Kitty O’Neil: American stunt artist who became world’s fastest woman

Aside from appearing on TV shows such as ‘Wonder Woman’ and films such as ‘The Blues Brothers’, she overcame disability to set land and water speed records

Hello Kitty: O’Neil in genial mood before jumping from a helicopter as Lynda Carter’s stunt double in ‘Wonder Woman’ (Corbis/Getty)

When she was five months old, a simultaneous diagnosis of the mumps, measles and smallpox left Kitty O’Neil with a scorching fever that caused her to lose her hearing and nearly killed her.

Her mother, a Cherokee homemaker, may have saved her life. She immersed Kitty in an ice bath, resisted teaching her sign language and instead showed her how to read lips and form words of her own, placing the child’s hands on her throat so she could feel the vibrations of her vocal cords.

In the years that followed, Kitty learned the piano and cello, feeling the music through her hands and feet, and trained as a platform diver, winning dozens of competitions. Her coach, Olympic gold medallist Sammy Lee, assured reporters she was a shoo-in for the 1964 Games in Tokyo. She seemed destined for a podium place when, in the lead-up to the Olympic trials, she broke her wrist and came down with a case of spinal meningitis.

Doctors told her she might never walk again. But within two weeks she was up out of bed, searching for a way to reinvent herself. “I got sick, so I had to start all over again, and I got bored,” she later told a journalist. “I wanted to do something fast. Speed. Motorcycle. Water skiing. Boat. Anything.”

So O’Neil, who died of pneumonia aged 72, set about becoming a stunt artist and record-setting daredevil. Amid a battle with cancer that required two sets of operations in her twenties, she raced motorcycles and speed boats, dove off hotel rooftops, leapt from helicopters, set herself on fire, waterskied at more than 100mph and earned the title “world’s fastest woman”, reaching speeds of about 600mph while piloting a rocket car across a dried lake bed in southeastern Oregon.

From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, she stood in for actresses including Lindsay Wagner of The Bionic Woman, dangled out of a sixth-story window for an episode of the television detective show Baretta, braved rising waters on a sinking jet plane in the movie thriller Airport ’77, was immolated during a graveyard seance in 1978 film September 30, 1955 and rolled, crashed or raced cars for films such as 1980’s The Blues Brothers and Smokey and the Bandit II.

For one memorable 1979 stunt in TV series Wonder Woman, she leapt off the roof of a Hilton hotel in Los Angeles, arms spread wide, and fell 127 feet before landing on an inflated air bag, setting a new women’s high-fall record. “If I hadn’t hit the centre of the bag, I probably would have been killed,” she said.

O’Neil later broke her own record by jumping from a helicopter onto an air bag 180 feet below. The bag measured 60 feet by 80 feet, she said, “but from up there, it looked about the size of a postage stamp”.

“She was a wonder woman, a true wonder woman,” said her friend Ky Michaelson, a fellow stunt performer who designed several of the vehicles O’Neil used to break records in the 1970s, when she alternated between stunt jobs and efforts to drive a car faster than the speed of sound.

Her small stature – at 5ft 2in and 1lb under 7 stone during her heyday – helped her withstand the strong G-forces of her record-setting drives, Michaelson said, including a 1977 outing in which she drove the quarter-mile in only 3.22 seconds, reaching 412mph.

“She crashed one of my cars at over 300mph and walked away,” he says. “The only bone she ever broke was in a hand one time when she was racing motorcycles.”

O’Neil credited her hearing impairment with helping her maintain focus, and spoke and read lips well enough that some directors were unaware she was deaf. “I know I’m deaf. But I’m still normal,” she told The Washington Post. “The way I look at it, being handicapped is not a defect. People say I can’t do anything. I say to people I can do anything I want.”

In 1977, she set a women’s water-speed record of 275mph. But perhaps her greatest stunt or daredevil achievement occurred on 6 December 1976, when she set the women’s land speed record while driving the SMI Motivator, effectively a rocket on three wheels.

Speeding across the Alvord Desert in Oregon, she notched an average speed of 512.71mph during two runs – obliterating the previous record of 321mph, set by Lee Breedlove in 1965.

She said that for a moment she reached a maximum of 618mph, approaching what was then the overall world land speed record of 630.388mph. (The records, maintained by the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme, are averaged over two runs, not set or broken in any single moment of awe-inducing speed.)

O’Neil later recalled that the runs were “a beautiful experience,” in which the vast flatness of the Oregon desert seemed to move past her in a series of rolling waves, but also disappointing. Not content with being the fastest woman on the planet, she sought to outpace the fastest man and break the sound barrier as well, and was preparing to do so on 7 December 1976, when Bill Fredrick, builder of the Motivator, told her she could not.

She had, it turned out, been contracted only to break the women’s record. Her friend Hal Needham, a stuntman and filmmaker who was then busy directing Smokey and the Bandit, was signed up to break the men’s record, bankrolled by a Chicago company that had developed a toy line featuring his likeness. For the Needham doll to succeed, the thinking apparently went, Needham would have to be the one breaking the record.

A war of words ensued, with O’Neil’s husband – Ronald “Duffy” Hambleton, a bank executive turned stunt performer – declaring that Needham’s representative had said it would be “degrading and humiliating to Needham if Kitty ran 650 and Needham ran only 660.” The representative issued a denial, and PR executives insisted that contracts, rather than sexism, were the deciding factor.

Neither stunt performer drove away with the record, and O’Neil sued unsuccessfully to have another shot inside the Motivator. She had reportedly used just 60 per cent of its engine’s power during her initial record-breaking runs, and believed she “could have done 700 or 750”.

“I’m a liberated woman, but I’m not trying to compete against men,” she had told People magazine earlier in 1977, before the drive. “I’m just trying to do my own thing.”

Kitty Linn O’Neil was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, on 24 March 1946. Her father was an oil wildcatter of Irish descent and a major in what is now the Air Force. He died in an plane crash when she was a child, and O’Neil’s mother went to work as a speech therapist. She eventually helped found a school for hearing-impaired students in Wichita Falls, Texas.

By 1970, O’Neil had turned from diving to racing. She was driving a motorcycle in Valencia, California, when she met Hambleton at a race. “She hit a bad spot in the terrain, and I tried to help her,” he told People. “She thought I was trying to pass her. Then she hit a rut and the cycle crashed. When she got up, she took off her gloves and found parts of two of her fingers inside.” Doctors sewed them back on.

According to news accounts, O’Neil married Hambleton and cared for his two children for several years before tiring of life on their Fillmore, California, orange ranch. She entered the stunt business with training from Hambleton, Needham and Dar Robinson, widely considered the greatest high-fall stuntman in movie history.

O’Neil soon became the first woman to join Stunts Unlimited, considered Hollywood’s premier stunt agency. Her exploits inspired a Mattel action figure and a 1979 TV movie, Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story, starring Stockard Channing. (Only about half the movie was accurate, O’Neil said.)

By 1982, she had separated from Hambleton and retired from the stunt and speed business, later explaining to the Aberdeen (South Dakota) American News that she left the industry after colleagues were killed while performing stunts. She lived with Michaelson in Minneapolis for several years before moving to Eureka, South Dakota, in the early 1990s with a companion, Raymond Wald, who had roots in the former “wheat capital of the world”.

“How and why they settled in Eureka probably still has a lot of people scratching their heads and a bit baffled,” said Barry Lapp, president of the Eureka Pioneer Museum, which features an exhibit on O’Neil’s life.

She had no immediate survivors.

Kitty O’Neil, stunt artist, born 24 March 1946, died 2 November 2018

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