History's Toughest Heroes: Kitty O’Neil: Hollywood's Real Wonder Woman

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You're about to listen to history's toughest heroes.

Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcast but if you're in the UK and you can't wait you can listen to the latest episode a week early.

First on BBC Sounds.

A woman stood on the 12th floor balcony of the Valley Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California.

She was ready to jump.

The sheer concentration in her face is outstanding.

It's this look of being unstoppable, of being grounded in who she is.

It was February 1979.

The woman glanced down, 127 feet below her.

A crowd had gathered.

a camera crew, a bunch of onlookers, and her target,

an airbag.

Well, actually, if you get up real high, the bag starts looking more like a postage stamp.

The jump was going to be the climax of an episode of Wonder Woman, the hit TV show, but the star, Linda Carter, would never do a stunt like this.

I mean, it was way too dangerous.

The producers needed a real-life superhero, and luckily, they found one.

The woman on the edge was Kitty O'Neill.

She was wearing the full Wonder Woman costume, a red bustier, blue hot pants, dotted with white stars, and a gold crown.

She signaled she was ready.

She was sort of regarded as the greatest Hollywood stunt woman who ever lived.

She was like a living legend at that point already.

A show-stopping stunt could easily become a tragedy.

No woman had done a fool this high before.

The kind of stunt work that we did,

we didn't need any band-aids.

They either worked or didn't.

I mean, you weren't going to get injured, you're going to get killed.

But the noise of the onlookers didn't distract O'Neill.

The cameras started rolling.

Everyone went quiet and braced.

Then Kitty O'Neill raised her arms above her head and dived head first

off the edge.

I'm Ray Winstone, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's toughest heroes.

True stories of adventurers, rebels and survivors who live life on the edge.

Kitchy O'Neill, the real Wonder Woman.

It's 1946 in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Five-month-old Kitty O'Neill was seriously ill with mumps and measles.

The fever was running dangerously high, so her mother packed ice all around her body.

I'm sure that wrecked her parents to see their five-month-old suffer that way.

Erica Goodman Huey is deputy editor of ESPN.com.

and covers the world of stunts.

Kitty slowly recovered, but the illness left her deaf.

Her parents didn't know she couldn't hear until she was two years old.

They only worked it out when she didn't start talking.

Patsy O'Neill refused to teach her daughter sign language.

Signing was treated with suspicion by some at the time.

Patsy wanted to make sure her daughter was never looked down on.

Instead, she taught her daughter an unconventional method of lip reading and sensing vibrations.

She had decided Kitty would learn to speak.

Her mother would take her hands and put it on her vocal cords and

she would say out words over and over real slow.

Kai Michelson is a long-time stuntman and inventor.

He's worked on over 200 movies and television shows as stuntman or coordinator.

So I've worked with the best out there.

We set many, many records in the stunt business.

Kai was a close friend of Kitty's.

He knew her well, but she could still surprise him.

I was with her one time going down the road and we were playing a song from the Beatles.

And she says, I like the Beatles.

I says, how did you know that was the Beatles?

She says, vibrations.

At the age of eight, Kitty was sent to a local school.

And so the school kids made fun of her and stuff like that.

It really bothered Kitty for a long time.

They did did laugh at her and she would go home crying.

But her mother told her to toughen up and fight back by showing the other children exactly what she could do.

By sensing subtle changes in the frequency of vibrations, she gets Kitty involved with cello and piano.

Kitty used her skills to shut the bullies up.

She jumped right on piano and started playing and everybody was just amazed at the fact that that girl, who they were first making fun of, she could actually play music.

from then on her friends at school said they didn't think of her as deaf she was just kitty

her mother said faith determination and positive attitude could get her anywhere but where did kitty o'neill want to go it didn't matter as long as she got there fast turned out Kitty was a thrill seeker and she found speed exhilarating.

Maybe she got it from her dad, John O'Neill.

He was a pilot during the Second World War.

After that, he went into the oil business.

High risk, high reward.

When Kitty was about four, she demanded that her father put her on top of his lawnlower as he handled the lawn and ride it as fast as he could.

But tragedy struck when Kitty was just 11 years old.

Her father...

He was killed in a plane crash.

John O'Neill left his family comfortably off.

The next year, Kitty joined the swimming team.

Then she discovered diving and the thrill of the fall.

Again and again, she climbed the tower and throw herself into the air, spinning and tumbling in precise moves before smashing into the water.

And she competed as a competitive 10-meter platform diver and 3-meter springboard diver.

She won several awards.

She was the toast of the town.

Her mother took her to California to train with an Olympic gold medalist.

She wanted to compete in the next Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Unfortunately, as luck would have it, before the trials for the 1964 Games, Kitty broke her wrist while training and contracted spinal meningitis.

I mean, it was a bad setback.

Again, Kitty recovered.

But when she did, she got fed up with diving.

When she stopped diving, she said it just wasn't scary enough for her she just kept up in the ante

when she was 16 and got her driving license she rolled her mother's car then she threw herself into high adrenaline sports the kind where if you lose focus for even a moment it could kill you hand gliding scuba diving skydiving she did them all

Her mother died of a stroke when she was in her early 20s, but Patsy O'Neill left behind a daughter determined to live without compromise.

Kitty O'Neill made headlines in 1970 when she broke the woman's world record for water skiing.

She sliced over the water at a whopping 104.8 miles an hour.

O'Neill raced motorbikes on dangerous off-road courses.

The Mint 400 was an all-out scramble through the desert of Nevada, smashing through silt and trying not to get buried in sand dunes.

The risk of death was all part of the fun.

Kitty crashed a motorcycle one time and got her fingers in the spot

and cut the one finger off.

O'Neill just put her glove back on.

She wanted to keep going.

Someone finally convinced her that racing with severed fingers was a terrible idea and she should go to hospital.

Some cats have nine lives, she had 20 lives.

Now the man who got her into hospital was a stunt man called Duffy Hambleton.

He introduced her to other stunt performers and Kitty O'Neill realized she had finally found the perfect career.

I'm sure there were some doors shut on Kitty but whatever it took she was going to knock that door down and it didn't even matter.

She was armed with the Bible and the power of positive thinking by Norman Vincent Pill.

And with those two books, she reckoned you could could do anything.

Which was handy because just about anything could be asked of her on set.

They have to pretty much be the everything athlete because you don't know where the stunt is going to take you.

Women were still rare among stunt performers.

There weren't many films or TV shows that would have required women in stunt positions.

We might have played the mother or, you know, the teacher, but these were not active roles.

And the few stunts they might have been hired for were often performed by men in wigs.

But in the early 1970s, glimmers of change were appearing in Hollywood.

Because we were starting to see films that featured women in a lead role and that featured women in this sort of superhero space.

And so O'Neill began to make inroads into the stunt world.

O'Neill got a job on the sci-fi action show, The Bionic Woman, working as a stunt double for the star, Lindsay Wagner.

Soon, word got out about the deaf stunt woman, who was willing to do anything.

The high you get is kind of like going down a roller coaster, a real steep, long roller coaster.

That wasn't as bad as I thought it was.

I thought I was going to die.

Hollywood's most dangerous stunt work was taken on by Stunts Unlimited, an agency run by famed stuntman Hal Needham.

O'Neill was one of the first women to join.

You really have to have credentials to really get in there, but it's a very tough, tight thing to get in.

Not everyone welcomed her.

Some referred to O'Neill as just a token woman.

Stunt women still had to fight to be seen as skilled professionals, equal to the men.

There's a lot of resentment in the business from a number of the stuntmen themselves.

You gotta realize if you gotta be a stuntman, you gotta have a lot of ego.

You gotta be the macho man.

O'Neill was able to cut out the noise.

She said her deafness was actually a superpower.

It allowed her to concentrate and stay calm and focused while the buzz of the filmmaking went on around her.

She kept finding work.

She became the first woman ever to perform the ultra-dangerous maneuver, the cannon car roll.

In the backseat of the car, we would build a cannon with a piece of telephone pole and believe it or not, basically a stick of dynamite.

And you get going 100 miles an hour and you pull the emergency brake and the car would go sideways.

And that's when you hit the button and the cannon would go off and make you roll 10, 15 times, which was a very violent crash.

Stunts like that earned her real respect.

The danger is what really bonds to stunt people together.

It's more like convenient a police officer or something.

You go to work, but you're not sure if you're going to come home at night.

O'Neill told People magazine, I'm a liberated woman, but I'm not trying to compete against men.

I'm just trying to do my own thing.

One the woman was tailor-made for O'Neill.

She looked just like the raven-haired, steely-eyed star of the show, Linda Carter.

And she didn't think twice about the dangers of the role.

Well, when I talked to Linda Carter, she was clear about Kitty sort of legitimizing the Wonder Woman series and making it more of an action play.

Just like on that February day at the Valley Hilton Hotel when O'Neill plunged 127 feet from a balcony, High Falls need laser focus, skill, and courage.

She nailed it.

It was an awe-inspiring moment for Wonder Woman, for television stunt work, and for O'Neill, a gold medal-worthy dive.

And just seeing her lunge her body in the air with hot pants, how can you beat that?

Yes, you are representing everything that we assume as femininity at the time,

but yet really encapsulates what we mean by feminine power.

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Less than one year later, O'Neill broke her own record, this time jumping an incredible 180 feet from a helicopter.

She jumped from a helicopter as Wonder Woman 2.

Linda Carter still insisted on taking her turn dangling from the chopper for the close-ups.

The two women became good friends.

Now for a television special, O'Neill set another record.

This time she jumped 112 feet on fire.

The crew dressed her in a fire suit, slabbed her with glue, then touched her with a torch.

Flames blossomed around her as she plummeted through the air.

You better hope that there's a crew coming in there with fire extinguishers to put you out or you're going to get burned.

The fire protection that you have is probably good for maybe about 30 seconds.

Kitty really didn't want to sit still at anything very long.

Well, even if I walked with her, she was always 10 steps ahead of me.

She always wanted to go faster, and she found the perfect opportunity.

At the time, the land speed record was held by a vehicle known as the Blue Flame, which hit an incredible 622 miles per hour.

That's faster than your average passengers yet.

An inventor called Bill Frederick developed a light three-wheel rocket car called the SMI motivator.

It was powered by a hydrogen peroxide engine which could produce a horsepower of 48,000.

No one knew how fast it could go.

For the speed freak like Kitty O'Neill, it was irresistible.

When she found out there was a car that was capable of possibly going through the speed of sound, she thought that she could break that record.

To break the speed of sound, she'd need to hit 750 miles per hour.

But imagine the vibration, the thrill of the sonic boom.

O'Neill and her friend and colleague, stump man Hal Needham, well, they signed a contract to drive the motivator.

The deal they made was that O'Neill would try for the women's speed record, which was just over 300 miles per hour.

Needham would go for the men's record, which stood at 622 miles per hour.

O'Neill headed out to the El Verde Desert in Oregon.

It's a dry lake bed.

The ground is all cracked earth that stretches out to a pancake flat horizon.

It's 100 miles from nowhere.

There's nothing except a lot of machine gun bullets, the military practice out there shooting up the place.

O'Neill was ready to make her first run.

The car was 38 feet long.

It looked as thin as a needle.

No tires could withstand speeds like this, so the motivator ran on three aluminium wheels.

Well, one of the greatest dangers is the wheels coming apart.

And that was the first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on.

I mean, what would happen when a car approached the transonic zone?

Well, that was anybody's guess.

If it lost contact with the ground, it wouldn't just be a car crash.

The motivator would become an exploding missile.

For O'Neill, the only thing that mattered was breaking the sound barrier.

A sonic boom would silence the doubters forever.

Wearing a bright yellow jumpsuit, she jumped into the car and put her helmet on.

Her friends friends checked the straps holding her were secure.

The countdown began.

Then she hit the ignition.

Well, it's kind of like eyeballs in, eyeballs out, because it's very quick.

It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head.

O'Neill blazed across the desert ground.

Scorching a line in the dust, the vibrations were extraordinary, unlike anything she'd experienced before.

The sonic boom was within reach.

She reached a land speed of 600 miles per hour and clocked an average speed of about 512 miles per hour.

That ride shattered the land speed record for women of about 200 miles per hour.

As the vehicle slammed to a stop, the stress on her body was incredible.

And you have to stop in a short distance.

So the G-forces are pretty close to 1314 Gs.

It'll kick your butt pretty good.

O'Neill was 5'2 inches inches tall and weighed less than 45 kilograms.

Thanks to her tiny frame, she could handle more G-forces than the boys.

In jubilation, she emerged from the car.

She became a legend in that very moment.

But as far as she was concerned, the ride had just begun.

Kitty's reaction after setting that record was, I want to go faster.

I want to go faster.

That was Kitty's deal.

She wanted to go faster.

She was sure the motivator could reach the speed of sound but a superhuman attempt had just run into the

well when kitty started going over 500 miles an hour the people that were doing the doll project they thought wait wait a minute this is not the deal the event sponsors was a toy company they were making an action figure of how needed them and they really needed him to get the glory.

O'Neill was only supposed to break the women's record, but now she was threatening the men's record as well.

When Kitty got too close to breaking the men's record through some legal maneuver, they took Kitty out of the car so she couldn't go any faster.

They wanted the male record to be higher than the female record.

Now, a spokesman said it would be unbecoming and degrading for a woman to set a land speed record.

Later, they denied ever saying it, but the damage was done.

O'Neill was furious.

According to her partner, Dovey Hambleton, this was when it dawned on her.

Women had been held back all along.

Kai Michelson caught wind of this scandal in the desert.

At the time he was inventing a dragster powered by rockets, which he reckoned could set the drag racing speed record.

Now he was looking for the perfect driver.

When he heard about Kitty O'Neill, he thought he'd found a kindred spirit.

They were both addicted to frills.

I'm the kind of guy, you know, if there's a blade that's spinning and they tell you not to touch it.

I'd probably be the guy that would touch it.

Well, he was used to being around people who lived on the edge.

But O'Neill was on a whole new level.

She scared him.

She was so single-minded.

Kitty was really in her own world.

There's a lot of things that Kitty did not know about.

She knew what was going on in her little world, in her little world with the Kitty O'Neill world.

And if she felt someone was intruding on that world, she had an easy solution.

If she didn't want to hear you, she would turn around from you.

She wouldn't face you.

So no matter what you said, she ain't going to listen.

1977.

A scorching hot drag strip in the Mojave Desert.

O'Neill got into Michelson's car and fired the rockets.

The car shot forward so fast you could hardly see it through the whirling clouds of dust.

In just 3.22 seconds, O'Neill accelerated to a staggering 412 miles an hour.

Her work with Michelson was just beginning.

But friendship, expertise and courage ain't always enough.

A lot of bad things can happen.

A lot of bad things.

The next year, O'Neill drove Michelson's rocket-powered Corvette.

This time, she wanted to set a new record.

This time,

over a quarter of a mile.

On her first run, O'Neill clocked over 350 miles an hour.

But if she wanted the record, She had to repeat that on the second run.

The attempt was recorded for another television special.

The Corvette again streaked past the audience at a crazy speed.

The course ahead was narrowed by two telegraph poles.

O'Neill controlled the car through them,

but then she ran out of road.

The Corvette hit a bump and was thrown into the air.

It spun end over end.

O'Neill's friends ran towards the wreckage.

When they got there, the car had disintegrated.

But there was O'Neill standing next to it, hands on her hips.

She told them, fix the car, do it again.

O'Neill and Michelson enjoyed a unique friendship.

Kitty would come over to my place with her fire students and she'd say, I want to light myself on fire today.

I said, Kitty.

She's following me all over the house.

I want to light myself on fire.

I said, Kitty, I'm not going to light you on fire.

Michelson also understood what was really driving her.

Kitty was just out to prove that a woman could basically do anything.

See, O'Neill had to keep going forward as fast as possible.

She went on a rampage, smashing one record after another.

She just loved the power of it.

She loved the chase.

She loved...

going beyond what her body would take her.

She didn't just want to be the fastest woman on land.

She wanted to be the fastest woman on water too.

Piloting a jet-powered boat, she'd reach top speed of 275 miles an hour.

I've never met a person in my life that had no fear and Kitty had no fear, which is not good, by the way.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, audiences demanded bigger and bigger thrills.

Stunts got more complicated and more dangerous.

Accidents, terrible injuries and even deaths kept happening.

They would wait for the end of the filming just in case if somebody got killed they didn't have that bad feeling all through that movie.

Performers had to tell Hollywood producers again and again that their lives were worth the expense of seat belts and decent brakes.

At the same time, Fighting for equal pay and fair conditions cost some stunt women their careers.

Some people don't get the recognition that they should get.

They're the ones risking their lives and yet the actors come off looking like the hero of the deal.

Maybe sensing that she didn't have many of her 20 lives left, O'Neill retired.

What more did she have to prove?

I mean she'd won her place in the record books and inspired a new generation of stunt women to follow, or should I say fly.

in her footsteps.

Deaf people can do anything, she once told a a group of students.

Never give up.

When I was 18, I was told I couldn't get a job because I was deaf.

But I said, someday I'm going to be famous in sports to show them I can do anything.

She let them see themselves or what they aspire to be on screen.

She opened those doors.

When they watch Kitty or read about Kitty, they learn that they should live without fear, that they could occupy a space where the impossible becomes possible.

She even got her own action figure.

Two years after she was denied the chance to break the overall land speed record, Mattel made a Kitty O'Neill dull.

It wore O'Neill's trademark yellow tracksuit and the box featured an illustration of her flying through the air on a motorbike.

After her retirement, O'Neill moved to a quiet town in South Dakota.

But she never lost her need for speed.

She always wondered what it would be like to break the sound barrier.

The prize that had been snatched from her in the Oregon desert.

Kitty always had the dream of going back and breaking that record.

Even at her age, she would call me up.

Let's build a car.

Let's build a car.

When Kitty O'Neill died at the age of 72,

she was still the fastest woman on land.

At the Academy Awards that year, she was honored.

Brought tears to my face to see that Hollywood actually looked up to Kitty.

I thought that was pretty cool.

Kai Michelson wonders, you know, what he would say to his friend if only he could speak to her again.

I just want to tell her how proud I was of her.

I was very proud of Kitty.

She was a wonder woman, a real live wonder woman, Kitty O'Neill.

Next time, on history's toughest heroes.

Can an enslaved man commandeer a Confederate ship and escape to freedom?

If we go at the right of mourning, maybe we could take this ship and get his family to freedom.

Robert Smalls, Last Chance for Freedom.

From BBC Radio 4,

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Listen to the Fort on BBC Sounds.

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