Fonda told the Los Angeles Times he wanted the auction called off, calling the confusion “embarrassing and infuriating.” Fonda always took credit for designing and building the bikes. When they stopped returning his queries he contacted Fonda’s lawyer as well as reporters.
Last fall Granger says he contacted Profiles in History. Although no arrests were ever made, the authorities deemed it arson. The bike wasn’t damaged but he used the occasion to tell local news outlets that this was the original Captain America. In 2010, a fire destroyed Granger’s roadside warehouse in Austin, which held his bike and other collectible vehicles. “Haggerty is really not on top of things,” says Parnham. “I thought I was signing something that said was a replica I had built,” he says. Haggerty signed a certificate of authenticity but says he made an honest mistake. After a History Channel segment around 2005 featured both owners, Granger asked Haggerty to give him something in writing. In 2002, Haggerty apparently off-loaded that frame to John Parnham, president of the National Motorcycle Museum. Meanwhile, in a Chicago Tribune article that ran around the time of the exhibit, Haggerty says Granger owned a copy with only “a few bits and pieces, a chain or a fender, nothing more” and that he still had the original frame in California.
HARLEY EASY RIDER UPDATE
Granger says it was too expensive to update the catalog from its run at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which actually had a replica. In 1999, Granger let “The Art of the Motorcycle” exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum label his bike a replica. Although he didn’t put anything in writing, she says, “Everybody believed it was the bike.” Granger who now calls Haggerty “one of the biggest fucking liars in the world,” still maintains that Haggerty told the truth back then. Tiffany Kruse, Dan’s daughter, says Haggerty passed it off as the original. The sale went through Dan Kruse Classics in Texas. So he sold Captain America to Granger for $63,000. In 1996, Haggerty-who has served jail time for selling cocaine and tax evasion – was deep in debt. However, a 2008 video seems to show Haggerty falsely stating he sold the original to the Guggenheim Museum. Haggerty passed three polygraph tests last fall and Eisenberg remains confident in the authenticity of his bike. The other bike in question is and has always been a replica of the original bike.” The dispute seemed settled when Haggerty issued this statement: “The bike owned by Michael Eisenberg is the only authentic Captain America bike that was rebuilt from the original frame up. Haggerty knew the Captain America better than most as he wrangled bikes on the set of Easy Rider. To solve the dispute, they turned to none other than “Grizzly Adams” star Dan Haggerty. Now, the chopper is locked at the center of a quarrel between two men both claiming rightful ownership.
Then along came a Texan named Gordon Granger, who claimed that he was, in fact, in possession of the original Captain America. The bike hit the auction block and sold for a princely $1,350,000. It’s owner was a collector and realtor named Michael Eisenberg. The problems started last fall, when the Profiles in History auction house, which specializes in Hollywood artifacts, put Captain America up for sale.
HARLEY EASY RIDER MOVIE
Now, forty years later, Captain America is a movie prop worth millions of dollars that rests at the center of a messy legal battle over the bike’s authenticity. People who watched the film-in which Wyatt and Dennis Hopper’s Billy cross the country, wheel-on-wheel, on a tragic quest-imagined discarding their own possessions and reshaping their idea of the American Dream. As time passed, Captain America became the centerpiece of this anti-establishment, middle-finger-of-a-movie. It is Captain America, the chopper driven by Peter Fonda’s Wyatt in Easy Rider and a chromed-out icon of ’60s counterculture the open road. It has ape-hanger handle bars, upswept mufflers and an ironic stars-and-stripes-emblazoned gas tank.
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