VIEWPOINTS : Huckster Image Belies Another Side of Iacocca : Some Insiders Dispute TV Persona, Calling Chrysler Chairman Insecure

It was early in the do-or-die year of 1980 at Chrysler Corp. Lee Iacocca had been chairman for only a short time, and as one of his first acts he had cut his salary to $1 a year. Cash from the $1.5-billion loan guarantee he had pressured out of Congress would not begin to roll in until June. The current Chrysler cars were languishing in the dealer showrooms. The economical new front-wheel K-cars were not yet ready.

Chrysler was a high-wire act teetering over the abyss of bankruptcy. The press had already consigned the company past its demise. The papers were making Chrysler, the 14th-largest industrial corporation in the world, smell like a corpse twisting in the wind.

Just then, Iacocca received great news from that other paisan of note, Frank Sinatra. The crooner knew Iacocca only casually, but one evening Sinatra had been sitting with Bill Fine, the former chairman of Bonwit Teller, talking about Lee’s dilemma, and the singer had pronounced his blessing upon the auto man. “I hope he makes it,” Sinatra said. He offered his services to help out and Fine passed the word.

It was like the coming of the Marines, and Iacocca’s advertising people practically expired in their delight. It had taken them more than a year to convince Iacocca that he should put his ego on the line in public by agreeing to make television commercials for Chrysler, even though the chairman often thought his company wouldn’t survive. Now there just was no way for him to dodge the TV role any longer, and the ad people, having landed their reluctant star, wondered what sort of production would bring out the best in him on the screen.

To their credit, they wanted nothing phony. Surely Iacocca would perform best if they simply let him play his favorite role, himself. But how?

For some time, Iacocca had permitted cameramen with hand-held equipment to photograph him in action at Chrysler meetings. The advertising people liked what they saw, and they were ecstatic when they viewed films of the chairman testifying calmly, colorfully, wittily, always in command before the congressional committee weighing the federal loan guarantee legislation. That was it! He was a natural. Totally casual, natural commercials were the answer. Let Iacocca be Iacocca. And who could be a more natural partner for a commercial than Sinatra?

It would be the summit of selling power, a love feast.

Elated, Leo-Arthur Kelmenson of the Kenyon & Eckhardt ad agency, a loyal Iacocca crony, rushed to Palm Springs to confer with Sinatra about the details. Sinatra’s public relations people were already unrolling press releases to herald the singer’s rescue mission. His business manager, the normally implacable Mickey Rudin, waved the project ahead with unaccustomed informality. No papers were necessary.

“You don’t want a contract?” asked Kelmenson, nonplussed.

“We’ll set it up later,” said Rudin.

“Lee, if you’re working for a dollar, I will, too,” Sinatra had said, according to the account in Iacocca’s autobiography. In fact, the singer got some Chrysler stock options that eventually became very valuable. For the present, he received a free two-year “loaner” of a station wagon and even this doubtful blessing worked out nicely. Chrysler had a terrible reputation for quality, yet Sinatra’s car happened to serve him well (which was more than Gregory Peck could claim for the Imperial that Chrysler bestowed on him. Peck, who also helped the company, found that his car kept breaking down on the Los Angeles freeways).

And so Iacocca’s new partnership with Sinatra was indeed a love feast, but only until the filming of the commercial began in the Chrysler suite of Iacocca’s favorite New York hotel, the Waldorf Towers.

The chairman had been briefed that the ad people wanted to film a completely natural conversation between the two men. The encounter was to come off with no script, no preparation at all. According to this creative notion, the film crew would capture the spontaneous sparks of the two nimble minds accustomed to turning on vast audiences. Just let these two giants toss the verbal ball around and the commercial would all but drop into the can--so went the theory. For the paltry few seconds needed for the actual commercial, the ad experts would only have to cull out the choice highlights of the bon mots that were sure to fly through the air. It was a natural.

It didn’t work.

“These two egos walked in and Lee was upset right away,” says Bill Winn, an eyewitness and one of Iacocca’s oldest buddies. Winn was merely uncomfortable during the filming, most of the other participants were “petrified” by the palpable tension, Winn recalls.

“Lee had no preparation and Sinatra worked with different ground rules. He had cue cards.”

Like sturdy troopers, the two lions wrestled for half a day but brought forth no roars, even though some cue cards were finally scribbled for Iacocca in the course of the session.

“I’m a man in business myself,” Sinatra intoned into the camera. Iacocca rambled, “We have what the car buyer wants.” And then, not altogether convincingly, “We’re in business to stay.”

Both men looked overweight and grim.

“It was embarrassing,” remembers John Morrissey, a Kenyon & Eckhardt account executive at the time and another Iacocca loyalist. “We put it on the air just once. They looked like two Italian grocers.”

“Lee needs a script,” says Kelmenson dryly. A script, yes, plus much reassurance to overcome Iacocca’s reserve--inhibitions that he hides so well, that are seemingly so out of character, that even his friends sometimes forget them. Sometimes, but not often.

“What you see is not what you get,” said Donald N. Frey. I nodded agreement. We were talking about Iacocca, with whom Frey had worked closely for the better part of a decade.

I had, by then, been chatting with the Chrysler chairman’s colleagues, friends, relatives, schoolmates and teachers for months, and as my search for the real Iacocca progressed, I found myself drawn into comparing their reminiscences with his own recollections and confessions as he shaped them for public viewing in “Iacocca: An Autobiography” (more than 2.6 million copies sold in hardback plus 3 million more in soft covers--an unprecedented record for the story of a businessman).

The discrepancies between the Iacocca version and the testimony of my eyewitnesses were puzzling and confirmed what Don Frey had just been telling me about the two Iacoccas: the qualities the public perceives in him as against his character as insiders know it.

Clearly more than one Iacocca had to exist, for what I had studied in The Book (as I came to think of the Iacocca megacreation) and what I had seen of the man on television did not match up too well with what I was hearing from the chairman’s own crowd, many of them intimates who admire and even adore him.

Divergencies between perception and reality are an intriguing phenomenon to discover in anyone, but in the case of Lee Iacocca I find the differences spellbinding. After all, just about everybody in the United States “knows” this man. His “name recognition”--the pollsters’ technical term for the percentage of people who can identify someone correctly--registers at an astounding 92.7% (70% is considered very high). Furthermore, most of the people (78%) who know Iacocca also say they like him; they buy him as he advertises himself in The Book and on TV.

As I pressed on in my search for the real person, it became clear that the differences between Iacocca as he appears from the distance and Iacocca as I was beginning to see him from up close are, well, spectacular, and the discrepancies unfold in specific contrasts that I found quite unexpected and unpredictable.

I had perceived the author of The Book--and the huckster strutting across my television screen--as a loud, brash, emotive trumpeter. According to the “Iacoccalytes” of my recent acquaintance, the man is, in fact, rather shy and inhibited--something of a wallflower, aloof with people he doesn’t know too well and all but frozen stiff with strangers.

Though he comes across publicly as a smooth, hyperarticulate pitchman, he actually suffers from an acute case of social insecurity. Thus his apparent love affair with television, for example, is imaginary, a myth. Although Iacocca’s statute was created by TV, he detests the medium. It unsettles him, even in the company of Frank Sinatra.

While the polls certify him as a national hero figure, his image in his hometown, Detroit, has long been mixed at best. At least within the automobile industry his reputation is dirtied by nasty talk about his ruthlessness, his ego, his temper and his ethics. Some of the stories are no doubt the ferment of sour grapes. Some are disturbing, for good reason.

Even physically Iacocca is not what he appears to be. To look at him on TV, to listen to the managerial voice that rings in confident cadence through the pages of The Book, he is a strapping superman, exuding fitness and strength. Yet according to the Iacoccalytes, he is a hypochondriac who feels forever cold and is riddled with symptoms that he feels certain are wracking his body.

I was stunned and confused by these conflicting impressions because, like the people responding to the pollsters, I had been led to believe that Iacocca is pure, uncomplicated energy, all brains and guts. Perhaps unfairly I felt a little cheated when I became exposed to the more complex underside of the Iacocca personality, like a child learning there is no Santa Claus. I didn’t seem to know the man everybody knows and likes.

From “The Unknown Iacocca” by Peter H. Wyden copyright 1987 by Peter H. Wyden Inc. to be published by William Morrow & Co. Inc.