Evel

by Leigh Montville

  At the end of October, the first foreign possibility was slipped into the newspapers. The destination would be Japan. Another daredevil, the thirty-year-old son of a World War II kamikaze pilot, would try to rocket over Mount Fujiyama, a 12,388-foot-tall volcanic mountain sixty miles southwest of Tokyo. Bob Truax would build a new Skycycle. Knievel would publicize the event by appearing in a minimum of five, maximum of ten motorcycle jumps around the country. The jumps would be over no more than thirteen vehicles.

  “I don’t give a damn what kind or what size vehicles they are,” Knievel said. “I’ll get $45,000 per jump against 50 percent of the gross gate receipts.”

  Though he claimed to have sold one of the battered test Skycycles to Japanese interests for $265,000, plans for the production never proceeded much further. The appropriate financial backing never arrived. The name of the daredevil son of the kamikaze pilot was never announced. By January 1975, Japan was forgotten and Knievel had a new and better destination in mind. He was going to London. He was going to jump over the River Thames.

  The proposal was put forward by British promoter John Daly. Knievel would be back in the Skycycle. He would take off from Battersea Park, travel somewhere between 250 and 500 yards across the famous river, then land on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. The New York Times on January 8, 1975, quoted a British government official who was skeptical about the attempt, noting the various permits required, plus, “if he [Knievel] falls into the river, the permission of the Water Authority and the Pollution Authority also would be required,” but the presence of Daly in the operation gave it some substance.

  Thirty-seven years old, the son of a dockworker, Daly was another former insurance salesman who had found success in the entertainment world. During his two-year stint with Canada Life, he had befriended actor David Hemmings, then became his manager. When Hemmings reached the big time in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 hit Blow-Up, he and Daly used the financial capital to form a talent agency called Hemdale, which soon managed rock acts like Yes and Black Sabbath, owned the worldwide rights to the musical Oliver!, and moved into movie production.

  Daly bought out Hemmings in 1971 and in the last two years had backed the London stage production of the musical Grease (starring the understudy to Barry Bostwick on Broadway, newcomer Richard Gere) and had just completed production on Ken Russell’s movie version of Tommy, the rock opera by the Who. Despite a major fire on the set, which was a pier in Hampshire, and despite the presence of Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Roger Daltry, Keith Moon, Pete Townshend, Tina Turner, Elton John, and Jack Nicholson in the cast, the film was only Daly’s second-most-exciting business enterprise in 1974. He was also, you might remember, Don King’s partner in “the Rumble in the Jungle,” Muhammad Ali’s eight-round knockout upset of George Foreman (“If Evel Knievel can make that jump, I can whip George Foreman’s rump,” Ali had predicted) on October 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire.

  That event, which featured the birth of the rope-a-dope, the machinations of Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, and countless plot lines, not only had been a boxing version of Snake River Canyon but also impacted Snake River Canyon. Bob Arum, remember, had been free and inclined to work with Knievel because Muhammad Ali had followed the money—mostly money raised by John Daly—to Don King. Knievel, remember, had been moved to invent the phony $6 million paycheck for Snake River because Ali and Foreman both were promised $5 million, again, money mostly raised by John Daly.

  Now Daly, with his ability to raise money for curious events, was drawn to Evel Knievel for his next promotion, and Knievel was drawn to Daly. On February 14, 1975, the two men met at the Regency Hotel at 560 Park Avenue in New York City to iron out details. Included in the meeting was Bob Arum.

  The promotional world was small and incestuous. The people involved in it were, if nothing else, resilient.

  “Now listen, here’s the way the tour’s going to be,” Knievel said the next day in his suite at the Regency. “I have a few ideas that are going to be great for publicity. First, we’ll get a girl to go to the highest building in London. You get all the press and television cameras there, and we’ll get the girl to slowly take all her clothes off and throw them onto the sidewalk off the top of the building. When she’s finally naked, she throws her arms in the air and shouts, ‘Don’t miss Evel Knievel at Wembley Stadium …’ ”

  And so it began again.

  “The other thing I need are six Rolls-Royces,” Knievel continued. “What I’ll do is this. Each week I wreck one. Some I’ll drive into a wall at sixty, seventy miles per hour—not dangerous, really—and some I’ll drive into the Thames. We’ll get a headline every week, ‘Evel Knievel Wrecks Another Rolls,’ and each time we’ll have a picture …”

  The deal had been made, indeed, with Daly. His management team of George Miller, American representative Fred Schier, and advertising director Howard Gottlieb mingled in the suite with Arum, with Zeke Rose, with Jonathan Martin of ABC, with Fred Bezark, with John Hood and assorted other characters.

  Though the press still was fed the story of the great blast-off over the Thames—“I know I can make it across,” Knievel told the Washington Post, adding, “This time I’ll see that they fix the damned parachute”—the venue and the challenge quickly were changed. Wembley Stadium (capacity: 82,000), England’s national athletic home field, site of the track and field competition for the 1948 Olympics, called by soccer superstar Pelé “the cathedral of football, the capitol of football, the heart of football,” became the place. Thirteen red British buses, single-deckers, not the double-deckers of London postcards, became the opponent. The daredevil half-astronaut became a motorcycle rider again.

  He would take a familiar route to international fame. This would be Caesars Palace with a British accent.

  “The European people are very stuffy and very dry,” Knievel explained in the suite, half of the people there from Europe, virtually all of them with a greater knowledge of the continent than he had. “They are serious people, don’t look for a free laugh. They have seen guys strapped into cars jump off a ramp over two or three cars, land on another ramp, and they say, ‘Wasn’t that great?’ but they’ve never seen a guy hang on to the handlebars of a motorcycle and go over thirteen buses. They know there’s no bullshit involved, and if you have any apprehension about what European people will think, you can forget them. I’m the greatest stuntman and daredevil in the world.”

  Among the group who knew better but nevertheless nodded in unison at this European appraisal by the boss were Brian Cartmell and Harry Ormesher. Cartmell had been hired by John Daly to run the publicity for the event. Cartmell then had hired Ormesher, a London sports photographer known as Harry O, later to become a famous fashion photographer, to take pictures. The two were destined to become Knievel’s tour guides to London, a somewhat smaller version of the Lear jet tour of the United States before Snake River.

  This was their first view of their man. He seemed a bit excitable. Was this the way he always acted? They didn’t have to wait long to see what kind of high maintenance would be involved.

  “Look, you guys, I’ll tell you who I’m bringing with me to England,” Knievel said. “It’s going to be a helluva show. There’s this guy called …”

  The phone rang. Knievel paused.

  “Somebody stop that fucking phone …”

  He began talking again.

  “Yeah, there’s this guy called …”

  The phone rang again.

  “I told you to stop that fucking phone …”

  He moved in a flash, grabbed the phone with both hands. He looked as if he were going to throw it, kick it, strangle it into submission. This was the intermittent rage that was familiar to anyone who had worked at Snake River. Anything was possible.

  “I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m speaking!”

  John Hood took the phone from him, took the receiver off the hook. The room had grown very quiet. Would he strangle Hood and the phone at
the same time? Everybody waited.

  “Don’t let the fucking thing ring again.”

  And then it was done.

  “Now, I was telling you about a guy named Orval Kisselburg,” Knievel continued. “You have to see what he does. He shoves a stick of dynamite up his ass and blows himself forty feet into the air!”

  Done.

  Cartmell and Ormesher looked at each other. They had the same thought.

  “The guy was out of his mind,” Ormesher said. “We were dealing with some American madman.”

  Knievel laid out the plan. He would bring Kisselburg to Wembley. He would recruit Butch Wilhelm, the midget, again. He would put on a show these Brits never had thought about, much less seen. The big trucks would be shipped by boat, his customized Cadillac pickup added to the lot. He would fly down another godforsaken ramp, gun that Harley, sail it across however many buses were set in front of him, land on the other side. He could do that.

  The date for Wembley would be May 26 at 2:30 p.m., a Monday, the spring bank holiday, also celebrated as Whitsun Monday in Great Britain, the first Monday after Pentecost. Knievel would bring his caravan of thrills to ten other sites around the British Isles, smaller jumps in succeeding weeks in places like Bristol and Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester, Blackpool and Nottingham, usually two shows a day, afternoon and evening.

  It was his most ambitious schedule in years. He would be paid $450,000 for the tour. If all went as well as everyone predicted, he would continue across the English Channel and through the rest of Europe, play a string of dates on the continent before a triumphant return to the United States.

  “Are the women in England as beautiful as they say?” he asked Cartmell.

  “Yes,” the publicity man replied. “They are called English roses.”

  “Good,” Knievel said. “I’ll water a few of them.”

  Cartmell, who looked a bit like John Cleese, top banana of the Monty Python Flying Circus, the BBC hit comedy show, was a former Fleet Street reporter who knew what sold and what didn’t sell in Great Britain. He had worked with assorted celebrities and politicians, dusting off their résumés. He once brought the last living relative of Napoleon Bonaparte and the last living relative of Admiral Horatio Nelson together to play the new board game, Trafalgar, near the site of the famous sea battle off the coast of Spain. The publicity picture, taken by Harry O, ran in every paper in England and France.

  Knievel presented some obvious public relations challenges. Though he thought every Englishman and certainly every English rose knew all about him, he was mistaken. The average London resident had no idea who or what Evel Knievel might be. The canyon jump had stirred little interest. The presence of English commentator David Frost at Snake River was seen as more interesting than anything Knievel did.

  Cartmell would have to blitz the British press to draw any kind of a crowd to Wembley’s vast spectator terraces. He would have to work around Knievel instead of with Knievel if the naked woman on the building, something out of the 1930s, was supposed to be a grand promotional idea. He would have to make his own ideas appear to be Knievel’s ideas. Suggestion was needed much more than argument with this character.

  An example, a test case, soon arrived. The conversation in the crowded penthouse had taken an inevitable turn toward the thousands of dollars in diamonds that the daredevil was wearing. He freely explained the logic behind them yet again, a man buying diamonds when he can’t get insurance. He told his little stories about each piece of jewelry. He said a woman a few nights earlier said the diamond on his left hand was so large that she thought it was a portable television set. He estimated the value of the diamonds at $600,000.

  “What happens if you get mugged?” Harry O asked with great logic. “Where’s your insurance then?”

  “Then this is my insurance,” Knievel said.

  He pulled a snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson revolver from his jacket. He pointed it straight at Harry O. He said the gun was loaded.

  “I sleep with this baby under my pillow every night in case some dumb jerk gets the idea of robbing me,” he said.

  Harry O, once his nerves settled, suggested that a picture of Knievel loading the .38 Smith and Wesson at night, maybe with some money and jewels sprinkled around the bed, would be a great publicity shot. Papers everywhere in England would use it. Knievel immediately said the picture was impossible. He didn’t pose for pictures. Didn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it. Not for anyone.

  “I don’t pose for pictures,” Knievel said. End of story.

  Harry O thought about that. Cartmell thought.

  “Evel,” the photographer said after a while, “what if I showed up just as you were going to bed? Took a picture of what you were doing before you went to bed? Maybe caught you when you were loading the gun? That wouldn’t be posing.”

  Knievel considered the request.

  “I’ll be taking a nap tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “If you were around, I suppose you could take the picture.”

  Sure enough, the jewels were spread out on the bed the next afternoon. The money, augmented by a couple of thousand-dollar bills, brought by Arum from the bank just for the picture, were spread on the bed. Sure enough, Knievel loaded the gun. He was shirtless and serious. Bullets were spread out on the bed. He looked like Clyde Barrow getting ready for work. The picture eventually would be seen everywhere.

  “That’s the way you had to work with him,” Harry O said years later. “Make him think everything was his idea.”

  Another example: Ormesher also had asked Knievel if he did physical workouts to stay in shape. Knievel said that of course he did. Ormesher asked when Knievel might be working out. Knievel said, oddly enough, that he might be working out just prior to loading his gun. Ormesher said that would be another great candid shot. Knievel agreed.

  “Freddie,” he then said, turning to Fred Bezark, the lawyer. “Buy me a gym suit and some sneakers. I need ’em by noon tomorrow.”

  The two Brits also accompanied their man on his business travels. He was in New York for the annual toy fair at the mammoth International Toy Center at 200 Fifth Avenue. Ormesher added some shots on the street when Knievel took over a pneumatic drill and a hard hat from a construction crew and started drilling. (No one mentioned that he started drilling at a spot that already had been patched with new tar.) Cartmell added some stories when Knievel went into Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue and tried to buy the Tiffany Diamond for a million dollars. (“It’s not for sale, sir,” the clerk said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Knievel said.) There was also a chance to look at the client onstage as he charmed two thousand toy wholesalers, telling them about the tour of Great Britain and defending the perils of Snake River.

  “If I had made it,” he said, “everyone would have said it was easy.”

  The European tour would be a chance to create new fans and possibly bring back the disenchanted. The challenge was familiar. The format was familiar. No button to push here. No bucket of bolts. He could do what he always had done to make himself famous, get on that bike and fly. The people of the British Isles would be certifiably amazed. Amazed and grateful.

  “If it wasn’t for America,” Knievel informed Cartmell and Harry O, “you two would be Krauts.”

  “How’d you work that out?” one of them said.

  “Because, you stupid son of a bitch, we won the fucking war for you,” Knievel said. “It was our bombers that flattened the Kraut cities, and it was our destroyers that sank all of those submarines. If it was up to me, I’d have let you all rot … what do you think of that?”

  Would he say stuff like this in England? Cartmell wondered.

  “Here’s what I think,” the publicity man replied, maybe out loud, but also maybe only in his mind. “You don’t know your history from your arse.”

  The fun had begun.

  24 Wembley

  He arrived in London on May 6, 1975, which gave him almost three weeks to promote the May 26 jump at Wembley. The tour wo
uld continue from there for the next two months, finishing with a week in Blackpool at the end of July. There was no need to hold back.

  “I hope to make a sincere effort to become the world’s first private astronaut,” he announced at a first press conference the next day at the Inn on the Park across from Kensington Gardens.

  The selling went from there. Knievel might have been unknown in Great Britain, but he was made for the British tabloid press. He spoke only in headlines, dressed only in his flamboyant outfits, carried the cane, drove around in the candy apple red customized Cadillac pickup truck. Cartmell pounded out press releases, one after another, took his one New York interview with the daredevil and cut it into individual pieces for the many London newspapers to digest and distribute. Cartmell was not afraid to use the magic promotional word.

  “I suppose you might even say that his closest friend is Death, because Death has been a regular companion of Evel for quite some years now and Evel expects one day to get more than just a handshake from Death, a permanent hug,” the PR man typed. “He has maintained many times that his idea of heaven is to arrive there in the prime of life, with plenty of vehicles to jump, where there are great golf courses, some good-looking girls and where there is plenty of sunshine. He has never visited Britain, but he is hoping to meet our Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and other members of the Royal Family.”

  Knievel met Harry O at Wembley one morning and told him to take only one picture. That was a shot, the thirteen buses in a line, Knievel standing at the far end of that line. He was a speck, dwarfed by the obstacle that confronted him. Got that? It was a heck of a shot. He had never jumped thirteen buses. Nobody had. Knievel said he was done posing.