Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (7 page)

Knievel was in Vegas for a middleweight title fight when he first clapped eyes on the spectacular fountains in front of Caesar’s grand entranceway. They gushed intermittently high up into the dry Vegas air and Evel realised straight away that they were perfectly suited to his needs: he vowed there and then to jump them. But even though he had built up a big-enough reputation to command national media coverage when he announced his jump, it wasn’t so easy gaining permission from the casino’s owners.

It is worth pointing out that Evel Knievel was a notorious yarn teller and it was often difficult to separate whole truths from half-truths, and half-truths from complete fantasy, when listening to his animated and entertaining speech. Over the course of almost 40 years he repeated and exaggerated the same tales to the point where he appeared to believe even the furthest-fetched stories himself. Knievel didn’t become the legend he is by telling modest, mundane anecdotes about himself; his larger-than-life character was very much part of the reason why he attained such fame, and his enthusiastic and often over-the-top story-telling went a long way to creating that character. Knievel himself may well have had the last laugh by telling tongue-in-cheek stories and fooling many into believing them. Indeed, it was once a running joke that in 20 minutes Knievel could tell enough yarns about his early life to keep a reporter busy for 20 years just checking them out. His famed rhetoric was exemplified in his explanation of how he gained permission to jump the Caesar’s fountains.

The day after the aforementioned Vegas title fight, Knievel called Caesar’s founder and executive director Jay Sarno, claiming to be a certain Frank Quinn from
Life
magazine. Knievel took up the story from both men’s points of view:

Knievel:
Do you know Eval Neval?

Sarno:
Eval Neval? Who the hell’s he?

Knievel:
He’s the guy who’s gonna jump the Grand Canyon, says he’s gonna jump over your hotel.

Sarno:
I heard about that nut, he ain’t gonna jump nothin’ around here. I gotta go, goodbye.

The following day, Knievel called Sarno again, this time posing as a reporter:

Knievel:
Hi, this is Larson with
Sports Illustrated.
You ever heard of Evel Neevle?

Sarno:
Evel Neevle? Who the hell’s this Evel Neevle?

Knievel:
He’s the guy that’s going to jump the Grand…

Sarno:
Oh yes, some guy called me yesterday about that guy. I don’t know, something around here…something’s going on. I don’t know. Call back.

Two days later, Knievel called again, this time impersonating a friend who worked for the ABC television network.

Knievel:
This is Dennis Lewen from ABC’s
Wide World of Sports.
Do you know Evel Knievel?

Sarno:
Eval Neval, Evel Neevle, Evel Knievel? Who is this crazy guy? Everybody’s calling me up about him. I think we’ve got a deal with him, I don’t know, call back.

With the ball rolling, Knievel then sent his fictitious business partners to work. Because he admired the Jewish community for their financial skills, Knievel had created three fictitious Jewish businessmen to head up his company, ‘Evel Knievel Enterprises’, the idea being that the list of names on his headed stationery would look impressive and persuade people to take him more seriously.

The president was named as H. Carl Forbes, the vice president was Mike Rosenstein and the secretary and treasurer listed as Carl Goldberg. Knievel himself did a very fine, if stereotyped, Jewish/ American accent and claimed he often called people up, on his own behalf, in this accent pretending to be any one of the three fictitious businessmen. With Sarno at least now aware of who Evel Knievel was, it was time for the killer punch and this time Knievel called impersonating Rosenstein:

Knievel:
Hello, this is Rosenstein.

Sarno:
Who?

Knievel:
Rosenstein.

Sarno:
Who the hell do you represent?

Knievel:
Evel Knievel. He’s going to be in your office this afternoon about two o’clock to see you about this big jump. He’s gonna make you famous. Nobody ever heard of this Caesar’s Palace.

With the meeting set up, Knievel finished the story. ‘So I go to this Sarno, knock on his door, the secretary lets me into these big executive offices; she ran to the back [office] door and says, “It’s him, it’s him.” He comes running out of his office and says, “Kid, where you been? I been looking all over for you!”’

It’s an unlikely scenario and would depend on an extremely switched-on businessman like Sarno being fooled no less than four times, but it is indicative of the way Knievel worked, which was very much along the same lines as ex-carnival huckster Colonel Tom Parker who became a multi-millionaire representing Elvis Presley by promoting him in a similarly unorthodox but effective fashion. Knievel never took the obvious approach when it came to promoting himself, and in an era before PR executives and massive marketing agencies became all too commonplace his imagination and flair for self-promotion served him well.

However, Knievel actually gained permission to jump the fountains at Caesar’s, and he bartered a deal with Sarno which would see him performing three leaps there: on New Year’s Eve 1967 and on 3 and 6 January 1968. Promotional posters were placed all over Las Vegas inviting the public to see Knievel, who was already billing himself as ‘The King of Stuntmen’. By leaping over what the promotional posters billed as the ‘highest fountains in the world’, Knievel was claiming a world-record attempt and the posters even boasted that ‘a two-hundred-yard elevated takeoff runway ramp’ was ‘now under construction’.

The pre-jump publicity campaign was enough to rouse interest among Vegas regulars who would never dream of showing up at a small-time county fair, and crowd estimates on the evening of 31 December reached 25,000 – a figure which would later prompt Evel to boast that ‘Frank Sinatra couldn’t draw that crowd if he jumped naked off the hotel roof.’

With the ramp in place, the rear suspension on his Triumph Bonneville stiffened and special cams, pistons and valve springs fitted to give faster acceleration and a higher top speed, Knievel readied himself for his 2 p.m. matinée performance with what had, by now, become his standard preparatory routine: a few shots of Wild Turkey bourbon and a quick prayer. He was confident to the point that even a bad omen en route to his waiting motorcycle didn’t dampen his spirits. ‘The one thing I remember was coming downstairs [from his hotel room] for the jump. I’d had my good-luck shot of Wild Turkey, like always, and was walking past the tables and stopped at the roulette and bet $100 on red. It was black. I thought nothing of it, just put my helmet under my arm and kept walking.’

As he appeared outside the entrance to the hotel to the cheers of the crowd, Knievel waved and soaked up the applause before donning his helmet and mounting his motorcycle. Under normal circumstances, Evel would perform a few practice runs by heading straight for the take-off ramp before veering off left or right at the last second. At Caesar’s, however, there simply wasn’t the space to allow for such a luxury and Knievel would effectively be flying blind. All he could do was dump the clutch on the Triumph, hope his rear wheel would hook up and grip the wooden runway, then kick his way up through the gears to gain whatever speed he felt he needed. If he dropped the clutch too harshly when setting off his back wheel could easily lose traction and spin up, and if he fluffed just one gear change he could easily fail to gain the required momentum. There could be no stopping at speed halfway up a ramp to have another run. Apart from possible rider error, there was also the danger of component failure – and that risk was much more pronounced in Knievel’s era than it is now. British bikes in particular, like Knievel’s Triumph, were renowned for spouting oil leaks back in the 1960s, and that was only one potentially lethal hazard. Another very real danger was the possibility of a chain snapping under the strain of the launch, leaving Evel with no drive and the threat of the chain becoming entangled in his rear wheel, which would almost inevitably cause a crash. Or the engine could develop a misfire for any number of reasons, again leaving Knievel down on power and unable to clear the distance. His throttle could stick open as he sped down the runway, meaning he would be travelling way too fast and would overshoot his landing ramp, again putting him in great personal danger. And those were just the problems he faced on the take-off. Other problems, like a rear wheel collapsing on landing (which would actually happen during a 1970 jump in Seattle), or the rear suspension bottoming out and spitting him off (which happened many times), or even brake failure, were all to be considered. Motorcycle jumping, especially in Knievel’s pioneering days, was extremely dangerous.

But it was danger which had drawn 25,000 people out onto the streets of Las Vegas and Knievel wasn’t about to have any second thoughts and disappoint the biggest audience he had ever attracted. It was make-or-break time and Evel knew it. His reputation and career would stand or fall on this one jump alone. There could be no backing out, even if his nerves were screaming, his palms sweating and his heart racing.

With Knievel and his mechanics satisfied that the bike was set up as well as it could be and sounding as it should as he revved it in neutral, Knievel finally decided the crowd had waited long enough and kicked the Triumph into gear. He gunned the bike down the runway, revving it out to maximum revs in each gear until he reached 90mph. It was the highest speed he could achieve in the distance he had to work with but he still had no more idea than anyone watching if it would be enough to carry him to safety. Still, Evel’s run was looking good. He seemed to have the speed and his launch looked perfect; he even had the measure of the bike in mid-air, purposefully dropping its tail in search of a smooth rear-wheel landing. He sailed through the spray of the ornate fountains, travelling what seemed an impossible distance for anything without wings, and the Las Vegas revellers gawped in disbelief at what they were seeing. He had done it. This crazy kid had actually gone through with what he’d promised, and hell, did it look impressive. As man and machine descended back down towards the landing ramp things still looked good; it still looked like Knievel was going to pull off the apparently impossible. Then his worst nightmare happened.

Just one foot further and Evel may well have got away with it. He’d travelled a distance of 141 feet – way further than he’d ever managed before – but he landed just inches short and his rear wheel smashed into the safety deck which guarded the lethal edge of his landing ramp to prevent him from being decapitated in the event of him falling short.

The term ‘rag doll’ is over-used when describing a rider being thrown from a motorcycle either in racing or stunt riding, but there is no other way to describe how Knievel’s body was slammed and battered down the Tarmac when the impact of the landing threw him off the bike, tearing its handlebars from his grasp. He was thrown over the front of the motorcycle and landed first on his back before tumbling at great speed end over end, limbs flailing helplessly as his head took an equally brutal battering from the Las Vegas asphalt. The crowd, who split seconds earlier were expecting victory, looked on in horror.

Some reports said that Evel actually slid further than he had jumped, and the only thing which eventually stopped him from tumbling even further was a decorative brick wall which he slammed into while still carrying speed. What happened next was nothing short of chaos. The crowd went hysterical, screaming and wailing, convinced they had just witnessed a man killing himself right in front of their eyes. Smoke poured from the twisted metal of the once-immaculate Triumph as medical crews, hangers-on and rubberneckers surged round Knievel’s battered and apparently lifeless body. General panic reigned until Knievel was removed by ambulance to the nearby Sunrise Hospital. It would be 29 days before he woke up again, but when he did, he would be a star.

The Caesar’s Palace crash resulted in the worst injuries of Evel Knievel’s career. He landed so hard that his left hip was forced up into the pelvis, leaving both structures comprehensively smashed. He also broke his nose, sustained several broken ribs, smashed out several teeth and fractured his jaw. But the immediate and most serious concern was for the head injuries which left Knievel in a coma. His head had taken repeated blows as he was thrown viciously along the Tarmac, and even though crash-helmet technology in 1967 was extremely basic by today’s standards, Knievel’s Bell Magnum helmet had at least saved his life. In acknowledgement of the fact, he has kept it to this day.

Evel lay unconscious for day after day and week after week with his devoted wife Linda at his bedside, wondering if her husband would ever wake up and, if he did, would he be brain-damaged? Would he be able to walk again? She knew better than anyone that a man as active and daring as her husband would never tolerate being confined to a wheelchair and would never be able to accept being dependent on others.

As the weeks crept by, feeling like years, it became increasingly unlikely that Evel would regain consciousness, but after an agonising 29 days for Linda, Kelly, Robbie and Tracey Lynn, the man they all loved and admired showed his true mettle: he woke up. The family, not to mention the nurses who had tended him night and day, were understandably beside themselves when Knievel not only opened his eyes but proved that he’d lost none of his abilities of speech and understanding. It was a moment of unadulterated joy that few experience. Evel Knievel had, to all intents and purposes, prised himself from the very jaws of death and returned to life.

When he was stable enough and when his doctors were confident that he was in a fit state of mind to be told, Knievel learned the true extent of his horrific injuries, which, while they were gruesome and painful, were at least not life-threatening. A successful operation was carried out to insert an 18-inch steel rod between his left femur and pelvis, but, as a result of his hip being pushed up into his pelvis, his left leg was now almost an inch shorter than his right. Knievel would be left with a permanent limp, but that seemed almost irrelevant; the only thing that mattered was that he was alive when he really shouldn’t have been.

Surprisingly, Knievel remembered every bone-crushing moment of the crash (at least up to the point of being knocked out), but to this day he still doesn’t know quite what went wrong. When asked at what point he knew he wasn’t going to make the landing he replied, ‘I never knew it. I thought I’d made it. It was a surprise and a shock – a big shock.’ He added, ‘I was hurt real bad – landed on my head. That was the most serious of all. I remember the whole thing; every tiny bit of it. There was a little six-foot safety ramp and I landed right on top of it. It was just a piece of steel sitting on a van.’

When asked if he had any idea what actually went wrong, Knievel replied ‘I just wasn’t going fast enough’, while also explaining that he simply
couldn’t
go fast enough because the run-up ramp wasn’t long enough. But what was done was done, and, besides learning from the experience, there was nothing more that could be done about it. All he could do now was focus on getting better.

Knievel remained in hospital for a total of 37 days. It wasn’t his first hospital stay and it wouldn’t be his last, but it was certainly his longest. As he lay in bed recuperating, the world outside was going Knievel crazy, and it was largely down to the fact that Evel’s horrific crash had been captured in all its bone-crunching detail, not by ABC or any of the other mainstream networks but by future
Dynasty
actress Linda Evans. Evans was at the time married to movie director John Derek, who later married and made a huge star out of Bo Derek. Many years later, Knievel actually claimed that he was responsible for introducing John Derek to Bo, despite their insistence to the contrary. ‘John was filming a project at a Harley store where Bo worked for her father. I didn’t know her but I introduced her to John anyway. She has a sister that looks almost exactly like her. Anyway, to hear John and Bo say it they met on the Mediterranean. They met at a Harley store in Long Beach.’

Whatever the case, Knievel had struck a deal with John and Linda Derek allowing them to exclusively shoot his Caesar’s jump on 16mm IMO cameras. It proved to be a wise move, as Knievel explained: ‘The film that was shot of the Caesar’s Palace jump has been said by a lot of people who are in the film business to be one of the greatest pieces of film footage ever filmed. This was filmed by one of the most beautiful blondes; her name was Linda Evans. John Derek shot the jump at the take-off and Linda shot the landing and the accident.’

The footage shot by the couple was aired over and over again, both in real time and in slow motion, and it was unquestionably responsible for transforming Evel Knievel from a fairground attraction into a national star. So frequently was the footage shown that it was widely believed to have been played more times than any piece of film since the infamous Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas back in 1963. Knievel always believed that ‘In any adversity there is the seed of benefit’, and that never proved to be more true for Knievel than now. He may have come close to losing his life, and, having survived, had to endure enormous pain as physiotherapists forced his limbs back to life, but the upside of the Palace crash was that it had captured the attention of the great American public: Evel was famous at last.

Someone crashing a motorcycle is, in itself, not usually an act which guarantees widespread mainstream celebrity. If it was there would be no end of motorcycle racers and stuntmen who would qualify as household names. While the American public had thrilled, cringed and been utterly amazed upon seeing footage of Knievel’s accident, it was the unsaid, almost intangible reasons behind why he had crashed – why he had been prepared to crash – which appealed to the collective subconscious.

For the first time in modern history, Americans had become disillusioned with their government, their society, and their country as a whole by the late 1960s. The massively unpopular war in Vietnam, which America had been involved in since 1961, had polarised the nation, and mass protests and riots were literally tearing the country apart. Being an American suddenly wasn’t so simple any more. Millions believed the government was wrong to commit so many young soldiers to lay down their lives in a war on the other side of the world for a cause most did not understand.

The American people were, quite simply, confused. It was no longer clear-cut as to who were the heroes and who were the villains. Thousands performed the previously unthinkable act of burning the Old Glory, the starred and striped American flag. For one brief moment in time, Evel Knievel offered an escape. He offered Americans the kind of hero they could believe in, one who gave hope and inspiration to anyone facing problems, challenges, danger – or all three combined. Here was a man who gave his word that he would attempt to fulfil his dream right there in front of anyone who cared to watch and he would not back out of the challenge, even in the face of hideous injury or possible death. If it is true that God loves a tryer then so does the public, and Evel’s was a simple one-act stage play which preached the message that if you want to achieve something then don’t let fear get in your way. In a modern-day version of Robert the Bruce and his spider, he encouraged the nation to believe that if at first you don’t succeed then try and try again. ‘I always said you can fall many times in life but you’re never a failure as long as you try to get back up. Use your body or use your head, or use anything you got left to be a worthwhile human being. And I think America needed that kind of figure when it was on its knees with Vietnam. You have dreams in your life which require taking risks, and if you see someone else taking risks to get what they want you are inspired to try yourself.’

Knievel was more than a performer; he offered a service to his audience. Too many worked in dull nine-to-five jobs and would never have the chance – or courage – to attempt anything as dangerous and outrageous as Evel did. He symbolised all their struggles and condensed them into a lightning strike, death or glory leap, which he would either triumph over or suffer in spilled blood and crushed bones. Those without his courage – and there were many – could watch from afar as he took all the risks.

The phenomenal success of the James Bond movies has often been attributed to the fact that all men want to be like Bond while all women want to be
with
Bond, and Knievel struck a very similar chord in the psyches of his male and female audiences. While the men were content to admire his guts, the women were attracted to him not only for his movie-star looks but also because of his courage. And Knievel’s appeal to kids as some kind of real-life superhero who flies through air is easy to understand. Evel Knievel had all angles covered.

When asked to reflect on what he thought made him so famous and universally appealing after Caesar’s, Knievel answered, ‘America was down on its ass when I came along and needed somebody who was truthful and honest; someone who would spill blood and break bones and suffer brain concussions. Somebody who wasn’t a phoney. People pulled for me because they pulled for the underdog. I got hurt bad but I kept trying – I refused to lay down and die. I always tried to get up.’

As he recovered in hospital, Knievel slowly became aware of his growing celebrity. He was inundated with requests for interviews for radio and television and would proudly pore over the printed newspaper and magazine stories in his bed. But something else was beginning to take shape, something that was harder to put a finger on than just fame: he was slowly becoming an ‘attitude’. Comedians and chat-show hosts began referring to anyone doing something daring or dangerous as being worthy of Evel Knievel. The name began to enter the American language on an everyday basis: ‘Not even Evel Knievel would try that’, ‘Who do you think you are, Evel Knievel?’, or, ‘He’s broken more bones than Evel Knievel.’

In the ensuing years, even major Hollywood movies would pass reference to the daredevil whenever a scene gave rise to a mention. In the 1998 Bruce Willis movie
Armageddon,
Ben Affleck is about to leap a space buggy over a canyon on an asteroid but not before he turns to his passenger and asks, ‘You ever heard of Evel Knievel?’ In the 2003 remake of
The Italian Job,
when one of the lead characters falls off his motorcycle another quips, ‘Help Knievel get up for his next jump.’ Even the James Bond movies paid homage in 1974’s
The Man with the Golden Gun.
When Roger Moore as Bond prepares to make a leap over a river in a car, which will include a 360-degree barrel roll, he too asks his passenger, ‘Ever heard of Evel Knievel?’ There were countless more examples on television.

To become a byword for anything crazy, daring, risky or down-right mad; to become the name that most people the world over associate with motorcycle riding was probably Evel Knievel’s single most enduring achievement, and it all started with his Caesar’s Palace wipe-out.

Ironically, the fact that he had failed in his attempt to clear the fountains had made him way more famous than he would have been if he had completed the challenge successfully. It was a valuable lesson to Knievel, which taught him to always seek advantage in an apparently disadvantageous situation. He even managed to turn the fact that he had a limp to his advantage by obtaining one of the most instantly recognisable Knievel props – his famous jewelled cane.

While he did have a genuine physical need for such a device, it was typical of Evel to seek out something different, something which would uniquely identify him as well as adding a touch of glitz, and for that the cane was perfect. But just like his name, the origins of the cane are shrouded in the contradictions and myths of Knievel folklore. He often claimed the cane dated back to 1883 when it had belonged to the mayor of Philadelphia, but he would then contradict this by admitting it was custom-made for him by his jeweller friend, G. Darrell Olson. It certainly seems odd that the mayor of Philadelphia would have owned a cane featuring a motorcycle engraved into its gold top, since motorcycles hadn’t even been invented then! In another version of the story, Evel said he picked the cane up from a pawnshop in Spokane, Washington for $35 and was later offered $35,000 for it by legendary pianist and entertainer Liberace. Knievel refused the offer.

What was never in doubt, however, was that his cane (or at least one of them, for there appears to have been several incarnations) opened up to reveal six shots of Wild Turkey. Knievel even demonstrated this novelty on national television, explaining how the top of the cane screwed off to allow access to six test-tube-style vials of booze. The true origins of the prop are ultimately irrelevant; what matters is that instead of appearing like a crippled old man after his operation, Knievel emerged with even more swagger and lordliness, his cane becoming as much a recognisable part of him as a Stetson was to John Wayne.

After leaving the Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas, Knievel was lauded as a celebrity and he milked it for all it was worth. After all, this was what he had been striving to achieve for so many years. Having attempted numerous scams and successive oddball professions, each seeming doomed to failure, he had finally hit upon a formula that the public seemed to love and he was going to make the most of it. He could hardly fail to be aware that such a novelty act carried with it the risk of being a mere flash in the pan; a sideshow with a sell-by date. If this was to be Knievel’s 15 minutes of Warholian fame, he sure as hell wasn’t going to waste it.

In today’s climate of manufactured fame, Knievel would have been sucked in by stylists, PR people, marketing companies and spin doctors, but in 1968 he had the intuition to do it all by himself and quickly set about growing into the role of a celebrity. He started hanging out in the glitziest bars, clubs and casinos in Vegas, began to wear increasingly loud and ostentatious clothes, rode around in flash cars and dated beautiful women, ignoring the fact that he was a married father of three.