Evel

by Leigh Montville

  “There are three kinds of people I can’t stand,” Knievel said early in the conversation. “New Yorkers, lawyers, and Jews.”

  Arum was all three. Maybe the partnership would get no further than the introductions. He stuck around to find out. Was Knievel joking? Or was this how he really felt? This was interesting.

  There was little doubt Arum came from an entirely different universe. His sensibilities, experiences, hell, his clothes, were entirely different. Arum was a city kid, born in Brooklyn, had lived in New York for most of his life. Yes, he was Jewish. Yes, he was a lawyer. He wore glasses, had gone to college, to law school. His mind ran in a certain direction. Yes, he worked for the negotiation, the adjustment, the business compromise. That was his training. He was as tough as Knievel. His toughness simply was seen in different arenas.

  Don King, who soon became Arum’s major competitor and sworn enemy, once described him to Vic Ziegel of New York magazine by telling a fable about an asp and an alligator. Arum was the asp in the story, a terrified creature who asks the alligator to give him a ride to the other side of the river because floodwaters are rising.

  “I can’t do that,” the alligator says. “Because I know you’d bite me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the asp replies. “If I bit you, we’d both drown. If you die, I die too.”

  The alligator appreciates the asp’s logic. Gives him a ride. Halfway across the river, the asp bites the alligator on the back. The alligator screams.

  “Why?” he says. “Now we’re both going to die. Why would you do that?”

  “I can’t help it,” the asp says. “I’m a snake.”

  “That’s Arum,” King told Ziegel, then shuffled metaphors thoroughly. “He sticks so many daggers in your back you look like a porcupine.”

  Knievel was a cowboy. That was Arum’s opinion. The daredevil was bluster and force. Opinions flew off him in a constant storm. What was real? What wasn’t? This moment’s opinion could be replaced by the opinion of the next moment. The man was a whirlwind, a meteorological disturbance that moved through a perpetually hurried day. Nothing was subtle.

  “He was with a whole coterie of people, ordering everybody around,” Arum later said to a reporter in a description of that first meeting. “He never sat still for a minute. He kept giving speeches. At first, he never let me get a word in edgewise. I’m pretty forceful when I speak. I had come to Cleveland to put across my point, but Evel has a tendency to chop people up—not by doing a job on them, but by chopping them up and not letting them get in an idea or a thought of their own and just really using the person he is talking to as a platform to get his own ideas across.”

  The trick was to wait him out, not to argue. That was what Arum quickly decided. Argue and Knievel would balk, never budge. Much better to slip in a thought, let it percolate, let him find the logic for himself. A test, when Arum finally was able to speak a bit, was the proposed structure of the show that would surround the canyon jump.

  The problem with the jump, with all of Knievel’s jumps, was that they didn’t take very long. They were finished in a matter of seconds. He could string out the process, ride back and forth on the motorcycle, do a few wheelies, warm up a few times before the actual attempt, but even that option would be missing from the canyon.

  Knievel always had envisioned a short show that opened with a film about his life, maybe half an hour long, then the buildup to the jump, then the jump itself, then replays and interviews. Arum suggested—only suggested—that people would want more for their closed-circuit money. He suggested—that word again—that a number of daredevil acts perform before Evel closed the show. Like boxing, there would be an undercard. People would feel better about spending their money.

  Knievel thought about it. Agreed.

  “If you hit him too hard, he becomes so obstinate you can’t do anything with him,” Arum said. “But gradually, if he takes the time to sit by himself and think—he’s an extremely intelligent guy—and when he eliminates his emotional initial reaction, the idea made a lot of sense and he went along with it.”

  By the end of the Cleveland visit, both men had thought about what the other one said and decided to do what made sense. Knievel felt confident that he wasn’t going to be flimflammed by this fast talker from New York. The fast talker made business sense. Arum decided that he could live with the cowboy. He had lived with a variety of personalities in the boxing business, lived with Muhammad Ali. He could figure out how to live with this guy.

  They shook hands on a deal.

  The decision was made easy by the fact that ABC television also wanted to be part of the operation. The network had scored well in the ratings with the L.A. Coliseum jump on Wide World of Sports in November of 1973, then came back with a jump three months later on February 17, 1974, from the Green Valley Raceway at North Richland Hills, Texas. Howard Cosell and Don Meredith were the announcers as Knievel tried to clear eleven Mack trucks. The presence of Cosell and Meredith, two of the three voices from Monday Night Football, still the hottest show on television after four seasons, showed the importance the network placed on the show.

  DANDY DON: This is really exciting to me. I’ve never really seen Evel jump. I’ve enjoyed talking to him. He’s a very unusual fellow when you think about it. This is the guy who’s going to jump over this canyon, the Devil Snake River, whatever the darn thing is … Snake Canyon River, that’s it … but in any event, I don’t really understand all this stuff. Why in the world does he do this, Howard?

  HOWARD: Well, he put it philosophically with the three basic questions of life, as he sees it. Where do you come from, what are you doing, and where do you go from here?

  DANDY DON: And here he comes right now.

  The network was a natural partner for Snake River. Long seen as almost a comical third to NBC and CBS in the ratings competition that dominated all of television, ABC had found its place at last. Focusing on the baby boomer youth market, using game shows like The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game, comedies like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched (and Happy Days, scheduled to debut in the fall of 1974), and dramas like The Mod Squad, ABC was strong in sports, with Monday Night Football and Wide World of Sports, familiar with Evel, and full of big ideas for Snake River.

  On April 6, 1974, the network recorded “California Jam,” a West Coast answer to Woodstock at the Ontario Motor Speedway, and split it into four different shows. The festival—which featured Deep Purple; the Eagles; Black Sabbath; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer—drew over 250,000 people and, unlike Woodstock, ran without any major problems, even when Deep Purple guitarist Richie Blackmore blew up his gasoline-soaked amplifiers and caused a commotion.

  The man who ran the show was Don E. Branker, a twenty-eight-year-old former musician and cowboy from California’s San Joaquin Valley. He had the long blond hair and mustache of a musician, liked to dabble in the illegal substances he found around him, but had cowboy sensibilities when it came to hard work. ABC was impressed with the way he handled such a large event.

  When California Jam ended, Branker found himself on a private jet with young network executives Dick Ebersol and Don Ohlmeyer, headed toward Twin Falls, Idaho, and Snake River. ABC gave him $10,000 to prepare a report on the feasibility of a rock festival on the far edge of the canyon. The network envisioned sort of a Woodstock-plus, great music added to the sight of America’s daredevil shooting through the sky.

  At Snake River, Branker combed the real estate that would be used on both sides of the canyon. The only discernible structure anywhere was a large dirt mound put together by Ray Gunn before he left, plus a steeply angled launch ramp on top of that. The far side of the canyon was desolate. It reminded Branker of what the surface of Mars must be like. He went home to California and typed out a ten-page report. His basic advice for the network was “no.”

  “Two things ruled it out in my mind,” he said. “First was accessibility. The few roads were very small. There were no hotel
s to speak of. There was nowhere for people to stay, to eat, no ways to get around. Twin Falls was a town of maybe sixteen thousand. It could never handle the crowds they were talking about.

  “The second thing was that the rocket had no guidance system. Nobody knew where it was going to land. How could you have all of those people over there, not knowing where the rocket would land? It was a disaster waiting to happen.”

  Branker sent the report to New York, cashed the check, thought he was done with the Snake River Canyon jump. A month later, he was its executive producer, headed back to Twin Falls to figure out how everything would work.

  ABC had scrapped the rock concert, but was enthusiastic about the jump. It was now a partner with Arum and McMahon. The network would provide all of the production, plus concentrated pre-event publicity. The extent of ABC’s involvement would be a secret. The promoters would have their own announcers for the closed-circuit shows in the theaters, but one week later ABC would put its version of the event on free television. The show had to be kept a secret—a situation that would become quite ungainly when trucks and cameras with ABC logos on the side appeared everywhere around the canyon—to protect the closed-circuit gate.

  “We were pioneers in televising Evel’s feats,” ABC senior vice president Jim Spence said, explaining the decision to join the promotion. “We had a good relationship with Arum because we’d worked with him in boxing. We were the only game in town—why CBS and NBC didn’t want it, I don’t know—so we were able to control the pricing. We got a fair rights fee. We thought it would do very well in the ratings.”

  “One of our producers, before the jump at the Coliseum, had said, ‘You know who Knievel reminds me of? Conrad Birdie,’ ” Dennis Lewin, senior vice president for production at ABC, said. “So throughout the jump, we kept playing music from Bye-Bye Birdie, the musical. When he made the jump, we played ‘We Love You, Birdie.’ That’s when we started dipping our toe into Evel Knievel.”

  Now the network was in much further.

  Development of the Skycycle, an essential piece of the production, had gone slowly during the long wait for funding. Bob Truax instituted a no-money-no-work policy because he had such trouble getting promised checks from Knievel. Truax’s curious scientific mind wouldn’t let him stop altogether, so he still tinkered with the X-2, but he wouldn’t add more helpers, buy more equipment, until he knew they would be covered financially.

  Now, in May of 1974, the situation changed in an instant. The funds from ABC and Top Rank, etc., became capital to finish the X-2, then build a second, matching rocket. The production pace shifted from virtual standstill to everyday chaos. The September 8, 1974, launch date—no chance for postponement because of the closed-circuit production, tickets purchased, fans in their seats—meant that the project had to be completed in less than four frenzied months.

  “We can hold the audience for about twenty minutes,” Bob Arum told Truax, underlining the importance of staying on schedule. “After that, people start asking for their money back.”

  Truax’s situation had changed since he started working on the rocket two years earlier. He had retired from the civil service in Potomac, Maryland, and recently relocated to Saratoga, California, with a plan to take a consulting job at a famous university like Stanford or with some high-tech company in “Silicon Valley,” which was the new name for the area around San Jose. His first version of the X-2 pretty much had been completed in the backyard in Potomac, so he wound up transporting the rocket across the length of the United States.

  This was done in a large trailer built to carry the steam-powered drag racer he had built for Walt Arfons. (The drag racer, certifiably fast, never had great success because of handling problems. It also left great puddles on the track, which forced postponement or cancellation of following races.) Truax hitched the trailer to his Ford Ranchero and clanged and banged across America, adventures and misadventures along the way, his cargo somehow intact and functional at the end.

  The X-2 was a different rocket from the X-1 built by the departed Malewicki. Truax never liked the X-1, thought it didn’t have enough power or safety considerations. Part of his new deal with Knievel was that he could start over again. He told Knievel that he would stay out of the public relations if Knievel would stay out of the engineering, pay in advance, and let him build a rocket that would get Knievel over the canyon safely. Knievel agreed to the terms.

  Malewicki’s X-1 had been stylish, sleek, had the two wheels that gave it at least some relationship to a motorcycle. The rocket had been destroyed by Truax in a test at Snake River on November 3, 1973, mostly done for promotional purposes in hopes of landing a sponsor. The tanks had been only half-filled, so the X-1 was doomed to fall into the canyon even before it took off. Truax worried for a minute that maybe the thing would get into the air, loop around, and come flying straight at the gathered group at the launch site, but the flight went fine. The rocket ran out of steam, flipped over, spun deep into the canyon, splashed into the river at the bottom.

  Knievel, present for the launch, looked into the canyon. He cast out any grim thoughts when he spoke.

  “This is a success,” he said. “This was what we wanted to do.”

  The X-2 that Truax had built was not nearly as pretty, but more rugged. The body came from an old jet airplane wingtip that he had found at a salvage yard for $100. The fins were surplus helicopter fins that he had adapted. The autopilot came from an old Nike missile. The steam engine, more powerful than the one Truax had built for the X-1, was the same engine that he had used for the Arfons drag racer. The new rocket was a composite, put together from a lot of used parts. A bucket of bolts. That was what it was.

  Now it sat in Truax’s new backyard in Saratoga.

  “Before long I was putting the finishing touches on the X-2,” Truax wrote in an unpublished autobiography. “We had come this far on a very limited budget, but in May [1974], Knievel called me and told me to pull out all stops. He had found a sponsor with deep pockets … What followed were wondrous days. We never knew how long the project would take or what kind of difficulties we would encounter, so no effort less than the maximum would do. We worked until we were ready to drop.”

  The X-2 had to be finished, then test-fired, because Truax frankly wanted to see if his theories actually worked. A second X-2, what he called “the flight bird”—the rocket Knievel actually would ride—had to be built from scratch, adjustments made after the results of the test firing were known. Truax hired engineers, electricians, sheet-metal workers, a parachute expert, even his son and nephew, to get things done. He had as many as fifteen people on the job.

  “We went from a lot of time, no money, to no time, a lot of money,” engineer Facundo Campoy, who had worked with Truax from the beginning, said. “It was quite a change.”

  Innovation ruled. This was not NASA. To substitute for wind tunnel tests, the crew would tow the thirteen-foot rocket on a trailer up and down the freeways. (“Not ideal,” Truax admitted.) To test the engine, the process was more complicated. Truax or someone would go to Pacific Rentals and rent a dump truck for the weekend, neglecting to mention the reason for the rental. A ramp then would be welded onto the truck, the rocket placed on the ramp. The crew would drive the dump truck and rocket to a drag strip, where the back of the truck would be raised to a fifty-seven-degree angle, the same angle as liftoff. The back axle would be locked, and the steam engine would be tested.

  The water had to be heated to 600 degrees, which took a while, so the heating would begin before the crew and truck left from Truax’s house. They stopped one day for gas, the attendant coming out of the station to service a dump truck with a rocket on the back. The rocket engine was bubbling and hissing.

  “You guys steam-clean cars or something?” the attendant asked.

  At the end of the weekend, the crew would remove the rocket, take off the ramp, paint over the spots where the welds had been, then try to dirty them up as if nothing happened. The owner of P
acific Rentals never said anything until he saw his truck—his truck?—and the rocket one night on the evening news.

  “It’s a complex vehicle, and all kinds of things could go wrong,” Truax explained about his creation in an interview. “But if the engine valves work okay, if the vehicle doesn’t roll over, if there’s no major structural failure, if the parachutes deploy, if it comes down straight and hits level ground, if the damn thing doesn’t fold up around Evel’s neck, it’s a success.”

  Work continued. That was the deal. The engineer engineered.

  The star of the show went out to do the public relations.

  18 America

  The idea for the phony check came from the star of the show. The star of the show suggested that Bob Arum present him with a $6 million down payment on the certain Snake River Canyon fortune that would follow on September 8, 1974. The check would be the highlight of the press conference on June 24, 1974, to announce the event in New York City.

  The promoter was not amused.

  “Your guarantee is $225,000,” he pointed out to the star of the show. “That’s what we owe you. Not $6 million.”

  No, no, the check only would be for publicity purposes. This would be a flash of excitement, lending a touch of glamour to the proceedings. The assembled correspondents, sad sacks that they were in their gray and purposeless lives, would be thrilled to be in the room with just the idea of that much money. There already was one Six Million Dollar Man, the television show, with Lee Majors as Steve Austin, at the top of the ratings. Simply make another one.

  “I wouldn’t cash the check,” Evel Knievel said. “You’d just present it to me. The way I figure it …”

  And here Arum recounted the quote, years later, as he remembered it.