The Mute stripped off his Levi jacket, exposing another Angel decal on his leather jacket. Take that off, too, the irate patrolman ordered, again using the Mute’s notepad and pencil. And under the leather jacket was a wool shirt — also emblazoned with the club colors. Off with it, the officer scribbled angrily. Under the shirt was an undershirt. It too had been stenciled with the club insignia. Okay, wise guy, take that off too, the nonplussed patrolman wrote.
With a smirk, the Mute removed his undershirt, and puffing out his chest, brought into full view the Hell’s Angels’ grinning death’s-head, which had been tattooed on his body. The policeman threw up his hands in disgust, handed the Mute a ticket and sped off in his patrol car. But the Mute had the last laugh. He was prepared to go all the way. His trousers and shorts were also stenciled.
He was a way-out mother, the Mute’s friends agree.
People are already down on us because we’re Hell’s Angels. That’s why we like to blow their minds. It just more or less burns em, that’s all.
— Zorro
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.