Evel

by Leigh Montville

  The explanation was given to Gil Rogin, the Sports Illustrated writer. Unable to shake the image of the suitcase under the bed in the tiny Vegas hotel room, he had returned to New York and convinced his bosses that Knievel would be a good subject. Now Rogin was on the job again, collecting the varied pieces of Knievel’s life, trying to separate the truths from the exaggerations, watching his subject, yes, jump over the ten cars successfully and afterward drink stingers, straight up, in a hotel bar in celebration. This was scheduled to be the long story in the back of the magazine, known every week as “The Bonus.” Knievel was on the job too, spinning his tales, trying to put as many exclamation points in “The Bonus” as he could.

  “I really came bursting through that door,” he said about the Long Beach jump. “The tach was 7,500 rpm and the speedometer was bouncing between 60 and 70. I saw those white lines heading up that ramp and I said I got to do it!”

  Rogin hung around Los Angeles, wrote down all the specifics of what seemed to be absurd undertakings. Knievel lived in his own bus in L.A. this time. Rogin would meet him at the bus, then follow him around. When Knievel went to Las Vegas to get ready for the Caesars jump, Rogin went with him. Knievel drove.

  The car was a 1937 purple Rolls-Royce, which he said he had picked up a day earlier. (Just another fact for the story that wrote itself.) The pace was moderate, conservative. (The guy is driving to Las Vegas to jump the fountains at Caesars Palace on a motorcycle and he drives at fifty miles per hour, seat belt fastened, like an old man in a station wagon bringing his Social Security check to the craps tables.) Knievel sang a happy song over and over.

  Never worry,

  Never fuss,

  When Evel Knievel drives the bus.

  The talk was constant. Rogin had decided that he liked the daredevil even though the daredevil seemed decidedly anti-Semitic. Rogin, Jewish, wore a Star of David from a chain on his neck, but that didn’t stop the idle remarks, the jokes about Jews. Rogin surprised himself by letting it slide. Knievel’s youthful exuberance, his ambition, maybe where he was from … there were other parts of this guy that seemed to mute the unfortunate words he said here or there.

  “He wasn’t really a roughneck, which I had thought he might be,” Rogin said. “He was good company. I enjoyed being around him.”

  The trip, L.A. to Las Vegas, always boring, was not boring at all. Knievel prattled along, talked about swindling, arm wrestling, blowing safes, jumping the Grand Canyon, assorted subjects. When Vegas came into view, the lights in the middle of the desert, a burst of color, electricity, megawatt magic, Knievel became philosophical. He knew the importance of what awaited.

  “If I keep making these jumps,” he said, “I’m going to wind up dead. And I just don’t want to wind up dead.”

  Caesars Palace. The fountains.

  What had he done?

  Whatever it was, it belonged to him. He had created the moment from nothing. This would be a self-imposed fate.

  “I haven’t come down this road by accident,” he also said to Gil Rogin. “I’m here.”

  A writer never can go wrong with a quotable man.

  11 Caesars (II)

  The best indication that this was more than just another jump over a string of cars or panel trucks at some dusty drag strip or fairgrounds was that it was going to be the starting point for an Evel Knievel movie. The working title was “Why?” and the producer-director-cinematographer was actor John Derek. Knievel and Derek had met at the Tiger-Rouse fight, and Derek had watched the show in Long Beach, and the two men had made a deal to do a documentary on Knievel’s life.

  The actor and the daredevil were a natural pair. The most famous line the actor ever had spoken was “I want to live fast, die young, and make a good-looking corpse” as a murderous juvenile delinquent in the 1949 film Knock on Any Door, starring Humphrey Bogart. Knievel, of course, pretty much had embraced that philosophy.

  Now forty-one years old, Derek had moved beyond those delinquent roles, had appeared in epics like The Ten Commandments and Exodus, but probably was best known for his relationships with beautiful women. His first wife was starlet Patti Behrs, his second actress Ursula Andress, and now he was about to be married to Linda Evans, the star of The Big Valley. (He later would be married a fourth time to eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Collins, who became known by her nickname, Bo, and married second name, Bo Derek.) Knievel obviously shared this appreciation for beautiful women.

  “John was an exceptionally creative man,” Linda Evans said years later, trying to describe Derek’s charm. “He could get interested in many things, things that were off the beaten path. An example, he made me my boots. He started talking one day with a bootmaker on the set of Big Valley about how boots were made. Then one day, out of nowhere, John brought home a last, the form you use to make a pair of boots. The first boot took him a year to finish, the second one half of a year. That was John. He could do anything. He was very intelligent, very creative. The films he shot, they were just gorgeous.”

  Derek had rented two enormous cameras—at least they looked enormous to Evans—to film the jump. One had a normal lens, which would be used from long range. Derek would use this camera to capture the crowd, the atmosphere, the panorama. The second camera with a long lens was for a close-up. This would be trained at the landing ramp, catching the flight of Knievel and motorcycle as they became larger and larger, directly into the camera. Evans never had worked a camera like this in her life. She was nervous about the idea. Derek told her not to worry. Then Derek himself became nervous the night before the jump.

  “We went out to dinner at Caesars, the three of us, John and Evel and myself,” Evans said. “It was supposed to be low-key. Except John and Evel got into a terrible fight.”

  The fight was about the jump. Knievel solemnly informed Derek that the jump was not going to be a success. He had calculated all there was to calculate, and he could not make this jump. He would land short. He would crash. This was the pessimism that eventually surfaced prior to most appearances for Knievel, the whistle-past-the-graveyard moment that seemed to be a necessary part of his preparation, but it sounded awful to Derek. He was horrified. He didn’t want to film a tragedy.

  “Cancel the show,” he said.

  “I can’t do that,” Knievel said.

  “You could kill yourself …”

  “It’ll be all right …”

  Around and around the two men went, variations on that argument. Derek was angry. This was the stupidest thing he ever had heard, a man putting himself in a situation that he knew would cause him bodily harm, perhaps even death. Knievel repeated that a promise was a promise, this was what he did for a living. Derek repeated that this was the stupidest thing he ever had heard.

  Finally, he quit. The partnership was done. He was Evel Knievel’s friend, and he didn’t want to be a partner in any production that could take his friend’s life. Nothing could be that important. He would film the jump, yes, he and Linda would do that because it was too late now for Knievel to find someone else, but he didn’t want the film, didn’t want the rights, didn’t want any part of this deadly enterprise. There would be no movie.

  “If you’re going to kill yourself,” John Derek said, “I don’t want to be one of the reasons. You’re on your own.”

  Knievel went off to take care of his jitters in whatever ways he could find. Derek and Evans went outside to the parking lot to set up their cameras and to practice for most of the night. Evans was terrified. She not only didn’t know if she could operate the camera, now she didn’t know if she could look at what might happen in front of her.

  “I never liked violence in movies,” she said. “I never watched. My mother always talked about taking my sister and me to the movies. I’d be the one with my head between my knees, my hands over my ears, at the scary parts. I never even liked the dramatic parts. I’d walk outside to get popcorn. I liked the frothy movies.”

  The froth had disappeared from this production. />
  The final day of 1967 was cool in Las Vegas. The temperatures, high of 48 degrees, low of 29, were nothing compared to the reading of –13 degrees (with windchill of –48 degrees) in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where the nation was captivated as the Packers outlasted the Dallas Cowboys, 21–17, in the NFL playoff game that would soon be called “the Ice Bowl,” but still, the numbers were cool for Vegas. Sunny, but brisk.

  The marquee at Caesars Palace advertised Fiddler on the Roof, the Broadway production starring Theodore Bikel, which would have performances at 8:30 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. at Circus Maximus to celebrate the New Year. No mention was made of Knievel. The other attractions in town ranged from Phil Foster and Joe Flynn at the Aladdin to Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars at the Tropicana to comedian Jan Murray at the Thunderbird to Arturo Romero and His Magic Violins at the Dunes and Psychedelic Topless at the Nevada Club. A reveler had choices.

  The crowd, determined by guesstimate since there were no tickets, was somewhere around ten thousand people, everyone bundled a bit against the cold, the underdressed Roman slave girl waitresses from Caesars working with goose bumps in their cleavage. The magic word was “free.” People took a break from the gambling tables, killed time while waiting for the celebratory night to arrive. They would hold a beer, a cocktail, in their hands and watch some knucklehead try to kill himself.

  The knucklehead in question had spent a lot of time around Sarno’s offices during the weeklong buildup to the event. He was a bundle of pleasant energy, didn’t seem terribly involved in the planning. Sarno’s secretary, Evelyn Cappadona, asked him one day why he wasn’t outside, practicing, making sure everything was just right.

  “You don’t understand, Evelyn,” Knievel said. “This is a one-shot deal. You do it or you don’t.”

  Jim Dunbar, stationed near the jump site as a valet parking attendant, talked with Knievel daily as the ramps were built on either side of the fountains. He found the daredevil to be “cool, calm and collected, personable.” Kim Kimball, a salesman for Montesa motorcycles from Spain, part of the Ascot crowd, did most of the work on the ramps. Dunbar also talked to him.

  “Kimball was frustrated,” Dunbar said. “He couldn’t get Knievel to go out and see if he could get going fast enough to clear the fountains.”

  Technology was not part of the production. Knievel never had brought mathematics or physics into his plans and surely did not now. He felt like he didn’t need experts. He was his own expert. His research was his performances, the feeling he took away from each success or each failure. He didn’t even use the speedometer anymore, relying on touch, feel, sound, to determine if he was traveling fast enough or slow enough to complete the jump. The ramps were basic backyard construction, nothing special. The angle was again determined by the naked eye. There was no formula for jumping cars. There was no micrometer precision. All of this might be added by other people in a far more bulletproof future, much of the danger removed, but this was the primordial stage of motorcycle jumping. There was no need for slide rules, calculators, or even practice.

  Suck in your breath and go. That was the game.

  Standing on the front steps of Caesars, looking out toward Las Vegas Boulevard, the jump would travel from left to right, the opposite direction most people later would assume it went. Knievel would jump directly into the low, setting sun. The fountains, as dramatic as they looked, were not the challenge. They were no taller than the average line of cars. The challenge was the distance.

  The takeoff and landing ramps each were 40 feet long, 10 feet wide, plywood and two-by-fours. An elevated 200-foot runway would lead Knievel into the jump. He would have to clear 140 feet, almost half of a football field, the longest distance he ever had jumped. A van, a panel truck, again was parked in front of the landing ramp for safety, a steel plate stretched on top of the roof. This was where he hoped to land if he came up short. He would have to be traveling somewhere between eighty and ninety miles per hour when he left the takeoff ramp to travel ramp to ramp. No one—it didn’t have to be pointed out—had ever tried something exactly like this.

  The parking lot, filled with cars, came right up to the landing area. On the morning of the jump, Dunbar noticed how close the cars were. He moved a bunch of them to give Knievel a larger landing zone, basically a free area that went to the retaining wall at the edge of the Caesars property. On the other side of the wall, the property for the Dunes casino began.

  Knievel had become more and more nervous as the jump approached. John Derek and Linda Evans were not the only people who heard his doubts about success. A number of the boys from the bars in Butte had arrived. Linda and the kids had arrived. His father. His mother even had come up from Reno. There were also representatives from Moses Lake, from Los Angeles, all the pit stops.

  “I’ve got to admit, I’m getting a little edgy,” Knievel told Al Guzman, a sportswriter for the Las Vegas Sun the day before the jump. “I’m still confident I can make it, but my nervous system doesn’t seem to agree. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

  Dressed now in the white-red-and-blue leathers that left no doubt that he was a purely American exhibitionist, he knocked back a shot of Wild Turkey, maybe two, in his suite to calm his nerves. (“He was shaking,” Skip Van Leeuwen said, describing Knievel’s pre-jump condition.) He stopped once in the casino on the way to the parking lot, according to his self-remembered legend, placed a $100 bet on red at the roulette wheel, saw the white ball land on black, and plodded forward to his self-appointed task.

  The ultimate moment, as always, happened in an instant. After the requisite false starts to get a feel for the situation, he gunned down the elevated runway and up the forty-foot ramp and into the air—crossed over the fountains, freeze-frame perfect—and landed short. Crashed. He hit the final safety van. He went from healthy and free, perfect, to a man in need of a doctor and an intensive care ward.

  Blink once. Blink twice.

  That was how long it took.

  The crash was a furious blur. Knievel flew off the bike—didn’t he fly off the bike?—hands wrenched from the handlebars, and landed and bounced and rolled and bounced, and it was an instant mess. The crowd reaction was a gasp. People started running, moving everywhere, tried to help, maybe just moved to move. Knievel could be heard to complain about a pain in his back as he was carried one hundred feet to an ambulance, then taken with appropriate speed and solemnity to Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital.

  What happened?

  He clearly had lost control of the four-hundred-pound motorcycle. He clearly had gone flying. The motorcycle … half the people screamed because they thought the riderless motorcycle might come their way. Was there mechanical error? Someone suggested the throttle had fallen off. Was there driver error? What?

  John Derek asked Linda Evans what kind of pictures she had shot. She still was shaking from the experience. She had no idea. She wasn’t sure she had been looking at the right place. Fast. The motorcycle was coming straight at her, out of control. She saw everything. Did the camera capture it all? Proper lighting? In focus? No idea.

  Jim Dunbar, the parking valet, looked at where Knievel landed. If those cars hadn’t been moved the morning of the jump, he would have landed in the middle of them. Did Knievel realize how close he came? He probably would have been dead.

  “I thought he was dead,” more than one observer remarked. “He had to be dead the way he landed.”

  The jump, in the end, was no different from a pileup on Interstate 15 coming into the city, blunt and unsettling. Everyone had a personal perspective. Everyone had a different accident report to file.

  Jay Sarno watched the proceedings from the roof of Caesars with his two sons, Jay Jr. and Freddie. Jay Jr. was nine. Freddie was six. They were wrapped in the same buzz as everyone else, the pageant unfolding in what was a piece of their everyday life, the parking lot. The kids had what amounted to box seats as Knievel came up the ramp, not fast enough, no, and landed short and started flipping.

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bsp; The key mistake in the crash, Jay Jr. would remember for forty years and more, was in the way the safety van was set up. No one had thought to put blocks under the tires. When Knievel landed short, the truck underneath the metal plate had no resistance. The truck settled down on its springs and shock absorbers from the force, moved a little bit, then sprung back upward. The upward spring was what sent Knievel flying out of control.

  While the daredevil was being loaded into the ambulance for the ride to Southern Nevada Memorial, the Sarno family cut through the chaos to the family Cadillac, where Little Jimmy, the driver, awaited. The Sarnos then followed the ambulance to Southern Nevada Memorial.

  “There was all kinds of activity outside,” Jay Jr. remembered. “Reporters, television crews. It was like one of those alerts for a nuclear disaster.”

  Jay Sr. left the kids in the car. He was gone for a long time, more than an hour. The kids, watching the activity, grew edgy, worried. When Jay Sr. returned, they wanted to know everything, starting with the basic question: was Mr. Knievel all right?

  Their father gave them a quick and memorable lesson in promotion. The first thing he did was smile. Yes, Mr. Knievel was all right. He and Mr. Knievel had just been laughing together in the emergency room about the crash. There were some broken bones, of course, and Mr. Knievel’s leg had been pushed back into his pelvis, so there might be an operation, but the only real worry was whether or not he would be able to walk without a limp. He was a lucky, lucky man. There were no other worries.

  The father cautioned, however, that this was not what his sons would hear on television or read in the newspaper in coming days. The injuries would be much more serious when they were detailed for the general public. There would be questions about whether or not he ever would walk again, questions about whether he ever would perform. This was to keep the story alive, to keep Mr. Knievel’s name in the paper, to keep Caesars’ name in the paper. This was good business for everyone concerned.