Man-eating killer sharks had been the American demon of choice for the past three years since the publication of Peter Benchley’s surprise best-seller, Jaws, in February of 1974. The book went to the top of the New York Times fiction list for forty-four straight weeks, eventually selling over 20 million copies. This led to the Steven Spielberg movie, starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss, which was the box-office hit of the summer of 1975 and earned over $470 million worldwide. The ominous theme from the movie had become part of an ongoing sketch starring Chevy Chase as “the Land Shark” on the hit television show Saturday Night Live, now in its second season, and a Jaws 2 sequel soon would begin filming, and on and on it went. Shark chic was everywhere.
The Knievel jump was a heavy-handed attempt to carve out a slice of this public fascination. A commercial scheduled to run in the days preceding the telecast would paint a picture of the battle between the fearsome sharks and the familiar daredevil in his white leathers. The announcer would describe Knievel’s leap and the trouble that lurked below and warn that, “if he doesn’t make it, water wings won’t work.”
The attempt would take place at the old Chicago Amphitheater, a place where he jumped before, famous as the site of the protest-filled, riot-filled 1968 Democratic Party Convention, a hulk of a building located on the edge of the now-closed stockyards on the South Side. The independent producer would be Marty Pasetta Productions, credited with six Oscar awards telecasts, seven Grammy telecasts, plus the Elvis Presley comeback special, Aloha from Hawaii, that was bounced off the satellite on January 14, 1973, to the largest worldwide television audience in history. The hosts would be Telly Savalas, the actor who played the top-rated private detective Kojak on television, and actress Jill St. John, famous as a James Bond girlfriend in the movie Diamonds Are Forever.
Marty Pasetta himself would be the executive producer. Michael Seligman, a rising star in the specials business, would be the producer. The show would have that mashed-together television buzz of an awards show, a halftime at the Rose Bowl, a true made-for-the-medium event. The ratings would be unbelievable. Sequels would follow. Everyone would have fun, make money.
Or maybe not. Seligman was the first to realize that a potential disaster lay ahead. He went to visit Knievel a few weeks before the jump in Fort Lauderdale.
The two men had met once before in Los Angeles at Dino’s Lodge, the bar owned by singer Dean Martin at 8524 Sunset Boulevard. Still a stop on any Hollywood tour because it had been the site of the opening credits for the hit television series, 77 Sunset Strip (1958 to 1964), the bar was built on the side of a hill. While the famous entrance was at street level, the back of the building dropped two flights lower.
That was why Knievel dared Seligman to jump out the back window. First night they met, just talking, drinking cocktails, that was the challenge: jump, do it now, go ahead. There was no predicting how far a man might travel before he landed in the dark, not to mention what the conditions might be for that landing.
“You should do it,” Knievel said. “If you’re going to work with daredevils, you should be a daredevil yourself.”
“I’m a Jew,” Seligman said. “Jews don’t jump out of windows. We hire people to jump out of windows. We hire our daredevils.”
Knievel laughed. Seligman laughed. They seemed to get along. Seligman’s wife was pregnant with his daughter-to-be. Knievel suggested the daughter-to-be should be named Evelette. Everyone laughed again.
Now that the producer had to visit the daredevil in Florida to work out details of the telecast, it seemed natural to accept an invitation to stay for the night aboard the Evel Eye 1, even though he also could stay with his parents, who lived in Fort Lauderdale. The night sounded pleasant. He and his parents could go to a large dinner with Knievel and his family; then he could go back to the yacht with Evel.
“The dinner was fine,” Seligman said years later. “Nothing was out of the ordinary. Then we got back to the boat. He’d been drinking. I went to bed, and he started beating up his wife and his children. It was terrible. I didn’t see it firsthand, no, but I heard all of it. I heard the yelling, and I heard the slaps, and then I heard the crying. I heard his wife, Linda, crying. I heard the kids crying.”
In the middle of the night Seligman quietly gathered his things and left the boat. He went to stay with his parents.
Nothing was funny now. From the moment the show was conceived, it had contained an inherent possibility for trouble, the chance that any of the live acts could draw an instant cloud over the proceedings with a bad result. Scenarios had been created for what to do in each case, how to handle hospital situations, how even to handle death. (The first move in all fatalities would be to switch to a commercial or a string of commercials.) Now there was the additional worry that the star of the show, the guy whose name was in the title, was a time bomb. Evel Knievel was seen again as a jerk. The shark tank people had come to the same conclusion as the Snake River rocket launch people.
“He was just an awful guy,” Michael Seligman said.
A press conference was held on January 25, 1977, six days before the event, in the Beverly Room of the Conrad-Hilton Hotel in Chicago to start the publicity buildup. A miniature tank that contained thirteen plastic man-eating miniature sharks had been installed in the room. A miniature Knievel, the Ideal Toys version, built to scale, sat on a miniature motorcycle on a miniature plastic ramp next to the tank. This way the real Knievel could explain the jump to the reporters in the packed room, move the model of himself and the motorcycle over the models of the fearsome sharks with his hand, land safe on the miniature other side, and … never mind.
The real Knievel did not appear for the press conference at the scheduled start time. No one knew where he was. The guess was that he was somewhere between Fort Lauderdale and the Conrad-Hilton. The guess covered a lot of the United States.
Everybody waited. Time passed.
“We were in contact with him all day yesterday,” Joey Goldstein, brought in from New York to handle the public relations, said. “We lost contact with him last night.”
Everybody waited. Time passed.
“He is what he is,” Marty Pasetta, executive producer, said, taking the podium, trying to make unpredictability a virtue. “Knowing Evel, he could very well come walking into this press conference or he could very well not come walking into this room.”
Time passed …
Pasetta tried to press ahead, detailing the other acts that would appear on the show. Karl Wallenda, the most familiar name on the list, would appear from Miami, where he would walk a wire stretched between hotels, from the Eden Roc to the Fontainebleau. Dave Merrifield, also in Miami, would perform on a trapeze that hung from a helicopter, his act providing incredible background shots of the city. Ron Phillips, Knievel’s buddy from Butte, would drive a skimobile off a ski jump in Lincolnshire, Illinois, watch out below. Orval Kisselburg, a daredevil who had known Knievel almost since the beginning, would blow himself up with an act called “the Russian Death Chair” at the same location. Finally, “Jumping Joe” Gerlach would jump off the roof of the Chicago Amphitheater itself, an eighty-four-foot drop, to a three-foot sponge on the street.
The media crowd, grumpy now, began laughing. Each act seemed more bizarre than the previous one. The possibility of Jumping Joe Gerlach jumping off the roof of the Amphitheater into a three-foot sponge on the street sounded more silly than terrifying. The entire show sounded silly. Dark humor.
Time passed …
Pasetta, at the end of his presentation, was handed a note from a messenger. The note, read aloud by the producer, said, “This is a more dangerous jump than Snake River Canyon or any of my other jumps. Signed, Evel Knievel.” No one believed it was real.
Knievel never appeared.
The grumpy people went home.
A reporter called Joey Goldstein the next day to see if the press agent ever did contact his client. Goldstein said he had. Knievel was still in Fort Laude
rdale. The reporter asked what the daredevil’s excuse was for missing the press conference. Goldstein, fed up with Knievel for the second time in his life after his experiences with the Snake River tour, went contrary to normal press agent procedure: he told the truth. He said Knievel told him, among other things, “I’m sick and tired of dealing with Jews.”
Maybe Knievel had said it only for Goldstein’s benefit, a personal ethnic dig. Maybe it was no more than an insensitive joke. Maybe, too, he meant it. Whichever the case, printed in a Chicago newspaper the next day, along with the previous Snake River quote about the three things in life he hated most—“lawyers, New Yorkers, and Jews”—it read like he meant every word of it.
The star of “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers” was left to scramble longdistance in denial. He said he had received ninety-one phone calls from people who were upset with him. He said he never said the words. Never would. He had a wisdom tooth that was giving him hell. That was why he didn’t go to the press conference. He had a lot of friends who were Jews. He made a list, including Howard Cosell, and said he owed all his success to these people. He said he himself was probably a Jew because he “believed in life.”
“If any son of a bitch in Chicago says I’m anti-Semitic,” he said, “I’m going to beat the shit out of him.”
He said he was on his way to Chicago.
A couple of problems also had developed with Knievel’s opponents in this venture. That would be the sharks.
The first problem was that local animal rights people were worried about possible injuries to the animals. The city’s Commission on Animal Care and Control said it might have to stop the show. (“What do we do if he falls into the tank and the sharks attack?” David R. Lee, executive director of the commission, asked. “To save his life we may have to destroy all these creatures.”) The animal rights people were waiting for any legal missteps, ready to call a halt to the proceedings in a moment.
The second problem was whether there were going to be any proceedings. The people in charge of catching the sharks in the Florida Keys were worried about whether or not they could find enough sharks, and then if the sharks would look fierce enough. The press releases promised thirteen man-eaters in the tank.
“We’ve got four acceptable animals, maybe five,” shark expert Gerrit Klay reported to Red Smith, columnist at the New York Times, from the Shark Quarium in Marathon, Florida, a week before the event. “The weather’s been terrible.”
The sharks were going to be far from man-eaters. The biggest boxes Klay had for shipping the animals to Chicago were eight feet long. He was hoping to catch lemon sharks or blue sharks, but pretty much was looking for anything with a dorsal fin. There would be no white sharks, like the killer in the movie Jaws. White sharks can be as large as thirty-six feet long. There also would be no danger.
“If Evel Knievel should fall in,” shark expert Klay said, “he’d spook these animals right out of the pool.”
The Smith article was syndicated across the country. Marty Pasetta was forced to scramble again. He described to reporters the size of the saltwater pool that was being built, ninety feet by fifty feet, four feet deep. For the animal rights people, he described the care that would be taken with the sharks, the twenty-five thousand pounds of salt and the varieties of chemicals that would be put into the water to create a familiar environment. For the potentially bloodthirsty viewers, he described the dangers involved. The sharks definitely would be lemon sharks. They all would be at least ten feet long. They wouldn’t have been fed for three days before the jump. They would be “mean.”
“Jacques Cousteau,” Marty Pasetta said, “assured us that lemons are mean.”
Knievel finally appeared in Chicago on Friday, did the local Phil Donahue Show, did AM Chicago and other television. He said again that he was not anti-Semitic. He promoted the jump, did his job. The sharks finally appeared on Saturday and were released into “the world’s largest indoor saltwater pool.” They definitely were a long way from home. Chicago was in the midst of a record forty-five-day stretch when the temperature would not move above 32 degrees. The temperature outside two days earlier was a record –13 degrees, the coldest day in the coldest month in Chicago weather history. The wind chill was –60 degrees.
The chill now extended to the show itself. Who wanted to come out of the house? Pasetta’s staff was distributing free tickets to Chicago high schools in an attempt to draw any kind of a crowd. Ticket sales were almost nonexistent.
“This time the sharks are going to be the good guys,” sports columnist Robert Markus wrote in the Chicago Tribune.
Ever since Peter Benchley wrote “Jaws,” sharks have been painted as the heavies, certainly an unfair picture.
Sharks are like everyone else. There’s good and bad in all of them, Personally, I never met a shark I didn’t like. But I’ve met some people I didn’t like.
One of them is going to jump a motorcycle over a tankful of teeth in the Amphitheatre on Monday night. His name is Evel Knievel and everyone I know is rooting for the sharks.
The play-by-play announcer assigned to the jump was thirty-eight-year-old Brent Musburger. He had become CBS’s prominent sports voice, front and center for the past two years as the anchor of NFL Today, the pro football show that dominated the Sunday ratings with a cast that also featured former Miss America Phyllis George, former Philadelphia Eagle Irv Cross, and Jimmy the Greek. Musburger was a Montana native, grew up in Big Timber, which was located between Bozeman and Billings, so he found a measure of acceptance from Knievel.
“We always could talk about Montana, it was an easy entrée,” Musburger said. “I’d met him at some kind of event a few years earlier in New York. Maybe when he announced that he was going to jump the canyon. I didn’t know him well, but I had memories of Butte from when I was a kid. We could talk about Butte. There were some good restaurants in Butte. I’d go there with my parents.”
Gary Deeb, the television critic for the Tribune, wrote a column that killed the idea of the Death Defiers (“So now it’s CBS succumbing to the sleazy lure of Knievel in a mad effort to boost prime-time numbers”) and lamented the presence of Musburger, a serious voice in this unserious project. Musburger was not chagrined. He had appeared in a number of unserious projects.
“It was the era of trash sports, baby,” he said. “It was like the Wild West. I’d been to Rio de Janeiro to broadcast Steve McPeak’s walk on a tightrope over a canyon. I’d been to the Mojave Desert to see this guy, ‘the Human Fly,’ walk on the wings of a jet …
“The Human Fly. They put me up in a cherry-picker for that one. I’m up there, trying to see what he’s doing as the plane comes closer to the abandoned airport where we were. I can’t see anything. I’m just making shit up. The UCLA band was down on the ground. They’d been brought out just for this. They were in a formation that said, ‘GO FLY.’ He comes by, does what he was supposed to do. I shout, ‘Nice run, Fly.’ I have no idea what I’m talking about. I read later that the UCLA band sued because it hadn’t been paid.”
To Musburger, this event promised to fit into the same book of off-the-wall trash memories. How do you broadcast this thing? “Heeeerrre he comes … the sharks look hungry!” Marty Pasetta promised that paramedics and scuba divers would be on hand in case they were needed. An ambulance would be on the premises. If, perchance, Knievel did land in the tank and the sharks began to tear him to pieces, a special camera had been located underwater to record the action.
Musburger, the day before the show, looked down into the tank. He was surprised. He thought the sharks looked like minnows. He did not feel afraid. This was the challenge? Maybe, with the right camera angle, it would look better. He hoped so. He went back to his hotel to get ready for the big night ahead.
This was a mistake. He missed the action. Evel Knievel crashed and landed in the hospital before the event even began. Even the Human Fly hadn’t done that.
“I wasn’t there in the afternoon,” Musburger said, “bu
t I guess the director wanted Evel to do a practice run. He went to the trailer, where Evel was drinking Jack Daniel’s with another guy. They’d been drinking for a while. The director said he wanted Evel to do the practice run. Evel told the guy to go to hell. The director said if Evel didn’t do the practice run, there would be no show. So Evel punched the director, just whacked him, sent the guy spinning out the door of the trailer, right down the stairs.
“Then he put on his helmet, said something like, ‘You want a practice run? I’ll give you a practice run.’ He went over to the bike, kicked the starter, jumped into the saddle. Cameramen scrambled to get to their equipment. And he just took off. And he crashed. Went over the side. He was drunk, and he crashed the motorcycle. It was something straight out of Hollywood. They carried him off to the hospital.”
Musburger’s account of the events was backward. Other accounts flipped the scene 180 degrees: Knievel wanted to do a practice run, the producers didn’t. He was drinking, drunk. There was an argument. According to Michael Seligman, Knievel pushed Marty Pasetta against the wall of the trailer, said something like, “I don’t care what you want, I’m doing a practice run.” Pasetta was left in pain in the trailer. Knievel stormed off, jumped on the bike, crashed, landed in even more pain than Marty Pasetta.
“Thank goodness we were ready for anything,” Seligman said. “We had all the cameras in position. We were rolling. We had all the angles covered except from the cameraman Knievel crashed into.”
A third version of the argument inserted Sandy Wernick, part of the production staff, into the role of the pushee in the trailer. Wernick, according to this story, tried to convince Knievel not to take a practice jump because it would jeopardize the prime-time show. The two men argued. Knievel finally asked Wernick if he was a Jew. Wernick said he was. Knievel pushed him, went out, and crashed.
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