Not easy, but he had a great ride
Cliff Vaughs’ role in designing iconic bikes for a counterculture film was but one part of his journey.
“Easy Rider” bike designer Cliff Vaughs, 79, lived a marvelously checkered life.
Cliff Vaughs is credited with designing the choppers that starred in the 1960s counterculture motorcycle movie “Easy Rider.”
But that credit was long in coming. Vaughs, who died July 2 at 79 in his Templeton, Calif., home, spent decades as an expatriate before winding up back in America, broke and homeless.
In the last two years, though, Vaughs experienced delayed stardom.
Motorcycle historians and bike bloggers increasingly acknowledge the African American photographer, documentary filmmaker, music producer, political organizer and biker as the artistic author of the “Captain America” chopper.
“It’s the most famous motorcycle in history, and that deserves some recognition,” said Paul D’Orleans, motorcycle historian and Cycle World columnist. “But as a man, he’s so much more interesting than that.”
I met Vaughs in 2014 while reporting on a motorcycle said to be the original “Captain America” chopper. It was headed for the auction block and expected to become the most expensive motorcycle ever sold.
There were suggestions the bike was a fake. Experts said only Vaughs, who’d built the original, could determine its authenticity.
After much digging and probing, I got an email address, and — to my surprise — a reply. Vaughs said he didn’t like talking to reporters but he might talk to me — if I was related to Karl Fleming, the Newsweek reporter he’d known as a civil rights activist in the 1960s in Mississippi and Alabama. That was my father. Vaughs had just returned to the U.S. after living in Serbia. He believed the motorcycle up for auction had no connection to the original “Easy Rider” bikes, which were all destroyed in the making of the movie or disappeared shortly after.
When the auction ended — with the chopper’s provenance still in dispute — Vaughs invited me to visit him in San Diego, where we spent the day talking about his life. It was checkered, marvelously so.
Born in 1937 in Boston to a teen mother who worked as a housekeeper and nurse, Vaughs grew up poor but excelled in school, attending Boston Latin School and Boston University.
He was a news photographer, an assistant for fashion photographer Richard Avedon, Vaughs said, and worked as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
After SNCC sent him west to open a Los Angeles chapter, my father helped him get TV and radio news jobs, said Vaughs, who later used his Hollywood connections to produce the race relations documentary “What Will The Harvest Be?” The now-lost film had interviews of Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond and others.
It was in his capacity as news reporter that Vaughs met Peter Fonda, who was being arraigned for marijuana possession. The two men became friendly at the courthouse.
Their mutual interest in bikes led to a meeting at Vaughs’ West Hollywood home. Seeing a garage full of motorcycles, Fonda asked him if he could build bikes for a movie he was doing with fellow actor Dennis Hopper.
“I gave him some drawings I had made and told him the gas tank had red-andwhite stripes and white stars on a blue field,” Fonda remembers. “It had a tall sissy bar and fishtail pipes. But Cliff did all the rest.”
Vaughs teamed with Ben Hardy, a veteran African American bike builder who had a shop in Watts. They bought four used Los Angeles Police Department Harley-Davidsons at an auction and went to work. Vaughs was to be responsible for the bikes during filming and to get an associate producer credit.
But after the choppers were built Vaughs was fired. Fonda remembers the decision being made by Hopper, who wanted his friend Tex Hall to be the movie’s motorcycle wrangler.
Vaughs and Fonda remained in touch, working together on the 1972 motorcycle safety documentary “Not So Easy.” But Vaughs and Hardy — who died in 1994 — were left out of the “Captain America” conversation and Vaughs developed a grudge. So in 1975 Vaughs bought or borrowed a sailboat — there’s dispute about whether he actually paid for the boat, said his friend Lew Irwin, who claims to have put up the $40,000 purchase price for a boat he never saw again — and headed for the Caribbean.
For the next three decades, Vaughs told me, he worked as a boat captain, smuggling political refugees out of Honduras, moving bales of marijuana from Bimini to Miami and maybe transporting guns and weapons from time to time.
“He was the original ‘Pirate of the Caribbean,’ ” said D’Orleans.
During that period, he said, he was arrested and imprisoned multiple times.
Was Vaughs a fabulist? It was hard to know. He also said he had boxed on the U.S. Marines team during his military service, that he had been recruited to train the Nicaraguan military by the Somoza family and that he had produced three records by drummer Buddy Miles (though no Buddy Miles records I’ve been able to locate list Vaughs’ name in the credits).
His sailing career ended, he said, when his last boat was boarded by pirates, who robbed him of all his belongings, threw him overboard and sailed away.
By the time I located Vaughs, he was living in his car, getting meals and taking showers at a San Diego Veterans Affairs facility. He didn’t want to burden his five children, from whom he said he was estranged.
But a month later, Vaughs’ situation had improved. One of his sons had helped him get a room in a friend’s house. Vaughs’ health was better. He posed for photos in a vest bearing the insignia of the Chosen Few, the primarily African American motorcycle group he rode with in the ’60s.
D’Orleans helped get Vaughs invited to a motorcycle film festival in New York, where the “Captain America” bike builder saw the completed “Easy Rider” — for the first time — and participated in a panel discussion on chopper style.
“My arm is weary from handshakes, accolades, good will,” he told me in a jubilant email.
Vaughs was gratified when Fonda made a public declaration of Vaughs’ contributions to the design of the “Easy Rider” bikes.
“I apologize profusely for not being more forceful about your role in their existence and their perfect design,” Fonda told Vaughs in an email. But he downplayed the movie’s importance in his life: “I’m happy about it, but that was just a month out of my life.”