I'm still somewhere down the rabbit hole reading books about Michigan, trying to find my way back up to the surface but getting detoured into further digging at every turn. The other day, in the library to get a book on the history of Longfellow's Hiawatha, I remembered to check on another promising title I'd come across: John McDonald's A Ghost's Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan's My Years with General Motors. McDonald was the Fortune reporter who cowrote Sloan's memoir of his many decades at the helm of GM. Sloan's account is certainly a classic Michigan book, but not the sort I'd curl up with at the end of an evening. McDonald's, however... As you might tell from my affection for DVD commentary tracks, I love a good "Making of..." story, and I'd heard this one, about McDonald's legal battle to keep GM from suppressing its former CEO's book,* was a good one. Would McDonald's short little recollection be to Sloan's as Hearts of Darkness is to Apocalypse Now or Burden of Dreams to Fitzcarraldo: a behind-the-scenes story that's (to my mind) even better than the original?
The answer turned out to be no, unfortunately, but that doesn't mean the book was without interest. For the most part, it's a dry account of corporate law, with lengthy quotes from lawyers' letters and notes on strategy, and with machinations so subtle I could hardly follow them. Sloan, at this point an elderly man of fading powers, is hardly a charismatic character on the scale of Coppola or Herzog, despite his fierce personal loyalties and occasional flashes of steel. And it almost goes without saying that there are no Brandos or Kinskis to be found anywhere in the vicinity. The one fascinatingly malign figure, Maurice "Tex" Moore, the corporate counsel to both GM and Time, Inc. (McDonald's employer) as well as the personal lawyer to both Sloan and Time's Henry Luce, is an implacable foe of McDonald, revelling diabolically in his conflicts of interest, but alas he remains at a distance throughout the story.
What is interesting is the offhand portrait of a narrow culture, the clubby, Mad Men-era world of corporate management, corporate law, and corporate journalism that McDonald is as much a part of as any of the other figures. They know each other socially as well as through business, and the social ties and graces seem as important to the drama's resolution as the legal and business concerns. And McDonald negotiates this world with consummate skill, playing the other players against each other and ultimately succeeding in his David vs. Goliath quest to get the book out and get paid what he deserved. But there's actually little said about McDonald himself--only from the introduction did I learn that he was friends at one time with Leon Trotsky as well as Sloan, and also with Robert Penn Warren, John von Neumann, and any number of colorful denizens of the race-track world, of which he was himself one.
From time to time, McDonald does leave aside his legal discussions to sketch a character in a way I'm sure came in handy in his numerous Fortune profiles, and one is memorable enough to leave you with here:
Mr. Sloan tended to be loyal to persons around him. His long-time secretary, Miss Kucher, had been with him from the nineteenth century and remained with him at General Motors for her lifetime. She typed with two fingers and spelled according to her likes and was that kind of person. She referred to him as "that man."
Oh, Miss Kucher! You deserve your own book.
* GM, though they were never explicit about it (or really about anything), clearly tried to suppress the book out of fears its thorough and relatively open history of the company would somehow give the federal government fodder in its antitrust claims against the company, which at that time held over half of the U.S. car market. Weirdly, the 1990 introduction to the copy I have of Sloan's book, by the management-theory legend Peter Drucker, makes no mention of antitrust concerns and claims that the book was delayed because of Sloan's senses of loyalty and decorum, which kept him from publishing the book while any of the GM executives featured in it were still alive. But many of those execs were still alive when the book finally came out, and Dan Seligman's introduction to McDonald's memoir lists a handful of similarly bizarre errors in Drucker's piece (including his assertion that the death of Sloan's younger brother Raymond was "the greatest tragedy" in Sloan's life, although Raymond actually outlived his brother by 17 years), and makes clear that its misinformation was one of the reasons McDonald wanted to set the record straight in his own book, which, in a nice bit of historical rhyming, he wrote in a burst of passionate documentary energy in his final years, just as Sloan had done with his memoir four decades before.
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