Robert “Evel” Knievel was a master of seduction. Whether chalking up a sexual conquest, running a small-time con, or selling insurance, he knew how to bend people to his will. And nowhere was this skill more apparent than in his career as a daredevil. Over the course of a decade, Knievel kept a national audience riveted to his every move. His secret? Consistently raising the stakes. From 1965 to 1975—when he tried to fly his Harley-Davidson XR-750 120 feet over 13 buses in London—Knievel increased the distances of his jumps some 200 percent, while more than doubling the size of his bike’s engine. And that’s not including the time he strapped himself to a rocket and tried to blast 1,400 feet across a canyon. “He did get trapped by the fact he had to do more and more and more,” says Leigh Montville, author of the new biography Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel. “It’s a tough way to live, but the idea of 9 to 5 appalled him.”

^†attempted
Illustration: Neil Stevens