Albrecht von Goertz and the BMW 507

He grew up on the family estate at Brunkensen, near Hanover, the second son of an old noble family; his father was an army officer and his mother the daughter of a wealthy Frankfurt banker. Cars had held him since he was five or six, BMW's profile of 2004 says. He left school at 18, shortly before his final examinations, and in 1933 began an apprenticeship with the Deutsche Bank in Hamburg, moving after 18 months to Helbert Wagg & Co. in London.

BMW's profile says he never warmed to banking and decided in 1935 to leave Europe; he applied for an American visa and sailed in the autumn of 1936. Der Spiegel, in 2011, gave another reason: his mother was Jewish, he counted in Nazi Germany as half-Jewish, and he could expect serious trouble there.⁠source 1​source 4​source 2

New York came first, with jobs washing cars at an air service and in an aero-engine factory, then Los Angeles and its hot-rod builders. From 1938 he had a small garage with a showroom there, where he chopped Ford Model A and Model B cars, and in 1939, at 25, he built the first car of his own design on a Mercury chassis: the Paragon, a two-door coupé with covered rear wheels and unusual rear side windows, shown for several weeks at that year's World's Fair in San Francisco. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the US Army, five years on the Pacific front by BMW's account, and Der Spiegel adds that by then he had become an American citizen.⁠source 1​source 2​source 3

Back in New York after the war, staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, he parked the Paragon behind a customised Lincoln Continental. He got out to look at the Lincoln, its driver got out to look at the Paragon, and the driver was Raymond Loewy; BMW and Der Spiegel both tell it that way. Loewy helped him into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then made him a junior designer in his Studebaker department, where, in BMW's words of 2006, "Goertz and a colleague designed the successful facelift of the Studebaker Champion - the so-called 'bullet nose'". After two and a half years they parted, and BMW's magazine, telling Goertz's story in 2004, gives Loewy a parting line:

In English, translated: "You'll never be a real designer. See that you marry a rich woman." Goertz worked next for Carl Otto and then Norman Bel Geddes, drew cars for a New York magazine, and in 1953 opened his own office, Goertz Industrial Design, Inc., in New York. His first German client was Hohner, for accordions and harmonicas for the American market.

After the 501 and the V8 502, BMW wanted a luxury sports car to win it a place in America, the only market, BMW's profile says, where cars at that price could be sold at all. Max Hoffman, its importer in New York, was the link. Industrial Design's profile of him in 1959 has Hoffman telling him he had taken BMW on as a client but that its car as then designed would not sell in America, and suggesting he send BMW some sketches; Der Spiegel has Hoffman, who knew of Munich's trouble with the shape, encouraging an acquaintance from New York to try. His designs were taken up, and he worked for BMW for two and a half years, Industrial Design says.

He started from the chassis of the 502 3.2 Super, shortened by 35.5 cm (14 in), and the 503, for which he built on Kurt Bredschneider's preliminary work, soon joined the 507 on his drawing board. The grille nearly sank the project. BMW's managers held, the 2004 profile says, that "ein BMW ohne vertikale Niere, wie man sie vom 328 kennt, sei kein BMW" (translated: a BMW without an upright kidney grille like the 328's was no BMW); Der Spiegel wrote in 2011 that only an outsider could have laid the kidney flat and stretched it so wide that it was hardly recognisable.

Both cars were ready for Frankfurt less than a year after the contracts were signed, and days after the premiere Hanns Grewenig, BMW's sales director, sent him a telegram in New York:

In English, translated: "The 507 is the star of the show! Congratulations!"⁠source 1​source 3​source 2​source 4

His work for BMW ended in 1957, BMW says; Der Spiegel also records sketches and models he made for it of a four-seat Isetta and a mid-sized car. Sports Cars Illustrated, testing a 507 in December 1959, wrote of him:

Porsche, by BMW's account, had him design a successor to the 356, which stayed a prototype after "Dr. Porsche" called it "ein sehr schönes Auto, aber ein Goertz, kein Porsche" (a very beautiful car, but a Goertz, not a Porsche). BMW's list of his designs runs from an Agfa camera of 1955–60, Rowenta irons and Mont Blanc pens to SABA radios and televisions, a Rolodex and Puma sportswear of 1983–87, and Der Spiegel names an anniversary grand piano for Steinway as his last work.⁠source 1​source 2​source 10

BMW's profile says he went to Japan on impulse in 1962 and, after several visits, signed with Nissan. Nissan's own letter to him of 1980, as Japanese Nostalgic Car reproduced it in 2009, says it retained him from 1963 to 1965 as a design consultant, advising "on the basic methods of styling a general sports car", and that he was the sole design consultant on a two-litre sports car that Nissan was trying to develop with Yamaha, which was not built.

BMW, in 2004 and 2006, credits him with the Datsun Silvia and the Datsun 240Z; Motor Sport in 1987 had him producing "the distinctive profile of the Datsun 240Z coupe", and Der Spiegel (2011) says he designed the Fairlady prototype that became the 240Z. The same letter gives the 240Z to Nissan's staff:

Motor Sport wrote in 2007 that "contrary to popular belief, the 240Z wasn't penned by a German aristocrat", naming Yutaka Katayama as the man now widely held to be behind its outline, and in 2010 gave much of the final shape to Akio Yoshida and Kumeo Tamura. The dispute between Goertz and Nissan ended in 1980: amicably, Der Spiegel says; with a letter drafted to head off the lawsuit he was threatening, in Japanese Nostalgic Car's account; and with his day in court, in Motor Sport's of 2007.

For the Silvia, BMW and Motor Sport (2007) say he styled it, Motor Sport (2010) that he had a hand in it "if only on a peripheral level", and Japanese Nostalgic Car calls the link tenuous; Nissan's letter does not name it. Hemmings, citing Wanda James's Driving from Japan, says the Toyota 2000GT came out of that Yamaha project: Nissan had dropped it by the time the prototype was ready in 1965, Yamaha offered the car to Toyota, and Toyota had its designer Satoru Nozaki finish the shape; Japanese Nostalgic Car gives the design to Nozaki.⁠source 1​source 6​source 5​source 2​source 11​source 12​source 13​source 14

BMW's profile of 2004 has him returning to the family estate at Brunkensen in 1989, at 75; BMW's notice of his death says in the 1990s. Early in 1996 he set up the Albrecht-Graf-Goertz-Stiftung for young designers, on 29 February 2000 he was awarded the Federal Republic's Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse (Cross of Merit, First Class), and he spent his 90th birthday, on 12 January 2004, at BMW Mobile Tradition in Munich. He died in October 2006, aged 92. The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg held his papers in 2011, Der Spiegel wrote, and showed "Made in USA – Design von Albrecht Graf Goertz" until 27 March 2011. Der Spiegel's profile of him that January recorded that he drove BMW M3s into old age.⁠source 1​source 4​source 2