Dean Jeffries: The man behind the Monkeemobile

"Dean Jeffries: 50 fabulous years in hot rods, racing and film," by Tom Cotter. Motorbooks, Minneapolis, Minn. 2009. 192pp.

By Chris Verner

cverner@salisburypost.com

The name Dean Jeffries isn't widely known beyond hot-rod buffs of a certain age, but one of his automotive creations would be instantly recognizable to legions of baby-boomers who wouldn't know a little Deuce coupe from a Dixie cup.

Jeffries designed and built the Monkeemobile, the radically restyled Pontiac GTO that is as inextricably linked to the 1960s-era rock 'n' roll band the Monkees as their hit "Last Train to Clarksville." Pontiac wanted to promote its youthful performance image on TV, and the made-for-TV rock band proved an auspicious vehicle — with Jeffries' supplying the stylistic talent. When the automotive customizer and painter heard that Pontiac wanted a tie-in vehicle for the new show, he created some sketches, "got the deal" and fabricated two versions of the Monkeemobile — within 10 days.

Nowadays, it would take longer than that for the lawyers to draw up a contract.

But that was a different era and, as Davidson-based automotive writer Tom Cotter's retrospective vividly illustrates, Dean Jeffries was a different kind of car guy. Different even from the handful of other car customizers and builders whose gleaming, bechromed, chopped, channeled and candy-coated wonders graced the pages "Hot Rod," "Rod and Custom" and other car magazines. In the 1950s and '60s, hot rods were all the craze in the American automotive world. In the same way that Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and a handful of iconoclastic "beats" reshaped literary fashion, a small coterie of car customizers, most of them based in California, were bending the automotive paradigm with custom cars featuring futuristic styling, eye-popping paint jobs and jet-age styling cues such as fins and bubble-top canopies. Among them were George Barris, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Von Dutch — and Jeffries.

A high-school dropout, Jeffries first made his name as a "pinstriper," applying freehand designs such as scrolling flames or intricate curlycues that owners used to personalize their cars. As a pinstriper, Jeffries' clients included many celebrities in racing and acting, including Steve McQueen and James Dean. Dean died while driving the Porsche 550 Spyder on which Jeffries had hand-lettered the phrase "Little Bastard," Dean's self-bestowed nickname. Jeffries also applied his pinstriping and graphics talents to race cars. His skills were in such demand, he recalls, that one year he had painted 22 of the 33 cars racing in the Indianapolis 500.

Driven by his restless creativity, Jeffries branched out from painting cars into designing and building them. Yet while he had made a name for himself as a painter, he wasn't considered in the same league with more high-profile customizers who had mastered the art of self-promotion as well as the art of shaping sheet metal. (Two of them, Barris and Roth, were central characters in "The Kandy Coated, Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Tom Wolfe's seminal essay on the California custom culture.) That changed for Jeffries in 1964, when he created the Mantaray, one of the most iconic cars in hot-rodding's long history.

He wanted to create something new, something "that hadn't been built before," Jeffries tells Cotter. The inspiration came during a trip to the beach, when he saw a manta ray come "swooshing by."

Almost 50 years later, Jeffries' Mantaray hasn't lost any of its "swoosh." The car's swooping curves and canopy-topped cockpit give it an other-worldly appearance, as if it might have rolled up onto the beach after a Sunday drive in mythical Atlantis. Today, the Mantaray appears just as futuristic and cutting edge as it did in 1964. But its Weber carburetors and 289 Ford Cobra engine forge a brawny link to its old-school hot-rod heritage, as well.

Along with the custom cars he designed for himself and for clients, Jeffries developed vehicles for dozens of television series and movies, including "The Green Hornet" and "Death Race 2000." He built the Broncos used in the Michael Douglas hit "Romancing the Stone" and doubled as a stunt driver for Douglas in the chase scenes. Jeffries was so talented as a stunt driver he had a thriving parallel career piloting the cars he created for movies.

Although Jeffries' formal education ended with high school, he was not only a brilliant stylist but also mastered the engineering and mechanical side of auto building. The attention to function as well as form is obvious in the vehicles he created, whether it's the graceful Mantaray, with its Maserati running gear and intricate substructure of steel tubing, or the 23,000-pound rolling fortress he hand-built for the 1977 sci-fi movie "Damnation Alley."

Above all, Jeffries was a consummate craftsman who even today, in his late 70s, remains passionate about cars and the possibilities of automotive design.

"Jeffries is much more than a talented hot rod builder," Cotter writes. "Jeffries has so much depth in his life that he makes the rest of us look vanilla."

Cotter's thoroughly researched and energetically written book captures the full flavor of his subject. With anecdotes from Jeffries' contemporaries and more than 250 photos and sketches from his personal collection, it offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of a unique life and creative persona that took the art of the automobile in bold new directions.

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Motorcycle enthusiasts will be interested in another recent work from Cotter, "The Vincent in the Barn: Great Stories of Motorcycle Archaeology" (Motorbooks, 2009) This continues the "barn find" theme that Cotter explored in two earlier books, "The Cobra in the Barn" and "The Hemi in the Barn." Like the previous collections, "The Vincent in the Barn" is a compilation of stories about rare or collectible vehicles that were discovered in out-of-the-way places and often have interesting histories. In this case, Cotter concentrates on vintage motorcycles, such as the British-made Vincents of the title, Indians and flathead Harleys.

While the machines are interesting in themselves, Cotter also relates some fascinating back-stories behind the barn finds. For instance, there's the bizarre case of George Disteel, a California motorcycle enthusiast whose son was killed while riding a Vincent Black Shadow. Distraught over the death, Disteel become an eccentric recluse who made it his life's mission to remove Vincents from the road by buying them up and stashing them away. After he died, 17 motorcycles were discovered languishing in a ramshackle shed on his property, and he probably had hidden away many others that were never traced back to him.

Another tale involves a 1928 Triumph that sat unused in an Australian dealership for 60 years. When new, the bike had been the grand prize in a charity auction, and the winning ticket was never redeemed. And then there's the story of the 1932 Brough that Lawrence of Arabia, an ardent cycle enthusiast, was riding in 1935 when a crash took his life.

Amply illustrated with photographs, the 40 stories in "The Vincent in the Barn" show that, whether the subject matter involves two wheels or four, Cotter has an archaeologist's instinct for unearthing interesting machines and intriguing characters that converge to create entertaining tales.