<VV> Kovacs

[Tony]

At 06:43 AM 12/7/2007, kenpepke at juno.com wrote:
>  Yes, and I kind of remember some sort of conflict with someone just
>before he left.


I did some digging on this a few years ago.   According to his wife 
Edie Adams, he had been in a big hurry to attend to some 
"aggravating" domestic issues regarding his kids from the previous 
marriage to his mentally unstable ex-wife who had actually kidnapped 
the children once before after the courts had awarded him sole 
custody, and he had left the get-together in a rush, fearing that 
there might be more similar trouble from the ex-wife.

Ms Adams said that Kovacs had, "as usual", been without sleep for a 
long time, had been working long hours which was typical of the 
comedian seeing as how he was going through IRS issues, thus worked 
many long hours in attempts to satisfy the tax man, and was tired by 
the time he had arrived at the party being hosted by his friend 
Milton Berle.   He called (or received a call) about his kids while 
at the party and whatever it was had caused him to become alarmed and 
he left in a hurry, taking Edie's station wagon instead of his own car.


>  He took the Corvair, which was his wife's car, and
>left his Rolls at the party.  The pictures of the car showed high
>speed severe damage and it hit on a front corner ... not characteristic
>of an over-steer accident.


Actually, photos of the car show severe sideways impact damage to the 
driver side, buckled the roof and bent the unit construction 
badly.   There was no front end collision damage evident.   The 
driver side front door was crumpled into a wad and jammed up into the 
interior of the car, displacing where Kovacs would have been 
seated.   The driver side back door skin was torn off the door, or 
had been pulled off by efforts to extricate Kovacs from the vehicle 
after the fact.   The front seat was buckled and bowed upward almost 
into the dash, and the roof skin was crumpled into a pyramid 
shape.   The windshield frame was badly distorted and the windshield 
itself was thrown out of the car completely.    One good look at the 
photos of the car demonstrate that anyone in the driver's seat was 
unlikely to have survived the accident which had to have happened at 
a high rate of speed to have bent the car that badly.

According to investigators, Kovacs had approached a curve in the 
dark, going much too fast following a heavy rain storm (although 
according to the police report it had stopped raining at the time of 
the accident) and the car simply slid off the wet road and went 
sideways into a large utility pole.

Other comments from participants at the Berle home suggested that 
Kovacs had consumed "a drink or two" that evening but did
not appear to have been impaired.

In any event, the make/model of the car was not a factor.   At the 
speed the car had been going when it hit the pole, it would have left 
the road regardless of whether it had been a Corvair or anything 
else.    In fact, at one time not very long after the accident, his 
wife had stated in an interview that the car had not  been at fault, 
that Kovacs simply was driving too fast in bad conditions.

...many years later, Edie Adams supposedly changed that position and 
in another interview suggested that the fact that it was a Corvair 
may have been an issue in the accident.     It's likely that the 
scuttlebutt as regards Nader and his book etc could have influenced 
her comments.


That's about all I really know about the incident.



tony..