AGV Backmarker: Hollywood Confidential

August 27, 2009 by Mark Gardiner
Filed under Backmarker

When I arrived at Jay Leno’s garage, the door was open and there was a 1931 Henderson four parked in a pool of sunlight. “This was a great bike,” Jay said. “It was powerful and smooth, and had automobile-quality electrics and reliability.”

Jay shows two local cops what a state-of-the-art police bike looked like in 1931. This is the Henderson I rode, but no, they did not follow us to the garage to write a ticket. (That said, Leno does have the dubious honor of being the driver of the oldest vehicle ever stopped for speeding in the state of California.)

He went on to explain that this particular bike was one of the last Hendersons ever made, and that it had been set up for police work and displayed on the manufacturer’s stand at the ’31 New York Auto Show. As a police bike, it had a “tattletale” speedometer, with one needle that worked as normal and a second that registered the highest speed reached, and which had to be manually reset. “Look,” he said, pointing to the gauge. “I hit 79 mph coming in this morning.”

Then he asked, “Have you ever ridden one of these?”

When I said no, he said, “Then let’s go! I’ll get my other one.”

He disappeared into an adjacent building, while one of his mechanics reminded me that I’d have to work the clutch with my left foot and shift gears with my left hand. To make matters worse, there were two shift levers on the left side of the fuel tank. I mustn’t touch the outer one, as it operated the bike in reverse, for use with a sidecar. I envisioned nudging the wrong lever by accident, locking up the rear wheel, and spending the rest of my life trolling eBay for used Henderson parts.

One of the motorcycles in a service bay was a Y2K “jet bike” powered by a 320 horsepower Rolls Royce turbine engine. When I snapped a photo of it, Jay told me that it was actually a service loaner. The company that made the bike wanted to take his back to modify it, so they lent him the bike that appeared in the movie Torque. “Oh God, no,” he said. “I’d never own anything with a paint job like that.”

Jay started both bikes and led me out onto the streets of Burbank. After a few blocks, I started to get used to the utterly alien controls of the oldest motorcycle I’d ever ridden. Coming to a stop was relatively stress-free as long as I remembered to get it into neutral while it was still rolling and release the clutch, so I’d have my left foot free to put down—because my right foot was occupied on the rear brake. (The front brake lever was about two inches long and located on the left handlebar. When I squeezed it, a tiny angel pressed the head of a dandelion against the inside of the front brake drum; at least, that’s about how much stopping power was generated.)

Just about the time I was thinking we should head back to the garage while my honor and Jay’s bike were both intact, he led me onto Interstate 5—in real we’ve-just-emptied-the-asylums traffic. I had no idea how hard I could rev it; I didn’t even know how many gears it had. While the sprung seat/rigid rear end was surprisingly comfortable, I was taken aback by an alarming speed wobble at about 60mph. How Jay ran it up to nearly 80 on his morning commute was beyond me.

Living down here, I see lots of celebs who wear their custom hogs and Ducatis like designer clothing. By that I mean, they use what’s given to them for promotional purposes, preferably at some red-carpet gala while paparazzi flashes pop. That’s not Jay Leno; he’s a little bit embarrassed by the Hollywood-star cult’s free-food-for-millionaires ethos and aware of the irony in the fact that, at a stage in his career when he can afford anything he wants, manufacturers of new bikes often give him machines. He’s been a lifelong motorcycle enthusiast. His garage—actually a 17,000 square-foot restoration shop with five full-time employees and four nearby storage buildings totaling nearly 100,000 square feet—is home to about 100 motorcycles, as well as his better-known collection of automobiles. Almost all of them are licensed and insured and at least occasionally taken out on the roads.

Bernard Juchli, the general manager of Jay’s garage. “I tell him, ‘Jay, just because it went 100 mph back then doesn’t mean it should go 100 mph now.”

Once we were safely back in the garage—after only one embarrassing stall on my part—Jay told me the bike I was riding still had its original brake shoes. “I’ll bet if you gave the average modern rider a bike like this, with almost no brakes and terrible handling,” he said “they’d actually have fewer crashes, because they’d have to think so far ahead.” Personally, I hadn’t felt safer, but maybe that was his point.

When Leno was a kid growing up in Andover, Massachusetts, most of the high-performance bikes he saw were in magazines. “I was that kid, sitting in the back of math class, with a copy of Cycle World,” he told me. “I was in the eighth grade in 1964, when they put out an issue with a white and gold Triumph Bonneville on the cover, and I thought it was beautiful.”

After fantasizing about it for years, his first riding experience was hardly the stuff dreams were made of. “I was about 18, and I bought a used Honda 350,” he remembered. “I’d never ridden a motorcycle, and the salesman handed me the keys. I was wearing prescription glasses, I had no helmet, and it started to rain as I rode home. A big truck passed me, and in the wind blast, my glasses flew off.”

Seeing the humor in his own misadventures always came naturally to Jay. Even before he was out of college, he got gigs as a stand-up comedian in Playboy clubs. “After I graduated, I worked in car dealerships by day and did comedy at night,” he told me. “I kept the day-job money in one pocket, and the comedy money in the other one. When there got to be a lot more money in that pocket, I realized I could make a good living in show business.”

“Projects for Boys” indeed... This contraption, not quite finished, is part knucklehead Harley, part 1902 Knox steam engine, and (I’m not kidding) that squat metal cylinder where the motor should be is a heat exchanger from a Titan nuclear missile. “The Air Force sold that to me,” Leno said. It’s obviously good to be him when you want a favor. He added wryly, “I guess I built that to gain entrance to the More Money Than Brains Club.”

To this day, he’s got the two pockets of money; they’re just really, really big pockets. “I live off the money I make doing comedy, and bank all the television money,” he told me. Although he jokes about the amount of money he spends on this hobby, the truth is that his vintage motorcycles have probably been as good an investment as the stock market in recent years.

“Sometimes, you buy the story as much as the bike,” he told me. “A few years back, I crashed a Vincent, and I was limping around on the Tonight Show, and I said, ‘If anyone out there has a Vincent gas tank they want to sell, call me.’ Sure enough, some old guy calls from Florida and says, ‘I have a gas tank, but you have to buy the whole bike.’ He gives me the serial number, and I call the Vincent club and they tell me the bike with that number is lost. It was the third Black Shadow ever made; it was sold to an American G.I. and never seen again. They mention the G.I.’s name, and I’m stunned. It’s the old guy who called. It turned out he brought the bike home, it broke the bronze idler gear, and he put it aside. Then he got married, had kids, he just never got around to it. The bike was still virtually new.”

“I don’t think of myself as a collector,” he said, “because I ride all of my bikes.” And he doesn’t baby them, either; I was aghast when he told me he’d been clocked at over 100 mph on his 1924 Brough Superior—an ex-Brooklands race bike that makes the Henderson I rode look positively modern.

During his television-taping season, Leno checks in with his mechanics by phone several times a day from his office on the NBC lot. After taping his show in the afternoon, he comes to the garage for an hour or two to recharge his own batteries. He drops one vehicle off and picks another up to use the next day. “When he’s working, Jay only rides or drives one vehicle a day, so he doesn’t break too much,” Bernard Juchli (his garage manager) told me. “But during the summer he’s here all day, and he’ll take out five or six vehicles, so he creates more work for us.”

Toward the end of the day, Jay wheeled out a 1918 Pope. “Riding this thing,” he told me, “60 mph feels like 200.”

Those mechanics tend to be guys who had their own shops specializing in restoration and vintage race preparation. They appreciate recession-proof job security, being surrounded by great bikes and cars, and most of all they appreciate the fact that now, they only have one customer to keep happy.

They also have absolutely everything they need to do their jobs. “I don’t know of any private individual who’s got this much equipment,” Bernard said, gesturing toward the CNC milling machines, water-jet cutting table with a 15-foot bed, and a 3-D printer for parts prototyping. They can make virtually any part, for any vehicle, in-house.

Although Leno appreciates the amazing performance capabilities of modern sport bikes, he bemoans the way they’re filled with incomprehensible digital gadgets, with motors sealed behind bodywork making them almost impossible for owners to service.

“I have this book that was published in the ’20s,” Jay said, “called Projects for Boys. It’s full of projects like building your own steam engines and making your own crystal radios. Those were thought of as projects for boys. Nowadays, men can’t do that stuff.”

I stood there with his mechanics and watched as he kicked the Pope to life and rode out the gate. As he disappeared around the corner, we turned back into the garage. Just then, there was a loud, metallic crash and we all froze in place, exchanging wide-eyed glances. After a moment, one of Jay’s guys jogged out for a better look.

“It was just a garbage truck,” he said with relief, adding, “I hate that sound.”