 What began in the late 1940s as a tailfin inspired by Harley Earl’s love of aircraft design became GM stylist David Holl’s signature design in 1959 and the ultimate in early postwar Cadillac styling.
It’s funny how the passage of half a century alters our memories of the past. Take American cars from 1959 for example. People look at them today and say, “Wow! What magnificent automobiles.” They get excited over every compound curve of the fenders; rave over the massive chromed grilles and body trim, the “D” cup bumper bombs, and sky-high tailfins. Pretty exciting stuff compared to today’s serious, mostly form-follows-function aerodynamics, and rounded or razor-edged body lines. We see a 1959 Cadillac and “reminisce” about the good old days when cars had character and designers worked from their hearts and imaginations rather than a government mandated safety, emissions, and specifications manifest and a styling playbook that limits what can and cannot be done. Certainly a lot of the best American and European cars of the 21st century still have pizzazz and head-turning style, but the majority follow a pattern, a sameness, a commonness intended to appeal to the masses, and with that comes a loss of individuality, something all cars, domestic or foreign, were exuding in extremes 50 years ago. No one will argue that point. But we forget how poorly most of them handled, particularly American cars, how much gas they consumed, and how we discarded them as Old Junkers when the next new thing came along in the 1960s. That’s the beauty of looking back. Selective memory; we only recall the good parts. But let’s face it; if you’re old enough to remember 1959, you know that the world was a different place. It is where our generation’s history is grounded, and whatever changes have come, however different things are today, we have that image of what once was. The cars of 1959 are very much a real part of that memory.
Chrome, Fins, and Unbridled Ambition
American cars produced in the late 1950s were the most ostentatious to ever come from Detroit’s styling studios. The big chrome look, which had started tastefully in 1954, had reached absurd proportions by 1958, and the majority of it was coming out of General Motors. That people backed away from GM models in the late 1950s wasn’t particularly the fault of General Motors’ obsession with chrome and trim, but more something we can still relate to half a century later; the US economy had reached a dismal low by 1958, plunging the nation into the worst recession in years. Yes, history does repeat itself. Every American automaker was suffering by the late 1950s, but General Motors, being the largest, just seemed to be bearing the brunt of it, although back then GM still accounted for nearly half of all new car sales in America!
It may well have been the need to attract customers into showroom that compelled Harley Earl, Bill Mitchell and GM’s stylists to breech the boundaries of sensible proportions and create designs which almost mocked the outrageousness of the company’s Motorama Dream Cars. But at the heart of it, America had an appetite for this, just not the money. The Motorama shows had opened our minds to the possibilities, and the consuming public expected nothing less. What they didn’t expect was not being able to afford it.
 At Cadillac it began in 1957 with the new Eldorado Brougham. Virtually hand-built, only 400 were produced in 1957 and 304 the following year. The Brougham was Cadillac’s retort to the Lincoln Continental Mk II, nothing short of a passion play for Cadillac which spent more money building the cars than they could sell them for! If it was just to make a point, it was a point well taken. The Eldorado Brougham was the most luxurious automobile of 1957 and 1958. It drew most of its exterior styling from GM’s Orleans Motorama show car. The pillarless four-door concept was a favorite of Harley Earl, as was his design for the stainless steel top, a feature that would become an Eldorado trademark for decades to come.
The driving force behind America’s lust for tailfins may have begun with Harley Earl’s 1948 Cadillac models but it was nurtured to maturity in the early 1950s by Virgil Exner and Chrysler. Exner’s design for the 1957 Chryslers caught GM and Ford completely off guard and hastened GM’s rush to make taller, bolder tailfins that culminated in 1959 at Cadillac, but lasted into the early 1960s at Chrysler. (Chrysler archives)
When 1959 rolled around GM was trying not only to compete with Ford and Chrysler, but with itself. And for Cadillac that meant raising the bar, figuratively and literally. It began with an all new Eldorado Brougham. The car was completely redesigned and fitted with handcrafted bodywork contracted out to Carrozzeria Pininfarina in Italy. With the body and interior being completed half way around the world, the production was extremely limited, only 99 were built with an average price of $13,074 making it one of the most expensive cars sold in America.
The new Italian-bodied Eldorado Brougham was just the beginning. Cadillac surprised everyone with a totally redesigned model lineup for 1959. Cadillac had had a complete makeover in 1957, but even more impressive, in terms of industry standing, was that the all-new 1959 models were to be a one-year-only series, as everything would be redesigned again for 1960, making 1959 one of the most exclusive model years in Cadillac history.
The 1959 Cadillacs would represent the most opulent statement in chrome and fins ever, the height of the tailfin, both figuratively and in terms of popularity. Not only was the restyled top-of-the-line Eldorado Biarritz an exercise in outrageous excesses, but so was the entire 1959 lineup. Every Cadillac (except for the Italian-bodied Eldorado Brougham which forecasted the look of 1960’s models) had massive chrome-edged fins rearing up from just behind the doors, sweeping skyward and dissected midway by huge twin bullet taillight lenses virtually at eye level to most other drivers sitting in their cars! They were so large that Cadillac owners often mistook their own tailfins for another vehicle in the rear view mirror. Only 1,320 of the high-finned 1959 Eldorado convertibles were built, selling for a base price of $7,401. The Eldorado closed out the 1950s as the flashiest American car of the era.
As a companion, Cadillac had the Eldorado Seville two-door hardtop, also at a lofty $7,401. The good news was that you didn’t have to spend over seven grand to have the Eldorado Biarritz look; the 1959 Series 62 convertible was remarkably similar in appearance, as was the Coupe de Ville to the Seville. The difference in price, however, was significant, with the Series 62 convertible starting at $5,455 and the Coupe de Ville at $5,252. The 1959 Cadillacs remain the most unique and easily identified American cars of the 20th century. [The same can also be said for the 1963 Corvette split window coupe].
Faced with stiffer competition from Ford and Chrysler, more so the latter with Virgil Exner heading the styling department, General Motors tried to redesign all five automotive lines between 1957 and 1959, and this heroic effort strained the company’s resources to the limit. But if the public wanted tailfins and big chrome grilles, then tailfins and big chrome grilles they would have. At Chevrolet, where fins were about to take a different direction, everything seemed to be falling into place for chief stylist Claire MacKichan until photographs of the all-new 1959 models reached the desk of Chevrolet boss Ed Cole. He has seen the cars in development, but as the photos passed through his hands he began to wonder if GM might had stepped too far ahead of public tastes. He dispatched a small fleet of 1959 Chevrolets on a series of public showings, what we call a consumer clinic today. The comments that came back weren’t encouraging. In Dearborn, photos of the 1959 Chevy models also caught the attention of Ford Division’s new chief, Robert McNamara, a rank and file conservative who had already made a name for himself by killing off the two-passenger Thunderbird and precipitating the resignation of legendary stylist Franklin Q. Hershey. McNamara had opted to follow a relatively traditional path for 1959 and feared that Chevrolet’s flamboyant horizontal tailfins, huge rear windows and exotic front end designs would trounce Ford’s middle-of-the-road styling. As it turned out, his fears were unwarranted. Whereas Ford would later boast about the Gold Medal for Exceptional Styling that it had won at the 1959 Brussels World’s Fair, Chevrolet’s 1959 models would be the target of humorists and cartoonists like Charles Addams, whose famous New Yorker lampoon pictured a small boy running from the family garage crying, “Mama, something’s eating my bicycle!”
The 1959 Chevy’s conference table-sized decklid, 32 cubic foot trunk and batwing fins prompted Mechanix Illustrated’s bombastic road tester Tom McCahill to claim it was “big enough to land a Piper Cub.”
 Before the new models were even unveiled, GM brass could see the handwriting on the wall. The horizontal fins and huge rear window, combined with a very busy grille and enough chrome to make driving toward the sun hazardous to oncoming traffic, were just too much. With an 80.8 inch width, 119 inch wheelbase and 210.9 inch overall length, the 1959s looked out of proportion. The one saving grace was the Impala convertible. With the massive roofline and huge backlight gone, the car was toned down enough to make the horizontal tailfins seem credible. Actually, pretty cool looking by 1950’s standards.
Over at the Buick and Pontiac Divisions, GM styling was going its separate ways with the 1959 Buick models showing fins that were canted, somewhere between the Cadillac’s high rise vertical approach and Chevy’s 90 degree slant, while Pontiac designers split the difference with a distinctive V-form fin. Oldsmobile combined a look that was somewhere between Buick and Pontiac. Of the three it is this author’s opinion that Pontiac had the best overall look. Pictured are a 1959 Buick Electra (red car) and a 1959 Pontiac Bonneville. (GM Archives)
When the 1959 models started arriving at dealers, the traditional barrage of customers anxious to “trade up” suddenly became hesitant. This was the third “brand new” Chevy in as many years and one that had already been barbed by the press and run over by the competition. From introduction day, Chevrolet waged a showroom battle against Ford, offering incentives to help move the 1959 models. Ultimately the cars from Dearborn edged out Chevrolet with a final tally of 1,468,451 Fords to 1,416,076 Chevrolets. Ironically, six years later, Chevrolet’s general sales manager Lawrence Averill noted that while the 1959 model had not been a great seller when new, it eventually became a sought-after used car! In fact, compared to most GM cars built in 1959, the Impala was a pretty attractive set of wheels.
Chrysler had its share of hits and misses in the 1950s, but like GM was not afraid to take some interesting risks. The first had come immediately after the end of WWII with the wood-sided Town & Country sedans and convertibles. Next Chrysler dared to build a high-performance family car, a banker’s hot rod, the original Chrysler 300, and then race it, and win. The Letter Cars of the 1950s were to become the styling flagship not only for Chrysler but for American automotive styling well into the decade. It was Chrysler and chief stylist Virgil Exner’s boldness that drove GM to build its most stylistically outstanding (for better or worse) cars of the era in 1959.
The 1959 Chryslers were at the tail end of Exner’s resurrection of the company’s image. The 300E coupe and convertible were the epitome of the 1950’s models despite the fact that only 550 coupes and 140 convertibles were manufactured that year, a recession year, that only saw 69,411 Chryslers of all types sold.
It is also worthy of note that Chrysler was the first to have a coachbuilt luxury car bodied in Italy. The 1959 Ghia Crown Imperial, bodied by Carrozzeria Ghia (a styling partner since the early 1950s) marked the third year for this handcrafted model, which not only rivaled the Cadillac in styling but in price – an average of $16,000, about $3,000 more than the Cadillac Eldorado Brougham.
Foreign Wheels on American Roads
Foreign makes had been big business for American importers prior to WWII, particularly Mercedes-Benz, which would be one of the first to make a comeback to our shores in the postwar era. But there were a number of new cars beginning to appear in US showrooms by the early 1950s, cars with which most Americans were unfamiliar, like Porsche, Ferrari, and Volkswagen, three stellar marques today, but virtually brand new in the postwar Fifties.
By 1959 Mercedes-Benz had reestablished itself in the US market with an endless series of unforgettable cars like the 300 Sc, 300 SL Gullwing and Roadster, and by the late 1950s the very elegant 220 S and SE series. The design of the new 220 S and SE clearly departed from all past styling cues traditional to Daimler-Benz, save for the upright grille and three-pointed star hood ornament.
The SE was introduced in September 1958, two years into the production of the 220 S, and offered the advantage of a fuel-injected engine. The SE was the most advanced of Mercedes’ new round-body models. Virtually identical to the 220 S, it was equipped with intermittent mechanical fuel injection and a new camshaft. A Bosch two-plunger fuel injection pump rode on the left side of the engine and was driven from the cam chain. A large cast-alloy air plenum and intake pipes fed air to the intake ports while the use of manifold injection, rather than port injection, allowed high-pressure fuel to be infused through a calibrated jet placed upstream of the manifold and cylinder head junction. The new fuel-injected six produced 130 horsepower, increased torque by five percent over the S, and fuel efficiency by eight percent. Even though it was a six, the 220 SE equaled or out performed most American V8s and achieved better mileage.
Compared to Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari was a new comer in the 1950s, though company founder Enzo Ferrari had a long established reputation throughout Italy and Europe as both a constructor and former head of Alfa Romeo’s championship racing team. By the early 1950s Ferrari had established himself as a builder of both racecars and road cars. In America, Ferraris were highly regarded as the finest high-performance sports cars made. The company even used model designations like Superamerica and Spyder California. The latter became one of the most desirable imported sports cars of 1959.
Back in 1957, Ferrari had commenced series production of its first convertibles, the 250 GT Cabriolets designed by Pininfarina and first shown at the 1957 Geneva Motor Show. The GT Cabriolet was not intended for competition, although with a 240-horsepower Colombo V12 under the hood, there wasn’t much aside from suspension, tuning, and a very plush interior that separated the car from those built for competition. It was perhaps the ideal compromise between the two extremes for the late 1950s, but compromises were not what American buyers or US importer Luigi Chinetti wanted. He was looking for a more aggressively styled GT convertible to sell. Chinetti’s was not the only voice beckoning Enzo to send Pininfarina back to the drawing board and his engineers to task on a revised chassis and suspension. Ferrari’s West Coast distributor, race driver John von Neumann also agreed that the 250 GT Cabriolet was not the kind of Ferrari his customers wanted. He told Enzo that an open car with the characteristics of the lighter Berlinettas would be very popular in the United States. Ferrari complied and gave approval for a special series to be built; the 250 GT Spyder California, which went into limited production in May 1958 and was built through 1960 on the long wheelbase GT Berlinetta chassis.
The revised coachwork, penned by Pininfarina, was once again manufactured at Modena in the workshops of Scaglietti. The cars were produced in two series, the long wheelbase, of which fewer than fifty were built, and the short wheelbase, a lighter weight, steel-and-aluminum-bodied version, introduced in 1960 and built through 1963. The total was again around fifty examples.
Among a handful that were pressed into competition was one entered by Luigi Chinetti’s North American Racing Team and driven by Bob Grossman and Ferdinand Tavano to a fifth overall finish in the 1959 Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans. Several Spyder Californias were also fitted with competition engines and, upon special order, supplied with all-aluminum bodies. The cars were otherwise made of steel, with aluminum doors and deck lids.
Among the most notable successes for a competition Spyder California was the ninth place overall and GT class win of Richie Ginther and Howard Hively in the 12 Hours of Sebring. Another 250 GT Spyder California, this one driven by Giorgio Scarlatti and Carlo Abate, captured the GT class at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1960.
The LWB Spyder California was produced in three series. About seven cars were built before the new LWB 250 GT Berlinetta engine and chassis were utilized. It is estimated that twenty-seven second-series cars were produced between the end of 1958 and the end of 1959. Most of the competition versions came out of this production run. The third-series cars were fitted with the outside plug V12 engine, developed from the 250 Testa Rossa, and equipped for the first time with disc brakes. Minor styling changes by Pininfarina to update the cars included reshaping of the rear fenders to reduce their width, a new rear deck, and new one-piece taillights. The Spyder California, in either wheelbase, was one of the first Ferraris to be described as a “driver’s car,” a car that was capable of exceptional speed and handling yet comfortable and luxurious enough for daily driving.
 Porsche was another name that Americans had little knowledge of in the early postwar Fifties, that is until US imported Max Hoffman put the small, rear-engined sports cars in the spotlight at Watkins Glen. In the 1950s Hoffman was building a power base comprised of the leading German makes, and after his chance meeting with Ferdinand Porsche in 1950, he believed that the new, sporty, VW-powered 356 Coupes and Cabriolets would be a hit in the American market. As in most things regarding automobiles, Max Hoffman was absolutely right. He took delivery of three 356 Porsches in 1950, two of which he sold to famed American sportsman Briggs Cunningham. Hoffman took the third to the Concours d’Elegance at Watkins Glen in New York, where the Porsche won the trophy for “The Most Interesting Car.” With its rear-mounted, horizontally opposed, air-cooled four-cylinder engine and aerodynamic body styling, the 356 was nothing else if not interesting!
At Porsche there has always been a fine line between race car and road car. In 1959 Zuffenhausen rolled out the most luxurious of all 356 Carrera models, the 1600 GS. Only 47 were built, 12 were Cabriolets and of those only two were Hardtop Cabriolets like the example shown. Agreeably a contradiction of terms, the unique pair of Carrera Cabriolets was fitted with a removable hardtop painted in a contrasting color. (Photographed on location at the Greystone Mansion, Beverley Hills, California)
With Hoffman’s exclusive clientele, the 356 Coupes and Cabriolets he had imported in 1950 and 1951 found their way into the hands of wealthy would-be American racers, and by the end of the 1951 racing season a small but enthusiastic body of Porsche owners had been created who were successfully campaigning 356 Pre-A models in production sports car classes across the country. In 1952 Hoffman returned to Watkins Glen driving a new 356 Pre-A Cabriolet and proudly walked off with the award for the “Best Looking Car”, a marked improvement from “Most Interesting” only two years earlier. Max Hoffman was selling 356s as quickly as Porsche could deliver them.
By 1959 Porsche was offering its improved 356A models and after 1955 a competition-based four-cam engine as an option. These cars were visually distinguished by gold Carrera script on the front fenders and rear deck lid. The four-cammers also displayed dual exhaust pipes, and a rousing increase in performance compared to the pushrod 356s. In 1956-57 the Carrera models were further differentiated from the pushrod models with the addition of twin grilles on the engine cover.
Beneath the otherwise inconspicuous 356A bodywork, the Carreras were equipped with modified suspensions utilizing stronger stabilizers, more vertical shock mounts, improved track rods, a hydraulic steering damper, wider track and larger 15-inch wheels. Although the new 356A Carrera was a heavier car, by about 100 pounds, it had more responsive handling than standard models and could exceed 125mph.
In 1959 Porsche introduced the most opulent of all 356A Carrera models, the 1600 GS. Weighing 2100 pounds, somewhat heavier than its predecessor, the 1959 cars were equipped with the improved 115-horsepower 692/2 four-cam plain bearing engines. The 1959 model year also marked a turning point in Porsche history. The exclusive relationship with Max Hoffman that had begun in 1950 came to an end when Porsche took control of its exports to the United States by establishing Porsche of America Corporation. The new company imported cars through six individual distributors across the country, including Hoffman who remained Porsche’s east coast distributor for another five years.
For many American sports car enthusiasts the postwar Fifties is best remembered by a little two-seater known only by the initials, MG. The cars had first started arriving on our shores in number after WWII. The first were small, narrow, very British prewar based two-seaters with right-hand drive. In short order that changed, as American demand increased exponentially into the new decade. The early 1930s styled MG TC, TD, and short-lived TF models finally gave way to an all-new design designed MGA. This was the car that earned the respect of automakers on both sides of the pond with record sales and a dedicated owner body, especially in the United States.
The MGA was introduced on September 22, 1955 at the Frankfurt Auto Show. It literally stunned the automotive world. It was the first all-new design from MG in more than 25 years. It became the most popular sports car ever built up to that time and remained in production until June 1962. Over a period of seven years MG sold more than 100,000 MGAs. In July of 1958 MG added a second model, the Twin-Cam, a high-performance version of the MGA. The Twin-Cam was produced though June 1960 and only 2,111 were built. They became highly desirable in SCCA racing in 1958 and 1959, as the high-spirited sports models proved better suited to the racetrack than city driving.
Americans had, for the time, one of the greatest varieties of makes and models in history; from practical, reasonably-priced family cars, to luxury cars, exclusive, limited editions limousines, and sports cars built both here and abroad. The old Goldilocks principle might well be applied; there weren’t too few cars, or too many from which to choose, there were just enough to make 1959 a perfect year for automotive enthusiasts, no matter what their taste or budget.  |
