He was in his full all-American flight uniform, modeled on his racing leathers. He wore the flight helmet. Blood flowed to his upside-down head. More blood flowed. While his eyes stared straight at the blue Idaho sky, he obviously thought about the possibilities after the rocket was launched for real in two days. The possibilities did not seem great.
“I’ve created a monster,” he said later, “and I don’t know how to handle it.”
At ground level, as Evel sat upside down, the first battalions of true Evel believers had arrived. They were not a pretty sight, these believers, dirty and self-medicated, pushing against the cyclone fence erected to keep them away from the rocket, biker guys and biker chicks, pleading and snarling. One woman, spaced out and topless, a crucifix bouncing between her breasts as she rode atop her boyfriend’s shoulders, was called “the Hollow Lady” by Eszterhas and “the Quaalude Queen” by Cardoso. She fit either description. A young guy, also on top of someone’s shoulders, named himself “the State Pig of Montana.” “I’m the State Pig of Montana,” he said, again and again. He was covered in dirt, presumably as filthy as any state pig of Montana should be.
The Quaalude Queen and the State Pig kept up a constant clatter of “Evel, Evel, the tribes have assembled,” calling to the man of the moment, who probably couldn’t hear them, hung up in the sky. The Queen added the fact that she loved him and would be proud to share her love with him. The State Pig continued to state that he was the state pig. The man of the moment finally saw and heard all this when he came down from the rocket with his blood still filling his cranky head. He told one of the guards that if any of the screamers made a move to climb to the rocket to “blow their goddamned heads off.”
And then he made a strange remark.
“Look at this,” he said, loud enough for promoter Arum and anyone else to hear. “Sunday is the greatest day of my life, and it’s run by a bunch of goddamned New York Jews.”
Arum tried to shuffle the words off (“My values are different from his—he’s a cowboy”), but they hung around like an unpleasant odor. What was that? “Bunch of goddamned New York Jews”? Things did not improve when Knievel returned to his trailer.
This was supposed to be the time, finally, when he sat for an interview. He went into the trailer. The ragged clot of press people closed around the door, a crowd, cameras and microphones sticking out from all sides. The plan was for Knievel to sit down on the steps on a red-white-and-blue throw rug hastily supplied by Shelly Saltman. The plan, alas, would put him out of sight from reporters and, more importantly, cameramen in the back rows.
“Have him stand,” Jim Watt, an NBC cameraman out of Los Angeles, suggested to Saltman.
Before Saltman could reply, Knievel popped out of the door. He had heard the request and did not like it.
“If I want to sit down, I’m going to sit down,” he said.
“Out,” he then said to Watt. “Out.”
Out? A strange dance began as Knievel turned and went back inside the door, then burst out again and said to Saltman, “Tell him the next time he looks at me to have a smile on his face,” and then to Watt, “I’m not an actor, Mr. Cameraman, do you understand that?” and then Watt replied, “That’s right.” And then it seemed finished, and then Knievel pushed it one more step. He said, directly to Watt again, “I said, ‘Have a smile on your face.’ ” Watt said years later, “I had just come back from working in Vietnam. I probably told him to go fuck himself,” but what he really said was, “I don’t smile for anybody.” It meant the same thing.
Watt was a smaller man. He was hamstrung by his equipment. Knievel bounced off the steps of the trailer, swinging the cane. He had a good angle. He hit Watt’s camera. He hit Watt’s shoulders. He knocked Watt to the ground. He stood over the cameraman.
“Get him out,” Knievel said. “Out! I don’t need any crap from a cameraman like you.”
“I can’t go without my camera,” Watt said.
“I’ll stick it in your ear if you’re not careful,” Knievel said as other parties finally moved between the two men.
Not only was this ugliness, it was ugliness witnessed by the people who were sending all of those words across the country. Knievel clomped back into his trailer. Watt picked himself up and walked away with his broken camera. There were assorted guesses that this was part of the hype, a first cousin to those fights at the weigh-in between two boxers—They Really Don’t Like Each Other!—to promote the big heavyweight fight. Watt, though, made it seem real. He was a real cameraman, whacked for trying to do his job, nothing else. Knievel also made it seem real. He was out of control.
After a while, he came back and sat down on the stairs and tried to explain himself. He was more restrained than he had been all day. Almost calm.
“I think all of you here now know, regardless of what two or three jackasses might say or have said, out of the millions of legitimate press people in the world, what this thing is,” he said. “It’s a monster. I think you all know now by looking at me that I wish I didn’t have to do this and wish I wasn’t here. But I’m going to, and I’m trying to keep my wits about me … and you’re all welcome to film whatever you want as long as you’re here to help me. If anybody doesn’t want to help me, I’ll go after them and throw them out, just like I did the last guy.”
He went over to the fence and talked with his constituents at the end of the interview. The State Pig of Montana was happy. The Quaalude Queen was happy. The man of the moment stepped onto the waiting helicopter, Watcha McCollum at the controls, and away they went.
A story. The person who hated Knievel most was Don Branker. Arum privately had decided that “I never would root for someone to die, couldn’t do that, but I wouldn’t mind seeing this guy bounced around a little bit in that rocket,” but mostly kept his opinions to himself. He still had to sell tickets. Branker did not have that problem. The twenty-eight-year-old rock ’n’ roll site manager, running on overdrive every day, worried not only about whether or not Knievel would get inside the rocket, but also about details like providing one portable toilet for every five women in the crowd, one more for every ten men. The theatrics had worn him down. He’d had enough.
His relationship with Knievel was terrible. Knievel wrote him off from the beginning as a long-haired hippie asshole, a characterization that put him near the bottom of all shit lists. Every suggestion Branker made wound up in a battle. One fight led into another. Knievel thought Branker didn’t know anything. Branker thought Knievel was an idiot.
When he was approached by Eszterhas for an interview in Rolling Stone, the rock ’n’ roll guy let his opinions roll. He sat next to the rocket and talked into a tape recorder and vented:
I got into this thing because I wanted to get away from Watergate and everything it was doing to my head. I’d promoted over 400 rock and roll concerts and I was the producer for California Jam in Ontario and I’d promoted the Stones, the Dead and Alice Cooper. I got involved in this too, I suppose, because I wanted to do an event that had nothing to do with rock and roll.
I hadn’t met Knievel, but I knew that he is as important to little kids today as Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle were in my childhood. He interested me sociologically that way. I also realized that you can walk into just about any house in America today and sooner or later hear the name Evel Knievel. It’s crazy, but it’s America. Maybe it’s part of an escape syndrome. Maybe America just badly needs a hero.
So I came out here months ago and started setting things up here as a producer for Top Rank. I’m not going to kid anyone, Top Rank gave me a contract for a lot of money, but also I felt what I was doing was important. I was working with a community and putting it through tremendous changes very fast. And I realized that after the jump is over, I’ll go back to L.A., but the people in this community will still have to live here. I tried my best to keep that in mind as I worked with them.
Finally I met the star. I watched Knievel and for a while I thought him the most charismatic
man I ever met and that includes both Jagger and Dylan. I’d watch him go into a room and his presence would fill it up. He’d become everything going on in that room.
After I worked with him a while, though, I started noticing certain things. He has a real tendency to exaggerate, more than any person I’ve ever met. In addition to that, he himself believes everything he says. Where I come from, that’s a pathological liar. He would say these things that were lies so emphatically that he just about made you believe them—even though you knew they were lies. And in this respect his power of the press blew me out. It seems to me he scares the press and they end up eating out of his hand because he strikes some bully chord in them. Since most newspeople I’ve met aren’t exactly heroic, they just let themselves be run over.
I noticed all the hypocrisies too. He flaunts other chicks more than any other performer I’ve met. Yet he stands for a conservative Americanism. Like I’ve seen him go into a crowd where he hears somebody yell “Fuck!” and he’ll say: “You shouldn’t cuss around women and children.” Then an hour later I’ll see him tongue-lash some guy and call him every kind of asshole with the guy’s girl right next to him.
I noticed other things too. Like the fact the guy has a tendency not to pay his bills. Guys come in here saying—I still haven’t got that check he said he’d send me. Little guys who don’t make a lot of money. Yet he’ll flaunt his diamond rings at them. And stupid, needless lies. Like he went around the country saying for a while that all the tickets to the site had been sold so nobody else can get in. I think he’s still lying about that. He says now that 50,000 people will come here. I’m guessing 10,000.
He’s also full of prejudices. I’m a freak and I get the feeling he doesn’t quite trust me because my hair is long. A couple of weeks ago I hosted a network thing on TV, In Concert, and I had the O’Jays and Flash Cadillac on, and Evel heard I’d be on TV and he said he’d watch me. He did too. He called me and said—“I like what you do, but get rid of all that music. The hell with that rock and roll. I hate that rock and roll. I’ll make a Skycycle believer out of you yet.”
His emotions are erratic. He’ll call people twenty-four hours a day, for example, any time of the night, and start yelling about some little thing that hasn’t been done. He can be sitting at a table, and he’ll be complimenting the guy sitting at his left and smiling, and suddenly he’ll turn to the guy on his right without breaking stride and say something like—“You damn no good son of a bitch, you didn’t do this or that. I’m gonna kick your ass!”
One of the things I discovered after working here a couple of months is that the promoters and Top Rank aren’t exactly running the show. Evel is. All of it. Every single detail. He doesn’t trust anybody about anything. He wants to do everything himself, and his response to everything is money. That’s his only concern—money. How many dollars will it cost? And how many dollars will it bring in?
Take this whole security issue. I stay awake nights worrying about people going over the rim Sunday because the security is woefully bad. Irresponsibly bad. And it’s directly Evel’s fault. I had to fight him to get a public-address system for Sunday. I want a guy to get on the PA every few minutes and tell the people to stay the hell back from the rim. It will be a kind of psychological conditioning. So I went to Evil and hassled, and he said—“How much is it going to cost?” And I told him $18,000, and he said—“Hell no, to hell with it, that’s too much money.”
I finally talked him into it. “How’s it going to look if people get killed Sunday?” I asked him. I said—“If just one person dies out here, the whole thing won’t be worth it.” That line didn’t seem to cut much ice with him.
I tried to talk him into putting another fence along the rim for Sunday, but he won’t go for that. One fence is enough, he says, and he keeps talking about the security men who’ll be up here. “The fence costs too much,” he says. I tried to argue with him, but he just said—“It’s my show, not yours!”
I wish this thing was over with. To tell you the truth, he scares me now. What’s even scarier, I think, is that he really believes he’s going to be the president of the United States someday. I’m not kidding. I’ve heard him talk about it. The Knievel toys are the biggest-selling toys since the Barbie doll, and the way he figures it, ten, fifteen years from now those kids are your voting majority. He’ll become a crusader like Oral Roberts in politics and talk about decency for America. If that ever happens, I’m going to tell a lot of people about how, back in Idaho, when he wasn’t a candidate for president, he was more worried about his damn money than about people’s lives.
The scene with the cameraman, Jim Watt, was a final disturbing bit of evidence for Branker. Knievel was the ultimate bad guy. That was Branker’s opinion. That was why he did what he did that night.
One of the loose ends of the promotion that had to be tied in a hurry involved Miss Beauty Queen, Miss Junior Miss Beauty Queen, whatever she was. The young woman, the girl, starry-eyed and excited by all that was happening, apparently wrote a love note to the man of the moment. The man of the moment’s wife discovered the note and was offended. The man of the moment instructed Bob Arum to slip Miss Beauty Queen $200 and send her back to wherever she was from. Miss Beauty Queen found another place to go.
“I took her back to my room at the Blue Lakes Inn,” Don Branker said, “and I fucked her. Out of spite I fucked her. I fucked Evel Knievel’s girlfriend for spite.”
Branker’s parents had come into town. They spotted him with Miss Beauty Queen the next morning and knew that he stayed with her all night in his room. He was married at the time, a wife back in California.
“What are you doing?” his mother asked.
Her son really couldn’t explain.
The next night, the night before the jump, there was no time for sex or spite. Branker was called to the launch site from an organizational meeting at the Blue Lakes Inn. He had hired a local Indian called Chief Red Cloud to help with the many problems that might develop in Twin Falls. The Chief had done good work, especially calming the local population, but this was a different problem than had been anticipated.
“You better get out here,” Chief Red Cloud said. “There’s a riot going on.”
Branker drove his rental car over the bouncy, bumpy dirt road to the site. There were no lights at the site except in the trailers the promoters used as offices and the spotlights on the ABC trucks and the rocket. Everything else was wilderness dark, darker than dark. Branker’s headlights, when he pulled in, gave him flashes of what was taking place. People were moving. Noises of destruction were coming from assorted locations. Anarchy.
He drove fast, fast as he could, to the trailer. Tommy Frazier, brother of former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, was there. He had been hired by Top Rank as security. Chief Red Cloud was there. Filthy McNasty, for some reason, was there. He had showed up, driving the Cadillac hearse with the name of his bar on the side. A few other people were there. Bob Arum and Shelly Saltman were on their way.
This was a definite crisis situation.
“It was right out of a movie,” Branker said. “If you told people, they wouldn’t believe it. The first thing I saw … they’d literally torn the top off a beer truck. They were throwing cases of beer out of the truck. People were running everywhere with cases of beer. It was ‘Mad Max Meets Evel Knievel.’ ”
Second sight was worse than first sight. Screams came from the darkness, female screams. Cheers. More screams. More destruction. Fires were started. Portable toilets on fire. Concession stands on fire. The people in the Qualls family’s fields—how many people? a lot—were drunk and high and doing whatever they wanted to do, and there was no one to stop them. The people apparently had been upset by the $40 fee to park, about the prices for the beer, thought they were being gouged. They gouged back. Or maybe they simply wanted a party. Beer was now free.
Branker had hired some shotgun-carrying guards for the day, but they were gone. Who knew where they went
, intimidated by the crowd. There were no guards. The one weapon available was a pistol that one of them had left in the trailer. Branker took charge of the gun.
He had supervised the installation of fences at the site. Most of them were along the edge of the canyon, the two-fence system that hopefully would stop people from falling over the edge if they surged forward when the rocket took off. He’d had another fence constructed around the rocket, the television equipment, and the trailers. This had created a compound.
The rioters had control of the rest of the site, the dark part. They would make a move sometime toward the compound, the lit-up part, for total control. That was to be expected.
Arum called the governor of Idaho, asked about the possibility of the National Guard coming onto the scene. The governor said that could happen, but if it did, the rocket launch certainly would not take place. Branker called the adjutant general of the National Guard. The adjutant general said the Guard had to protect the town in case there was a riot, not the promotion. There would, in short, be no help from the National Guard.
“So it was us,” Branker said.
When the rioters came, he and Chief Red Cloud went outside to the fence for the confrontation. Branker carried the gun. He has been asked through the years how many rioters were involved. His answer has been, “Maybe five thousand,” but he never has been sure. Did Custer count the Indians? The one thing he knew at the time was that there were a lot more enemies than there were bullets in his gun.
A leader seemed to step forward from the crowd. Again, like a movie. A couple of lieutenants seemed to be behind him. They said they were going to tear down the fence and come into the compound. Branker stepped closer with the gun by his side and said they were not.
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