► CAR meets Evel for one of his last ever interviews
► Recalling a life of boozing, boasting and breaking bones
► ‘Whatever you do, enjoy your life. It’ll go so fast you won’t believe it’
Most of us will remember motorcycle stunt legend Evel Knievel for his spectacular jumps, his showmanship and, of course, his bone-mashing crashes. I’ll never forget helping him choose a new sofa.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I rang his doorbell (marked ‘Forbes’), in Clearwater, Florida. But I’ll admit furniture shopping wasn’t my first thought.
‘This is an orthopaedic couch,’ chimed in a keen sales assistant as we stood discussing the merits of a white leather porno movie-style three-seater half an hour later. ‘It’s designed to mimic the natural curve of the spine.’
‘It won’t fit mine,’ was Knievel’s bone dry, quick-fire reply. ‘I broke it four times.’
The salesman had no idea who he was talking to, despite the hundredweight or so of diamond-encrusted, EK-initialled bling about Knievel’s person. The remark sailed over his head like a Harley clearing a line of buses. When he turned his back, Evel borrowed my pen and surreptitiously autographed another couch as a mischievous joke.
In the course of more than 300 jumps, Knievel claimed to have broken 35 bones, endured 15 major surgeries, lost a month in a coma and spent a combined three years in various hospitals. All with no medical cover because, understandably, no insurance company would touch him.
But the rewards were immense. In his time, Knievel was a superstar in the Presley, Ali and Sinatra league. Not bad for a self-made former small-time crim from a rough little Montana mining town. The medallion man, Knievel had it all: cojones like demolition balls, square-jawed looks, women by the thousand, and a personal fortune worth (so he told anyone who’d listen) $35 million.
Billing himself the ‘Last Gladiator of the New Rome’, his performances were displays of insane courage and potential public snuff spectacles. Every time he downed a couple of slugs of Wild Turkey to numb his screaming nerves, gunned his bike up the lunch ramp and touched the lucky rabbit’s foot handing round his neck, both Knievel and his fans understood there was a very real chance he’d leave in an ambulance. Or a casket.
Death drew the arena crowds yet somehow he always cheated it. The old daredevil was on borrowed time when we met for what we both thought might be his last interview. Knievel’s doctors had given him six months to live … eight months before. Hepatitis C from an infected blood transfusion has attacked the remains of his booze-ravaged liver ‘like a rattlesnake’. Without a transplant, he had weeks to live. But his legendary luck held and a donor organ arrived just in time.
By then the glory days and most of the millions were long gone. But the gunfighter swagger remained. I spent a couple of days with Knievel and his energy and attitude were relentless. I almost forgot he was 60 and perhaps only days from death. He rode his Evel Knievel limited edition motorcycle, ranted and raved, boasted, laughed, cried, told tall stories and filthy jokes, offered fatherly advice and bawled me out for asking if he’d really been in prison with Charles Manson (‘Are you calling me a goddamned liar? What’s the matter with you?’).
He lived with his 28-year-old fiancée Krystal, in a comfortable but modest apartment overlooking a golf course. As we drove home from the furniture store, he gave a rapid-fire inventory of the millions of dollars’ worth of toys that had passed through his hands. A compulsive show-off, Knievel bragged and name-dropped as if, after everything, he still had something left to prove.
‘I had 14 planes. I had a Golden Eagle, a Beech Duke, a King Air, a Bonanza… When I bought my first jet, I told the guy who sold it to me I’d just bought a new ship. He said the happiest day of your life will be when you sell that sonofabitch. I’d never have another one. There’s only one thing you can spend more money on than a ship and that’s a woman. They’re both holes you keep pouring money into. I’ll give you a less in life. Don’t forget it. If it flies, floats or f*cks, lease it. Don’t be an idiot!’
He may have been a biker but, obviously, flash cars played their part too. Especially Ferraris: ‘I had two Daytonas, two Spyders and the first Boxer imported into the US. The Boxer can’t compare to the Daytona. Ferraris they make now just don’t compare to the Daytona. It was as good as any automobile I have ever driven. I used to run mine at 180mph all the way through Nevada and Montana in one straight 1500-mile run.’
He even collected people. ‘I used to drink with Graham Hill, Henry Cooper, Joe Bugner,’ continues the self-aggrandising monologue. ‘Elizabeth Taylor bought an Aston exactly the same colour as mine… I used to have an Aston that was made for Prince Charles…’
I’d hoped for a ride in his hopped-up Aston Martin Lagonda but it was in the workshop having its clunky old Chrysler three-speed transmission replaced. ‘My Aston will outrun any Aston ever built,’ its owner bragged. ‘It’s got a 502 big-block Chevy engine with fuel injection. The only motor that’s better than a Chevy big-block is a Ferrari V12!’
With the underside of its bonnet mirrored to show off its all-American heart transplant and chrome Laker side exhausts, the 17ft long Aston was as brash and flash as Knievel himself. There was no mistaking the car when I subsequently saw it on eBay with a $150,000 reserve.
Knievel was selling up, the listing explained. He had been diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis: a terminal lung disease. He was dying.
I remembered what Knievel had said to me as we drove up to his apartment complex in my lame Oldsmobile rental car. Leaning towards me and clapping a giant, gnarled old hand on my shoulder, he lowered his voice and growled: ‘Whatever you do, you’d better enjoy your life because it’ll go by so fast you won’t believe it.’
Knievel often boasted he had lived better than any king or prince; that his own life had been ‘like a dream’. I had the strange honour of seeing him relive it when he invited me over to watch a two-hour Evel Knievel TV special with him, Krystal and some friends. The couple were in high spirits. Krystal had just found a yellowed but apparently still bankable cheque for $50,000, dating back to 1984, in a box full of Evel’s old photographs.
Relaxed and friendly, Evel eased back into his new leather throne, hushed his guests and watched intently as the edited highlights – and lowpoints – of his extraordinary life were replayed. We winced as crash after horrific crash was shown in ghostly slo-mo, Knievel’s body being battered, broken, bent to unnatural angles and slung violently along the asphalt like a crash test dummy, ripping apart his Old Glory leather jumpsuit like it was made of paper.
Toughest to watch was his leap over the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, 1968. He cleared them but the disastrous landing left him in a coma for 29 days (although it has since been claimed he made business calls from his hospital bed). The Bell crash helmet he wore was there on a shelf in the apartment. ‘Go ahead, pick it up’, he told me. ‘That bastard saved my life.’
But the prize was global fame. When he left hospital, the world was desperate to know what this madman would do next. This was his chance. But how did he get back in the saddle after a wipeout like that?
‘It wasn’t easy,’ he admitted, ‘You run out of nerve really easy.’ What Knievel did next was announced plans to jump the Grand Canyon on a rocket-assisted motorcycle. When the Government refused permission, the location switched to the privately owned Snake River Canyon in Idaho.
A warts-and-all-affair, the documentary charted his career trajectory through the high drama of the canyon jump to the wilderness years of the Eighties when he was visibly paying the price for his full-bore lifestyle. Ex-wife Linda described Evel’s womanising and whiskey-fuelled rages, while their son, daredevil ‘Kaptain’ Robbie Knievel, claimed his famous father had phoned him, crying, saying there were things he would change about his life if he could. Evel said nothing. He just looked solemn, eyes filling up.
Another awkward moment followed. The film told how Knievel was arrested for allegedly attacking Krystal after finding her with another man. ‘She attacked me!’ roared Evel, breaking the embarrassed silence with a big grin. ‘It was me who called the cops. I’d hired a private detective to follow her. She was hitting me! She hit me in front of the cops!’
‘Don’t believe anything he says!’ resorted Krystal. ‘He’s got rocks in his head!’
Knievel married Krystal under the fountains at Caesars Palace the following year. They divorced two years later but were living together again in Clearwater when he died on 30 November last year.
‘I believe the spirit will go on,’ he told me when I asked if he feared death. As death drew closer, Knievel found Jesus, claiming God spoke to him in a hotel room in Daytona Beach. They say he moves in mysterious ways.
Knievel could be a foul-mouthed, avaricious attention-seeker, and a bully fuelled by anger and egomania. He had as many enemies as friends and there was a dark streak of madness in his soul. I don’t know if I’d go as far as calling him a goddamned liar but he launched his career by persuading Caesars Palace to okay his jump by bombarding them with phone calls, posing as lawyers, reporters from influential magazines and as the European President of Evel Knievel Enterprises – the fictitious ‘H Carl Forbes’.
By the time he reached Snake River in 1974, his aggressive hustling and arrogance had set the stage for a Knievel backlash. Even by his own standards, the canyon jump seemed suicidal. So when a malfunction deployed the parachutes early and his Skycycle floated gently down to safety, many suspected the stunt was faked. Knievel always denied triggering the chutes himself, blaming a design flaw in the stem-powered rocket he described as a ‘beer can’.
A couple of years ago I met the aero engineer who built the prototype Skycycle, Doug Malewicki. He surprised me by confirming Evel’s story.
‘People still ask me what happened but he didn’t do that,’ he said. ‘They had that same problem in an earlier test. This is what the owner of the parachute company told me. They needed to set it up considerably different [sic] but they just didn’t have time to build the bugger. But it was the best opportunity. If he’d been killed in the darned thing, then he’s dead. If he’d have made it across, people would have said “well, its not a damn motorcycle, it’s just a rocket and we’re sending people to the moon, so it’s not a big deal”. But he came pretty close to being drowned in the water and got banged around and cut up a little bit. Perfect. It was the optimum solution.’
Not that Malewicki was ever under any illusions about Knievel. At least not after the first time he saw him jump: ‘He would always give a little 15-minute speech – “don’t do drugs, don’t drink” – and he goes back in his truck and chugalugs Smirnoff. And you think, “What? You mean he’s lying? Well, I guess so”.’
Malewicki left the Skycycle project early, concerned that Knievel might be going bust. ‘He claimed he had all this money but he was pretty bogus on that too,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t that loaded and a lot of times cheques would bounce. He’d call you and say “it’s good now” and it would bounce again. Not by a long shot was he any kind of Mother Theresa, let me say that. But he could do really nice things too. My folks came to a jump in Chicago and he sat with them for half an hour and my mom and dad loved him, they thought he was great. He could be a super charmer. He was unique. One of the greats. He just did it his way – a little rough. But he put his hide on the line with the wrong kind of bikes and the wrong kind of ramps and he still did it. And he has to be, in the last century, one of the world’s most astute applied psychologists.’
It’s true. Much of Knievel’s self-mythologising, exaggeration and embellishment was just taking care of business. From nothing – by today’s standards he wasn’t even especially good at jumping motorbikes – he turned himself into a cultural icon. And whatever else might have been bogus, the broken bones were real.
If his life was like a dream, it was the kind of dream that sometimes wakes you in a cold sweat. But there’s no denying he made the most of it. I hope he enjoyed it too. Because I liked him, even if he did have terrible taste in sofas.