None of them realized what an empty bag they were holding until their deals began to collapse. The Angels weren’t quick to see the trend, because they were still celebrities. But one day the phone stopped ringing and the game was all over. They were still talking money, but the talk would soon go sour. Cash was all around, but they couldn’t get their hands on it. What they needed was a good agent or a money-mad nark, but they couldn’t get that either. There was nobody to hustle Sal Mineo for the $3,000 they wanted for helping him make his movie. And nobody to coax $2,000 out of the producers of the Merv Griffin show, who had also talked about a film. (God knows I tried, and the Angels still blame me for blowing that two grand they wanted, but the sad truth is that Merv’s people just wouldn’t pay. . . perhaps because they knew Les Crane had already scheduled a Hell’s Angels bit.) There were others who tried to put the outlaws onto some loot: a San Francisco journalist who knew the Angels was contacted by a man from one of the TV networks who wanted to be on hand with a camera crew the next time the outlaws ripped up a town. But the deal fell through when the Angels offered, for $100 apiece, to terrorize any town the TV people selected. It must have been tempting, a flat guarantee of some hair-raising footage. . . and it is a measure of the television industry’s concern for the public welfare that the offer was turned down.
Would ye deny the public prints?
— Anglo-Saxon motto
The Angels were extremely proud of their Post exposure, though the cover featured one of the most obscure and least typical members. Given a chance to present their 6,670,000* readers with a really unnerving tableau, the Post chose instead to go with Skip Von Bugening, a former rock-‘n’-roll musician and supermarket clerk who looks and talks like everybody’s idea of the ideal Job Corps candidate. Skip is a good lad, but to foist him off on the public as a typical Hell’s Angel is like reshooting The Wild One with Sal Mineo playing the lead instead of Marlon Brando. Less than six months after he made the Post cover, Skip was stripped of his colors and kicked out of the club. He never was Angel material, said one. He was just a goddamn show-off.
* Circulation figure at the end of 1965, according to the Post circulation department
As the outlaws got more and more publicity their reaction to it became increasingly ambiguous. At first, when nearly everything written about them was taken from the Lynch report, they were outraged that responsible journalists could be so sloppy and biased. They spoke of editors and reporters as so much human garbage, hopelessly corrupt and not worth talking to under any circumstances. Every unfavorable article produced outbursts of bitterness, but they enjoyed being interviewed and photographed, and instead of withdrawing into angry silence, they kept trying to even the score by giving new interviews to set the record straight.
Only once did they become seriously hostile to everything connected with the news media. This was immediately after the Time and Newsweek articles. I recall trying to show the Time article to Crazy Rock, then working as a night custodian at the San Francisco Hilton. He glanced at the clipping and tossed it aside. I’d go nuts if I started reading that stuff, he said. It don’t make any sense. It’s all bullshit. The Frisco Angels wanted to give me a chain-whipping on general principles. Later, when I met the Oakland Angels, there was talk of setting me on fire because of what Newsweek had done. It was not until my article on motorcycles appeared in The Nation that they really believed I hadn’t been conning them all along.
Yet later in the year, and especially after they made their political debut — in a clash with the Berkeley peace marchers — the Angels stopped laughing at their press clippings. The tone of the coverage was changing, notably in Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner and William Knowland’s Oakland Tribune. Even in the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that had never done anything but laugh at the Angels, the late Lucius Beebe devoted one of his Sunday columns to sneering at the Berkeley marchers and ended it by saying, The Hell’s Angels would appear to be possessed of a sense of fitness and realism that is lacking elsewhere on the East Bay scene.