Architectural Digest-Motoring

Susan Cheever, December 1999

"It was the first time I'd ever felt that way, " Kevin Costner says of the sexy, unkempt twenty-two-year-old he met in 1988. "It wasn't just lust, it really hit me. I looked at it and it looked back. It was, sad, all rusted out and patched with gray primer, but I thought, I want you.”

Bull Durham, the romantic comedy that helped transform Costner into a star, is about a minor-league catcher who falls for a sexy heart-of-gold. Off camera, though, the major-league romance was between Costner and his 1966 Mustang Cobra G.T 350H. A convertible for an out-of-work ballplayer, it had a disintegrating coat of dark green paint and a cloth roof that looked as if it couldn’t keep out the rain. "I just liked the car," says Costner, who went on to reinvent cinematic baseball in Field of Dreams and this fall’s For Love of the Game "I'm no motor head. A car has never been an identity for me, but this was it."

The course of true love did not run as smoothly as the Cobra's modified racing engine. When Costner asked to buy the car off the Bull Durham set, the price was too high. “He did a markup on me," Costnet says of the film's producer. "He was trying to make three or four thousand dollars more than he paid. Because of my middle-class roots, I stepped away from, it. I was bummed." Costner’s wife, Cindy-they have since divorced-had other ideas. 'Bless her heart, she went down and wrote him a check for whatever he wanted,” Costner remembers. "I came home, and there was the car. We had it painted and fixed up. it looked just like a little green jewel."

The Cobra G.T. 350H was the child of Carroll Shelby's design genius and the Ford Motor Company's ill-fated liaison with the Hertz rental company. Hertz wanted to offer sports cars to special customers, so Ford and Shelby designed a rentable version of the G.T 350, with its 289-cubic-inch racing engine, tachometer, air scoops and competition brakes, called the G.T 35oH. The car was too wild for most Hertz customers, who found the racing brakes which work best at high speed-balky and dangerous.

"Usually I like my cars to be practical," Cosmer says. His first car was a red Datsun pickup he inherited from his parents when he got his license. After graduating from high school, he outfitted the Datsun with beds and lived in it while he drove around the United States from Maine to the Mexican border. He eventually replaced it with another Datsun pickup, a blue one. When he and his wife had been married a few years, they splurged on a Mazda. "Given my economic situation, I never owned a new car until about ten years ago."

Although Cosmer's circumstances have changed, his taste for useful cars has not. His fleet of vehicles, spread over three houses, includes tractors, dump trucks, four-wheel-drive Subarus and a Lexus van. "My big move was this car," he says. The Cobra has definitely been worth it. Accompanied by his children- who love the car-or his white Labrador, Wyatt, Costner tootles around Los Angeles gathering compliments. “I’ll be stopped three or four times a day in this car," Costner remarks. “People drive up next to me and give me that little thumbs-up or that sign you make with the thumb and index finger that says'Perfect!' It's a very sweet feeling."

"This car is like a beautiful woman in a bar-every guy goes up to it," says Kevin Costner, standing in his 1966 mustang Cobra G.T. 350H with his dog, Wyatt. He fell for the car after driving it in Bull Durham.