Dean Jeffries, customizer, dies on May 5th 

By Wallace Wyss

The man who helped put the Cobra on the map by painting the first Cobra (not once but many times) has died. He was  Hollywood customizer Dean Jeffries, who died May 5th at the age of 80.

Tom Cotter wrote a book about him entitled Dean Jeffries: 50 Fabulous Years in Hot Rods, Racing & Film, In the book Cotter tells about how Jeffries was one of the original group of hot rodders of the ‘40s who started customizing cars, chopping tops, lowering cars, putting in hot rod engines. His competition was the Barris Brothers, Bill Cushenberry, Gene Winfield and the Alexander Brothers in Detroit.

Jeffries died in his sleep May 5^th. He was in ill health over the yerars, having suffered from cancer. He also injured himself several times in his part-time career as a stunt driver where, for instance, in Romancing the Stone, he broke his back twice when stunt cars crashed wrong. He also fell off a ladder, that one put him in a coma.

He was born February 1933 in Lynwood, California, and reportedly dreamed of going to the Art Center College and being a car designer but never made it there, instead his designs were done in grungy shops with a welding torch. Not that he wasn’t noticed by the industry—one time Ford had a custom car caravan and featured cars from Jeffries and other customizers and even assigned him to build two show cars.

He served in the US Army in Germany where he reportedly learned the fine art of pinstriping from a German furniture and piano striper. Once back in the states he hung out with the most famous pinstriper,  Kenneth “Von Dutch” Howard, which led him to being hired to be George Barris’s in-house pinstriper. He started doing some famous cars, among them James Dean’s infamous Porsche 550 Spyder with the nickname “Li’l Bastard,” (the one Dean was killed in only days later) and Chili Catallo’s 1932 Ford three-window coupe, the one that the Beach Boys used on the cover of their Little Deuce Coupe album.

Jeffries' Cobra connection was that he knew Shelby wanted to get this Cobra gong and volunteered to do it for next to nothing. Shelby said he could do it any color he wanted so he chose a pearl yellow.

After that car got on a lot of magazine covers, Shelby borught it back and Jeffries repainted it again and again, a different color each time, to make people think there were Cobras just pouring out of Shelby’s Venice Beach factory,. Eventually Shelby gave him a “full house” 289 tricked up for racing with four Webers which Jeffries put into his famous Mantaray custom, which is built on the bones of a Maserati  8CTF Grand Prix car he got from his father in law.

His most famous TV cars were the  Monkeemobile, based on a Pontiac and the the Chrysler Imperial-based Black Beauty from The Green Hornet . One of the most ambitious cars was the huge many-wheeled truck from  the film Damnation Alley.

He also got into the dune buggy business with a car called the Kyote , which wasVolkswagen-based.

  
Jeffries called a spade a spade and was known in his later years to tell everybody with earshot that George Barris was continually taking credit for cars that , he –Jeffries—had done.  “He couldn’t put a dent into something, never mind taking one out, but he’s a hell of a promoter, believe me,” Jeffries told tom Cotter, his biographer.

Wallace Wyss is the author of SHELBY The Man, the Cars, the Legend (Iconografix)

Dean Jeffries  1962 Ford Cougar concept for a Thunderbird successor

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