Evel

by Leigh Montville

  “You can’t run it,” Knievel said.

  “We’re going to run it,” Wilson said.

  Knievel became angry. He threatened to sue Wilson, to sue ABC, to sue everybody concerned if the speech ran. Wilson told him that the speech would be fine. Go ahead and sue.

  On Saturday the show ran, the retirement speech ran. The tape was spellbinding. Again, like Caesars Palace, this was something that people did not see in the technology of 1975. This was different. This was exciting. Argue the morality of what this guy did for a living, fine, but admit that this was some kind of show. He walked in, and he was going to walk out. After the flop at the canyon, this was the rebound of Evel Knievel. This was his best moment.

  “He never apologized for yelling at me, threatening to sue,” Wilson said. “But when he came back from England, Jim McKay met him at the airport to do an interview for us. Evel was on a gurney, but he had his helmet with him from the jump. He said, ‘Give this to Doug.’ That was the closest he could come to an apology.”

  He had been in the hospital for eleven days, then back at the Tower Hotel for five more before coming back home on June 10, 1975. Linda had hurried to London along with Kelly and Robbie. They accompanied him back to New York and then to Butte, where he was scheduled for three more weeks of bed rest. He said he would return to London in the fall to tackle those buses again.

  “You told seventy thousand people you were going to retire,” a reporter said at John F. Kennedy Airport. “How can you say now that you’re going back?”

  “I don’t care what I say,” Knievel said from the gurney. “The schedule calls for me to jump again in September.”

  A story. The Lamborghini was parked in front of the Tower Hotel the entire time he was in the hospital. Management liked the idea of a famous, expensive car in the front driveway, so it never was moved during Knievel’s recuperation. When he came back, he and any visitors to his suite could look down at the car. It was easy to spot. The color, yes, was a bright red.

  “Come on, we’re going for a ride,” Knievel said one day during his recuperation to Harry O. “We’re going for a drive.”

  “You can’t drive,” Harry O said. “You have that broken back. Or whatever it is.”

  “No, you’re going to drive. I’m going for the ride.”

  Knievel needed help to get dressed, help to get out of the room in a wheelchair. He needed help, from the two men who carried him, to get into the car. Harry got into the driver’s seat, which was on the right side like the rest of the cars in England.

  As they drove along, Harry feeling out the temperament of this cheetah of an automobile, Knievel became impatient. The speed limit on the highway was, say, seventy miles per hour. Harry would not go over the speed limit. English laws were tough.

  “Come on,” Knievel said.

  No.

  “Come on.”

  No.

  Knievel somehow worked his right leg over to Harry’s side, worked his right foot over to Harry’s foot on the gas pedal. Knievel’s foot stepped hard on Harry’s foot. The speed shot up to 100, 110, 120 miles per hour. Harry screamed.

  He was convinced (again) that Knievel was out of his mind.

  The site of the rematch turned out to be Cincinnati, not London. The buses turned out to be Greyhounds, not the red buses shown in travelogues for the British Isles. The month turned out to be October, not September. The jump turned out to be Evel Knievel’s final probe of the far limits of his chosen profession.

  He was back at an amusement park, back in the carnival smells of corn dogs and onion rings, back in the shadow of giant roller coasters, back in the weird reflections of fun-house mirrors. The European excursion lasted exactly one afternoon. He was home. The old market, Middle America, was opened again.

  “I’d been looking for some big production,” Jim Gruber, a former minor league ballplayer, now the manager of promotions and special events for Kings Island, said. “Somehow Evel Knievel got in my mind. I thought that we could do that.”

  Knievel had appeared at the Soap Box Derby in August in Akron, Ohio, and Gruber had gone to check him out. Gruber’s big worry was that the daredevil was some kind of wildman, someone who could turn into a public relations nightmare. He was surprised at how personable Knievel was, at his message of safety to kids. This was exactly what he wanted for the amusement park.

  Kings Island had been open for only three years. Located twenty-six miles northeast of Cincinnati in Mason, Ohio, the park featured a one-third-size replica of the Eiffel Tower and a set of fountains that matched the fountains at Caesars Palace. Fountains-Caesars-Knievel, it all made sense.

  After the requisite trip to Butte and the requisite unorthodox negotiations (Knievel handed $100 to the waitress in the cocktail lounge at the War Bonnet Hotel in Butte and told her to give it to a noisy man at a nearby table if he promised to just shut up for the next hour), the deal was done. The announcement of the jump was made in the closing minutes of an ABC special, Portrait of a Daredevil.

  “We got our man,” Jim Gruber said.

  Knievel came into town two weeks before the jump. His approach here was entirely different from his approach in London. Or at Snake River. Or, for that matter, anyplace else. He was all business. For the first time in his career, possibly the first time in his life, he brought caution into his operation. The jump over fourteen Greyhounds scared him. He resembled a normal, everyday human being considering this jump. Holy shit, this was a long way.

  There was a reason for this caution. He had decided that this would be the final long jump of his career, the final attempt for any kind of record. The possible consequences, this one last time, suddenly were frightening. He didn’t want Fate to nab him on the way out the door.

  “I’m convinced that he was serious about this being his last jump,” Gruber later told Cincinnati magazine. “He was just too cautious, too nervous. About half the time in his practice jumps he was coming down on his front wheel instead of the back.”

  Practice jumps. That was how serious this was.

  Kings Island management provided him with a helicopter for his time around Cincinnati. He flew over the site of the jump every day and made changes in the way the ramps were being set up. He asked for the ramps to be elevated. He then asked for the ramps to be lowered. Up, down, halfway. Yes. He then asked for the ramps to be widened. He asked for a bridge to be built over a culvert. He asked for a guard rail to be removed so he would have a longer landing area, straight into a street. He asked for guards to block off the street when he jumped. Just in case.

  His mind seemed to hop from worry to worry. He asked for the ramps to be painted. He asked for the helicopter to hover over the ramps to dry the paint so he could practice. Nothing was right. He jumped over five, six, seven buses in a practice. He asked that the buses be parked so close together that they would scrape the paint off each other. He never had done stuff like this.

  “He didn’t like being banged up anymore,” a friend said. “He really loved golf more than anything. It killed him when he was banged up and couldn’t play.”

  He had turned thirty-seven years old eight days before the October 25, 1975, date of the jump. Ten years had passed since that first shaky leap in Moses Lake across the bag of rattlesnakes and the sleepy mountain lions. The words he blurted in London about retiring had left a residue. London had felt different. Every other time he had crashed through the years, he had been on a path, building toward the canyon jump that was going to be the ultimate challenge. Crazy as it sounded, crazy as it played out, he’d had the canyon as a goal. There was no ultimate challenge anymore. There was no goal.

  Retirement wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “It hasn’t come easy,” he told reporters during the week, summing up his career. “Look at these scars.”

  He pulled off the top of his jumpsuit, showed all the zigs and zags from his many operations. The question always was about how many bones he had broken. The answers varied—at the end of hi
s career, he would settle on thirty-seven major bones, fourteen operations—but the scars alone were warning enough to keep most sensible people out of the daredevil business.

  For the first time, he seemed to be thinking right along with the sensible people. His body was still banged up from Wembley. He would have to give himself a shot of Xylocaine to numb the pain just to get through the jump. The dotted lines were leading to an ending he did not want to see. That was the only ending possible if he kept pushing his limits.

  “To pay the price would be just too great,” he said. “Never again am I going to jump this far. I like it here. I like to be among you humans.”

  The crowd was a disappointment. Attendance for this final record jump was 25,000, a number that was diminished by the fact that 20,000 of the people had simply paid four bucks more than the basic $8 fee to enter the park and ride the rides. Management had hoped for a much larger turnout—the area was set up to hold 70,000 people—but the day was lousy, dark and cold, intermittent rain, and the jump was shown live on Wide World of Sports.

  John Hood had quit after the London crash, but Knievel had asked him to come back. (“I had to come back,” Hood said. “I was the only one who knew where the trucks were in London. The only thing I’d sent back right after the show was the Lamborghini.”) Roger Reiman, the Daytona champion, also had returned as another mechanic to adjust the gears. The gears were now important. Everything was important.

  On the morning of the actual jump, Knievel had practiced again, something he never did. He cleared ten buses this time, fine-tuning. Even as he took the microphone to talk to the crowd, moments before the actual jump, he still was tuning. He asked the Kings Island crew to remove the extra length of plywood ramp they had installed going out onto the street through the hole where the guard rail was removed.

  “With the threat of rain gone,” he said, “I think it would be safer without the plywood.”

  He promised to make “the best jump and the safest jump of my life,” and away he went. One pass, two passes, three passes, thumbs-up, he came down the adjusted ramp, over the elevated ramp (this part adjusted to half the height of the buses because it sat on flatbed trailers), then up the final ramp and into the sky.

  For a half-second, a second, it looked as if he might flip backward. The front end this time was high, too high, an obvious overcompensation for the crash in London when the front wheel landed first. The balance of the motorcycle was out of whack. Backward seemed to be the easier direction to travel, ass over nearest teakettle.

  Then he brought the front end down.

  But not too much.

  The motorcycle landed on the back wheel in the middle of the safety plywood that had been extended onto the roof of the fourteenth bus.

  The front wheel landed.

  Perfect.

  He shot off the end of the ramp and through the hole in the guard rail. Turned around in the street.

  Done.

  “If a man is a real professional, he has to realize he cannot go beyond a point of no return and a motorcycle doesn’t have wings on it,” he told the crowd. “I am going to continue to perform around the world with my two sons, but I have jumped far enough. I am going to walk away from here along with you, and I hope to come back and walk away year after year. That’s a professional.”

  Done.

  Or so he said.

  Fifty-two percent of all televisions in America were tuned to Wide World of Sports when Knievel jumped at Kings Island. An estimated 55 million people watched in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. This ultimately would be the highest-rated show (22.3) in Wide World’s forty-five-year history from 1961 to 2006.

  25 Fort Lauderdale, FL

  The night was still alive, even if the bars in Fort Lauderdale were not. The famous daredevil and a longtime friend from Butte, Ron Phillips, had met two women, and the famous daredevil said they should move the party to his lavish hotel lodgings at the Bahia Mar Beach Resort. This was a fine idea, except the hotel thought the daredevil had checked out. Some other well-heeled visitor now occupied the lavish lodgings. No rooms were available. Not even for the famous daredevil.

  His reaction to this news was a surprise. There was no reaction. He didn’t get angry at all. The famous daredevil, Mr. Evel Knievel, simply suggested everyone follow him. There was a backup plan.

  He had been thinking he might buy a boat, you see, and the Bahia Mar Beach Resort was planted next to the Intracoastal Waterway, and boats were docked along the marina, big boats, yachts, and one of them surely would be for sale because boats always were for sale. Sure enough, the search party of two men and two women found a boat, a yacht, that had a “For Sale” sign on the side.

  Knievel knocked on the door, the hatch, whatever it was called. The time roughly was three o’clock in the morning. The owner of the yacht appeared after a long stretch of knocks. He was not happy when he appeared.

  “I want to buy your boat,” the daredevil said. “How much do you want for it?”

  The sleepy-eyed owner named a figure.

  “I’ll buy it,” the daredevil said. “I won’t argue about price. I’ll pay just what you want … with one condition. I’ll give you a check … and you get off the boat. Right now.”

  The deal was done. Just like that. The owner took the check, woke up his family, and they gathered up their belongings and left, as if they were refugees fleeing an impending invasion. The daredevil and Ron Phillips and the two women settled in for the night.

  “The next morning,” Phillips said, “Bob decided we should take our first boat ride.”

  This was complicated by the fact that the boat the daredevil had purchased was an eighty-seven-foot Broward yacht, which was a large boat. Only a licensed captain could operate a yacht this size. The daredevil found a captain at the marina, and the party went out for a pleasant day on the high seas. On the way back, a problem developed. The captain steered the boat to one side in the waterway and stopped to make room for another boat coming in the opposite direction. The daredevil was not pleased.

  “Just keep going,” he said. “The hell with them.”

  The captain politely explained a few nautical rules. One was that a smaller boat always had to make way for a larger boat. This had not been an issue all day, owing to the size of the daredevil’s new boat, but the boat that now was passing was larger. The eighty-seven-foot boat had to surrender the right of way.

  The next move was inevitable. The daredevil went onto the boat market in the succeeding days. He discovered the availability of a Feadship, which was 116 feet long. Feadships (built by First Export Association of Dutch Shipbuilders) had been sold over the years to people like Henry Ford, Malcolm Forbes, and Arthur Godfrey. This was one of the biggest yachts in the world at the time.

  The daredevil, of course, wanted the Feadship. On the day the deal was supposed to be completed, papers signed, cash exchanged, Skip Van Leeuwen, one of the long-ago motorcycle racers at Ascot, a short-term member of the Hollywood Motorcycle Daredevils, was Knievel’s guest in Fort Lauderdale. The daredevil had given him a stateroom on the eighty-seven-foot boat, the Broward. A painted wooden sign with Van Leeuwen’s name was even hung on the stateroom door, a sure sign of nautical stature.

  The two men now went together to pick up the new boat, the truly big boat. Van Leeuwen’s head was spinning.

  “Some papers have to be signed, and Bob has to give this salesman a $635,000 check,” Van Leeuwen said. “Bob writes the check. This was a Saturday. The salesman said the bank wasn’t open, so he couldn’t take the check. The deal would have to be put off until Monday.”

  The daredevil did not like this. He steamed and stewed and took out his car keys. He hung them in front of the boat salesman’s face.

  “These are the keys to my Bentley, which is worth $165,000,” the daredevil said. “You hold on to the keys until Monday. If the check doesn’t go through, you keep the car. All right?”

  The boat salesman agreed. He took the keys.


  “Now get the fuck off my boat,” the daredevil said.

  He would call the Feadship the Evel Eye 1 and the eighty-seven-foot Broward also would become the Evel Eye 1, and in rapid order an array of service boats would be added, an eventual Evel Knievel armada of thirteen Evel Eye 1s. Finding a place to put this many boats became a problem, so he bought a house at 2824 N.E. Twenty-eighth Street in Fort Lauderdale on the Intracoastal Waterway with three hundred feet of docking space. He not only was a boat owner, he was one of the biggest boat owners in the United States.

  The new passion for boats fit in with his assembled other passions for planes, cars, jewelry, flashy clothes, large tips (“Here’s $100, watch my car”), golf, large gambling bets, diamond-studded canes, Wild Turkey, well-endowed women, and any other loud and ostentatious gewgaws that might come into his line of vision. These might have been frivolous attachments for another man, but for him they were business expenses.

  He was Evel Knievel. This was the way he was supposed to live.

  “I’m a retired millionaire,” he replied when one reporter asked what to call him if he wasn’t going to jump anymore.

  The idea was that he would stay in the news. Maybe he no longer would place his testicles directly on the line, attempt those life-or-death jumps that would scare away eight out of any average cat’s nine lives, just the idea of them, but he would not leave the public sight. He would jump a little, put on some different kinds of shows every now and then, but the important thing was that he would still be Evel Knievel, larger than life. People would want to be him because he would live out their dreams for them.

  He was a public personality. That was how it worked. He was a character in everybody’s living room. Example A of this life came on November 9, 1975, two weeks after the successful Kings Island jump. He was the subject of a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast.

  This one-hour show on NBC was a staple of the network’s lineup. The format was familiar. Dean drank a bit, smoked a bit, and laughed real hard. Knievel, the roastee, the man of the hour, sat next to the podium at a long table on the stage at the ballroom at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Assorted other public personalities at the table came to the podium to make gentle fun of him. These people ran from Milton Berle to Glen Campbell to Dr. Joyce Brothers, from Nipsey Russell to Ernest Borgnine to Don Rickles to Senator Barry Goldwater, from McLean Stevenson to William Conrad to Foster Brooks and Ruth Buzzi.