Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (25 page)

Whether people believed him or not, Knievel had said he would make his last jump in the spring of 2003 but as the date came and went, with no jump, older fans were reminded of the continual postponement of the Snake River attempt. In the meantime, Evel had his upcoming Evel Knievel Week to think about. The event ran from 29 July to 3 August and served two purposes: one was to honour Knievel and the other was to attract much-needed tourist money to Butte. Knievel had always been proud of his hometown and offered his services free of charge for the festival in order to give something back to Butte. ‘I’ve given a couple of weeks of my time here,’ he said. ‘I’m very happy about it but I have cancelled a couple of events that could have meant quite a bit of income for me but that doesn’t matter. Giving back to the community and to the friends that I grew up with is what’s important to me.’

Butte hadn’t really done much to promote the Knievel phenomenon in past years and hadn’t even erected a statue, opened a museum or celebrated his fame in any significant way. There had been some talk of naming a street after Evel and there were many supporters in favour of the idea, especially County Commissioner Mike Sheehy who proposed the notion. But complaints from businesses who would have to change their stationery and addresses at their own cost scuppered the proposal, at least temporarily.

Butte did, however, arrange for a museum of Knievel memorabilia to be opened in time for Evel Knievel Week as part of its $60,000 investment in the event. Evel himself attended to open the exhibit, which officially kicked off the week’s activities. The exhibit was housed in Butte’s Piccadilly Museum of Transportation Memorabilia and Advertising Art, and included the crumpled X-2 Sky Cycle, Evel’s Wheelie Bike, the early mock-up Harley-Davidson ‘jet bike’, the XR-750 he crashed when jumping the shark tank, a life-size statue of Evel and a collection of toys and other memorabilia.

It was estimated that between eight and ten thousand people descended upon Butte for Knievel Week, most of whom were on their way to the famous Sturgis Rally – which was due to be held the following week – and were looking for a warm-up party. There was certainly plenty to entertain, as visitors could watch live bands, see stuntman Spanky Spangler set himself alight and leap from the ninth floor of the Finlen hotel onto an airbag, attend custom bike and car shows and generally party in the streets until their hearts (and livers) were content.

True Knievel fans also had plenty of opportunities to meet their hero in the flesh as Evel led a 100-bike ride-out round the ‘Knievel Loop’, a newly signposted route through Butte that took in many sights connected with Knievel’s life. Die-hard fans could even part with $50 to attend a dinner hosted in Evel’s honour with the man himself in attendance.

While Evel Knievel Week might have been a thrill for his more ardent fans, the event was not a financial success and was reduced to just three days in 2003 and renamed Evel Knievel Daze (sic) in a bid to make it more cost-effective. But the real surprise of the 2003 event was the woman who accompanied Evel throughout the activities – Krystal Kennedy. Evel’s persistence in following her and bombarding her with flowers, cards and telephone calls had obviously paid off and the two erstwhile lovers were reunited despite the tempestuous nature of their relationship. Knievel was full of praise once more for his ex-wife and explained all that she had had to put up with over the years. ‘I was an alcoholic. I had hepatitis C and didn’t know it. She went through my alcoholism; she went through a condition I had called a bleeding oesophagus; she went through a hip transplant, all the time nursing me back to life and back to health…I had a temperament problem, a bad one…I was on drugs like Zoloft [an antidepressant] – it was like dropping a pill in the Pacific Ocean. After the divorce I finally fought back and got on medication that would help me, help the damage I did. She then returned to me – she came back. And together we’re trying to make every day a good day. Hopefully we’ll get married again some day.’

Krystal had indeed been Knievel’s guardian angel in the years that she had been with him and had saved his life on more than one occasion, as she explained without presuming to take credit for the fact. She had rushed him to hospital at least 15 times since meeting him, ‘And I don’t mean for stupid stuff but in life-threatening situations. He’s been bleeding internally well over half those times.’

Yet again in his roller-coaster ride through life, things seemed to be going Evel’s way, and work began on the Evel Knievel Xperience Café in Primm, Nevada, a casino/resort development town on the Nevada/California border. It was a project Evel had long dreamed of as he had kept all his bikes (14 of them according to his own estimate), trucks, trailers and assorted memorabilia and had always wanted to display them all in one place, either in a themed restaurant or bar. This at least seemed like a realistic project, and one which could have been easily achieved until Evel started talking of virtual-reality theme rides being incorporated so visitors could experience crashing into the Snake River Canyon and flying through the air on a Harley-Davidson – all without the pain he himself had endured in the same attempts. ‘I have a ride that you can get on and you can jump 30 cars yourself, on the ride. Then you experience a crash which you may not be able to get up from. You can jump in my rocket car, jump the Snake River Canyon, hit the wall, go down in the river, and when you hit at 130mph the water splashes right in your face.’

The Evel Knievel Experience was set up as a three-way venture between Talisman Companies, Kirk Kerkorian (owner of the MGM Grand among other casinos and resorts) and Net Net Inc., a Nevada corporation owned by Evel’s son Kelly who had turned his mind to business after turning his back on stunt-performing in the 1970s. Kelly had also been making a name for himself on the golf courses of Nevada. Having won the Las Vegas City Amateur Championship in 1998, he progressed to the Southern Nevada Golf Association Championship where he took consistent top-ten placings. He might not have followed his father into professional motorcycle jumping but Kelly Knievel certainly shared Evel’s passion for golf.

Knievel senior expected to make either $1.35 million a year from the Xperience or, alternatively, would opt for one third of the profits. As well as the virtual-reality rides, he also envisioned various games based on his career being included in the Xperience as well as a sports bar and a restaurant serving up traditional truck-stop food. An existing roller coaster which spans the freeway in Primm was also due to be renamed the ‘Evel Knievel Great American Daredevil Roller Coaster’ in a link-up with the Café.

Knievel had planned for his resort to open in 2003 but, just like his planned comeback jump, it never happened. In fact, he had begun telling reporters that his jump would take place at the opening of the Café, which is a half-hour drive from Las Vegas. However, when one year after the initial date for both events had passed, nothing had materialised.

What did materialise was another sudden surge of interest in Evel, both from Hollywood and a more unlikely source – a small Los Angeles-based theatre company. In the spring of 2003 it was announced that Evel had signed over the rights to the Zoo District theatre company to make a rock opera based on his life. Musical director and composer Jef Bek approached Evel with a seven-song demo he’d been working on for two years and won the approval of his childhood hero to produce ‘Evel Knievel: The Rock Opera’. ‘He was a living superhero,’ said Bek. ‘He knows I get him and he knows I understand what’s really significant about his legacy.’

Bek (not to be confused with rock singer/guitarist Jeff Beck) was inspired by Knievel as a child and was determined to become a motorcycle stunt-rider himself before crashing his bicycle into a tree stump and realising he might not be made of the same stuff as Knievel. Knievel himself thought the project – which would include songs influenced by Seventies giants Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd – was ‘a wonderful compliment’ and even suggested he might make a cameo appearance during the show’s opening nights.

But it was the attention from Hollywood which really promised to make Evel an ‘A list’ celebrity once again. The much-hyped movie
Pure Evel
had sunk without a trace back in 1998, and most assumed the project had been shelved indefinitely. But in 2004 it was announced that
Pure Evel
had been given the green light by Universal Studios and would be directed by Joseph McGinty Nichol (better known as McG), who had recently enjoyed big box-office success with
Charlie’s Angels
and
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,
both based, appropriately enough, on the 1970s hit television series. The script was to be written by another major Hollywood player, Andrew Walker, whose previous credits included
Se7en
starring Brad Pitt,
Sleepy Hollow
with Johnny Depp, and
8MM
starring Nicolas Cage.

The movie, tentatively scheduled for a 2005 release, was to be centred around the Snake River Canyon jump when Evel’s fame was at its peak, and, in contrast to the George Hamilton biopic, it promised to be a warts-‘n’-all portrayal of the darker side of Knievel. McG had long been fascinated by the Knievel legend and confessed that Knievel had been one of the characters he fantasised about in his ‘Walter Mitty childhood’. ‘Here the fact really is stranger than fiction,’ he said. ‘This is a guy who was a bank robber, who carried Wild Turkey in a cane. This is a guy who painted his name on his Learjet and then bought a second one to fly alongside so he could look at it from the air. The picture is about a man and that which made him great will also be his undoing. I want to tell darker stories. This will be a dramatic piece.’ McG planned to produce the movie under his Wonderland Sound and Vision company and would be aided by Stephanie Savage as executive producer. It was once again rumoured that Mathew McConaughey would play Knievel, but nothing was confirmed in the press release as far as actors were concerned.

Knievel hit the headlines again in early 2004 when it was announced that the industry standard for mobile gaming – the Superscape Group – was to launch a state-of-the-art Evel Knievel game for mobile phones using highly realistic images of the stuntman and his bikes. Superscape’s chief executive Kevin Roberts said that ‘Given the worldwide interest in this personality and his spectacular exploits, I believe that the Evel-ution game will prove a great hit for gamers worldwide.’

Hard on the heels of the announcement that
Pure Evel
was set to enter production came the news that American cable-television giants TNT were to start shooting a made-for-television movie about Evel’s life in April 2004. It was to be produced by Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions, the company responsible for the five-Oscar-winning movie
Braveheart
among others. While Gibson would act as executive producer, actor George Eads from hit television show
CSI
(
Crime Scene Investigation
) would play Knievel in the film, which would follow Evel’s whole life-story rather than just part of it. The script was written by Jason Horwitch, whose past movies had included the 1998 Harvey Keitel/Bridget Fonda vehicle,
Finding Graceland.
TNT’s senior vice president Michael Wright also appeared to be a personal fan of the subject of his new movie: ‘Evel Knievel is that rare larger-than-life character from which good film biographies are made. I grew up – like a lot of other kids in the Seventies – thinking Evel Knievel was the coolest guy on the planet. Now, after going through the development process with this project, I see him as a fascinating and complex character, a guy with an admirable streak of self-confidence, determination and pure grit.’

Nothing cements and increases a person’s fame as much as a major Hollywood movie, and while Knievel is already a hero to millions around the world,
Pure Evel
and
Evel Knievel
look set to make him a hero to a whole new generation who were not even born at the peak of his fame.
Pure Evel
may not cover his whole life-story, but no two-hour movie – including, presumably,
Evel Knievel –
could ever hope to cram in every aspect of such an incredible life; a life which was perfectly symbolised by the jumps that made Evel famous in the first place. His willingness to have a go and to get back up and try again if he failed applied to his private life just as it did to his jumps. The willingness to accept and deal with the pain and injuries he was sure to suffer along the way; the highs and the lows; the good times and the bad; the falls from grace as well as the perfect landings. The fame and the fortune, the glitz and the glamour, his fall from glory and the alcohol-soaked wilderness years followed by his remarkable comeback; not to mention the illnesses he fought and his fiery romances, have all combined to make Evel Knievel’s life anything but an ordinary one, and certainly a far-from-perfect one. But these are the things that made him Evel Knievel and the man himself was quick to point out that he wouldn’t have had things any other way. He played the cards he was dealt, switched them when necessary and always kept an ace up his sleeve. He lived a life that few of us would have the courage to follow and he enjoyed every minute of it. ‘I’ve had a good life. I’ve lived a better life than any king or prince you’ve ever had in England. There is no president, no athlete – nobody – that has ever lived a better life than I.’

On another occasion Knievel reflected, ‘Some people can only dream of such a life. I lived it. I was watching television the other day – a biography on the History Channel of Aristotle Onassis. They talked about his wealth, his riches, and I wasn’t impressed. I had bigger boats than he did, bigger yachts; I had more Rolls-Royces, more Ferraris. I had more racehorses than he did. I screwed more women than he did – and they were better looking too.’

When Knievel started performing, his jumps genuinely amazed spectators in an age when such feats were anything but commonplace. That era has now been superseded by one in which we are desensitised to outrageous stunts as people continue to push the limits of what is possible. Knievel’s simple ramp-to-ramp jumps have been replaced by freestyle riders performing acrobatics in mid-air, hanging off their bike in contorted positions as they soar over much greater distances than Evel ever did. Apart from all the Extreme athletes, we are also constantly subjected to madcap stunts through programmes like
Jackass
where the participants appear more than happy to perform any number of life-threatening capers in order to raise a laugh or a wince from the audience. The
Jackass
crew, like the Extreme sportsmen, are the direct descendants of Knievel in that they are prepared to shed skin and break bones in order to thrill themselves and their audiences and break away from the confines of ‘normal’ everyday society. While Evel’s jumps may look tame by today’s standards, his crashes certainly don’t, and his reputation as the originator of a whole new lifestyle remains intact, and is, if anything, growing.