“Nothing ever came of it,” Thomas said. “But I don’t think he had any intention of coming through anyway.”
The work-release program was nothing less than idyllic under the circumstances. Hang around the hotel bar during the day. Have a cocktail, perhaps more than one. Spend the night signing autographs and telling campfire stories to people who really wanted to listen. Never show remorse. Not once. Knievel was spotted one day playing golf. He was wearing yellow shoes that Doug Sanders had given him. This was better than summer camp in the mountains.
Rosenfeld, the publicist, was in the backseat of the Stutz one work-release morning with Knievel and some other people, moving through the Hollywood smog, when Knievel suddenly ordered the chauffeur to take a right at the next driveway. The driveway led to the front gate at 20th Century, the scene of the crime against Saltman. Guards came out of their little booth to bar the way this time when they saw Knievel. It was a good laugh. The work-release program was a laugh.
The Los Angeles Times, as often happened with newspapers and situations that are too good to be true, soon took notice. On December 15, 1977, less than a month into Knievel’s sentence, a front-page story by veteran court reporter Bill Farr detailed a brewing storm about Knievel’s work-release situation. The headline was “Knievel’s Furlough Fuels Controversy.” An accompanying photo by Art Rogers was stretched across five columns and showed Knievel leaving jail, the chauffeur waiting next to the elongated Stutz. It was not exactly a scene out of The Birdman of Alcatraz.
“If I couldn’t be on this program, I’d end up having to file for bankruptcy, and that would not only hurt me and my family but a whole lot of other people I work with,” Knievel said in explanation. “But I’ll have to leave that to other people to say whether it’s a fair thing.”
The implication in the story was that his fame had given him a free pass. Ann Burnett, the deputy county probation officer, said again that Knievel was “a totally unsuitable candidate for work furlough.” Deputy District Attorney Stanley Weisberg, the prosecutor, decried Knievel’s continuing lack of remorse.
“My focus is on deterrence …,” Weisberg said. “As I have mentioned, he is a public figure. He claims a special relationship with the country’s youth. This status carries with it special responsibilities. One is to set an example for those who may wish to follow him.”
A story. On Christmas Eve, out on furlough, Knievel showed up for dinner at the Beverly Hills home of J. C. Agajanian, his old promoter. Agajanian had been through a rugged set of operations for lung cancer. Knievel wanted to cheer him up. A low public profile did not seem to be part of the plan. The daredevil arrived on a three-wheeled jet motorcycle that had been developed by Bob Truax for parades.
He wooshed down Sunset Boulevard, pulled into Agajanian’s circular driveway in the Trousdale Estates with an entrance that involved noise, sparks, flames, the usual stuff associated with jet engines. Agajanian’s family rushed outside to see what the commotion was.
“Evel drove the jet cycle around a little bit more, then we all went inside for dinner,” Agajanian’s son, J. C. Agajanian Jr., said. “He had to leave early to go back to jail, so we all went out to see him off. It was quite a sight, dark now, that thing roaring away with the flames coming out the back. Exciting.”
The next morning, the first thing Agajanian Jr. heard was crying. He found his mother in tears on the front lawn. Every flower, every bush had been scorched by the flames. The entire garden was ruined.
“It was a real mess,” he said. “That jet motorcycle put out a lot of heat.”
On Wednesday, January 3, 1978, the work-release situation became a mess. Knievel, who said he had won a big bet to open the new year when the underdog University of Washington upset the University of Michigan, 27–20, in the Rose Bowl behind quarterback Warren Moon (apparently you also could make a bet while on work-release), used part of the winnings to order up a dozen Cadillac limousines to transport the other 117 members of the program back and forth to their jobs. He said this was his New Year’s gift to his fellow residents in the jail. They would have the $17 per hour drivers, plus Cadillac limos, for the rest of the week, through Sunday.
“In order that this new year, 1978, may be started with a feeling of friendship, it is in personal gratitude that I offer the limousine and chauffeur service to my fellow inmates on a 24-hour a day basis …,” Knievel said in a press release. “Please accept this as an honest goodwill gesture for you and your families.”
Rosenfeld, the publicist, part of the operation, was the man who had ordered the cars from Carey Limousines and put out the press release through the City News Service, telling reporters that the event would happen. He drove to the Hall of Justice to see how well everything worked. He found chaos.
“I said, ‘How bad could it be?’ ” he said. “Then I got there. It was like the Oscars.”
Limousines were everywhere. They created a morning rush-hour gridlock. Some drivers had parked in the spaces for workers at the Hall of Justice, including the spot reserved for Sheriff Peter Pitchess. Some had double-parked in the street. Knievel, who was met this day by his own driver in the customized Cadillac pickup truck, a customized motorcycle sitting in the back, finally was convinced by his probation officer to cancel the cars.
The probation officer, Dennis Caldwell, said that the prisoners would put their work-release status in jeopardy by accepting the rides. Only ten of the eligible workers had signed up because of this threat. The project—if that was the right word—was not viable. Knievel reluctantly agreed. He said that he was disappointed, that he had acted only out of friendship and concern for his fellow inmates, whom he saw struggling every day to travel to work.
The final words on the venture came from two of the $17 per hour chauffeurs.
“It seems kind of wrong to be driving criminals around in these big cars,” one driver told Bill Farr of the L.A. Times. “But come to think of it, a lot of criminals drive around in Cadillacs anyway, so maybe it isn’t such a mockery of justice after all.”
“It’s kind of unusual,” the other driver said. “We usually take people around Beverly Hills.”
Knievel, of course, was the one passenger bound for Beverly Hills. And he had his own luxury transportation.
On Friday, January 5, 1977, two nights after the limousine extravaganza, an all-points bulletin was issued to local law enforcement agencies notifying them that Knievel had escaped from work-release. He had not returned to custody by 9:30 p.m. after one of those Polo Lounge days. The rules gave him a three-hour grace period after the 6:30 p.m. check-in time, and after that he was considered a fugitive. His absence was classified as an escape.
He had called, told probation officer Caldwell that he was upset by certain world news reports on television and that he was leaving the country “until it straightens itself out.” He didn’t specify what the “it” was, but a spokesman for the sheriff’s department said he understood that Knievel was referring to a tour of the Middle East by President Jimmy Carter. Or something like that. Someone suggested Knievel might be headed to Cuba.
Publicist Rosenfeld also received a call. Rosenfeld wasn’t home, but his wife answered. Knievel told her in a rambling, roundabout monologue that he was upset with the breakdown in the moral fiber of the United States. Or something like that. She told him that he should go back to jail.
“She wound up talking to him for a long time,” Rosenfeld said. “He kept saying that he wasn’t going back. She kept saying that he had to go back, that he’d be in too much trouble if he didn’t go. I think she’s the one who finally convinced him.”
He turned himself in at the Hall of Justice at two-forty in the morning on Saturday. He told watch commander Lieutenant George Corbett, “You wouldn’t believe the troubles I’m having.” These troubles were immediately extended as he was booked on a felony escape charge and transferred to a private cell, away from his new jailhouse friends and fans. His work-release privileges were rescinded.
His state of mind—his fractured state of mind—became part of the public record one week later. Fifty-three days after beginning to serve his sentence, seven days after his walkabout, he appeared before the three-member L.A. County Board of Parole Commissioners to appeal for his freedom. It was a memorable performance. His approach seemed to come straight from some 1940s black-and-white cinema vision of parole board drama.
He fought back tears. He pleaded. He begged. He gave a grand, over-the-top Evel Knievel performance.
“I need your help …,” he began in a shaky voice. “And you could parole me this minute if you believe in me.”
The hearing was held in a room inside the central jail. He was seated at a single chair in front of the panel, dressed in his prison blues. He was as forceful in his contrition as he was in any of his pre-jump homilies. He mentioned family, God, and Christian pop singer Anita Bryant. He blamed the media for society’s ills. He invoked the sadly departed image of Elvis. He admitted that he was pretty much broke, that he had squandered the millions that had come his way and now owed hundreds of thousands of dollars more. He lamented the loss of his daredevil youth. He praised Judge Rafeedie, “a fair man.” He damned Hustler magazine for wanting to run a centerfold spread of Jimmy Carter’s mother, Miss Lillian, naked. He missed only stray dogs, orphans, and spilt milk in his litany of sadness.
His trouble missing curfew … well, here, it started with Miss Rona Barrett saying on national television that he had been seen with “another woman” at a cocktail lounge while on work-release. That obviously wasn’t true, of course not, but his wife had seen the report, and his son had called from Montana and said his mom was despondent, and, well, that would get to anyone.
“I felt society was against me, that the press had treated me wrong and I didn’t care for this country …,” he said. “The press puts pressure on a lot of people, like a guy like Elvis Presley, who finally took his own life with drugs.”
Look at Hustler and the things that it did, the mean words that it said about the God-loving (anti-gay) Miss Bryant, the proposal about Miss Lillian, the asshole award it had given to none other than Los Angeles police chief Edward M. Davis, a fine man. What was going on with this country? The world in general was a mess. The world of Evel Knievel in particular was a mess. It all was a mess.
“I’m not a poet or a singer or a dancer,” he said. “I’m a professional risk-taker and at thirty-nine years old there is no future for me in this daredevil business. If you think like a young man at this age, you are dead.”
Two friends had flown from Butte to help bolster his case. (They were met at the airport by the chauffeur and the customized Cadillac pickup truck of work-release fame. A buzz of curbside interest suddenly surrounded the two men as they stepped into the cab and were driven into town.) The first to testify was Gary Winston, the county attorney in Butte. He asked that Knievel be granted a transfer to Butte for post-jail probation.
“I promise you it won’t be just a holiday for him,” Winston said.
The second witness was Father Joseph Finnegan, who ran a boys’ home at the old Hanson Packing Company. Father Finnegan detailed Knievel’s trips to the home to speak to the boys, his generosity of spirit, his invitations to both the boys and their parents to visit him at his house on the golf course. It was one of the few looks at any charitable enterprise by the man.
“He’d encourage the boys to stop smoking,” the father said. “He’d give them $50, $100 to stop. He was very good.”
The board listened to all of the words, asked very few questions, then decided not to decide. A special hearing already was scheduled in five days in Santa Monica before Judge Rafeedie. The district attorney, John Van de Kamp, had decided in the end not to prosecute the felony escape charge, so the hearing was added to determine Knievel’s immediate future in the California penal system. The parole board would await the decision of the court before making its own decision.
Judge Rafeedie was not amused by any of this.
“If a legitimate escape charge can be filed against Knievel, it should have been filed,” he said in the Times. “I don’t appreciate them throwing it back to me, but I will handle it.”
The judge’s crankiness had turned to base-level outrage by the time the hearing arrived. Looking down from his bench at a quiet, for once, Knievel, he said, flat out, “I don’t want to hear about this case anymore.” The judge then laid out the defendant with a gusto not seen since the many writers had gone to work on the daredevil three years earlier at Snake River Canyon.
Rafeedie characterized Knievel’s beating of Shelly Saltman as “an act of extreme cowardice,” not the “frontier justice” that Knievel seemed to think it was, not the “act of an heroic avenger.” The frontier justice argument was nonsense. Someone else held Saltman while Knievel beat him with a baseball bat. This was not the act of some fearless and courageous character, some childhood idol. This was a coward at work.
To Rafeedie, Knievel’s tumultuous and very public time in jail so far had indicated how little the man understood about the severity of his crime. The judge was fed up with all of it. He felt abused by Knievel’s conduct.
“Some of the show business stunts and PR pipe dreams like lining up limousines in front of the jail served to inflame the public and to discredit a program in which thousands of men have served with dignity,” the judge said. “You are not Evel Knievel, the daring daredevil, you are Robert C. Knievel, an inmate with a booking number. You ought to spend the rest of your time in jail in self-examination. Do your time in jail with some dignity.”
The afternoons at the Polo Lounge were done for the duration of his sentence. Work-release privileges were permanently rescinded. Knievel would be shipped to the Wayside Honor Rancho in Castaic. This was a long way from San Quentin perhaps, a minimum-security, unlocked facility where seventy-two convicts worked as gardeners, growing plants for the rest of the prison system, but it also was a hundred miles from Beverly Hills. The fun was done.
The important news about Knievel during his work-release follies—it had been less than two months, remember, since he entered jail, less than four months since he attacked Saltman—had taken place further back in the papers than these many curious adventures on page 1, often not in the papers at all, quiet items about business decisions being made, about lawsuits filed and lawsuits decided, loans called in or rejected, properties seized. This was where the true punishment was being delivered.
A T-shirt company in Helena wanted money for shirts that had been made, shipped, and never paid for. Watcha McCollum’s helicopter service still wanted the money for services rendered during the canyon jump. The town of Twin Falls wanted money for cleanup. The provider of portable toilets still wanted money for the toilets that were destroyed at the event. In Bal Harbour, Florida, the Transit Charter Company wanted $50,000 for the Dee Robinson renovations on its 116-foot Feadship, Evel Eye 1, that had not been authorized. The U.S. government wanted money from back taxes. The bill, with interest, now had crossed the $3 million mark. The state of Montana wanted money … the list did not seem to end. Oh, yes, a civil suit by Shelly Saltman for unspecified, but sure to be costly, damages already had begun its climb through the judicial process.
Our Hero’s working capital had pretty much disappeared, simply because he had spent everything. His credit line now had also disappeared in a hurry. Unable to generate new interest in his career, no matter what he did, even offering his spleen to the daredevil gods, importing limos for convicts, crying and pleading before the parole board, his prospects had disappeared.
The biggest blow of all came from Ideal and the toys. Zeke Rose, the PR veteran of the Snake River tour, had delivered the company’s blunt appraisal of the future for the Evel Knievel line on the day Knievel went to jail: the marketplace would decide. Christmas would be the test. The company was not happy with the events in Los Angeles.
“The company recognizes that it sells its products to children,” Rose
said, “and that it has a responsibility to the children and their parents.”
Christmas had arrived and departed. Sales, which had begun to shrink before the attack, had disappeared from the charts. The Knievel toys had been responsible for 18 percent of Ideal’s $137.6 million in sales during the previous fiscal year, ending on January 31, 1976. They had been the company’s biggest seller for the past three years. Now, before the end of this fiscal year, they were discontinued.
Lionel Weintraub, the president of Ideal Toys, knew the news before Christmas. He sent the good-bye letter on December 14, 1977.
Dear Evel—
I would like to take this opportunity to clear any misunderstanding which may exist concerning Ideal and its relationship with you and the toys that bear your name.
During the past five years, the sale of more than one hundred million dollars in Evel Knievel toys has been a revelation to the toy industry and testimony to your popularity and our ability to make quality products. It marked the first time that a successful toy was marketed bearing the name of a real person. Previously such successes were limited to dolls.
Despite the quality and durability of the toys and your heroic exploits and public concern for the safety and welfare of children, the sales of Evel Knievel toys were destined to decline. This year, that decline was sharper than anticipated.
I have always felt that our relationship was rewarding both personally and professionally, and trust you will emerge from your present difficulties to achieve whatever new goals you have set for yourself.
May the new year bring you and your family Peace, Health and Happiness.
Sincerely,
Lionel Weintraub
“Based on what happened last fall, there’s no reason to continue production,” Zeke Rose said as the company made the official announcement on March 28, 1978, that it was taking the toys off the marketplace.
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