Arthur Hailey - Wheels

The illustration was in color. It showed a dune buggy on a rugged beach, in action, banked steeply on its side. All wheels were fighting for traction, sand spewing behind. Cleverly, the photographer had slowed his shutter speed so that the dune buggy was blurred with movement. The text with the picture said the ranks of dune buggy owners were "growing like mad"; nearly a hundred manufacturers were engaged in building bodies; California alone had eight thousand dune buggies.

Brett, glancing over Adam's shoulder, asked amusedly, "You're not thinking of building dune buggies?"

Adam shook his head. No matter how large the dune buggy population became, they were still a fad, a specialist's creation, not the Big Three's business. Adam knew that. But the phrase which eluded him was somehow linked . . . Still not remembering, he tossed the magazine on a table, open.

Chance, as happens so often in life, stepped in.

Above the table where Adam tossed the magazine was a framed photo of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module during the first moon landing. It had been given to Adam, who liked it, and had had it framed and hung. In the photo, the module dominated; an astronaut stood beneath.

Brett picked up the magazine with the dune buggy picture and showed it to the others. He remarked, "Those things go like hell! - I've driven one." He studied the illustration again. "But it's an ugly son-of-a-bitch."

Adam thought: So was the lunar module.

Ugly indeed: all edges, corners, projections, oddities, imbalance; little symmetry, few clean curves. But because the lunar module did its job superbly, it defeated ugliness and, in the end, took on a beauty of its own.

The missing phrase came to him.

It was Rowena's. The morning after their night together she had said,

"You know what I'd say today? I'd say, 'ugly is beautiful.'"

Ugly is Beautiful!

The lunar module was ugly. So was a dune buggy. But both were functional, utilitarian; they were built for a purpose and performed it.

So why not a car? Why not a deliberate, daring attempt to produce a car, ugly by existing standards, yet so suited to needs, environment, and present time - the Age of Utility - that it would become beautiful?

"I may have an idea about Farstar," Adam said. "Don't rush me. Let me put it out slowly."

The others were silent. Marshaling thoughts, choosing words carefully, Adam began.

They were too experienced - all of them in the group - to go overboard, instantly, for a single idea. Yet he was aware of a sudden tension, missing before, and a quickening interest as he continued to speak. The Silver Fox was thoughtful, his eyes half-closed. Young Castaldy scratched an ear lobe - a habit when he concentrated - while the other product planner, who had said little so far, kept his eyes on Adam steadily. Brett DeLosanto's fingers seemed restless. As if instinctually, Brett drew a sketch pad toward him.

It was Brett, too, who jumped up when Adam finished, and began pacing the room. He tossed off thoughts, incomplete sentences, like fragments of a jigsaw . . . Artists for centuries have seen beauty in ugliness . . . Consider distorted, tortured sculpture from Michelangelo to Henry Moore . . . And in modern times, scrap metal welded in jumbles - shapeless to some, who scoff, but many don't . . . Take painting: the avant-garde forms; egg crates, soup cans in - collages . . . Or life itself! - a pretty young girl or a pregnant hag: which is more beautiful? . . . It depended always on the way you saw it. Form, symmetry, style, beauty were never arbitrary.

Brett thumped a fist into a palm. "With Picasso in our nostrils, we've been designing cars like they rolled off a Gainsborough canvas."

"There's a line in Genesis somewhere," the Silver Fox said. "I think it goes, 'Your eyes shall be opened."' He added cautiously, "But let's not get carried away. We may have something. Even if we do, though, there's a long road ahead."

Brett was already sketching, his pencil racing through shapes, then discarding them. As he ripped off sheets from his pad, they dropped to the floor. It was a designer's way of thinking, just as others exchanged ideas through words. Adam reminded himself to retrieve the sheets later and save them; if something came of this night, they would be historic.

But he knew that what Elroy Braithwaite had said was true. The Silver Fox, through more years than any of the others here, had seen new cars develop from first ideas to finished products, but had suffered, too, through projects which looked promising at birth, only to be snuffed out later for unforeseen reasons, or sometimes for no reason at all.

Within the company a new car concept had countless barriers to pass, innumerable critiques to survive, interminable meetings, with opposition to overcome. And even if an idea survived all these, the executive vice-president, president, and chairman of the board had veto powers . . .

But some ideas got through and became reality.

The Orion had. So . . . just barely possibly

might this early, inchoate concept, the seed sown here and now, for Farstar.

Someone brought more coffee, and they talked on, far into the night.

The OJL advertising agency, in the person of Keith Yates-Brown, was nervous and edgy because the documentary film Auto City was proceeding without a shooting script.

"There has to be a script," Yates-Brown had protested to Barbara Zaleski on the telephone from New York a day or two ago. "If there isn't, how can we protect the client's interests from here and make suggestions?"

Barbara, in Detroit, had felt like telling the management supervisor that the last thing the project needed was Madison Avenue meddling. It could transform the honest, perceptive film now taking shape into a glossy, innocuous melange. But, instead, she repeated the views of the director, Wes Gropetti, a talented man with enough solid credits behind him to make his viewpoint count.

"You won't grab the mood of inner city Detroit by putting a lot of crud on paper because we don't know what the mood is yet," Gropetti had declared. "We're here with all this fancy camera and sound gear to find out."

The director, heavily bearded but diminutive in stature, seemed like a shaggy sparrow. He wore a black beret which he was never without, and was less sensitive about words than he was with visual images. He went on, "I want the inner city jokers, broads, and kids to tell us what they really think about themselves, and how they look on the rest of us lousy bums.

That means their hates, hopes, frustrations, joys, as well as how they breathe, eat, sleep, fornicate, sweat, and what they see and smell. I'll get all that on film - their mugs, voices, everything unrehearsed. As to language, well let the crud fall where it may. Maybe I'll prick a few people in the ass to get them mad, but either way they'll talk, then while they do, I'll let the camera wander like a whore's attention, and we'll see Detroit the way they see it, through inner city eyes."

And it was working, Barbara assured Yates-Brown.

Using cinema verite technique, with a handheld camera and a minimum of paraphernalia to distract, Gropetti was roaming the inner city with a crew, persuading people to talk frankly, freely, and sometimes movingly, on film. Barbara, who usually accompanied the expeditions, knew that part of Gropetti's genius lay in his instinct for selection, then making those he chose forget that a lens and lights were focused on them. No one knew what the little director whispered into ears before their owners began talking; sometimes he would bend his head down, confidentially, for minutes at a time. But it produced reactions: amusement, defiance, rapport, disagreement, sullenness, impudence, alertness, anger and once - from a young black militant who became impressively eloquent - a blazing hatred.