Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (8 page)

He felt he had been given a second chance at life and was selfishly determined to enjoy it in every way he could. If his public increasingly built his image up as that of a fearless gladiator, a swaggering, gunslinging cowboy who stared death in the face and laughed at its inability to claim him, then so much the better – it was all good for business. In fact, Knievel was quite happy to add fuel to the fire by telling wild tales about his past to anyone who would listen and he certainly commanded the attention of many. At this point, Knievel’s stories were all fresh and new, and his audiences revelled in listening to his tales of derring-do as much as he enjoyed telling them. Few celebrities cherished the limelight as much as Evel did.

When he had been in a coma it was uncertain if Knievel would ever wake up again. He did. When he did awake, it was uncertain if he’d ever be able to walk again. He did. When he could hobble around, it was by no means certain that he’d ever be able to ride a motorcycle again; and when he did that it was still not known if he would ever be able to jump again. Having announced his intention to jump again from his hospital bed, Knievel knew he had to capitalise on his newfound fame quickly before it dissipated. At the same time he realised there was little to gain by attempting another massive showpiece stunt like the Caesar’s spectacle which carried such a high risk of injury, so Knievel decided on a return to his standard car-jumping routine, only this time the crowds would be bigger and the media coverage equally so.

After five months of recuperation, Evel returned to his roots and lined up a 13-car jump at the Beeline Dragway in Scottsdale, Arizona for 25 May 1968. He may have thought it was a relatively safe option compared to the fountains of Caesar’s Palace, but motorcycle jumping is never safe as Evel proved by wiping out again, this time breaking a leg and fracturing a foot. It may not have been as serious as the injuries he picked up in Vegas but for Knievel it must have been incredibly frustrating. His newfound fame gave him a licence to print money by simply doing what he’d been doing for the last three years, but his battered body would not let him do it.

He was forced into another boring and tiring period of recuperation, unable to work and unable to capitalise on his name. But he wasn’t just losing out on the chance to
make
money, he was actually losing heaps of the money he had earned in paying medical bills. As he said, ‘There’s no hospitalisation insurance for daredevils.’ That was to remain true throughout most of his career until he gained insurance through membership of the Screen Actors’ Guild after starring in the 1977 movie
Viva Knievel!
Between 1965 and 1977, however, Knievel spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his own hospital bills.

Just ten weeks after breaking his leg, Evel was back in the ring again at the Meridian Speedway in Idaho to attempt another 13-car leap, obviously undaunted by the number that had already proved unlucky for him. This time, however, he cleared the gap, and then repeated the feat in Spokane and Missoula before heading to the Tahoe-Carson Speedway in Nevada to jump a ‘mere’ ten cars. Despite seeming to have completely mastered the art of jumping 13 cars, Knievel crashed out yet again, having only cleared nine of his ten obstacles. This time he came down heavily and slammed into his own truck, which was parked just before the landing ramp. Not only did Knievel break his right shoulder, he also re-broke the left hip he’d smashed at Caesar’s Palace just 10 months before. This was a serious setback aggravated further by his contracting a staph infection while recovering in hospital from his injuries. Staph infection is caused by the
Staphylococcus aureus
bacteria entering the body through a cut or wound. It can usually be treated relatively easily with antibiotics but it hampered Evel’s recovery and was another irritation he didn’t need. More hospital treatment meant more time off work, which meant more time making no money and more damned medical bills.

Knievel was becoming a very experienced hospital patient, and the more time he spent in them, the more he grew to hate them. Hospital food was a particular bone of contention. ‘I don’t like hospital food. If you are hungry enough I guess you can eat it but I’m a New York steak and lobster-tail man myself. You don’t see much of that in hospitals. They don’t seem to go much for oysters Rockefeller either.’

But Knievel wasn’t always ready with an easy quote when hospitalised; after all, he spent an estimated total of three full years in hospital during his career, a horrendous amount of time by anyone’s standards. But he remained staunchly philosophical about ‘doing his time’, simply putting it down to being ‘the price you pay for being a risk-taking daredevil’.

Over the course of his life, Knievel would undergo 16 major open-reduction operations – where the body is cut open to have metalwork inserted. The result is that Evel had had around 40 screws and plates fixed inside him in order to piece him back together and hold him together, and often needed to have parts replaced as they were battered out of shape during further crashes and heavy, jarring landings.

Knievel’s career injury tally makes for truly grim reading. As well as having a fractured skull and being in a coma for 29 days following his Caesar’s crash, he also broke his nose, smashed out several teeth and fractured his jaw. He broke both left and right collarbones several times and vertebrae in his upper back on two separate occasions. He suffered a fractured sternum and broke all his ribs on different occasions, broke his right arm and his left arm at least twice each and had both wrists broken. He had fractured vertebrae in his lower back and crushed his pelvis on three occasions as well as crushing his hip, which led to the total hip, ball and socket eventually being replaced with titanium in 1997. Below the waist he broke both left and right femurs (the largest bones in the body) a total of five times, suffered a broken right knee and right shin and had both ankles broken. Not wishing to leave any part of his anatomy unscathed, Evel also broke several toes during his career. About the only major injury Knievel successfully avoided was a broken neck.

He may have spent three years in hospital, but how many more years he spent healing from injuries outside hospital buildings is anyone’s guess, and Knievel was notoriously short-tempered during any recovery process at home. Accustomed as he was to being a go-getter, he found it frustrating in the extreme to have to sit around doing nothing and having to be tended to while he waited for his body to heal so he could go out and have fun, make some more money and, ultimately, risk further injury.

Knievel was caught in a catch-22 situation: if he didn’t jump he couldn’t make money; yet if he did jump he ran the risk of injuring himself, which in turn meant he couldn’t jump and therefore couldn’t make more money again. Every time he jumped was a risk, but it was always a calculated one and he always accepted it when things went wrong. ‘All my jumping risks were calculated…but anything can happen. You have to commit yourself to the jump 60 yards away. There are jumps [that] before you even take off you know you aren’t going to make. Sometimes you find out in the air…and then you’ve got to make a decision. If you’ve got any chance at all, you grit your teeth and hold on. If you don’t, then you relax and just roll with it.’

The latter part of this philosophy shows Knievel had an innate understanding of ‘how’ to crash. The first rule of being a professional stuntman or stuntwoman is to know that tensed-up muscles lead to more serious injuries, whereas relaxed, limp bodies tend to ‘give’ more and are less susceptible to injury. Even so, Knievel was well aware that his chosen profession/sport punished mistakes and errors of judgement more harshly than most others. ‘Football players fall down on Astroturf or grass,’ he explained, ‘and rodeo riders fall down on nice soft dirt or cow manure. But boy, when you fall off a motorcycle at 60, 70 or 80 miles per hour on the asphalt, there’s nothing in the world that compares with it. The asphalt bites back. It just murders your body; it tears you to pieces.’

Bizarre as it may seem, given his chosen profession and his refusal to retire from it despite the repeated injuries he suffered, Knievel actually did have a healthy respect for fear and by no means had a death wish. On the contrary, he used fear and nerves to pull the best from himself. ‘Fear is a high-octane fuel for the possibility of success,’ he often said. ‘I have never subscribed to the “no fear” attitude. Those who truly feel they have absolutely no fear belong in a mental institution.’ All the same, Knievel stops short of admitting to any specific fear or how it affects him personally. ‘Do I fear death? No. Was I ever afraid to make a jump? If I was afraid, I was not going to tell you about it. I’m Evel Knievel. I’m not supposed to be afraid.’

Another fallout from the Caesar’s crash was that Evel changed motorcycles again. Despite his enthusiasm for the Triumph T120 Bonneville he wasn’t quite so enthusiastic about the support (or lack of it) that he felt he was getting from his Triumph supplier, Johnson Motors. He had already taken one last rash course of action in a bid to ‘persuade’ his supplier to increase its backing. ‘Just before the Caesar’s Palace jump I decided to cash in on some favours. I had loads of trouble with Johnson Motors out of California. They provided the Triumph motorcycle for me – one of the best motorcycles ever built – but did nothing in return for all the promoting I did for them. I threatened Pete Coleman, who was the president, that if he didn’t put an attorney on the next plane to Las Vegas with a $20,000 check the Triumph would miss so badly that it would make it the laughing-stock of the motorcycle world. I told him I’d burn his cycle in front of Caesar’s Palace. Can you believe he accused me of blackmail? But you better believe they sent an attorney and he had that check.’

This is another of Knievel’s tales which should be taken with a pinch of salt. The last thing he wanted to do was miss such a big jump on purpose and risk life-threatening injuries; what’s more, to the average spectator who didn’t know a thing about motorcycles his missing the jump would suggest that Evel’s skills were lacking rather than reflecting badly on the Triumph, which, to the majority of them, was just another motorcycle.

Whatever the case, at the end of 1968 Knievel parted company with Johnson Motors after Caesar’s and hooked up with the rather obscure American Eagle company. Despite the patriotic-sounding name, the bikes were actually built in Italy by Laverda and sold in the States under the American Eagle brand. Knievel was introduced to the brand by former Honda America employee Jack McCormick, the man who coined the famous slogan ‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda’. It may sound simple, even corny today, but the slogan went a long way in the 1960s towards convincing the American public that not all bikers were dangerous, greasy yobs – a campaign which Evel supported wholeheartedly.

Once Knievel decided to go with American Eagle he was allocated what was essentially a twin-cylinder Laverda 750S and again he stripped off all non-essential gear like mudguards, lights and indicators in a bid both to make the bike lighter and to make it look that bit more special. He also added a set of high, wide handlebars taken from a scrambler bike as they offered more control and leverage for pulling wheelies and controlling the bike on landings.

It was the Laverda which was first painted up in the now famous white Confederate stars on blue background stripes. Knievel would use a variation of this design for the rest of his career and to this day countless products are marketed (some licensed, some not) bearing a similar design. It was also while riding the American Eagle that Knievel’s famous white-starred jumpsuit first appeared. He had switched to a white suit with stripes down the legs and sleeves while riding the Triumph, but it was only when he rode the Eagle in 1969–70 that the look he is now renowned for first appeared in full. The suit would continue to develop in the following years, becoming more and more outrageous, and would, somewhat inevitably, spark many comparisons with that other famous wearer of white jumpsuits, Elvis Presley.

It has long been debated which of the two men was the originator of the look and it is still a difficult matter to decide on since they actually appeared to develop along separate lines. While not exactly wearing a white jumpsuit, Knievel had been wearing white leathers (a growing craze among motorcycle racers at the time as they attempted to distance themselves from their greasy, black leather image) as far back as 1967 when Presley was still churning out dreadful Hollywood movies and had not yet returned to performing live. It was not until 1969, when he started his Vegas seasons, that Elvis appeared on stage wearing a fringed white jumpsuit, which had been developed from his interest in karate, hence the similarity to the standard white karate suit.

It was only when Knievel started adding flared bell-bottoms, high collars, large, initialled belts and, most blatantly, a jewelled cape in the early Seventies,
after
Presley had developed similar accessories, that he could be accused of copying the singer, of whom he openly admitted to being a huge fan. But at least Evel confessed he was influenced by Presley, saying he ‘always loved the outfits that Elvis wore’. In fairness, the imitating may well have worked both ways to a certain extent: while Presley was never really associated with a walking cane, and certainly had no real need for one, he was photographed several times posing with one very similar to Knievel’s. In this case, Knievel can definitely claim to be the originator. And it doesn’t require a huge stretch of the imagination to imagine why Presley would take some styling cues from Knievel, for as the mid-Seventies approached, Elvis was piling on the pounds and was not attracting new young audiences. Knievel, however, was at the peak of his powers and hugely popular with American kids. Presley may well have taken a few styling cues from his fellow jumpsuited icon.

Knievel often went further than claiming to be just a fan of Elvis, once bragging that ‘Elvis was a good friend of mine. He dated my sister Loretta, my half-sister, for a long time.’ It is odd then that the two performed and often based themselves in Vegas, but no photograph appears to exist of the two ‘friends’ together, and none of Presley’s major biographers make any reference to Knievel as being a friend of his. Despite this, Knievel once claimed in an interview, ‘I used to go backstage at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas when he was done with his shows and we’d sit for two or three hours and talk together and have a drink or two with Colonel Parker. He was a wonderful guy; he always introduced me at his shows if he knew I was there.’