Evel

by Leigh Montville

  “Evel, a lot of people will be forever grateful to you for everything you’ve done for them,” Ernest Borgnine said. “Especially the thirty-three doctors’ children you personally put through college.”

  “This man has so much metal in his body, they just came up with a new disease for him,” Milton Berle said. “Terminal Rust.”

  “How do you like the outfit he’s wearing?” Georgia Engle of The Mary Tyler Moore Show asked. “It looks like Liberace’s underwear.”

  This was what you did as a personality. You got together with the other personalities, and America watched and envied, and the money kept rolling into your many accounts. You were a product. People bought you after a while. You were a brand name. There was no better quality than consumer loyalty. Knievel understood this.

  “Kids look up to me more than anyone in the world,” he told show business interviewer Bob Thomas of the Associated Press. “Sure, they respect Muhammad Ali, but not every kid wants to be a fighter. They all want to jump motorcycles and cars.

  “I tell people I’m Evel Knievel, but I’m not necessarily evil. I want to do good with my life. Mostly I want to reach kids and tell them the dangers of narcotics. That’s the biggest crusade of my life.”

  The money and the business offers still came from all directions. Checks—substantial checks—would arrive from anywhere. From Europe. From the Middle East. From the Far East. These would be fat sums of money attached to some product attached to one famous man in America. Surprises. Thank you very much.

  Knievel brought his old friend from Butte, Louie Markovich, George Markovich’s brother, down to Florida simply to pre-interview people who wanted to do business. Was there any merit to the deal? Louie would decide if Evel should decide. That was how many offers there were.

  “A lot of them sounded good,” Markovich said. “All kinds of things. I remember something from Aruba. They wanted Evel to come down, sign some autographs, appear in the casinos. See how it went. That sounded really good, but I don’t know what happened. I don’t think anything ever came of it.”

  The leased Lear jet was ready to go at any hour, day or night, to any place in the country. A call from Knievel to the hangar was all it took and everyone was in New York. There he was, riding a bicycle through Central Park to promote bicycle safety. Oops, there he was in Las Vegas for some other damn thing. For relaxation, he was standing behind three different blackjack tables at once, making thousand-dollar side bets on two-dollar hands played by senior citizens. Lost $15,000 in five minutes. Who cares? He was off tomorrow for another celebrity golf tournament in Palm Springs, for a talk show in L.A., for something.

  Linda would come down to Florida for a week, two weeks, mostly without the kids. She and her husband would go down the Intrascoastal in the Feadship, dock for a week in Miami. Then she would go back to Butte. He never went to Butte much these days, but when he did he went to his personal bank vault.

  The vault was inside the office building he had commissioned next to the Met Tavern, across Harrison Avenue from the Civic Center. The building was substantial, a real office building with a real office where his secretary, Meg Meagher, handled real business. The vault was also substantial, looked very much like one of those places Knievel would have robbed in the old days. The door to the vault had gold lettering that read “Evel Knievel National Bank. Savings. Absolutely No Loans.” Money was piled randomly on the floor. He would tell visitors that they were looking at over a million dollars. He sometimes would bring people into the vault so everybody could throw the money into the air and sit underneath the shower of cold, hard cash. There were a lot of one-dollar bills in the vault.

  “I tell people there are no withdrawals, no interest,” he said. “All they get is a wish of good luck from me.”

  This personality business was a full-time job. Only once was there talk about actual investments. Even that did not last long.

  “We went to New Orleans,” Markovich said. “There was a guy who owned thirty-three racetracks. He wanted Evel to be involved in some housing complex with him. Evel brought in Leslie Nielsen, the actor. We played golf every day for a week. Leslie Nielsen was my partner. Evel played with the guy who owned thirty-three racetracks. I don’t know how it all came out. I think maybe the guy had something to do with the mob.”

  In New Orleans, golf with Leslie Nielsen. In Florida, golf with Jackie Gleason, a neighbor. In Los Angeles, golf with Flip Wilson. Hell, golf with all kinds of people. Knievel joined the Lakeside Golf Club right at the edge of Hollywood, the celebrated club where Bing Crosby and W. C. Fields and Johnny Weismuller and all kinds of people once belonged. Personalities.

  He was one of them.

  “So he’s driving one of the boats,” a Fort Lauderdale friend said. “There’s a restaurant on the Intracoastal where the owner had pissed him off for some reason. There are all these signs near the restaurant that this is a ‘No Wake’ zone. There are tables and chairs, people eating, right on the dock. This is lunchtime. Evel guns it! The water comes up like a tsunami. Knocks over tables and chairs. Dinners go flying. Gets everyone wet. He just keeps on going.”

  Wasn’t that what personalities did? That was what this one did. Spending money and leaving a big wake were part of his job.

  A story. Dee Robinson was a thirty-year-old college senior at the University of Maryland. For her final year, she had taken advantage of a partnership program with the Art Institute in Fort Lauderdale to study interior design in Florida. She read a story in the local newspaper about an upcoming roast of Knievel at a celebrated Fort Lauderdale disco. He always had intrigued her. She had ridden Harleys with her dad when she was young, knew a bit about motorcycles, still rode one.

  Even though she was supposed to study for a test the next day, she went to the disco on the appointed night. Evel Knievel. What the heck. The place was filled, packed, and she was lost in the back, couldn’t see, but then a good-natured bartender asked if she wanted to stand on the bar. She stood on the bar. She could see and, yes, be seen. She was a pretty woman.

  Midway through the proceedings—she thought the guest of honor looked uncomfortable up there at the head table, pinned down for a bunch of speeches—a man came up to her, said he was Mr. Knievel’s bodyguard, and that Mr. Knievel had spotted her and would like to invite her to a party back at his yacht after the roast. If she accepted, the bodyguard said he would drive her to the yacht.

  “I have a test in the morning,” Dee Robinson said first to herself.

  “But it’s Evel Knievel,” she said second to herself. “It’s a chance to meet Evel Knievel and see his yacht.”

  “Sure,” she said to the bodyguard.

  The 116-foot yacht, the Feadship, Evel Eye 1, was appropriately amazing. The night was amazing. Maybe twelve people had come from the roast, and Knievel gave them a tour, and then everybody hung around the deck and had drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Robinson, single, by herself, stayed in the background until the bodyguard came to her again and said Mr. Knievel would like to talk to her in the pilothouse.

  The meeting went fine, better than fine. Knievel was locked into his charming gear, personality turned to glib and sociable. Robinson slipped into the same gear. Somewhere in the conversation Knievel asked her what she did for a living.

  Not wanting to admit that she was still a college student, her education delayed by time in the military, she skipped a step and said she was an interior designer. Knievel was delighted. He asked her questions about design, about her career path. She made up answers. Knievel stayed delighted.

  “Here,” he finally said as he went to his special Evel Knievel checkbook, filled out one of his special Evel Knievel gold checks. “I want to hire you as a designer. I want you to start working on my yacht.”

  He handed her the check. She stared at the amount, the $10,000 down payment. Amazing. Knievel had only two demands for the renovation. Both involved the sleeping quarters. The first was that the bed had to be at least seven feet wide, large enou
gh that he could fit comfortably between three women on each side. The second was that a secret compartment had to be built somewhere close to the bed.

  “What will you put in the secret compartment?” Robinson asked, thinking about size.

  “I’ll need room for a half-gallon of Wild Turkey,” Knievel said. “And for Bruno.”

  “Who’s Bruno?”

  “My .357 Magnum.”

  Oh.

  She went back to the Art Institute the next day, didn’t do well on the test, then told her teachers she needed some time off because she had a job redecorating Evel Knievel’s yacht, the Evel Eye 1, the Feadship. She also said, since most of the teachers worked on the side, that she probably could hire some of them along the way. Which she did.

  The job became her senior project. She arrived at the house on N.E. Twenty-eighth Street every day on her motorcycle, supervised the renovations. Knievel introduced her to people as “my interior designer.” She somehow fit two queen mattresses into the sleeping quarters for Knievel’s proposed ménage à sept gatherings. She created the secret place for the Wild Turkey and Bruno. She had all of the carpets ripped out, replaced with patterns that included the initials “EK.” She added a life-sized steel statue of Knievel on a motorcycle. She added a helicopter landing pad for special occasions, because you never know. She did whatever the boss wanted, spent a lot of money.

  “He was like the dog from Aesop’s Fables, the one who sees his reflection in the water while he’s crossing the bridge,” she said. “The dog is carrying a bone in his mouth. When he sees the reflection, what he thinks is another dog with another bone, a bigger bone, he becomes jealous and begins to bark. His bone slips out of his mouth and goes into the water. Instead of two bones, he has no bone at all. That was Evel and his boats. He was always chasing the next thing that looked even bigger and better. Chasing the illusion. Just because he could.”

  One day he came aboard the yacht with a cypress clock he’d been given at some dinner. He liked the clock, wanted to hang it in the new interior.

  “Where do you think it should go?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Every place seemed taken. The clock didn’t fit. Knievel said he’d make it fit. He got a hammer and some nails. He nailed the clock into the ceiling of the sleeping quarters.

  “There,” he said. “People will see it.”

  “Yes, they will,” Robinson agreed.

  “I never told him that I was still in school or that this was my first job,” she said. “By the time I was finished, I had graduated from college and was in business for myself. I was an interior decorator for yachts. I’d gotten other jobs from my first one.”

  Knievel had other plans too. He talked about building a new house in Fort Lauderdale. He wanted Robinson to do the special design work. First order of business would be ordering fourteen stained-glass windows to depict some of his jumps. Was this okay? She said stained glass would be fine. Would the windows depict only the successful jumps or the unsuccessful ones too? He told her not to be fresh.

  He finally jumped again in Worcester, Massachusetts, of all places, on October 11, 1976. This was almost a year after the jump at Kings Island and was only his third jump in the two years since Snake River. He also signed for two jumps at the end of the month at the Kingdome in Seattle. All of these events fit inside his new pulled-back, cautious schedule. He was scheduled to jump thirteen U-Haul trucks in Worcester, ten Greyhound buses per night in Seattle.

  His younger son, Robbie, now fourteen years old, would make his jumping debut in Worcester. From the beginning, Robbie was the one who had wanted the daredevil life, the one who had the gene that made him challenge anything or anyone in his path, the gene that his father had. They had rubbed against each other from the start, father and son, collided, essentially because they were the same headstrong, obstinate character. The people in Butte who saw it mostly said about the father, “Uh-huh, that’s just what he deserves.”

  Robbie had been onstage before, at both Toronto and Kings Island, doing wheelies, but this would be his first jump over anything. The hurdle of choice was four of those U-Haul trucks. His father had talked for years about how he didn’t want his sons to follow his career path, but now he didn’t seem to mind. He saw the possibility that Robbie could replace him as the star in the business and he, the semi-retired star, could manage that business and maybe perform a little. Robbie would be the daredevil. He would be the personality.

  Kelly, the older son, now sixteen, already had decided to retire from the act. He was more interested in the business side of the operation. His father could help there too.

  “Here was Evel’s basic negotiation,” a friend said. “The promoters would come in with their contracts, drawn up by lawyers. Evel would let them talk, explain everything, then he would turn his copy of the contract over. He would list ‘1-2-3,’ and he would write, ‘Up-Front, Percentage, Guarantee.’ ‘That’s my contract,’ he would say. ‘Let’s start with number one. That would be in cash. Right now.’

  “He once had me make a copy of the promoters’ proposed contract. Then, when everybody was sitting around the table, he took the original copy and ripped it up. The promoters were shocked. He went into 1-2-3. Finally he brought out the copy of the original contract.”

  The Worcester contract and the Worcester show were weird from the beginning. The promoter, Abe Ford, was an old-time wrestling guy from Boston. He originally had talked about putting the show in Foxboro at Schaefer Stadium, where the New England Patriots played. That was a stadium that seated sixty thousand people, a big-time event, but then the deal fell apart. Abe Ford convinced Knievel to go to Fitton Field, where Holy Cross played college football, a field with an old-time wooden grandstand that seated twenty thousand people. This became a not-so-big-time event. Ford said he had to stage some kind of show somewhere to recoup the money that he had put into the potential Foxboro show. Knievel agreed to the new deal.

  He was supposed to jump the thirteen U-Haul trucks on Saturday, but the show was rained out, postponed to Monday afternoon, Columbus Day. The weather was fine on Monday, but the new Knievel brought out his new worries. The invincibility definitely was gone. He looked at the football field, a diagonal path set up to give him the most speed going into the jump, and he looked at the thirteen U-Haul trucks, and he pulled three of them out of the line. The ninety-five-foot jump became seventy-five feet. He mentioned the rainy weather and not enough room to get up to speed, even with the diagonal, as his reasons.

  Even then he did a series of practice jumps, two jumps over four trucks, three more over seven trucks, before he successfully jumped the ten trucks. (Robbie successfully jumped the four trucks.) The crowd was only nine thousand people, and the receipts, at the end, had disappeared. Abe Ford and the other promoters also had disappeared. Knievel claimed he had lost between $20,000 and $30,000.

  Since the show was in the afternoon, he had time to go to Boston and search for Abe Ford. Luckily for Ford, and probably for Knievel, the search was fruitless.

  “He had that second cane, you know,” John Hood said. “The one that was really a lead pipe, disguised as a cane. He was not afraid to use it. He’d broken some promoter’s leg with it.”

  In Seattle on September 29 and 30, 1976, the careful Knievel also appeared. He looked at the ten buses in the Kingdome, looked at the ramp, and pulled three of the buses out of the line. He jumped seven both days, the second day live on Wide World of Sports. His shoulder hurt after the second jump, and he went straight to the hospital, where he was released with no more than a shoulder strain.

  This performance turned out to be his final jump on Wide World. He had been part of seventeen of the show’s telecasts in ten years. He was seen as an ABC attraction as much as Fonzie or Barney Miller or Robert Blake as Baretta. He had helped bring the network back to life. The network had given him life. It had been a great arrangement. He had ABC president Roone Arledge’s private phone number an
d was not afraid to use it.

  “We’d have some argument about sports,” Louie Markovich said. “Who played center field for the Yankees, quarterback for the Packers in 1935. Something like that. Evel would say, ‘I’ll call Roone. He’ll know.’ ”

  The network still considered him a personality, still bounced ideas around, had plans to use him in various situations, would use him at the Kentucky Derby in the next year, but the jumps were finished. ABC executives pretty much agreed that part of his career was finished.

  “I think there was an overall feeling that it was done,” Jim Spence said. “What else was there to do?”

  Ta-da.

  Enter CBS.

  The network that had lusted after Knievel for its CBS Sports Spectacular, that had tried to broadcast the canyon jump as news, now picked him up as entertainment. The sports department had no say, yes or no, in the matter. The network bought a privately produced special, a Hollywood sort of extravaganza, that featured the famous daredevil and assorted other daredevils. The network bought trouble that it never had imagined.

  Yes, it did.

  The famous daredevil bought it too.

  26 Chicago, IL

  The show was called “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers.” The date of the broadcast was set for January 31, 1977, a Monday night, 8:30 to 10:00 p.m. on the East Coast, Knievel’s first jump on prime-time television. A number of daredevils were scheduled to perform their sundry death-defying feats. Knievel would finish the night “by attempting to jump over the world’s largest indoor saltwater pool, which will be filled with man-eating killer sharks,” according to a press release.