One reader sent the photo below with no message other than a caption that just read "Rita." This is another one of those cars where the back story is more interesting than the mechanicals; it's a 1953 Cadillac Series 62 specially bodied by Ghia to the order of Prince Aly Khan as a gift for actress Rita Hayworth. It was originally white with gold anodized trim, and the Hayworth-Ghia relationship appears to have lasted longer than the Hayworth-Khan one.
You'd think, just looking at this thing, that it would have to be a one-off, but you'd be wrong.
There was a sister car ordered around the same time by John Perona, the owner of New York's El Morocco night club. Note that in its original form, this car featured a contrasting light blue color in the recessed cove delineated by the bright metal streaks. The quad headlight arrangement was also a harbinger of things to come. The design of the Caddy twins has been credited to Ghia design chief Luigi Segre...
But Segre's design shares the rigorous horizontal emphasis, notchback low-roof proportions, and large round tail lights of Giovanni Savonuzzi's Ghia Supersonics, a limited series of coupe bodies which appeared on a variety of different makes (Fiat 8V, Jaguar, Aston Martin) also starting in 1953. Below is the first one, on a Conrero Alfa 1900 with a unique plexiglass roof, getting ready to crash in the Mille Miglia...
Both Segre and Ghia designer Savonuzzi collaborated on the 1954 Desoto Adventurer II show car with Chysler design chief Virgil Exner. This car, much more on the Cadillac scale than the compact Supersonic, nonetheless shares the Supersonic's flattened oval profile and horizontal ridge running right over the wheels from head to tail lights. Here, however, the plexiglass roof has been traded for a glass window that retracts into the trunk area...
The Ghia Caddy's split rear window may owe something to Mario Boano, who explored the split window theme during his ownership of Ghia and afterwards at his namesake firm, on cars like the Alfa Romeo 1900 below. Together, the three designers established a kind of "Ghia look", and Ghia attempted to interest major league manufacturers in it, hitting the big time once with VW's Karmann-built Ghia, and attaining small-scale production of the Dodge Fire Arrow as the Dual Ghia (both featured in these pages for August 29, 2015). Ghia also produced a run of Imperial limousines for Chrysler from 1957 through '65, but never got any GM production contracts as a result of those two '53 Cadillacs. It would be Pininfarina that would eventually get those jobs, but the cars that emerged are a story for another day.
Photo Credits:
Top: '53 Ghia Cadillac (santafeconcorso.com)
2nd: '53 Ghia Cadillac (carstyling.ru)
3rd: '53 Ghia Supersonic Alfa Romeo (coachbuild.com reproduced in fabwheelsdigest)
4th: '54 Ghia Desoto Adventurer II (hemmings.com)
5th: '55 Boano Alfa Romeo 1900 (Riga Master Workshop @ rmw.lv)
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