Evel

by Leigh Montville

  “The contest is Evel Knievel versus the canyon,” Wells Twombley, sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, said in words that were soon copied into a bunch of newspapers across the country. “The canyon is the sentimental favorite.”

  “I thought Knievel was a bully, abusive in his tone,” Joe Eszterhas of Rolling Stone said. “He was one of those guys who acted like he was the star and everyone else didn’t matter. I thought he was a bully and a prick.”

  Eszterhas had started to form his opinion on the party crawl in Butte and reaffirmed it daily at the canyon. Twenty-nine years old, the future Hollywood screenwriter already had written a critically acclaimed nonfiction book about murder and the conflict between youth and authority in a small town in Missouri, Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse. When he approached Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner with the idea of covering Knievel and the canyon, Wenner said, “Great, go do it.” He could write as much as he wanted.

  “I thought the story was larger than Knievel by himself,” Eszterhas said. “I wanted to do this gigantic picture of Americana. The whole panorama of Idaho and farms and motorcycles and kids, this event with Knievel at the center of it.”

  Not all of the press for Knievel was bad. There were a few writers who painted the man of the moment as the next Lindbergh, or at least a sports-page, wacky reincarnation of him. (Lindbergh had died in Hawaii a week earlier at the age of seventy-two, putting him in people’s minds.) There were a number of writers, a majority, who started out intrigued by Knievel and the production, but who grew more and more disillusioned as the big day approached. (Why are all of those trucks with ABC logos here when Top Rank says the event never will be on free TV? Hmmmm.) There were writers who had disliked Knievel’s act before they even arrived. (Death for sale. Gross.)

  “I hope he doesn’t die,” one of this group said. “Because then he’ll be seen as a martyr.”

  The big journalistic wonder was whether this was a fraud, a fix. Was Knievel going to be shot into the air, land on the other side, free and easy, and chuckle as he walked to the bank? The worry was that everyone—writers and the general public included—was being hoodwinked.

  The promoters’ and Knievel’s constant overstatements of the money involved were a negative here. If all this money had been spent, wouldn’t the danger have been engineered out of the equation? The sentence that was heard most often was that if NASA could put a man on the moon, surely these guys could get Knievel across the canyon.

  The promoters tried to strike down this kind of talk since it was a brushfire that could burn down the entire production. Bob Arum was moved to put on a show-and-tell demonstration after using up all his words.

  “Look at that,” the promoter said, pointing at the 13-foot rocket and the 108-foot launch rail and the wide and deep expanse of the canyon. “If it’s a fraud, it’s a fraud. Let it speak for itself.”

  The rocket looked very small.

  The citizens of Twin Falls never really had wanted the event to come to their town. They accepted it as if it were a large tablespoonful of castor oil, somehow good for them, but never liked the thought of what was to come. Now, as the date approached in a time-warp hurry and as hairy strangers appeared on fat-boy motorcycles that fumed and belched, well, worry and fear took charge again.

  The citizens of Twin Falls might not have spent a lot of time in the outside world, but they had seen movies. Bad things could come from this invasion.

  “I don’t like it,” Mrs. John Blasius, longtime resident, told the Twin Falls Times-Herald. “I’m afraid someone’s going to get hurt. It could be on the canyon. It could be riots in town. We have the word that they’re going to barricade the liquor store and all the sporting goods stores. I just think it’s foolish. A lot could happen to the town. They’re going to have all these hippie motorcyclists in here for this.”

  “They should control the drinking,” her husband added. “If they’ve been drinking, they can’t handle them all. It may help the town, yet it could be overdone, too.”

  The town was small, maybe 21,000 people in a county that contained only 44,000 people. The Los Angeles Times pointed out that there were 46 churches, 15 parks, and 14 Negroes in Twin Falls. The idea that as many as 50,000 people might arrive was scary enough, but the kind of people who might arrive was even scarier. This was seen as an invasion of Visigoths, or maybe a spaceship settling down at Shoshone Falls, a 212-foot drop, bigger than Niagara Falls, don’t you know, and dispensing platoons of alien beings.

  Rumors began as soon as the visitors arrived and set up camp by the falls. Housewives were supposedly raped. Property supposedly was destroyed. The sheriff’s department investigated, said the rumors were groundless—skinny dipping perhaps, but no rapes reported anywhere. People still worried. The population was filled with hunters, gun owners, and the rumor here was that local sales were brisk in both guns and ammo. The possibility of shoot-outs between cowboy hunters and big-city motorcycle gang members was mentioned.

  “Any time a town doubles, triples or quadruples its population, there are going to be problems with security, traffic flow, shortages …,” businessman Jerry McBratney, one of the cooler voices, said. “Whether we like it or not, the jump is scheduled. I have mixed emotions about the thing, but there are problems with any big crowd.”

  Twin Falls County sheriff Paul Corder deputized forty citizens as special officers for the weekend to augment his normal roster of sixteen. Thirty-four state police would arrive to direct traffic on the crowded roads. The National Guard would set up a command center next to the sheriff’s office, and units were asked to hold drills on the weekend of the jump, alerted that they might be called.

  The Magic Valley Hospital in Twin Falls made disaster plans. The hospital had 120 beds but could handle only a maximum of ten people at a time in its emergency room. The emergency room staff was doubled, from one doctor to two. Five hospitals were put on alert for overflow. A big worry was that people would fall into the canyon.

  “Our local people, who know the canyon, sometimes fall over, so what are you going to do with strangers?” Sheriff Corder said. “That canyon could be a problem. There will be people all along the canyon with no respect for it.”

  A temporary air traffic control tower was brought in for the Twin Falls City-County Airport, which normally had no need for a tower. The Federal Aviation Administration, which would man the temporary structure, announced that air travel on Sunday would be restricted to 8,000 feet above sea level, 3,900 feet above the jump. The X-2 Skycycle, classified as an aircraft by the FAA, was exempt from this ruling.

  Security for the site was left to the promoters, who were supposed to hire their own guards. This included the 38 acres around the rocket that were leased to Knievel and the adjoining 216 acres retained by farmer Tim Qualls. These latter acres were available to campers, $40 for the weekend, a stiff price. Qualls told reporters that no comparisons should be drawn between himself and Max Yasgur, who leased his dairy farm in upstate Bethel, New York, for Woodstock. Yasgur became so supportive of his hippie visitors, providing them with free food, water, and dairy milk, that Rolling Stone had published a full-page obituary when he died in 1973. Qualls said he was not Max Yasgur.

  “I’ve got a reputation for being mean and ornery, and I aim to keep it,” Tim Qualls said.

  The Twin Falls County Fair, normally the biggest event in the area, also was scheduled for September 4–7. With an annual four-day attendance between 70,000 and 100,000 joined by Knievel’s projected 50,000 gathering at the canyon jump, this would be an unprecedented influx of people. Sheriff Corder reported that his extra men would patrol not only the fair but rural areas to make sure people could attend the fair without worry of being robbed. This did not stop some 4-H livestock exhibitors from threatening to pull out of competition. They were worried about the safety of their animals.

  Sheriff Corder said that the fair never had brought many problems, that it was local people, like a big family get-together. H
e wasn’t sure what problems the motorcycle people would bring.

  “There’s no telling what kind of people we’ll have to look out for,” he said. “We’ll have to rely on the state cops to help out.”

  A separate universe was created at the edge of that canyon. That was the situation. The concession stands already had been set up. (Hamburgers were a dollar, hot dogs 50 cents, beer at 40 and 50 cents per can, $2.50 for a six-pack, $9 for a case. Commemorative statues in gold, silver, or bronze were $150,000, $22,500, or $5,000. An Evel Knievel belt buckle was $40, a commemorative coin $3.) Drinking fountains had been brought to the site. Two hundred portable toilets had been brought to the site.

  What next? The people of Twin Falls could only wonder.

  Jerry Swensen, owner of a local meat market, had a history of making a comment about life and times in his weekly advertisements in the Times-Herald. He made one about all of this, said in his ad that the promotion was “all a put-on” and that Evel Knievel was “full of baloney.” He nevertheless promised to present Knievel with a twenty-pound baloney if the jump was successful.

  A few days before the jump, who came into the store? Swensen was in Salt Lake City, where his wife was in a hospital recovering from a brain tumor. His father, Sherman, was behind the counter. The man of the moment, the famous daredevil, the public figure who television commentator Geraldo Rivera said just the other day was more popular than Ted Kennedy, John Lennon, or David Cassidy of the Partridge Family, went to the case, picked up a twenty-pound baloney, and slammed it down in front of Sherman Swensen.

  “You know what you can do with your baloney, don’t you?” he said.

  He walked out the door.

  Sherman put the baloney back in the case.

  The man of the moment was becoming unhinged by what he faced. That was the feeling of the promoters as they worked through the final days. The man of the moment was scared out of his mind. He was zipping back and forth to Butte on the Lear jet. He was drinking a lot. He was spending a lot of time with a good-looking young woman who said she once was Miss Beauty Queen or maybe Miss Junior Miss Beauty Queen, something like that. Other women from his past also had arrived and shared his attention. The TV reporter from the airplane. She was around.

  He was frenetic, worse with each day, hour, minute. He would talk about his family and how much he wanted to be with them, how worried Linda and the kids were. He would order another round, kiss another woman. He would talk about his friends, the people from Butte, how much they always meant to him. He would explode at some small thing they did.

  “All the people he was with, the hangers-on,” Bob Arum said, “he abused them terribly.”

  Filthy McNasty and his brother, Wolfgang, arrived from Los Angeles. They had made their reservations long in advance at the Blue Lakes Inn. Knievel came to them and said they couldn’t stay at the inn. He said he needed their rooms.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Wolfgang said.

  They stayed in their rooms.

  There was a dinner for the promotion staff at the Blue Lakes Inn. Facundo Campoy, one of the engineers who had worked with Bob Truax from the beginning, brought along two young guys who had helped at the site. Knievel yelled at him from the head table.

  “Who are these guys?” he asked. “They weren’t invited.”

  “They’ve worked every day since we got here.”

  “Not invited. Get ’em out of here.”

  Campoy and the two young guys left. Knievel sort of apologized the next day. Campoy said that it was fine. He was a professional. He did not have to get along with the person in charge to do a good job.

  A general end-of-the-world feel had come over the entire operation. Nerves were stretched. People acted in ways they never had acted. Maybe it was the isolation, everyone gathered in the middle of this rural nowhere. Maybe it was the realization that this weird promotion actually was going to take place, that a human being actually was going to risk his life for entertainment, yucks, jollies. Maybe it was the realization that the weird promotion, whether the star lived or died, probably was going to finish as a large financial egg.

  First reports of ticket sales around the country were not good. Boxing telecasts in theaters had a history of being a last-minute purchase, an impulse buy, but that was boxing. This was a different sort of cat. Not good. The tickets for the site, the live attraction, also had not sold. Knievel’s big show for the Twin Falls citizens of cutting off ticket sales at 50,000, even though he could sell 200,000, seemed ludicrous. If 15,000 people appeared, it would be a miracle. The timing pretty much was that if people weren’t here by now, they probably weren’t coming.

  “Knievel played it all wrong,” Bob Arum said. “He didn’t think about kids when he did his promotion. His appeal mainly was to kids with the toys, television. Despite ABC and Sports Illustrated making this some kind of sports event, this was a kid event.

  “Knievel wouldn’t shut up about how he was going to die. The more he talked about dying, the worse it was. What parent was going to let his kid go somewhere to watch someone die? This wasn’t a kid-friendly event.”

  There were no kids at the site. If there were, Mom and Dad grabbed them by the hand and turned around in a hurry. The people who bought tickets were predominantly bikers. The event looked more like the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, than a family picnic. These were hard-core party people. This was a full-blown party atmosphere. The end-of-the-world atmosphere extended everywhere in the vicinity.

  “Forget Knievel, forget making money,” Arum said. “The one perk was that the sex was unbelievable. I had been separated from my wife, and Twin Falls, Idaho, was like a Mormon place or something, and all of these women were so caught up in the jump, everybody—I mean everybody—was pushing women away. Great-looking women. And when the jump actually took place, the place was overrun with all of these women, and all these nerdy writers suddenly were the attraction, covering the event. It was one orgy, that’s what it was. It wasn’t even an orgy, it was ‘Hey, you want to get laid?’ No problem, right.

  “We had the U.S. women’s ski team acting as our official hostesses. Suzy Chafee, Suzy Chapstick in the commercials. Anyone wanted a massage, they gave ’em a massage. It was wild.”

  One question Arum was asked often was about whether he was promoting a suicide. (See? Not kid-friendly.) He said he wasn’t. He said there was no blood on his hands, no matter what happened.

  “If there’s a fatality Sunday, I don’t think we’ve promoted a suicide,” the promoter said. “Knievel was determined to do this crazy stunt.”

  Could he have done it without you?

  “Sure. He couldn’t have done the same promotion. He couldn’t have made as much money, but he could have done it. He would have done it. He had been talking about it for six years. He was determined to go through with it. He made the decision. All we did was give him a good promotion.”

  Arum said the rocket would lift off on time, no matter what the wind speed was, no matter what the weather was. Rocket designer Bob Truax said a twenty-mile-per-hour wind was a maximum. Anything higher would force a postponement. Arum said that Knievel would be in charge of that and that only a hurricane would bring a postponement. Twin Falls did not have a lot of hurricanes. He also said television coverage would stay with the event no matter what happened.

  The rocket people did busy work around the X-2. They had finished all changes despite the tight schedule. They fretted now about whether everything worked, but they felt reasonably secure with what they had done. Former astronaut Jim Lovell, commander of the first spacecraft to orbit the moon, was part of the closed-circuit broadcast team. He took a look at the X-2 and said that he would travel in it if Knievel had second thoughts. Facundo Campoy and Bill Sprow also said they would fly in the X-2.

  “I’d been a drag racer in speedboats until my wife made me give it up,” Campoy said. “In one season in my division, nine of the twelve racers were killed. So maybe I had a different pers
pective.”

  Truax was one dissenter. He said he built rockets, didn’t fly in them. His estimates on Knievel’s chances had varied during the rounds of interviews, but he had settled on sixty-forty odds that Knievel survived. He said that Knievel had the same chances as a good test pilot in a new, untried plane.

  “If you were going to give me $6 million for doing it, I’d say, ‘Nothing doing,’ ” Truax said. “It’s a dangerous thing.”

  Knievel heard all of this talk, the pros and cons of whether he would survive. Jimmy the Greek had arrived at the site, unbidden, simply to fuel his own publicity machine, and while he wouldn’t predict a life-or-death outcome, he did say that “the odds are three-to-one Knievel is crazy.” There probably would be more speculation about the man of the moment’s fate in the next forty-eight hours than there ever had been about any man of any moment.

  One of the more bizarre additions to the conversation was a six-foot-tall, one-ton tombstone delivered from the Rock of Ages Corporation in Barre, Vermont. The company said it was a commemorative stone for the jump, but not a lot of imagination was needed to envision another use.

  Knievel had the required imagination. He silenced a dinner table conversation at the Blue Lakes Inn when he read a quote from Jack London that he wanted inscribed on the side of the stone. Jim May, the Twin Falls lawyer, had found the quote.

  “I would rather be ashes than dust,” Knievel read. “I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze, than be stilled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function is to live, not to exist.”

  Pause.

  “That’s it,” Knievel said. “That’s me.”

  The man of the moment’s edginess became public on Friday afternoon. This was the dress rehearsal for Sunday’s launch. He was lifted to the X-2 early by a giant crane, swung through the air in a bosun’s chair, then caught and helped into the cramped cockpit, where he sat for forty-five minutes in the sunshine at the fifty-six-degree launch angle. That meant he was almost flipped upside down. An ignition test was run on the steam engine and failed—five-four-three-two-one-clink—then worked on a second try. Knievel was left to fidget and sweat while other people hurried around him.