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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."