G.M.'s Most Efficient Model FREDERIC GARRETT DONNER

SIX times a day a Broadway cast of 50 went through their singing, dancing paces last week as a musical skit called The Magic Man opened General Motors' 1961 Motorama of 36 new cars at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. Not in the show were some cheery lines spoken by short (5 ft. 8 in.), grey-haired Frederic Garrett Donner, 58, General Motors' board chairman and its chief executive since 1958. The world's largest industrial corporation, announced Donner, plans to spend $1.25 billion next year to expand and develop its worldwide (21 countries) auto empire, testifying to its faith in "continued economic progress." If consumer incomes continue to rise and consumer confidence is sustained, said Donner, the auto industry may sell 7,000,000 cars in the U.S. in 1961, including imports. By 1970, based on a projected rise in population and gross national product, he expects that total to hit 8,000,000.

The auto industry may play the deciding role in what happens to the U.S. economy in the months ahead. Nearly 12 million people--one of every seven U.S. workers--are directly or indirectly employed in the automotive industry. The industry consumes 18% of all U.S. steel shipments (10-15 million tons annually), 43% of all lead, 64% of all natural rubber. With 47% of U.S. auto production, G.M. is the auto industry's biggest force --and Fred Donner is its most powerful, though in some ways its most retiring spokesman.

Little known when he took over G.M., little inclined to be as visible as his predecessors, "Engine Charlie" Wilson and Harlow Curtice, Donner shuns speechmaking, keeps a careful cowl over his personal life and, says one colleague, "has an idea that General Motors' chairman is expected to be one of the most dignified men in the world." He rose through the financial side of the business, has never worked at making or selling a car. Donner does not consider this unusual. "People seem to think of accounting as a rigid little box," he says. "At General Motors the financial staff gets into all areas of the business more than any other staff."

What Donner learned in such areas, he has never forgotten. He has an encyclopedic knowledge about G.M., a prodigious memory and a fetish for facts. If someone is vague about a fact, even in casual conversation, Donner whips from his pocket a tiny notebook prepared by his office, crammed with industry charts and tables.

A cool, efficient manager of the modern stripe, Donner is a strong believer in team talk. He rarely makes a decision without extensive consultation with G.M.'s experts, shares responsibility to a unique degree with President John F. Gordon, a crack production man. By staying in the background and avoiding public controversy, Donner has also toned down G.M.'s earlier reputation for corporate arrogance.

Donner is a prodigious worker who has little patience for anything but the best from either himself or his colleagues. No Detroiter, he commutes regularly to Manhattan on the 7:34 from Port Washington, Long Island, keeps as careful a check as the engineer on the arrival time. Says he of the 7:34: "It hasn't varied more than two or three minutes for quite some time now." After a packed day, Donner heads homeward with a briefcase full of papers, brings them back next morning marked with his own crisp comments.

DONNER'S mind is so neatly compartmented that he can juggle three columns of figures at once, read a report while talking on the telephone, carry on simultaneous conferences in his office with three executives involved in entirely different matters. He keeps his hand in everything. Recently he helped sign up Danny Kaye for a three-year TV contract which, to the discomfort of admen, did not have an option to drop Kaye if the first shows were unsuccessful. (Kaye's first show proved a qualified critical success.) Donner also likes to give G.M. cars a rough spin on the proving grounds, insisted that a wooden curb be built so that testers of G.M.'s compacts would know if customers could get in and out easily.

Fred Donner is one of the best paid men in U.S. industry (1959 compensation: $670,350), but his pleasures are comparatively simple. He lives with his wife (his two children are married) in a 22-room home in Sands Point, L.I. that once belonged to Producer George Abbott, keeps a Fifth Avenue apartment to be nearer his work in busy periods. He drinks moderately (Scotch, martinis), is also a wine connoisseur, does not smoke.

He is a prodigious reader who gets more than half a dozen newly published books each week, sprinkles his conversation with quotes that range from Thucydides to Churchill. He is fascinated by the Civil War, collects first editions of Dickens.

Like most of G.M.'s executives, he is a product of the Middle West, where his father was an accountant in the small town of Three Oaks, Mich. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in business administration and a Phi Beta Kappa key, worked briefly for a Chicago accounting firm, joined General Motors' New York staff as an accountant in 1926. His quick grasp of figures and his lucid speech propelled him quickly upward. In 1941, at 38, he became one of the youngest G.M. executives ever to reach a vice-presidency. In 1956 he was named executive vice president for finance.

One of Donner's first jobs when he took over at G.M. in 1958 was approving the new 1960 luxury-size compacts--Buick Special, Olds F85 and Pontiac Tempest --then in the clay-model stage. At first skeptical of the compacts--he prefers the term small cars--Donner now thinks that the auto industry has been "witnessing a series of changes that may prove little short of revolutionary over the long run." But Donner does not feel that the compacts will sweep all before their path. He still expects the majority of G.M.'s customers to buy larger cars. Says he: "The challenge of the marketplace is one that calls for all our skills in design, in production, in marketing."

Presenting G.M.'s huge new expansion program last week, Donner obviously felt that G.M. was meeting that challenge head on. Now he, like everyone else, will have to wait for the consumer to make the final judgment.

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