Autos: The Salesman

General Motors Corp. owes its dominance of the auto world to its envied system of collective management, accomplished through a series of interlocking committees. The System has so many checks built in that it never produces a wrong decision so disastrous that it cannot recover, and it never allows one man to become absolute boss. But it has produced strong men, and one of them was Harlow Herbert Curtice, G.M. President from 1953 to 1958, who died last week of a heart attack in his home in Flint, Mich.

A supersalesman with boundless enthusiasm, “Red” Curtice had an almost unerring instinct for the styling or engineering touch that would inspire the public to want G.M. cars above all others. “New cars must not be too radical or they will not sell,” he said. “Automobile owners are among the most conservative people in the world.” Curtice himself was not. Reaching into all parts of G.M.’s sprawling operations, he was the prime mover behind the two-tone paint job, the wrap-around windshield, the hardtop convertible. Only rarely, as when he indulged in the chrome-splashing spree that hurt sales in the late 1950s, was he wrong. Right or wrong, he constantly admonished that “G.M. must always lead.”

Man of the Year. And G.M. did lead under a crucial Curtice decision in 1954. At a time when businessmen gloomily concluded that the economy’s postwar and post-Korean expansion was spent, Curtice told a meeting of 500 top business leaders that G.M. was investing an astonishing $1 billion to build plants. “Bet-a-Billion Curtice,” they called him. U.S. business roared into a boom in 1955, Detroit sold an alltime high of 7.2 million cars, and G.M. became history’s first corporation to earn more than $1 billion in a year. Harlow Curtice was TIME’S Man of the Year for 1955.

At times his flair for strong leadership strained the smoothly meshed G.M. System. Some aides thought that he delved too deeply into the affairs of autonomous divisions, and to many employees, the handsome man with pencil-thin mustache seemed autocratic and distant. To all he sometimes seemed ambitious.

Triumph & Tragedy. When Curtice left business school and applied at the age of 20 for a bookkeeper’s job with AC Spark Plug, later a G.M. division, an interviewer asked him what his ambition was. Said Curtice: “Your job, within a year.” Topping that, he became AC’s controller within a year, went on to head the division. Tapped in 1933 to take over the staggering Buick division, he led it to fourth place in industry sales by introducing a low-priced model that was a best seller during the Depression. When G.M. President Charles Wilson became Dwight Eisenhower’s first Defense Secretary, the board did not have to debate long over his obvious successor: Curtice.

After his retirement, tragedy hit him: on a hunting trip three years ago, he accidentally shot and killed his old friend Harry W. Anderson, a longtime G.M. vice president. The incident left him with a deep grief. Though he remained active on the G.M. board, traveled widely abroad and mixed with a few auto pals he withdrew more into himself.

For Harlow Curtice, star salesman and hard-driving executive within the G.M. System, lived by a simple credo: “The best committee is the committee of one.”