He maintained homes on L.A.'s Westside and in Indian Wells, Aspen, Colo., Detroit and the Tuscany region of Italy, where he owned a small estate and winery, Villa Nicola, named after his father.
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In retirement, Iacocca joined with the late billionaire Kirk Kerkorian in an abortive effort to take over Chrysler, made an unlikely assortment of investments and went through a second divorce.
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“It’s a hell of a note,” he added, “but I have a feeling I’m going to be remembered only for my TV commercials.” That was how he wanted to be measured, he said at his retirement.
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31, 1992, he had overseen a second and more fundamental turnaround.Ī series of dramatically styled cars and trucks, developed on Iacocca’s watch in radically new ways, made Chrysler the hottest - and most profitable - auto company of the mid-1990s. And sentiment turned against an auto industry that was seen as having mismanaged itself into trouble once again.īut by the time he retired as chairman of Chrysler on Dec.
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Meanwhile, his strident attacks on Japanese trade policy, even as he imported Japanese cars for Chrysler, offended many who saw his speeches as racist and self-serving. Part of the solution was to eliminate thousands more jobs while he collected enormous paychecks, and his image with Democrats and labor suffered. Besides his commercials, he made a cameo appearance on the TV series “Miami Vice” and turned down an offer to host “Saturday Night Live.” Chrysler’s ad agency even test-marketed a commercial starring an Iacocca Muppet bantering with Kermit and Miss Piggy.īy the late 1980s, new problems, some traceable to Iacocca mistakes, threatened Chrysler anew and he came under fire from Wall Street. Iacocca’s name and face turned up so often that he entered pop culture and some wearied of him. Senate from his home state of Pennsylvania. He publicly discouraged talk of the presidency and later turned down an appointment to the U.S. Two phenomenally successful books and Iacocca’s leadership of a money-raising blitz to refurbish the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the mid-1980s further honed his image as a patriot and champion of working people, and prominent Democrats seriously touted him as a candidate for the White House.īut he recognized that his dictatorial and often profane style wasn’t suited for politics. The message hit home as factories closed by the thousands in the 1980s and the nation’s economy seemed to wither in the face of competition from Japan. and Japanese policies that he said were killing American jobs.
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Iacocca exploited his high visibility to attack U.S. “And he was second only to Henry Ford in the amount of publicity he generated.” “He was easily one of the greatest figures in the history of the automobile industry,” said David Lewis, a professor emeritus of business history and Ford expert at the University of Michigan.