Park this elegant two-door on a concours lawn and most onlookers will guess Italian thoroughbred long before they guess Jaguar. The flowing fenders, the tall greenhouse, the subtle Jet Age fins out back, none of it shouts Coventry. Yet underneath that hand-formed aluminum skin beats the heart of one of Britain's great sports cars, and it is about to cross the block in Indiana.
The story starts in 1955, when Jaguar quietly handed out a handful of bare rolling chassis from its freshly launched XK140 coupe to a select group of European coachbuilders. Just ten left the factory in that form, and four of them landed at Turin's legendary Carrozzeria Ghia. Ghia turned its in-house stylist Giovanni Savonuzzi loose on the project, and what he sketched was a fully bespoke alloy body, long of hood, glassy of cabin, and finished with those signature tail fins. The result wore a name that still confuses people at car shows today: the Jaguar XK140 SE Ghia.
This particular car is the fourth and final example Ghia built, making it the bookend of an already tiny run. New, it was delivered through Los Angeles distributor Hornburg to R.W. Martin of La Jolla, California. Martin held onto it before selling it to Gower Champion, the Tony Award-winning Broadway director and actor, who reportedly enjoyed it for the better part of a decade.
Then, in 1967, the Jaguar found its most famous keeper. Ricardo Montalbán, the actor who would go on to play the enigmatic Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island and spend 13 years as the silky-voiced pitchman extolling the Chrysler Cordoba's "rich Corinthian leather," bought the car and was photographed with it all over Los Angeles. Friends say the appeal for Montalbán was simple: nobody could ever figure out what he was driving.
Exactly how long Montalbán kept it isn't documented, but by the early 1990s the XK140 had joined Don Williams' celebrated Blackhawk Collection in Danville, California. It received a full ground-up restoration during that era and earned invitations to the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in both 1992 and 1996. The car resurfaced publicly in August 2022 at RM Sotheby's Monterey sale, where it changed hands for $335,000.
Now it belongs to the secretive M Group of Burlington, Washington, part of a high-profile 41-car stable, and it heads to Mecum's massive Indy 2026 auction in Indianapolis on May 16 as one of the headline lots. The Smiths odometer reads a believable 59,929 miles, and the sale includes a Jaguar Heritage Trust Production Record Trace Certificate confirming how the car left the factory.
Mechanically, the Ghia cars benefited from the upgrades that came when the XK140 replaced the XK120 in 1955. That meant a 3.4-liter inline-six tuned to 210 horsepower, good for roughly 125 mph flat out and a 0-60 mph sprint of about 8.4 seconds, genuinely quick numbers for the mid-1950s. A four-speed manual sends the power rearward. Because Ghia swapped the standard steel body for aluminum, this example is thought to be even livelier, shedding as much as 220 pounds. Upgraded brakes and rack-and-pinion steering, in place of the original recirculating-ball setup, tightened up the way it drives.
Spotting the Jaguar DNA takes a trained eye. There's a stylized "growler" badge on the nose, chrome Jaguar script on the trunk lid, and three-eared knock-off spinners on the chrome wire wheels. Look closely and the outline of the standard XK140's grille hides within the center of Ghia's own grille design. The car still wears its original yellow Marchal headlamps, while the air intake on the hood is believed to be a 1960s addition. Inside, the restored cabin pairs tan leather with brown wool carpeting trimmed in matching tan leather piping, and the engine bay is as crisp as the day it rolled out of the Blackhawk shop.
It's being offered with no reserve, which makes it one of the more intriguing question marks on the docket. Mecum doesn't publish estimates for no-reserve lots, but given that one of four Ghia-bodied Jaguars with two award-winning celebrity owners and a Pebble Beach history doesn't come along often, a result in the $400,000 to $500,000 range would surprise no one. Whatever it brings, the next owner inherits a one-of-four piece of European coachbuilding from the golden age, and a car that, true to Montalbán's delight, almost nobody will recognize.
For more on where the collector market is heading, see our look at the collector cars buyers are quietly moving away from and why collector truck values continue to outperform expectations. And for another celebrity-owned classic on offer, check out Jason Newsted's 32-years-owned 1969 Plymouth Road Runner convertible.
