DESIGNING A MOTORAMA CAR
By Robert Cumberford
Late in 1955, I was assigned temporarily to a GM styling "body studio" directed by Herb Kadau, who had no staff. I would be his junior stylist (my official title) and sketch artist. He was to transform the 1955 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham Motorama car into a formal town car suitable for attending the opera. There wasn't that much to do:
I just had to imagine a rear compartment roof, with the driver exposed to the elements to emphasize the class privileges of the people in back.
I pinned up twenty-five or thirty variants. Nothing fancy, no color renderings, just black pencil on plain paper. One day, GM design vice president Harley Earl himself came in alone. I had seen him once or twice in the year I'd been with GM, but this was my first working contact. Earl liked a folding fabric roof I had drawn, complete with landau bars. "Lou," he said - Earl called Kadau "Lou Kadoo," and no one dared correct him - "what's he thinking here?" The "he" in question was me. It was surreal. Earl would not suffer to speak to low-level people, nor should mere mortals address the great man directly. So Kadau turned and asked me. I explained, whereupon Herb/Lou turned back to Mr. Earl to repeat what I had just said.
I thought hinting at a convertible's crossbows would be elegant. Earl agreed, had us leave off landau irons, dictated a padded black leather cover, and that was that. A wonderful, middle European draftsman, Joe Hrabach, drew it up full-size, in the process teaching me more about drafting than I had learned in years of school, and I went back to the Chevrolet studio. That roof profile showed up later on millions of early-1960s GM cars. Motorama magic: dream car to everyman in five years.