Evel

by Leigh Montville

  The eventual outcome was that the two men in the truck parked the rig outside and carried Knievel to the office. That was how actor and daredevil met. The daredevil was delivered to his office like an animated side of beef.

  The animated side of beef said his career was going great, that people wanted to see what he did. He had a number of jumps lined up.

  “Looks like the last one didn’t work out too well,” the actor remarked.

  From the beginning, Hamilton thought Knievel was fascinating. There was something very American about him, some chip-on-the-shoulder earnestness mixed with bullshit and adventure that always played well across the broad middle of the country. The more Hamilton heard him talk, the more he thought about tent evangelists and carnival barkers. Knievel said preposterous things, but he was dead serious when he said them. He wanted to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle. He was serious.

  “He was one of the slickest, maybe the slickest character I’d ever met,” Hamilton said. “He was a con man, but it was all petty con. Do you know what I mean? He was one of those guys who would bet you in a bar that he had your name tattooed on his cock. Then he would whip it out, and he’d had the words ‘Your’ and ‘Name’ tattooed, just so he could win bets in bars. That kind of guy.”

  Hamilton signed him up to do some stunt in a week. Knievel said he was going in for surgery to remove “eleven and a half pounds of metal,” but would be back and ready for the job. Hamilton was dubious. Eleven and a half pounds sounded like a lot of metal.

  On the appointed day, the daredevil called from St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank. Hamilton talked to him for a moment, but then heard a thud and the line went dead. When Hamilton finally got through to the room again, a nurse answered. She said Knievel had passed out, that was why the phone went dead.

  This was another paragraph in an interesting story. Hamilton had been thinking about a movie that somehow involved this guy. The first thought was something about a whacked-out stunt man, but the more the actor saw Knievel in action—he passed out?—the more he became convinced that Knievel himself was the movie. Motorcycles. America. Insanity. Hamilton loved the package. After more than a little negotiation, he made a deal with Knievel, $25,000 for the rights to the daredevil’s life story.

  “I was happy when I got the rights,” Hamilton said. “Then I said to myself, ‘What the hell am I going to do with them?’ ”

  The answer came from Joe Solomon, a grind-’em-out executive producer of B movies, many of them with motorcycle themes. Solomon saw the recent success of Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider, which entranced critics and filled theaters in 1969, and lamented that he had featured Jack Nicholson in Hells Angels on Wheels only two years earlier. Now Nicholson was considered an easy winner of best supporting actor at the Oscars for Easy Rider. Joe Solomon wanted his own Easy Rider.

  Hamilton said that was a large order. He couldn’t promise another Easy Rider, but he thought Evel Knievel could be a very good movie.

  “I want to make a movie about this guy that shows the insanity of America,” Hamilton said. “Something about what our values are.”

  Solomon said that was fine as long as the picture came in on time, under budget, and had a bunch of motorcycles in it. The deal was made. The story of the daredevil from Butte—at least a version of it—was going to be on the big screen.

  Putting together the varied pieces of the movie took over a year before filming began. Hamilton needed a script, a cast, a plan. He often needed to run ideas, situations, past Knievel, needed to get signatures on documents. The process invariably took longer than the actor thought it would. Knievel was back in action, jumping again, which meant that he often was back in inaction. He often was in the hospital.

  “I’d have to get something done, and he’d be out of it,” Hamilton said. “He’d be in a hospital, and they’d have him on a morphine drip or something else to stop the pain. He was gone. You’d have to come back sometime later.”

  The deal with Triumph motorcycles had ended badly, and Knievel now rode a fat-assed American Eagle 750. The bike was the product of an old-line Italian manufacturer, Laverda, but had been imported recently to the United States under the American Eagle name. Knievel, by now the most recognizable motorcycle rider in the country, was a perfect choice as spokesman. The bike, alas, had been built for endurance racing. It dominated the European endurance circuit, but was not very good at jumping, flying.

  Knievel couldn’t handle the bike. Or maybe the bike simply couldn’t handle the jumps. Take away the four days outside the L.A. Sports Arena, Knievel’s understated debut with the American Eagle, and he crashed as often as he landed safely on the bike.

  The first crash was back in Butte. On September 20, 1969, back in Naranche Stadium, the old football field for Butte High School, he attempted to clear sixteen Toyotas parked side by side in front of family and friends. He landed a little short, ran into a fence at the end of the field, and was thrown into it. He broke an ankle.

  Dan Killoy, the longtime neighbor, visited him in the double-wide a few days later. Knievel was in a cast, but getting ready for a jump at Tri-Cities Speedway in West Richland, Washington, over the weekend. This would be seventeen Subarus.

  “You’re in a cast,” Killoy said. “How can you do that?”

  “I’ll cut the cast off,” Knievel said, “do the jump, then go to the hospital and get the cast put on again. No problem.”

  That was how he traveled for much of the next year. He never was healthy. For every jump that was a success—he made the trip over the seventeen Subarus in West Richland a week late after a cancellation due to high winds—he would add another broken bone to a crowded list. If he survived a jump of eighteen Mercury Cougars at Seattle International Raceway, despite a near wipeout in a thirteen-car practice run, he would break his collarbone when he came up short in Yakima trying to repeat his jump over thirteen Pepsi trucks. (“This time he wasn’t drunk,” promoter Ted Pollock said. “How do you figure it? When he was drunk, he made it. When he wasn’t drunk, he got hurt.”) If he survived in Vancouver, wearing a special brace as he cleared twelve cars, he crashed in a return to Seattle International, where he cleared nineteen Datsuns, but bounced off the safety van, wobbled and fell badly, got shipped off to the hospital with several broken ribs and compound fractures of the fourth and fifth vertebrae.

  “I’ve had 12 major open reduction operations,” Knievel reported to Charles Maher of the Los Angeles Times in a medical update from St. Elizabeth Hospital in Yakima. “That’s when they cut you open and put a plate or a screw in. I’ve had about 35 or 40 screws put in me to hold the bones together.”

  Maher asked about the food at the many hospitals the daredevil had visited. The daredevil must be an expert on hospital food.

  “I don’t like any hospital food,” he said. “If you’re hungry enough, I guess you can eat it. But I’m a New York steak and lobster tails man myself. You don’t see much of that in hospitals. They don’t seem to go much for Oysters Rockefeller, either.”

  He gave a perfect description of his crashes to Jerry Uhrhammer, sports editor of the Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard. He said if someone wanted to know what a single crash felt like, the someone should sit on the hood of his car, put a helmet on, and have his wife drive to a freeway. She should blow the horn when she got the speed up to ninety miles per hour.

  “Then you hold your nose and fall off,” Knievel said. “Then you’ll know what it feels like.”

  That was exactly the feeling the daredevil had at his next jump, next crash, at Pocono International Raceway in Long Pond, Pennsylvania, on August 16, 1970. Doctors told him in Seattle in July that he would be out of action for six months with his injuries, basically a broken back. He distilled the six months into six weeks.

  This was an important jump, first appearance on the eastern side of the Mississippi River. Thirteen cars. The result was not pretty.

  “First the rear wheel … landed on the safety ramp and bucked the front
wheel hard on the wooden slats,” a report in Saga magazine said. “Knievel couldn’t hold on to the handlebars after the terrific jolt and he went flying head first over the front wheel … he went bouncing down the ramp … tumbling like a rag doll.”

  The crash and description were similar to what happened at Caesars Palace. He finished with a broken right hand, broken sternum, three broken ribs, and a broken shoulder. He was, however, able to be lifted upright to walk to the start-finish line, climb a ladder, and address the crowd.

  “This business is getting a little too rough for me,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. But a lot of times a guy runs short on nerve.”

  He would not jump again for four more months. The doctors in Seattle with their six-month estimate had not been wrong.

  A story. One of the jumps he made successfully in the middle of this stretch of mishaps was an immediate and different addition to his public melodrama. Back on January 23, 1970, a Friday night, first jump of the year, Knievel tried to clear eleven cars (an indoor record) at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He wound up slugging it out with a bunch of the Hells Angels, the nation’s foremost motorcycle gang. It was another videotape moment.

  “The announcer for the show had been drinking all night,” Gene Sullivan said. “When Evel came on to do his jump, the announcer said something he shouldn’t have said. He announced the canyon jump, and then said, ‘If Evel Knievel makes this jump, he’ll set back the Hells Angels one hundred years.’ ”

  Sullivan was new to the Knievel operation. He was a big guy, fresh out of the Navy, where he had been the heavyweight boxing champion for the Seventh Fleet. His father was Prescott Sullivan, longtime sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. In the run-up to the jump, his father had gone to an interview session with Knievel. Son went along, just to listen.

  When Knievel went into hyperbolic overdrive, the usual stuff, his code of honor, his aspirations, talk about Caesars Palace and the injuries, talk about the canyon, the words resonated with Sullivan. He told Knievel he liked the message and offered his services. Maybe this was the direction he was supposed to travel. Maybe Knievel needed a bodyguard, an inexpensive bodyguard at that, someone who wanted only a couple of hundred bucks a week to live. Maybe.

  Knievel said he would think about it. Sullivan went to the Cow Palace. This was the first time he actually had seen Knievel jump.

  “It was one of those providential things,” Sullivan said.

  Knievel and the Hells Angels had never had good thoughts about each other. Knievel always took great pains to say that he dressed in white leather, not black, because he did not want to be associated with the Angels and gangs and the dark side of motorcycling. The Angels always took great umbrage at those remarks. They also had been hounded, battered in the newspapers and on television for the past month in the Bay Area for their actions when they worked as security guards for $500 worth of beer at the now-infamous free concert at nearby Altamont Raceway in December. One of their members stabbed a spectator to death while the Rolling Stones sang, a violent and graphic incident captured on film for the documentary Gimme Shelter.

  So when the half-buzzed announcer said what he said, there was a history. When Knievel came flying up the ramp for his jump, and when a Hells Angel came down from the stands and threw something at him—Gene Sullivan thought it was a wrench or maybe a pair of pliers—this was not exactly unexpected. The wrench, or maybe the pliers, missed Knievel. He hit the jump perfectly. He cleared the eleven cars and managed to stop himself in the dangerously short landing area. He then did a U-turn. He came back to the offending Hells Angel, whom he had spotted from the corner of his eye, jumped from his still-moving motorcycle, pushed the gang member against a concrete wall, and started to pummel him.

  Four or five Hells Angels came to the defense of their man. Sullivan, who watched the whole mess develop in front of him, jumped to the defense of Knievel. He started whaling on a Hells Angel. Assorted spectators joined him. A donnybrook developed, something out of a Wild West saloon. The Angels eventually were routed, two hospitalized. Sullivan eventually shepherded Knievel back to the trailer and a few shots of Wild Turkey.

  “You want a job?” Knievel asked.

  “Sure,” Sullivan said.

  “You’ve got it.”

  The job started immediately. The worry was that the Angels would look for retribution. Knievel went to a friend’s house in Sacramento, knocked on the door, and said he had to hide for a night because the Hells Angels were after him. Sullivan and Ray Gunn were left with the big trailer at the motel. The advertising message on the side did not seem like a good thing at the moment. The letters couldn’t have been any larger. They were so bright they seemed like they were written in neon. The two men shared a room. They both were jumpy.

  Unable to sleep, Sullivan went out to get something to eat. When he came back, Gunn was sleeping. Sullivan thought it would be fun to scare his new partner. He made a sharp noise. Gunn bolted upright, pulled a gun from under his pillow, and pointed it at the new bodyguard.

  “Geez,” Gunn said. “I almost shot you.”

  The Angels never did appear.

  The screenplay for the movie was written two times during this period while Knievel alternately crashed and convalesced. The first attempt was by Alan Caillou, a writer whom executive producer Joe Solomon found. An Englishman with a broad mustache, a middle-aged guy who drove a period Bentley around Hollywood, a writer of men’s adventure paperback novels under various nom de plumes, Caillou churned out an effort that George Hamilton couldn’t stand. It was a straight-ahead portrayal of Knievel, sort of a World War II movie brought up to date, man in combat with death every day. Hamilton was distraught.

  He petitioned Solomon to allow a rewrite. He promised that no characters would be changed, no expenses added. The rewrite would be painless to all finances. Solomon said that was fine, as long as the motorcycles remained.

  Hamilton interviewed a bunch of the young emerging screenwriters, including George Lucas and Paul Schraeder and maybe even Spielberg. None of them seemed to get his idea. He then ran it past John Milius, laid out the plot and the peculiar American insanity to everything, the crazy man, the crazy country, a reflection of crazy national values.

  “So tell it back to me,” Hamilton said.

  Milius described the story, the jumps, the injuries. He described the proposed canyon jump. He described the probable ending.

  “The guy splatters on the other side,” he said. “That’s what America really wants to see. They want to see him splatter on the other side.”

  Perfect. Evel Knievel wasn’t selling success! He was selling failure! Perfect. That was what America loved, the danger of it all. Hamilton set up the screenwriter in the house with the white walls and the Strauss waltzes, the Cuban cigars and the sunbathing women. The women were imported strictly for Milius.

  “I knew a guy,” Hamilton said. “I don’t know where he got these women. I made one rule … Milius doesn’t get to touch one of them until he’s finished.”

  Hamilton was delighted with the product that quickly came from the arrangement. He read the screenplay and felt like “I had the jellyfish in my hand, but Milius gave it the sting.” Proud of this coup, this script, Hamilton sent the pages to Knievel. He was shocked when Knievel called and started yelling. The script was terrible. The daredevil demanded that Hamilton come to the Hollywood Land Motel.

  This was when Knievel pulled the gun on him and made him read.

  “I don’t think Knievel read very much, if at all,” Hamilton said. “Someone had read the script for him and told him that it said bad things about his sister. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I think it might have been some of the stuff about kidnapping his wife.

  “He pulled the gun, and I never read better, never talked faster. I explained the scenes to him. I finally convinced him that it was all right. He was making suggestions to me by the end.”

  The parts that Hamil
ton thought would bother Knievel most never were mentioned. Milius had drawn a self-absorbed, egotistical character, silly in a lot of ways. Crafty and crazy. Not a pleasant guy by any means. This was what should have set Knievel off, but Hamilton thought the subject of the movie never really understood what the movie was about. Knievel was worried about small deviances from facts.

  “People are so close to something they sometimes can’t see,” Hamilton said. “The movie I did about Hank Williams was like that. Here was this tragic character, drank himself to death at the age of twenty-nine. He was pushed there first by his mother, who brought him into the bars to sing when he was thirteen years old, then kept there by his wife, who did the exact same thing. The women were the villains. His mother was dead when we did the movie, but his wife was alive and signed off on everything. She never saw what the story was.

  “I don’t think Knievel did either.”

  The two lines Hamilton liked best in the script were simple. They captured the wonder of Knievel’s every performance to date, the surprise and relief at every finish. The movie would use Linda Evans’s footage of the Caesars crash. After the crash, Knievel would lie on the pavement with his injuries. He would blink and smile.

  “I’m alive,” he would say.

  “I’m alive,” he would say again.

  That was his triumph every time he performed. That was truth.

  13 Action

  The odd part of Knievel’s red-white-and-blue motorcycle career, the words “America” and “American” mentioned virtually every time he spoke in public, was that he never had performed on an American motorcycle. From the first jump at Moses Lake on his Honda, through the jumps on Nortons and Triumphs and now the Italian Laverda 750s under the name “American Eagle,” he had taken whatever small deal was available, always had gone for price over performance. He had risked his life on whatever discount equipment he could find.