EVEL DOINGS : There’s Still a Roar Coming From Knievel Clan, but It’s No Longer the Old Man’s Cycle

Wouldn’t you like to be Evel Knievel’s son?

--One pudgy adolescent to another, poolside at Caesars Palace.

For the better part of a decade, he was America’s human Rorschach test.

Each time Evel Knievel launched his motorcycle and splattered, folks ogled the splotch of broken bones and pondered its meaning. Some saw courage and determination, or at least old-fashioned hucksterism at its finest. Others saw stupidity personified.

A calm of sorts fell over the country when Evel finally abandoned the daredevil circuit almost 10 years ago. But this evening, Knievel’s 26-year-old son Robbie is scheduled to race a motorcycle up a ramp and fly over the same Caesars Palace fountain that put his father into a coma in 1967.

Now anyone who’s conscious can hear the roar of a seemingly distant era, as the massive engines of the Knievel hype machine once again rev up past the red line. What isn’t clear, though, is whether the silver-haired man is still at the throttle or just going along for the ride behind the people who hope to use his publicity value as a ramp for launching Robbie into big-time celebrity.

The Living Legend

Evel the Elder was revved pretty high himself this week as he limped through the kitschy opulence of the Caesars casino, fielding phone calls, snapping out orders, schmoozing with well-wishers and barking playful insults at the hangers-on and friends swarming around the man being billed as a living legend.

Behind Knievel’s hard, no-remorse stare, though, there’s a hint that perhaps the legend was too hard won. When he says he wishes his son would find another line of work, it sounds like more than Knievel melodrama.

Knievel’s rise from Butte, Mont., hubcap thief to folk hero can be charted through his X-rays as easily as through the photographs of his gaudy stunts.

Showtime Event Television, which will broadcast Robbie’s jump to pay-per-view customers tonight, provided a publicity kit listing the elder daredevil’s “career highlights.” Leading off with this highlight--”April, 1967: Suffered severe groin and other injuries trying to jump over a motorcycle heading straight for him at 60 miles per hour in Barstow, Calif., hospitalized for weeks”--it reads more like a trauma center log than a resume.

Broken Bones

By 1971, the media were braying that Knievel had broken more than 100 bones. A decade later, the Guinness Book of Records put the figure at 433.

Today, Knievel says he only broke about 35 bones in 14 or so major accidents.

But no one doubts that morbid fascination had much to do with his spiraling fame, as Knievel went from jumping a pit of rattlesnakes in Butte to leaping over cars, then heaps of cars, then Mack trucks, double-decker buses and a tank full of sharks.

“Knievelmania” hit its apex in 1974, when the Evel One tried to ride a rocket-powered “sky cycle” over the Snake River Canyon in Idaho.

“The witless Knievel is titillating a barbaric appetite for treating violent death as a spectator sport,” columnist George Will wrote at the time. “Like pornography, the event is brutalizing, anti-life.”

Such sentiments, though, didn’t keep folks from flocking to the site, where a full-fledged ‘60s style “happening” developed.

The jump itself was a fiasco. Knievel’s parachute went off prematurely and the daredevil floated back to the side of the canyon from which he took off. But the fizzle did nothing to slow his skyrocketing popularity.

During the 1974 Christmas season, sales of the Evel Knievel toy “action figure” blew away G.I. Joe; over the next few years, Knievel stunt cycles, flags and radios grossed between $100 million and $200 million. In the manner of a true cultural phenomenon, Knievel even had his own “Evel Knievel syndrome” bestowed upon him by a London dentist, who warned that impressionable British teen-agers were knocking their teeth out in attempts to jump bicycles over obstacles.

Just as broken bones made his career, they also effectively ended it. In 1977, Knievel took offense at what he saw as an unflattering account written by a former business partner. Armed with a baseball bat from Sear’s, he and an accomplice broke the man’s wrist and fractured his arm, because, Knievel later explained: “You write with your hands.”

Knievel was sentenced to 180 days in a Los Angeles County work-furlough program. Like everything he did, he turned it into a publicity stunt. When people complained he was going to his daily job in a chauffeured Stutz di Italia, Knievel sent a dozen Cadillac limos to the Los Angeles jail to pick up other inmates.

He never could kick-start his career again, though, and in 1980, he finally resigned himself to making goofy golf bets and peddling the Western-style paintings he produced.

And, from time to time, he has tried to fire up some publicity for his handsome son, who so far keeps plunging into the chasm of facelessness, in spite of--or perhaps because of--the fact that he’s a much better motorcycle stunt jumper than his father ever was.

So it is that Showtime and Caesars latched onto Knievel--or vice versa--and sent the two scurrying across the country on a publicity blitz.

And so it was that the father and son landed in Vegas, where they got things rolling with a press conference, then swaggered into a barrage of live radio and television interviews.

Marketing Advice

“We went into this with a 96% awareness level of who Evel is,” said Suzan Couch, a marketing consultant for Showtime. “More people were aware of him than George Bush.”

“Get that woman away from me,” Knievel would bellow when she was out of earshot, tossing in one of the many expletives that riddle his often uproarious tough-guy patter. “I need her baby-sitting me like I need a hole in the head.”

On the air, his personality mellowed only slightly.

“When Robbie was a little boy, he used to hold me in his arms and promise me he wouldn’t do what I did for a living. He broke his promise,” Evel repeated as he and his son sat side by side on a lawn near the Caesars fountain, doing live, hit-and-run satellite feeds to television stations in Norfolk, Va.; Dallas; Cincinnati; Sacramento, and eight other cities.

But Robbie’s his own man now, and his father is resigned. As he told anchormen and women across the country, “I don’t want to be known as the best daredevil who ever lived. I want to be known as the father of the best daredevil who ever lived.”

Pitch for Profits

With their helmets on their laps--Robbie’s shiny new one, Evel’s battered old savior--the two made a strong pitch for motorcycle safety. And without fail, they also made a pitch for profits.

Robbie: “It’s pay-per-view on Showtime. $14.95.”

Evel: “Call your cable operator today.”

After Tuesday’s final TV interview, Robbie retreated to his rented motor home to prepare for the jump.

Evel set up shop in a dark bar overlooking the casino’s “Riot di Roulette,” and began talking business and hustling up rooms and tickets.

“They’ve got 1,100 seats in the bleachers and they’ve had 9,000 requests for tickets,” he told business acquaintances from California or New York and the old buddies from Butte who kept the name “Evel Knievel” booming over the Caesars page system night and day as they called to say they’d be there, joining the tens of thousands of people Evel figures will fill the streets.

Sound of Coins

Between phone calls, Knievel’s conversation careened from story to story, celebrity to celebrity, always landing back on a Knievel--either father or son.

His voice a deep growl over the sound of coins clattering out of slot machines in the background, he described meeting Salvador Dali--who happened to like his paintings, he said.

Then there was the time he and Richard Burton chatted about the charms of Elizabeth Taylor, whom Knievel lists as one of his three unfulfilled conquests--along with racing at Indianapolis and free-falling from an airplane into a haystack.

“You know, I think Liz wanted a date with me,” Knievel said with a grin. “I really think she did. But the best she could do was George Hamilton, who played me in a movie. She ended up with George Hamilton and Malcolm Forbes, two guys who want to be Evel Knievel. . . . Can you believe it? Malcolm Forbes has all the money in the world and he wants to be like Evel Knievel.”

On the Wagon

For a while, a few years back, Knievel went on the wagon, railing against boozers as “pimples on the (rear end) of progress.” This week, though, he was knocking back one Canadian Club after another, chasing them with lite beer.

“Friends say they’re worried about me drinking. I tell them, if you had kids like mine, you’d drink, too.”

Now he’s got a 9-year-old daughter, Alicia, and he’s spoiling her rotten, he said. But Knievel concedes that he had faults as a father, and that it was his wife, Linda, who raised the couple’s three oldest children--a 28-year-old son, Kelly; Robbie, and daughter Tracey Lynn, 25, a missionary.

“I was out trying to conquer the world when my children were growing up,” he said. “They loved me, but they were glad to see me leave home. They all told me that.”

Linda was glad to see him go sometimes, too, she said. For a time, the only reason she didn’t leave him was because she was afraid “he’d hurt me or kill me,” she said.

‘Bad, Bad Attitude’

There were even moments, she admitted, when she caught herself not caring when she saw him cartwheeling down a ramp. “Maybe I thought he deserved it,” she said. “. . . I had a bad, bad attitude. I was very rebellious towards him.”

Then she found Jesus and was “born again.”

“I’ve learned to trust in God and be content in my circumstances,” she said. “I believe God is holding on to him for a reason. . . . I believe God wants him with me for a reason. Thank God, I’ve learned to accept him for what he is.”

Knievel and Robbie, who first rode in his father’s show at age 8, had a particularly problematic relationship. When Robbie was born, his father was in jail in Twin Falls, Idaho--arrested for speeding to the hospital with a revoked driver’s license.

More than once as he got older, Robbie sped to hospitals in ambulances with his father after a spill. He was frightened by his dad’s seemingly lunatic stunts. He cried as he waited at the Snake River jump, thinking, “Jesus, what are you trying to prove?”

Like his father, Robbie was rebellious, and several times the two came to blows. One night, when the boy came home drunk after breaking into a music store, Evel kicked him in the face, breaking his nose.

“He looks a lot better with the new nose,” Knievel jokes. “I did it for no charge.”

Robbie smiles at that line, now. A solid, tough-featured athlete, he said the father-son relationship finally improved when he first whipped his old man in a fight.

As he sat in his rented motor home eating Fritos, Robbie said he learned a lot by watching his father. But while he loves and respects him, he doesn’t want to become a clone of the legend.

“My dad’s eating this up,” he said of the accelerating media blitz. But Robbie spurns the term “daredevil”--which Evel Sr. consistently applies to him--and has no interest in persuading the media to swarm around his ego like moths around a glaring bulb.

Name Recognition

He knows that his father is proud of him and he knows that his name recognition is valuable, but said, “If he loves me and wants to help me, he should stay out of the way now.”

In many ways, Evel Knievel is happy to oblige.

“I’m tired of being a gunfighter. I couldn’t pull the trigger anymore,” Evel said, the elusive quality in his face suddenly looking a lot like sadness.

“Anybody who says that old age makes them smarter is full of it,” he snarled. “They run out of nerve . . . I don’t have the guts, I don’t have the recuperative power, I don’t have the desire.”

At the peak of his publicity binges, Knievel flew in his own Lear jet emblazoned with his name, or toured the country in lavish motor homes fitted with Jacuzzis and other accouterments. He wore thousands of dollars in jewelry, $700 cowboy boots and the finest Italian suits.

Court Orders

But in the early ‘80s, a Santa Monica court ordered Knievel to pay the man whose arm he broke $12.7 million; the IRS sued him for $1.6 million in back taxes. Knievel continues to deride the victim of his 1977 assault and boasts that the man “I hit with a baseball bat . . . never got a dime.” He added, “I’d rather die than pay the IRS what it says I owe them.”

He works, he contends, as an unpaid consultant to the corporation promoting Robbie’s jump. He “had to fight” with his lawyer of 20 years, who heads the corporation, “to give me $1,000 in expenses,” he said, pulling a wad of $100 bills from his wallet.

Knievel’s wife and youngest daughter now live in a home in Butte given to them by the oldest son, who like Robbie, lives in Las Vegas. Knievel himself says he owns no real estate and has no permanent home.

As for the other trappings of the high roller, “I don’t want ‘em,” he said. “Robbie bought me an Aston Martin Lagonda, a $200,000 car. I’ve got a 12-gauge shotgun, a set of golf clubs, some clothes and shoes and a rabbit’s foot. I travel around, have a good time. What more do I need? If it flies, floats or goes to bed with you, lease it. That’s my new motto.”

Robbie has said that with the bike he’s riding, the padding he’ll wear, and the skill he possesses, the chances of his getting seriously hurt in the jump are slim.

Wait and See

His father isn’t so sure. As Knievel sees it, there are three things that can happen.

If he makes the jump, Knievel will be a proud father cheering in the bleachers; if Robbie hurts himself, “I hope he’ll be man enough to face it.”

And if he dies?

“I’ll bury him,” Knievel snaps. “On his tombstone I’ll put, ‘Here lies my son. I loved him.’ ”

His own epitaph, he said, will read: “What the hell are you looking at?”