Bill Mitchell's design vision shaped 5 decades of GM vehicles

Bill Mitchell was just 24 when General Motors design boss Harley Earl made him Cadillac chief designer. The first car done under Mitchell's leadership was the trend-setting 1938 Sixty Special; next he knocked it out of the park again with his bold and beautiful 1941 Cadillac.

Then the 1948 Cadillac sprang tail fins on an unsuspecting automotive world. Earl and Mitchell, inspired by the shape of the graceful P-38 fighter plane, sculpted the car's rear fenders to resemble the P-38, complete with gentle bumps at the tips representing the plane's tail. But conservative buyers didn't appreciate the fins at first. So Cadillac General Manager Jack Gordon had Mitchell working on the 1951 model with instructions to shave down the fins.

"Cadillac chief engineer Ed Cole and I didn't share Jack's conservatism, so we played a little trick on him," Mitchell related later. "Each day we would raise the fin opposite the one we were supposed to be working on, so it would look like we were lowering the other one. The result was that the '51 ended up with higher and more prominent fins than the '48-'50. I later confided to Gordon what we had done, and he got a chuckle out of it, because by that time the fins had really caught the public's eye. But he'd have raised hell if he'd caught on at the time."

Difficult genius

Few who knew Mitchell are likely to forget him. His presence was at once energizing and intimidating. Not a tall man like Earl, Mitchell nevertheless filled a room with an aura of command and confidence. But along with his genius came a difficult personality. On the job, he was tough, demanding, vain and profane, ruling his fiefdom with fear and intimidation. Away from the job, he was a flamboyant skirt-chaser who often drank to excess. Yet he knew what buyers wanted. And he knew how to motivate and inspire his people to bring out their best.

The son of a car dealer and a natural car fanatic, Mitchell was born in Cleveland in 1912 and grew up in Greenville, Pa., and New York City. After studying at the Art Students League of New York and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he took a job in New York as an illustrator and layout specialist for the Barron Collier advertising agency. There, he befriended the three Collier brothers -- Miles, Sam and Barron Jr. -- who founded the Automobile Racing Club of America, predecessor of today's Sports Car Club of America. Soon their racing clubhouse was decorated with Mitchell's race-car sketches and drawings.

When a Detroit industrialist saw them there, he suggested that Mitchell send a portfolio to Earl at GM. Mitchell did, and Earl liked what he saw. The young designer was hired in 1935 to work on the 1937 Cadillacs and LaSalles.

Through the fabulous '50s and sexy '60s, at the forefront of the mysterious art of auto design, where every decision has profound influence on the financial welfare of major corporations and their employees, Mitchell was arguably the most successful, productive and widely imitated leader. While he lavished attention on Cadillac and took excellent care of Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick, he had a special place in his heart for Chevrolet, from his beloved Corvettes down to the brand's most affordable cars.

Remarkable Chevys

From December 1958, when he succeeded Earl as design boss, to his 1977 retirement, he presided over the appearance of some 72 million cars and a few million trucks -- a great many of them remarkable Chevrolets of all types and sizes.

The first thing Mitchell did after taking the top job was have his studios tone down the flamboyantly finned 1959s for the 1960 model year, and most will agree that the '60 Chevys were the more appealing execution of the same basic shape. Then he had the studios set to work on less flashy, fin-free (except for Cadillacs) designs across the board for 1961.

The cleanly styled compact Chevy II debuted for 1962, followed by the stunning '63 Corvette Stingray, the handsome '64 Chevelle and both a sporty Corvair remake (some called it a poor man's Corvette) and beautifully sleek, new full-sized Chevys for 1965. The first Ford Mustang-fighter 1967 Camaro drew accolades and sales, while 1968 ushered in an attractive new Chevy II and the radically restyled third-generation "Coke-bottle" Corvette.

New for 1970 were the brilliant second-generation Camaro and the elegant Monte Carlo "personal luxury" coupe, and for 1971 the Vega subcompact (bad car, great small-car design). And the federal-bumper GM cars mandated for '73 were mostly better than rivals.

Mitchell complained that the growing burden of federal crash regulations and relentless pressure to downsize were making customer-pleasing designs increasingly tough. Yet two of the sharpest mid-1970s cars on the road were the Ferrari-inspired Monza coupe and an attractive Nova that debuted for 1975.

Hot sellers

Not long before Mitchell's 1977 retirement came one of his finest achievements: substantially downsized "full-sized" cars for all five divisions. All were excellent and solid sellers, but the handsomely proportioned '77 Chevy Impalas and Caprices were arguably the best. The downsized "mid-sized" Malibus and Monte Carlos that followed for 1978 were also very well accepted. And GM's first fuel-efficient front-drive X-car compacts for 1980 were nicely styled and packaged and hugely popular at first, especially the Chevrolet Citation versions.

Mitchell said his greatest frustration in 42 years of auto design was putting up with managers, salespeople, marketers, financial people, engineers and product planners who thought they were designers: "I wouldn't think of trying to tell them how to write an ad or build a transmission or organize a production line, because I'm not trained or experienced in those fields. For the same reason, I think they should keep their noses out of my business.

"Designing a car by committee is like 10 guys doing a painting," he continued. "I can show you every good-looking car that was done without the committee, usually so damned fast they didn't have time to get their fingers in it, and I can show you cars that were hurt by committees. Every time you see one that looks like five different people did it, figure it out."