Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (21 page)

But such excitement was rare, as Knievel spent most of his time just roaming America alone in his bus. The only other occasions when he appeared in public were whenever he could score a few bucks for appearing at the opening of a new car-showroom or at some golf tournament as a very second-rate celebrity, living off the fumes of his former glory and churning out the by now well-rehearsed anecdotes.

Desperate to see some sort of light at the end of his long, dark tunnel, Evel once again questioned the existence of a god, and asked Him to send a sign to prove He existed and hadn’t completely abandoned the old daredevil he appeared to have spared so many times in the past. In a blistering tirade worthy of an evangelical preacher, he ranted, ‘When I pray and when I question God I always say, “God, if you’re really there, since I’m alone driving this motorhome down the road, I’m between Albuquerque and Phoenix, prove to me that you’re here; send an angel down here in the middle of this road. Stop me right now, I’ll let the angel in. Let this angel talk to me and tell me that you’re real, that I better abide by the ten commandments, and that I better believe in God and do what’s right. Once that angel has living proof that you are there…” Sometimes I think, “Maybe he sent the baby [Alicia]. Maybe the baby’s the angel.” I thought to myself, “I’ve got a beautiful family, I’ve got a beautiful wife and a little baby. There’s more to life than just wasting yourself on alcohol.”’

The thought inspired Evel to spend more time with Linda and Alicia, and, after two years of drifting aimlessly, he returned home to pick them up before returning to life on the road, this time with his family in tow. Knievel truly seemed to dote on his youngest daughter and treasured the time he spent with her on the road. ‘The most precious times and special times with her are when I get to help her get into her little bath-tub, dry her off and hold her in my arms. Say her prayers with her before she goes to bed, kiss her goodnight and let her know that her daddy cares about her and that I love her. It’s not that I love her more than I did my other children, I think I really just appreciate her so much because I’m older and I’m not out trying to conquer the world, and I know how fast my other kids grew up.’

In a rare television interview in 1986, Linda explained how Alicia had helped to reunite the family after such a trying time. ‘It comes to a point where everybody needs to be needed, to be loved, and I felt my husband came to that point when he lost everything. He thought that he’d never run out of money and when he did it was a shock. It took him a couple of years to get over it. I thought that God loved him enough to give us this little girl. God placed a special love within her because right from the beginning she always loved her daddy. She’s been very special to him and of course to me because she’s so full of love. And he [Evel] can holler and yell at her and she’ll just go over to him and give him a big hug and kiss and he’ll just melt right back down.’

In 1986, the first post-famous documentary was made on Evel Knievel by Twin Tower Enterprises (
The Last of the Gladiators: Evel Knievel
), giving the retired stuntman his first chance to tell of his fall from fame and his financial ruin. It also gave him the opportunity to make a few dollars and to be paraded in front of an audience again. Evel allowed the film crew onboard his bus and reviewed his rise to fame and his fall from it. He also admitted he had been an alcoholic but claimed his ‘angel’ Alicia had cured him of it and that he was once again happy living with his family on the bus. Alicia herself, at just six years old, explained how she stopped her father from drinking. ‘Every time he got a whisky I’d pour it on the floor. I said, “If you don’t quit drinking I’m gonna pour every single bottle down on the floor.” So he quit drinking and…so…I made him quit!’

Knievel told the cameras that he had beaten his addiction to alcohol, saying, ‘The first couple of weeks were tough – just murder. But I got through it and all of a sudden it just became easier for me each and every day and I finally licked it.’ It wasn’t to last. Within months of the documentary being shown, Knievel was back on the bottle and the happy family atmosphere he had strived so hard to portray finally collapsed once and for all. Things were about to get even worse for Evel Knievel.

If golfing seemed a rather quaint pastime for a retired daredevil, the other big passion which had crept into Evel’s life was even more surprising: he was dedicating much of his spare time (and he now had a lot of it) to painting. Although he had never mentioned it when he was at the peak of his fame as a daredevil jumper, Knievel now claimed that he had always been interested in art. However, only in the late Seventies and the Eighties did he have the time to pursue it more fully under the guidance of long-term friend and painter Jack Ferriter, who used to paint Knievel’s trucks, planes, bikes and trailers. ‘I was always creative and started painting when I was eight years old, but it wasn’t until the Seventies that I truly understood the wonderful value of art. Jack Ferriter, an artist and genius who captures American history as well as any artist, including C.M. Russell, taught me the gentle stroke of a brush. You know, it’s funny; one of the last things in the world people want to buy is art, especially from a guy with a reputation like I’ve got as a daredevil. Boy is it tough to overcome it and sell yourself as an artist.’

But even when it came to painting there were those who doubted Knievel’s integrity, claiming it was just another scam in the Knievel book of cons. In his book,
Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel,
author Steve Mandich suggests that Knievel was simply adding his signature to Ferriter’s work and passing it off as his own as a means of making cash. Mandich claims to have the testimony of an artist (who remains unnamed) in Butte who was at school with Knievel and who says he was once approached by the daredevil and asked if he’d think about painting some pictures and allowing Evel to put his name to them. The pair could then sell them for handsome sums by exploiting Evel’s name and then split the cash. The artist in question refused the alleged offer from Knievel but thinks it not beyond the realms of possibility that Knievel had managed to strike a deal with Jack Ferriter for the same purposes.

Knievel’s paintings, mainly of American wildlife and Wild West scenes – with the odd foray into portraits of himself and even one of Mother Teresa in which he included his own blood – do bear a striking resemblance to Ferriter’s, but that may be expected if Ferriter did indeed tutor him and Knievel followed his lead blindly without developing his own individual style. Interestingly, Evel has been filmed in a studio putting the finishing touches to a painting in the documentary
The Last of the Gladiators: Evel Knievel,
but since he is merely dabbing his brush here and there and the painting is practically complete it is impossible to say if he is genuinely finishing one of his own paintings or merely touching up one of Ferriter’s. Naturally, both men vehemently denied any suggestion that the Knievel paintings were not genuine. In fact, Knievel was fond of boasting about the compliments his artwork received: ‘The president of Brown & Bigelow, which is a big calendar company in Minneapolis and one of the biggest greeting-card companies in the world…he told me he’s never seen anything in the world better than that watercolour I did of Mother Teresa, and he told me that I’d never do anything better; that it was the best that he’d ever seen in his life.’

Whatever the case, the paintings provided Knievel with at least some money, thanks to a tie-in with the Legend’s (sic) Corporation of North Royalton, Ohio, who bought the rights to his lifetime’s work in 1983. Knievel would spend several months in a studio in Cleveland before packing the paintings into his bus and touting them round the States, hoping to find individual or bulk buyers or anyone who was willing to display them. Once again, he started making some public appearances, this time to promote the paintings, but it was a far cry from the scenes of hysteria which used to surround him when he appeared in person in the mid-1970s.

Knievel’s nomadic existence continued as one year drifted into another and he seemed destined to spend the rest of his days aimlessly following the American freeways, completely forgotten by the public. As he bitterly noted, ‘Being a hero in America is the shortest-lived profession that anybody could hope to participate in – or hope not to participate in.’ He bitterly added, ‘You can be famous for a lot of things. You can be a Nobel-prize winner; you can be the fattest guy in the world; you can be the guy with the smallest penis. Whatever it is, enjoy it. It don’t last forever.’

By the mid-1980s Linda had returned home to Butte, tired of Evel’s drunken rages and bitterness at losing his fame and fortune. Of the wife who had stood by him for so many years, an ungrateful Knievel could only say of her return to Butte, ‘She was bitching too much and I can’t live with that. You know, I wasn’t put on this earth to sit and listen to bitching all the time. I was put here to have fun. A woman is for loving and caring for; who said they have to bitch? I have got no time for all that.’

With his wife no longer there to restrict him, Knievel fell even deeper into the seedy life of a vagrant with no fixed abode and began to seek his sexual pleasures among the professional women of the streets. It was another measure of how far he had fallen: 10 years before he was hiring bodyguards to fight off the attentions of beautiful young women and now he was stalking the city streets hoping to pay for sexual favours. How often Knievel participated in such behaviour was known only by him, and this more sordid side of his life may never have come to light had he not approached an undercover policewoman in Kansas City named Cheri Williams, who was posing as a prostitute as part of an undercover operation to trap men like Knievel.

Evel was arrested on charges of soliciting and was once more fêted by the media, but again for all the wrong reasons. His arrest came just three months after the release of the
Gladiator
documentary in which he had gone to great lengths to prove himself a doting parent and loving husband. At a press conference held a week after his arrest, Evel typically put some spin on the situation and claimed he had known all along that the woman was an undercover cop and that all he had done was insult her. ‘There’s a little evil in all of us,’ he said, ‘but there might be a little more evil in your police department than there is in me.’ Despite his initial claim that he did not try to solicit Cheri Williams, he did eventually plead guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct on 23 July 1986 and was fined $200. The damage to his reputation was somewhat more substantial.

Knievel’s unhappy Eighties continued: he was drinking again, hustling on the golf course and gambling any winnings he picked up. When times grew particularly hard he wasn’t too proud to accept handouts from old friends either. The late television presenter Flip Williams had been a good friend of Evel’s in the 1970s and was one of several friends who were willing to help out a man who was down on his luck, as Evel explained: ‘I was at Turnberry in North Miami playing golf. One night at the bar I was tapped on the shoulder and it was Flip’s son. He handed me a cheque for $5,000 and said, “This is from my dad. He forgot to pay you on a golf bet while in Butte.” Flip didn’t owe me anything. He knew I was in financial trouble. I shall never forget him.’

Stumbling from one crisis to the next, Evel reappeared in the newspapers in 1989 amid another sex scandal. He had been playing golf with a friend named Clarence Paulsen before heading to the bar of the Ridpath Hotel in Spokane where the two were staying. At one point, Knievel announced he was going up to his room for a nap and left Paulsen alone at the bar. At around 9 p.m., Paulsen obtained a key to Knievel’s room from reception, claiming that Evel had asked him to wake him at that time. When he opened the door he was more than a little shocked to find Knievel in bed with his (Paulsen’s) ex-girlfriend. According to Evel, Paulsen attacked him and severely beat him, though Paulsen has always denied this.

At first, Evel tried to keep the matter secret, not wanting to appear in the press yet again for sordid doings. But when a local newspaper picked up on the story and made the matter public he decided to sue the Ridpath Hotel for invasion of privacy, on the grounds that a staff member had given Paulsen a key to his room. Knievel said it was this action which had caused him severe injuries and subsequent depression as well as public humiliation. He sought $130,000 in damages and was actually awarded $51,000, but not until 1995. But once again the case proved that public interest in Evel Knievel in the 1980s was so low that the only time he ever made the news was when he got into more trouble with the law; after all, no newspaper can ignore a ‘former celebrity in trouble’ story.

As the Eighties gave way to the Nineties, Knievel’s tax bill had soared to $7.6 million, meaning that, added to the money he still owed Sheldon Saltman, he was in debt to the tune of $20 million. There still seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel, no hope of ever making enough money to pay off his debts, no way of regaining the fame that he had so coveted and no way of reconciling with his wife, whose ever-stronger religious beliefs seemed to annoy Evel as much as his erratic and sordid behaviour annoyed Linda. Their marriage was effectively over by the mid-1980s although they never officially divorced until December of 1997.

Conservative and traditional as she was, Linda had desperately wanted to remain married and provide a solid upbringing for Alicia, and, to her credit, she endured more than most in pursuit of her goal. ‘When you get married, you stay married and that’s the way it is. I didn’t want step-moms and step-dads around and I didn’t want to be alone.’ But everyone has their breaking point and Linda finally reached hers as far as any meaningful relationship with Evel was concerned. They still stayed in touch, but from the mid-1980s onwards Knievel had effectively been operating as a single man. There wasn’t much he could be credited with when it came to being a husband but he at least owned up to the fact that the failure of his marriage was his fault alone. ‘There is only one bastard in this family and that’s me. There’s never been a bad day with myself and my wife that was not my fault.’

Despite his mounting troubles, Knievel finally found something to smile about in 1991; something that made his life worth living again. At the ripe old age of 52, Evel fell in love. Her name was Krystal Kennedy and she was a 21-year-old senior on the Florida State University golfing team. Evel was already looking much older than his 52 years by the time the pair met at a charity golf match in Largo, Florida, but the age gap was not about to stop him turning on the charm he’d practised on countless girls over the years. After all, he
was
still Evel Knievel and he
had
been a major star, and it wouldn’t be the first time that an impressionable young girl had fallen for a much older man under similar circumstances. Evel, as usual, put his own slant on the age issue, saying, ‘She’s a little young for me but what the hell – if she dies, she dies.’ When the question of the age gap was put to him seriously he simply said, ‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about; I’ve had young women, I’ve had old women. So what?’

The only real problem for Evel was that Krystal told him on the day they met that she was due to be married in two weeks, but even that didn’t put him off. Ignoring the fact that Kennedy had a fiancé, he confessed to being ‘infatuated with her beauty, her smile and her personality’ and added, ‘I immediately knew pursuing Krystal was the right thing to do.’

For her part, Krystal certainly didn’t seem to be completely suckered in by Knievel’s boasts and storytelling. On the contrary, she appeared to enjoy his hoopla for what it was while being able to see right through him. ‘I never met anybody in my life who had more colourful stories than he does. He weaves fact with fiction. There’s a fine line there. He’s good at that. That’s the great thing with him – he can look you right in the eye and tell you a story and you don’t know whether to believe him or not.’

Krystal believed enough of it to break off her engagement and join Knievel in his luxury bus on his apparently never-ending tour of the US. It seemed a partnership made in heaven: both loved to golf, both were good at it, and both loved to drink, party and gamble, pastimes they both excelled at too. It became even easier for Evel to hustle and win money on the golf course with Krystal in tow. He could bluff his opponents by feigning lack of mobility from his battered limbs while claiming that Krystal was just a little girl who hadn’t played much. But both were more than capable of pulling out the right shots when they mattered, usually on the last hole when their opponents thought they had the win in the bag.

When they weren’t staying in hotels and travelling around the country (which accounted for at least nine months of any given year), or back in Vegas – where Knievel had started hanging out again after ten years of being disillusioned with the city – the two stayed in Krystal’s condo which overlooked the golf course in Clearwater, Florida.

Life seemed to have taken a turn for the better for Evel and he draped his young blonde on his arm like a prize trophy. Instead of feeling foolish for dating someone who was younger than three of his four children, Knievel was proud to be seen with Krystal and having a much younger partner obviously massaged his ego. He may not have been in a strong financial position but the pair were earning enough by hustling on the golf course to get by, and, since bets on a golf course were usually paid in cash, it meant the IRS couldn’t seize any of their winnings.

While Knievel may have found happiness of a sort away from the limelight, something incredible was about to happen which he could never have foreseen; something that would completely change his life. It started slowly then gathered pace before positively snowballing into nothing short of a national craze. It was a revival; a revival that was instigated by a nostalgia for lost youth; a revival of everything and anything connected with the 1970s. Slowly but surely, the decade everyone had once tried to forget as being embarrassingly non-stylish was gradually becoming cool again, and the impact on Knievel, one of the true icons of the decade, would be massive. The light at the end of the tunnel that Evel had been waiting for was ignited slowly and dimly but would grow into an almost blinding brightness. Evel Knievel was about to make a comeback.