The Dinosaur Hunter

(6 of 10)

Back in the U.S., Romney spent a year at the University of Utah before heading for Washington in search of a job—and Lenore, who had moved there when her father took a Government job. Romney was hired by Massachusetts' Democratic Senator David I. Walsh as a speedwriter. When his speedwriting turned out to lack speed, Walsh kept him on anyway, put him to work keeping track of legislative matters.

When Lenore Lafount moved to New York to study acting, he spent all his weekends there. In 1930 he went to work as a lobbyist for Aluminum Co. of America; when Lenore got an offer from Hollywood (she was a bit player), he convinced Alcoa that he would be more valuable in their West Coast office. "I kept thinking," he says, "that some movie hero would get her." Lenore thought she wanted a career, but George's persistence was overpowering. Just as M-G-M offered her a three-year contract, he persuaded her to marry him instead, took her back to Washington as his wife. Says Romney: "It was my greatest selling achievement."

Short Trips. At Alcoa, Romney was frustrated by lack of opportunity to advance through the layers of executives. "As near as I could figure it," he says, "I would have been about go by the time I rose to the top." When the Automobile Manufacturers Association offered him a job as manager of its Detroit office, he jumped at the chance.

Romney's first big job for the A.M.A. was a study of car use, and it shaped his whole thinking about the role of the auto. The overriding finding was that the U.S. auto was being used less and less for long trips, more and more for short, essential trips, such as going to church, to work, to stores. Romney saw its meaning immediately: an inevitable trend toward more functional, basic transportation.

As director of the Automotive Council for War Production during World War II, Romney worked up a cooperative system that enabled companies to share one another's production advances. At war's end he performed one of his biggest services by persuading Government officials to cut short cumbersome contract-termination procedures that might have tied up auto plants for months. Instead, automakers began rolling out new cars almost immediately after war's end, thus averting heavy unemployment.

Out of Gas. After the war, Romney went to work for Nash-Kelvinator as assistant to President George Mason. The company, which had started in 1902 with Founder Thomas Jeffrey's Rambler, a one-cylinder runabout, was bought in 1916 by Charles Nash, president of General Motors, who introduced the first Nash in 1917. As solid and conservative as its uninspiring cars, Nash had for years been a profitable but never a spectacular company.

Romney picked Nash over other jobs because George Mason, like Romney, believed in the future of the smaller car. The company had started developing one before World War II, was ready to introduce a new, compact Rambler. Also in the works: the Nash Metropolitan (wheelbase: 85 in.).