Captain America

CAPTAIN AMERICA

IT'S THE ULTIMATE CHOPPER. IS IT THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS MOTORCYCLE?

JIM LEONARD TELLS THE STORY WITH PRACTICED precision. He has told it many times before.

“I was putting gas in the bike at the Monument Valley Gas Station when a big bus full of Germans screeched to a halt. A guy waving his arms ran off the bus. I guess he didn’t speak any English. He just pointed at the bike, tears streaming down his face, and said “Peter Fonda!”

Leonard, a Hollywood film sculptor and model maker, doesn’t look a bit like Fonda, but his motorcycle is the spitting image of the ill-fated chopper that Wyatt, the character played by Fonda, rode to his death in the 1969 cultclassic movie Easy Rider.

Let’s be very clear. Leonard’s version of “Captain America,” as the movie bike came to be called, is an exact copy, not a replica or a facsimile. It is a clone, right down to the spacing of the stars on the teardrop fuel tank. If you could check the two bikes’ DNA, all the amino acids would line up just right.

Easy Rider was the right movie for the right generation. It debuted at a time of social upheaval, a crime and karma morality play that today is regarded as the ultimate “freedom” movie. Starring Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson in a supporting role, Easy Rider cost $300,000 to make. A worldwide celluloid phenomenon, to date it has grossed more

than $50 million. The movie traces Wyatt and Billy (Hopper) as they ride from Los Angeles to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, a tale rife with those three threats to the 1960s status quo: sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. The movie ends with both characters getting blown from the saddles of their bikes by a shotgun-wielding redneck in a Chevy pickup, martyrs to the Great Society.

The film had a great impact on many people, including Leonard, so much so that he had already built two lessthan-perfect incarnations of Captain America before starting on the bike you see here, a task made more difficult because there was no original to go from. Two bikes were built for the movie, one a runner, the other blown up at the end of the film. The runner, according to most accounts, was stolen after filming and dismantled, its components scattered among L.A.’s biker underground.

Leonard spent five years scrounging parts, relying on press photos, film stills and the movie itself (he’s seen it 300 times), going over every inch of the bike to make it microscopically correct. Chromed Panhead motor and tranny, Linkert M74-C carb, MCM fishtail exhausts, police bike kickstand...it’s all there, except for one small clamp that there, except for one small clamp that Leonard is hunting down.

“You can call that Beck Frontrunner tire a 100-phonecall piece,” says Mil Blair, co-owner of the Jammers motorcycle shop in Glendale, California, who helped track down parts for the bike. Leonard located Dean Lanza, the original painter of the movie bike, to make sure his paint was correct. At a charity toy run, no less an authority than Peter Fonda himself noticed that the stitching was slightly off on the seat that Leonard had built, so Larry Hooper, the original seatmaker, was enlisted to make things right.

Captain America usually resides in Leonard’s living room, but it does get ridden, as evidenced by the pilgrimage to Monument Valley, location for much of the filming of Easy Rider.

“There’s a special feeling when I ride the Captain America bike,” says Leonard. “It’s like I’m riding a piece of history."

Paul Garson