Where Evel Lurks

Former daredevil Evel Knievel is still a gambler, so look for him in Las Vegas

By Richard Hoffer

At rest, which is a physically enforced condition for him, he is a startling sight. Diamonds of odd provenance ("Redd Foxx, paid $50,000 for them," he says) catch the casino light, and his half leer gleams wickedly. There's a crookedness to him that you can't quite put your finger on. Over the years he has broken 35 bones, he says ("Not every bone in my body, that's a common misconception"), and everything about him seems angular, his joints not in concert. But here he seems comfortable, as if his skeleton had been restructured for just this purpose: His body folds perfectly into the Cloud Nine bar in the Maxim Hotel in Las Vegas.

"I'm the biggest gambler in town," he says, by way of greeting. In Las Vegas? "Won $26,000 last week; bet the Packers at the half. Lost $6,700 on Bruce Seldon. Believe that? Had dinner with him two nights before the Tyson fight, and he's telling me how he's going to win this for his mother, how he's a Christian. Forget the money, I believed in the kid. But I like Miami this week, and I'm betting Notre Dame big the first half."

Evel Knievel sips a light beer. He's among old friends at the Maxim, the casino hotel where he usually stays. He has come to Las Vegas for a few days -- had to drive a Pontiac Firebird onto a stage at a car show and went to the inaugural Indy race at Vegas's new speedway -- but as usual when he visits Vegas, he will end up spending weeks, maybe a month, folded up in his living room, the Cloud Nine. The air-conditioned days go by, and Evel, insulated from time as we know it, makes the best of them. "Woody," he says to the bartender, "did I ever bet sports here?" Woody chuckles.

It is a strange ether that Evel floats in, but everyone's retirement is different, right? His is wildly intoxicating, exotic beyond anything the financial magazines promise. A jeweler named Sammy, who seems to be wearing his entire inventory, shows up to consult on earrings for Evel's girlfriend, Krystal Kennedy. Evel wants them to be two karats each, but Sammy, who looks like the last man on earth to argue for modesty, says one karat would be plenty. Evel shrugs. Less is more? Hardly. A shoeshine man appears at the bar. "The lizards look good, and the alligators look good," Evel says, "but I got six pair of shoes for you tomorrow." Evel looks into the shoeshine man's eyes. "You need anything, you O.K.?" The man shrugs, and Evel withdraws a rubber-banded wad of money from his pocket and peels off $30.

Woody produces another light beer, and the day turns to night. Evel says his doctors disagree on whether he has liver disease, but even he admits that he drinks too much. Just beer, though. "Had my last drink of Wild Turkey in 1989," he says, "the day after Robbie jumped Caesars." Was it his last drink because his son cleared the same 50-yard jump over the Caesars Palace fountains that Evel attempted on New Year's Eve of '67? (Evel came up short and ended up in a coma for 29 days.) "No, I'd just had enough," he says. The beer he drinks is often even lighter than it's meant to be. Krystal, a former member of the Florida State golf team and a feisty traveling companion, tops his glass with mineral water whenever he's not looking. Evel sips it and calls to Woody in mock alarm, "Is this beer flat?"

"Those were a bad 10 years, till 1990," Evel says, beginning one of those outrageous yarns he loves to spin. "Tough time. Made $60 million, spent 61. I never cared about money, though. Lost $250,000 at blackjack once." That hurt? "Nah, had three million in the bank at the time."

Things Evel bought with his $60 million: "I had a 124-foot ship, an 87-foot yacht, a helicopter, a Learjet. I had trotters, Tennessee walkers, Appaloosas, quarter-horses and thoroughbreds. I had 14 motorcycles at one time. Cars, I don't know -- five Rolls-Royces, terrible cars. Have a $280,000 Aston now. Had a million-dollar home on 8.9 acres in Butte." Other stuff too, like that diamond-encrusted walking stick filled with Wild Turkey. Rocket bikes and sky cycles. Who knows what all he bought?

Krystal appears, and, to absolutely no fanfare, Evel hands her an unmounted diamond he says is 6.5 karats. She met him at a golf tournament in Florida five years ago. He's going on 58, she's 26. They're quite a pair.

"A little big," she says, sizing up the stone alongside the one on the ring she's wearing.

"But do you love me?" he says.

"I'll think about it," she says and heads for the blackjack tables.

"A great little golfer," Evel says admiringly, "and a good little gambler, too." It reminds him. "I once won $50,000 in golf, beat this guy one up. Eagled the 1st hole. You do know I'm the biggest gambler in town, don't you?" In Las Vegas? "Oh, yes," he says, fierce all of a sudden. "I bet my life here."

Robert Craig Knievel hasn't made a motorcycle jump since 1980, but he must have made hundreds of them over his 14-year career, in venues ranging from civic centers and county fairgrounds to Idaho's Snake River Canyon, where he made his famous abortive attempt to rocket three quarters of a mile, from one side to the other, in 1974. All those nights when he left his wife, Linda, and three kids in the hotel room -- dressed in his leathers, with his helmet tucked under his arm, wondering if he'd come back and see them again -- the terrible feeling in his stomach never yielded to experience. "The feeling just got worse, every time," he says. It was surprising. "Got so I couldn't pull the trigger."

He got out in time, sort of. He never cheated on his stunts, and going by his X-rays, his performances were less than surefire. Beginning with one of his first jumps -- in 1966, when he failed to clear a box of rattlesnakes, and the critters slithered clear of their splintered crate -- he established the national threshold of danger, and he raised the bar every time, or at least added another bus. The thrills were genuine. He figures he spent 3 1/2 years in hospitals in the service of his daredevilry.

He was certainly paid well enough -- as much for his promotional genius as for his performances. As for the failed Snake River Canyon leap, it hardly matters whether he made $6.5 million, as he says, or $250,000, as others claim. More to the point was the fame that he fashioned from the stunt. It became apparent that his jumps (whether made over 19 cars at a backcountry track or over 13 Greyhound buses on Wide World of Sports) were not meant to get him from here to there, but to support the growing industry that was Evel Knievel. In the 1970s his action figures helped resuscitate a flagging toy industry. His Evel Knievel bikes, made by AMF, were everywhere. His name was on pinball machines, toothbrushes, blankets, curtains and radios. In your basement you may have an Evel Knievel lunch box.

Of course that money and Linda are long gone. By the time he straightened himself out in 1990, following a spree of spending and drinking that was every bit as outlandish as his stunts, all that remained was his fame, the residue of Evel Knievel quilts and wristwatches. Luckily for him, though, he lived into this ridiculous era in which fame is highly bankable.

Celebrities of Evel's vintage are suddenly attractive to sponsors, card-show organizers, bankers and car dealers. A guy like Evel, such an icon to a certain generation that he is seen as a kind of Elvis, is the beneficiary of a windfall for no good reason except that he survived, and Elvis didn't.

"I'm not bragging," he says, "but I'll make more money in the next 10 years than in my whole career." He thinks he represents seven or eight companies, outfits such as Choice Hotels and Little Caesar's Pizza. He is vague, he says, because he doesn't care that much anymore. The money just comes in. He claims he has gotten as much as $10,000 a week from sales of a pain-relief gizmo called the Stimulator, which he endorses and sells on his Happy Landings Web site. He'd prefer to have no involvement in his business affairs beyond the actual appearance work and the endorsement of the checks. For two years one of his Snake River Canyon sky cycles was parked inside the Vegas Hard Rock Cafe, at a handsome sum per annum. A movie about him (the fifth by his count) and a planned Evel Knievel theme restaurant in Las Vegas (to be called the Daredevil Cafe) will proceed without any worry on his part -- though he expects residuals.

So, sallying forth from his fairway home in Clearwater, Fla., he golfs -- he says he has a 12 handicap -- with Krystal and his buddies five days a week; he shops; and he bets on sporting events. Because three or four months are a long home stand for him, he is less likely to be in Clearwater than on the road, carving a circuitous seasonal path through the U.S.: Atlanta; St. Louis; Butte, Mont. (where his 102-year-old grandmother, the woman who raised him, still barks at her "Bobby"); Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (where he has a home); Deer Valley, Utah; San Francisco; Vegas. He drives all the time; this trip to Vegas was in a custom-painted Chevy Tahoe with a TV antenna. His Web site (www.evelknievel.com) updates his itinerary: "Evel is on vacation in the Midwest and near the West Coast, playing golf and relaxing in the mild warm weather."

"I have a wonderful life," he says. A lucky life? "I wouldn't say that. I broke enough damn bones and spilled enough damn blood, I wouldn't call it lucky." The rebuke is mild, though. A light beer or so later he says, "Luck may have had something to do with it." He's alive, isn't he?

At 11 p.m. Evel, who has been camped out at the Cloud Nine for a couple of hours since dinner, suddenly decides it's important to get to Caesars Palace and bet college football. Krystal and her chips are gathered from Maxim's casino, a stack of crisp hundreds is withdrawn from a safety box, and Evel's entourage piles into a limo for the drive -- a long block. Evel folds and unfolds his betting list, a scrawl of games he likes, 11 on Saturday alone. "I like Miami," he says. Krystal approves. "Won $100,000 in football last year," he says.

But the book at Caesars is closed. Krystal goes off to a blackjack table, and Evel finds another bar, fits into it and orders a Clamato. Suddenly he is surrounded, as he was earlier in the evening, by well-wishers, autograph seekers, older women who remind him, "You used to be so-o-o handsome." Evel enjoys this, not only because it appeals to his considerable ego but also because he just likes being with people. Some cowpokes, ZZ Top look-alikes in Vegas for a miners' convention, approach him, and everybody compares life underground. "Worked a mile below," Evel says, "mining copper for Anaconda." Everyone nods.

This is not a bad place for Evel to be. The cocktail waitresses, not a few of whom remember him from that 1967 jump at Caesars, are all over him. "If you want to kiss Evel," says one of the old-time girls, "you better do it now, while Krystal's gone." Evel laughs nervously, as if there is more history here than he would like to reveal. And they do kiss him. "They were awfully nice to me back then," Evel says, wiping lipstick from his cheek.

It is interesting that Caesars inspires no dread in him. Sailing across those fountains out front, then losing control and clattering across the asphalt for 200 feet, coming to rest at actress Linda Evans's feet ("She got pictures," he says) in one of his most horrific accidents -- it all has no grip on him whatsoever. "The one thing I remember," he says, glancing out from the bar to the casino floor, "was coming downstairs for the jump. I'd had my good-luck shot of Wild Turkey, like always, walking past the tables and stopping at roulette and betting $100 on red. It was black. I thought nothing of it, just put my helmet under my arm and kept walking."

He was luckier in 1989, when he got Robbie to use a safety landing ramp on his avenging jump at Caesars. "He didn't want to do it," Evel says. "Almost had to fistfight him. But if he hadn't used it" -- he demonstrates with cocktail napkins -- "he'd have been decapitated. I don't get any credit for that."

Worse, Evel and Robbie, who makes his living the way his father used to, have hardly spoken since then, for reasons Evel will not discuss. "Breaks your heart when your son doesn't love you," Evel says, "but he's without doubt the best motorcycle performer there is."

All in the past. Evel holds no grudge against Caesars, against anybody. He only wishes the sports book were open now. "Let's go," he says suddenly. He scoops up Krystal from the blackjack table, but she's furious because, unbeknownst to Evel, she was embarrassed by all the attention he got earlier that night from women. When Evel tries to soothe her by giving her $500 to bet on red at the roulette table, she stalks off, leaving him confused and, of course, embarrassed. They had a slightly more unpleasant set-to in 1994, when police arrested Evel on suspicion of beating Krystal at a motel in Sunnyvale, Calif. But the case disappeared overnight when she refused to press charges, saying only that they'd had "an argument and a tussle." Regardless of what happened then, this night's incident won't develop quite as famously. In fact, Evel is more rueful than anything else -- a beleaguered member of the ever-dim male gender. "Next time," he says, pointing to a companion, "we're going to do this in your town, with your girlfriend." He calls for the limo and rides back to the Maxim, fingering his bet sheet.

The following morning he bets the Miami game twice, $1,000 per, and plans to bet a host of other games smaller and Notre Dame huge the first half. He says he is on a kind of a roll. A Blue Angels pilot came up to him and told him that one of his public service announcements years back -- wear a helmet, don't do drugs, who knows -- turned his life around. This happens all the time: Evel's lifetime of risk is rewarded in ways he never dreamed of. Bets made, tickets cashed.

Didn't he say he was the biggest gambler in town? He's the biggest and the best. Miami kills Rutgers that night, just kills 'em.

Issue date: Oct. 7, 1996