henry bought the schoolhouse that he decided Mary and her little lamb had attended, he had a plaque installed hailing ‘Sarah Josepha Hale, whose genius completed the poem in its present form’. When a group of art dealers tried to interest the world’s wealthiest man in some old masters, he thumbed through their illustrated brochures with great delight, then was nonplussed when they tried to close a sale: ‘But why would I buy an original when I can look at it in these catalogues you’ve given me?’

  Henry was a Model T made flesh; Edsel’s defining venture was the first Lincoln Continental, a streamlined, modernist coupé, shaped like a teardrop and powered by a V12 engine. The Continental was gorgeous – it’s one of only eight cars deemed ‘automotive works of art’ by New York’s Museum of Modern Art – but it was also the exact sort of high-end, small-volume ponce-mobile that Henry despised. At $3,000, the first Continental cost ten times as much as the last T, and sold a lot less than ten times fewer: in the first full year of production, 1940, just 400 were shifted.

  Edsel died of stomach cancer three years later, at the age of forty-nine; Henry would outlast him by four years. The old man had the bitter last laugh beyond the grave: launched in 1958, the Ford Edsel was received so disastrously that the mid-range saloon remains a byword for commercial failure. Only 118,000 Edsels were sold, leaving the firm with a $350 million loss on the project. Some blamed the marketing; some the car’s poor reliability. But there’s a much simpler lesson to be learned: if you want a car to sell, don’t model its front end on a front bottom.

  And, one sullen, dank afternoon, I went back to where it all began.

  The Piquette plant’s continued existence is almost as astounding as its history. Viewed from the puddled street, that careworn, three-floor brick facade looked more like some artfully dilapidated craft brewery than the birthplace of the automotive age. Piquette Avenue made a far more convincing deathplace: the little building where the first Model Ts were made is a lonely survivor amongst the ruins of post-industrial Detroit, a wasteland of graffiti-flanked hulks and lumpy undergrowth that stretched as far as the eye could see. Its sole active rivals were a pair of old warehouses opposite, one repurposed as the Abundant Faith Cathedral, the other as the Soul Saving Church. Parked between them, its kerbside wheels deep in brown water, sat a scabby Honda with a PSALM37 licence plate.

  America isn’t exactly embarrassed with historic sites of global import, so I was rather taken aback to discover that the Piquette plant had lain forlorn and forgotten until 2000, when a group of Model T enthusiasts acquired the building. It was only recognised by the heritage authorities in 2002. The ground floor is let to an industrial laundry, and the museum on the upper storeys was created by the amateur volunteers who still run it. They could clearly do with some funding. When another of those micro storms turned day to night and shattered the heavens, rain blew in around the old sash windows and speckled the factory planks.

  Between 1903 and 1908, Ford produced seven models of scattergun appeal, from the snobby $2,500 Model K phaeton to the cheap and cheerful $500 two-seater Model N. The Model N notched 7,000 sales: a record figure for the era, and one that sealed Henry’s determination to target the mass market, as well as banking the funds for some serious related research and development. Late in 1906, he walled off a 15-foot-square corner of Piquette’s narrow top floor, and put in a single door with a big padlock. Only seven chosen men – fourteen-year-old Edsel amongst them – would be given the key. The dominant fixtures within were an old rocking chair that had belonged to Henry’s mother and a blackboard. He was planning to do something that had never been done, and to do it from scratch in a year – a schedule that necessitated free thinkers who weren’t afraid to defy accepted wisdom. College degrees, which he felt restricted the imagination, were unwelcome. Trust and loyalty, though, were essential, and though Henry was not an easy man to work for, these qualities would in due course be stupendously rewarded.

  I found Ford’s hallowed ‘secret room’ in the early stages of a reconstruction project, which together with the clattering horizontal rain made it tricky to tap into the vibe. So too did the curator who followed me around, though I could hardly blame him. I was one of four visitors, and by far the most troublesome: I just couldn’t stop touching stuff. It was so difficult to treat all these Model Ts with due reverence when I’d been more or less living in one, strewing it with crisps and cans and farting deep into its ancient upholstery.

  ‘Sir, we do ask visitors not to …’

  ‘Sorry!’

  Every time I thought I’d reined myself in I’d have a relapse, and a good prod. Hmm – I wonder if this exploded Model T engine and gearbox has that same funny bi—

  ‘Sir, we do ask …’

  ‘Sorry!’

  Wow, a 1924 Touring just like mi—

  ‘Sir …’

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘Now, let’s see: “1927 Ford Model T Tudor Sedan, owner: Peter Nikolajevs.” Hey – that’s Pe—’

  ‘Sir …’

  ‘Sorry!’

  Anyway, the young improvisers Ford picked to bring his dream to life, behind that padlocked door up in the Piquette eaves, were all well known to him. The museum saluted them in a series of information boards, but I’m going for jazz-combo introductions (with apologies to Henry, who hated jazz with a depthless passion). On flow charts: Peter Martin, a Canadian who had been in full-time industrial employment since the age of twelve, and was the fifth person Henry ever gave a job to. He’d been pencilled in as production manager. On spreadsheets: James Couzens, son of a Canadian soapmaker, who spent seven years checking railroad freight cars, then blagged a clerical job with a coal dealer who happened to be one of Ford’s major investors. Couzens was Henry’s business manager, and would have an impressively broad remit spanning sales, advertising, purchasing, shipping and accounts. On the lathe: Charles Sorensen, a Dane who joined Ford in 1905 as a twenty-four-year-old pattern maker, and wowed Henry with his talent for translating half-formed engineering ideas into actual metal parts. On blueprints: József Galamb, a hotshot Hungarian mechanical engineer who had been in the US for less than two years when Ford hired him at the end of 1905, and still spoke very p
atchy English. And on the fuse box: our old friend Spider Huff, a Ford employee since the age of sixteen, and a mercurial volt wizard. Hit it, boys!

  You could say that Henry Ford was blessed with an unusually good eye for talent – and you should, because it’s true. Yet it still seems remarkable, if not astonishing, that his small, young team not only rose to the challenge of designing a truly universal car, but then mustered the communal wherewithal to mastermind its production, marketing and distribution on a scale beyond imagination. That they did so is a testament to the all-round, commonplace brilliance that was miraculously generated in turn-of-the-century Middle America, as celebrated at Greenfield Village. It’s also worth noting that not one of Henry’s team, with the possible exception of the enigmatic Spider, was born in the United States.

  Henry’s vision for the Model T was constructed around material lightness. A light car could cope better with country mud, and by needing a smaller engine would also be cheaper to produce. After examining some surprisingly unbent components from a wrecked French racing car he developed a fascination with vanadium steel, which was three times stronger than other steel alloys and could thus be used far more sparingly. But no one in the US had even dabbled with vanadium, whose production process demanded temperatures way higher than any domestic foundry had achieved. When his team suggested hiring a metallurgical engineer to tackle this dilemma, Henry unleashed his trademark scorn for graduate specialists. ‘Make an expert of Wandersee!’ he shouted, to everyone’s alarm: John Wandersee was a dogsbody mechanic who had started his career with Ford sweeping the factory floor. But Henry knew. He always did. Wandersee dutifully tracked down a small foundry in Ohio, accrued the necessary skills and within months was supervising production of high-grade vanadium.