Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel

By Steve Mandich

He was not a rock'n'roll star, cartoon character, religious figure, professional wrestler, writer, or politician. Nor was he famous for being an artist, comic book superhero, television personality, or movie star. He wasn't exactly an athlete either. Granted, he wore a few of these hats at various points throughout his career, but his fame primarily emanated from an obscure occupation which he made entirely his own.Arguably, no other figure in popular culture outside these realms had an impact which resulted in global notoriety, generated millions of dollars in merchandise, inspired widespread imitation, and yet was a constant source of controversy. He was a genuine celebrity, and at the height of his career, he was one of the most talked-about men in America.In Evel Incarnate, Steve Mandich vividly recounts the life and the legend of Evel Knievel -a relentless self-mythologizer, abetted by an international community of fans. They were hungry for a real-life super-hero, and waited with bated breath for the summit of his career: the much heralded, now infamous, Snake River Canyon jump.But the truth about this motorcycle daredevil is as fascinating, extraordinary and injury-laden as any of the legends he could promote. Incisive, witty and informed, Evel Incarnate is the Evel Knievel biography by which all others must be measured.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910570081

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

ALL ABOUT EVEL

‘I’m a jumping son-of-a-bitch – I’ll jump anything.’

He was not a rock ‘n’ roll star, cartoon character, religious figure, professional wrestler, writer, or politician. Nor was he famous for being an artist, comic book superhero, television personality, or movie star. He wasn’t exactly an athlete either. Granted, he wore a few of these hats at various points throughout his career, but his fame primarily emanated from an obscure occupation which he made entirely his own. Arguably, no other figure in popular culture outside these realms had an impact which resulted in global notoriety, generated millions of dollars in merchandise, inspired widespread imitation, and yet was a constant source of controversy. He was a genuine celebrity, and at the height of his career, he was one of the most talked-about men in America.

He was Evel Knievel, the King of the Stuntmen, the World’s Greatest Daredevil, the Last Gladiator in the New Rome. He was a motorcycle daredevil, the motorcycle daredevil, whose hell-bent determination to leap a bike over cars, buses, trucks, animals, and even natural wonders entertained audiences for over a decade. Evel’s stunts may not have been defining events in American history, but his significance as a major pop-culture phenomenon cannot be denied. In his heyday of the 1970s, during a decade of excess in which overblown rock groups like Kiss found sizeable followings, Evel provided ‘family entertainment’ while preaching old-fashioned values, greatly appealing to blue-collar, God-fearing, middle-American sensibilities. Especially when he crashed.

Some observers suggested that Evel’s act was a diversion from the social upheaval at the time, providing cheap thrills which didn’t demand much thought. His conspicuous flag-waving ran counter to the Vietnam War protestors, his brand of chauvinism was railed against by the emerging feminist movement, and while he inadvertently embraced the counterculture’s notion of free love, the clean living he espoused distanced him from the hippie ‘dope fiends’ he loathed.

Evel asserted that his self-destructive attitude filled a national void: ‘America was down on its ass when I came along,’ he explained in a 1997 interview with Racer X online. ‘They needed somebody that was truthful and honest. They wanted what I did, someone who would spill blood and break bones and suffer brain concussions, someone that really hurt and that wasn’t a phony. And I wasn’t a phony. That’s what they needed, that’s all. And they pulled for me, because they pulled for the underdog. And I got hurt so bad, but yet I kept trying. I refused to lay down and die. I didn’t quit, I always tried to get up. And America needed that worse than anything in the world.’

Evel became one of the most recognized public figures of the decade and a modern-day amalgamation of several familiar archetypes. Like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, Houdini the escapologist, and the thrillseekers who plunged over Niagara Falls, Evel drew attention to himself through his own dangerous and absurd pursuit. He was a throwback to the classic daredevils of yore: people such as trapeze artists, high-wire walkers, lion tamers, fire-eaters, human cannonballs, alligator wrestlers, bullfighters, wing walkers, sword-swallowers, and flagpole sitters.

Some viewed him as an American folk hero like Buffalo Bill, an outlaw like Jesse James, a master of self-promotion like P.T. Barnum, or even Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to grow up. He also brought to mind Captain America, both Marvel Comics’ patriotic superhero and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider, even if the only similarity between the two motorcyclists was the stars-and-stripes helmet. However, Evel often came crashing down like Icarus, the birdman of Greek mythology, whose wings came off when he flew too close to the sun. Nevertheless, Evel is frequently mentioned among the most popular sports figures of the 1970s, which include Muhammad Ali and O.J. Simpson, and on a few occasions he is listed beside other twentieth-century American icons such as Babe Ruth, John Wayne, and Elvis Presley.

Evel often likened himself to an astronaut, seeing himself as a pioneer in an uncharted world. ‘What I’m doing might make more of a contribution to man and society than, say, selling insurance,’ he told Sports Illustrated in 1968. ‘I’m not a stunt man. I’m not a daredevil. I’m... I’m an explorer.’

If the truth be told, a handful of other motorcycle daredevils had performed stunts before Evel rose to fame, though they were largely unknown. One notable exception was Bud Ekins, Steve McQueen’s stunt double in The Great Escape, who famously leapt over a barbed-wire fence. Yet it was Evel who single-handedly introduced the concept of motorcycle jumping to the masses, and made it popular as a form of showbusiness, and incidentally helped to bring motorcycling further into the mainstream.

For his efforts he became a self-made millionaire, and he watched as a spate of imitators followed in his skidmarks – whether they were professionals, like his son Robbie, or simply admiring children attempting new tricks on their bicycles. He became the world’s most famous motorcyclist, and twenty years after his retirement he continues his reign as the most famous daredevil in history. Before Evel arrived on the scene American motorcyclists were commonly perceived as savage, beer-swilling outlaws. The stereotype was largely rooted in Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the rebellious Johnny (‘Whaddya got?’) in 1954’s The Wild One, and perpetuated by increasingly seedier biker films which followed. Evel tried to distinguish himself as a ‘good’ motorcyclist from what he saw were the ‘bad’ bikers, with their drugs, violence, anarchy, and all the other undesirable elements he felt that the public associated with them. He deliberately set himself apart from the black-dad gangs, with his white, star-spangled jumpsuit accessorized with a jaunty cape, in an attempt to project a wholesome public image. Though Evel seemingly crusaded to make motorcycling in general more acceptable, he was also an outlaw in his own particular style – ‘out of step with society’ as he liked to phrase it, for which he made no apologies.

However, his fame wasn’t entirely built upon his all-American image, valiant showmanship, and a string of death-defying feats. Ironically, he gained far more recognition for the bone-shattering crashes he survived than for all of his successful jumps combined. A spectacular wipe-out proved much more newsworthy than any safe landing, and even when he didn’t crash, many of his landings were shaky, and few of his leaps could accurately be described as graceful. In a morbid sense, he would be unknown if each one of his stunts didn’t offer the strong possibility of serious injury, or death.

Evel wisely capitalized on his audience’s thirst for blood, first whetting their appetite in 1967 when he nearly killed himself attempting to fly over the fountains of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The master of disaster raised the stakes with a ludicrous plan to jump a motorcycle over the Grand Canyon in 1968, which resulted in a fizzled rocket ride to the bottom of the Snake River Canyon in 1974. Evel’s flirtation with death and apparent appetite for self-destruction created a macabre public allure – the attraction, quite simply, was that each jaw-dropping stunt he attempted might be his last, and he milked it for all it was worth.

Oddly enough, he bounced back after nearly every one of his crashes, as if all his smash-ups and extended stays in hospital only made him stronger. Whoever coined the old ‘if at first you don’t succeed’ adage probably didn’t have men with Evel’s intense determination in mind. He was seemingly indestructible, wearing scar tissue like badges of courage, which begged certain questions. Why would this ostensibly sane man pursue such a risky profession? Was it simply for money or fame, or was he driven by something deeper? A psychological craving for attention? A genetic predisposition? An addiction to adrenaline? A death wish? Maybe it was just his special purpose, his calling, his raison d’être. He approached life in the spirit of mountaineer George Mallory, who, when asked why he so badly wanted to climb Everest, responded with the timeless words, ‘Because it’s there.’

The stunts themselves are only the beginning of Evel’s story. All three major television networks featured him on various programs, and two Hollywood movies bore his famous name – one being an action picture in which he starred as himself, and the other a film biography, chronicling his rise to fame from his youth in the tough mining town of Butte, Montana. Evel dropped out of high school and worked in the copper mines and at other odd jobs, both legal and illegal, before he became a full-time daredevil. While uneducated, he was intelligent, clever, and articulate, and once his career took off, he negotiated lucrative endorsement contracts with Harley Davidson and several other major companies.

The sales of Knievel toys and related merchandise generated millions in revenues, affording him the riches he shamelessly flaunted – diamond rings, fur coats, exotic cars, luxury yachts, private jets, a country-club home, and his trademark, jewel-encrusted cane. He courted a legion of die-hard fans who paid good money to watch his shows and buy his products, some fully accepting his rhetoric as the gospel, which he always delivered with machismo and hubris. Many viewed him as a knight in shining leather, and in a few more fanatical instances, he was raised to a Christ-like status. ‘Why, he’s the new messiah,’ one of his young followers proclaimed in the Chicago Tribune. ‘He’s unkillable.’

All the attention and money only fueled Evel’s insatiable lust for life. He certainly did not while away his days in quiet desperation, but lived at full throttle, earnestly believing his own outrageous hype and playing the crash-and-burn persona to the hilt. The recklessness he displayed on his motorcycle spilled over into his checkered personal life, which involved hard drinking, high-stakes gambling, rampant philandering, staggering financial problems, and a tendency towards violence. He engaged in physical clashes with the Hell’s Angels, members of the press, his son Robbie, and even one of his own biographers, which landed him in prison for six months.

His name frequently arose on both sides of all kinds of lawsuits – when he wasn’t being taken to court himself, he frequently threatened legal action against others, poised to sue anyone at the drop of a helmet. When he finally hung up his leathers after fifteen years of motorcycle mayhem, on the verge of financial ruin with a near-crippled body, he quickly faded away. Decades later, the high times fully caught up with him. He needed a full hip replacement as a result of his multiple wipe-outs, and a liver transplant, a result of the heavy boozing. He received both within about a year of one another, and almost miraculously lived to weather his early sixties.

Of course, any figure of his stature will have a fair share of critics. He was certainly regarded with much skepticism during his career, both by the media and the public in general. Though his fans considered him a hero, champion, and living legend, others merely dismissed him as an eccentric goofball on two wheels, amounting to nothing more than a novelty sideshow act, or a sort of glorified, white-trash performance artist. Some have called him an egomaniac, a hypocrite, a thief, and a thug. His sanity was often brought into question, as were his morals. His claims were challenged, his stunts panned, his character attacked, and he was cited as a bad influence on children.

Regardless, he regularly appeared in sports pages and magazines nationwide, as well as in other general-interest publications, yet some journalists were loath to call him an athlete – his physical exertion was relatively minimal, and he didn’t actually compete against anyone else. Evel arrogantly countered that he transcended mere sport: ‘I would like you to tell me if you can find a tougher opponent than mine. Because my opponent is death.’

Still others have called him a compulsive liar. While the reality of Evel’s life and career was astonishing in its own right, for some reason he felt the need to make it appear even more incredible. He routinely exaggerated the truth, whether about the distances he jumped, or the amount of money he made, or the attendance at his performances, or anything else. He was a great story-teller, more than willing to spin remarkable yarns about himself for anybody willing to listen. He told the same tales countless times to countless listeners over the years, whether to press rooms packed with reporters, or in personal interviews, or just to the guy on the next barstool, but he almost always used some degree of poetic license.

To give him the benefit of the doubt, most of these stories were based on truth, but after repetition over time they probably became embellished. The highly quotable Evel always spoke bluntly, whether making outlandish boasts and nonsensical claims, delivering ad-lib homilies, tossing out red herrings, or simply being honest, yet he always strode a fine line between fact and fiction. Sports Illustrated ’s Robert F. Jones noted, ‘It has been said that in twenty minutes Evel can tell a reporter enough anecdotes about his early life to keep them busy for twenty years checking it out.’

One telling piece of evidence was that his stories frequently contradicted one another. ‘Ask him a straight question and one will get fifty crooked answers,’ Jones further observed, in the same piece. Evel told conflicting versions of many incidents in his past, apparently depending on his audience, or his mood at the time, or perhaps he was simply oblivious to the idea that anyone might actually be paying attention. For instance, he visited Washington in 1961 hoping to meet with President Kennedy to discuss a political matter of particular interest to him. The meeting never happened, which he explained in several interviews. As the years went on, however, he started saying that he did in fact meet the President, and he even began to relate a previously unheard anecdote to accompany the claim.

Creating more confusion, the press repeatedly transcribed these embellished, contradictory stories verbatim, with little fact-checking, and irresponsibly reported them without any particular caveats. Unlike professional major league sports, most of Evel’s performances were not uniformly documented on a national scale, but tended to be covered in smaller local publications whenever he came to town. Additionally, his motorcycle-jumping details were never officially recorded or maintained, as opposed to baseball statistics, Wall Street shares, and television ratings. Whenever any local stories about Evel did make it into the papers nationwide, they were often carelessly treated as novelty items off the newswire. As a result, the spotty coverage and conflicting details culminated in an overall body of half-truths and misinformation.

In all fairness, many of his oral accounts cannot be verified or disproved, even if their improbability makes them suspect. The only one who knew the entire truth was Evel himself; yet he repeated these stories so frequently over the years it seems as though he believed every word that came out of his own mouth. Indeed, these exaggerations have taken on an almost mythical quality, but in many cases that’s exactly what they are – nothing more than myths. The whole of Evel’s life, as he has told it, has amounted to a series of episodes in what might best be described as the ‘Knievel Legend’. Because of this, compiling an accurate, definitive, and thoroughly comprehensive portrait of the man is virtually impossible. The next best thing is to document the established facts, and prescribe the remainder with a grain of salt.

All this said, the story of Evel Knievel – the man, the myth, the motorcycle-jumping maniac – is one wild ride. That’s how Evel liked it.

CHAPTER ONE:

FROM BOBBY TO EVEL

‘I’m not Evil – I don't relish doing things that aren’t right.’

Butte, Montana was once a rugged, rip-roaring boom town, home of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and reputed to have more bars and brothels per capita than anywhere else in the United States. The mile-high town was built on what the locals called ‘The Richest Hill on Earth’, dominated by several stark, black steel gallows frames, which served as elevator towers for the underground mines. The population of the town peaked at one hundred thousand in 1917, though both the population and economy have been in steady decline ever since. With so many residents employed in such dangerous work, the community has frequently been characterized as a bleak place where a life-on-the-edge mentality prevailed – drinking, gambling, prostitution, and all-around lawlessness were commonplace.

Robert Craig Knievel was born in Butte on 17 October 1938, during the Great Depression and just before World War Two. Bobby, as he was called as a child, was the son of Robert Edward and Ann Keaugh Knievel, inheriting a German-Irish ancestry. Almost eleven months after Bobby’s birth, a second son was born, Nicholas, but the young couple soon divorced and went their separate ways. The boys’ mother moved to Nevada while their father moved to California, though Bobby was just seventeen and a half months old, and Nic was only seven months old.

The children were left behind to live with their paternal grandparents, Ignatius and Emma Knievel, who owned a tire store and lived in a small house on Parrot Street. The surrogate parents provided a modest upbringing for the boys, who addressed them as ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, but it was a difficult task for the relatively older people. Evel later explained that they simply couldn’t understand one another: ‘We couldn’t bridge the generation gap.’

Evel has described his childhood in Butte with several stories that are part of the Knievel Legend, that composite of tall tales he has told time after time. In an incident which supposedly revealed his early artistic promise Bobby’s freehand drawing of a brook trout was queried by his schoolteacher, who was certain that it was traced. The obstinate boy stood by his work, and because it was suspected that he was lying, he earned a three-day suspension from Webster-Garfield Elementary. Another time, while walking home from school, he noticed a man in a white suit and top hat standing on the tail-end of a train as it slowly rolled through town. Bobby climbed onto the back of the caboose and shook hands with the man, who turned out to be none other than President Harry S. Truman, presumably stumping through Montana on the famed whistle-stop tour of his 1948 presidential election campaign.

Though he was a small skinny kid he was a born hellraiser, bursting at the seams with impish energy. Evel often recalled that one of the main activities he shared with the other kids in Butte was to go uptown and throw rocks at the prostitutes until the pimps chased them down the street. Observing that the pimps appeared to be the most well-to-do men in town, wearing slick clothes and driving fancy cars, the impressionable Bobby aspired to be a pimp himself.

Among Bobby’s other boyhood idols were Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, and heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis. He imitated Rogers by dressing up in cowboy duds, and like the famed Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, he often got into fights. Making an even stronger impact was racing driver Joie Chitwood and his team of traveling stuntmen. Emma took the eight-year-old Bobby to witness a performance by Chitwood’s Auto Thrill Show when it rolled into Butte’s Clark Park. There are many conflicting tales in the Knievel Legend regarding exactly what Bobby saw – one car jumping over another, or a car jumping ramp-to-ramp, or someone jumping a motorcycle over a car, or through a flaming hoop, or off one ramp onto another. Perhaps it was all of the above. In any case, the performance was a moving, influential experience for the boy.

Evel also told a few different stories about what happened the very next day. In the most common version, Bobby found some old wooden doors in his grandfather’s garage and propped them up on buckets, forming makeshift take-off and landing ramps. He jumped his bicycle between the ramps, and progressively moved them further and further apart, until he finally crash-landed and broke his bicycle. Elsewhere, he said that he actually tore the garage doors clean off their hinges, and put some weeds from a field nearby between the ramps, and set them ablaze. With Nic’s help, the brothers charged neighborhood kids two cents apiece to watch Bobby leap over the flames, but he took a spill, and they ended up burning both doors. In a different story he ‘borrowed’ a motorcycle from a neighbor’s garage to practice wheelies and jump slag heaps, and rode it around town until it ran out of gas. Whatever the case, the seeds for a career in daredevilry were sown.

When he was fifteen Bobby took a trip to visit his father and new family in El Sobrante, California. His father raced cars in the Bay Area before opening a Volkswagen dealership in Berkeley. He bought Bobby his first motorcycle during this visit, a British BSA Bantam 125, on which Bobby promptly learned to ride wheelies. After bringing the bike back to Montana, Bobby began to enter flat-track races. Looking back, Evel often boasted, ‘When I was racing in Great Falls, Montana, as a kid, they used to make me start in the back row facing the wrong direction, but I’d still win.’

Bobby became something of a juvenile delinquent, and was considered a ‘troubled loner’ by his Butte High School classmates. He was scheduled to graduate in 1956, but much to the dismay of his grandparents he dropped out of high school when he was sixteen. The teenager went on a wild streak, getting into several brushes with the law and spending many nights in jail – for such petty offenses as reckless motorcycling, snatching purses, fighting, vandalism, stealing hubcaps, and various small-time scams. ‘One time the police caught me and another boy with about 300 hubcaps,’ Evel told Penthouse in 1974. ‘I could steal a guy’s hubcaps when he was sitting in the car.’

Another episode in the Knievel Legend from these formative years was the origin of the nickname ‘Evel’. The most common version goes something like this: Bobby was arrested one day for leading the police on a wild-goose chase through town on his motorcycle. He was jailed alongside another man, William ‘Awful’ Knofel, who was suspected of murdering a Chinese woman in a laundry. Recalled Evel, ‘The guard thought it was funny as hell and he shouted, Double the guard! We got Awful Knofel in one cell and Evil Knievel in another! We’re in for one hell of a night!’ Evel also said that the next day’s issue of the Montana Standard-Post reported that Butte taxpayers would be charged to pay an extra deputy to help guard both Awful and himself. Police officer Morris Mulcahy, who was on duty that fateful night, has since claimed full credit for making the comment, and thereby coining the famous name.

A less common version of the story was that a neighbor of the Knievels, a one-armed Little League baseball umpire named Nick McGrath, was the one who gave Bobby the moniker. He noticed that during a baseball game while Bobby was batting, the boy glared at the opposing pitcher with his ‘evil eye’. McGrath later caught Bobby stealing his hubcaps. Sometimes, Evel offered only the vague, sarcastic explanation that he was given the name ‘because I was such a good little boy’. In other instances, Evel would eschew any fabled tales and simply state that he was given the nickname later on by his co-workers in the mines, or by the fathers of his girlfriends, or by motorcycle racing promoters, or by a sponsor of one of his early daredevil stunts.

After some initial apprehension, Bobby took a liking to the name and eventually adopted it, only changing the spelling to ‘Evel’ as his daredevil career began. He didn’t want to be thought of as truly an evil person, as the satanic connotations contradicted the upstanding image he would try to present. The unconventional spelling was a bit of a compromise, but it nicely matched his surname, and the rhyming double consonants created a catchy alliteration. Journalists later made endless puns out of ‘Evel’ in newspaper headlines, though they misspelled ‘Knievel’ about as often. While he never had it legally changed, ‘Evel Knievel’ would one day be among the most memorable stage names in show business.

‘They should’ve nicknamed my brother Evil – he was worse than me,’ he later told Big Bikes online. Ignatius and Emma continued to have problems raising their mischievous grandsons, especially Bobby, with his propensity for finding trouble. ‘We tried to stop him, we couldn’t stop him,’ Emma later recalled.

In 1956 the boys’ father moved back to Butte with his new family – second wife Jeanie Buis, and their three daughters Christy, Renee, and Robin. Their mother also remarried, and the new couple had two daughters, Loretta and Kathy, giving the brothers a total of five new stepsisters.

Bobby didn’t want to work at his father’s new Volkswagen dealership; perhaps he was not quite ready to accept fully the man who left him as a child. Instead, he opted for the harsh life of the mines. For a Butte teenager without a diploma the job was practically inevitable.

He spent the next couple of years working for the Anaconda Company, where his duties included diamond-drill operator and skip tender. He also shuttled his co-workers around in a company bus until they complained that he drove like a wildman and chose not to ride with him.

Another installment in the Legend concerns the time Bobby talked a crane operator into dropping a six-ton boulder into the back of a giant earth mover, so that he could use the vehicle to pop wheelies. The vehicle’s upended front struck some power lines, blacking out the entire town, and Bobby was consequently fired. He knew that mining wasn’t for him anyway, as the dead-end job was low-paying, grueling, and with the threat of cave-ins, floods, and poisonous gases it was quite dangerous. According to one local historian, silicosis, a lung disease caused by continued inhalation of mineral dust, killed even more miners than accidents.

Bobby viewed the United States army as the obvious alternative, and he enlisted in the late 1950s. He spent a year in the 47th Infantry at Fort Lewis, Washington, plus seven more in the reserves. The highlight of the experience was his pole-vaulting duties on the track team, claiming that he once cleared 14 feet, 6