Cadillac Brougham Coupé Speciale "Jacqueline"
Weird Car of the Day #521: 1961 Cadillac Brougham Coupé Speciale "Jacqueline" by Pininfarina - Forever project
At the 1961 Paris Salon, Pininfarina unveiled a Cadillac unlike anything on American roads.
It was enormous but restrained, with no tail fins, little chrome, and a polished stainless-steel roof floating above slender pillars. Inside, its 130-inch wheelbase stretched for just two people. Pininfarina nicknamed it Jacqueline, after America’s glamorous new First Lady.
As is often the case at WCOTD, there was a complication: beneath that beautifully tailored body, it was a bust: no engine, transmission, or working steering. The Jacqueline was a full-scale sales pitch, and Cadillac didn't bite.
Pininfarina needed the work, as the Turin firm had just finished building the bodies for 200 Cadillac Eldorado Broughams in 1959 and 1960. Those cars were hand-finished in Italy on chassis sent over from the United States, then shipped back across the Atlantic.
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(Yes, fellow millennials, just like the far superior Allanté.)
Keep in mind, Pinin Farina, as the company was still known when the arrangement began, was simply the coachbuilder, not the designers. The Brougham’s shape had been created inside General Motors by Chuck Jordan and Dave Holls.
Pininfarina wanted a larger role, and produced a series of proposals intended to convince Cadillac that Italian design could give the marque a new flagship.
Jacqueline was the last, and perhaps the most convincing.
Where contemporary Cadillacs relied on chrome, fins, and visual fireworks, the Jacqueline was unusually clean and ahead of its time. Quad headlights sat at the outer edges of a wide, simple grille. A single curved crease ran along each flank. At the rear, concave wraparound lamps replaced Cadillac’s familiar fins.
It had the same wheelbase as a contemporary Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Yet it seated only two, with fitted luggage space behind the sculpted bucket seats, plus an enormous trunk farther back.
It was an Italian GT enlarged to American scale, or perhaps able to effortlessly move the entire wardrobe of a style icon.
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Its stainless-steel roof recalled the earlier Eldorado Brougham, although the Jacqueline’s was polished rather than brushed. Almost everything else rejected Cadillac convention. Even the crest on its hood omitted the broad "V" normally used to advertise the company’s V8 engine.
Honesty is the best policy, I suppose? Remember: there's no engine…yet.
The 1961 show car’s body sat on a simple tubular frame with basic axles. Its windows were Plexiglas and did not open. The dashboard and steering wheel were Cadillac pieces, but the instruments were dummies and the wheel wasn’t connected to anything.
Instead of being crushed, this unicorn concept remained with Pininfarina for more than 30 years, occasionally emerging from the company museum for exhibitions. It was later sold and passed among European collectors.
Then, someone not named Geppetto decided it should become a real car.
