Evel

by Leigh Montville

  Maybe he shared the bill with Jack Kochman’s Hell Drivers, and maybe they inherited the dirt on the Garden floor—and the flies in the Garden balcony—from the rodeo, which had just left town, but New York was New York. Knievel had brought Linda and the three kids with him. Ray Gunn had driven the big rig straight down Broadway. This was the big time.

  “Evel Knievel is twice the man you or I am—he makes his living ripping off death while we’re all trying to live without being ripped off,” writer Philip Werber declared. “Evel is a man. He takes no shit from anyone, he fears nothing, for a dollar he’ll jump over your hell while you cringe from your seat.”

  They didn’t describe daredevils that way in the rest of the country. They did in the Village Voice. If Hollywood was where dreams were made, the movie and the invented story, this was where the nonfiction version was typed out. This was where the words were shipped to the provinces.

  He was a gossip item …

  “How does your wife feel about you risking your life?” syndicated columnist Earl Wilson asked, the question sent across the country.

  “Who the hell cares,” Knievel replied. “I wasn’t put here to be the slave to any woman.”

  He was a self-contained business …

  “I make half a million dollars a year,” Knievel told Phil Thomas of the Associated Press, the answer sent across the country. “Except it depends on the year. Last year I didn’t do too well because I broke my back twice and after that I got hit by a car while I was on my bike. That was a bad year.”

  He was a whole bunch of stuff that maybe even he hadn’t considered. Or perhaps never phrased exactly the same way …

  “Knievel is a lean, handsome man with curly hair, a hard-looking exterior, a quick temper, and a good deal of humor, perception and charm,” writer James Stevenson decided.

  From the choppy years of his youth he has retained the wary eyes of a cardsharp, a thief’s nerve, the combativeness of a brawler, the aplomb of a professional athlete, the flamboyant instincts of a promoter, and the glibness of a con man. There are trace elements of Robert Mitchum, Elvis Presley, Captain Ahab and an astronaut … His vanity and temperament are considered unusual even by show business standards, and he will give anybody bloody hell on a moment’s notice. His courage speaks for itself.

  This was part of a profile that ran in the July 24, 1971, New Yorker. Stevenson, on the way to a career as a prolific cartoonist, illustrator, and author of children’s books, ate a couple of meals with Knievel, followed him around the Garden, watched the warm-up jump over ten cars (Knievel cleared the cars, but crashed into the far wall and collected a few more bruises because he couldn’t stop) and the actual jump (a success, a strip of corrugated rubber put on the far side to help slow the bike).

  Knievel went through his life story again, this time described how he gave up the life of crime while driving a Pontiac Bonneville across four states at 150 miles per hour as he was chased by police. He talked about starting both boys, Kelly and Robbie, on minibikes when they were five years old, putting them in a ditch and tying a rope to the minibikes so they wouldn’t be able to go out of control. He talked about his grandparents, shooting ducks, working in the mines, jumping cars on a motorcycle, crashing nine times. He talked about the show he put on for the people at Madison Square Garden.

  “They never saw anything like what I do,” he told Stevenson. “And they’ll never see it again.”

  The New Yorker. The most literary magazine in America. Address labels were put on the front covers, which featured a drawing of a leafy summer salad in a large bowl. The magazines were shipped across the country. The process of building a name in full public view continued. More words to more people.

  Words were everywhere. Evel Knievel was everywhere.

  14 Toys

  In the fall of 1971, as the movie still played in drive-ins and theaters across the country, as The New Yorker with the salad on the cover still sat on tables in assorted dentists’ waiting rooms, Knievel pulled up to a ninety-nine-year-old renovated carriage house in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, for a business meeting. They were coming faster now, these business meetings, opportunities opening in a hurry, but none of them had brought the big financial payout that he hoped was out there.

  The owner of the carriage house was a curious character named Marvin Glass. He, like any businessman, like Knievel, was exploring options, trying on another idea for proper size, wondering about the fit. Was there anything here? He was spinning the entreprenurial wheel one more time.

  “Marvin didn’t even know who Evel Knievel was at the beginning,” Jeffery Breslow, one of Marvin’s partners, present at the meeting, said. “A kid, I think it was the son of Marvin’s accountant, got him interested, kept talking about the things Evel did. Marvin decided to bring Evel in for the meeting.”

  Glass was the president of Marvin Glass and Associates, the leading toy design business in the United States. He was a dynamic presence, regarded as a self-tortured genius in the field. He was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, a tiny man, no more than five-foot-five, 130 pounds, an erratic buzz saw fueled on three packs of cigarettes and twelve cigars per day mixed with all the coffee a human being possibly could consume. At the age of fifty-eight, he was wrapping up his fourth marriage.

  His fortunes had zigged and zagged through a career that started in 1948 when he had a couple of early hits with the Busy Biddee Chicken, a plastic hen that laid five marble eggs in succession, and the Yakity-Yak Talking Teeth, a windup set of chattering dentures that soon became a joke-store staple. The hits were followed by misses, which were followed by hits, then more misses, then hits again. A financial disaster like the production of a line of stained-glass, very Christian Christmas ornaments—Marvin learned, alas, as he sat in his stuffed warehouse, phone not ringing, that Christmas was not necessarily a religious holiday when people chose decorations for their trees—had to be offset by winners like Operation: A Skill Game Where You’re the Doctor, or Rock’em, Sock’em Robots, or Super-Specs, an outrageous pair of joke sunglasses ten times the size of normal glasses.

  His company headquarters at 815 North LaSalle Street, across from the Moody Bible Institute in downtown Chicago, was famous for its security. Approximately seventy-five people worked in various capacities trying to figure out what trick, what game, what toy, would capture the world’s attention next. Everything was done in secrecy. Visitors were allowed to enter only after they stood in front of a television camera at the foot of a set of stairs, then were restricted to Marvin’s office or conference rooms once they were buzzed inside. Designers in the brightly colored, seldom-seen work area were required to return their projects to one of two large bank safes at the end of the day. Marvin’s office was in the center of the building, double-walled, no windows, a bunker inside a bunker.

  If all of this mumbo-jumbo—partly Marvin’s paranoia, partly show business, partly genuine concern about corporate espionage in a very competitive industry—added to his image as a toy genius, then so be it. The image was not bad for business. He sometimes sent his creations to the annual February toy fair in New York, the grand exposition where future products were unveiled, backed by armed guards. He sometimes sent voluptuous, top-heavy models instead of the guards. He himself showed up at least once with his latest creation inside a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

  His home in Evanston, the ninety-nine-year-old renovated carriage house, was another part of the image. It was featured as the “Playboy Pad” of the May 1970 issue of Playboy magazine. The headline for the article was “Swinging in Suburbia,” the reader’s imagination left to supply the definition of the word “swing.” The detailed description of the “emperor-sized ceramic Roman tub for eight” presumably was a clue.

  “Distaff guests frolic in the huge ceramic-tile tub as the Jacuzzi whirlpool whips up bubbles,” an unnamed correspondent reported.

  An elegant drink dispenser is close at hand. A complicated mechanism controls the c
olored-light system in the shower tub-room’s ceiling; hues span the spectrum, gradually changing from warm red to deep violet and back again … Those more romantically inclined can relax just down the hall in the wood-paneled den where a blaze can be kindled in the fieldstone fireplace and libations can be mixed at the black leather–added bar that stands at the opposite end of the room.

  One of the illustrations showed four smiling distaff guests enjoying the ceramic tub. Another showed a naked masseuse in the sauna. A third showed guests playing Funny Bones, a party game developed by Marvin for Parker Brothers.

  The rest of the house was described with equal enthusiasm. The high-beamed ceilings in the living room. The two fireplaces capped by an enormous hood. The sculptures and paintings by Picasso, Dalí, Roualt, Frank Gallo. Wet bars everywhere. A grand piano. A high-fidelity system with controls built into the marble cocktail table. The magazine called the house “a live-in adult toy.”

  Marvin, it was obvious, liked women, liked a good cocktail, liked intrigue, romance, the battle, the chase. Marvin liked money. Not to save, but to spend, to indulge, to enjoy. Was it any surprise that Marvin was friends with his Chicago neighbor Hugh Hefner, the man who had typed this lifestyle into public acceptance? Marvin was a Playboy man.

  “What is a Playboy?” the magazine asked in its “Playboy Philosophy” column as early as April 1956. “Is he simply a wastrel, a n’er-do-well, a fashionable bum? Far from it.” The magazine explained:

  He can be a sharp-minded young business executive, a worker in the arts, a university professor, an architect or engineer. He can be many things, providing he possesses a certain point of view. He must see life not as a vale of tears, but as a happy time; he must take joy in his work, without regarding it as the end of all living; he must be an alert man, an aware man, a man of taste, a man sensitive to pleasure, a man who—without acquiring the stigma of the voluptuary or dilettante—can live life to the hilt. This is the sort of man we mean when we use the word “playboy.”

  Marvin, of course, immediately liked Evel. Was there anyone else in creation who better “lived life to the hilt”? Evel, of course, liked Marvin. They were on the same glossy page.

  “Evel impressed everyone in the room,” Breslow said. “Everyone was charmed. There was an air of excitement about him. Articulate, very handsome. He’d done the Caesars Palace jump. He was interesting.”

  Marvin Glass had entered the meeting with a toy in mind, a toy that later would be called the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle. The usual course for development of a product from the shop involved a bunch of designs, trial and error, finally resulting in the top-secret prototype that Marvin could sell to a big manufacturer after what he hoped would be a bidding war with other manufacturers. The manufacturer then would produce the toy and market it. Marvin’s company by now was involved only in the research and design.

  In this case, the research and design were minimal. The toy Marvin envisioned already existed in another form, a truck that he had sold to Ideal Toys. The key component was a gyroscope turned sideways, which acted as a powerful back wheel. The points at either end of the gyroscope were inserted into notches in a “power source,” a plastic contraption that featured a crank. The gyroscope was slightly elevated. The child or adult in charge would crank as hard as he could, making the gyroscope spin faster and faster. When the cranking stopped, the rapidly spinning gyroscope would touch down and shoot the truck at great speed off the power source and across the floor.

  The product had been a failure, lost in the ongoing traffic jam of toy trucks that flooded the market. Marvin still had hope for the concept. The speed should be attractive to kids. What if the gyroscope was the back wheel of a plastic motorcycle? What if the rider was a bendable rubber figure, dressed in red, white, and blue with a little plastic helmet, a little plastic cane, everything the same as worn by a caped hero who appeared on television? What if the bike could fly off ramps and over barriers and across Mom’s freshly polished linoleum? What if the caped hero sometimes flipped and crashed, wow, and got back up and rode again? Marvin thought he could sell the same toy to Ideal all over again.

  A deal was announced between Marvin and Knievel in the last week of November 1971. The two men posed for a publicity shot as Knievel signed the contract for personal promotion and licensing with Marvin Glass and Associates for “more than one million dollars.” Marvin called Knievel “the last of the world’s true gladiators,” a line straight from the movie, and promised a future filled with Evel toys and other products.

  “Few people have had as much impact on the American scene in the last decade as Knievel,” Marvin said. “He is probably the first motorcyclist whose name has become a household word.”

  Ideal Toys, as Marvin suspected, quickly came aboard. Ideal’s president, Lionel Weintraub, a few years earlier had rejected a proposal to produce GI Joe, the action figure, because he thought “boys won’t play with a doll.” GI Joe turned out to be a major hit, the equivalent to a boys’ Barbie. Lionel wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. He too was educated in the popularity of Evel by the next generation, his son, Richie, a motorcycle-riding, guitar-playing teenager.

  The deal, despite the exaggerated “million-dollar” figure, was modest. No one was making grand predictions. The teddy bear, produced in 1906, maybe America’s favorite all-time toy, might have been a tribute to Teddy Roosevelt, but very few toys based on real-life people had been produced, and fewer had sold well. Ideal had to look back to its Shirley Temple doll in the thirties to see its last real-life success story. Take away some movie cowboys like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Tom Mix from the fifties, who really were playing characters under their own names, and there were few modern precedents for the success of toys based on actual human beings. A comic-strip superhero or a cartoon character was a far better bet.

  A March 5, 1960, article by Peter Wylie in the Saturday Evening Post on Marvin, entitled “Troubled King of Toys,” spelled out the statistical realities for any toy in the marketplace. Over 200,000 toys were introduced at the New York toy fair in any year, but only 50,000 would be put into production. Only 200 of the 50,000 would make money. Only two or three would emerge at the front of the class, must-have selections on every Christmas list.

  The first Ideal product, the Evel Knievel action figure, complete with white jumpsuit, white shoes, plastic helmet for vinyl head, and walking cane, whipped together in three months for the 1972 toy fair in February, turned out to be a solid item, but hardly a runaway hit. The Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, which took a year to produce and get ready for the 1973 toy fair, was the big investment. It was anything but an assured commodity, another hopeful in a room full of hopefuls.

  “I remember making my presentation to the buyer for Sears,” Stewart Sims, Lionel Weintraub’s son-in-law, said as he described the initial lack of interest. “He looked at me and said, ‘Your toy might do all the things you say it will, but it will not be doing them in the Sears catalog.’ ”

  No, but it surely would in the 1974 catalog. The Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle became the most popular toy in America for Christmas 1973, one of those damnable hot items that had to be tracked down, store after store, waiting list after waiting list. For girls, the most popular toy was Kenner’s Baby Alive, the first doll to eat, chew, and fill up a diaper, but the Stunt Cycle captured the other side of the market.

  The only reason Ideal didn’t sell a million of the toys for Christmas 1973 was that Ideal couldn’t make a million fast enough. The toy could have sold as much as twice that figure.

  “I had to demonstrate the Stunt Cycle to the National Association of Broadcasters,” Stewart Sims said. “You’re in a room with all of these people. The rules were pretty strict. A toy had to do what it was advertised to do. You couldn’t use fantasy to sell toys. You had to get down on your knees and show what the toy could do. If you can’t get down on your knees, you probably shouldn’t be in the toy business.”

  Sims demonstrated the many facts o
f the stunt cycle. (A few years later he would be back at the NAB, showing that Rubik’s Cube actually could be solved.) Unlike GI Joe or other action figures, which required a lot of imagination, Evel Knievel could provide action himself. He could do something. Put him on the bike, crank up the gyro, the Energizer, as hard and fast as you could, stop cranking, let him go. He shot off the Energizer across linoleum floors, wood floors, driveways, stretches of concrete, any flat surface. The faster the Energizer had been cranked, the faster Evel Knievel traveled.

  Adjust his position at the takeoff and he did a wheelie. Put up a ramp, he climbed the ramp and flew off into the unknown. Light something on fire, lay out a stretch of water in the middle of the track, shoot him out the window, shoot him off a roof, the evil possibilities for what could happen to Evel were endless. The crashes were wonderful. The motorcycle went flying. He went flying in a different direction. Maybe his helmet flew off in a third direction. He did the strangest things, landed in the strangest predicaments, and somehow always was able to get back on the bike. Exactly like the real-life character.

  “Hold your breath, kids!” a full-page ad on the back cover of Marvel comic books proclaimed. “YOUR OWN EVEL KNIEVEL. MORE DARING THAN EVEL HIMSELF. Make him leap to fame on his stupendous STUNT CYCLE. He’ll do wheelies! He’ll do jumps! He powers away on his gyro-driven super bike. Stunts and tricks you wouldn’t believe!”

  “Jumps your set of encyclopedias volumes A through W,” another ad said over a cartoon rendering of that very jump. “Sensational leaps over your neighborhood ditch.”

  The success of Christmas 1973 (“Everybody was clamoring for the toy,” Stewart Sims said) opened up an endless string of possibilities for 1974, 1975, and beyond. Ideal would expand the line, expand again. The company would put out the Scramble Van, the Chopper Bike, the Gt Cycle, the Stunt and Crash Car playset, the Dragster, the Canyon Rig, the CB Van, the Sidewinder, the Stratocycle, the Trail Bike, the Funny Car, the Super Jet Cycle, the Skycycle, the Stunt Stadium, the Fast Tracker, the Road and Trail playset, the Stunt World playset, the Skull Canyon playset, and the Stunt Game, a board game. Evel Knievel would be at the center of each of these products, his name and picture across the top, the new signature “No. 1” associated with Harley-Davidson somewhere on the box.