Thinking Small (53 page)

This new understanding between Allied countries and West Germany would later have big effects in terms of exports for the Volkswagen plant. The change in relations was something men like Nordhoff and Hahn were conscious of; they knew what it could mean for VW sales. In the long term, both men believed that the United States would eventually be open to automotive exports from Europe. But that didn’t mean that the Volkswagen was going to be any American’s
car of choice. In the past ten years, other European countries had succeeded in making People’s Cars of their own. In France, there was now the rear-engine 4CV Renault. In Italy, there was the Fiat 500. And in Britain, there was the Morris Minor. All of these cars had some market
resemblance to the Beetle, and all of them had their eye on becoming the first successful European “small car” in the American market.

In its attempt to become a player in the American market, it helped VW that both Nordhoff and Hahn spoke excellent English.
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They were also both charismatic and great with the press; both men had the kind of innate European charm that Americans found attractive. In 1954,
Reader’s Digest
did a piece on Nordhoff and Wolfsburg, referring to
Heinrich as “noble,” and noting that he had nice blue eyes. The piece also called the city the “town that a little car had built.” At the end of the 1940s, most American press about the car had focused on Hitler. In 1949, when Pon and Nordhoff had tried to bring the Bug to America, the car had been flatly rejected. Now, five years later, American citizens had warmed to West Germany, and the article was focused not on Hitler and the Nazis but rather on Nordhoff and the “miracle town.”
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Wolfsburg was being rewritten as a success story of the West. In 1954,
Time
magazine decided to do a long article about Nordhoff and his town in their special issue called “Germany: the Fabulous Recovery.” A hand-drawn picture of Nordhoff is on the cover of that issue, alongside
a VW sign with sunbursts of Beetles streaming out of it. Inside, Nordhoff is described as being “like a diplomat.”

This new way of thinking of Wolfsburg—as a model town of the West—had great benefit for Volkswagen. Sales of the car increased quickly. In 1955, the time when Americans first nicknamed Wolfsburg a “gold-rush town,” Volkswagen suddenly found itself the single biggest exporter of foreign cars to the United States. In 1956,
Road & Track
did a road test of the car, writing of the Beetle:

It sounded good. And it was. But compared to America’s Big Three that were selling millions of cars each year, VW’s 34,000 was a small blip. All together, foreign car sales amounted to less than 1 percent of the U.S. market. Nevertheless, in the wave of VW’s small success, Nordhoff decided to open his own U.S. branch and factory in 1955.

The idea of an American factory, however, very quickly proved to be a mistake. Just six months after the decision had been made and the land purchased, new studies came in that showed VW would never be able to sell enough cars in America to sustain the costs of having a factory there. There were also antitrust issues, and it became clear that the decision to buy land had been too rash. Nordhoff took full responsibility for the blunder, and they sold the factory and
decided instead to have offices in the States (in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey), but not to produce cars there for now. The new division of the company would be called Volkswagen of America.

Almost as soon as VW began to have some success in the United States, however, that success came under threat from the French automobile company Renault. In January 1958,
Time
magazine reported that
“the car that has come up fastest in the U.S. market in the past year is Renault’s Dauphine.”
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The article goes on to say that
Renault was “within striking distance” of overtaking Volkswagen as the number one exporter to the United States: “Dauphine is already outselling Volkswagen in eleven U.S. states, including Texas,” the article noted. Such developments worried Nordhoff considerably. That same year, just before his fifty-ninth
birthday, he fell ill and had to have surgery at the Mayo Clinic in the United States. From his hotel bed in New York City, where
he spent most of January recuperating, Nordhoff
wrote a desperate note to his colleagues back in Wolfsburg telling them about the Renault sales. By 1958, a total of 200,000 Volkswagens had been sold in the United States (over the past twelve years), but Volkswagen was slowly losing its edge, he feared. Volkswagen of America needed a man who could lead it in a new direction. As Nordhoff languished in the St. Regis hotel, he summoned Carl Hahn.

Hahn flew to New York City and met Nordhoff in his hotel room. The two discussed American exports for a while before Nordhoff finally disclosed the reason that he had called Hahn all the way from Germany: He wanted Hahn to take over Volkswagen of America, move to New York, and assume full control of U.S. operations. Hahn hesitated. He wasn’t at all sure that he was ready to take on such a huge responsibility. But Nordhoff reassured him: He’d thought it
through, he said, and he knew Hahn was ready for this. A few short months later, Carl Hahn was living in the United States.

It became clear very quickly that Nordhoff had been right: Carl Hahn and America got along well. Hahn modernized VW’s offices with computers and hired people to train the staff in service and efficiency. He also standardized service facilities, giving the American Volkswagen dealership network a sense of cohesion and a way to communicate among themselves and help each other. Millions of dollars were set aside to get updated service centers up and running all over
the country. It was essential that customers never lack parts for the cars they bought, and to make that happen, the system needed to work like a well-oiled machine. Still, there was an even bigger decision Carl Hahn made in his first year, something that had not been a concern of Volkswagen before that time. If Volkswagen was going to continue selling cars, he reasoned, if it wanted a future in the United States in the midst of all the competition that was setting in, then it was
going to have to enter the deep waters of American capitalism: It was time to advertise.

The first time
Julian Koenig saw a Volkswagen, he found it such a strange sight that he stopped in midstep and watched it scoot around the corner of the street he was about to cross. Other than that one memory, however, he didn’t have any real impression of the car. In fact, in 1958, when DDB decided to take on a car dealership called Queensboro Motors—the only place in the New York
tri-state area that sold Volkswagens—it was Helmut Krone who knew the most about Bugs: He’d actually bought one back in 1950, making him one of Volkswagen’s first American customers.

Queensboro Motors was owned by Arthur Stanton and it was part of a larger importing company that Arthur, his brother Frank, and their partner, Victor Elmaleh, owned. That larger company was called Worldwide Automobiles and it was the sole Volkswagen distributor for all areas east of the Mississippi. The Queens section of Worldwide was a new building and its design was based on a Hamburg garage called “The House of Glass”: the walls were transparent. While
a VW had its oil checked or wheels rotated, the car’s owner could watch. The first ad DDB did for the dealership shows an alienesque VW rising from the floor, as its owner drinks coffee nearby, observing his car through the sleek, clear walls.

Arthur and Frank Stanton, the owners of Worldwide, were also two of the earliest American fans of the Volkswagen. In the late 1940s, having left their big New York corporate jobs and moved overseas, importing American cars to Europe and Africa and generally having a grand time—these two brothers had discovered the little VW and fallen for it. Arthur had even traveled to Wolfsburg to meet with Nordhoff and ask him for his permission to sell the cars in a
dealership they’d set up in Morocco. Nordhoff was happy to say yes. Later, once Arthur and his brother decided to move their business back to America—now
bringing over all the foreign cars they’d discovered in Europe to sell in the States—the VW was at the top of their list. As early as 1951, they entered into contracts with Nordhoff, and Worldwide became the main VW dealership on the East Coast. (Max Hoffman had brought the VW over
too, but Hoffman was set up on the West Coast.)

The Stantons’ staunch support of the VW seemed to have been an odd decision—sales in the States were terrible at first—but very soon, it became clear that they’d simply been ahead of the game. By the mid-1950s, being one of the only suppliers of the car, and with word slowly spreading about the VW, the Stantons were flooded with orders for the little car. And because delivery still took a long time, and wasn’t always predictable, they
often had a long waiting list for the cars, and people who would show up immediately to claim the stock as soon as it arrived from Wolfsburg. All this attention the car was getting was simply by word of mouth. Just think what could happen if there was a bit of advertising involved, the Stantons thought. And Arthur was also wanting to publicize his new Queens-based “House of Glass.”

Luckily for everyone involved, Arthur Stanton happened to be friends with Richard Avedon, the same photographer who had taken Julian Koenig’s wedding pictures in 1951. Avedon was on his way to being known as America’s most unique and captivating photographer; his portraits of presidents and cultural figures would eventually become legendary. But back in the fifties, Avedon’s style, like DDB’s, was still considered strange, at least in terms
of America’s norm; thus DDB and Avedon were, so to speak, part of the same crowd. When Avedon was at dinner one night with Arthur Stanton and his wife, Joan, Arthur mentioned they were looking for someone to do their advertising. Avedon naturally suggested DDB. He even called and set up Stanton’s meeting with Bill Bernbach. The Stantons loved the ads that DDB did for them, so when, less than a year later, Carl Hahn happened to mention to Arthur Stanton that he was
looking for an advertising agency, Stanton (like Avedon) immediately suggested
that Carl Hahn go and talk to Bill. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.

Still, even after hearing Arthur’s warm recommendation, Hahn didn’t expect much; he’d been all over Madison Avenue, met with thousands (literally) of ad men, and he hadn’t liked what he’d found there. “People presented me with all kinds of fancy offices and spins, but there wasn’t much behind it all.”
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The
ads all looked the same, the only difference was “the color of lipstick they’d put on,” Hahn said
²
. But as it turned out, all those poor experiences actually served Hahn well: On the day he went to DDB, it was clear he had found something unusual. The meeting was friendly and informal. “There was nothing offered but water to drink,” Hahn
said. “Bill sat on his desk.” But Hahn liked Bill from the start. He said that when he first met Bill Bernbach, he had the feeling he’d met a man who was being real with him, a breath of fresh air. And Bill liked Hahn as well; he found him elegant and regal, but also down to earth. The men fell into an easy friendship. And Bill Bernbach was excited about the possibility of such an account. He finally would have a chance to say a thing or two to both Detroit and
the big ad agencies, or so he hoped.

Admittedly, coming up with an ad for Volkswagen that could make any kind of impact on Madison Avenue, let alone Detroit, seemed like a pretty unrealistic dream. Helmut Krone, in his black glasses and freshly pressed button-down shirt and having recently (just months before any talk about a VW campaign had begun) purchased his second VW Bug, leaned his long frame against the wall and watched as Bill walked Hahn to the elevator after their meeting. Helmut was
flabbergasted by Bill’s enthusiasm:
“I still don’t, to this day, know what went on in his head when he accepted the account; in fact, he worked very hard getting it,”
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he said. And he wasn’t the only one confused about Bill’s choice. As Bill would soon learn, getting his team to do a few ads for a local Queens foreign car distributor
was one thing. Getting them to create ads for a German car company was quite a different story.
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George flat-out refused to work on the account. “I don’t have to tell
you
why,”
⁵
he said. Bill was Jewish, after all, so George assumed he would understand. As George tells it, there was no way he was going to go to Wolfsburg and meet with a bunch of Nazis. “Let me give you a little history lesson,
Bill,” he said, “about what the Germans did to the Greeks in the Second World War. See, it all started when Hitler diverted troops from the Soviet lines in order to help Mussolini—”