ABSTRACT
One day in the early 1930s Harlow Curtice, the new general manager of General Motors' Buick Division, ventured to the third floor of the corporation's headquarters in Detroit, where the Art and Color Section was located. This was the corporate “beauty parlor,” as some of Detroit's hard-boiled, no-nonsense automotive men referred to it, where the “pretty-picture boys” dressed up the automobiles that came off the engineers' drawing boards. The section was headed by a California transplant named Harley Earl, a style-conscious man given to wearing white-linen suits and purple shirts. But he was also a huge, powerful man who could curse, drink, and womanize with the best of the industry's engineers and production men. And he was determined to wrest the power to design cars away from them.
