People · Bill Mitchell · Prologue

A Fish Off Bimini

The Bahamas — deep-sea waters off Bimini

The line goes tight, and Bill Mitchell — GM's Vice President of Design, a man who has spent his professional life obsessing over the exact curvature of a fender — forgets, for a while, that he is anything other than a man with a fishing rod. What comes up out of the water is a shortfin mako shark: dense muscle wrapped in skin that fades, without a single hard edge, from a deep blue-gray spine down through gray to a pale, almost luminous belly. Mitchell has caught plenty of fish. He has never been quite this transfixed by one.

Most people mount a trophy fish and move on with their lives. Mitchell has the shark mounted, and then has it shipped — not to a den, not to an office wall, but directly into a General Motors design studio. He gathers his paint crew around the actual animal and gives an instruction that must have sounded insane to anyone who hadn't worked for him before: match this. Not approximately. Exactly. The dark spine, the fading gray flanks, the pale underside, reproduced in lacquer on a car that does not yet fully exist.

This is, in miniature, the whole of how Bill Mitchell worked. Harley Earl — the man who hired him, promoted him, and eventually handed him the keys to General Motors' entire design operation — built his career on showmanship and institutional force of will. Mitchell, his student and successor, shared the force of will but layered something else on top of it: an almost obsessive fidelity to natural form, chased down to the exact gradient of a predator's skin. Where Earl asked does it look like something you want?, Mitchell asked a sharper question: does it look inevitable?

The shark would become the Mako Shark show car, then the Mako Shark II, then — filtered through years of studio work — the flared, muscular body of the 1968 Corvette. But that's getting ahead of the story. By the time Mitchell hooked that fish off Bimini, he had already spent a quarter-century inside General Motors, built one Corvette-shaped race car in near-total secrecy, and fought the company's most stubborn engineer to a standstill over a strip of glass in a rear window. To understand why a shark could redirect an entire car company's styling direction, you have to go back to a Buick dealership, and a kid who could draw.