The story was that the land on the far side of the canyon, the proposed landing area for the Skycycle, belonged to the state of Idaho. The Idaho attorney general, always looking for revenue, announced that he would grant access to the land to news agencies for a fee. The plan was to auction off the rights to take pictures. The attorney general was not thinking about live television at the time, more about local stations and still-cameramen, but CBS now asked, “What about a television network?” Wasn’t CBS a news agency?
The network’s idea was to cover the canyon jump as a news event. The $50,000 was their auction offer. There would, of course, be grand repercussions. Top Rank’s closed-circuit audience probably would disappear, as would the ABC audience for the replay a week later, but CBS would be a hero to the public, providing a live home telecast for free. The state of Idaho would be $50,000 richer.
“There was a precedent,” O’Malley said. “The Rose Bowl Parade, for instance, was covered on different channels. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was covered on different channels. These were public events on city streets. If you could make a deal with the city to set up your cameras, you had a right to show what went past.”
O’Malley laid out the idea for his boss. Wussler loved it. That was why everything happened so fast. O’Malley was spinning from the speed.
“I get into Boise that night,” he said. “I’d had to pack in a hurry, had to borrow $500 from a CBS lawyer because this was way before ATM machines arrived and there wasn’t time to go to a bank. You know those displays at the airport, where you push a button to get a reservation at a hotel? Those had been invented. There were two options in Boise. I think I pushed the button that was lit. The woman comes on the phone and asks whether I want the deluxe room for $35 or the executive for $43. I ask, ‘What’s the difference?’ She says the executive has a Jacuzzi. I figure, eight dollars, what the heck. I check in, get to my room, can’t find the lights. It’s dark. I fall into the Jacuzzi and almost kill myself.”
A hearing already was scheduled for the next day, August 28, 1974, in Boise, the state capital. Bids would be accepted the day after that. The process was taking place eleven days before the jump. Somewhere during the night, Knievel’s Twin Falls attorney, Jim May, was called by a friend who had information that O’Malley was in town and CBS was trying to execute this flanking maneuver to televise the jump.
May and Don Branker, the twenty-eight-year-old long-haired producer from California, were on a private plane at sunrise, heading to Boise. Branker even wore a sports coat for the occasion. The hearing was held in the capitol building, chaired by Lieutenant Governor Jack Murphy. The feeling from the beginning was that this was a pro-forma affair, that the deal with CBS pretty much was done.
When Murphy finally asked if anyone was in the room representing Knievel, it was a surprise when Branker stepped away from a back wall and walked to the front. He told the state officials that Top Rank owned the exclusive television rights to the event and if they were not honored, lawsuits would be filed everywhere. He then asked for a lunchtime recess to be able to call Top Rank president Bob Arum in New York. The request was granted.
“I want your permission to cancel the jump,” Branker told Arum after outlining the problem. “I want full authority to say we’re going to cancel the jump.”
“Cancel the jump?” Arum said. “We can’t do that. We’ve got too much invested.”
“I know that,” Branker said. “But do they know it?”
“You’re talking about a million-dollar gamble here. Let me try to call Wussler.”
Arum called. He argued. Wussler wouldn’t budge. Arum called Branker.
“Do what you have to do,” he said.
Back at the hearing, Branker argued that Evel Knievel was a performer, no different from a singer, and the canyon jump was a performance, and Top Rank owned the rights to that performance, no different from a concert. O’Malley argued that the Snake River Canyon jump was a news event and CBS was in the business of bringing news to its viewers. Branker asked what O’Malley would think if an ABC crew showed up and started to broadcast the U.S. Open golf tournament, which CBS owned. O’Malley said that was different, that CBS had bought rights to all of the camera positions on the golf course. Branker asked, “What if we filmed from a blimp? From a helicopter?”
Branker’s final argument centered on a prize bull that got loose from a pasture. If someone came upon that bull, could that someone take it and sell it? No, of course not. The someone didn’t own the bull. The television rights for the canyon jump were the same as the bull. Top Rank owned them, and if anyone else, i.e., the state of Idaho, sold them, lawsuits would come down like rain.
Branker returned to the back of the room, where attorney May heartily shook his hand. The rock promoter felt like an exhausted Clarence Darrow.
The hearing was finished, the auction still scheduled for the next day, but something had changed. Branker overheard O’Malley talking on a pay phone about “some hippie talking about prize bulls …” The next day CBS withdrew from the scene. There were no bids to televise from the far side of the canyon.
The show was a show, not news. ABC and Top Rank owned the show.
“We were really getting a lot of heat from theater owners across the country [who had committed to show the jump], and we had a very tender situation on our hands,” Wussler said in New York. “It got to be a larger issue than it ever should have become. But we’ve had a very interesting time for the past forty-eight hours.”
A final bit of business, maybe monkey business, had to be cleared up in Butte before attention could shift to Twin Falls and Snake River: Knievel had to stage his million-dollar party. The promise of a gala blowout had been a constant on the Evel Knievel Says Good-Bye Tour. Invitations had been extended to gossip-column celebrities who ranged from Elvis to the pope to Jackie Onassis, a party like no one ever had seen, a ramble through the assorted nightspots of Knievel’s youth trailed by that Brinks truck and a quickly shrinking pile of money. A million bucks. What kind of good times could a million bucks buy in Butte? A beer cost less than a buck.
Bars like the Freeway Tavern, owned by Muzzy Faroni and Judo Stanisich, had been getting calls for weeks, locals wondering when they should appear. Muzzy and Judo, whoever answered the phone, said to hang loose and pay attention. There was no set date. There really was no plan. Bob would have the party when he felt like having the party.
Uh-oh.
He decided sometime during the day of September 2, 1974, that he felt like having the party on the night of September 2, 1974, six days before the rocket launch. This was Labor Day. He also apparently decided that the million-dollar price figure might have been a bit of an exaggeration. The party didn’t begin until after eleven o’clock that night.
“We got a call,” Muzzy Faroni said, “that he was coming.”
The day had been spent at the Butte Country Club, where the Evel Knievel Classic Golf Tournament took place. Elvis, despite a special printed invitation to the tournament and the jump, just for him, had declined the offer to visit the festivities, and Jackie O and the pope and Sinatra and Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor also, alas, had other important engagements, so the two celebrities in town were heavyweight boxing legend Joe Louis and aging tennis notable Bobby Riggs. The sixty-year-old Louis, beset with Internal Revenue Service problems, still worked as a greeter at Caesars Palace and no doubt was paid to take a quick hop from Vegas on a Lear jet for the event. Riggs, fifty-six, still was in the news from his losing match a year earlier in the Astrodome against Billie Jean King, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, in the celebrated “Battle of the Sexes.” He also still was on the payroll for the Welch Candy Company, advertising Sugar Daddy, a caramel lollipop. Riggs wore a yellow-and-red Sugar Daddy track suit every day to promote the product. The Welch Candy Company also was a sponsor of the canyon jump, a logo for Chuckles on every piece of Knievel’s equipment to promote that product, so a certain synergy existed here. So, yes, Riggs also wa
s being paid.
The celebrity golf tournament featured two paid celebrities. Plus Knievel.
“Before the tournament began, Evel came up to Joe Louis and said, ‘Joe, I need a little help,’ ” Bob Arum said later. “ ‘These are my people in Butte. Could you do me a favor, just knock a few out of bounds here and there? To make me look good.’ I heard him say this. Joe didn’t know what to say. The idea was so foreign to him. He stuttered, Joe did, so he said, ‘I-I-I coul-coul-couldn’t do that.’ I’ll always remember that.”
Knievel played in a foursome with Louis, Riggs, and Ed Zemljak. It was daredevil golf all the way, bets everywhere. Knievel soon discovered that Louis was not so good that he purposely had to hit bad shots. He hit more than enough on his own.
“I’ll bet you $50 you can’t put the ball on the green,” Knievel said at the two-hundred-yard, par 3 sixth hole. “I’ll pay you on September ninth [the day after the canyon jump].”
“If I knock this on the green, I’ll ride with you on the eighth,” Louis said before his shot landed just short.
Riggs, a golf hustler, a tennis hustler, a hustler’s hustler, set up a bet with Knievel that if either of them shot 37 on the par 35 back nine, the other one would pay $5,000 for the pleasure of seeing the feat happen. Knievel went over. Riggs chipped in from the fringe on the eighteenth hole to shoot 37. Ed Zemljak saw Knievel write another check to another opponent after another round.
The golf tournament dissolved into the always-raucous golf tournament banquet, which dissolved into the million-dollar party, which was no longer a million-dollar party. Knievel and Riggs and Arum arrived together in a jeep at the Freeway a few minutes before midnight. The place was packed, word out, maybe three hundred people, maybe more, elbow to elbow, filling every inch of the small bar room, but they were not people Knievel knew. The people Knievel knew mostly were home in bed. These were kids, most of them underage.
“Drinks for everybody,” Knievel shouted.
The pandemonium that followed was what would be expected from the combination of free beer and young drinkers. The Freeway was overwhelmed as the young drinkers took as many beers as they could as fast as they could. On a normal night the bar was known for its pork chop sandwich, a Butte staple invented by the proprietors of a restaurant called Pork Chop John’s, but perfected here when Muzzy hired John’s chef for $5,000 just to bring the recipe. There were no pork chop sandwiches now. There was only beer.
The kids whooped and laughed and pissed in the parking lot. They took every beer the Freeway had and then followed their pied pipers, Evel and the guy in the Sugar Daddy warm-up suit, who now were in a police cruiser headed to the Acoma Lounge and Supper Club in the middle of town. The police cruiser was flashing the lights and using the siren and headed the wrong way up Montana Street.
“There was nobody in the bar, a Monday night after midnight, and then the party arrived,” Jimmy Sheehan, one of two bartenders at the Acoma, said. “It was the craziest thing ever. By the time Evel got there, he had to fight his way in. Bobby Riggs, they just passed him through the crowd and over the bar. Then he goes to stand, and he stands on a box that collapses, and he falls right down.”
The scene at the Freeway was repeated at the Acoma with mixed drinks added here. Owner Sandy Keith, Knievel’s onetime commanding officer in the National Guard, said, “Give ’em anything they want.” A polka band played “The Caissons Go Rolling Along” as the crowd cleared out every bottle in the place. Kids stood on top of the piano bar. Kids stood on top of the banquettes. Kids stood everywhere. They chugged drinks from the two tall Galliano bottles that had been in the bar forever.
One of Knievel’s better Butte escapades had started in the Acoma. Drinking in the bar one day, he looked across Wyoming Street at the nine-story Finlen Hotel, the tallest building in town, maybe all of Montana, and made a bet that he could drive his motorcycle through the lobby, onto the elevator, up nine floors, onto the roof, do a lap, then be back on the elevator, down nine floors, back in the lobby, back out the door, and free by the time the police arrived. The key to the bet was that the police station was located within a block of the hotel.
“And he did it,” Jimmy Sheehan said. “By the time the police arrived, he was gone.”
Now he was with the police. The next stop was Bob Pavlovich’s bar, the Met Tavern. More of the same. Then to the El Mar Lounge, a country-and-western bar for a final stop. One reporter, Joe Eszterhas of Rolling Stone magazine, chronicled the entire party parade. He noted that the herd of youthful drinkers became more and more sparse at the last two stops, more beer thrown at each other than drunk at the Met, an older crowd at the El Mar already, the kids not really welcome at two or three in the morning.
“Evel Knievel is a motherfucker,” one kid shouted in a party-ending stretch of dialogue from the El Mar reported by Eszterhas.
“He’d be the best fuck your mother ever had,” one of the resident old-timers replied.
That seemed to be a fine and appropriate good-night.
The million-dollar good time was a bust. Sandy Keith at the Acoma said that Knievel had “rung up a $4,000 bill in an hour.” He said this with a certain admiration, but if the bill was the same at the other three bars, and it probably was less because the Acoma was the site of the mixed-drink open bar, the total for the night was $16,000. The million-dollar party came up $986,000 short. There was no Brinks truck. Take away Bobby Riggs and his Sugar Daddy outfit and there were no celebrities. (Joe Louis went to bed.) There weren’t even friends and associates of Knievel. There were just the underage kids and the daredevil.
The pope and Elvis and Liz Taylor and John Wayne and the rest of the invitees apparently knew what they were doing.
20 Twin Falls, ID (I)
An eclectic cross-section of American journalism formed one of the first waves of outsiders to hit Twin Falls and Snake River as the event grew closer and closer. The publicists for Top Rank said with breathless importance that they had issued over 130 press credentials to publications ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to Time magazine and Mother Jones and the Wall Street Journal. Adding photographers, radio personnel, and technicians, the credentials figure went past 300.
“I just okayed a guy from Kokomo, Indiana,” veteran fight publicist Harold Conrad, a confidant of Ernest Hemingway in the old days, brought on as part of the promotion, said. “The guy does a talk show. Last night every call was on Knievel. His boss said, ‘Get out there and cover this thing.’ ”
Unsure how to treat the man and the event, different editors had made different personnel choices for the assignment. Sportswriters were sent to cover “Man vs. Canyon” as if it were the Super Bowl, the World Series, another Ohio State–Michigan battle for Big Ten football supremacy. Science reporters, the same people who had covered rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and the landing on the moon, were sent to cover the technical aspects. ABC prominently added Dr. Jules Bergman, its voice-of-authority science expert, to the broadcast crew. A final group of writers included sob sisters, metropolitan columnists, entertainment reporters, and television writers. These people primarily were interested in celebrity and/or death.
The canyon jump was a convention of journalistic cynics.
“Do you know how they write ‘motherfucker’ now in my paper?” New York Daily News sob sister Theo Wilson asked a disparate group within this disparate group.
She had covered the arrival of the Beatles in the United States, the Charles Manson trial, the Sam Sheppard trial, the trials of Sirhan Sirhan and Angela Davis. She recently had been covering the news generated by the Pentagon Papers. No one answered her motherfucker question.
“They write it ‘blank-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank fucker,’ ” Wilson said with a pleasant smile.
The logistics for covering the present blank-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank fucker and his attempt to jump this large hole in the ground were not great. There were so few motel rooms in the area that some reporters stayed in Bu
rley, forty miles away from the canyon. The promoters, through Bob Arum and Shelly Saltman, exaggerated all aspects of the production. Money figures were exaggerated. Early ticket sales were exaggerated. Exaggerations were exaggerated. Burt Reynolds was coming! Maybe John Wayne! Truth was hard to find.
Knievel was unpredictable. He split his time between Butte and the Blue Lakes Inn in Twin Falls, flown back and forth in a leased Lear jet piloted by his friend, now air transport chauffeur, Watcha McCollum. Sometimes Watcha wore a red velvet dinner jacket while he worked. Sometimes Watcha and Evel, as they arrived from Butte or departed to Butte in the Lear, buzzed the large tent where the reporters worked. The promoters promised press conferences with Knievel most days, but most days the conferences never happened. When they did happen, they never happened at the prescribed time.
The man of the moment was seen mostly in flashes. He carried his magic cane and seemed to be in an angry hurry, barking at the people who worked for him. He was not afraid of using the magic cane to open a path. He also was seen late at night, ordering another round of drinks for the bar at the Blue Lakes Inn, making pronouncements, giving more commands, nuzzling with assorted women who were not his wife, sometimes when his wife was in a room down the hall.
The journalistic cynics were not impressed.
“Bobby Knievel might have been the worst creep I ever met …,” freelance writer Bill Cardoso, formerly of the Boston Globe, later wrote. “A philanderer and a bully. None of which, of course, should be held against a man. But he blew my vote of confidence because in public life he was a hungry spokesman against these evils. Whenever and wherever he could find an audience. Mr. Red-White-and-Blue. What an asshole.”
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