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Iacocca claims that before he took Dale Carnegie courses at age 25, he was a terrible speechmaker. Nowadays in public, and often in private, he seems more a crackling stand-up monologuist than a sober corporate spokesman, a sort of Rodney Dangerfield who gets all the respect in the world, or George C. Scott's Patton turned happy and unthreatening. "I gotta tell ya," Iacocca told a wined-and-dined gathering of stock-market analysts in Detroit earlier this month, "with our $2.4 billion in profits last year, they gave me a great big bonus. Really, it's almost obscene." (The bonus, to be made public soon, was about $500,000.) Asked at a press conference a few days earlier why he lays so much blame on Toyotas and Nissans for the U.S.-Japan trade deficit, he snapped back with his own questions: "Whadya want me to talk about? Tomato puree? Rutabagas?"
A slight Daffy Duck lisp comes and goes, and provides an affecting touch of vulnerability. He works the audience, improvising. On some occasions he will begin slowly, reading straight from a prepared typescript. But then, eager to give his measured words emphasis, he starts his right hand stirring the air in tight counterclockwise loops. And before long, like one of his new turbocharged cars, he revs up and zooms off, quoting himself, zigzagging between '60s idiom ("flip out," "bummer") and mild profanity, tossing away irreverent asides like empty beer cans. Hyperbole comes naturally, and repeatedly: to the analysts in Detroit, he said Chrysler's admittedly successful mini-van is "the hottest new product . . . in your lifetimes." Says Douglas Fraser: "I'm a hip shooter. I'll admit it. But Lee, Lee is a hip shooter deluxe."
So, Lee, uh, what about economic policy? "Where's Dave Stockman?" he shoots back, expecting no answer, then providing plenty of his own. "Every time he tells the truth he gets in trouble. He gives them the hard facts. 'Shoot the messenger!' they're yelling. Don Regan, why talk about him? He's not my favorite, but that's beside the point. He sold the President the idea that the deficit has nothing to do with interest rates. So I've stricken him off. I don't listen to him or I'm liable to get mixed up on Economics 101, O.K.? So who's in charge of economic policy? Who are these people?"
Iacocca talks nonstop, like the salesman he is. If not for the humor and the regular flashes of common sense, his declamations would be rants. When Iacocca gets going, which is usual, he pauses only when he runs out of breath. He is in such a rush to say so many things that he cannot always be bothered to find the mot juste: if guys is his trademark noun, helluva is Iacocca's favorite modifier.