A Spunky Tycoon Turned Superstar

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From the Keller Building to the design dome is only a quarter-mile, but a general rides, as Iacocca did one recent afternoon in the back of a black Chrysler Fifth Avenue. At the styling dome, six subordinates awaited him, two clutching clipboards and pencils. Iacocca had come to decide how he wants several new cars to look. One seductive prototype parked in the dome will be manufactured beginning in 1988 as a co-production of Chrysler and Maserati, the Italian high-performance carmaker. Iacocca stands in one place, arms folded, studying the maroon convertible as it rotates slowly on a turntable. "I like the chrome," he announces. An aide scribbles a note. Chrysler's Maserati makes a half-turn. "I want better-looking wheel covers than this," the boss tells them. Clipboards rise. The hubcaps go. Iacocca has been at Chrysler for six years and five months. The first half of his time there was infamously miserable. There are some noteworthy errors from that dark era. "Selling our realty company was a goddam mistake--excuse me, a big mistake," he says. The second half of his Chrysler reign, on the other hand, has been rollicking. The minivan is a hit. Bigger cars, with higher profit margins, are selling well. "Americans are falling in love with big cars again," Iacocca explains, "and with gas at a dollar a gallon, what the hell, why not?" Chrysler profits last year, $2.4 billion, were higher than those of the previous 60 years put together. (Ford's were $2.9 billion last year, GM's $4.5 billion.) Of the laid-off workers, 41,000 have been rehired. Iacocca last month had the company give a $500 bonus to all 100,000 employees. The morning he announced that Valentine's Day gift, Peggy Johnson remembers, "he was like a kid at Christmas. He couldn't wait."

It almost seems like Detroit's go-go days again. And some of the resonances from the old times seem ironic. "In many ways," reckons a member of the Ford family, "Iacocca and Henry Ford are alike." Iacocca, for instance, can be an unreasonably terrifying boss. Says one chewed-out executive: "He's vitriolic and explosive." Ford had Iacocca do his dirty work; former Chrysler executives say that Iacocca has relied on Gerald Greenwald, his vice chairman and suave heir apparent, to deliver the bad news. Iacocca's definition of management by consensus is revealing. "Consensus," he says, "is when we have a discussion. They tell me what they think. Then I decide."

For most of his life, Iacocca says frankly, his politics have been a function of his class. "When we were poor," he writes in the book, "we were Democrats. But when times were good, we were Republicans." As recently as the 1970s he called himself a Republican, and two years ago he was approached about the job of Transportation Secretary by the Reagan Administration. "I'd happily serve a President on either side to run economic policy," he says. "I would like to be the economic guy."

But Chrysler's bad times have firmly shoved him over toward the Democratic Party, and the prickly free-enterprise purity of the Reagan Administration has kept him there. He is a Democrat, isn't he? "Yeah, I guess I am," Iacocca told TIME, "when you put it that way--straight Democrat versus Republican. The Democrats today are more pragmatic, not so ideological."