Famous Mustang Owners, and the Stars Who Only Drove Them

That distinction matters, because the record on famous owners is thinner than the internet suggests. A lot of names get attached to the Mustang through a film role, a photo shoot or a friend's story. This piece keeps to owners the documents support, and it says plainly where a famous name drove a Mustang without ever holding the title. For the films and the songs, our Mustang pop-culture guide covers the screen side.

The pilot who became famous for buying first

Tucker flew for Eastern Provincial Airlines. The car he bought was no ordinary convertible: it carried serial number 5F08F100001, a pre-production car built at the Rouge between February 10 and March 5, 1964. It had reached a dealer in Newfoundland, and someone sold it before anyone in Dearborn noticed.

Picture the scene in early 1966. Ford wants its first car back, and the man who owns it is happy with it. So Ford makes an offer that is hard to refuse: the One Millionth Mustang, equipped to his specifications, in exchange for Serial Number One. Tucker took nearly everything on the option sheet. The only extra he passed on was the High Performance 289.

On March 2, 1966, he stood in Dearborn, met Lee Iacocca, and posed beside his new 1966 convertible. The Henry Ford records its color as Silver Frost, though some accounts describe the millionth car as white, and the white car in the ceremony photos may have been a different vehicle. Ford then donated Serial Number One to The Henry Ford, where it still tells his story.

A rock star, a gift and a Shelby that vanished

Jim Morrison is the clearest case of a famous person who truly owned a classic Mustang. His was a 1967 Shelby GT500 in Nightmist Blue with a parchment interior, a four-speed and no Le Mans stripes. Elektra founder Jac Holzman gave it to him after "Light My Fire" became the label's first No. 1. Morrison had admired Jay Sebring's GT350, so the gift landed on fertile ground.

He drove the car in his own film, HWY: An American Pastoral, shot in the Mojave Desert and Los Angeles in 1969. His friend Babe Hill named it "The Blue Lady," after a character in a screenplay Morrison was writing, not after the paint. The last California DMV record, dated April 30, 1969, lists James Douglas Morrison care of the band's accountants. After that the trail goes cold. One story has it hitting a telephone pole on Sunset Boulevard; another has it towed from long-term parking at LAX. Nobody has produced the car.

That registration slip is the important detail. It is the reason Morrison belongs on this list with confidence, while dozens of other names sit on it by rumor.

Celebrities who owned Mustangs, and stars who only drove them

Here the most famous Mustang of all becomes an awkward fit. Steve McQueen drove the close-up shots in Bullitt, and the Highland Green 1968 GT fastback is welded to his name in public memory. But the surviving hero car was not his to keep. Robert Kiernan bought it in 1974 for $6,000 after answering a Road & Track ad, and his family held it until it sold at Mecum Kissimmee on January 10, 2020, for $3.74 million with fees.

The same gap shows up on television. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. drove new Mustang convertibles in The F.B.I. from 1965 to 1969, a Ford-sponsored series. Millions of viewers watched him behind the wheel every week. That is screen use, not ownership, and the distinction is worth keeping straight when a star's name turns up in a sales listing.

Racers and a Ford who kept the faith

Some of the most believable owners are people whose working lives ran through the Mustang. John Force won 10 NHRA Funny Car titles in Mustang-bodied cars from 1997 to 2013 (he raced Mustangs through 2014), driving for Castrol GTX. Away from the strip he keeps a 1965 Mustang in his museum in Yorba Linda, California. A man who spent decades in a nitro Funny Car with a Mustang body chose an early pony to keep under his own roof, and that says something about where the affection started.

Then there is William Clay Ford Jr., great-grandson of the company's founder. His first car was a Mustang, a detail the Mustang Club of America noted when it inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1999. The record does not say which model year it was, so it would be guesswork to call it a classic. It is still a human detail: a Ford family heir started out in the same car that ordinary buyers were lining up for.

His current garage is better documented. In 2024 Ford said that Bill Ford now owns the 1964½ convertible that paced that year's Indianapolis 500, one of the first Mustangs built, and that his uncle Benson Ford drove it on race day. He took it onto Jay Leno's Garage the same year. Few celebrity Mustangs come with a paper trail that short: the owner's own company put it in writing.

"The famous name is the part people remember. The registration card is the part that is true. When the two line up, you have a story. When they don't, you have a rumor with a nice paint job."

Nora Beckett

Why the paperwork outlives the fame

Every one of these cases turns on a document. Tucker's story survives because Ford wrote down the trade and kept the car. Morrison's because a clerk at the California DMV filed a slip in April 1969. McQueen's case is clear in the other direction, because a 1974 classified ad and a 2020 auction record show who actually owned the car. Fame fades in and out of fashion. A title history does not.

That is worth remembering if a Mustang is ever offered with a famous former owner attached. The claim may be true. It may also be a story that grew a little each time it was told at a show.

Most people never get near a car with a famous owner, and that is fine. For a lot of collectors the first Mustang in their lives was a toy, from Hot Wheels and pedal cars to the die-cast models collectors still trade. The real car came later, with their own name on the title, and that is the kind of ownership the Mustang was built for. It is also why an airline captain in Newfoundland, not a movie star, holds the title of first buyer. The rest of that story is in our Mustang history.

Sources and notes

• The Henry Ford: Stanley Tucker and Ford Mustang Serial Number One
• Mustang Club of America: Hall of Fame inductees (William Clay Ford Jr., John Force)
• Street Muscle: On the trail of the Blue Lady, Jim Morrison's lost 1967 Shelby GT500
• Ford: Bill Ford and the 1964 Indianapolis 500 pace car on Jay Leno's Garage
• Goodwood: Original Bullitt Mustang sells at auction
• Gooding & Company: 1964 Shelby 289 Cobra CSX2220, originally owned by Jay Sebring