10/15/2008 – 10/16/08
You could say Jim Hailey has the Cadillac of vintage-car collections — because most of the cars in it are Cadillacs.
The queen of the collection, parked in two garages that open onto a shaded brick courtyard at the side of his Santa Fe home, is his most recent purchase: a white 1958 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham with a brushed steel roof. The late Academy Award-winning actress and princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly, bought it for her dad.
She suffered a stroke behind the wheel of her Rover P6 sedan while driving to Monaco on a winding road in 1982, and the car went off the road and slid down a mountainside. She died a day later of her injuries. She was 52.
Hailey found her dad’s Cadillac on the Internet and bought it from a broker in Los Angeles earlier this year. He has since turned down a $190,000 offer for the car. There’s been a resurgence of interest in Cadillacs 25 years and older, Hailey said, particularly in Europe.
“There is so much quality,” Hailey, 38, said of the ‘58. “That car was built without cost in mind. It sold for $13,000, but GM lost $900 on each one. It’s an engineer’s delight.”
Nevertheless, he said, “I can’t stand celebrity cars. I don’t care if Joe Blow owned it; you’re buying the car.” It’s the car that counts, not previous owners.
Cadillac hand-built 704 of the Broughams between 1957 and 1958 — what Hailey calls the “heyday of GM,” when a Cadillac was the Cadillac of luxury cars. His is No. 525. It has 59,000 miles on the odometer.
The car has been repainted once, but the white leather interior is original. The chrome, including plating over the rear wheelwells, gleams as if it just rolled out of the factory on those tires with their thin whitewall strips.
The 6-liter V-8 has three two-barrel carbs under a monstrous air cleaner, covered in sparking chrome, and churns out 335 horsepower. But it’s really not enough to give zoom-zoom to the 5,100-pound Caddy — which is smaller and shorter but up to 700 pounds heavier than regular Cadillacs of the time. Don’t ask about gas mileage.
The Kelly car is one of five Cadillacs in the collection in Santa Fe, which Hailey made his permanent home three years ago. But he travels often to Dallas to oversee his commercial real-estate business and has another collection there in partnership with a longtime friend.
“In buying and selling, you end up in a dealer role without being a dealer,” Hailey said. His theory about the value of older cars is that the more undependable they are, the more they are worth.
For example, he said, a Dodge Viper “has a far better resale value” than a Mercedes SL. “People can’t tolerate being treated nice,” he said. “Mercedes is the best.”
The other head-turner in his Caddy garage is a black-over-red 1976 Eldorado convertible with a 500-cubic-inch V-8 and a mere 15,000 miles. The model was the last American convertible until a revamped Chrysler organization began producing droptops again in the early 1980s.
Nearby, the green 1969 Fleetwood Brougham, with a 472-cubic-inch powerhouse and 55,000 miles on it, is in all original condition. Hailey, an accomplished street racer — that’s another story — said he “runs the hell out of it.”
It’s parked alongside a white 1982 Fleet Brougham d’Elegance with a 5.7-liter diesel engine that has covered 21,000 miles. “GM didn’t know how to build a diesel, but by 1982 they improved it,” Hailey said,
A white 2005 STS with the 4.6-liter Northstar V-8 and 40,000 miles is more of a daily driver and is housed in another garage with the ‘58 and a red 1962 Corvette, top down, with a 327-cubic-inch small-block. A white 1979 Jeep Wagoneer Limited is nearby, for hauling. It, too, looks showroom bright.
It was Hailey’s dad who turned him on to cars. He always had one or two collector cars around their house in West Texas, near Abilene — Corvettes, Mercedes-Benzes, those types. But Cadillac was a mainstay around the Hailey home.
“My dad would buy my mother a 1- or 2-year-old Cadillac every six years,” Hailey said. “So I grew up around Cadillacs.” And he got to know them by driving and, later, restoring them.
He delighted in driving one, a 1976 Seville, a mile down the road to pick up the mail from the box. He was 12.
Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.
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