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Labor had nicknamed aloof, reserved A. P. Sloan "the undertaker." Some of his associates call him "Silent Sloan." But not to his face; they always address him as "Mr." His immense wealth ($43,000,000 in G.M. stock alone) has somehow connected him in the public mind with Wall Street financiers.
Actually, A.P. Sloan is probably the most functional, frill-less piece of human machinery in the U.S. industry hierarchy. He is also close to being its top industrial statesman. Once an associate likened him to a bearing, "self-lubricating, smooth, eliminates friction and carries the load."
At 70, he carries the load of running G.M. with remarkable ease. He still dresses with a touch of the dandy. In his tie, he usually wears a pearl stick pin. A silk handkerchief always cascades from his breast pocket. Usually he gets to his office about 9:30 a.m., goes through his business day in a lope. In winter, he drives from his 14-room apartment on Fifth Avenue; in summer he takes the train into Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station from his 25 acres near Great Neck, L.I., rides the subway to his office.
He ticks off the day's conferences, which always include an hour's long-distance call to Detroit, with metronomic precision.
In his conference chair he squirms, gestures, listens closely (he is slightly deaf), continuously shifts his small, well-shod feet, which usually end up perched on the table. The afternoon clicks by with the same production-line regularity. By 5:30 p.m., he is ready to leave for home with a bulging brief case under his arm. Usually, after dinner with his wife, he works for a few hours. He is in bed by 10 p.m. Two weeks of each month he usually spends in Detroit, hardly stirring out of the grey walls of G.M.'s building there. (He even sleeps in a suite in it.)
The running of G.M. is his work, hobby and dissipation. He does not smoke, takes only an occasional cocktail and has never played golf or any other sport. Sports, Mr. Sloan firmly believes, are an unprofitable waste of a man's time.
Once, when friends insisted that a man in his position should own a yacht, he bought a 236-ft. boat for $1,000,000. But he rarely used it, in 1941 finally sold it to the U.S. Maritime Commission for the Navy for $175,000. When a friend asked him how things were aboard, he gave a businesslike reply. Said he: "The crew of 43 is eating regularly and appears to be healthy."
Completely absorbed in G.M., he talks about it fluently and well, to small groups, in a voice that sometimes has a trace of a Brooklyn accent and a tendency to curl out of the side of his mouth. He reads widely, but except for an occasional detective story, only on economic or technical matters. He has developed the knack of boiling his own economic ideas down to clean, bare bones. Sample: "The whole objective of industry should be to reduce prices. That's what produces employment and expands business." The Way Up. Unlike many another G.M. bigwig, Mr. Sloan did not drive himself to the top by his own supercharger.
He had some help along the way from his father, who had a tea & coffee importing business in Brooklyn, prosperous enough to allow the Sloans to have two or three servants in the home most of the time.