Pink Cadillac
Pink Cadillac | General Motors
Bruce Springsteen wrote about a Pink Cadillac but he was actually thinking about the Corvette. The song follows Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally” in using automobile travel as a metaphor for sexual activity, in particular the lyric “I love you for your pink Cadillac”, which was intended to be a veiled reference to a vagina. Springsteen, in fact, vetoed the first attempt by a female singer to release a version of “Pink Cadillac”, that being Bette Midler in 1983. However, “Pink Cadillac” had its highest profile incarnation via an R&B interpretation by Natalie Cole, which became a top10 single in 1988.
Cadillac was formed from the remnants of the Henry Ford Company when Henry Ford departed along with several of his key partners and the company was dissolved. With the intent of liquidating the firm’s assets, Ford’s financial backers, William Murphy and Lemuel Bowen called in engineer Henry M. Leland of Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing Company to appraise the plant and equipment prior to selling them. Instead, Leland persuaded them to continue the automobile business using Leland’s proven 1-cylinder engine. Henry Ford’s departure required a new name, and on August 22, 1902, the company reformed as the Cadillac Automobile Company. Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing and the Cadillac Automobile Company merged in 1905.
