For some people, any pink Cadillac is reason enough to take notice, but this 1957 Sedan de Ville has an unusual story to tell. It was allegedly purchased by Elvis, and this short-lived “Mountain Laurel” color later became the first version of Mary Kay Pink, the color used for the pink Cadillacs of Mary Kay Cosmetics.
How I came upon this car was rather roundabout. I was looking through the 1957 Cadillac data book for some detail related to Rich and Patrick’s Vintage Photos post about Frank Kent Cadillac in Fort Worth, Texas. I was mildly amused to note that one of the interior combinations offered on the De Ville in 1957 included black “Corinthian pattern nylon” (rich, Corinthian nylon?) combined with “Mountain Laurel” leather.
Curious, I did an image search to see what this combination looked like and found that Mountain Laurel — which Cadillac offered for only two years, 1956 and 1957 — was a pleasant light pink, less lurid than some of the aftermarket pink paint jobs I’ve seen on late ’50s Cadillacs over the years.
To me, the real standout was the interior.
I don’t know about any of you, but when it comes to luxury car interiors of the ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, I tend to be especially fond of anything that looks like a fancy frosted cake, which the Mountain Laurel leather and black Corinthian nylon combination definitely does.
If this were in a bakery window, they’d charge $8 a slice for it.
This black-roofed Model 6239D Series 62 Sedan de Ville (the De Ville was still a Series 62 sub-series at this point) sold at Mecum Kissimmee in January 2018. It was nicely restored and seemingly in good condition, but the consignor’s big sales pitch was that the car’s original owner was (allegedly) Elvis Presley. I say “allegedly” because Mecum was obliged to say the seller had no documentation from Graceland or the Presley estate to confirm that Elvis had ever owned the car, just a letter from Elvis’s cousin’s wife. Elvis bought a lot of Cadillacs over the years, so who knows.
That claim didn’t seem to arouse any great bidding frenzy in Kissimmee. The Sedan de Ville eventually sold for $38,500, a good but not spectacular price. However, the same car then popped up at a Worldwide Auctioneers event in November 2019 — in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of all places — where the seller held out despite bidding that reached as high as $230,000 USD. So, SOMEONE was apparently convinced that this was a genuine Elvis car and ought to command a high premium.
Even if Elvis did originally buy this car, Mountain Laurel wasn’t a unique one-off special order color. It was a factory option, although it was dropped after 1957, and there was no close equivalent for 1958. Between 1959 and 1963, Cadillac offered a number of other pink or mauve shades, but they weren’t exactly the same thing.
A few years later, however, a Dallas businesswoman named Mary Kay Ash decided she wanted a pink luxury sedan. In September 1963, Ash had started her own cosmetics company, a multilevel marketing program originally called Beauty by Mary Kay. Its signature color was what Ash described as a “delicate shade of pink,” and she wanted her car to be the same color. After being turned away by a local Lincoln dealer who condescendingly told her to come back with her husband, Ash ended up at Frank Kent Motor Co. in Fort Worth, where she told the salesman she wanted a De Ville matching her company’s eye and lip palette.
Ash repeated this story many, many times, and some of the details became amorphous. In her 1981 memoir, Mary Kay, she said she bought her first pink Cadillac in 1966, but by the 1990s, she’d amended that to “the autumn of 1968.” Sometimes, she said the car was a Coupe de Ville, at other times a Sedan de Ville. Either way, Ash always insisted that the salesman tried hard to talk her out of special ordering it in pink, exclaiming, “When that car gets here, you are not going to like it!” and warning her that it would be expensive to have it repainted. However, Ash was insistent, and Cadillac eventually determined that its discontinued 1956–1957 Mountain Laurel color was a close match for the Mary Kay palette.
They say you should never let facts stand in the way of a good story, but for what it’s worth, I have my doubts about this one. As I’ve previously explained, Cadillac had established procedures for special ordering non-standard colors, including discontinued paint colors from past model years — this was definitely not the first or the last time someone handed a Cadillac salesperson a tube of lipstick or a swatch of fabric and asked them to match it! Naturally, there was an extra charge for this (probably on the order of $135–$140 for a non-metallic color like Mountain Laurel), and the 1969 Cadillac data book warned that their latest high gloss acrylic paints might not always match older colors “formulated with now obsolete pigments.” However, such requests were by no means unusual for Cadillac, and Mountain Laurel wasn’t even a particularly outrageous color — Cadillac’s factory color choices for 1969 included the vivid mauve pictured above, which could be pared with eggplant-like mauve leather.
In any case, Ash got her pink Cadillac, which made a big splash. She recalled in 1981:
That car was a sensation! Everybody loved it, and Directors kept asking me, “Can we have a pink Cadillac as our top prize?” Richard [Ash’s son] looked at the figures and decided we could. The next year, our top Sales Director received a pink Cadillac. The second year, we presented five, the third year ten, then twenty. Then we opened it up to the plateau system, which is what I prefer above all. That meant that everybody who achieved a certain production level received the use of a pink Cadillac.
Mary Kay later supplemented the pink Cadillacs with other, cheaper GM cars lower-tier salespeople could earn, including a pink Buick Regal and a pink Pontiac Grand Prix. This amounted to a healthy chunk of fleet business, so GM was happy to make this shade of pink a Mary Kay exclusive. “Actually, we give General Motors such a large annual order that they now officially call our color ‘Mary Kay Pink,'” Ash told The Saturday Evening Post. (Later variations were a bit different than the original hue.)
Over the years, there have been quite a few of these Mary Kay “career cars,” although the number of older survivors that are still Mary Kay Pink is very small. The cars aren’t purchased outright, but leased on a two-year co-op basis (with the company picking up part or all of the lease payments, depending on the salesperson’s earnings). The lease agreements require the selling dealers to repaint returned cars in some other color prior to resale, so car that are still pink were sold privately off-lease, like this rough-around-the-edges 1983 Coupe de Ville.
The Allanté sometimes showed up in Mary Kay Pink as well. I found two different survivors that are still pink.
Other than the reuse of the color, what does that have to do with the pink Sedan de Ville once purportedly owned by Elvis Presley? In the immortal words of Dark Helmet from Spaceballs, “Absolutely nothing!” However, all this is a reminder of how much of the collector car market is less about the car itself than about coming up with some compelling story or narrative hook. It’s the “George Washington Slept Here” school of auto sales, from cars supposedly owned by celebrities to ex-Mary Kay Career Cars to a bizarre Bring a Trailer listing I found a while back for a 1997 Plymouth Neon Expresso sedan autographed by Green Bay Packers players as part of some casino contest.
I guess I understand the impulse, but I’m of a mind that a Mountain Laurel De Ville can be its own reward — regardless of who might have owned or ridden in it way back when.
Related Reading
Vintage Photos Of A Cadillac Dealership At The Height of 1957 Luxury (by Rich Baron)
Car Show Capsule: 1957 Cadillac Coupe de Ville – Oh! Maybellene (by Tatra87)
1957 Cadillac With 15 MPH Bumper And Continental Kit – A Rolling Statement (by Paul N)
COAL #6: 1957 Cadillac Sedan de Ville (by Jose Delgadillo)
1960s Cadillac Special Orders: Non-Standard Color And Trim Options By “Special Request” (by me)
My brother had one of these mid 50s models, bought when it was about 10 years old. It was a unique color, probably a cross between light yellow and light brown. A color chart found online indicates it might have been Driftwood. He couldn’t afford to keep it running in the mid 60s — dual exhaust system, biggest tire size. Love to see them.
Seems my first comment was eaten by Akismet, here’s another try
I also love the “fancy frosy cake” interiors of old; I had never though of them that way, but the nickname is certainly fitting!
Mountain Laurel looks very elegant both inside and out; the contrast with the black and chromes is gorgeous in the interior
Maddening to think that at the time there was a large choice of colors and interior materials, even on lower priced cars. Today not only is the choice extremely limited, but some colors or combinations that are formally available require extremely long lead times, and are in fact discouraged.
Programs like Manufaktur from Mercedes carry outrageous costs – compare to Cadillac’s Special Orders which for a very reasonable fee would allow one a myriad of options
57 Cadillac or 57 Imperial?
I M P E R I A L
A 57 Cadillac is probably at the bottom of my list of 50s Cadillacs I might want to adopt, but that interior would zoom this car right to the head of the line! Just wow. There are few things that excite me about an old car more than a pristine original interior. Those are the things that are hardest (or at least the most expensive) to recreate in a restoration. This one is simply sublime!
It has long been my understanding that Elvis Presley often bought cars as gifts for other people in his orbit of friends and family, so a car may have been “owned” by Elvis in a technical way. Frank Sinatra sometimes did the same thing, but he favored Chryslers.
The only “proof” of Elvis involvement is a letter from his cousin’s wife Patsy Andersen-Presley, which worked at Graceland. I also would imagine that the Elvis connection comes from him gifting the car, perhaps even to her.
Seems crazy that someone was expecting for it to sell for more than 230K$.. but then, there are those who think the king did not die in 1977 so who knows?
He definitely did, that part isn’t in dispute. I saw a story the other day about how he went into a Denver Lincoln-Mercury dealership late one night in the early ’70s and started buying Marks for the local cops. So, it’s plausible, but not verified, except for the letter from his cousin’s wife.
Gorgeous car in that color. Its just amazing the vast difference in GM styling over the years, like a 57 Belair compared to this caddy.. Back when styling meant so much..!! Here’s a pic of two cars on a trailer that sat for years at a junkyard entrance north of me. More recently they have disappeared perhaps under restoration somewhere…
What a gorgeous subtle shade of warm pink. Pesto Bismol pink is perhaps my least favorite of all colors but this shade would rank near the best of the best, go figure. Paired with black that interior is just stunning, and combined with GMs beautiful but dangerous heavy use of chrome interior accents interiors don’t get any better!
I think there are relatively few surviving pink late 1950s Cadillacs that have not been claimed by one seller or another to have been “Elvis’ Cadillac”. After pink Cadillacs, there are kind of ratty 1960s and early 1970s airplanes…quite a few of those too. Fortunately, I guess there are still top-dollar buyers for the Cadillacs at least in Saudi Arabia.
The black roof really sets this one off .
The interior is eye catching as well .
Nice car and good back story .
-Nate
Very nice color combination indeed. Really goes well with the ’57 styling.
Young Gen-Xer/ old Millenial here. I need to go against the grain and call out the ’57 for being absolutely hideous to my eye. And it’s not the color. The sheet metal is a disaster. Overwrought. Lines and folds everywhere with no flow or cohesion, front and rear pillar cantilevered in opposite directions, stubby little back doors that tie in poorly to the rest of the car. Nothing blends. Nothing goes together. It’s hodgepodge of shapes The best I can say is they did a masterful job bringing the exterior color into the cabin.
The ’59 Coupe is almost worse. The exaggerated tailfins are cartoonish. I shake my head at the frenetic design swings Hyundai/Kia are making now, but they’ve got nothing on the 50’s jet age absurdity.
The good looking Cadillac? The Allante.
I’ll see myself out now…
The Allante? Dear God, the proportions of that poor orphan thing were particularly awful….the short, short, short wheelbase, the chunky but too-small wheels shod with chunky, to big tires, the yard-and-a-half rear overhang and the profile of the awkward roof guaranteed the Allante’s lack of success. Even now, pristine Allantes are worth less than Fleetwood Broughams of it’s day.
Say what you want about 50s cars, but they sure had character! Look at the lines of the 1957 car. It is all different shapes and colours. It seems a bit over the top and by 1961, the craziness had mostly ended. That said, Cadillac had no trouble selling their befinned monsters
The ’57 thru ’59 are too over the top for me, but this one is beautifully restored. For the fifties Caddies, I prefer the ’54 thru ’56 models. I also love the 1960…
But I have to agree with JPC on this one… That interior is sublime. Although to my eyes, the nylon seating surfaces appear a deep chocolate ganache to me rather than black, if we are to keep with the frosted cake analogy, which is apropos here.
This is a pretty cartoonist car, and I think may literally be the inspiration for some cars in cartoons – especially ones lampooning late-50s chrome barges. But I do like the color, and the interior. Although it falls short of greatness, there’s still a fun aspect to it, and it’s a worthy collector. It’s the kind of car that’s perfect for someone fun to pop out of; you can imagine Rodney Dangerfield or The Monkees turning up in one. On the other hand, if John Wayne or Lee Marvin turned up in one, everyone would ask how they got stuck driving the wife’s car…
This shade of pink is beautiful and contrasts well with the black on the roof and in the interior.
Here are mountain laurel flowers — they bloom around the end of May here in central Virginia. The pink color is quite subtle, more noticeable on the buds. The plant is an evergreen and is widespread in the wild here.
Pink Mountain Laurel in New Jersey is quite distinguishable from the white. What I appreciate is the history of Mary Kay Ash. What an entrepreneur! One of my sisters-in-law had a Mary Kay Pink Cadillac – a 1996, that had been repainted. However, we could see some of the pink.
So iconic. Like the interior. Does not call to me though. That “69 Eldo” sure does. Seem to recall, “Mary Kay” switched to berry, color “Pontiac’s”, near “1990”.
Over the years, they did have a number of “Career Cars” that were not Mary Kay Pink, but it was not so much switching to a different color as adding additional cars people could earn short of the pink Cadillac.
This is also true for the short-lived Rocky Mountain Life Insurance Company fleet of 1969 Mercury Cougars that were awarded to their top salesmen. https://www.rmlcougar.com/
Reportedly, while they were on the production line in Wixom painted #WT9083 Ford Fleet Purple, the DSO manager for the southeastern states happened to visit the plant, looked them over and ordered an additional 10 Cougars in that same color, including a couple of convertibles for select Lincoln-Mercury dealers in his sales district to display in their showrooms.
This is my favorite Cadillacs from the fin era. Got too wild after that and the ’58 was downright ugly.
I think it is the reverse cant fins that are the best styling feature to me. Didn’t like the pointy ones that followed. However, I did like the sleeker early sixties Cadillacs too.
I’ve seen a Mary Kay Cadillac SRX so they still do it. On the ex celebrity line, I knew someone who got a Mercedes 560SL from a radio station in Portland that was supposedly owned by Madonna.The ex-celebrity car I would want to own would be Rowan Atkinson’s scratch and dent McLaren F1 (he crashed it twice and it was repaired both times).