“He was the original ‘Pirate of the Caribbean,’ ” said D’Orleans, who heard many of the same stories in meetings with Vaughs.ĭuring that period, he said, he was arrested and imprisoned multiple times, and had several boats stolen or seized by government agents of various countries. In 1975, he bought or borrowed a sailboat - there’s some 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.įor the next three decades, Vaughs told me, he worked as a boat captain, ferrying passengers between islands, smuggling political refugees out of Honduras, moving bales of marijuana from Bimini to Miami and maybe transporting guns and weapons from time to time.
Vaughs developed a grudge, and added the “Easy Rider” experience to what was, for him, a long list of being treated badly by white America. Vaughs and Fonda remained in touch, working together on the 1972 motorcycle safety documentary “Not So Easy.”īut as the “Easy Rider” reputation grew, and Fonda and Hopper’s careers went more mainstream, Vaughs and Hardy - who died in 1994 - were left out of the “Captain America” conversation. The 1969 film became a box-office sensation and is generally credited with popularizing the chopper movement and with giving Harley-Davidson an enormous financial boost. Fonda remembers the decision being made by Hopper, who wanted his friend Tex Hall to be the movie’s motorcycle wrangler. Not long after the four choppers were built, though, Vaughs was fired. Vaughs was to be responsible for the bikes during filming and to get an associate producer credit. Vaughs and Hardy bought four used Los Angeles Police Department Harley-Davidsons at an auction and went to work. The two men were hired to create four motorcycles: a “Captain America” and “Billy” bike for Fonda and Hopper to ride in the movie, and two copies to be used by stunt doubles. Vaughs teamed with Ben Hardy, a veteran African American bike builder who had a shop in Watts. “It had a tall sissy bar, and fishtail pipes. “I gave him some drawings I had made, and told him the gas tank had red-and-white stripes and white stars on a blue field,” Fonda remembers.
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Seeing a garage full of motorcycles, Fonda asked him if he could build some bikes for a movie he was setting up with fellow actor Dennis Hopper. Their mutual interest in bikes led to a meeting at Vaughs’ house in West Hollywood. Vaughs went to the courthouse, and the two men became friendly. Fonda, then a young actor, had been charged with possession of marijuana and was being arraigned. It was in his capacity as news reporter that Vaughs met Peter Fonda.
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His early professional career included stints as a news photographer, an assistant for fashion photographer Richard Avedon, Vaughs said, and work as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.Īfter SNCC sent him west to open a Los Angeles chapter, my father helped him get jobs in TV and radio news, said Vaughs, who later used his Hollywood connections and Southern ties to produce the race relations documentary “What Will The Harvest Be?” The admired but now-lost film, featuring interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond and others, aired on ABC in 1965. He grew up poor but excelled in school, eventually attending Boston Latin School and Boston University. Born in 1937 in Boston to a teenage mother who worked as a housekeeper and a nurse, Vaughs never knew his father. When the auction ended - with the chopper’s provenance still in dispute, and a $1.35-million sale that later fell through - Vaughs invited me to visit him in San Diego, where we spent the day talking about his life. He had seen it and believed it had no connection to the original “Easy Rider” bikes, which were all destroyed in the making of the movie or disappeared shortly after. Vaughs, who had been living in Serbia but had just returned to the U.S., agreed to discuss the motorcycle up for auction. 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 while working as a civil rights activist in the early 1960s in Mississippi and Alabama. After much digging and probing, I got an email address, and - to my surprise - a reply.
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