Evel

by Leigh Montville

  The rules did not go both ways. Saltman saved a note he and Zeke Rose received about that situation for the book.

  Don’t ever insult or kidd [sic] me other than in private or we will have to part company.

  Thank you,

  Evel

  At the end of the first week of the tour, the group made a side trip to Twin Falls. Part of the reason for the visit was for publicity, more pictures of Evel next to the canyon, an interview with AP writer Jurate Kazickas, but a larger part was to assure the sometimes jittery folk of Twin Falls that raping and pillaging would not take place on September 8. A public meeting was scheduled. Bob Arum had returned to the tour for the day simply for this stop. He wanted to make sure Knievel knew how important it was.

  “Remember that anything you should say in criticism of Idaho or Twin Falls can hurt us,” Arum said. “It can blow us out of the water.”

  Knievel, who in the past had called the people of the town “a bunch of cotton-spud farmers,” was at his Sunday-school nicest when he talked with the mayor of Twin Falls, the county commissioner, and the assorted local makers and shakers. He not only volunteered to cap his on-site ticket sales at 50,000, after previously promising crowds from 100,000 to 200,000 people, but vowed that he would jump the canyon at midnight without any crowd at all if that was what it would take to make the Twin Falls people happy. He simply wanted to jump the canyon.

  He said he would take out a county permit to stage a local gathering. He said he would donate $100,000 to the Idaho State Police and ask the troopers to “spend it all” to put away any motorcycle gang members who might make trouble. Anything else? He said he would do it.

  “When I leave Twin Falls, I want to have the same smiles and friendly handshakes from the people as when I got there,” he said.

  This was the maddening magic he could perform in public. When he wanted to put on a suit of good nature and affability, he wore it better than just about anybody. He joked that if his safety systems didn’t work, he would become a permanent member of the Blue Lakes Country Club, which was located on the canyon floor. The course would have a new sand trap the management “wouldn’t believe.”

  The charm continued with the interview with the AP writer at the site. The key to all interviews with Knievel was talking to him when he was in a good mood. The trick was knowing when that might be.

  “I’m so famous that if the youth of this country voted for President tomorrow, I’d probably win,” he said to the reporter. “I have to have a 24-hour guard on my house in Butte, Montana, to protect my privacy. I make more money for a personal appearance than Elvis Presley and Liberace combined … I’m Evel Knievel.”

  “He’s a supersensational showman,” Saltman told the reporter. “He’s outspoken, courageous, flamboyant. He has charisma, machismo, his own musk smell. He’s articulate and handsome.”

  Saltman left out the part about being a big pain in the ass.

  The visit to the Snake River site, despite Knievel’s performance for the landed gentry of Twin Falls, was not a great moment for Arum. Clouds had been slipping into his mind all week about this promotion, about whether it was going to work, and now they would not leave. He was pretty much convinced that the enterprise was doomed.

  The big talk about the $6 million check, about the billions of people who would watch this show from around the world, fell apart when you looked at the actual ramp and the facilities at the rim of the canyon. This was his first time at the site, the first time he saw exactly what he was selling. A county 4-H club fair looked more exciting. He was struck by the desolation. The ramp simply sat there, naked as a piece of construction equipment that had been abandoned in the desert.

  “I’m fucked,” he said to himself.

  “It looked like the Toonerville Trolley,” he later said. “There was nothing there. It was ludicrous. It was a big joke.”

  The press who came to Snake River would be skeptical and cynical, with good reason. Most reporters had the same well-worn eyes that Arum had. Slightly more than two months were left before the event. How could an attractive package of thrills, excitement, and derring-do be put together? How could this amateurish-looking rocket, straight from the pages of Boys’ Life or Popular Mechanics, make anyone want to put up five or six bucks to stand around in some faraway arena? Selling this thing would defy the greatest salesmen in the world.

  Another problem was Knievel. Arum’s view of his star had worsened. This was more than any cultural differences. He now thought Knievel simply was crazy, out of his mind. The guy was a bully, a lout. His craftiness could be misjudged early in a relationship for intelligence and a certain wit, but that soon disappeared. The core person who remained was not a good person.

  Arum kept comparing Knievel to Muhammad Ali. He had brought his two most famous clients together a week before the tour started at a party at Jimmy Weston’s restaurant in New York. The purpose was to introduce Knievel and help promote a fight the next night between Joe Frazier and Jerry Quarry at Madison Square Garden. There was a pop-culture majesty to the moment, to be sure, the two great sports-page showmen of the time, maybe any time, thrown together, big mouth versus big mouth, just like that.

  “You know what you are?” the boxer shouted. “You’re the white Muhammad Ali.”

  “Then you’re the black Evel Knievel,” the daredevil shouted in return.

  Everybody laughed in the restaurant, sounded great, certainly was the image most of America had of the two men, two peas from the same hyperbolic pod. But this was not true. That was what Arum decided. The two men were not even close.

  He had been with Ali ten times as much as he had been with Knievel, twenty times as much, maybe a hundred times as much. Ali, for all of his noise, despite the nervous tremors he set off in certain sections of white America, always was a gentleman and a pussycat. Knievel had been more trouble in a week and a half than Ali had been in all the time Arum had known him.

  “Ali was a kind, caring, warm person,” Arum said. “This guy was the anti-Ali. He was a monster.”

  Funny, the solemn faces from the Nation of Islam, the so-called Black Muslims standing behind Ali with their suits and ties and sunglasses, were seen as a cause of concern in many parts of the country. Arum had worked with the Nation of Islam. Knievel was ten times, a hundred times the trouble.

  Ali and the Muslims never drank, part of their religion. Knievel apparently drank all the time. Ali liked women, for sure, but worked with quiet discretion. “Give your number to Rahmann,” he would say to an attractive woman, sending her to his brother. Knievel never was discreet.

  “Ali and the Muslims were tame, tame, tame,” the promoter said. “These were normal people, considerate people. They didn’t hurt people’s feelings just to hurt people’s feelings. They weren’t anything like this guy.”

  Two incidents quickly reinforced Arum’s thoughts.

  After the meeting in Twin Falls and the visit to the canyon site, Knievel and the tour group flew to Salt Lake City, where he was one of sixty recipients that night of the Golden Plate Award as a “Giant of Endeavor” by the American Academy of Achievement. It was a big-time award. Actor Jimmy Stewart, singer Paul Anka, Lorne Greene of Bonanza, rodeo star Larry Mahan, basketball player John Havlicek, actress Cloris Leachman, test pilot Chuck Yeager, and cartoonist Pat Oliphant were among the other recipients. The dinner drew over one thousand guests to the Salt Palace, where presenters included actress Helen Hayes and commentator Lowell Thomas. The guest speaker was special Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who told reporters he was “quite confident” that within two weeks the Supreme Court would force President Richard Nixon to turn over all secret recordings from the Oval Office.

  Linda Knievel had joined the group in Butte a night earlier, made the trip to Twin Falls, then to Salt Lake City for the event. Her presence had brought a change to Knievel, quieted him down, but also had created the ominous quality that Vince McMahon had noticed. The air changed, not for the better, when he
was around his wife. Linda, everyone thought, was quiet, lovely, very pretty, and overmatched. Everyone worried about her.

  Getting on the plane the morning after the dinner, Knievel was cranky, upset that Linda wasn’t moving fast enough. He gave her a spank on the bottom to make her move faster. Getting off the plane in Butte, he couldn’t find his car keys and accused her of losing them. He dumped the contents of her pocketbook onto the tarmac in his search. He eventually found the keys in the pocket of a jacket that he had packed in his bag.

  That night he invited Saltman and Zeke Rose and some other people to his house for dinner. He always had complained about Linda’s cooking (“but I love her”) as part of his discourses on marriage. Dinner wound up being served late, eleven o’clock, after Knievel spent a long day of golf and early night of drinking at the Butte Country Club. Linda served the meal, Knievel looked at one of the dishes—the peas?—and decided they weren’t done enough or were done too much and threw them. Maybe he threw them at Linda. Maybe he threw them at the wall. He threw them. Linda locked herself in the bedroom. Dinner was a quiet affair.

  “He’s crazy,” Bob Arum, who had left the tour again in Salt Lake, said when he heard this report. “Out of his mind.”

  The second incident came the following week in Austin, Texas. Knievel, for maybe the only time on the tour, went to bed early. The hotel where the group stayed featured a swimming pool. Some soldiers on leave from a nearby military base had met some girls and were in the pool at around eleven-thirty at night. They were having some fun, making some noise. Saltman and Zeke Rose and a couple of Knievel’s friends from Butte also were in the pool. They were quieter, but also making noise.

  A figure came out from one of the rooms in the hotel, yelling for everyone to keep it down. The figure then began shooting. The soldiers, the girls, Saltman and Rose and Knievel’s friends all ran.

  “It was crazy,” Arum said. “People could have been killed. They were just kids having a good time.”

  The shooter was Knievel. He admitted that the next day. He said he also had called the police, telling them some people were making noise and an unidentified someone had shot at them to make them keep quiet. The shooting had worked, hadn’t it? The pool was empty in a hurry. Quiet.

  “A madman,” Arum said when he heard this report.

  His solace was that he “didn’t have a lot of skin in the game,” wasn’t risking much of his own cash. Between Invest West and the sponsors like Mack Truck and Chuckles Candy and Ideal Toys, with ABC pretty much picking up the television costs, Arum would not be in much trouble no matter how much trouble developed with the promotion. The real risk belonged to the closed-circuit exhibitors across the country. If Arum supplied them with the event, Arum had done his job.

  His one worry was whether or not Knievel went off into the sky. If the event didn’t happen at all, that was when Arum would find financial disaster. The exhibitors would come after him. He had to get Knievel into the air. He had to hold his nose and keep going.

  “We can do this,” Shelly Saltman told him. “This is our job. We make bad people look good. And we’re very good at our job.”

  The tour hopped one last time to an end in Seattle on July 12, 1974. There had been a break for the July Fourth weekend where Knievel was the grand marshal of the Butte parade. He did wheelies up and down the streets of his youth to standing ovations. Attendance jumped from 45,000 a year earlier to 70,000 this year, mostly because he was there. The only bump in the final week was when he blew off Portland, Oregon, as the plane was about to land because he didn’t like the local closed-circuit promoter—“Fuck Portland,” he said as the plane went back into the air—but that was minor.

  Overall, by any public relations criteria, the tour was a great success. The total column inches in newspapers probably could stretch across the country. The star of the show was everywhere. The June issue of Oui magazine, for instance, had come out during the trip to match Penthouse with a long profile of him stuffed between a story on “Sex in the Soviet Union” and five pages of naked pictures of Sigmund Freud’s niece. The big guns would unload during the coming seven and a half weeks. He would be on television more than the Marlboro Man.

  The canyon jump at that moment was second only to Nixon’s troubles with Watergate, the calls for resignation, as a subject for public discourse. Maybe it was first in a lot of homes. If there was anyone who hadn’t heard about Snake River and what was going to happen on September 8, the person hadn’t heard about anything, probably didn’t know how to tie his shoes.

  Not all memories of the tour were bad. Arum and Saltman were locked in for the rest of the promotional grind, working directly at the site, but Zeke Rose, the public relations man for Ideal Toys, pretty much was done. He had loved his time crisscrossing America with Knievel. He felt that Knievel had changed his life.

  “I had been very businesslike, uptight,” Rose said. “Watching Evel, I learned to relax, go with the flow. I learned to live on impulse a lot more. I’d never lived the way I did during those three weeks. It was very good for me.”

  Rose had brought his bag of toys off the plane at each stop, laying them out so the press could see what they looked like. He had answered questions. He had been associated with Knievel before the tour, so he was the only public relations representative who had a personal history with the guy. He had never minded the way Knievel operated in the past—the guy called him at four in the morning once to go shopping for an organ, still called him often in the middle of the night at home, which was okay except the phone was on his wife’s side of the bed—and he liked this grand buildup to the grand moment. He had fallen into the frenzied rhythm of it all, the nonstop buzz. He had no doubt about what was going to happen next.

  “I thought that after the jump Evel Knievel would have a ticker-tape parade through New York City,” Zeke Rose said. “Just like Lindbergh. I really did.”

  19 Tests

  On the morning of August 8, 1974, exactly one month before the launch of the Skycycle and its celebrated passenger across the Snake River Canyon—well, hopefully across the Snake River Canyon—Americans found a different daredevil on the front page of their newspapers. His name was Philippe Petit. He was a twenty-four-year-old Frenchman who was shown walking a tightrope strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 110 stories above Manhattan.

  The picture did not tell the whole story. He not only walked on the wire while he held his long balancing pole, he danced on the wire, jumped on it, lay down on it. He laughed and smiled, did calisthenics, seemed to have a wonderful time. He began his journey at 7:00 a.m. and performed for an hour and fifteen minutes as traffic stopped below and commuters stopped and stared and marveled at what they saw while various law enforcement agencies tried to figure out a way to get him down.

  “If I see three oranges, I have to juggle,” he told reporters as he was dragged to Beekman Downtown Hospital for a mental evaluation after he finished. “If I see two towers I have to walk.”

  As the day progressed, more facts were discovered about Philippe Petit. He had come to the United States on a self-imposed mission to walk between the towers, but had been making a living as a street performer outside Lincoln Center and Madison Square Garden. He previously had walked on a tightrope between the two towers at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and between the two towers of the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia.

  The latest walk was a group effort. Petit said he went to the World Trade Center at least two hundred times in three months to work out the logistics. As many as six friends posed as delivery men and hard-hat workers the previous day to enter the building with his equipment. They then hid themselves overnight on the two roofs. At sunrise, they fired an arrow from one roof to the other with a five-foot longbow. The arrow was attached to fishing line, which was attached to the cable. The cable then was strung between the two roofs … the show began.

  “After the first crossing I look at the people, and that was fantastic,
” Petit said. “New York woke up and what did they discover? There was a high walker on the twin towers. I was not scared because it was a precise thing. I was dying of happiness.”

  Judged sane at the hospital, he was released from custody in the afternoon when Manhattan district attorney Richard H. Kuh declined to press charges. As part of the deal, Petit agreed to perform a free show at a lower altitude for children at Central Park at a later date.

  The similarities in risk-taking to what the more prominent daredevil proposed to do in Idaho were obvious—“Combining the cunning of a second-story man with the nerve of an Evel Knievel, a French high-wire artist sneaked past guards at the World Trade Center, ran a cable between the top of its twin towers and tightrope-walked across it yesterday morning,” Grace Lichtenstein wrote in the lead for the New York Times—but the dissimilarities in everything else were striking. Here was a man who took the risk simply for the excitement of it, who did it for free, climbed the mountain because it was in the vicinity. He was the counterculture daredevil, part of the peace and love generation that rejected materialism, part of the times that were a changin’, uh-huh. He wore ballet slippers while he worked.

  “I have no ambitions,” he told the grand rush of reporters.

  “What about dreams?” someone asked.

  “I have a dream,” he said. “Niagara Falls. I would like to cross the falls, but who knows? For that I need permission.”

  Knievel, despite his popularity with kids, was from a previous generation. The bottom line always counted. He reveled in materialism with his cars and airplanes, his extensive and expensive wardrobes. He was a red-white-and-blue American capitalist hero surrounded by noise and gasoline fumes, strength and power. He was not counter to the culture, he was the culture, front and center.

  “This is a business, a big business, and a tough business,” Knievel said in that Penthouse interview still on the stands. “I hope I make enough money in the next five years where I could shut [my boys] off maybe wanting to jump the motorcycle like I do because they’re going to have to pay the price for success in this business and the price is getting half-killed. And I don’t want my kids to do that. I’d rather have them go into some other business with the money that I make.”