Evel

by Leigh Montville

  Sarno Sr. and Knievel had cooked up the plan right there in the emergency room. That was the major cause of the great laughter. Sarno was late getting back to the car, he said, because he had been sprinkling some $100 bills throughout the hospital to selected orderlies and nurses to be sure that they, as unnamed sources, would report to the press that the daredevil was in a dire state.

  “It was all a fabrication, all horseshit,” Jay Sarno Jr. said years later. “My father and Knievel were like two giggling, sneaky teenagers. They were putting something over on everybody. They were a couple of promoters.”

  Sarno told other people in the following days that he had visited Knievel and given him the $4,500 for the three jumps, even though the last two never would be performed. He felt sorry for the kid. He said he agreed to pay the hospital costs. He also picked up the hotel room, plus meals, plus bar bill, part of the contract, and added on the gambling debts. They were not part of the contract, but, as he said, he felt sorry for the kid.

  “Now get the fuck out of my life,” Sarno said he had told Knievel in the hospital after detailing his largesse. “I never want to see you again.”

  He now said he was a little presumptuous with his words. At that good-bye moment, he thought the promotion was a disaster, beginning to end. Then he stopped back at Caesars that night. He couldn’t find a parking space, not even his own. The carryover attention from the afternoon had made Caesars the hottest place in town.

  Happy New Year’s.

  The story that came out the following day did indeed portray a man in serious trouble. Doctors supposedly were deciding whether or not to fuse his pelvis. If the pelvis was fused, he would be unable to walk and his career certainly would be finished. The Associated Press sent out a two-picture photo spread that was used across the country. The first showed Knievel in full flight on the Triumph T-120, high above the fountains, framed in the air by two of those Italian cypress trees. The second showed the separated bike and man rolling along the parking lot in a single ball of dust. The title for the two pictures was “End of a Stunt Driver’s Career.”

  “Evel Knievel, 29-year-old Hollywood stunt driver, is pictured here in what probably will be the last such feat of his career,” the caption read. “Flying high at left, Knievel fell short of the mark—the 150-foot flight over Las Vegas casino fountains—and crashed. Knievel was thrown against a retaining wall and suffered a badly fractured pelvis, probably ending his career.”

  The Las Vegas Sun ran a front-page story headlined “Injured Stuntman Fair; Medics Hold Up Big Decision” on January 2, 1968. Tom Diskin, the paper’s sports columnist, wrote that he had been refused entry to Knievel’s hospital room, “as expected.” The columnist still was dizzy over what he had seen, thinking how easily Knievel “could have been decapitated” if he had landed a few feet shorter than he did.

  “I once knew a veteran sportswriter who, after losing several friends in auto racing, refused to get acquainted with other drivers because of the way he felt when they were killed,” Diskin wrote. “Now I think I know some of the feeling he had.”

  Three days later, doctors at the hospital announced that fusion surgery would not be necessary, but that Knievel probably still would be in the hospital “for months.” The inference was that he still had some serious problems.

  “The treatment originally diagnosed for Mr. Knievel is going to be continued,” an unnamed doctor said at Southern Nevada Memorial. “No surgery is considered needed. Fifteen years ago surgery was felt necessary for a smashed pelvis, but now improved techniques allow it to be treated with traction.”

  Friends expected the worst when they went to visit, then were surprised when they found the patient up to his old ways. Bryan Farnsworth, who had set up the bike in the first place, had missed the jump, but showed up two days later from L.A. to see if there was anything he could do to help. He found that Knievel didn’t need any help.

  “They told me at the front desk he couldn’t have visitors except for family,” Farnsworth said. “I told them I was family. I was his cousin from Butte. They let me in.

  “Evel was a little groggy from the drugs, but was sitting up. His leg was wrapped in plastic, otherwise he was fine. He spent the whole visit showing me newspaper clippings about the crash, magazine articles. I think he showed me something from Time magazine.”

  The crash was a publicity miracle. Knievel didn’t have to be told twice about that. People always paid attention after he crashed, then came back to talk about his injuries, his fate. Voyeurs always perked up when he described his crashes … and who wasn’t a voyeur? This clearly was the best crash of them all. The stories and attention multiplied and became even better when John Derek and Linda Evans came to the hospital a week later. They brought along the pictures from the big day.

  After the crash, the two movie stars had sent the film to Los Angeles to be developed at a Hollywood laboratory. The process took four or five days, so they went camping. They drove around the wilderness, stopped when they had the urge to stop, slept under the open sky, reveled in being normal and anonymous. When they finally went to L.A. to pick up the finished product at the laboratory, they also received the first review.

  “That’s the most extraordinary film I’ve ever seen,” the technician said.

  Linda Evans was stunned. The technician said he had developed moving pictures for a long, long time. He had developed Academy Award winners. He had never developed anything as graphic as this one crash. He was amazed. Everybody who saw the film was amazed.

  “You could see everything,” Linda Evans said. “It was just so stunning to me. The camera captured every twist and turn of his body. Arms. Legs. Hips. Everything disconnecting.”

  Beginner’s luck perhaps. Mind over matter. Whatever it was that she used in her filmmaking debut with the long lens, it worked. The entire edited clip of the jump was no more than a minute long. Her contribution was less than half of that, maybe twenty-five seconds, even that number inflated because the action from her camera was shown in slow motion. The twenty-five slow-motion seconds, though, were absolutely spectacular.

  The film …

  John Derek, with the other camera, pans the crowd at the beginning of the clip, a background noise of Roman trumpets and unruliness, people waiting for a show to get rolling. The action continues, still John Derek’s camera, through the first warm-up ride to the edge of the ramp, yes, and then the real ride, everything done in a hurry, in front of your eyes before you are ready. Well into the jump, maybe two-thirds of the way, John Derek’s shot from the side of the action disappears. Here is Linda’s camera, straight on, different speed. Knievel is in the air, ready to land. Slow motion, everything happens in slow motion.

  He hits, back wheel first, on the safety van …

  Boom …

  The metal panel lifts off the van. The front wheel of the motorcycle is turned, hard right, by the impact. His hands come off the handlebars. He starts to fly off the bike, straight up, propelled, then turning, turning …

  He does a complete flip, perfect, as if he had come off the ten-meter board in an Olympic diving competition, a violent, unplanned somersault. His arms go out in front of him to break the fall, but are of little use because, yes, he lands hard on his back …

  Boom …

  He bounces, then rolls to one side, tries to cover up, but his momentum is in control and he does another complete turn, this time sideways …

  Boom …

  Another complete turn sideways …

  Boom …

  He rolls straight ahead one more time now, another complete turn, helmeted head over flame-resistant heels, helmeted head bouncing off the pavement, arms, legs, flying. “Like a ragdoll,” most people will say …

  Boom …

  A final sideways flip puts him at rest, pretty much at Linda Evans’s feet. The Triumph T-120, a secondary character in the production, has taken an eerie course, following Knievel’s bouncing path, threatening to run him down. It finally
clatters out of the picture, moving past Evans’s camera and somewhere behind her.

  Derek’s camera takes control again, the return to normal, fast time—people running to the injured Knievel, post-crash chaos that looks like a scene from a Central American revolution—oddly enough is a relief. The man has stopped bouncing. Done. The painful part is finished.

  “It’s your film, do what you want with it,” John Derek said when he presented the finished product to Knievel at Southern Nevada Memorial. “Linda and I just hope you never do something like this again. We don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “I’m glad that he got something he could use out of it all, but, wow, at what a price,” Linda Evans said. “How do you do something like that? How could you ever get on a motorcycle again?”

  Retirement never entered Knievel’s mind. Retire? This was the beginning.

  The film was everything. The film was instant credibility. (How dangerous, how scary, are the things I do? This is exhibit A.) The film was a passport, a not-so-secret word that opened the toughest doors in television, made its owner a desired guest. (I can bring along the clip from Caesars Palace. People love that.) The film was what made most of America first remember the name of Evel Knievel. (Did you see what happened to this guy? Lucky he’s still alive.) The film was the foundation for a business, a career, found at last. The talking person from Butte now had a grand talking point. He crashed at Caesars Palace, and now he wanted to jump the Grand Canyon! Stay tuned.

  Everything that followed came from the film.

  Knievel always gave great credit to John Derek for following through and giving him the film. He also admitted, gladly, that the crash was the foundation of his entire career, the moment he was delivered to the American public. No one can say what would have happened if he had completed the jump, then completed the next two fountain jumps, but a pretty good guess is that the news would not have moved outside of Las Vegas.

  A story. The first time the film was shown on national television, Matt Tonning was one of the more interested viewers. This was a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, Wide World of Sports on the TV as background noise, everything quiet in his Montana recreation room until this daredevil came onto the screen from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The announcer in the background noise mentioned the name “Evel Knievel.”

  Evel Knievel?

  That had to be Bob Knievel, his friend, Bob Knievel from Butte. The crazy salesman for Combined Insurance. The one who worked with Jay. The one who sold the mental hospital. The one who conned the lawyer in the bar about betting on the size of his penis. The same Bob Knievel. Nobody ever called him Evel, not back then, but this had to be the same guy.

  Sure was.

  The filmed action from Las Vegas now became totally compelling. There was good reason. Tonning had been contacted in the intervening years a few times by Bob. There had been some genial conversation, more than a few laughs, then Bob had asked to buy some insurance. He no longer was employed by Combined, he said, but was still a true believer. He had bought a policy, then another and another, bought ten policies in all. The company had rules that a salesman should sell only two policies, maximum, to a single customer, but Bob was a friend and he really wanted to be protected and he was insistent, and so maybe a few rules had been broken. Tonning had entered other salesmen’s names to sell the extra policies to Bob.

  Now Bob was a daredevil? This was his new job?

  Tonning watched the proceedings with an immediate sense of dread. He knew the ending before it happened.

  “There I was,” he said, “sitting at home and watching my career skid and crash across the Dunes parking lot. I knew right then I was going to be fired.”

  There would be rumors that Knievel had bought as many as fifty policies, maybe more, from different Combined agents, that he was very well covered by Combined Insurance when he crashed in Las Vegas, but the rumors didn’t matter to Tonning. No clever little W. Clement Stone saying could get him out of this jam. He was called to the home office in Chicago during the next business week.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” his boss asked.

  He had no good reply.

  He was fired.

  A printed burst of publicity for Knievel arrived when Rogin’s story appeared in the February 4 issue of Sports Illustrated. Entitled “He’s Not a Bird, Not a Plane,” the story ran for nine pages in the biggest sports magazine in the country, more than seven thousand words. A single picture of Knievel standing up on his Triumph halfway across the fountains, hanging in the middle of the air as if he were some Disney cartoon character, some product of a wild imagination, Caesars Palace in the background, the faces in the crowd waiting with mouths open to see what came next, was stretched across the first two pages. The caption read “He is Evel Knievel, self-styled conservative Wildman—here soaring over the fountains at a Las Vegas hotel—who intends to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle.”

  Rogin had gone home, missed the jump and the crash, but that was all right. The event was stitched into the narrative nicely, the story more about the wacky character and his wacky plan to jump the canyon. The safecracking, the kidnapping of Linda, the hitchhiking to Washington to stop the elk kill, the hockey against the Czechs, the insurance career, all of that was included. This was the basic background tale of Evel Knievel that would be saved in a pile of old Sports Illustrateds, Olympic skiers Billy Kidd and Jimmy Huega on the cover of the issue, and brought out to fill up countless newspaper columns.

  “Everybody expects Evel Knievel to be a long-haired guy, but I’m a conservative Wildman,” Knievel told Rogin. “I am a guy who is first of all a businessman. I present myself to the public as an athlete and an average human being. I look like a pole vaulter.”

  The likeability that the writer had found in his subject came through in the story. Knievel was a bold scamp, a charming entrepreneur selling the possibilities of his own demise. He was cast in that grand role of An American Original, talented in the whacked-out game he had invented for himself. He certainly was a stranger no more to the American public. Between Sports Illustrated and Wide World he had hit the two major sports media outlets. The film would bring him to the nonsports outlets, the talk shows that clogged the daily television schedules.

  There was no doubt that he seemed to have a future when he checked out of Southern Nevada Memorial in a wheelchair on February 6, 1968, thirty-seven days after he had been delivered in an ambulance. He only needed time in Butte to heal before he stepped back onto that motorcycle, got back into the game.

  The Caesars jump was his life-changing moment, the catapult into public view. He took the post-jump deceit he manufactured with Sarno and refined it, multiplied it many times, in the future. The more he would show the film, the worse his injuries would become. Knievel biographer and historian Steve Mandich noted in his SteveMandich.com blog that within two years a story appeared in the September 1969 issue of Science and Mechanics claiming that Knievel “suffered a severe brain concussion.” The statement quickly grew from there to an almost routine Knievel response that he had been in a coma for twenty-nine days after the Caesars Palace crash. A basic part of his story, totally bogus, was that he landed in Southern Nevada Memorial in a coma and woke up twenty-nine days later and was famous.

  (“What’s it like to be in a coma for twenty-nine days?” Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated once asked him. “How the fuck do I know?” Knievel replied. “I was in a coma for twenty-nine days.”)

  One of the people Knievel met during the buildup to the jump was Joe Louis, the former heavyweight boxing champion. Louis, one of Knievel’s idols as a kid, worked at Caesars as greeter now, part of the operation. One of Knievel’s friends said he heard that the champ, on the eve of the jump, had advised Knievel, “You know, it might work out a lot better for you if you don’t make it,” which ultimately turned out to be true.

  The event became the most famous part of Caesars lore. (“It’s still the most asked question I get,” va
let parking attendant Jim Dunbar, still on the job in 2010, said. “Where did Evel Knievel crash?”) The film, despite all the photographic advances that have evolved, the computer simulations that can make anything and everything explode, still has remained startling, memorable. Linda Evans, living in the state of Washington, forty-three years after the event, was asked one day by the manager of her local supermarket if she would meet with one of his young employees who apparently was a big fan. She was flattered, prepared to talk about her career on the hit television series Dynasty. This was not what the young fan wanted to talk about.

  “Did you really shoot that film of Evel Knievel at Caesars Palace?” he asked.

  A final word came from Evelyn Cappadona, Jay Sarno’s secretary. She continued to hear rumors that Knievel had not been injured as badly as the papers said. She didn’t think they were right. Mr. Sarno always had said on television that Knievel was injured. He was quoted in the newspapers. He wouldn’t lie about something like this, would he?

  “You wouldn’t lie about something like this,” Evelyn said one day to Mr. Sarno. “Would you?”

  The boss laughed out loud.

  “Sure I would,” he replied. “This was all about publicity. That was why it happened. That was why it was great. The publicity.”

  12 Movie

  The return to action was scheduled for May 25, 1968, a Saturday night. The plan was to jump thirteen Bill Watkins Fords at Bee Line Dragway in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Bill Watkins dealership, at the corner of Scottsdale and Camelback, made a weeklong production of the event, with ads that announced thirteen new Fords, thirteen demonstrators, and thirteen used cars were for sale at “Evel-ly Low Prices!” Buyers not only were invited to look at the cars on the lot, but also could see “Evel Knievel’s fantastic equipment” on display before it was moved to the drag strip for the jump.