Evel

by Leigh Montville

  The new notoriety obviously was in effect. Knievel was at a new venue, new city, but wasn’t a stranger. The clip had been shown on Wide World; readers had read the stories and not only knew about the crash but knew about the plan to jump the canyon. For the first time he didn’t have to beat a bass drum to announce his arrival. The noise already existed.

  One of the people intrigued by what he heard was a twenty-eight-year-old engineer named Doug Malewicki, who was the chief rocket design manager at Centuri Engineering in Phoenix. He was intrigued by the idea of a rocket-powered motorcycle flying off a ramp and out over the Grand Canyon, also intrigued by the man who would ride it. On a lunch hour, early in the week, he convinced Centuri’s head artist, Tom Cameron, to come along for a ride to Watkins Ford to look at this fantastic Evel Knievel equipment.

  Part of the presentation, along with the forty-foot flatbed and the trucks and motorcycles, was a prototype jet cycle for the canyon jump. The prototype was nonsense, partly slapped together in Moses Lake by Ray Gunn, who had been hired as Knievel’s mechanic, truck driver, and general handyman. (“He’d been asking me to go with him from the beginning, but I couldn’t see any financial sense in it,” Gunn said. “Then, when he crashed at Caesars Palace and got all that publicity, I thought it might be worthwhile after all.”) Gunn had attached a pair of ominous-looking wings and a pair of bottle-shaped thrust units to an ordinary motorcycle to create a contraption Knievel could use when he talked about the jump on television or in front of crowds. Knievel had wheeled it onto the set of The Joey Bishop Show two months earlier, sat down with Jerry Vale, Leslie Gore, and Charlie Callas and talked about doing the jump on July 4, 1968. The thing looked like a science-fiction version of a deranged mechanical housefly.

  Malewicki, the engineer, as he looked at it during his lunch hour, was aghast at what he saw. The deranged mechanical housefly was worthless, a piece of garbage, a hoax. Look at this! Look at that! Wow! He had the outrage of a basic slide-rule, book-smart nerd, finding something so obviously wrong that the general public assumed was legitimate. Holy cow! Where were the general public’s brains? His buddy Cameron, part of the 99 percent of Americans who knew little about rockets and mostly didn’t care, listened and said, “Hey, if you feel so strongly about it, leave him a letter.”

  Malewicki borrowed three pieces of stationery and a pen from the Bill Watkins Ford receptionist. He not only detailed how worthless and foolish the prototype was, but outlined how a proper rocket/cycle actually could clear the canyon and land with Knievel still alive. All of this filled the three pages, which he presented to the receptionist along with his business card. She placed everything in an envelope with Knievel’s name on the front.

  Knievel called Malewicki the next afternoon. The call was noisy.

  “What kind of bullshit is this?” the daredevil wanted to know. “Who are you to tell me what I should be doing?”

  “He was antagonistic,” Malewicki said. “He was mad. I could never figure that out. He knew what he had was bogus. Why would he start out antagonistic? He was mad at me. For what?”

  The conversation did become reasonable after that first flurry. Knievel had read the letter. He was interested in Malewicki’s ideas. How would the engineer prove some of his theories could work? Well, the engineer said he could build a model rocket in a couple of days, a different kind of prototype. He could fire off that rocket as part of the show at the Bee Line Dragway on Saturday night. Would that do the job? Knievel said he’d like to see that rocket.

  Malewicki, it turned out, made model rockets for a living. His employer, Centuri Engineering, was a leading manufacturer of miniature rockets for science classes, for enthusiasts, for smart kids on Saturday afternoons. He recruited four other engineers, all Centuri employees who had heard about Evel Knievel and the canyon, to come to his house and work on the prototype. They quickly built a rocket that had wheels.

  “That was what Evel talked about,” Malewicki said, “so that was what we built.”

  On Saturday evening they turned up at the drag strip with ten thousand other people for the show. One of those people was not Knievel. In the afternoon, practicing after such a long layoff, he did the opposite of what he did in Las Vegas, got up too much speed (not too little) and overshot (not undershot) the landing ramp. He shattered his right leg and right foot when he landed. He was now at the Mesa Lutheran Hospital instead of the Bee Line Dragway.

  News of his absence was held off until the crowd had come through the gates. The people then were told that Jumping Jack Stroh, back with Knievel to jump over that seventy-miles-per-hour motorcycle as part of the show, now would do Evel’s jump. Three of the Bill Watkins Fords, all Mustangs, would be removed, so Jumping Jack would jump ten cars. The captive audience would still see a show.

  Malewicki and company performed first. They sent off their rocket with precision and suitable applause. Perfect. Jumping Jack then tried Evel’s act. Not perfect.

  He made the same mistake Knievel made in the afternoon, too much speed, overshot the ramp. The announcer, in a surreal shout, said, “And he’s made it,” which technically was true, but Jumping Jack had hit the handlebars with his chin when he landed and was knocked out. The motorcycle wobbled, wobbled some more as it slowed, then fell down. Jumping Jack fell with it. A good-sized gash on his chin added a lot of blood to the picture. Jumping Jack was taken to Mesa Lutheran to join his boss.

  A day or two later, Knievel called Malewicki, invited him to the hospital. The reports of the rocket firing had been good. Knievel was still interested. Malewicki went to Mesa Lutheran.

  “Sitting in a chair outside Evel’s room was his wife, Linda,” the engineer said. “I introduced myself. She was very nice. She told me to go inside, and, well, it was classic Evel Knievel. He was in the room with a blond go-go dancer. His wife is outside in the chair, he’s in there with this blonde. They seemed very friendly. His leg was in a big cast. It was the absolute perfect introduction to the man.”

  Malewicki convinced Knievel, and maybe the go-go dancer, that he could build a rocket/motorcycle that could take the daredevil across the canyon of his choice. This not only could be done, it could be done easily. Hell, NASA was getting ready to send a man to the moon in the next calendar year. A canyon should be easy. Knievel liked the idea, wanted to make a deal. He convinced Malewicki that this could be a financial bonanza. He offered 30 percent of any canyon-jumping profits, plus expenses. The two men shook hands. There was no contract.

  “I was twenty-eight years old,” Malewicki said. “What did I know?”

  The canyon project had switched from daydream and nonsense to strong possibility. There was an actual chance this might actually happen.

  Malewicki went to work in Arizona. He had to make the jump from model rocket to man-sized rocket, not only build the thing powerful enough to carry that man a significant distance and somehow deposit him safely on the other side, but build it under the restrictions of a tight, small budget. He also had to make it look a little bit like a motorcycle. That was a challenge. Knievel went back on the road in July, returned to his motorcycle-jumping career. That was another challenge.

  He rolled off a string of successes to start, surprise, surprise, and seemed to have the process figured out at last. He jumped at least eight times, probably more, because records weren’t kept anywhere, each show a local event, and landed safely every time. He went back to Missoula, jumped those thirteen cars just to show he could do it. He jumped at least three times at the fairgrounds in Salt Lake City, rattled through the Northwest, stopped at places like Blackfoot and Meridian, Idaho, Walla Walla and Spokane, Washington.

  His success was mostly an illusion. The truth was that he had nothing figured out. Ray Gunn set up the ramps now and watched him every night he jumped. Every night was a quiet terror.

  “I could look in his eyes and see he was afraid on most of the jumps,” Ray Gunn said. “I knew he was afraid. I could even see it when he practiced. He was in a pani
c.”

  The ramp was never right. The bike was never right. Something was never right. The daredevil was never right … and yet he never backed down. There was something that kept him moving every night, one step after another, moving toward what came next, no matter what the cost. His brother, Nic Knievel, always said that the only competition for Evel Knievel was Bob Knievel and Bob Knievel was the one who would get them both killed. Bob Knievel was the source of all ambition, the one with the hundred-pound testicles, the one who made Evel Knievel ride those ramps toward some imagined payoff.

  “I guess he calculated he would be a coward if he ever walked away,” Ray Gunn said. “He never wanted to do that. Myself, I was from the country. Money and fame never mattered that much to me.”

  On the afternoon of October 13, 1968, still well removed from both money and fame, sometimes not making much more than a couple thousand bucks per show, the money tied to the gate receipts, Knievel dedicated a jump to his mother. He stopped at the Tahoe-Carson Speedway in Carson City, outside Reno, to jump ten cars. His mother was at the track along with his half-sisters Loretta and Kady. They had been in the crowd at Caesars Palace, so they knew that bad things could happen. The memory made everyone jumpy, especially his mother. She was so nervous at Caesars Palace that she couldn’t even come out of the hotel to watch.

  “It’s okay,” Loretta said to her mother. “He’s done this a million times. He’s dedicated the jump to you, made you stand up and wave to the crowd. It’ll be fine.”

  Unknown to Loretta and Kady and their mother, there was one hitch in the approach that made this jump different. The dirt racetrack had a dip midway between Knievel’s starting point and when he hit the ramp. He and Gunn had not been able to figure out the effects of the dip. Every time Knievel went into his approach, he lost speed on the downslope, then didn’t have time to recapture what he had lost before he hit the ramp. They knew the problem, but had run out of time to work on it. Knievel said he still would be fine. He would make sure he did not lose speed going through the dip.

  The afternoon was windy, but not windy enough to stop the show. Knievel went through his trial runs, came back to the appointed takeoff spot, this time for real, traveled halfway to the ramp, hit the dip, slowed down, tried to recover on the second half, and couldn’t. The moment he left the ramp, the entire crowd knew that he would not make the jump successfully. The arc of his motorcycle indicated immediately that he would land very short of his target.

  “He’s dead,” his mother screamed even before he hit the panel truck at the end of the line of cars and went flying.

  The afternoon ended at the Washoe Medical Center, his mother holding his hand as he lay in yet another hospital bed. He underwent surgery for a broken left hip the next day, for a broken right collarbone later in the week. His discomfort was extended when he picked up a painful and life-threatening staph infection from a Foley catheter. His hospital stay was extended indefinitely.

  “He was a sick guy,” Ray Gunn said. “Just to visit him, I had to take off my clothes and wear one of those hospital uniforms.”

  No Jay Sarno appeared from Caesars Palace to provide financial assistance for the hospital bill this time. Any money from those Combined Insurance policies had been spent long ago. He was on his own. The racetrack promoter, in fact, declared in the newspaper that Knievel had signed a liability waiver as part of the contract. One day ran into another, as hospital time tends to do, and Knievel complained to everyone that he wanted to go back to Butte. When no plans were made for that to happen, he made his own plans.

  Ray Gunn showed up at the hospital with a station wagon in the middle of the night. He collected Knievel in a wheelchair, padded quietly and deliberately through the hospital maze, careful to keep out of sight of nurses and doctors. Gunn almost lost his man when they reached the outside and the wheelchair stopped short and Knievel flew back through the air as if he had been shot off the motorcycle one more time, but eventually Gunn helped him back into the chair and they reached the station wagon. Knievel lay in the back, moaning. Gunn drove. They stopped in Twin Falls, Idaho, where Knievel knew a man who owned a mattress store. They picked up a mattress, put it in the back, much better, and completed the trip to Butte.

  The Washoe Medical Center soon announced that it was seeking $1,808 for twenty-two days of care for the daredevil, but had slim hopes of success. Knievel claimed he was broke. The twenty-two days, added to the thirty-seven days at Southern Nevada Memorial in Las Vegas, meant that he had spent almost two months in Nevada hospitals in 1968.

  He tried to perform one more jump before the end of the year. He set up a date in Portland at the Coliseum with Ted Pollock. A few days before the jump, no more than six weeks after two surgeries, he checked into a low-rent hotel in Portland. He looked terrible, looked like he couldn’t walk, much less ride a motorcycle. He had a fever, pus was coming from open wounds. The staph infection would not leave.

  “I’m fine,” he assured Pollock, but as each day passed he looked less and less fine.

  The promotion also was less than fine. Customers were not forming lines outside the box office. Pollock had paired him with a country music show that featured singer Molly Bee.

  “How much have you brought in so far?” Knievel asked on the day of the show.

  “Maybe $25,000,” Pollock said. “No more than that.”

  “I’m not going to jump,” Knievel decided. “It’s not worth it.”

  Pollock had a partner in the promotion. Pollock saw Knievel’s condition and felt sorry for the daredevil. Pollock’s partner saw Knievel’s condition and saw the promotion falling apart. He felt sorry for the promoters, not Knievel. He wanted to sue.

  “Bill, just take a look at this guy, will you?” Pollock said. “If he goes out and kills himself, do you want that on your conscience? Look at him. He’s in no shape to make this jump. Let it go, will you?”

  The other promoter eventually agreed. He still was mad. He had one stipulation: he would not announce to the crowd that Knievel was sick, unable to perform. The people would get their money back, still get to see Molly Bee, not a bad deal, but he would not be the one to deliver all that news. Knievel’s father, Bob Sr., had come up for the show. He did the job.

  Knievel did not jump again until April 24, 1969. More than six months were swallowed up by the Bee Line Dragway crash and aftermath. How could his notoriety from Caesars Palace ever pay off if he couldn’t work? He was broke again, slightly famous, but totally broke.

  Then George Hamilton arrived.

  Hamilton was thirty years old, the same age as Knievel, actually three months older. He was a bona fide movie star. Starting in 1952 when he was thirteen years old, cast as a servant to Lionel Barrymore in Lone Star, a western featuring Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, he already had appeared in eighteen movies. He was a leading man, handsome and certainly tanned, as most stories pointed out, urbane and charming, a bon vivant who had made gossip headlines when he dated Lynda Bird Johnson while her father was in the White House. He probably was best known for his roles as an Ivy League smooth talker in Where the Boys Are in 1960 and as country music legend Hank Williams in Your Cheatin’ Heart in 1964.

  He was involved with assorted projects now, always looking for more. His immediate job was a role in The Survivors, with Lana Turner, the first miniseries that followed a story from beginning to end on network television. The producers wanted him to do some stunt that seemed a bit perilous to him. He asked for a stunt man to do the job. The producers suggested he hire that stunt man.

  He tried to hire Evel Knievel.

  “His name was bouncing around with some people I knew,” Hamilton said. “They said there was this guy, Evel Knievel, wind him up and he crashes. How could you forget a name like that? He sounded perfect. I had my secretary track him down.”

  The phone dialogue went something like this:

  QUESTION: Can you do this stunt? You’ll have to do it in the next week or two.

  ANSW
ER: I can do anything. I’m Evel Knievel.

  Then he never showed up.

  Knievel had returned to Los Angeles to appear at the ninth annual Custom Car, Motorcycle, and Dune Buggy Show at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, April 24–27, 1969. Actually, he appeared daily outside the west end of the Sports Arena and jumped eight cars at nine o’clock on Thursday and Friday nights, at three in the afternoon on the weekend.

  This was his latest return to action. He still hadn’t recovered fully from the staph infection. He was still on crutches from his broken hip. He had to be helped onto the motorcycle to ride. He was probably the unhealthiest daredevil in creation.

  “In the past two years, I’ve had seven major injuries where I had to have major operations,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve broken my left hip and pelvis twice each. I’ve also broken my left arm, my right ankle and foot and my right shoulder. And both wrists and knees. Besides that, I had one bad brain concussion. And I broke my back.”

  If there was some overstatement of his injuries, that was forgivable. He certainly was busted up. The Times noted that he might have more metal parts inside himself than inside his motorcycle.

  “I have a problem with metal fatigue,” he said. “The screws in my body keep busting, and they have to put in new ones.”

  Hamilton soon had forgotten about Knievel. Someone else did the stunt. A month passed. Maybe two. Maybe more. Hamilton received a phone call from Scotty, who guarded the front gate at Universal Studios. Scotty said, “A Mr. Knievel would like to see you.”

  “Send him up,” Hamilton said.

  “There’s a problem,” Scotty said.

  The problem was that Knievel had arrived at the gate with two other guys in the big rig, his name and the world ramp-to-ramp record and the stated promise to do the canyon jump painted across the side. The big rig, Scotty said, would take up too much room inside the movie lot. No problem, Hamilton said, they could park outside and walk through the gate. Ah, another problem, Scotty said, Knievel couldn’t walk.