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Taillights & T-Birds. Walker went on to style the 1950 Lincoln and all Lincolns since, the Mercury, from 1951 on, and the 1952 Ford, which gave the company even straighter body lines and the circular taillights that are now as much a Ford trademark as Cadillac's fishtail fenders. But Walker's biggest success was in 1953. At the Paris auto show, President Henry Ford II was admiring the low-slung Jaguars, Mercedes and Ferraris, when he turned to Walker and asked: "Why can't we have a sports car like that?" Walker was waiting for just such a chance; his staff had been working on a sports car for months. He made a quick transatlantic phone call, and when he and Ford got back to Detroit, a clay model of the Thunderbird was waiting. "Instead of having a sag like a Jag," says Walker, "it had a clean, straight-line treatment that was typical of other Fords at the time. We wanted to get a small, sporty car without making it look small, since the American likes a good-sized package for the good chunk of money he pays."
On the market in 1955, Ford's low-slung T-Bird scooped the industry with a combination of 120-m.p.h. speed and comfort that started a new trend in sporty personal cars. That same year Ford hired Walker as vice president at $200,000 a year, and made him chief of all styling.
One of Walker's big jobs was to style the new Edsel. His mission was to make it recognizable as a Ford product, but different enough to make it a distinctively new car. "What we wanted," says Walker, "is for millions of people to be able to say at once: 'That's an Edsel.'" Using Ford's basic horizontal styling approach. he inserted gull-winged rear fenders, and an oval, purse-mouthed grille, with the inevitable result that a new gag was coined: "It looks like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon." So far, Edsel sales have not lived up to Walker's hopes, but it will be months before he knows whether he has a lemon or lemonade.
Where To? With his 1958 models all set, Stylist George Walker is already hard at work on Ford's multimillion-dollar bets for 1959, 1960 and 1961. Next year's line will have even heavier emphasis on the crisp, forward-thrusting look that Walker introduced with the 1957 Mercury, wider grilles, a straight-down rear window, and fins that flare out and down instead of up. Ford cars will be lower in the future—possibly down to a bare 52 in. high by 1961. "But we're not going to get the public to crawl into a car and lie on their bellies to drive it," says Walker. "We try to work with the public; we don't try to push them. If something doesn't look right to the buyer, it isn't right. You can't fool people with a lot of frills on automobiles."