Evel

by Leigh Montville

  Though Saltman certainly did not draw a flattering portrait of Knievel—various episodes on the tour were recounted, from the pistol shots into the hotel pool in Austin to the various incivilities toward Linda in Butte—friends of Knievel who later read the book found nothing wrong. The character painted in the pages was the character they knew. Maybe Saltman could have been nicer in some descriptions, but this was Knievel. Things that the daredevil said in the book were things his friends had heard him say for years. This was him.

  Knievel did not agree.

  He would later say the book was “a filthy lie” and “pornography.” He would claim the book insulted his mother, wife, and children and portrayed him as “an alcoholic, a pill addict, and an anti-Semite and an immoral person.” He would make the book sound as if it was the worst thing ever written about anyone in the history of the written word.

  There was no record of how long it took him to reach this conclusion, how long it took to read the book. There was a chance that he did not even read it, relying on other people to tell him how terrible it was, though he did give a copy of Evel Knievel on Tour a few years later to a friend in Butte and the friend found a number of underlines and notes in the margins that indicated Knievel had read the book with great interest. Or at least parts of it.

  “Some pages were ripped out too,” the friend, Joe Little, said. “I have to think those were the ones that really got him mad.”

  On the very first page of the book, in the very first paragraph, Knievel found exception. This was a page that was an extension, really, of the front cover, a browser’s inducement to buy the product in his hands. Under the headline “X-Rated Evel,” Saltman offered three paragraphs of quotes from the subject.

  “I’ve made love to more beautiful women than all you guys put together even know,” the first paragraph read. “Hell, I never knew a broad who wasn’t a pushover … I’ve got more broads than you ever saw … Penthouse knows it, Playboy knows it, and now you know it … even my wife knows it and my grandmother knows it. I don’t bullshit anyone.”

  The headline was underlined. Assorted words in the paragraph were underlined. The words “Constitutes Adultery” were printed in ballpoint pen at the top of the page. Underlines and comments continued throughout the book. “This Is A Lie And Not Accurate” was followed by “Lies, Lies,” which was followed by “Lies, Lies, Lies.” A quote on page 169, where Knievel complained to producers about appearing after Burt Reynolds on The Tonight Show (“That fucking Burt Reynolds, why the hell should he go first?”), was underlined with the comment, “Never Said It To Anyone.”

  Even Saltman’s final sentence in the book, which expressed joy at Knievel’s survival at Snake River (“I fell into the arms of Evel Knievel’s father and cried my eyes out, I was so glad to see that god-damned, cantankerous son of a bitch alive and well”), was found offensive. The phrase “son of a bitch” was underlined, the word “Insult” printed underneath.

  Again, there was no record of how long these feelings were allowed to marinate after reading. There was no record of how much drinking took place, how much Wild Turkey was consumed during the marinating process. There was, however, a record of Knievel’s feelings at times in his life about the First Amendment: he was not a big fan.

  George Hamilton had seen that when he first brought the movie script for Evel Knievel to Knievel’s low-rent motel room and was forced to read at gunpoint. Joe Eszterhas had a glimpse when his unflattering Rolling Stone article was published and he received phone calls that put the magazine’s offices on “Evel Knievel Alert.” Automotive writer Joe Scalzo also had felt the heat.

  Scalzo, who wrote for assorted publications and had written a number of auto sports books, wrote a couple of paperbacks, Evel Knievel and Evel Knievel and Other Daredevils in the run-up to the canyon jump. These were the first books written about Knievel, pretty much the only books before Saltman’s effort. They did not make Knievel happy.

  He called Scalzo to make his displeasure known.

  “You’re a rip-off prick,” he said to begin the conversation.

  The words came out in an angry hurry. Knievel said he would sue for all royalties from the books, plus damages for using his name without permission. The bluster continued for an appropriate length of time, Scalzo unable to get in much of a rebuttal, or even to mention that First Amendment thing, before Knievel abruptly hung up. Scalzo never heard from him again.

  The legal threats did not bother the writer much because he knew the books were not defamatory in any way. No court would rule against him. The belligerence did not bother the writer either, because he was in California and Knievel was calling from Butte, Montana. A punch in the nose could not travel from Butte, Montana, to California.

  That was not the case, alas, with Shelly Saltman. He worked about fifteen miles from the Sheraton Universal. Not a bad drive at all if you caught the L.A. traffic just right.

  Saltman now was at 20th Century Fox, where he was a vice president in the telecommunications department. He had taken the job because he was tired of the travel involved with sports promotions and ready for a different, corporate kind of challenge. His department worked with the new concept of made-for-TV movies for HBO and other cable channels and with another new concept, the sale of existing movies to companies that would put them on VHS and Betamax tapes to sell (or rent) for home viewing.

  The offices were on the 20th Century lot, famous for all the movies that had been filmed there, a touch of glamour, and Saltman was on his way to the famous studio commissary shortly after noon on September 21, 1977. He was his enthusiastic self, tracking down a rumor that the commissary now had a frozen yogurt machine. He would see if that was true. Now, though, he spotted Evel Knievel coming toward him. He was not surprised. All kinds of famous people came to the 20th Century lot. He smiled.

  “Hey, Evel,” he said.

  This was when someone grabbed him from behind, threw him to the ground, and held him there. What the hell? Saltman looked up and saw Knievel swinging a metal baseball bat at his head. What the hell?

  “I’m going to kill you, you son of a bitch,” Knievel said. “For what you wrote about my mother.”

  That was what Saltman heard. Just in time, the blow coming toward his head, he was able to free his arms and hold them in front of his face. The blow shattered his left arm and his right wrist. Or if it didn’t, the subsequent blows did.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Saltman heard.

  Whack.

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  Whack.

  Somewhere in the beating, Saltman passed out. What happened after that, he didn’t know. Knievel obviously stopped swinging after a while. He and his accomplice walked away, off the 20th Century lot. No one stopped them.

  “There were a number of witnesses, but nobody stepped in,” Saltman later said. “This was a movie lot. People were used to seeing all kinds of things happening around them. None of them thought this was real. They thought it was another scene from another movie.”

  When the executive on the ground in the pool of blood didn’t get off the ground and head for a sandwich, people grew suspicious. What the hell? When he continued to lie there, his friend Alan Rice decided this was for real. He lifted Saltman into a golf cart and took him to the medical office on the lot, where an ambulance was called. The police also were called and told that Evel Knievel had beaten the bejeezus out of a man right here at 20th Century Fox.

  Saltman was taken to Los Angeles New Hospital. A warrant was put out for Knievel’s arrest. Saltman didn’t awaken until after surgery had been done on his left arm. The arm was in a large cast.

  “I don’t know the provocation,” Saltman told reporters. “But I assume it had something to do with the book.”

  Alan Rice had called Saltman’s wife, Mollie, with the news. She thought the two men were playing a joke. Tell the truth, Shelly was going to be late for dinner? At sundown, Yom Kippur would begin. He was supposed to be home for
dinner with her entire family. Now he was going to be late?

  In Las Vegas, Bob Arum already was at services at his synagogue. He was called to the rabbi’s office for an important phone call. The phone call was from Shelly.

  “Shelly says, ‘Watch yourself,’ ” Arum said. “ ‘Evel attacked me with a baseball bat, and now he may be coming after you.’ I wasn’t too worried. Evel didn’t know what synagogue I went to.”

  Knievel was stopped by police that night at the Lankershim Boulevard on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway. He wasn’t exactly trying to hide, riding in the refurbished $129,500 Stutz with a bodyguard. He was tailed by a car that contained his lawyer. He explained that he was on his way to the West Los Angeles police station to surrender. The police redirected him to the North Hollywood station, then to West Los Angeles, where he was booked.

  Stan Rosenfeld, a young publicist in Hollywood, had been hired recently to work with Knievel in various movie projects. The work really hadn’t begun, so he didn’t know much about Knievel. The start of his education was a phone call during the afternoon from Rona Barrett, the print and television gossip queen.

  “Do you have a statement about Evel Knievel?” she asked.

  “A statement of what about Evel Knievel?” Rosenfeld answered.

  “He just took a baseball bat to Shelly Saltman’s arm.”

  “And then, as they say, hilarity ensued,” Rosenfeld said years later, describing the situation.

  He and Knievel prepared a statement for reporters at the station. Rosenfeld read Knievel’s words, “I stand by what I did,” and Knievel’s appraisal of the book as “a filthy lie” that called him “an alcoholic, a pill addict, an anti-Semite and immoral person.”

  The daredevil was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. He was released on $1,000 bail, told to appear next Wednesday for arraignment in West Los Angeles Municipal Court. The booking process did not take long. Knievel answered one question on the way out the door, wearing sunglasses, looking harried.

  “What are you going to do tonight?” a reporter asked.

  “I’m going to have me a good time tonight,” he said. “Like I do every night …”

  A story. An item had appeared in newspapers across Montana on the morning of September 21, 1977, the same day he attacked Saltman and was arrested. The Montana chapter of the national Multiple Sclerosis Society announced that Evel Knievel had agreed once again to be honorary chairman of the state’s annual MS READ-a-thon.

  The READ-a-thon was a reading competition. For thirty days, students would read as many books, magazines, and newspaper articles as possible. Parents and sponsors would contribute a certain amount of money to the MS Society for each book a child read. Prizes would be awarded to the biggest readers.

  “READ-a-thon is a great incentive to encourage children to read and that’s important in a time when TV and many, many other conflicts seem to draw them away from good reading habits,” Knievel said in the press release. “We feel that if a child can read for 30 days, that child will always be a good reader.”

  A story. After the attack and before he surrendered, Knievel made a call to Dee Robinson, his “decorator” back in Fort Lauderdale. He told her that some problems had arisen, so plans for the new house with the fourteen stained-glass windows were going to have to be shut down for a few weeks. Nothing major was happening, understand, just a few problems that he would work out.

  “What kind of problems?” she asked.

  “Oh, you’ll find out,” he said. “Soon enough.”

  She found out the next morning. She was in a convenience store and noticed the front page of a newspaper. She couldn’t believe the story. A baseball bat? An attack? A few days later another unbelievable story emerged.

  Mike Anderson, the captain of the Evel Eye 1, told her that the owner of the boat wanted to meet her. She said she knew the owner, Evel. No, Anderson said, Evel only leased the boat. The real owner had stepped forward and was taking back control. Payments had been missed. Evel never had been the owner, no matter what he said.

  Robinson met with the real owner, who was not a happy man. He said she had “ruined” his boat. She apologized. She said that she had thought Evel was the owner. She followed his orders. The real owner said he now had a set of different orders. He would hire her to make the boat look “exactly” the way it looked before the sleeps-seven bed and the helicopter landing pad and the sculpture and all the rest had been added. Could she do that? She could.

  The first job of her career was redecorating Evel Knievel’s yacht. The second job was removing all of the decorations she had done in her first job. She never worked for Evel Knievel again, didn’t see him for more than a decade.

  The famous daredevil hired Paul Caruso, a big-time Hollywood attorney, to represent him. Caruso had worked with a number of celebrity clients, including James Mason, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jane Russell, Brenda Vaccaro, Kirk Douglas, and Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch. He successfully had defended actor and war hero Audie Murphy on a charge of attempted murder against a dog trainer who allegedly brutalized Murphy’s dog and romanced his girlfriend. The key to the defense was Caruso’s contention that Murphy, credited with killing 282 German soldiers in a day to win the Congressional Medal of Honor, couldn’t have fired four times at the dog trainer and missed. Not guilty.

  Knievel’s defense for beating Saltman came straight out of Butte, Montana: I kicked his ass because he deserved it. There was no debate about whether the daredevil had done the deed. Too many people had seen him do it for that. The explanation he offered was that he was justified in doing what he did. Anyone in Butte would see that.

  “It was the way we grew up,” Louie Markovich, the longtime friend, said. “You could get away with a lot of things in Butte, but one thing you never could do was bring family into something. As soon as you brought family in, it was a whole different story. I think that was because so many kids came from such bad family situations. They didn’t have a father, didn’t have a mother. Bob didn’t have either growing up, but he never talked about it. Never talked about his mother. Never once. Nobody ever asked him about her. Because they knew …

  “He wasn’t educated, Bob. He dropped out of school. When the guy talked about his mother, I think that put him over the top. You didn’t talk about family like that.”

  “I think he thought he was going to be seen as a hero,” Jim Blankenship, another old friend from Butte, said. “A bunch of books had been written about celebrities. Tough things. He was going to show that one celebrity wasn’t going to take this. He would take matters into his own hands.”

  The victim became the villain when Knievel took the case to the public. Whose side are you on, the famous daredevil or the creep writer? Knievel was Buford Pusser, walking tall. He was Gary Cooper at high noon, Dirty Harry, Gene Hackman in The French Connection. He was on the side of good, of justice.

  “Because of what I did in this matter, I will never lose the love and respect of my family and friends,” he said. “I have personal convictions that must not be violated by anyone.”

  He brought this defiant attitude with him to the courtroom when he was arraigned on October 12, 1977. (A two-week delay had been granted to allow attorney Caruso to familiarize himself with the case.) Knievel said he wanted to plead guilty. He did what the policemen said he did. Saltman deserved it. End of case. Defendant would take his punishment.

  Caruso acted stunned at this development. He said that he had advised Knievel to plead not guilty because there were ramifications to any civil trial that might follow. He asked for a day to consult with his client. Judge Frances Rothschild granted the delay. She said that she had never come across such a situation in her West Los Angeles court.

  The next day Caruso announced to the court that he was resigning as Knievel’s attorney. Knievel announced to the court that he pleaded guilty, but acted because Sheldon Saltman had written “a vicious book of pornography” about him. He said that he had broken Saltman’s arm
s “because you write with your hands.” Judge Rothschild scheduled the sentencing for a month later in Superior Court.

  Saltman, still in the hospital, was amazed at all of this. Knievel’s strategy seemed to work. That’s the way it seemed, reading the newspapers. His side of the story was everywhere. Saltman’s was nowhere. There were things he would like to point out, but no one seemed to ask.

  Like, first of all, the slander about Knievel’s mother. The only mention of Knievel’s mother in the entire book was “Evel wouldn’t stay in Denver, because his real mother lived there and he didn’t want to see her. ‘My mother’s never taken care of me,’ he said. ‘I’m taking care of the woman that raised me, my grandmother, and that’s all there is to it, you dig?’ ” That was the righteous cause for a beating? That?

  A second thing: Knievel didn’t attack Saltman’s arms. He, the victim, put his arms up in self-defense. If Knievel’s planned path with the baseball bat had been unimpeded, the bat would have landed directly on Saltman’s head. This was attempted murder. Nothing less. Why wasn’t it being prosecuted as attempted murder?

  A third thing: the accomplice. Why was nobody trying to find the accomplice? Knievel mumbled something about not knowing the guy and something else about never ever saying the guy’s name. Nobody seemed to care about the accomplice. Nobody seemed to care about the seriousness of the crime.

  Saltman was confused about the entire business. He couldn’t believe any of it had happened.

  “I went through stages,” he said. “Like you read about with rape victims. First, I felt sorry for myself. Why did this happen to me? Then fear. Is this guy going to come back and finish the job? Then anger. My son was a water polo player at Arizona State, a big kid, and I guess his teammates had to stop him from getting on a plane with a baseball bat and come looking for Knievel. I was glad that didn’t happen, but for the first time in my life there was someone I could have killed. I had never felt that.