“The final stage, and this took a while, was pity. This guy just blew up a good life.”
The sentencing took place on November 14, 1977. Knievel was handed 180 days in Los Angeles County Jail, plus three years’ probation. He could have been sentenced to a maximum of four years in state prison or to the one year recommended by the district attorney and deputy probation officer Ann Burnett for “a cowardly act. This was not even a one-on-one confrontation.” The sentence was seen as lenient.
Judge Edward Rafeedie, while he said that “long ago we abandoned the concept of frontier justice here in California and in the civilized world,” also praised Knievel’s guilty plea. He said, “It is very refreshing for the court to have a defendant charged with a serious crime walk in and openly admit his guilt.” Knievel said he thought the judge was “fair” on the way out of court.
The idea of six months in jail did not seem to bother him. He would set off on a trip through the California penal system that was alternately comic, embarrassing, and flat-out sad. It was a Hogan’s Heroes, McHale’s Navy sort of sitcom wackiness that grabbed headlines and attention on the surface, that crazy old Evel Knievel, but a tale of further self-destruction underneath. What he didn’t realize was that the train of slowly accumulated gravy was leaving the station, taking away the pieces of the extravagant life he had built, and try as he might, he would not know how to stop it. The old tricks didn’t work anymore.
Public perception had changed. He convinced no one with his boasts of frontier justice. He tried to say that he needed assistance because his hands were still broken from the shark tank crash, but no one believed him. Two-on-one was two-on-one. America didn’t like that.
The swings with that baseball bat had put him on the other side of an invisible fence. He simply didn’t count the way he once counted. He had been heading toward the back edge of celebrity anyway, his age against him, his act suddenly shopworn, especially with the shark fiasco in Chicago, but now he officially was damaged goods, yesterday’s news, a treacherously loose cannon, and ultimately a bad guy. The votes were in.
“The biggest problem with fame is people begin to think everything is forever,” Stan Rosenfeld said years later, after representing actors George Clooney, Charlie Sheen, and an A-list group of Hollywood stars. “Fame and all the things that come with it are lent to you. You don’t own them. You have to pay rent. And when you don’t pay the rent—and people know when you don’t—everything can disappear. You kill your franchise.”
A story in the National Enquirer that appeared in his last days of freedom, “Evel Knievel’s Lavish Lifestyle,” proved to be a final celebration of his affluence. Harry O’s shot of Evel loading the .38 Smith and Wesson (“I don’t pose for anyone!”) sat nicely under the headline. A picture of the recently departed Evel Eye 1 Feadship was included, along with a picture of Evel leaning against the front fender of one of his Ferraris. Though the story mentioned the subject’s upcoming incarceration, the tone was curious, as if nothing had happened, a celebration of his good fortune and fiscal folly.
“I met the shah the other day, and he said, ‘You bought more planes in one day than I’ve bought!’ ” the prisoner-to-be said, meaning the Shah of Iran, the richest man in the world.
Knievel listed, one more time, the spoils of his profession. He claimed, yes, he once bought seven airplanes from Beech Aircraft at one time, once owned a total of eleven airplanes, two of them Lear jets. He once, of course, also owned thirteen boats, headed by the Feadship, which he admitted had been leased and now had been returned. (“I gave it back to the guy I leased it from because I felt sorry for him—he’s going through a divorce.”) He rounded off the estimates for the jewelry and the cars, but did say he had a late addition to his garage, the $129,500 white-and-gold Stutz convertible, the only convertible Stutz ever made. He claimed he had paid $675,000 in taxes the previous year.
The story read like a trip through life’s checkout lane. This was the pile of high-calorie stuff that had been amassed. A careful reader noted that there wasn’t a fruit or vegetable involved.
“If I lost it all tomorrow, I haven’t lost anything,” Knievel claimed. “I have had the gracious hand of God on me to let me live a dream of a life.”
This idea soon would be put to a test. The final death throes of the Evel Knievel franchise came during his trip through jail. They of course were public, public, public. They of course were something to watch.
As a footnote, the Shah of Iran would fare no better. The first demonstrations against his autocratic rule already had begun in Tehran. Within a year and a half, he would be an exile without a country, the Iranian revolution complete.
28 Los Angeles, CA
He was scheduled to begin his six-month sentence on Monday, November 21, 1977, but the weirdness began three days earlier. On Friday, November 18, the newly convicted felon called a press conference to announce that he was going to have his spleen removed. And he was going to be dropped from the bomb bay of a World War II B-29 or B-50 aircraft at forty thousand feet. And he wouldn’t be wearing a parachute. And he was going to land on one of thirteen haystacks.
Maybe.
“My name is Evel Knievel,” he said as he appeared from behind a curtain in a function room at the Sheraton Universal. “I am a daredevil. I am the best at what I do.”
He had lured maybe a hundred people, a group filled with many more friends and backslappers than press, to the room to announce his participation in “the most daring and spectacular feat in the history of man.” (Steve Harvey of the L.A. Times pointed out that a first press release had referred to the event as “the most daring and spectacular fete known to man,” causing many people to think that a lavish dinner was going to be announced.) He had a pointer, diagrams, facts printed on no-nonsense cardboard, plus a full set of his personal X-rays that he was glad to share.
This was it, he said, the end of his career, an end presumably not to be confused with any of those earlier retirements. He was done with motorcycle jumps, challenges, canyons, any and all long lines of cars, buses, or Pepsi Cola trucks, done with ass-over-teakettle crashes. He was done with the daredevil business … EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE LAST COLOSSAL EXTRAVAGANZA, THIS ONE LAST MOMENT. What a moment it would be.
Thirteen haystacks would be laid out in the parking lot of some lucky casino in either Las Vegas or Atlantic City. A speck would appear in the sky at a distance, then take shape as it moved closer and closer. My God, it was that World War II bomber, the B-29 or B-50, piloted by an unnamed World War II hero who had flown over one hundred missions during the Big One and never missed a target! The payload would be a human being this time. Evel.
The game was to drop Our Hero through the bomb-bay doors from forty thousand feet as if he were another bit of bad news for the citizens of, say, Dusseldorf. The estimate was that he would be traveling as fast as 130 miles per hour in his descent. Because a man’s spleen had proven to split open like an overripe grapefruit sometimes at downward speeds of over one hundred miles per hour, especially upon landing, the organ would be removed surgically from Our Hero a month or two before the Great Event by skilled physicians. While they were at it, the skilled physicians—or maybe a separate set of skilled physicians, no one ever specified—would implant a sophisticated “missile guidance device” in his chest.
His goal would be to land on one of the thirteen haystacks and not, of course, anywhere else. The “missile guidance device” would be keyed into transponders in the haystacks. Our Hero, not wearing a parachute, but with minimal protection in a pressurized suit and a special helmet, presumably would land with a whomp rather than a splat, hay flying into the air in celebration. The cheering would last well into the night.
“This will be my last and final act as a professional life-risker,” Knievel said. “I will be forty years old in a year, and I would like to relax.”
The live crowd would be enormous, spectacular, the television audience from around the world in the hundreds of mi
llions. Life itself would stop for this one moment. There would be betting, probably an international lottery, people guessing which haystack would be the landing spot. The winners would take home fortunes. All bets would be off, of course, if Our Hero missed the haystacks altogether.
He said he had been thinking about this stunt for a long, long time, simply never had mentioned it. He figured that the up-front payment would be $20 million, and he would spend every cent before he jumped. Just in case. Ralph Andrews Productions would handle the television rights and productions. Casinos would bid against each other for the right to play host.
The date would be the Fourth of July 1978, eight months away, after he had finished this 180-day jail sentence, this nuisance. He would “soar like an eagle” on July 4, though before that happened he had to “go through garbage, like a dump or jail, like a seagull.” He would do all of that. The old Evel Knievel, American daredevil, American icon, was going to be back, boys. One last time.
“Do you have a death wish?” a reporter asked.
“I do have a death wish,” Knievel said in an attempt at his old iconic wit and charm. “I’d like to die in bed with a good-looking broad when I’m 103.”
The joke sounded hollow and flat. The entire presentation sounded hollow and flat, desperate. This certainly was an attempt to rekindle the feeling, the excitement, of the weeks before Snake River, many of the same words and components dusted off and presented again, but now, well, everyone had seen Snake River. Everyone had seen a lot more of Knievel. Everyone pretty much had seen enough.
The absence of specifics for “Evel in a Haystack” was a giant indicator that the event would never happen. There was no deal with any casino on the books. There was no deal with any television network. There was no deal, period, for anything more than the rented room at the Sheraton, the chairs and tables, the buffet spread, and the words in the air.
Newspapers across the country mostly ran a little “People in the News” note the next day from the Associated Press or UPI or Reuters, mostly as another “hey look at this” bit of nonsense from Hollywood. The Valley News, a suburban Los Angeles daily, actually added some outside expertise to the story. A reporter called the L.A. County Medical Association and the State Board of Medical Quality Assurance to ask about the feasibility of removing someone’s spleen so the someone could be dropped from a World War II bomber. The reply was that the operation would be “totally insane,” “very improper,” and a “highly questionable procedure.”
The entire enterprise was highly questionable.
“I have earned millions of dollars through the years facing the greatest competitor in life—that is death,” Knievel would write in response to a letter to the editor from James M. Perry, former commanding officer for the U.S. Army Golden Knights Parachute Team, who questioned all of the facets of the haystack jump in the L.A. Times. “I enjoy life. I love to live every day hoping it will never end. I will do my best to see that it does not. There are two things that have kept other men from doing what I am going to do; one is fear and the other is the sudden stop when you hit the ground.”
He left out a third reason: no one cared. The announcement of the stunt was pretty much as far as the stunt went. The stuntman himself went to jail.
He showed up for that scheduled appointment on Monday, November 21, 1977, spleen still inside his body, at the county courthouse in Santa Monica to surrender to sheriff’s deputies to begin his sentence. If there was any worry about what would happen next as he began serving the first true jail time in his life, he didn’t show it. He acted as if he were a kid headed to summer camp in the mountains.
“Good morning, good morning, good morning,” he said to gathered reporters as he arrived forty minutes early.
He was dressed in his usual Super Fly outfit, this one made of blue leather and cotton. The exaggerated collar on the jacket boasted the usual wingspan, same as a good-sized pterodactyl or medium-sized executive jet. He wore sunglasses to guard against the L.A. morning haze, any flashbulbs, and, of course, because he was who he was. He was accompanied by lawyer Caruso.
The major reason for his good nature was that he knew he wasn’t going to be in jail very long. Caruso had wrangled a spot for his client in a work-release program that would allow him to leave every day between the hours of six-thirty in the morning and six-thirty at night to conduct normal business. Knievel would be allowed to wear his normal clothes, follow his normal routines, then return to prison denim and jail at night. This could start as soon as Wednesday. There was also a good chance his sentence would be shortened.
“With good behavior,” Caruso told reporters, “he could be out in four and a half months.”
Knievel surrendered in the courthouse to the deputies at 9:00 a.m., then boarded a bus with other prisoners for the trip to the Los Angeles County Jail. This was a famous place. Located on the top three floors of the massive Hall of Justice building in the city center of L.A. at the corner of North Broadway and West Temple Street, the county jail had, at different times, been home to characters like Bugsy Siegel, Charles Manson, and Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy.
The major pieces of the L.A. judicial system—the sheriff’s department, the district attorney’s office, the coroner’s office, eleven superior courts, and six municipal courts—were on the first eleven floors of the Hall of Justice. More than two thousand prisoners could be accommodated on the top three floors. The bars on the cell windows were obscured from the general public by long Roman columns, part of the building’s beaux arts architecture.
Built in 1925, familiar to watchers of the television show Dragnet, the Hall of Justice was a one-stop monument to the American legal system, a layer cake of law and order.
The final leg on the trip to punishment in L.A. County most often was an elevator ride. Going up. When the ride ended, when the doors opened, a different life awaited.
“There were some serious convicts in that place,” Lou Mack, one of the residents during Knievel’s sentence, said years later. “Some hard-core criminals. Some guys serving life. There were stabbings and beatings. I had threats against my life. I got up on some guy’s bunk one time, and he didn’t like it, and the word went out that he was going to kill me. Just for that. I went an entire week without ever sleeping until it got resolved.
“The serious cons were supposed to be on another floor, but they’d get to move around. They’d come down to our floor at night to have sex with the gay guys. The guards were in their pocket.”
Mack was a resident in the next cell when Knievel arrived at cell number 11. The moment brought a touch of excitement to bored lives. Everyone knew who Knievel was. A crowd gathered to watch the famous man, now wearing prison clothes, examine his new six-by-ten-foot living quarters, an area sometimes shared by as many as four prisoners at a time.
“I’ve got a yacht that’s bigger than this,” Knievel said.
And he did.
He was a different sort of prisoner from the start. After less than seventy-two hours inside the Hall of Justice, as scheduled, his participation in the work-release program began. He was outside again. Not only outside, but outside in style. His chauffeur appeared at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday in the $129,500 white-and-gold vintage Stutz, and Knievel came out of the building in another Super Fly outfit and, whoosh, was off to his business day.
He had the office at Ralph Andrews Productions in Toluca Lake, the sign “Evel in a Haystack” on his door, but in a pattern that developed quickly, he spent most days at the bar of either the Sheraton Universal or the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The other work-release prisoners went mostly to menial jobs, traveling by bus back and forth to work in factories or to farms to pick vegetables, to wherever they could find any kind of employment. Knievel rode in the Stutz every day, off to the Polo Lounge.
“That was his place of business,” publicist Rosenfeld said in mild defense. “That was what he did for his work. Talk with people.”
At nig
ht, back in jail, he was the same celebrity he was on the outside. Bigger, in fact. The other prisoners admired his style. He brought back pictures of himself from the Toluca Lake office, signed autographs, answered questions. He had no trouble. His crime, whacking someone with a baseball bat, hey, the guy deserved it. The other prisoners recognized the approach.
Bunches of them gathered each night in his cell where he told stories about his jumps and surgeries, pitfalls and pratfalls. The crowd would extend into the hallways it was so large. He would turn serious sometimes, go back to the W. Clement Stone foundation, and dispense formulas for success, for changing your life in a positive way.
He could use his own success as a lesson in how to find a straight path, how to leave the criminal life and still fulfill dreams. If he could do it, hey, other people could do it, too.
“He was a real big boost and inspiration to me,” Lou Mack said. “I was just some punk kid, a bad kid locked up in drugs and violence. He showed me how to look beyond my nose. To this day I say that him coming to jail probably was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“It amazed me that he could adjust to being in that cell after living his extravagant life,” Victor Thomas, serving a sentence for burglary, said. “The guy was just like one of the boys. He showed us the scars all over his body from the bad, unlucky accidents he had while performing. All the plates, screws, and surgeries made him like the Six Million Dollar Man.”
Knievel hired Thomas, known throughout the jail as a talented artist, to sketch a series of pictures detailing his stay behind bars. The pictures didn’t necessarily have to show things he actually did in jail. Thomas captured him playing basketball (guarding an inmate with an enormous Afro), eating lunch, going through a strip search (rear view), sleeping on his bunk, signing autographs, signing in and signing out as part of the work-release program. Knievel said the pictures would be used in his future autobiography. There would be no cash payment, but Thomas would become famous when the world saw his art.
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