Evel

by Leigh Montville

  Wernick, over thirty years later, now the manager of comedian Adam Sandler, refused to talk about the moment. Pasetta, retired, also refused.

  “He has never talked about the Death Defiers show,” his spokesperson said. “And he never will.”

  The result of the incident—and everyone agreed there was an incident that involved a push, anger, then the crash—was the same in all of the stories: Knievel was in the hospital. This was different from any of the crashes he had suffered in the past. The easy jump, no more than ninety feet in the original plan, the distance in baseball from home plate to first base, had been made easier when he pulled a safety deck into place that shortened the distance to sixty-four feet, roughly the distance from home plate to the pitcher’s mound. The idea that he could not make that jump was almost inconceivable.

  Yet he crashed.

  He easily cleared the pool of sleeping, docile sharks, but seemed to turn the handlebars in midflight. He hit the landing hard, tried to correct his path, and overcorrected. He took a hard right off the elevated ramp, went through a barrier, clipped a twenty-nine-year-old cameraman from Arlington Heights named Thomas Geren, who was filming the jump and had no idea what was coming. The motorcycle flipped, and Knievel went flying as it went upside down, everything out of control, and landed on concrete.

  He was taken to the Michael Reese Medical Center on the South Side, where he was diagnosed with a broken clavicle, broken right forearm, wrist and leg contusions, and bruises. (Geren also was taken to the hospital, but released with minor injuries.) Somewhere on the ambulance ride, or perhaps in the emergency room while he was having his injuries treated, Knievel figured out an explanation for what had just happened. He figured out a doozy.

  He wasn’t drunk. He was a hero! He had crashed in the afternoon to save innocent people, paying customers, who would be in the crowd at night. He had decided a day earlier that a crash was inevitable because the setup in the Amphitheater was too confined, too cramped, not right. Simply to get enough room to gather enough speed, a hole had been made in the Amphitheater wall. He would have to fly through the hole, onto the ramp, over the sharks, and then land on a ramp that went upward again, over some seats. It all was crazy. Rather than force the promoters to make the jump safe or for him to decide not to jump at all, back out of his contract, he took things into his own hands.

  “I knew there was going to be an accident, and the show couldn’t be canceled,” he said from his hospital bed. “So I decided to take what was coming to me, and I didn’t want to see anyone else hurt. I made the practice run before an empty house so no parents or children would be hurt.”

  He not only removed all blame from himself, but turned himself into Audie Murphy, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, jumping on a ticking hand grenade to save the rest of the platoon. This was grand, audacious stuff.

  “I knew when I saw it all squeezed together yesterday that it wasn’t going to work,” he continued. “When we put it all together, the tank, the ramp, and the ski slope, it was too cramped. I fell Sunday when I took a practice run up the ski slope. I knew as soon as I saw it that it was too steep to climb.

  “I’m not placing the blame on anybody or anything. It was a combination of pressure and faulty, hasty preparation. Because of the ski jump construction, I felt someone would have been killed. It was my obligation to make it safe, and there was a misunderstanding between the production company and myself.

  “The show had to come off, but I couldn’t take a chance with people’s lives. So I told the cameras to roll and took the run.”

  He was treated at the Michael Reese Center by Carlton West, a thirty-three-year-old black orthopedic physician. West had been put on alert, told that business might be arriving from that Death Defier show at the Amphitheater. He still was surprised when the emergency room began to fill with hubbub.

  “I didn’t have time to think about Evel Knievel as a celebrity,” he told Jet magazine. “I guess I started to think about it after all the reporters and the cameras came.”

  The angle for the Jet story, the magazine part of John H. Johnson’s African American publishing empire based in Chicago, basically was Black Doctor Treats Famous White Man, still seen as news in 1977. The reporter wanted to know if Knievel had mentioned Dr. West’s race. Dr. West said he certainly had.

  “His comments regarding that were actually complimentary,” Dr. West said. “But I think my youthful appearance was more striking than my color.”

  “I’ve been accused of being an anti-Semite by some newspapers, but that’s not true,” Knievel told the magazine. “When I was a little boy, the only man I wanted to be like was Joe Louis. I think he’s done more for race relations in this country than anybody.”

  So there.

  Left without the main attraction for “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers,” Evel Knievel, Marty Pasetta Productions, and CBS were forced to improvise. There were no thoughts of cancellation, but adjustments certainly had to be made. The film from the different camera locations was edited in a hurry, a package prepared for the show. A camera crew was sent to the Michael Reese Center to be ready for live updates and an interview with the injured star from his hospital bed. Telly Savalas and Jill St. John were briefed, told they had to ad-lib a lot.

  Pasetta, who hoped that news of Knievel’s premature crash would not be known until showtime, ordered that the press be kept from the Amphitheater until the last minute. Since the general public and the press could be confused for each other, the general public also was kept from the Amphitheater until the last minute. Since the general public in this case mostly consisted of high school kids with free tickets, and since the temperature outside was well below freezing, an unruly situation quickly developed. The first riot outside the Amphitheater since the 1968 convention became a possibility.

  “Let ’em in,” management decided after some angry moments.

  The show that followed was a mishmash of mistakes, an artistic disaster. Savalas and St. John struggled. They looked like they were a weekend replacement anchor team at a small station in the Midwest, unprepared, off stride from the beginning. All dialogue was stiff. The film of Knievel’s crash was shown. The daredevil was interviewed a number of times from the hospital. Savalas kept saying, “It’s only orthopedic,” about Knievel’s injuries. Whatever that meant.

  With Knievel out of action, the Death Defiers took on added importance. They were the live action. This became another mess. The first Death Defier scheduled to perform live was Wallenda, walking the tightrope between the two hotels in Miami. The problem was that he hadn’t even arrived at the hotels on time. He was caught somewhere on the streets of Miami in a traffic jam. He would perform later in the show, but the schedule had to be ripped up again. Savalas and St. John kept ad-libbing. Commercials came at strange times. Everything was strange.

  “I was at the top of the ski jump, waiting with my snowmobile,” Ron Phillips said later. “It was so cold up there, waiting and waiting. All the snow around the base of the snowmobile had turned to ice. I didn’t know that.”

  Wired for sound, able to hear the broadcast through a plug in his ear, able to talk into a little microphone, Phillips received word that he should go. He had made a few practice runs earlier, no problem, but now when he started moving and stepped onto the footpegs to lift himself, one leg slipped on the ice that had formed on the footpeg. That caused him to let off the throttle, and by the time he was able to give the machine more gas, he knew that he would not be traveling fast enough, which was fifty miles per hour, when he hit the edge of the ski jump. He knew he would crash.

  He went off the edge of the jump. He bailed. He went one way, the machine luckily went another. He landed lucky, on his back. Sort of lucky. Nothing had been broken, but the air in his body had been expelled by the force of his landing. He couldn’t talk.

  “Are you all right, Ron?” Jill St. John asked in his ear from Chicago.

  No answer.

  “Was that the practi
ce jump we just saw, Ron? … Ron? … Was that the practice jump?”

  The air came back into Phillips’s body.

  “You gotta be shitting me,” he said from the ice and snow.

  The Russian Death Chair was another problem. Kisselburg was receiving only $5,000 from Knievel for his act, but now he was the star of the show, the grand finale. He was very nervous. After all of his time on tour, all of the stunts, this was his first time on national television. This was also his first time in a tuxedo.

  “Orval always dressed as a clown when he performed,” Ron Phillips said, “but Evel told him this was national television and he couldn’t dress ‘like a fucking clown’ and had to wear a tuxedo. I don’t think he knew what a tuxedo was when Evel said it.”

  Phillips took Kisselburg to a tuxedo rental establishment, told him to say if anyone asked that he was going to a wedding. Fitted, dressed for the big night, he added another extra for his performance. In his normal act, he blew himself into the air with three sticks of dynamite. For national television, he decided to add a fourth stick for a bigger blast, a record.

  The trick was to place a fifty-pound bag of cement over the dynamite. As part of the finer print in the laws of physics, a cone of silence, maybe two feet by two feet, exists over the exploding dynamite. Stay inside the cone, put something in your ears to absorb the noise, fly into the air, and be all right.

  Kisselburg always put cotton in his ears. He had been told that ear plugs could be blown straight into your brain by impact, so cotton seemed to be a better choice. As everybody hurried on this night, though, schedules out of whack, he had forgotten to put the cotton in his ears. He realized this … five, four, three … as the countdown came and he girded himself for the blast.

  “Here was this guy, in the middle of a field in Skokie, Illinois, or wherever, strapped to a chair with three or four sticks of dynamite strapped to the seat,” Musburger, who now had to broadcast this part of the show, said. “He was going to blow himself up. It was a challenge to broadcast. How do you do play-by-play of something like that? ‘There he is, ladies and gentlemen, his finger is moving closer to the button …’ What if it all goes wrong?”

  The four-sticks-of-dynamite explosion was bigger than the three-sticks-of-dynamite explosion, bigger than Kisselburg had imagined it would be. He went flying, ten feet, fifteen feet, twenty feet into the air. The fifty pounds of cement, in addition to absorbing a bunch of the concussion, split open to cover the scene with a gray dust that covered everything. Including Orval Kisselburg.

  He was knocked silly, stretched out on the cold ground, and his hearing was gone. Phillips and the EMTs on duty ran to him and finally got him to his feet … “He’s alive!” Brent Musburger exulted on the broadcast from the Amphitheater … and tried to get him to get inside an ambulance. Kisselburg, uninsured in the daredevil business, refused. He figured his hearing would return as soon as the ringing stopped.

  The only other problem was that rented tuxedo.

  “It looked like shredded wheat,” Phillips said.

  He and Kisselburg zipped the suit into the handy carrying case, took the carrying case back to the rental place, and left in a hurry. Never heard from the people again.

  The reviews of the show were terrible. Joan Ryan of the Washington Post said, “Evel Knievel’s Death Defiers now must be considered the worst TV program ever” (against a lot of stiff competition). The worries of the animal rights people were justified as half of the sharks died. Only twelve sharks, in the end, had arrived for the show, not the unlucky thirteen that were advertised. One died before the show, so that left eleven in the tank when Knievel shot off the ramp and crashed. One died when the pool was being drained, another died from bites it had received in the tank from another shark, and three died in transit to their future home in Boston at the New England Aquarium.

  “I’ll tell you, I’ll never work with TV people again,” shark expert Klay said, angry that he’d had only three days to prepare the water for his clients instead of the promised ten to fourteen days. “They went back on their word.”

  The final verdict on the show came, however, in the weekly Tuesday meeting at CBS headquarters in New York that autocratic network chief William S. Paley held with his department heads. Careers, lives, were known to change in an instant in these meetings. Bob Wussler and his people at CBS Sports were terrified. They suspected they could be fired.

  Paley, according to one account, went through some other business until he reached the Death Defiers. He looked at the Nielsen ratings numbers and said something like, “Pretty good. If we can improve our production qualities the next time, perhaps Death Defiers II can be even better.”

  The numbers were everything.

  “That’s television,” Michael Seligman, who has produced the Oscar awards show since 1979, the Emmys since 1996, said. “It’s all about the numbers.”

  “Your act was sensational!” Seligman and Pasetta wrote in a co-signed letter to Orval Kisselburg a month later. “As you know, the show had the highest ratings on CBS this year, a 50 share.”

  27 Hollywood, CA

  His residence when he was in Los Angeles, okay, in Hollywood, now was the Sheraton Universal Hotel. He could sit in his suite in the twenty-story hotel, located on a hill overlooking Universal City, and almost be able to see the old Hollywoodland Motel on Ventura Boulevard where he had spent his early days in the city. He could think about how far the trip had been from one stop to the other.

  His neighbor was Telly Savalas, the host of the ill-fated sharks spectacular, a perpetual resident of the Sheraton because it was close to the Universal lot where he filmed Kojak. The hotel also was convenient for Knievel when he filmed an episode of The Bionic Woman with Lindsay Wagner at the beginning of the month, September of 1977, at Universal. He liked the hotel. He sometimes stayed for weeks in a row.

  A funny thing had happened during that Bionic Woman show. He was on the set, and some guy came to him and asked for his car keys. The guy said the Stutz d’Italia roadster, the Stutz valued at $129,500, was blocking traffic. Knievel flipped the keys to him, and the guy tried to steal the car, just drive it away. A security guard tried to stop him, and the guy panicked. He crashed the Stutz, the $129,500 Stutz, into the front gate.

  Just today the studio had settled on a figure of $9,588 to pay for the damages. Very good. Maybe it was an omen.

  There had been a run of not-so-good in the past year. Start with the shark fiasco. Continue with the movie, Viva Knievel!, with Lauren Hutton and Gene Kelly and Red Buttons and all those people. It opened in the beginning of June and pretty much was a bomb. The critics hated it, hated him. The public never showed up. The toys … the toys looked like they needed a boost too. Lee Majors, the Six Million Dollar Man, had taken control in the sales figures for two Christmases now. What did Lee Majors ever do?

  Then there was the Internal Revenue Service, always on his back. And some guy in Twin Falls said he hadn’t been paid for the chemical toilets. And even old Watcha McCollum, the pilot from Snake River, was looking for money, said, “Knievel not only doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘fear,’ he also doesn’t know the meaning of ‘accounts payable.’ ” Very funny.

  Maybe this payoff for the Stutz was a start. Maybe the critics would love the Bionic Woman episode when it played in a couple of weeks. Maybe the deal he had signed with Ralph Andrews Productions right here in L.A. would develop some great television ideas. Maybe there would be another movie, though probably not right away. Maybe the revenue stream would get back to its normal flow. Maybe.

  He was here anyway. Hollywood. This was where deals happened.

  He had lived long enough and tipped heavily enough at the Sheraton Universal that he knew the different people who worked the different jobs in the hotel. That was why he nodded hello to the cashier in the gift shop, looked toward the rack of paperback books, and said on this fine day, “Do you have something new I’m going to like?” That was why the cashier said, “N
o, but I have something new you’re not going to like.”

  The book was Evel Knievel on Tour, which promised on its front paperback cover that it would tell “the Inside Stuff on the High-Flying Daredevil No PG-Rated Movie Could Ever Show.” The cashier said the book was trash. The High-Flying Daredevil put down the buck-and-a-half price, plus state and local tax, and took the trash to his suite.

  Nothing ever would be the same again.

  The author was Shelly Saltman, the chatterbox publicity man from the Snake River tour, then at the canyon. He shared the credit with someone named Maury Green. Saltman had mentioned more than once to Knievel on the private jet during the tour that he was going to write a book, but three years had passed. The timing seemed strange.

  Why did he wait so long?

  “I had the tapes and was going to do the book, but then I was involved in other things,” Saltman said years later. “I sort of forgot about it. Then I was talking with some people one night, talking the way I normally do, and Maury Green, a writer, was there, and he asked, with all my stories about famous people, if I ever had thought about doing a book. I said, ‘It’s funny that you ask that.’ We eventually put together the book.”

  The tale basically was a chronicle of the tour, the book the publicist had said he wanted to do. Knievel’s words, Knievel’s deeds and misdeeds. Saltman’s observations were woven together, stop by stop, for 205 pages. As often happens with books, especially mass-market paperbacks, the most provocative writing was on the covers. The back cover promised even more than the front cover did.

  “They say that it takes a hustler to know one, and Saltman got to know Evel Knievel very well,” the text read. “On a breakneck nationwide tour to promote the Snake River Canyon jump, Shelly got a good, honest look at the man behind the myth. Here’s everything that goes on behind the scenes—big money, big wheeling and dealing, big hoaxes, parties, booze and broads—AS AMERICA’S SUPER-STUNTMAN WAGS HIS TONGUE AND SHAKES HIS FIST AT DEATH FOR THE SHEER, CRAZY, MONEY-MAKING HELL OF IT!”