Mister Ford: They Never Call Him Henry

THERE is a go-go spirit in Ford Motor offices that is unmatched in the auto industry. Company men feel that having a living, breathing Henry Ford around lends the firm a certain class that the hired managements of competitors cannot impart. As Ford executives are fond of saying, "Our plane can roll up and Mr. Ford can get out. Mr. General Motors cannot." But Henry Ford II gives the company much more than his name. He runs the show in inimitable fashion. He is impulsive, emotional, friendly. He also can be cold, defensive, rude. He is a thoughtful listener, but he can tell off one of his chief aides in a meeting and then look around the room and challenge the others to say whether they agree with the boss.

The heir to a classic American industrial fortune, Ford is in many ways unlike the company's founder, his late grandfather. The original Henry was a better mechanic than anyone he employed; by contrast, HFII (the monogram on his shirts) cannot tell one wrench from another. Though he is a discriminating judge of auto styling, some former associates suspect that he really does not care all that much about automobiles and would do about as well making buttonholes. But in the judgment of John Davis, former Ford Motor sales manager and longtime friend of both, Henry the Second is the image of his grandfather in one crucial way. "The only thing to understand about Henry and the old man," says Davis, "is their utter inconsistency. Complete chameleons, both of them."

Wines and Hamburger. Henry the Second is a connoisseur of wines and provides the best food in the auto industry at Ford Motor's executive dining room, but his own lunch there often consists of well-done hamburgers liberally sloshed with ketchup. He is a hard-laboring executive and an equally hard-drinking partygoer. He is unpretentious enough to carry his own baggage while traveling, and occasionally somebody else's as well. He has his own form of affectation, however: he pretends to be the country bumpkin that he obviously is not. Also, though he is usually forthright, he occasionally stirs suspicions that he is a bit of a put-on artist. Asked about his favorites in his art collection, he replies: "I've got a Toulouse-Lautrec that doesn't look like a Toulouse-Lautrec; then I've got a Degas and a Manet and a Gauguin" --all the names uttered in the tones of a bored auto dealer listing the cars he cannot sell.

Ford can indulge his inconsistencies because he is perhaps the most psychologically secure chief executive in the U.S. He is an extremely wealthy man ("I don't know how much I've got") and an unquestioned ruler for life. Through their ownership of voting stock, Henry, his wife and children control 7% of the company. Their holdings were worth $92.5 million at last week's close. Last year his job as chairman paid him $515,000 in salary and bonus, and he and his family collected $5,000,000 in Ford Motor stock dividends. There is absolutely no one he has to impress. Whoever and whatever interests him interests him; about the rest, as he makes plain, he cares not at all.

Starting at the Top. In running his company, Ford is all business. His intense sense of responsibility to the family name will not let him be anything else. He started at the top and stayed there, but doing so took an iron spirit. At 27, two years after the death of his father Edsel, he led a family coup that forced his aged grandfather to relinquish leadership of what was a sorely troubled company. Then Ford wrested real control from Director Harry Bennett and his crew of hired thugs in a series of tense confrontations, during which he was in some physical danger. For a while he felt it necessary to carry a gun to his office.

The first Henry sneered at bookkeepers and was bitterly antiunion. Henry the Second revived the company partly by instituting thorough cost accounting procedures and establishing relations of mutual respect with the late Walter Reuther. When Ford took over, the company was losing $10 million a month; last year it earned $546.5 million on sales of $14.8 billion.

Ford's success was once popularly attributed to brilliant No. 2 men, but that idea has faded as a long list of distinguished No. 2 men (Ernest Breech, Robert McNamara, Arjay Miller, recently Bunkie Knudsen) have come and gone. Some of them left, Detroiters gossip, because Ford eventually tires of people, particularly if they gain too much power in the company.

Detroiters sometimes liken the atmosphere in Ford Motor's executive suite to a Byzantine court. The company now has not one but three presidents: Lee lacocca, Robert Stevenson and Robert Hampson. The rumor mill turns largely on which one seems to be most in the chairman's favor at the moment. Whoever it is certainly does not call Ford "Henry"; no employee dares to. lacocca, a highly aggressive and voluble man, seems to have the lead now. He is one of the few executives who will tell Ford when he thinks the chairman is wrong. Even so, visitors to lacocca's office have seen him stiffen when Ford telephones, lacocca's end of the conversation: "Yes, sir; yes, sir; yes, Mr. Ford."

Mucking Up the Water. Working in shirtsleeves at a clean desk, Ford usually puts in ten-hour days on the job. When the work piles up, he sometimes sleeps in a bedroom that is part of his twelfth-floor office suite. All major questions, suggestions, ideas and issues are brought to him for approval. He has approved that symbol of corporate blunder, the Edsel, as well as the Mustang and Maverick, two of the bestselling new U.S. cars of recent years. Those cars have given Ford Motor the reputation of being the innovator in the industry. The chairman watches everything. Once an executive recommended that the company spend $20 million on a weekly TV series on the basis of its audience ratings. Said Ford: "That's a sample of 1,100 people. I don't want our company making big money decisions on a sample of 1,100 people."

He keeps dossiers on more than 1,000 Ford Motor executives, reaching down through seven layers of management; each dossier lists the man's history, evaluation by superior and estimate of promotion prospects. A calendar shows where each of 36 high executives will be every half-day for the next week. His memory for details and conversations is legendary. Ford Motor officers say that the chairman is forever reminding them if something they say does not tally with what they said three years earlier. Ford himself remarks: "My problem is, I'm told, that I get into too many details, and therefore I'm mucking up everybody else's water."

Away from the job. Ford can be by turns exuberant and shy. His activities as a swinger are celebrated--although, in his own estimation, overrated. His reputation as a jet setter, he said in an interview with TIME'S Peter Vanderwicken, is "sort of unfounded. I like to have fun, and I happen on occasion to see people who are members of the jet set, and if I'm there, why, I'm picked out. So then it gets in the damn newspaper or a magazine like your own."

Still, he once led an orchestra, fully clothed and playing When the Saints Go Marching In, on a late-night wade through the swimming pool during a soiree at Southampton, L.I. Now he may party with the likes of Gina Lollobrigida, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Stavros Niarchos (former husband of Ford's daughter Charlotte), and Spanish Prince Carlos-Hugo de Bourbon, whom Ford reportedly calls Jack Daniels. "Frank Sinatra sang at my 21st birthday party," says Ford, "so I've known him for a long time. But he wasn't well known then--he was just a singer in a band."

Ford carefully guards his privacy and that of his family. He does not socialize with his employees or other automen. Ford Motor executives are not unhappy about that. They would just as soon not drink with the boss because of his unpredictable moods. Ford likes to travel in Europe, which he does at least four times a year, partly because he is not recognized on the streets there and waiters do not fawn over him as much as they do in the U.S. One former subordinate thinks that he has a defensive streak because he has been surrounded for years by "people trying to sell him stuff."

Preface to End Them All. Ford maintains some reserve even with his family, including his daughters Charlotte and Anne Uzielli and his 21-year-old son Edsel II, a student of business at Massachusetts' Babson Institute. He told his daughters about his impending marriage to his second wife Cristina only 24 hours before it occurred. He met Cristina, a blonde Italian divorcee who looks like a Mediterranean Ingrid Bergman, in 1960 at a party in Maxim's in Paris. In 1964, when he was divorced by his wife of 23 years, the former Anne McDonnell, Ford incurred heavy criticism, which he characteristically ignored. Ford seems delighted with Cristina but has disappointed her in one way: she is a physical-fitness devotee who grieves that Ford refuses to use the exercise equipment in their 35-room Grosse Pointe Farms home.

In all Ford's chameleon-like moods, one element is constant: his blunt-spoken manner. The standout example is a statement given to Booton Herndon, author of an adulatory biography. During one luncheon interview, Ford announced that he had written "a whatchamacallem --a preface" and handed it to Herndon, who published it as a passage in the book. Its text: "I'm not interested in this damn book. I'm only cooperating because I've been asked to. I don't care if anybody reads it or not. [Signed] Henry Ford II."

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