Thinking Small (51 page)

Nordhoff, though far from perfect, gave the workers big salaries and benefits, policies that spread to become standard in new West German industries. It wasn’t really all that different from what Ford had done in America back in 1914, except Nordhoff had the advantage of hindsight. According to that same article in
Der Spiegel,
his workers hadn’t had a single day of strike. Somehow Nordhoff had made the factory feel like a home, a family, a place
where the people were taken care of and well fed. It came with all the warmth and drama and discomfort that any family knows, but also with the loyalty.
The car is our castle,
people in Wolfsburg liked to say.

A big part of Nordhoff’s “reign,” and of this familial feeling that developed with respect to the factory and the town, had to do with the cultural support he gave. He commissioned churches to be built by the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, a multipurpose exhibition space called the Stadthalle to be used for music and entertainment, and the Cultural Center located in the middle of town, equipped with a public library, an outdoor terrace, and
numerous rooms where painting, drawing, dance, and other cultural programs were set up for the young. And then there was the music. In 1951, in a rather wild but brilliant move, Nordhoff convinced the famous Prussian conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler to bring his Berlin Philharmonie to the Volkswagen factory. (Imagine the New York Philharmonic packing up their instruments and going to play inside a factory in Detroit!) The concert was actually held in one of the main factory
halls, and it was for the Volkswagen employees only. Most of them came there directly from their shifts. Furtwängler himself had been quite skeptical at first about playing in a factory, but the response, and the attention he and the orchestra received, left him
in awe. The musician Johnny Cash once said that the crowd at Folsom Prison was the best crowd he had ever played for. Not that the workers and the prisoners are in any way comparable, but perhaps
the attention and gratitude they gave to the performers was similar, a crowd more focused and appreciative than a typical audience, one for which such shows were easily accessible, would have been. It must have felt rather mystical to hear that music filling the halls of the Volkswagen plant. The orchestra was deeply moved by the experience too; they came back every year for the next ten years.

Because of all the success, Wolfsburg was often referred to as a “gold rush town.” Certainly Heinrich knew he had a lot to be grateful for, and yet he still wasn’t satisfied. One very big piece of the puzzle was missing, and Nordhoff couldn’t stop thinking about that one piece: the United States. For both economic and personal reasons, the United States was the place Nordhoff and the Volkswagen company needed most. But it was also the country
that seemed to want the least to do with them.

The Volkswagen was undoubtedly a German car. And yet it was also an international car, and in a way, some of its ancestors
(and its diverse origins) were American. The United States had been the model for designing the car, the factory, and the town. And now Wolfsburg was living “the American dream”—it had gone from rags to riches, both literally and metaphorically. But the United States was still playing hard to get when it came
to embracing and buying the car itself. In 1953, even though Wolfsburg was booming, Volkswagen sold only 2,100 cars in the States, and just getting that many sold had been an uphill battle. All the innovations Nordhoff still wanted to implement at the factory would require machines that were made in America. The best way to do that was with dollars, and the best way to get dollars was to sell cars to America, but that just wasn’t happening.

It was a problem that Nordhoff had already been working on for many years. In fact, not long after he’d arrived on the job, he’d met the Bug-loving Ben Pon and, learning how much Pon had done for exports, he’d asked if Pon would try his luck selling the car to the United States. And so, on January 17, 1949, Pon and the little car had taken the long transatlantic journey, traveling together aboard the MS
Westerdam.

But in America, Pon’s luck simply hadn’t held. Even though a friend of his had arranged a press conference upon their arrival, and although Pon had high hopes, he soon found that the spirit washing over the car in Germany had certainly not reached U.S. shores. People in America still thought of it as “Hitler’s car.” “We got a lot of publicity,”
⁹
Pon said later, “all of it bad.”

And things had only gotten worse from there. Every dealer Pon encountered rejected it. Not a single American car dealership was willing to take it on. In one story he would tell, Pon drove from New York City to Massachusetts in a snowstorm to see a dealer, and the man wouldn’t even come outside once he’d looked out the window and seen the car!

Pon had a limited budget on the trip, and since he’d made no sales, he eventually had to sell the car itself, and for well below market price. “I had a big bill at the Roosevelt Hotel,”
¹⁰
he said, “and I couldn’t meet it. So, in desperation, I sold the car and all
the spare parts I had brought with me to
a New York imported-car dealer for eight hundred dollars, just to pay that hotel bill.”

When he returned to Germany—where the car was already being seen in a very different light—Pon had a hard time convincing Nordhoff that things had gone so badly for him in the States. Nordhoff decided he had to see for himself, so he too had flown over to America in 1949. And he too had found it obvious that Americans did not want his car. One customs official had even laughed at the pictures Nordhoff showed him of the VW
¹¹
: “You want to sell that car here?” he’d asked. “Good luck.”

As the world had entered the 1950s, the chances of selling the VW in America continued to look grim. Aside from the fact that it came from Germany, in American eyes, the car had another problem. As Ford historian Douglas Brinkley has written: “The VW didn’t look anything like anything—animal, vegetable, or automobile
¹²
—ever seen in
America.” People wanted big cars because the automobile had become a sign of upward mobility: the bigger, the better, the higher your class. Drivers wanted a big white Buick or a color-coordinated pink-and-ivory Olds. They wanted elongated roofs and tailfins and a wider trunk; they wanted a smooth ride, a big upper-class tent that shielded them from sound. They wanted names like Thunderbird, Corvette, and Starlite, cars that long-legged American cowboys could stretch out in.
They wanted an automobile with a team of horses up front. Henry Ford had already given the people mobility. Now they wanted their mobility in a larger-than-life package.

Or did they?

Soon it would become obvious that there was a section of America that was hungry for something else. Once again, the little Volkswagen was on the verge of getting caught up in a larger cultural and economic wave of change. And yet again, it would become a symbol of that new world still waiting to emerge.

George Lois
was hanging out a window with an advertisement for matzo in his hand. Goodman’s Matzo, a brand of the crackerlike unleavened bread used for the Jewish Passover, was a new client
of DDB’s, and George was on the account. He loved the ad he’d come up with: a white sheet of paper with a giant matzo filling the page and the words “Kosher for Passover” hand-lettered in Hebrew underneath. Unfortunately, Mr. Goodman wasn’t as thrilled about the ad as George was, and he rejected it at the account meeting. Undeterred, George went to Bill and asked if he could repitch the ad to Mr. Goodman on his own. Art directors didn’t
usually go to a client’s office to pitch an ad to customers, especially not a client as tough as Mr. Goodman, but Bill decided to let George give it a try. His colleagues said it was a kamikaze move. But George was already off to Long Island City, beloved matzo ad in hand.

As George tells it, Mr. Goodman was “like a real rabbi rabbi, busy eyebrows, must have been ninety years old, and he had his whole family, his grandchildren and his grandchildren’s grandchildren sitting there with him, ready to hear my pitch.” The young guys were saying: “Hey, gee, Grandfather, I like that poster.” But Mr. Goodman wouldn’t budge: According to George, Mr. Goodman said “I don’t like it” at
least twenty times in a row. George knew that after the big deal he’d made of it at DDB, he couldn’t possibly go back without this account. So George decided to jump out the window.
¹

In his own words, it went like this: “We were on the third or fourth floor and there was a casement window there, see, so I go to the window and then I go
out
the window and I’m hanging
there and I say ‘Mr. Goodman, you make the matzos; I’ll make the ads!’—that’s a famous line now, by the way’—and he says ’Come back in! oh my God, oh my God, come back in! And then his
grandkids start fanning him, and he looks like he’s about to faint …” Suddenly alarmed, George pulled himself back inside and decided to leave from the door instead, thinking of the embarrassment he’d face after his impetuous stunt. But then, “the old guy recovers and stops me. He says ‘Hey, wait, George, you know, if you ever quit advertising, I’ll give you a job as a matzo salesman any day.’ ” In the end,
George got his way: The matzo account ran, and it was a huge success. But was it worth hanging out that window? “I’d never do it again,” George says.

Of course it wasn’t a typical way of getting an account, outrageous even for DDB. And when word got out, some started to feel that DDB was more of a circus than an agency. But in truth, DDB was about as serious as any other agency. What most of Madison Avenue really had a problem with was not the creativity but the trust and risk such creativity required. “If you stand for something,” Bill often said, “you will always find some people for you
and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you and nobody for you.” In the 1950s, DDB was doing well, but it didn’t look like a leader. It was still missing the three hallmarks of big-agency success: a big tobacco company, a Big Three carmaker (GM, Ford, or Chrysler), and a major “personal hygiene” company like Colgate-Palmolive or Procter and Gamble. What’s more, it was still a
Mad Men
world. No other
agencies were following DDB’s example in terms of structure or style; by the end of the 1950s, DDB was still the only place in town that put the art director and the copywriter together in one room. So was the agency’s approach revolutionary, or was their success just a fluke? New York City hadn’t made up its mind yet.

In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general and hero from the Second World War, was elected president. Eisenhower, as a
young army officer, had once had to cross America in a convoy, and he never forgot the experience: The cars had to crawl six miles per hour on average, and the majority of the roads the convoy took were unpaved, potholed, and dangerous. In the end, the cross-country journey had taken over two months to complete! Thus, one of
Eisenhower’s pet plans as president was to improve and upgrade the country’s network of roads. A good interstate was necessary for travel and for commerce, he realized. And due in large part to Eisenhower’s help, car companies would become the top profit-generators for the country; the 1950s was their heyday, a time when more than sixty million vehicles were sold. Many of the pre- and postwar kinks had been worked out; the unions were established and reputable
now, and the automobile industry was taking better care of its workers. (In 1950, the famous “Treaty of Detroit” had been negotiated between the UAW [United Auto Workers] and General Motors, for example, in which the union agreed to a five-year contract that allowed for annual wage increases and steady improvements in technology.) Benefits like health care and pensions were becoming standard. And for the first time items like homes, cars, and appliances were attainable
by a high percentage of the American population. The middle class had fully arrived.