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To make the changes he wants, Curtice can also find corner-cutting tricks. When he first saw sketches of a Buick that carried the fender line back into the body for the first time, he did not wait for the year-long process of changing dies. Instead, he devised a method of bolting extra panels of metal on to the old body to get the new style into his showrooms as quickly as possible. While looking over one recent model, Curtice spotted a flaw in its lines, was told that it was far too late to do anything about it. Said he: "To hell with the time element; let's make the change."
On the Spot. Curtice is a great believer in on-the-spot decisions when he has seen for himself what all the facts are. When he left for a quick tour of G.M.'s European plants six weeks ago, his plans were to spend $172 million expanding plants in England and Germany. But in Belgium, while touring G.M.'s assembly plant at Antwerp, Curtice was told that $6,000,000 was needed for more space and equipment. There had been no plan to expand in Belgium, but Curtice, in typical fashion, agreed to appropriate the money. The Swiss assembly plant, he learned, needed $3,500,000. Go right ahead, said Curtice, the money will come through. G.M.'s Swedish, French and Danish subsidiaries asked for money, and Curtice promised to work it out.
As the first G.M. president to make such a grand tour of foreign plants, Curtice rang up good press notices everywhere. Said Britain's Motor Trader in clipped accents: "America could export more of this type of American." Said Berlingske Tidende, Denmark's leading daily, after a Curtice press conference: "It was really felt that here was a magnate who had succeeded in performing the miracle to preserve his soul in company with an annual turnover of 70 thousand million kroner."
$637,233 a Year. Curtice's well-preserved soul is evident in everything that he does. As the highest-paid man in industry ($637,233 in salary and bonuses last year), he commutes to Detroit from Flint, where he lives simply with his wife in an eleven-room house that is cared for by only one servant. (Daughters Dorothy Anne, 21, and Catherine Dale, 17, are away at school; Mary Leila, 25, is married.) On weekends he likes to drop in on the nearby Buick division, shoot the breeze with anyone from a sweeper to a foreman.
His pleasures are simple; near the top of the list is a good game of poker for sizable stakes with neighbors and G.M. friends. He likes to dance (last summer he and his youngest daughter won a prize at Cape Cod, Mass., where he goes on vacation). Twice a year, he gets away on hunting trips, always insists on walking every field himself just to make sure that no bird is missed. Anyone who starts talking business with the boss on these occasions is likely to be presented by the rest of the group with a well-polished aluminum apple made in a G.M. shop.
Curtice enjoys practical jokes, even when they are on him (his companions once brought along a wired blanket and gave him a tooth-tingling shock when he sat on it). At a party after he became president of General Motors, everyone thought it a great idea to present him with a chef's outfit to kid the boss—the small-town boy who made good—about one of his early jobs.