Evel by Leigh Montville

Author:Leigh Montville [Montville, Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53367-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

A story. Somewhere during this time, Knievel met Elvis Presley. There was a pop culture inevitability to the moment. The daredevil from Butte, Montana, and the rock ‘n’ roll singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, wore the same showbiz clothes, worked the same fan base, even shared the same snarl when cornered. They were bound to bump into each other sometime, King Meets Last of the Gladiators, something like that. Flashbulbs would flash. Icons would smile under their piled-up hair.

The way it happened, though, was much quieter than that. Knievel’s half-sister, Loretta Young, had begun to date Presley. She introduced her brother to her boyfriend. No cameras were present.

“Elvis was playing the Intercontinental Hotel in Las Vegas, which later became the Hilton,” Loretta Young said. “My brother came to a show. We sat in one of those high booths up front. When Elvis went into his last song, his manager, Joe Esposito, got us, and we went back to the dressing room. Elvis changed clothes, and we all sat around and talked.”

Loretta, tall, blond, very pretty, went out with Elvis for two and a half years. He picked her out of the Folies Bergere chorus line at the Desert Sands, asked her for a date between shows. She refused because she already had a date with Jerry van Dyke, Dick van Dyke’s brother. Elvis persisted, came back the next night with yellow roses and a dinner invitation, and what was a girl to do? She was charmed.

He was funnier than the world knew. He was deeper than the world knew. He was, truth be told, a much sweeter spirit than her brother. Maybe the darkness would get him in the end, fame and drugs and deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, but not now. He still read the Bible every day.

“I found out what God’s real name is,” he declared one afternoon. “I read it in the Bible.”

“What’s His real name?” she asked.

“Hallowed.”

“Hallowed? What kind of name is that?”

“I don’t know, but it says it right here … ‘Hallowed be Thy name.’ ”

The meeting with Loretta’s brother went fine. Knievel always had been impressed by celebrity. Who was a bigger celebrity than Elvis? Knievel had a line about him that he repeated often—“I guess I thought I was Elvis Presley, but I’ll tell you something. All Elvis did was stand on a stage and play a guitar. He never fell off on that pavement at no eighty miles per hour.” All of which was true, especially the part about thinking he was Elvis.

“When he first got those white leathers, he said that he wanted to look like Elvis,” Loretta Young said. “And he did. He even had a rabbit’s foot for good luck. Elvis always had a rabbit’s foot for good luck too, until one day he realized where the rabbit’s feet came from. He said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this wasn’t such good luck for the rabbit.’ He stopped carrying them.”

Elvis wanted to know what projects Evel had in the works. Evel told him about Snake River and the canyon.

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