Thinking Small (8 page)

In 1909, the same year that the United States laid down its first mile of paved road, Porsche and his wife welcomed their second child into the world, a boy they named Ferdinand, after his father, but who would come to be known simply as Ferry. Now working for Austro-Daimler, a place that made cars for the elite as well as top-of-the-line racing cars, Porsche was at the Semmering hill climb racing one of his new designs on the nineteenth of September when word came
that his son had been born. It is a potent image—to imagine Porsche at the racetrack at the very moment his son enters the world—and not only because Porsche’s main connection to his children would always be tied up with the automobile, but also because his son’s birth occurred on the verge of a dramatic new decade of technological progress.

Between the years 1910 and 1920, the United States and Europe would experience a breathtaking degree of change. Change in transportation, economics, and political systems would go hand in hand. Technology was now, more than ever, beginning to be seen as a tool, indeed an engine, of political and economic influence, and Porsche himself was an example of how intimately these paths were being intertwined. Porsche was never interested in politics, and yet because he worked
in the field of transportation, which was becoming an integral part of political and social development, politics would always be a part of his life. At times, this was because government subsidies were a means of getting money for his cars, but there was also a more simple reason: cars were for the elite, and who was more elite than royalty? Before 1914, Europe was still a place of empires, of kings and queens and archdukes—and they were among the first to buy cars. Jacob
Lohner & Co., Porsche’s first employer, had built cars for royalty, and Porsche had eventually been asked to build a car for Archduke Franz Ferdinand. When serving mandatory military service in 1904, Porsche was called on to drive the archduke on various occasions as well.

And so the dramatic turn of events that occurred in 1914 hit
Porsche and his family close to home. That year, all that speed and dynamic change being generated by the Western world produced a loud and violent crash: the First World War. As a result, the structures of government and country that Porsche had known would soon be dismantled and rearranged. It would be the world’s first mechanized war—replete with machine guns, airplanes, and
tanks—and so it seems fitting that its opening shot involved one of the world’s first car bombs: Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself was the target, and though he survived the explosion, he and his wife were shot and killed later that same night while riding in their open-roofed automobile. With their murders, the First World War began. By the end of it, two empires would fall and a new balance would descend upon the political and economic world. The war would be ugly, as
all wars are, and yet somehow, out of all the pain and chaos, a new symbiosis would develop between the United States and Europe, paving the way for the automobile to become the twentieth century’s most intoxicating adventure.

Young Bill Bernbach
¹
got a job working at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The past decade had not been easy for him, and now well into his twenties, he was still unsure exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Bill had graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Commercial Science in
1933, just as the Depression was in full swing and jobs were hard to find, especially for a slight and shy young man, whose brilliant blue eyes were nearly always glued to a book.

Through family connections, he’d found his first job in the mailroom of Schenley Distributors, working for sixteen dollars a week, stuffing envelopes with promotional brochures. Working in an idyllic brownstone in midtown New York City, Bill
read fiction and philosophy in the lulls between his mailroom responsibilities. Though he loved literature, he was not someone who thought of himself as a writer or an artist, or someone who had any
conscious inspirations toward the creative life. He had studied business in school, but he had a contemplative streak that made it difficult for him to fit in with typical corporate manners and moods. Aside from his close relationship to his large family, he was a bit of a loner in those years. Lucky for him, there was another person working in the mailroom who also liked books. Her name was Evelyn Carbone, the daughter of Italian immigrants, fluent in French, with a recent degree
from Hunter College and plans to go back. She liked to watch Bill drift away into the paperbacks he smuggled into work, and she liked the intelligent way he could talk about what he read. The feelings Bill had for Evelyn were nearly bursting to be voiced by the time Evelyn took the initiative and invited him to one of her family’s elaborate Sunday lunches. On the day she asked, Bill said “yes” even before she could get the question out.

But Catholic girls were not supposed to ask Jewish boys to meals at their home, or so certain members of Bill’s family thought. When he told his mother about the invitation, she literally threw herself on the floor and wailed. Bill’s parents had experienced persecution in their home countries and had come to America looking for a new life: It was their faith and their religion they credited with having saved and strengthened them, and they clung to it
passionately, or at least his mother Rebecca did. She was very strict about the Jewish orthodoxies she’d practiced all her life, and she demanded her family respect them as well. She told Bill, her beloved youngest son, that it would kill her if he married a non-Jewish girl.
It’s just a Sunday lunch,
Bill said.

At that point, Bill was still shy about forcibly stating his own wants and opinions, even to his family. Thanks to some unexpected relationships, however, that was beginning to change. Bill was always drawing attention and protection from powerful strangers, though it was hard to say exactly why. Even though his father was a clothing designer who dressed with flair, Bill
inherited none of that love for ornamentation. He wore simple clothing and in
those early years at least was not afraid to repeat the same few outfits every week. He was five foot seven, and thin to the point of looking a bit malnourished. But there was something else about him, a kinetic curiosity, an energy and presence that imbued all his gestures with a charismatic appeal. Bill’s own initial innocence about this charisma is perhaps what made others want to take him under their wing. One of the first men to do so was one of the most powerful men in
New York City at the time: Grover Whalen, who, in 1935, was elected to preside over the coming World’s Fair.

Whalen was a former commissioner of the New York Police Department, a gregarious and experienced man of business who was the chairman of Schenley’s for most of the 1930s. He was also the “official greeter” of New York City, which meant he met and schmoozed with all the big personalities who came in and out of town. Whalen noticed something about Bill, the boy in the mailroom, and brought him up to work as his personal assistant. The job was not
glamorous—Bill ran errands and did clerical tasks—but the atmosphere often was: Whalen once took Bill with him on a business trip to Washington, D.C., for instance, just so the young man could experience his first plane ride. Bill would remember Whalen giving him five one-dollar bills when they walked into the Carlton Hotel, telling him,
“Now Bill, what
you do is get quarters for these, because we’re going to need quarters for tips.”
²
It was a whole new environment for Bill. “I didn’t have that kind of experience,” he would later admit. “I learned the ways.” Whalen liked Bill’s innocence, and would often invite Bill and Evelyn to attend star-studded events with him around New York. Bill confided in Whalen about the troubles he was experiencing at home thanks to his controversial
relationship with Evelyn, which, in the parlance of the day, would be a “mixed marriage,” if they decided to take that step. Whalen’s only piece of advice was this:
Follow your heart.

Once the World’s Fair got closer and required more time and
energy, Whalen brought Bill on board to help. At Schenley, Bill surprised everyone by writing an ad for one of their products, American Cream Whiskey, and sending it in to their ad agency, Lord & Thomas.
³
A version of Bill’s concept was printed in
The New
York Times
soon after (or so Bill thought). He showed the ad to those around him and told them it had been his idea. Bill was becoming more and more eager to impress and move up the corporate ladder, and that only endeared him all the more to his boss at Schenley, and to Whalen. Here was a kid who was hungry to learn. The perfect audience for someone who is hungry to teach.

Bill started taking the train all the way out to Flushing Meadows nearly every day. Soon, there would be millions doing the same. At the World’s Fair offices, Whalen put him to work writing short speeches and press statements. Bill was fascinated by the futuristic exhibits at the Fair, and by one of its main speakers in particular, Albert Einstein. He would soon memorize many of Einstein’s quotes, and his own speeches would later be littered with them.
“A problem cannot be solved on the same level on which it was created,” Einstein once said.

What Bill picked up from Einstein was the realization that a release from categorical thinking could lead one to new levels of creativity. Reading men like Einstein and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Bill came to understand science in a new way. He realized that the epiphanies of the writers he admired, and the epiphanies of the men and women who were creating the technological and scientific structures of the world, had been possible due to the same combination of
social freedom and individual discipline. He saw that scientific work could also be creative work, that the two were not as distinct as they seemed. In fact, traces of both could even be found in the time capsule of the Fair, which included, among other things, a new invention called the wristwatch, a fountain pen, a sampling of alloys, various pieces of industrial machinery, articles on philosophy and economics, and the books of Thomas Mann.

During the evenings at the Fair in 1939, there were often fireworks exploding into the sultry night sky. Perhaps Bill stayed
around after work to watch them sometimes, or to gaze at the glowing fountains of water that were also a popular attraction. And maybe Evelyn, who was now his wife, joined him there some nights. Bill had followed his heart and asked Evelyn to marry him, and she’d said yes. They found the pull between them too strong to
deny, but getting married had not been an easy decision. Relations with Bill’s family had been very tense. They’d hoped the situation would sort itself out with time. It didn’t. In fact, it got worse. Upon hearing of Bill’s marriage, his mother exercised her immense sway over Bill’s father and demanded the ultimate: Her husband had to follow the traditional Orthodox rules and declare their youngest son dead.

It was the beginning of some hard years for Bill. Leaving his job at the distiller’s to work with Whalen, Bill probably imagined great things would soon follow, but nothing materialized. Once Whalen’s work at the World’s Fair was over, Bill found himself thirty years old, disowned by his parents, newly married, and without a job. Evelyn was still working at Schenley and hers would be their only income for nearly a year. Watching months and months
pass, in his desperation (and naïveté) Bill finally took a job with a mobster organization that was not very safe. When his boss at Schenley heard about this from Evelyn, he realized how strapped Bill must have been. He told Evelyn that the two of them should have spoken up about their situation. Shortly after, he arranged for Bill to go and talk with a man named William H. Weintraub. Mr. Weintraub was in the advertising business. And soon, so was Bill.