Life of Evel: Evel Knievel (20 page)
That is not entirely to take away from Robbie’s achievements, however, which are considerable. He remains the only man to have conquered the fountains at Caesar’s Palace (he cleared them with Evel in attendance in 1989) after youngster Gary Wells was almost killed in the attempt. Robbie also became the first and only motorcyclist to jump the Grand Canyon – a feat which his father was not even permitted to attempt – on a standard motorcycle, but although the jump was impressive it was over a tributary of the canyon and not over a three-quarter-mile-wide section as his father had attempted at the Snake River. Knievel junior does, however, plan to jump the Snake River Canyon in the future, though as yet it is unclear whether it will be on a standard motorcycle or in a steam-powered rocket. He has also jumped 30 limousines, 17 trucks (no-handed) and, rather embarrassingly, 10,180 dishes for a television commercial, all of which had reputedly been washed with just one ounce of Dawn dishwashing liquid!
Robbie’s attempts to better all his father’s jumps appear to be a desperate bid to win Evel’s approval; a cry for attention since the two first went their own separate ways in the early 1980s. Robbie has made little attempt to carve out his own unique career-path and seems to be more than content trying to imitate and upstage his father. This desire to impress may have its roots in the fact that he desperately wanted Evel’s blessing and help early in his career, only to be shunned. Evel tried to restrict his son to easy short jumps of no more than 10 vans, apparently on the grounds of safety, but Robbie began thinking his father had another, less caring motive. ‘I started to think he might be jealous,’ he admitted, ‘and didn’t want to pass the torch. I was his biggest fan. I just wanted his support.’
Robbie continues to jump and has performed other spectacular leaps including a building-to-building jump in Las Vegas, 13 storeys up without a safety net. While Evel never actually attempted such a stunt, he did lay the foundations by once toying with the idea of jumping between the doomed twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Robbie has also leaped from a ramp built on a railway line facing an oncoming train, taking off just a split second before the train smashed through the ramp in what was a most impressive stunt. But he continues to fail to capture the attention of the world at large in the way his father did. Part of this is undoubtedly because he approaches his jumps in a much more scientific manner than Evel ever did and, by doing so, eliminates much of the risk. In other words, there is much less chance of seeing Robbie being wiped out than there was with Evel. It’s not that Robbie never got hurt – he has had his share of broken bones and concussions – but his body has not taken half as much abuse as Evel’s.
Despite the fact that he never became anywhere near as big a star as his father, Evel became increasingly jealous of his son’s achievements to the point where the two often went for years on end without talking. But the mutual animosity was not created exclusively by jumping rivalries; the pair had always endured a stormy relationship and never more so than when a youthful Robbie came home at 4 a.m. one morning when he was on probation for breaking into a record store. Evel completely lost his temper and lashed out at his son, knocking him to the floor. ‘He wouldn’t apologise,’ Knievel senior said by way of explanation, ‘so I knocked him down again. Then I kicked him in the face and broke his nose. I broke his nose and it broke my heart [but] I may break it again if he doesn’t listen to me.’ Evel took his son to a plastic surgeon the following day and reputedly spent $100,000 having Robbie’s nose fixed up. However, such incidents are not easily forgotten and the relationship between father and son remained inconsistent for many years.
Evel did, however, finally find it within himself to declare Robbie as the greatest motorcycle jumper in the world, and added that ‘the kid’s got more guts and more balls than anybody in the world’. But, still not willing to completely downplay his own achievements, he added, ‘Robbie has a tough thing to overcome with me. It would be like Muhammad Ali’s son wanting to be champion of the world.’
If all Robbie wanted was recognition from his father it seems he has achieved his aim. Recognition from the world at large is another matter, and it seems certain that no matter how long Robbie continues to jump and whatever else he achieves, he will always be most famous for being the son of Evel Knievel.
After his abortive attempts to tour with Robbie, Evel finally gave up the ghost and completely turned his back on motorcycle jumping. Of his enforced retirement he said, ‘I just dropped out of sight and played golf and relaxed. I just completely withdrew from the public eye. I tell ya, I came to a point in my life when I just couldn’t pull the gun outta the holster any more. Just couldn’t do it, couldn’t pull the trigger. I mean, I’d been hurt 30-some times and every time I saw a bus or a truck comin’ down the road I’d wince when I was driving a car. It’s something I can’t explain but, believe me, it gets to you.’
But his bitter disappointment at having to retire from jumping paled into insignificance in the face of his mounting financial difficulties. In 1980, the Miami Federal District Court found Evel liable for damages to his boat
Evel Eye 1.
Despite all his boasting to the contrary, Knievel didn’t actually own the boat but rather leased it from the Transit Charter Company with the promise that he would eventually buy it outright. The bone of contention was that Evel had made $50,000 worth of unapproved alterations to the boat and now quite clearly was not in a financial position to buy it. Knievel rather pathetically argued that he had been taking painkillers at the time he leased the boat and his decision to do so had been clouded by their effects. He also admitted that he was in debt to the tune of $4 million, owing money to banks and credit-card companies, and the fact that he still owed $200,000 on his house in Butte.
Too proud to file for bankruptcy, Knievel had to face many of his assets being seized, including his luxury Butte home, forcing him to move his family into a much smaller and cheaper property in Crystal Street, Butte while he suffered the humiliation of watching a lawyer move into the house which had been built to his own specifications. As he said, ‘Nobody likes to live like a king and realise that your throne may be jerked out from underneath you.’ Knievel’s throne may not have been completely jerked out from underneath him but it was being inexorably prised away.
But there was worse to come than the legal wrangling over the boat. The Internal Revenue Service now declared that Evel had failed to pay his taxes between 1972 and 1976, and that he owed $1.7 million in back-payments, although Evel himself sometimes claimed this figure was as much as $21 million. Whatever the case, it was money that Evel simply didn’t have and couldn’t expect to earn now that his career was over and his name was of little interest to anyone. He had started the 1970s as one of the world’s most famous stars and had entered the 1980s with nothing but hazy memories and a mountain of debt. It was the ultimate fall from grace and things got even worse in 1981 when the dreaded name of Sheldon Saltman re-entered Knievel’s life.
With Evel’s criminal sentence having been served, Saltman now attacked him through the civil courts and, on 22 December 1981, Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered Knievel to pay almost $13 million in damages to Saltman. Coupled with his tax bill, Evel was now in debt to the tune of at least $18 million without any obvious means of paying up. And so long as he continued failing to pay his taxes, so the penalties and interest increased. In a desperate bid to escape the attentions of the taxman, Evel quite literally ran away – or rather drove away – in a luxury tour bus and trailer (with a combined length of almost 100 feet) which was reckoned to be worth almost $500,000. It was to be his home for most of the 1980s but he remained defiant of the taxman and boasted, ‘My Knievel toys made $300 million; I had the top-selling pinball machine; my Evel Knievel action figure outsold both GI Joe and Barbie combined. But yeah, most of the money has gone. The IRS claim I owe them $21 million. They can kiss my ass. And I told them if they send someone around to get it I won’t be responsible for what happens to him. Money is for spending and enjoying and I sure did enjoy it.’
Linda opted to stay back at their small house in Butte to look after baby Alicia, even though she too was suffering from her husband’s massive debts. She couldn’t open a bank account herself or invest what little money she had left for fear the IRS would levy the cash, as they had vowed to do with any further earnings Evel was entitled to make from his Ideal Toy sales.
So, leaving Linda and Alicia behind, Evel packed up his bus and headed off aimlessly all over the United States, parking up as, when and where he saw fit. He soon settled into a circuitous annual route round the States, regularly taking in Atlanta, St Louis, Coeur d’Alene in Idaho, Deer Valley in Utah, San Francisco and Las Vegas. It was a lonely, miserable and depressing time for the man who had so recently been such a huge star. Drifting from town to town, he hustled for money in bars or on golf courses, he fished and he hunted, all with a bottle of Wild Turkey as his only constant companion. But at least he didn’t have to worry about paying out $13 million to Saltman, as he later boasted. ‘He hasn’t received one single dime and he never will. He’ll never get one single dime. I’d rather die.’ Knievel figured that if he didn’t have the money he couldn’t pay it to Saltman, and no one knew where the hell he was anyway, so long as he just kept travelling around.
While Linda, in the depths of despair over her ruined existence, turned to the church and became a born-again Christian, Evel himself questioned the existence of any God who could have allowed him to fall from grace in such a way. He had fallen during many jumps and suffered horrendous injuries but this fall hurt a thousand times more than any before, and he simply couldn’t come to terms with the new, inferior life which had been left to him and which he blamed the IRS and the US government for causing, due to the 80-per-cent tax bracket they placed him in. ‘The US Government is run by a bunch of fuckin’ thieves, liars and con men. To be a good politician in the US you’ve got to be a God-damned crook and a liar and a thief. That’s what it amounts to. And the Internal Revenue Service is worse than the Gestapo. They threaten people and lie and cheat. We need a business manager to run this country – a good one.’ ‘Abolish the IRS! Stamp out organised crime!’
Unlike Linda, Knievel never believed in religion in the standard acceptance of the word. ‘I don’t believe in hell. I don’t believe in gods or Jesus Christ or sacred cows. I don’t believe in that big fat-assed Buddha. Show me one piece of the tablets that Moses was supposed to have brought down from the mountain. Show me one piece of Noah’s Ark. People need a crutch. They need to make up stories. I don’t want to do that.’
Knievel harboured an extreme dislike for organised religion, especially when it came to those sects that specialised in raising ‘funds’ in the name of religion. In fact, there were few subjects which prompted Knievel into such a rant when given the chance to air his views. ‘All these so-called Christian people, Catholic people and Jews and Seven Day Adventists and Mormons; all these people that profess they’re men of God, all these silly-ass preachers…instead of takin’ money from their people every Sunday they oughta give ’em all donor cards and let them become donors of their eyes and kidneys and hearts and livers. If you die, you can’t take your liver to heaven with you, only your spirit goes. You’ve gotta leave your liver here to help somebody else live. Now, do you think you can do anything where God would bless you more than helping somebody live? So I challenge all of you so-called Christian people and all those believers in God. There’s less than one per cent of them that are donors. Where’s their heart at? Why should you give Jimmy Swaggart [a leading TV evangelist who resigned after a sex scandal] money? He’ll just go spend it on a whore. Why should you give Jim Bakker [leader of a multimillion-dollar religious empire who was jailed for five years for fraud] money? He’s just gonna spend it on some homo someplace. Who knows what these preachers are doin’ with our money? They’re scam artists, and [it’s] all tax-free. It’s the biggest scam in the world, religion.’
As his drinking and depression got worse, Knievel realised he was finally slipping over the edge, out of control, and he had to do something about it. ‘I think that I began to feel so bad from the alcohol hangovers, travelling alone like I did, partying like I did, that I really felt that I was beginning to lose touch with reality. I really started to feel bad and I knew that I was drinking too much alcohol and I had to do something with my life.’
He even checked himself into rehab in a bid to quit drinking, but, somewhat predictably, it didn’t last. ‘I stayed for two days then escaped. They filled me up on so much Valium and so much crap I couldn’t even think for myself. I thought, “Hell, I’d be better off drunk,” so I got the hell out of there.’
During this dark period Knievel spent a lot of time hanging out with mobsters in Chicago, who not only shared a passion for gambling but were willing to help out the former daredevil star financially at a time when Evel most needed help. He said of them, ‘I had a lot of friends, especially in Chicago, who were really beloved pals at a tough drinking time, at a tough time when I really kind of lost control and didn’t know which way to turn.’ In a darker moment of reflection he even added, ‘I came to a point in my life where I didn’t want to continue.’
He dined and played golf with known mobsters like Tony ‘Big Tuna’ Accardo, Joey Lombardo and Jackie Cerone, but his association with the Chicago mob would eventually lead to trouble. In 1985, Knievel was subpoenaed before the Grand Jury to testify against a suspected mobster called Robbie Margolwitz whose legitimate profession was the jewellery business. Knievel wasn’t fazed. ‘The FBI had investigated my friendship with Lombardo, Accardo and Cerone. My attorney, Fred Bezark, told the authorities flat out that they would have to grant me immunity or I would not even say “Good morning” to them. During the questioning, they asked me whether I knew that the FBI called Lombardo “the Stone killer”. I replied, “Joey is a good man. If Joey Lombardo killed anybody, then they deserved killing.”’ According to Knievel, someone on the jury actually applauded this statement and Evel was swamped with autograph hunters during the lunch break before the case was thrown out of court.