“ ‘If those two African Americans [George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, scheduled to fight on September 25] are going to be paid $5 million apiece to fight in Zaire, then I should be paid $6 million to jump a canyon in the United States,’ ” Arum said the star of the show said. “Except he used another word for ‘African Americans.’ ”
Arum thought the check would be a good joke more than a promotional tool or headline on any stories. He went along with the idea, dragged public relations man Shelly Saltman with him to the Chase Manhattan Bank in the morning to see if they could rent or borrow a certified check for $6 million for an hour, maybe two, maybe with a couple of accompanying rented security guards for emphasis. When the bank turned down the proposal, Arum wrote the check himself from a Top Rank checkbook that never could cover that amount.
“It was a joke,” Arum said. “A joke.”
The press conference was held in the Belvedere Grill of the Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center. The turnout was terrific, another indication that all of those movies about New York sophistication weren’t totally correct. Knievel, who only arrived in town at nine in the morning from Butte, then was forced to change in the car, entered the proceedings dressed in a white suit, red shoes, and a red shirt with an exaggerated collar. His cane and assorted jewelry completed the picture. Arum, introducing him in front of a large picture of Snake River Canyon, said, “On September 9 he will be the most famous person in the world.” The crowd applauded the importance of the man, the projected moment, the jewelry, the cane, maybe the majesty of his red shoes.
“I don’t know if I’m an athlete, a daredevil, a hoax, or just a nut,” Knievel said. “But when I make that jump, I’ll be competing against the toughest opponent of all—and that’s death.”
An intense promotional tour would start the next morning, an eye-popping, mind-numbing thirty-nine cities across the country in twelve days, so this was where he established the message he would hammer home to the American public. The major theme was not hard to discern.
“I’d say 5 percent of the people want to see me die,” he said. “Forty-five percent don’t want to see me die, but they want to be there if I do. And 50 percent are pulling for me.”
“Whatever I get out of this thing, be it win, lose, no draw, because there can’t be no draw, I deserve it because I’ve paid the price for success,” he said. “If I miss it, I’ll wait for you. Because dying is part of living. None of us are going to get out of here alive. If Mother Nature doesn’t get you, Father Time will.”
“Bob Truax says my chances are fifty-fifty … if,” he said. “One, if the vehicle does not blow up on the launch ramp. Two, if it goes straight up in the air and does not flip over backwards and come back into the crowd. Three, if it goes 2,000 feet up at 350 miles per hour and goes across the canyon. Four, if the parachute systems open. Five, if, when they open, I come down on the other side and can stand the G forces. And six, if I can get out of the vehicle.”
Death and disfigurement sat in the room as surely as they did when he was selling those Combined Insurance policies at the insane asylum in Warm Springs, Montana. Something bad could happen here. The good-looking man right in front of you, ladies and gentlemen, very well could be a walking, talking corpse. The name of the tour was “Evel Knievel Says Good-Bye,” supposedly because he would retire after this jump, but if the paying customer wanted to infer another kind of good-bye, well, that was all right too.
Numbers associated with the production came out in a dizzying sequence that gave everything a certain authenticity. The Skycycle would be fired off a 108-foot ramp at a 56-degree angle … 15,000 pounds of jet horsepower … had to travel 1,400 feet … would be 500 feet down into the canyon … etc. Knievel had spent $500,000 for the development of the Skycycle … $300,000 for testing … $100,000 simply for concessions and latrines at the site! The numbers would change during the tour, some of them preposterous ($500,000 for the development of the Skycycle?), some of them rough estimates (500 feet down into the canyon), but they were rarely questioned. Delivery was everything. Any numbers sounded fine if they were delivered with style.
“Your own mental attitude is the one thing you possess over which you have complete control,” Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone had advised. “Memorize: I feel healthy! I feel happy! I feel alive!”
The $6 million check was another number placed on top of the pile. Arum presented the check as if it were real. Knievel accepted it as if it were nothing more than justice for a man who was prepared to do the scary thing he was prepared to do. The check supposedly was a guarantee against 60 percent of the closed-circuit revenue. Top Rank and the promoters would receive the other 40 percent.
“Evel is being guaranteed the highest amount of money for any athlete or performer in the history of closed-circuit television or any other television,” Arum said. “He is being guaranteed the sum of six million dollars, but believe me, we won’t be happy until Evel’s percentage goes to ten or eleven million dollars.”
“I’ll outdraw the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl put together,” Knievel said. “And I’ll make more money than any heavyweight fighter in history.”
Photographers took pictures of Knievel and Arum with the check. Photographers took pictures of Knievel alone, pointing at the picture of the canyon with his cane. Photographers took a lot of pictures. The dimensions for the possible live crowd were drawn in Woodstock numbers, 200,000 people or more. The record for a closed-circuit telecast was slightly over 1.5 million viewers for the first Ali-Frazier bout three years earlier, a record sure to be broken. Knievel promised a million-dollar party in Butte before he took off in the Skycycle, an armored truck following him everywhere, free drinks for the world. He invited the pope. He invited Elvis, Aristotle Onassis and Jackie, O. J. Simpson, Bart Starr, Mario Andretti, the queen of England. He invited the world. Life would be wonderful for the newest Six Million Dollar Man. If, of course, he survived.
“I’ll be a winner,” he promised. “I’ll live like nobody else you’ve ever seen live. Lots of people who have a lot of dough like to put it in banks. I like to spend it. I figure if God wanted me to hang on to it, he’d have put handles on it.”
Arum was amazed that no one questioned the check, no one questioned the numbers. The stories that ran the next day talked about the $6 million payment as if it were essential fact. The promotion was a staggering success already. The expenses for the show, the jump, the attraction, were being overestimated by as much as twenty-five times what they truly cost. No one was complaining. The show sounded like it was much bigger than it was.
“Dave Anderson put the $6 million figure in the New York Times,” Arum said. “He would be mad at me forever for that. I told him it was a joke. He was not amused. He’d won the Pulitzer Prize, Dave Anderson. Everybody believed the check.”
Not everybody. Not exactly.
After the press conference, Knievel and the promoters adjourned to the bar at the Regency Hotel, where he was staying. Somewhere in the proceedings, Knievel pulled the waiter close, told him he wanted to pay for the drinks, and asked if he could pay with a check. Knievel gave him the $6 million check. The waiter went all the way to the cashier before he noticed the number that was written on the check. He returned to Knievel and said he was sorry, but the hotel could not handle a check of this size.
“That’s all right,” Knievel said, taking another check out of his wallet.
This was the real Top Rank check for the real $225,000. The waiter came back again. The hotel couldn’t handle this check either.
The tour began the next morning. First stop: Providence, Rhode Island. The mode of travel was a Lear jet, leased from a company in Dallas, repainted with Evel Knievel logos, renamed “the Montana State Rare Bird.” (A lighthearted bill had been filed by Montana state senator Neil Lynch to give Knievel that designation.) The core group of travelers on the seven-seat plane, besides pilots Art Jones and Jerry Manthey, were Knievel; Arum; Shelly Saltman
, the public relations man for Invest West Sports; an added financial backer, Zeke Rose, the public relations man for Ideal Toys; and Dick St. John, a lawyer for Knievel.
A crowd, estimated at two thousand people, was at La Guardia to see him leave. Another crowd, same size, was at T. F. Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island, to see him land. Both crowds were young, the types of crowds that would gather to spot music stars or Hollywood celebrities. A seventeen-year-old girl told the Associated Press in Warwick that she had told her boss that she needed the day off to attend a funeral. She did not feel she was lying.
“It will be the last chance we have to see him,” she said, meaning Evel.
The jet hopped from Providence to Hartford, to Boston, to Albany, then Buffalo, before the day was done. Death came along for all of the rides, sat up front at Knievel’s side at the press conferences, a half-beat away from dominating all conversations.
“Do you have a death wish?” was a question somewhere in the first wave of all questions.
“Yes, I do” always was the answer. “I want to die at 105 years old of natural causes in bed with two good-looking broads.”
An extensive press kit—“It is not immodest to state that this kit represents the finest assembly of material ever prepared for the exhibitor’s promotion of a closed-circuit television attraction,” a press release for the press kit boasted—was given to each member of the media, a big pile left with each of the individual exhibitors.
The Knievel legend was replayed in the kit, easy alterations and all. He was in jail with Awful Knofel. He was in a coma after the failed jump at Caesars Palace. He was half-drunk in Moose’s Place in Kalispell, Montana, when he saw that picture of the Grand Canyon. Facts didn’t matter.
A series of press releases chronicled the exploits of various daredevils through history. Harry Houdini, the magician. Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest. The Wallendas, the tightrope family dogged by tragedy. The idea was that newspapers could run a story a day about these people, to give the jump historical context. One of the stories was about Clem Sohn, a barnstorming air-show performer in the 1930s, a “kindred spirit” to Knievel.
“He [Sohn] perfected a set of homemade wings, lowered himself from an airplane, glided down from 20,000 feet to just 800 and then opened his parachute,” the press release read. “But on April 25, 1937, Clem Sohn took one gamble too many. During an aerial show in Vincennes, France, his chute failed to open. At age 26, as 100,000 horrified spectators watched, Clem Sohn plunged to his death.”
The operative word, again, was “death.”
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit were the major stops on the second day, Knievel’s mortality put on display in each city. He sounded as if he knew Clem Sohn’s story all too well.
“After all the backup systems I told you about, I have two more backup systems,” Knievel said in Pittsburgh, or maybe it was Cleveland, or maybe it was Detroit. “I can say the Lord’s Prayer in ten seconds, that’s one. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to spit against the canyon wall just before I hit and turn around backwards, and they’ll carve me into that baby like those presidents in South Dakota [at Mount Rushmore].”
These words were recorded by Shelly Saltman. One of the components of the tour, part of everyday life, quickly became Saltman’s tape recorder. He recorded most of the question-and-answer stops, plus some casual conversation during the day. He was writing a book.
“I was part of the promotion for the Ali-Frazier fight in 1971 at Madison Square Garden,” he said. “A couple of guys I worked with, Art Fisher and Neil Marshall, good guys, wrote a book about the promotion named Garden of Innocence. I read it, and it was fine, but I kept saying, ‘I remember this,’ or ‘I was there for that,’ and thinking I could have written that book. When this promotion came around, I decided to try it, to write a book just about the promotion. I cleared it with Evel, with his attorney, Fred Bezark. Evel was going to get some of the money if it ever was published.”
Saltman, forty-three years old, was a California transplant, a chatterbox originally from Boston who thought he basically could sell anything to anybody. He had landed in Hollywood to work with Andy Williams, the singer, and had worked with clients from the Osmonds to Fabian to Muhammad Ali. He once had been part of a promotion to stage a boxing exhibition between Ali and Wilt Chamberlain, a fight that never happened.
Names of famous people were dropped into his typical conversation more often than pauses for punctuation. He was a nonstop optimist, a glad-hander of the first order, a promotional land mine, an explosion of good cheer put in places where he could do the most commercial good. His wife, Mollie, once had given him a set of California vanity license plates that read “CON MAN.” He loved them.
Unlike Arum, he had run across Knievel years earlier. Back at the beginning, back when Knievel was going to do the shows at the Ascot Park racetrack for J. C. Agajanian, the daredevil appeared at a luncheon meeting of the Southern California Broadcasters Association. The site was Red Tracton’s restaurant in Encino. Saltman was there.
He remembered that Knievel started doing wheelies in the parking lot, then on the street outside the restaurant, roaring up and down. He attracted a crowd that included the local police. They were going to give him a ticket, or maybe take him back to the station.
“A couple of broadcasters, Tom Kelly and Gil Stratton, talked to the police for him,” Saltman said. “They were well-known guys. The police let him go.”
Saltman remembered the afternoon as interesting, different. A book about promoting this guy did not seem like a bad idea. Things happened around him.
The size of the aircraft (everything so cramped that the pile of press releases had to be moved off the seat that converted to an emergency toilet when someone felt an emergency need) combined with the long sky-hop days to accelerate the socialization process for the group of travelers. Everyone came to know everyone else in a hurry.
Or at least everyone came to know the star of the show.
His whims, his moods, quickly dominated the small group. He was the cowboy, indeed, the one-man whirlwind that Arum first had described. Except he was whirling faster now. He delivered his pronouncements on all things. He did not ask for many questions from the floor. What he said—right down to his prediction for the weather—was the ultimate word. There was little doubt that he was in charge. This was the way he treated the boys from Butte. This apparently was the way he treated everyone.
The fact that he drank was not a surprise, since he readily had shown the features of his screw-top cane everywhere with great pride. The fact that he drank so much, starting with a double bourbon and soda for breakfast every day, was a great surprise. He charged the night hard, no matter where the plane landed, until three or four in the morning. He was back at seven or eight for takeoff, strapped into his seat with his breakfast double bourbon and soda. Cocktails pretty much were served on a twenty-four-hour basis.
His affection for pretty women also was not a mystery. He certainly had repeated it many times in public, the idea that he was married, loved his wife, but also kept an active and ever-growing list of conquests on the side. The sight of all this activity still could be unsettling. This was an intimate look at the sexual revolution.
“He tells me I should sit with this girl at the press conference,” public relations man Joey Goldstein, hired to be part of the New York kickoff, said. “She’s about nineteen years old, I figure, his girlfriend, and I’ll say she might be the second-most-beautiful woman in the world only because there might be someone else in Tibet or somewhere who’s just a little more beautiful. We sit at this table, and Evel is at the next table with his wife, and I guess everybody knows who everybody else is, and he gets up and talks about how he loves his family. It was all just strange.”
Women treated him as if he were a rock star. He treated them as if they had damn good judgment. He was proud to be a sexist pig, a hedonist, a one-track mind. Women, despite whatever the two-year
-old Ms. magazine and its editor, Gloria Steinem, said about liberation, were happy to know him.
By the end of the second day, Knievel had invited a female television reporter from Pittsburgh to join the group on the plane for a couple of days. Or maybe she invited herself. She was on the plane.
“She wanted the story,” Saltman said. “And she got the story. Yes, she did.”
When the television reporter left, she soon was replaced by the Avis attendant from Chicago, from Salt Lake, from wherever it was. Knievel invited her to come along, and she quit her job right there and was on the plane. When she left, it was time to fly to Butte and home and the family for a couple of days.
“Women just loved this guy,” Bob Arum said. “They threw themselves at him. They loved the danger in him, I guess. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“Women were crazy about him,” Saltman agreed.
The biggest problem for the two promoters was to keep their man on schedule. He had a tendency to make changes in a moment, to order the hotel for the night to be switched from, say, Denver to Omaha to Kansas City because he knew some people in Kansas City. He ordered the pilots to detour at one point to Danville, Illinois, where he had them fly low over the headquarters of a friend, Watcha McCollum, a pilot, who wasn’t even on the premises. He seemed to make changes sometimes simply to make changes, to prove that he was in charge. The pilots worried sometimes about what the Federal Aviation Administration might think about all this.
His phone calls could come at any time, deep into the night. The call could be about anything at all, large or small. He would say anything he wanted to anyone. In the middle of every press conference, he would stop to make a remark to Saltman—“Shelly, stop talking, will you?”—or to Zeke Rose, the man from Ideal Toys. He sometimes would call Saltman to his hotel room, then refuse to open the door, giving orders from the other side. He was equally hard on the pilots, hard on anyone who worked for him.
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