Evel

by Leigh Montville

  He was a personal friend of the kids who owned the toy. They not only would put him into these perilous situations and he would survive, they would tuck him into bed at night. Man and plastic product were intertwined. Evel Knievel lived in Butte or Hollywood or wherever he lived. He also lived in the toy chest in the corner of the bedroom.

  More than thirty years later, almost forty, the toy would still make these grown-up kids, now with their own families, smile. They would type out comments for Feeling Retro, a website for memories of the sixties and seventies.

  “I used to race it from our living room to the kitchen,” forty-one-year-old Lisa of North Carolina remembered. “Then I would yell, ‘Hey, Mom, he broke every bone in his body.’ To this day I tell everyone that this was one of my favorite toys.”

  “I remember back when I was five years old and living in Ft. Walton, Florida,” Tom, forty-two, said. “I was playing with my Evel Knievel and having him jump a ramp in the front hall way of our condo and having the front door as my stop. (Hay bales.) Well, after many successful jumps, I wound him up for one last jump. Off he goes and at that very moment my father came in and opened the front door and Evel flew right out the door and fell four stories to the parking lot below.”

  “I wound it up to full speed and then tapped the spinning back wheel on the back of my best mate’s head (seemed like a great thing to do as a nine year old!)” said Mike, a forty-three-year-old from England. “The effect was immediate. My mate was almost scalped as reams of his 1970’s style haircut were dragged into the mechanism. Not able to remove the bike from my bleeding and screaming mate, he ran home where his mother completed the job and gave him a bald spot 30 years too soon.”

  “I remember jumping Evel over 20 cases of beer at my friend’s house, then flipping and smashing the bottom window of his mother’s china cabinet,” Dave, forty-three, said. “Toughest toy EVER!!”

  “I actually prayed to Jesus for this toy,” said forty-four-year-old Danny S. “Well, I am here to let you know that there is indeed a God because on Christmas morning, the ‘Red Rider, Dual Action, Carbon-Firing BB Gun’ of our generation, showed up, sure as thunder, under our tree upon my 5am wake-up … the memories of this greatest toy (my ‘Rosebud’) linger with me to this day.”

  The toy was the final piece of the perpetual dream for Knievel. This was the payoff. Fortune had joined fame. There never would be a public accounting of how much he would make—and he always would exaggerate numbers—but Ideal would say the toy made over $100 million, so if he made 10 percent of that he would have made $10 million. The success of the toy also brought other deals, negotiated by Marvin Glass and Associates, that would bring money from directions Knievel never had imagined. His name would be on bicycles, bedspreads, pinball machines, lunch boxes, candy bars, name a product, any product, an assortment of products. Some would sell, some would not. Money would be involved in all of them.

  He was caught in a fat tornado of capitalism that visits very few people in their lives. He was in the highest demand.

  “I was with him once, drinking,” Skip Van Leeuwen said, describing how crazy the situation would become. “There were all these guys in another room. They’d paid $5,000 just to sit down with him, to make a presentation. That’s $5,000 just to sit down. They were waiting, and we were drinking and he said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go play golf.’ He told all those guys they would have to come back the next day. Just like that.

  “He became so big. I worked with Mike Nesmith at one point. He was in the Monkees. I’d go out with him. I’d go out with Evel. There was no comparison in the attention they got. Evel was ten times as much. Crazy. Ten times as much as a Monkee.”

  The toy required very little change in Knievel’s life. He was able to push ahead with whatever schedule he wanted. Just being himself, doing his shows, was the only public relations exposure the toy needed. Outside of a few business meetings, Knievel mostly had to cash the checks.

  Stewart Sims was the first Ideal Toys executive to see Knievel jump, when he performed for two days at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, August 27–28, 1971. Sims came down from New York.

  He found his man to be a bit standoffish, wary, an impression that people who went into business with him often described. Sims wound up spending the afternoon with Knievel as he visited half of the jewelry stores in Philadelphia. Karl Wallenda, the famous tightrope walker, also was in the show, and Knievel was determined to buy him a piece of jewelry as a gift. He was determined it would be the right piece of jewelry.

  The spending already had begun.

  “He always liked to let people know he was a big dick,” Sims said. “He spent money. He liked to tell you he was a member of the Mile High Club [made love in an airplane], things like that. I never saw him dead drunk or anything, but he was hard to take. I always thought he was abusive. We were people who worked hard for him, and he never seemed to appreciate it.”

  One appearance Knievel would make for the toy was at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in New York in 1973. Sims arranged this, a coup of sorts, the first appearance by a toy in the parade. Knievel was supposed to appear in costume, do a few wheelies in front of the television cameras in front of the store in Herald Square, sell those toys. Martin Milner and Kent McCord, the two stars of Adam 12, would do the broadcast. Knievel would join the Rockettes, the Clydesdales, the Royal Lippizan Stallions, the Fifth Dimension, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, John Davidson as Prince Charming, and Tommy Tune and the Broadway cast of See-Saw, plus assorted balloons and marching bands.

  The appearance became an adventure. Knievel drove cross-country from Butte, hauling the motorcycle. He was supposed to call Sims when he arrived. He never called. Sims phoned his hotel room again and again, received no answer. Wednesday night turned into the first hour of Thursday, Thanksgiving. Sims jumped into his car and drove into New York. He found Knievel in the hotel bar at 2:00 a.m., entertaining the crowd.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Stewart,” Knievel said. “Because I don’t think I’m going to be able to be in the parade tomorrow.”

  What?

  “It’s raining …”

  Yes.

  “I don’t do wheelies in the rain. It’s a safety thing.”

  What if … what if we got some pieces of plywood? Brought them out in front of the store?

  “It’s a safety thing. We should just cross our fingers, Stewart, and hope it stops raining.”

  The rain stopped. Knievel did the wheelies on national television. He came out to Sims’s house on Long Island for Thanksgiving dinner. This was a big day. A month earlier, Sims’s daughter had been born prematurely. She was ready to come home from the hospital. Sims waited for Knievel to arrive for dinner, while his wife picked up the baby. Sims and his wife waited for Knievel to arrive for dinner. The toy was that big.

  Knievel carried the company for those first years. The ride always was shaky.

  “One concern we always had was what we would do if he died,” Sims said. “Part of his appeal was that he put himself in great danger and survived. What if he didn’t survive? That was something we always took into account, that it was always possible that he could kill himself in what he was doing.”

  The people who died turned out to be the Marvin Glass and Associates people. Marvin himself died in January of 1974, age fifty-nine, a quick dance with cancer in the first flush of Knievel’s success. He was replaced as president by Anson Isaacson, a man Knievel would call “my godfather” and his mentor in business dealings. Isaacson was shot to death in July of 1976 by one of the Marvin Glass toy designers, whose paranoia about all of the paranoia in the business had sent him into the office with a gun. He killed three people, wounded two more, then killed himself.

  Knievel sold toys through everything that happened.

  “Next year the Ideal Toy Company is going to make a lot of Evel Knievel toys and I think they’ll be something you’ll be proud to have your children have,” he said in a famous quote in a New York pres
s conference. “One toy I’d like them to make is my own idea; I think it’s the most super toy in the world. You wind it up, it goes like a little bugger, goes across the floor, and it grabs this little Barbie doll, throws her on the floor, gives her a little lovin’, jumps back on the motorcycle and goes whizzing out the door screaming ‘GI Joe is a faggot.’ ”

  Toys. Who suspected that the pot at the end of the rainbow contained toys? Anson Isaacson once said that Knievel had “about twenty licensing arrangements now, which call for from 5 to 10 percent of the gross receipts.” Who suspected that toys were so valuable?

  A story. Knievel went for a business dinner one night in New York with the people from Ideal after the toy was established as a hit. The restaurant, Laurent, on East Fifty-sixth Street, was based on the dining rooms found in European grand hotels. It featured an adventurous menu, dark wood on the walls, ornately carved high ceilings, three climate-controlled cellars with over 45,000 bottles of wine. It was a place to see and be seen, a New York restaurant of the moment.

  A dress code required all men to wear a jacket and tie. The toy executives wondered if this might force them to go somewhere else, with Knievel decked out in his usual high-collared Carnaby Street look, but he accepted a jacket and tie from the restaurant’s collection.

  He sat down at the head of a long table in the middle of the restaurant. The out-of-place jacket and the location of the table drew the attention of everyone in the room to him. He clearly was the guest of honor, a man who created a buzz of conversation wherever he went. He clearly was Evel Knievel. A number of diners came past and asked for his autograph. He signed, he talked. He was gracious and loud. Another famous man came to the table.

  “Excuse me, Evel,” he said. “I’m Richard Burton. I just saw you here and wanted to say hello. I’m a fan.”

  That was Richard Burton, the British actor. That was Richard Burton, sometimes the husband of Elizabeth Taylor, sometimes not. That was Richard Burton, probably as well known as anyone in the world at the moment.

  “Well, Dick, nice to meet you,” Knievel said. “Let me introduce you to the people in my toy company.”

  A few minutes later, a message came from another famous person. Salvador Dalí, the surrealist artist, known for his eccentric waxed mustache, for his paintings of limp wristwatches, for his flamboyance, was seated in a rear banquette. He was one of the three or four most successful living artists in the world. He would like to meet Evel Knievel.

  “Sure,” Knievel said. “Send him over.”

  The toy executives hurriedly told Knievel that Dalí was an older man. He was very well known, had created a style of art that was very popular. Perhaps it would be better if Knievel went over to Dalí’s booth. Knievel agreed. He was gone for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty. He returned.

  “How’d it go?” Stewart Sims asked.

  “Great,” Knievel said. “I told him I had bought one of his paintings, had it back home in Butte. He liked that.”

  Pause.

  Double pause.

  “You know,” the man who jumped across lines of parked cars on a motorcycle, who wanted to jump across a canyon, said, “those artists are some of the strangest people I’ve ever seen.”

  15 Famous

  He stepped into his new situation as if it had been custom-made for him at some tailor’s shop. Everything fit. This was the way he always had wanted to live, fast and rich and hedonistic. Borderline crazy. This was the traditional vision of good times that came out of long-ago Saturday nights in Butte when miners cashed their checks and blew the money as fast as they could on drink and women, gambling and nonsense, squeezed every bit of carnal pleasure possible out of a dollar, then returned to the dark hole when the dollars were gone. Fuck it. Have a good time. This was the life Knievel had tried to lead on credit and guile when he had little money. He could rip into it now.

  “Do you fear anything?” writer Stephanie Fuller asked him as he prepared to jump ten cars twice daily at the Chicago Amphitheater as part of Cycle-Rama 71 at the start of his grand run. She meant crashing, dying, maybe hitting his head on the amphitheater roof because he had only twelve inches of clearance when he jumped.

  “Yes,” he said. “VD.”

  A television show, The Beverly Hillbillies, had appeared from 1962 to 1971 on CBS with great success. The plot revolved around the fact that redneck farmer Jed Clampett, played by Buddy Ebsen, struck oil in his backyard, became rich in an instant, and moved his family to Beverly Hills, California. The jokes came from how the family handled wealth in this sophisticated big-money setting. Knievel made the Clampetts look small-time and boring in his switch to wealth. He had practiced. He was living around Beverly Hills much of the time anyway before everything started.

  His evolving dance with good fortune, starting in 1971, was nothing less than breathtaking (in either a good way or a bad way, depending on point of view) for anyone who followed it. As he grew bigger and bigger, richer and richer, he added and changed luxury cars in a hurry, bought mink and sable coats and designer clothes that startled the eye, bragged about his sexual conquests. He liked to show his $55,000 worth of diamond rings on his right hand alone, topped by a Baume & Mercier diamond watch. He had cheap replicas of the diamond rings made, then gave them away or hid them in bars and did magic tricks that made them appear.

  He paid $100 to attendants when he pulled into parking lots, told them to keep the spaces open on all sides around his latest Maserati. He gave $100 tips to waiters and barmaids. He called the managers of restaurants to his table and said he wanted to buy a drink for everyone working in the kitchen. An hour later, he called the manager back and said he wanted to buy another drink for everyone in the kitchen.

  He was always on the move, going, going, going. Since he wasn’t in the hospital after every other jump anymore, he could work out a true schedule. He was in Agawam, Massachusetts, and Hutchinson, Kansas, out in Portland, Oregon, down in Tucson, back in Chicago, Oklahoma City, East St. Louis, Uniondale, New York, Cleveland, St. Paul, Cincinnati. He crisscrossed the United States, made money everywhere. He would jump in four different states within a single month. He would jump sometimes in the same city for three, four days in a row.

  Every place he went, he blew through the premises like a force of nature. A force of nature with money to spend.

  “He came to Seattle for us,” Northwest promoter Ted Pollock said. “We were paying him $25,000. That was how far he had come. He eventually was too expensive for us after that. Anyway, he called and asked if I could pay him in cash. That was irregular, but I said it could be done. He jumped. I gave him the cash. I figured he needed it for something.

  “He did. The next morning, he showed up to play golf at the Broadmoor in Colorado. He took the money out of his bag, the entire $25,000, and put it down on the first tee. He was ready to bet it all. And I think he did.”

  How had life changed? At two consecutive shows in the summer of 1972, planes that were leased to him, not motorcycles, were involved in crashes. He boasted that by the start of 1973 he “owned” eight planes, part of a project to start an air taxi service out of Butte that never really developed. He now flew to some appearances, leaving Ray Gunn or someone else to drive the big rig to the location.

  The first crash happened on July 17 at Coon Rapids, Minnesota, at a drag strip where he was supposed to appear. A twin-engine Beechcraft owned by Knievel, piloted by a professional from Butte, tried to land on the strip and crashed into a trailer also owned by Knievel. The pilot was fine, but the daredevil said that the damage on the plane was $100,000, the damage on the trailer $1,000. At Knievel’s next show, this time at Continental Divide Dragway in Castle Rock, Colorado, he himself crashed a 414 Cessna into a twenty-five-foot flagpole on the side of the drag strip. He complained that his “people” hadn’t removed the pole.

  The gathered crowd—the airplane that landed and crashed on the drag strip was a sudden, added part of the attraction—made the same startled noise i
t would make if he crashed on his jump. He was not injured, and the plane was only slightly injured, a broken wing light. He made the eleven-vehicle jump (four vans, four pickup trucks, three cars), waved to the crowd, got back into the Cessna, and flew out of the place. He boasted that he never had a Federal Aviation Administration license, but knew how to fly an airplane and did.

  “I don’t need a license to fly an airplane,” he proclaimed to one interviewer. “I fly any damn place I want to. I fly from Seattle to Butte and Butte to Billings, Butte to Salt Lake City. What are they going to do? How can they stop me from flying around in the air up there? I mean, that’s silly. I can fly a 747. There isn’t anything I can’t fly.”

  The rules that applied to everyone else did not apply to him. (“What I do, according to the laws of society, may not be exactly right,” he told Penthouse magazine. “But the laws of society don’t constitute my morals. I constitute ’em.”) Celebrity was a golden pass to cut all lines. He used the pass.

  He proclaimed that he had made love to over six hundred women, a figure that he was not afraid to say was growing rapidly. He proclaimed that he had made love to eight different women in one day. Was that a record? His modus operandi was basic. He set up shop in the noisiest, hottest bar in whatever city was his home for the night. He bought a round for the bar. He received an assortment of rounds in return. The people came to him. He was Evel Knievel, famous, straight from the television set, from the moving picture show, straight from the poster on your kid’s bedroom wall. Adventure had begun.