King of the road

It's the 100th birthday of the Cadillac. Innovative, eccentric, brilliant – and mythologised by everyone from Elvis to Bruce Springsteen – the Caddy is the ultimate dream machine, says Dylan Jones

As vintage American cars go, you don't get any better than a Cadillac. Sure, there are your Mustangs, your Buicks and your little red Corvettes, but for those who know, those who care, a Cadillac is the money.

This year, the Cadillac celebrates its 100th birthday. In 1902, Henry Leland bought Henry Ford's secondary car company and renamed it Cadillac, after the man who founded Detroit, in 1701, a French soldier called Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac. Almost from the start, the company was winning awards for automotive innovation. In 1908, General Motors bought Cadillac, and in 1912, it introduced electric self-starters, which made car-driving hugely more popular, especially among women. The legend really begins in 1927 when Cadillac launched the LaSalle. It was the first car to be designed by a stylist rather than a technician. That stylist was Harley Earl, who was making a name for himself as an innovative car designer.

Earl is the man who made Cadillac what it is, who made it the most sought-after car in America. His finest hour was in 1948, when the iconic beast we know today came into being. One day during the Second World War, Earl, who was then head of "art and colour" at General Motors, saw something that would help him virtually to invent 20th-century car styling. It was an aeroplane, the Lockheed twin-engined P-38 Lightning.

The aircraft so excited him that it spurred him on to create something that would shape American culture for much of the next 20 years. Harley Earl beheld the P-38's design and then conceived the tailfin, a styling detail first seen on Earl's 1948 Cadillac.

Unsurprisingly, the car became wildly popular and set the standard for the American automobile. As Earl put it, "It gave [the consumer] an extra receipt for their money in the form of visible prestige marking for an expensive car." The fins provided "graceful bulk", something he believed to be characteristic of American taste. In many ways, Earl's 1948 Cadillac – and every Cadillac that followed – was the mark of the nouveaux riches, yet it changed the automobile for ever.

Last summer, when Detroit celebrated its 300th birthday, a statue of Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac was unveiled near the spot where he stepped ashore, claiming the land for France. That is ironic, seeing that Cadillac has been described as a scoundrel, an impudent liar, a conman extraordinaire and a shameless charlatan who invented a lah-di-dah name to conceal his humble origins.

The car he helped create was certainly lah-di-dah. As Earl's designs kept successfully seducing the American public, his cars became even more outlandish, and in the early 1950s they even developed breasts. These were bullet-shaped protuberances above the front bumpers – non-functional, expensive-to-repair pieces of chrome known in the styling business as "bombs", or "Dagmars" (in honour of an extremely busty blonde bombshell on late-night television).

Every new Cadillac had to outdo and outgrow the previous model. Each car had acres of chrome and dozens of winking lights, like a mobile jukebox. The 1959 Caddy had lethally sharp-looking tail fins which had sprouted rocket-shaped tail-lights that seemed to be clinging precariously to their sides.

The Cadillac is a prime example of what the American design critic Thomas Hine calls "Populuxe", a Fifties aesthetic that fuses populism with luxury. As he says himself, "The decade was one of America's great shopping sprees: never before were so many people able to acquire so many things, and never before was there such a choice." It was the era of the newly created world of mass suburbia, where everything family-owned – the house, the car, the furniture – was provisional: even if it didn't wear out, one always had the hope of being able to move up the ladder to something better. "There were so many new things to buy – a power mower, a more modern dinette set, a washing machine with a window through which you could see the wash water turn a disgusting grey, a family room, a two-toned refrigerator, a charcoal grill, and, of course, televisions." Or a new Jet Age Cadillac, each year, every year.

In America in the Fifties, suburbia determined popular culture, and in some part of his being, every suburban American male wanted a Cadillac. This was the decade of the car, when America took to the roads with a vengeance. And even though television was desperately trying to unite the country, the amount of contact Americans had with other people was steadily diminishing as they began to drive everywhere, avoiding cities and exploiting the highways.

Since the Fifties, and the dawn of rock'n'roll, the Cadillac has become a fundamental feature of the American pop song, an easily understood icon of success or retro cool. Whether it's Chuck Berry using one to extemporise the thrill of the American dream, or Don Henley seeing one covered with a Deadhead sticker, the Cadillac is the most totemic car in pop. Joe Strummer eulogised it, as did Marc Bolan and Aretha Franklin. And Elvis bought them almost as fast as he swallowed diet pills. By the time of his death in 1977 he owned more than 100, not including the pink Caddy he bought for his mother. His personal favourite bore the number plate 1-ELVIS.

One man who has helped fuel the Caddy's iconic image is Bruce Springsteen, whose entire oeuvre seems to be based on the ordinary American's ability, desire, and constitutional right to pursue the open road. Automobile imagery was crucial to his early records – which were mostly romantic parables of sex and freedom – and the heroes were dreamers and schemers who lingered on the fringes of society, down in "Jungleland", "Thunder Road", "Greasy Lake" or the "rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert". In his time, Springsteen has eulogised Dodges, Buicks, Fords and Chevys (even Subarus, believe it or not), but he really loves Caddys. There's "Billy's down by the railroad track sittin' low in the backseat of his Cadillac" ("New York City Serenade"), "...the keys to your daddy's Cadillac" ("Johnny Bye-Bye"), "Hey girl you wanna ride in daddy's Cadillac" ("Seaside Bar Song"), "Pink Cadillac" and "Cadillac Ranch".

It is this sort of obsession which has helped the Cadillac retain its iconic status among a new generation of consumers and collectors, when other marques – Chrysler, Plymouth, Buick, etc – have been allowed to splutter, break down and get rusty.

These days, of course, the Cadillac doesn't look much different from a Lexus, in fact that's doing a disservice to the Lexus. The chrome and fins are long gone, as have the sci-fi swimming-pool interiors. The 2002 Cadillac is just another American car – not a bad American car by any stretch of the imagination, but not a car that fires the imagination. No, you have to look back to the Fifties and Sixties for that.

The Cadillac wasn't just an iconic cultural artefact in the States; its appeal was global. To British youth of the post-war era, the Cadillac was the antithesis of all things domestic – if you were embarking on a journey to the promised land, then you simply had to make the trip in a Caddy. Palm trees and sunshine, James Dean and neon, the American dream was nothing if you weren't sitting up front in a pastel-painted Cadillac, the radio blaring out Buddy Holly.

And so it is today, as proved by the success of Dream Cars, the Redhill-based car company which specialises in leasing and selling vintage American cars. It currently has 50 cars in stock – all American, all from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies – with 30 of them for sale, and 20 for hire (weddings, films, photo sessions etc). And it can't get enough Cadillacs. "For years muscle cars have been the most sought-after," says the co-owner of Dream Cars, Stewart Homan. "But suddenly everyone wants a Cadillac, particularly the convertibles. They're experiencing something of a renaissance, and whereas we used to be able to pick up a second-hand Cadillac in Los Angeles for about $7,000 [£4,500], now you won't get much change from $35,000 [£22,600], if you're lucky." Dream Cars currently has 12 Cadillacs for sale, and Stewart reckons they'll all be gone in a month.

But not any old Cadillac will do. David Rosen, who is a partner in the London property company Pilcher Hershman, has long been a collector of vintage American cars, and in his time has owned a 1965 Mustang V8 convertible and a 1963 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu, two of the greatest cars ever built. His dream, however, is to own a 1964 Cadillac Coupe DeVille hardtop with white-wall tyres. "The great thing about the DeVille is that although it's as big as a boat, it only has two doors, so it feels like a sports car," he says. "It is the most amazing looking thing you'll ever see. It's the ultimate in luxury, and feels like your proverbial Miami beachfront apartment, complete with plastic covering on the seats."

Rosen has other favourite Caddys, including the 1965 Fleetwood Special sedan, the 1966 Seville convertible and the 1976 Eldorado drophead convertible ("The last of the great Cadillacs"), although practically any car that Cadillac produced between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Seventies will fire him up. "Along with the Lincoln, the Cadillac is the definitive American car," he says. "It is quintessentially American, like Coca-Cola or the Marlboro Man. What a Rolls-Royce is to an Englishman, so a Cadillac is to an American. Harley Earl was a genius, which is why anyone who truly cares about car design still wants a Cadillac."

That is why last weekend I drove a Cadillac for the first time, and although I was driving around London's Hyde Park instead of Southern California, it was still something of a trip. The model I drove was one of the best that Dream Cars has ever had, a car that Stewart Homan refuses to sell, a two-tone mint green 1954 Series '62 V8 convertible with white-wall tyres, power steering, power seats, a vacuum aerial, self-seeking radio and folding bench seats. This model has a mint-green carpet, a tinted windscreen, all its original chrome, and California plates. It's more than 20ft long, nearly seven-feet wide, and is worth in the region of £30,000 (twice as much as a hard-top because convertibles only accounted for a tenth of the production run). Its petrol cap is also hidden in the left-hand-side tail-light: legend has it that when Harley Earl was inspecting some new designs by his production team, he noticed that the petrol cap was missing. When he asked where it was, a savvy team-member – knowing that they'd forgotten to include one – told Earl it was secreted in the tail-light. And so they had to build it that way, a design quirk that lasted for a decade.

And the drive itself is magnificent, reminiscent of an old Mercedes. In fact it feels as though you're steering a boat, as the Cadillac (like a lot of old German cars) has what is called "same-day steering" – i.e. having turned the steering wheel, sometime later the same day you will eventually feel the car turning too. However, this is just one of the ways in which you feel magisterial when driving one: the best American cars have always been about monolithic elegance rather than speed, and this is the '54 Caddy all over.

"I wouldn't part with this car for the world," says Stewart Homan, expressing the sentiments of everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Chuck Berry before him. "Not only is it a classic American convertible but it's one of the great forgotten Cadillacs. It's an amazingly underrated car, and just might be one of the greatest Cadillacs ever."

Which, as any aficionado will tell you, is really saying something.

Dylan Jones is the editor of 'GQ' magazine

Dream Cars: 01737 765050; www.dreamcars.co.uk