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A hand-built, gold-drenched dream car that has spent nearly all of its 73-year existence away from public view is finally getting its moment on the auction block. The one-of-one 1953 Cadillac "Elegante" show car is headed to the auction stage for the first time ever through Kruse Auctions, which will offer the car during its 56th Annual Auburn Auction & Show over Labor Day weekend in Auburn, Indiana.
Long before "customer concept car" became a marketing buzzword, two friends decided to build one themselves. New York commercial artist Harry Birdsall dreamed up a Harley Earl-style luxury coupe that ordinary buyers could actually purchase, and enlisted Long Island contractor and speedboat importer Joe Mascari to help make it real. Birdsall sketched the shape, then handed the design over to fellow New Yorker Albrecht Goertz for refinement, a name that would later become synonymous with the BMW 507 and Datsun 240Z. Mascari's Italian business contacts led the pair to Carrozzeria Rocco Motto, a Turin coachbuilder, who hand-formed the aluminum body around a running chassis salvaged from a burned-out 1953 Cadillac Series 62 convertible.
The finished car, nicknamed "Elegante," is loaded with theatrical details: a hydraulically retractable hardtop, a curved wraparound windshield, a thin Lucite steering wheel with an illuminated hub, and 24-karat gold plating across the headlamp rings, wheel covers, dash, and door panels. Underneath the aluminum skin sits a 331-cubic-inch V-8 pulled from that donor Series 62. All told, the build reportedly took 30 months and roughly $30,000 to complete, at a time when a new Corvette carried a sticker price under $3,000.
That kind of spending paid off in attention. The Elegante was the unquestioned star of the 1955 New York Auto Show, held outdoors at the Cross County Shopping Center in Yonkers, with Birdsall telling reporters he hoped to build a run of ten examples at $20,000 apiece. That plan never materialized, and Birdsall instead drove the car as his personal transportation until his death in 1960. Ownership passed to Mascari, then to fellow speedboat racer Louis Nuta, and eventually to Miami contractor Stan Marks, who kept it for decades under a carport in Coconut Grove, a carport that collapsed on top of the car during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Birdsall's son, custom-car fabricator Richard "Dicky" Birdsall, had tried for years to buy the car back from Marks without success. After Marks passed away in 1990, his widow finally agreed to sell two years later, handing Dicky Birdsall a rusted, storm-damaged project rather than the gleaming showpiece his father had built. The ground-up restoration that followed took 16 years, and the finished car made just its second public appearance ever at the 2014 Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance, where it took home a People's Choice award.
Dicky Birdsall passed away last year, and his family has now decided to let the Elegante go to a new caretaker. John Kruse, founder and chief appraiser of Kruse Auctions, believes it deserves to be seen, describing it as "a global sensation waiting to happen" once a new owner starts showing it.
Because nothing quite like the Elegante has ever come up for public sale, there is no straightforward comp to lean on heading into the Auburn auction. Hagerty's Valuation Tools currently price a numbers-matching 1953 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, the closest production relative to the Elegante's donor chassis, at roughly $146,000 in number-3, or Good, condition, a useful baseline for what a well-kept factory Series 62-based Cadillac commands today. A one-off, coachbuilt show car with Amelia Island pedigree and a design pipeline running through Albrecht Goertz is a different animal entirely, and it is likely to sell well beyond typical Cadillac money once bidders get a look at it in person.
The Elegante will share the Auburn stage with another headline-grabbing one-off, the first publicly available 2026 Shelby GT350/TA, giving this year's sale an unusually strong lineup of unrepeatable machines. For collectors weighing how far bespoke, low-production cars can run past their donor platforms, this recent look at Hagerty Marketplace activity is a good reminder of how wide the gap between asking price and real-world value can get, even for far more common classics. Anyone curious about the everyday market for the Cadillac Series 62 platform the Elegante started life on can get a sense of current values from this no-reserve 1960 Series 62 convertible that resurfaced from Alabama storage, and fans of one-off metal in general may want to keep an eye on this Cannibal Chevrolet IMSA prototype currently chasing a new home.
However the bidding shakes out on September 5, the Elegante's return to public view closes a strange and eventful loop that started with two friends chasing a very expensive dream back in 1953.
