A Donor With a Heart : After coming close to death, car king Carroll Shelby plans to assemble Cobras to help his charity fund organ transplants.

Thirty months ago, death’s door opened wide for Carroll Shelby.

His heart was barely pumping and fatigue had enfeebled his body until he needed helping arms to the bathroom. Without a new heart, said surgeons at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the tough, bearish, fun, seemingly indestructible Shelby would be dead in a month.

“But dying wasn’t a big deal,” he says.

Because for 67 years Shelby had lived each hour as his last: Racing sports and Formula One cars and beating the world; crafting cars that made man and machine international legends; raising children to cherish and then grandchildren to love and be loved by.

Becoming a chili millionaire.

There also were three divorces, much Wild Turkey among lifelong friends, definitely too many animals hunted in years when nobody cared much about African elephants, a bad business deal or three . . . but, shoot, that’s life.

In a hospital bed, sprouting tubes, lungs filling with fluid, Shelby says he counted out his own end: “A hereditary heart condition, 30 surgeries in 30 years and 12 bypasses. I figured there was a good chance I would die. But I’d lived a great life. Regrets? Hell no.”

His obituary was written--but remains in media files.

For as Shelby’s odds shortened, they ran out completely for a young man in Las Vegas. He suffered a brain hemorrhage at a craps table.

A relay of helicopters and a corporate jet brought his 34-year-old heart to Cedars-Sinai. And Shelby’s initial post-operative memory is of a tall, bearded man wearing a hat and a long coat.

“I thought I was getting the last rites,” he says. “So I told this fella: ‘I’m really a little more Protestant than Hebrew.’ He said: ‘I’m not a rabbi. I’m an immunologist just figuring out what to do. You’ve got pneumonia and a temperature of 105.’ ”

Within days the fever was down, the patient was up, coronary arteries were firmly knitting--and an energetic, smiling, even gentler Shelby was working on a new enterprise.

“The Shelby Heart Fund,” he says. “It’s the dearest thing in my life right now, to do everything I can to motivate people to donate their perfectly good organs to people who aren’t so fortunate.”

And that’s not just people unfortunate in health, he says, but people unfortunate by social, economic and family circumstances.

“I’m talking about indigent people . . . because nobody cares for them,” Shelby says, continuing his typical, blunt Texas way of making points indelible. “The haves get the hearts in this world, the have-nots die.”

Blue eyes sparkle in his strong face: “So now that I’m on the right side of the grass, the Shelby Heart Fund is my way of giving back.”

The giving already has been splendid.

Several surgeries have been performed, one on a 6-year-old street kid from Culiacan, Mexico.

Proceeds from his speaking engagements, a Lake Tahoe golf tournament, a Palm Springs roast--maybe $200,000 in all--have been donated to the fund. Ask for Shelby’s autograph at any car show and he will ask for a $10 contribution. He recently printed 100,000 bumper stickers advertising the fund’s 800 number and its resolution: Don’t Take Your Organs to Heaven.

And now Shelby has dug into the rusty, dusty hoardings of his Gardena warehouse to reassemble an automotive trove that could add about $10 million to his charity.

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His fund raising hinges on mechanical leftovers from an Anglo-California sports car called the Cobra, inarguably the most famous performance automobile in American motoring’s 100-year history.

For almost three decades, Shelby--conceiver, designer and builder of the car--has been storing a stack of original Cobra chassis, racks of unused engines and bins of spares.

Last year, he counted the parts, explored the cost of retooling and knew he had enough bits and pieces to reissue almost four dozen 400-horsepower Cobras.

That means this year selling mint, zero-miles, never-driven Cobras once ready for assembly but left in parts since 1965.

To isolated purists it’s questionable commerce and first cousin to drumming liver tonics.

To car freaks, it’s as grand as discovering that the funny pencil sketches Great-Grandfather brought back from Paris in 1889 were signed by a starving student named Henri Matisse.

The first two-seat, aluminum-bodied, Ford-powered, thunder-and-lightning Shelby-AC Cobra was built in 1962.

Its purpose was simple and pure red-white-and-blue Shelby: To blow the doors off the Chevrolet Corvette and flatten everything else, especially Ferrari in international sports car competition.

In 1964--after only two years in production as the fruit of Shelby’s enduring partnership/friendship, with then-fast track Ford executive Lee Iacocca--Cobra beat Ferrari for the world’s manufacturer’s championship.

Shelby’s California plants in Santa Fe Springs and Venice made 1,100 Cobras. One subspecies was the Cobra 427SC built for racing. Under international rules, 100 cars should have been produced before the type qualified for competition.

But Ferrari cut corners and went racing after building only 60 models of its contender. So Shelby stopped building Cobra SCs at 57 cars. Nobody protested.

That left titles, chassis, engines and assorted spares for 43 unborn Cobra 427SCs to spend the next 27 years hidden and growing cobwebs in California storage.

Meanwhile, back in the auction rooms and museum halls of classic car collecting, Cobra values ascended.

When new, this chunk of noisy, naked muscle with side pipes and flared fenders was a slow seller at a measly $7,000. By the late ‘80s, Cobra prices had climbed to $500,000 and beyond.

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Unfortunately, its creator was nowhere near as healthy.

A bad heart finally forced Shelby to quit racing in 1960. That was a few months after he had driven an Aston-Martin to victory at Le Mans, finishing the 24-hour marathon while chain-sucking nitroglycerin pills.

The ‘60s were considerably less than therapeutic as he built the Cobra while financing and managing an international racing team.

The ‘70s and ‘80s were no easier as bluff, huge-handed Shelby charged into cattle ranching, big game hunting, breeding miniature horses, buying and selling airplanes, promoting his own chili mixes and building a 20-state tire distributorship with Goodyear.

There were homes in Dallas and Bel-Air and offices in a half-dozen states. A converted air-sea rescue launch ferried him between his two islands in the Sea of Cortez. And each fiscal year saw the making of more millions.

Shelby also was dying.

“In 1960 they said I wouldn’t last another five years,” he recalls. “Then, every five years, some new procedure came along to keep me alive.”

But in 1990, at 67, even Shelby wasn’t betting on even one more reprieve.

Quality of life had deteriorated until he wasn’t sure he had the energy to live. If he couldn’t get back to Cedars-Sinai in two hours, he wasn’t allowed to travel. Shelby slept with a beeper because transplant surgery does not observe business hours.

Shelby holds no pretenses about the means of his survival. He knows that at his age, by all medical measurement, he had small priority as a transplant candidate. There is an unwritten, unspoken dictate that heart transplants are for younger bodies with longer to live and maybe more to give.

Yet Shelby received a heart.

Because, he says, he is Carroll Shelby and has important friends and enough money to satisfy “the political thing” of organ transplants.

“A heart transplant costs $300,000,” he explains. “That cuts out a helluva lot of people right there. But I had the money. So they (doctors and hospitals) can charge the hell out of me and that way, every third or fourth one (transplant) can be a hardship case.”

He is not offended by the maneuver. Shelby is grateful to be alive and accepts any medical wile that keeps more people alive. He also realizes that unless there is a major shift in public thinking, there will always be more heart patients than hearts.

“Every day, by the hundreds, this society is burying people with perfectly good organs,” he says. “We bury enough healthy organs to take care of ten times the people who need them. Yet four out of five people who need hearts never get them.”

Hence the Shelby Heart Fund to improve the numbers, change public attitudes and persuade more people to check donor boxes on driver’s licenses.

The fund is administered through Cedars-Sinai because Shelby will not choose life for some, death for others.

“I don’t pick the people and make no recommendations to Cedars except to say they (patients) must be indigent,” he says.

Nor is there, at this time, the large lump sum needed to aid even a small percentage of the needy.

Which brings everything back to the Cobra.

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Shelby says he has spent $5 million tooling up and remanufacturing new parts for rebirthing the Cobras. Another $40,000 went into building one simple part: the parking brake. Hand-forming aluminum bodies costs $20,000 per car. Engines are $20,000. Paint is another $10,000.

“It costs me $150,000 to make each car,” he explains.

But to the right buyer in a better economy, a new-old Shelby Cobra 427SC built and blessed by its creator should be worth $500,000.

All of which will net the Shelby Heart Fund $350,000 per car.

A Japanese collector bought two of the six sold so far. Shelby will keep two Cobras, including the first of the new breed. Five more are under hand reconstruction in Shelby’s 65,000-square-foot plant in Gardena--quite close to the U.S. headquarters of Nissan.

“I have had offers from Japan to buy all the cars, but I don’t want to do that,” he says. A monopoly would only damage the market, even diminish the image of Cobra and its snake charmer. “I’ll sell two or three a year, and not to speculators or someone who wants to bury the car in a private collection. I want the car to be seen and I’d like it to be driven at vintage racing events.”

Shelby is also taking a new, more direct aim at an old nemesis: Kit car companies selling fiberglass Cobra replicas.

He has counted more than 200 manufacturers, here and overseas, selling 1,000 faux Cobras a year. Some are quality, expensive copies. Others, storms Shelby, are schlock knock-offs, little more than loose-handling collections of Pinto parts.

But rather than file suit for trademark infringement, Shelby has drawn up a licensing contract. Twelve leading replica manufacturers have said they will sign. They also have agreed to pay the Shelby Heart Fund a $1,000 royalty for every mock-Cobra they sell.

“I could probably have gone to court,” he says. “But it would be a long, drawn-out thing costing millions of dollars. And in the end, the world wouldn’t be any better off.”

These are new, full, bonus years for Shelby. He has remarried and was godfather to the Dodge Viper sports car conceived in part by old friend Iacocca. He is building a single-seat car for weekend racers and sketching plans for a carbon-fiber, 3.5-liter, supercharged sports car for $50,000.

Fifty-five pills a day suppress his body’s autoimmune system so it doesn’t reject the new heart; megadoses of vitamin C arm against pneumonia, colds and influenza.

But no more surgical masks on airliners, and Shelby has a date to take a federal physical. It could restore the license he first earned as a World War II military pilot.

A new heart, he knows, could be good for five years. Or maybe 10. “If I can get 10 years I’ll be near 80 and that’s pretty good for a guy who at 40 didn’t think he would make it to 50.

“I could also die sitting here right now and I’d be a happy man.”

And he can lift a glass occasionally with old friends. Like the King of Sweden, an avid driver and collector of Shelby machinery. Like former world driving champions Phil Hill and Stirling Moss, and classic car auctioneer Rick Cole.

Cole has gaveled dozens of Shelby Cobras, and his helicopter, coincidentally, was part of the airlift that relayed Shelby’s new heart to Cedars-Sinai.

“I told Rick that if he’d had any head for business and the price of Cobras, he would have crashed the helicopter and let me die,” Shelby says.

He roars at his own rudeness--heartfelt laughter.