People · Bill Mitchell · Chapter 2 of 6

Earl's Protégé

GM Art and Colour Section — 1935 onward

Talent moves fast inside Harley Earl's studio when Earl himself decides it should. Mitchell's rise is startling even by the standards of a department built around one man's personal judgment: within two years of walking through the door, he is running styling for Cadillac — General Motors' flagship marque, the halo brand every other division measures itself against — at the age of twenty-four. He draws the 1938 Cadillac Sixty Special, a car whose crisp, thin-pillared formality helps define an entire era of American luxury styling, and keeps producing landmark work for GM's most important divisions for the next two decades: the 1949 Coupe deVille, the 1955–57 Bel Air, the Buick Riviera.

By the mid-1950s, inside the building if nowhere else yet officially, there is no real mystery about who Earl intends to hand the department to. Mitchell has Earl's eye for theater and his own additional gift — a sculptor's patience for natural form that Earl, a showman first, never quite prioritized the same way. Where Earl chased boldness, Mitchell increasingly chases correctness: a line that isn't just dramatic, but feels like it could only ever have been drawn that one way.

Mitchell inherits an empire, a management style, and — almost immediately — a problem that Earl's era never had to fully solve: General Motors has banned its own divisions from racing. For a design chief who believes, as fiercely as any engineer, that a car's shape should be proven at speed before it's sold to the public, that ban is not a policy he intends to simply accept.