Many of the Angels are graduates of other outlaw clubs … some of which, like the Booze Fighters, were as numerous and fearsome in their time as the Angels are today. It was the Booze Fighters, not the Hell’s Angels, who kicked off the Hollister riot which led to the filming of The Wild One. That was in 1947, when the average Hell’s Angel of the 1960s was less than ten years old.
Hollister at that time was a town of about four thousand, a farming community an hour’s fast drive south of Oakland, off in the foothills of the Diablo mountain range. Its only claim to fame in 1947 was as the producer of 74 percent of all the garlic consumed in the United States. Hollister was—and remains, to some extent—the kind of town that Hollywood showed the world in the film version of East of Eden, a place where the commander of the local American Legion post is by definition a civic leader.
And so it came to pass, on July Fourth of that year, that the citizens of Hollister gathered together for the annual celebration. The traditional Independence Day rites—flags, bands, baton virgins, etc.—were scheduled to precede a more contemporary event, the annual motorcycle hill climb and speed tests, which the previous year had drawn contestants from miles around … valley boys, farmers, small-town merchants, veterans, just a crowd of decent fellas who happened to ride motorcycles.
The 1947 Hollister hill climb and races also drew contestants from miles around … many miles, and many contestants. When the sun rose out of the Diablos on that Fourth of July morning the seven-man local police force was nervously sipping coffee after a sleepless night attempting to control something like 3,000 motorcyclists. (The police say 4,000; veteran cyclists say 2,000—so 3,000 is probably about right.) It has been established beyond doubt, however, that Hollister filled up with so many bikes that 1,000 more or less didn’t make much difference. The mob grew more and more unmanageable; by dusk the whole downtown area was littered with empty, broken beer bottles, and the cyclists were staging drag races up and down Main Street. Drunken fist fights developed into full-scale brawls. Legend has it that the cyclists literally took over the town, defied the police, manhandled local women, looted the taverns and stomped anyone who got in their way. The madness of that weekend got enough headlines to interest an obscure producer named Stanley Kramer and a young actor named Brando. Shortly before her death, in 1966, Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper took note of the Hell’s Angels menace and traced its origins back through the years to The Wild One. This led her to blame the whole outlaw phenomenon on Kramer, Brando and everyone else in any way connected with the movie. The truth is that The Wild One—despite an admittedly fictional treatment—was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge, in the style of Time, it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film. It gave the outlaws a lasting, romance-glazed image of themselves, a coherent reflection that only a very few had been able to find in a mirror, and it quickly became the bike rider’s answer to The Sun Also Rises. The image is not valid, but its wide acceptance can hardly be blamed on the movie. The Wild One was careful to distinguish between “good outlaws” and “bad outlaws,” but the people who were most influenced chose to identify with Brando instead of Lee Marvin whose role as the villain was a lot more true to life than Brando’s portrayal of the confused hero. They saw themselves as modern Robin Hoods … virile, inarticulate brutes whose good instincts got warped somewhere in the struggle for self-expression and who spent the rest of their violent lives seeking revenge on a world that done them wrong when they were young and defenseless.
Another of Hollywood’s contributions to the Hell’s Angels lore is the name. The Angels say they are named after a famous World War I bomber squadron that was stationed near Los Angeles and whose personnel raced around the area on motorcycles when they weren’t airborne. There are others who say the Angels got their name from a 1930 Jean Harlow movie based on some scriptwriter’s idea of an Army Air Corps that may or may not have existed at the time of the First World War. It was called Hell’s Angels and no doubt was still being shown in 1950, when the restless veterans who founded the first Angel chapter at Fontana were still trying to decide what to do with themselves. While the name might have originated before any Hell’s Angel was born, it was lost in the history of some obscure southern California military base until Hollywood made it famous and also created the image of wild men on motorcycles—an image that was later adopted and drastically modified by a new breed of outcasts that not even Hollywood could conceive of until they appeared, in the flesh, on California highways.
The concept of the “motorcycle outlaw” was as uniquely American as jazz. Nothing like them had ever existed. In some ways they appeared to be a kind of half-breed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the Wild West. Yet in other ways they were as new as television. There was absolutely no precedent, in the years after World War II, for large gangs of hoodlums on motorcycles, reveling in violence, worshiping mobility and thinking nothing of riding five hundred miles on a weekend … to whoop it up with other gangs of cyclists in some country hamlet entirely unprepared to handle even a dozen peaceful tourists. Many picturesque, outback villages got their first taste of tourism not from families driving Fords or Chevrolets, but from clusters of boozing “city boys” on motorcycles.
In retrospect, eyewitness accounts of the Hollister riot seem timid compared to the film. A more accurate comment on the nature of the Hollister “riot” is the fact that a hastily assembled force of only twenty-nine cops had the whole show under control by noon of July 5. By nightfall the main body of cyclists had roared out of town, in the best Time style, to seek new nadirs in sordid behavior. Those who stayed behind did so at the request of the police; their punishment ranged from $25 traffic fines to ninety days in jail for indecent exposure. Of the 6,000 to 8,000 people supposedly involved in the fracas, a total of 50 were treated for injuries at the local hospital. (For a better perspective on motorcycle riots it helps to keep in mind that more than 50,000 Americans die each year as the result of automobile accidents.)
Nobody has ever accused the Hell’s Angels of wanton killing, at least not in court … but it boggles the nerves to consider what might happen if the outlaws were ever deemed legally responsible for even three or four human deaths, by accident or otherwise. Probably every motorcycle rider in California would be jerked off the streets and ground into hamburger.
For a lot of reasons that are often contradictory, the sight and sound of a man on a motorcycle has an unpleasant effect on the vast majority of Americans who drive cars. At one point in the wake of the Hell’s Angels uproar a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune‡ did a long article on the motorcycle scene and decided in the course of his research that “there is something about the sight of a passing motorcyclist that tempts many automobile drivers to commit murder.”
Nearly everyone who has ridden a bike for any length of time will agree. The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong ever done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their own fear of death, jail and lawsuits … which are much less likely if they can find a motorcycle to challenge, instead of another two-thousand-pound car or a concrete abutment. A motorcyclist has to drive as if everybody else on the road is out to kill him. A few of them are, and many of those who aren’t are just as dangerous—because the only thing that can alter their careless, ingrained driving habits is a threat of punishment, either legal or physical, and there is nothing about a motorcycle to threaten any man in a car.‡ A bike is totally vulnerable; its only defense is maneuverability, and every accident situation is potentially fatal—especially on a freeway, where there is no room to fall without being run over almost instantly. Despite these hazards, California—where freeways are a way of life—is by long odds the nation’s biggest motorcycle market.
‡ Now defunct
‡ Deaths are extremely rare. The
combat usually ends when the backers of either man decide the cause is lost.
‡ For Male Magazine
‡ In 1966 Terrible Ted ran a red light in an unmarked police car and collided with a Greyhound bus. The crash killed his wife, destroyed the car and critically injured the patrolman.
‡ Now defunct
‡ Preetam Bobo tells a story about a man in a “big new car” who forced him off the road on Highway 40 one Sunday afternoon in the 1950s. “The dirty little bastard kept running up on my taillight,” said Preetam, “until finally I just pulled over and stopped. The other guys had seen it, so we decided to teach the bastard a lesson. Man, we swarmed all over him … We whipped on his hood with chains, tore off his aerial and smashed every window we could reach … all this at about seventy miles an hour, man. He didn’t even slow down. He was terrified.”
6
We began to see that the Hell’s Angels were assuming a mythical character. They had become folk heroes—vicarious exemplars of behavior most youth could only fantasize (unless swept away in mob activity), and legendary champions who would come to the rescue of the oppressed and persecuted. An older motorcyclist, witnessing police harassment of his fellows at a town outside Prince George’s County, was heard to remark, “Just wait till the Angels hear about this when they come in tomorrow—they’ll tear this place apart.”
—From an article in
TransAction (August 1966),
written by two
psychologists who worked with Maryland police to avert rioting in a town preparing to host
national motorcycle races
I smashed his face. He got wise. He called me a punk. He must have been stupid.
—A Hell’s Angel explaining to a stranger
Of all their habits and predilections that society finds alarming, the outlaws’ disregard for the time-honored concept of an eye for an eye is the one that frightens people most. The Hell’s Angels try not to do anything halfway, and outcasts who deal in extremes are bound to cause trouble, whether they mean to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Angels such a problem for police and so morbidly fascinating to the general public. Their claim that they don’t start trouble is probably true more often than not, but their idea of provocation is dangerously broad, and one of their main difficulties is that almost nobody else seems to understand it. Yet they have a very simple rule of thumb; in any argument a fellow Angel is always right. To disagree with a Hell’s Angel is to be wrong—and to persist in being wrong is an open challenge.
Despite everything psychiatrists and Freudian castrators have to say about the Angels, they are tough, mean and potentially dangerous as packs of wild boar. The moment a fight begins, any leather fetishes or inadequacy feelings are entirely beside the point, as anyone who has ever tangled with them will sadly testify. When you get in an argument with a group of outlaw motorcyclists, your chances of emerging unmaimed depend on the number of heavy-handed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools.
Many of their “assault victims” are people who have seen too many Western movies; they are victims of the John Wayne complex, which causes them to start swinging the moment they sense any insult. This is relatively safe in some areas of society, but in saloons frequented by outlaw motorcyclists it is the worst kind of folly. “They’re always looking for somebody to challenge them,” said a San Francisco policeman. “And once you’re involved with them, it’s all or nothing. A stranger who doesn’t want anything to do with them, if one of the bums says something to his woman, he can’t take offense or he’ll have to fight four or five Angels, not just the one. People should understand this.”
One of the Frisco Angels explained it without any frills: “Our motto, man, is ‘All on One and One on All.’ You mess with an Angel and you’ve got twenty-five of them on your neck. I mean, they’ll break you but good, baby.”
The outlaws take the “all on one” concept so seriously that it is written into the club charter as Bylaw Number 10: “When an Angel punches a non-Angel, all other Angels will participate.”
The outlaws never know, from one moment to the next, when they might have to grapple with some foe bent on humiliating the colors. Here is a hazy, yet fairly instructive account of a clash with an ex-Angel named Phil and his XKE Jaguar. For several hours prior to the incident, Phil had been drinking and arguing in a roadhouse with a half dozen members of the Oakland chapter. Finally they told him to leave or be stomped. Phil went outside, backed his car off about fifty yards from the row of bikes at the curb, then plowed into them like a bulldozer, breaking the leg of one Angel who tried to get his bike out of the way. This is how the Lynch report told it:
On November 4, 1961, a San Francisco resident driving through Rodeo, possibly under the influence of alcohol, struck a motorcycle belonging to a Hell’s Angel parked outside a bar. A group of Angels pursued the vehicle, pulled the driver from the car and attempted to demolish the rather expensive vehicle. The bartender claimed he had seen nothing, but a cocktail waitress in the bar furnished identification to the officers concerning some of those responsible for the assault. The next day it was reported to officers that a member of the Hell’s Angels gang had threatened the life of this waitress as well as another woman waitress. A male witness who definitely identified five participants in the assault, including the president of the Vallejo Hell’s Angels and the Vallejo “Road Rats” [since absorbed by Angels], advised officers that because of his fear of retaliation by club members he would refuse to testify to the facts he had previously furnished.
Motorcycles are knocked over by cars every day all over the nation, but when the incident involves outlaw motorcyclists it’s something else again. Instead of settling the thing with an exchange of insurance information or, at the very worst, an argument with a few blows, the Hell’s Angels stomped the driver (a former member) and “attempted to demolish the vehicle.” I asked one of them whether the police exaggerated this aspect, and he said no, they had done the natural thing: smashed headlights, kicked in doors, broken windows and torn various components off the engine.
Another instructive clash occurred soon after the Monterey incident, when the outlaws were still feeling tough. It began as an everyday act of revenge, but it didn’t come off. Perhaps for this reason, the police report was unusually restrained:
On September 19, 1964, a large group of Hell’s Angels and Satan’s Slaves converged on a bar in South Gate (Los Angeles County), parking their motorcycles and cars in the street in such a fashion as to block one half of the roadway. They told officers that three members of the club had recently been asked to stay out of the bar and that they had come to tear it down. Upon their approach the bar owner locked the doors and turned off the lights and no entrance was made, but the group did demolish a cement block fence. On arrival of the police, members of the club were lying on the sidewalk and in the street. They were asked to leave the city, which they did reluctantly. As they left, several were heard to say that they would be back and tear down the bar.
In all, it was a pretty quiet outrage, and except for the demolition of a fence, it went into the books as a routine victory for law and order. It was also a good example of the total-retaliation ethic: when you’re asked to stay out of a bar you don’t just punch the owner—you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs you, rape her. This is the thinking, if not the reality, behind the whole Hell’s Angels act. It is also the aspect of the story that gets to the editors of news magazines. The combined testimony of 104 police departments is proof enough that the outlaws are unable to enforce their savage codes on any level of society but their own … and yet the white-collar, button-down world is obviously alarmed to hear that these codes exist at all. Which they do, and they are also adhered to
, as noted in the concluding paragraphs of the California Attorney General’s report:
The group seeks to exploit the so-called “gangsters’ code” of group loyalty and threats to persons who might appear in court against them. There have been instances of Hell’s Angels punishing witnesses by physical assault. In the event the witness or victim is female, the women associates of the Angels seem willing to participate in threats to discourage testimony. A practical problem seen in various cases is that both victims and witnesses generally exist in the same environment as do the Hell’s Angels. While gang rapes and forced sex perversions may have occurred, the victims and witnesses frequently are not of the higher social strata and thus are vulnerable to the mores of “saloon society.” It is believed that the only feasible approach to the solution of this problem is for investigating officers to recognize it and take all steps possible to protect witnesses both before and after trial.
Not many members of saloon society will find consolation in these words. The Angels and their allies bear grudges much longer than police feel it’s necessary to protect witnesses, and cops have a tendency to lose interest in a prosecution witness about five minutes after the jury comes in with a verdict. No bartender who has caused the arrest of an Angel will ever feel anything but panic at the sound of motorcycle engines in the street and the clumping of leather boot heels coming toward his door. The Angels don’t willfully trace their enemies from one place to another, but they spend so much of their time in bars that they are likely to turn up thirsty almost anywhere. And once an enemy is located, the word goes out fast on the network. It takes only two or three Angels, and no more than five minutes, to wreck a bar and put a man in the hospital. Chances are, they won’t be arrested … but even if they are, the damage is already done.
An intended victim—such as the bar owner in South Gate, who suffered only the loss of a fence in the first attack—will always know that his place has a certain distinction: it is marked, and as long as the Hell’s Angels or Satan’s Slaves exist, there is a chance that some of them will come back to finish the job.
Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga Page 8