“It would be great if you did a wheelie tomorrow morning in front of Buckingham Palace,” Harry O said. “Sort of ‘This is the first thing the Queen saw when she started her day.’ ”
Knievel refused.
“Elvis Presley never did a wheelie in front of Buckingham Palace when he came to London,” he said. “I’m not going to do one either.”
He did take a walk around the Tower of London and assorted spots for Wide World of Sports, which would broadcast the jump on a delayed telecast the following Saturday. He also did a press conference and jumping exhibition in the parking lot, the car park, outside Wembley.
The jump was minor, a ramp on one side, room for a van or two in the middle, a ramp on the other side. Pictures were taken, polite applause given. Knievel went back to talking in tabloid headlines.
Harry O, left with nothing to do for the moment while Knievel entertained the reporters, looked at the ramps and the distance in between, looked again, and asked another photographer if he could borrow his motorcycle. Harry O knew how to ride a motorcycle a little bit, and of course he tested the ramp, made the same little jump that Knievel had made, then returned the bike to its owner. Knievel was not happy.
“You’re showing me up,” he said when he found Harry O alone.
“I just did a jump,” Harry O said.
“Well, don’t ever do it again.”
Knievel was a single man for the trip; Linda and the kids were expected to join him later in the tour. He lived like a single man in a suite at the Tower Hotel overlooking the Thames. There was golf. There were women, drinks, howling at the same moon in a different country.
John Hood had shipped the equipment by boat out of New York, a three-week trip, everything packed into the sixty-three feet of Mack Truck. Knievel told him to get arrested when he drove the rig into London.
“Go down some side street where you get stuck,” Knievel said. “Back up traffic everywhere. Let the cops come and impound the equipment. Let them drive it away. Make sure the press is there to get pictures of everything. It’ll be great publicity.”
Hood decided not to do this.
“I talked to some people at the docks,” he said. “They told me that if the trucks were impounded, we wouldn’t see them for a long, long time. I drove through Trafalgar Square, had a couple of pictures taken, but that was it.”
The extravagant publicity plot—Hood remembered Knievel once proposed a fake car crash with George Hamilton in L.A., a fake kidnapping of some star in Las Vegas to get extra press—wasn’t needed in this case. The press releases and the pictures did the job. Nothing more than Knievel being himself was enough to make the British take notice.
“He is one of the few old fashioned showmen around today, an heir to a great circus tradition, the dare-devil prepared to disregard his own safety to reassure thousands that man can still achieve success against his environment,” Geoffery Wansell wrote in the staid Guardian. “It is the same calculated risk that has captured the imagination and drawn gasps from millions since Leotard the acrobat invented the flying trapeze in 1859, and Charles Blondin walked across the Niagara Falls on a high wire that same year.”
“He carefully unscrews the gold, diamond-encrusted clasp of his cane,” Michael O’Flaherty of the not-so-staid Daily Express wrote. “Pours himself a measure of Montana Mary—a potentially explosive mixture of Wild Turkey bourbon, vodka, tomato juice and beer. Checks that the .38 Smith and Wesson is loaded. And puts his life savings—or some of them—under the pillow.
“It is bedtime for Evel Knievel, stuntman extraordinaire, who makes a living courting death.”
Who could resist that? Harry O’s “unposed” picture of Knievel as he loaded the gun ran next to the text.
Over 70,000 people would show up at Wembley on the given day. This was for an event that measured zero interest at the start. None. Knievel sometimes claimed later that the crowd was 102,000 people, an inflated figure, but there definitely were a lot of people in the stadium. Over 70,000.
A story. Knievel played golf virtually every day. Harry O, the photographer, and Cartmell, the publicity man, played with him at the Wentworth Club with its three courses stuffed into the Surrey heathland outside London. John Hood came along, his job now to carry a King Edward VII cigar box that was used to hold money for all the bets. Knievel instigated bets for everything, bets for each hole, bets for most shots, bets and more bets. The usual daredevil golf.
He talked early in the match with Charlie, his venerable and toothless English caddie. Charlie had seen the group arrive in the dressed-up, customized, oversized Cadillac truck, a vehicle seen as often in England as a spaceship from the left side of Mars. Charlie was impressed.
“What other cars do you own?” he asked.
Knievel went through a list of the rolling stock at the moment back in Butte. He mentioned the two Ferraris and the two Cadillacs and the Porsche. Along with eleven horses and nine dogs.
“The car you should have is a Lamborghini Espada,” Charlie said.
“Why is that?” Knievel asked.
“Because it’s the best car in the world,” Charlie said. “A man of your stature should own the best car in the world.”
Evel considered this information for a moment. He decided that Charlie was right in both statements. The Lamborghini was the best car in the world, and, yes, a man of his stature should own one.
“John,” he said to John Hood, “go buy me a Lamborghini.”
Hood left with the King Edward VII cigar box. The foursome continued its round. Everyone had to keep track of his own bets. At the eighteenth hole, John Hood waited at the green. He told his boss that there were no Lamborghinis for sale in London, but he had found one in Brighton. The color was red. The price was 15,000 pounds. The exchange rate was 2.37 U.S. dollars to one pound.
“Let’s get it,” Knievel said.
And he did.
Frank Gifford, the former football player for the New York Giants, famous now as the Monday night play-by-play man with Cosell and Meredith, was the Wide World of Sports broadcaster for the jump. He had become friends with Knievel, spent regular time with him beyond the normal ABC meetings. He liked Knievel, liked his style.
“He was a little wacko,” Gifford said. “Drinking Wild Turkey out of his cane. I kind of admired him.”
The night before the jump, Knievel asked the forty-four-year-old Gifford to have dinner with him. They went to a restaurant where Knievel soon was surrounded by Brits. He told his stories, drank Wild Turkey straight from the cane, drank an assortment of other drinks that arrived at the table. Dinner was followed by visits to a string of pubs, more drinks, which were followed by some driving range moments on the banks of the Thames. Knievel had been looking at the river for three weeks and had a bag of balls and a five-iron with him. He was going to hit golf balls across the Thames.
(This wasn’t the first time he had hit golf balls across the Thames. Sitting in his suite at the hotel, he had convinced Harry O to go with him a few days earlier. Harry O agreed. Knievel brought his clubs and some balls, and they went to the elevator. He pushed the button that would take them up. Up? Knievel said they would be hitting the balls from the roof. And they did.)
“This is crazy,” Gifford decided after watching a number of balls disappear into the dark, presumably landing on the other side of the river (not a particularly hard shot).
He hailed a cab and went home. Knievel kept hitting balls. No camera was kept on whatever he did next. No clock was kept on when he returned to his suite. The only record of the rest of the evening was kept in his eyeballs. They looked like maps of downtown London the next morning, crisscrossed with many red, bloodshot lines. He was a mess.
Gifford was with him when he took his first look at the buses and the ramp. The setup. Knievel had a familiar prediction.
“I can’t do this,” he told Gifford.
Gifford had the same reaction John Derek had had when Knievel made a similar statement the night
before the jump at Caesars Palace over seven years earlier. What do you mean you can’t do this? If you can’t do it, then don’t even try. Pull the plug right now.
“I can’t do that,” Knievel said.
Take a couple of buses out of the line. Easy.
“I can’t do that,” Knievel said.
He said that there was not enough room on the takeoff ramp to get up to speed. The ramp was one of those ski slope deals, starting at the top of the stands, the same kind of steep ramp he had driven into the L.A. Coliseum to jump over the fifty crushed cars in a pile. That was a smaller jump. There wasn’t room here to get enough speed to clear the buses.
He said that was too bad, but he still would do the jump.
Gifford, like John Derek, wanted nothing to do with a stunt that was this risky. Are we encouraging this? Are we exploiting this? He didn’t want to be part of a televised death. Panicked, he searched for Doug Wilson, the producer. He explained his worries. Doug Wilson became worried. They went back to see Knievel at his trailer.
They knocked on the door. No answer. Knocked on the door again. No answer. Opened the door. Knievel was asleep.
Gifford woke him up. Asked how he felt now.
Knievel said he was fine. He would find the speed somewhere.
The show would take place.
Gifford still wasn’t sure about any of this, still was nervous, but at the appointed time, twenty minutes after four on a Monday afternoon in London, he was in his yellow ABC blazer. Knievel was in a new set of leathers, blue, just for Wembley, with enormous white French cuffs. He was doing some wheelies, then his two-warm-up trips down the ski slope, stop, down the ski slope, stop.
“I was talking with him today, and he looked out at the seventy thousand people here and said, ‘What does a man have to do to get this many people together?’ ” Gifford said on television. “I said, ‘Evel, you’re doing it.’ ”
This was the largest live crowd that ever had seen him perform, the largest by far. This was the crowd that should have been at Snake River, kids and families. The prices ran from three to eight U.S. dollars for the show. Affordable. This was his public relations masterpiece. Right here.
He came down the ramp on that third trip, after he gave a thumbs-up to television to let the producers know this was for real, tried to get the speed up to somewhere between 93 and 95 miles per hour, the number he felt would give him a distance of 130 feet, enough to clear the buses. Failed.
The parabola was all wrong from the beginning. Too flat. Too flat. Too short. He came down hard on the front wheel on the plywood safety extension that covered the top of the last two buses. Same as Caesars Palace. Blam. The thirteenth bus. The motorcycle bounced high in the air. He was thrown forward.
There was a moment, perhaps, when he could have saved himself … he tried to hang on, tried to hang on, tried … but then he was gone. Over the handlebars, flipped, flying, gone. He landed and rolled over and rolled again, and the motorcycle followed him, stalked him, seemed to know what it was doing. Mad. Same as Caesars Palace.
When he stopped rolling, the motorcycle rolled on top of him.
“He’s down and he is hurt,” Gifford said on the telecast. “Oh my God.”
John Hood was the first one to Knievel. He pulled the motorcycle off Knievel’s legs. Frank Gifford was close behind.
Gifford was terrified. He saw a bone sticking out of Knievel’s hand. He saw blood coming from Knievel’s mouth. Gifford thought he not only had been part of a televised death, he was part of a televised death of a friend. The crash was violent and stunning. How could anyone survive? Knievel had almost landed at Gifford’s feet when he finally stopped.
The announcer dropped his microphone and bent down and was only slightly heartened by the fact that Knievel was trying to speak. This would be the daredevil’s dying declaration, possibly his last words. Gifford listened very hard because he wanted to make sure he heard exactly what Knievel said.
“Frank …,” Knievel said.
“Yes, Evel,” Gifford said.
“Get that broad out of my room,” Knievel said.
The scene that followed was dramatic, melodramatic, serious, yet strange, part B movie, part Oberammergau Passion Play, part Road Runner cartoon, the part when the dazed coyote, boinnnnnnnng, tries to recover from his latest colossal mishap. Hood removed Knievel’s helmet. Knievel was shifted carefully to a stretcher, carried toward an ambulance. The crowd was beginning to cheer. He was alive.
He didn’t want to go to the ambulance. He wanted to go to the ramp, wanted to talk to the people. He wanted a microphone. Forget the blood, the bone in his hand. The route was turned toward the ramp. Room was cleared with each step. The microphone was brought close. Knievel asked to be helped up. The process was very slow.
When he finally stood, one arm over the shoulder of promoter John Daly for balance and strength, he made his announcement.
“Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country,” he said into the microphone, “I have to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I’m through.”
The reaction from the English crowd was mixed. There were as many boos as there were cheers, a lot of people who thought this was an act. He really wasn’t hurt, couldn’t be hurt. He was up there talking. This was bad theater. That was what it was.
The people around him knew differently.
He clearly was injured. He was in a lot of pain, winced every time he moved. His hair was everywhere, his face as dirty as if he had come from eight hours in those Butte mines. He should have been somewhere in the middle of the city now, siren blaring, headed toward an emergency room. He was here. He wanted to walk off the ramp.
Walk off the ramp? Gifford suggested that he had done enough. He should get on the stretcher.
“Help me walk off the ramp,” Knievel said.
“I got you, buddy,” Gifford said.
He walked off the ramp. Progress was very slow, Gifford at one side, John Hood at the other side, but he walked. Every time he paused, someone would suggest the stretcher. Every time someone suggested the stretcher, Knievel would plead his case.
“I want to walk out …
“Please help me out …
“I want to walk out …
“Please.
“I want to tell you something, Frank. I don’t know how I got here. I’m hurt awful bad.
“I walked in, I want to walk out.”
He eventually was put on the stretcher, lifted into the ambulance, taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, a two-hour trip through traffic. He was diagnosed with a broken right hand, a compressed fracture of the fourth and fifth vertebrae in the lower part of his spine, a fractured left pelvis, and a 7¾-inch split in his right pelvis.
Once again, his injuries, as serious as they were, did not match the impact of the pictures of the crash that gave him the injuries. The entire stretch of film—the crash, the dialogue, the words to the crowd, the way he looked—this again was stuff that never had been seen on television. This was more than reality. This was hyper-reality. He looked as if he were dead.
“He’s lying there, broken this, broken that, instinctively he says, ‘I gotta talk to the crowd,’ ” producer Doug Wilson said. “It was part showmanship, I guess, but part knowing who he was.”
In the hospital in succeeding days, Knievel blamed the “idiot mechanic,” who would have been Hood. He said the gears in the bike had been set up wrong for the jump, that a counter shift should have been added. He said that a different gearbox had been ordered from New Jersey too late, never reached London in time.
He also said that the size of the London buses was a problem. The American bus was eight feet wide. The London bus was eight and a half feet wide. Six inches per bus, thirteen buses. That came out to a six-and-a-half-foot difference. Give him the extra six and a half feet and he would have made the jump perfectly. Give him different gears, based on the knowl
edge that the buses were wider, and he would have made the jump perfectly.
The idiot mechanic kept quiet at the time because he was in need of a job, but pointed out a couple of things years later. The first was that Knievel had practiced only once, and that was that time for the press in the parking lot. He jumped the couple of vans, that was it, and even then was more interested in “a couple of girls that were around” than what he was doing in practice. The second thing was that this was the first time in his life that Knievel ever talked about technical things.
He was not a technical man. He basically used two Harley XR750 bikes for his shows, one bike for wheelies, the other for jumps. The wheelie bike was geared lower so it was easier for him to flip the front end upward and ride that way. The jumping bike was set up with higher gears for the speed necessary to make the jump. No specifics for each jump ever were determined for the jumping bike. The jumping bike was the jumping bike. No gearboxes were ordered from New Jersey.
The miss was no different from any of Knievel’s misses—it was a miscalculation by Knievel. He still had no speedometer on the bike, no tachometer, no research, nothing, he jumped totally on instinct and feel. His feeling was wrong here. The buses were higher than American buses, as well as wider. That was his problem this time. He didn’t go high enough, didn’t go far enough. He was bounced in the air and didn’t, couldn’t, hang on. This crash was no different from the many crashes in the old days. He didn’t have enough information.
“You look at those jumpers who came after him,” John Hood said. “They had everything figured out. He just didn’t want to know.”
The retirement lasted three days. The Wide World show wouldn’t be seen until Saturday, and on Thursday, at five-thirty in the morning, Doug Wilson’s phone rang in New York. Wilson had returned home to edit. Knievel told him to make a big edit. Wilson should cut out that whole speech to the crowd. Turned out Knievel didn’t mean it. He wasn’t going to retire. The speech would look stupid.
“No, it won’t,” Wilson said. “We’ll say something. People will understand.”
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