Max Baer and the Star of David (10 page)

In mid-February, Max fought and won a second exhibition bout, in San Francisco’s Dreamland arena, this time against Stanley Poreda, a heavyweight contender who’d beaten both Carnera and Schaaf, all proceeds from the fight, Max’s purse included, going to a trust fund Max had set up for Frankie Campbell’s widow and son. And Max’s generosity extended beyond the Campbell family, and his own family: he loved giving away money the way he loved having a good time. He would get two hundred and fifty dollars in a cash allowance from Hoffman (who tried in vain to control Max’s extravagances), and give it away within an hour to a bum on skid row, or a guy in line at a soup kitchen. Several times I watched him give down-and-outers the very shirts and jackets off his back. “He has a heart bigger than his body,” his sister Maudie once said to me, and it was true. And he was as generous to others—to his parents especially, for whom he bought a new home near Oakland, in the East Bay town of Piedmont—as he was to his brothers and sister, to Joleen and me, to Mary Ellen, and, as ever, to himself. He bought clothes, cars, and gifts for everyone—he was a great free spirit, and as this first (and only) championship year drew toward its end, what I began to understand was that he was freer than ever because, having had one of his dreams come true—becoming heavyweight champion of the world—he could let go of parts of his life that had led to the championship—the training, the deal making, the fights themselves—and, quite simply, do what he wanted.

After he had moved his parents to Piedmont, Max kept Twin Oaks mainly, he told others, so that Buddy, Augie, and Maudie could continue to enjoy it, but his real reason was so that Joleen would have a place in which to live that felt familiar, and in which she felt safe, for in that sublimely carefree and happy year—a year in which he fought only exhibition matches—the only dark cloud that shadowed his life, as it did mine, came from the fear that the beast Joleen claimed had made its home in her heart might persuade her to leave this world and join her brother James.

Max and I returned to Livermore on four other occasions that year, and each time we did, the first thing Max did was to visit Joleen, who remained as she had been—sad, brooding, silent. Still, Max was able to coax her into taking long walks with us on the property, and what surprised me was that he did not force conversation upon her, or ever—a sign of a sensibility few could have guessed at—ask her how she was feeling, or why she was sad, or what he could do to help. He simply attended to her and, now and then, told her of some incident that had occurred during our travels—usually a comic incident in which he had played the fool.

When the three of us picnicked in meadows where the horses and cows grazed, he would talk about places we had seen and good times we had had, and about how, win or lose in defense of his title (for he had reluctantly agreed, in April, to fight, again in Long Island City’s Madison Square Garden Bowl, against a journeyman heavyweight named James J. Braddock, who had lost twenty-one of his eighty-three fights), he was looking to get out of the fight game so he could make more movies, play the nightclubs, and, most important of all, start a family he intended to raise right here on the ranch.

“You don’t have a mean bone in your body, do you, Max?” I recall Joleen saying to him one afternoon in May when we were enjoying a midday picnic under a stand of pecan trees in the ranch’s furthest meadow.

“That’s what my mom always said,” Max said.

“Yet in the boxing ring you compensate for this deficiency of character admirably,” Joleen said.

Max laughed. “I like the way you put it,” he said. “But yeah—if it’s for all the marbles, then I gotta make sure I get the other guy before he gets me. Only…”

“Only what, Max?”

“Only I still think about that poor kid Campbell and what I did to him,” Max said. “It’s not like me, you know.”

“But it
is
,” Joleen said. “We are what we do, after all, though your mother has often said that, grateful as she is for the good life you have brought to the family, she can never get used to seeing you as the man you have become since you were, she claims, a somewhat shy, even cowardly boy who never liked fighting.”

“That’s true enough,” Max said. “But it’ll be over soon. I won’t ever throw no fight—I’m not a quitter, you can bet your life on that—but if—and it’s not the only reason—but if it can help you back to the Joleen you used to be, then that’s gonna help me do what I was gonna do soon anyway, which is to walk away from it all.”

“What you do or don’t do will not alter who I am or how I choose to lead my life,” Joleen said, starting to walk away. “I will always love you, Max Baer—whether you fight or don’t fight, or whether you win or you lose.”

Max prepared for his fight against Braddock even more lackadaisically than he had for the fight against Carnera. Still, he entered the ring as a ten-to-one favorite. Braddock, who had a reputation for being a plodder—slow-footed and slow-witted—was by now considered what we called “a tomato can,” meaning a washed-up fighter against whom an up-and-coming fighter might build a reputation, or a champion might fight in order to stay in shape and to keep the money rolling in.

Less than a year before, to support his wife and three children, Braddock had been working on the docks for five dollars a day and, when there was no work, had suffered the humiliation of going on relief. Following a leave-taking from boxing of nine months, he had, upon only two days notice, been given a chance to be a setup for a boxer on the rise named “Corn” Griffin, against whom he scored a surprise technical knockout in the third round, and after which, between stints as a dock worker, he had defeated two other good fighters, John Henry Lewis and Art Laskey, in a series of elimination bouts that had earned him his shot at Max.

On the night of the fight, Braddock came out fighting, and Max came out clowning. Max’s old habit—letting his hands drop to his sides either to hitch up his trunks, or to tempt the other fighter to attack—became a weakness Braddock exploited relentlessly. And Max was, simply, tired, his fatigue due in large part to having locked everyone out of his dressing room before the fight in order to have his pleasure with one of his new lady friends, an event that made reporters gleeful, and Hoffman insane with rage. And in the ring, he seemed surprised that no matter what he did—moving in circles around Braddock, flicking away jabs with a stiff, outstretched left arm, or faking a jab and then trying to move in with a series of uppercuts—Braddock just kept coming, his head burrowed into Max’s shoulder while he pushed Max around the ring, backing off now and then in order to land solid lefts and rights, and then coming at Max again.

Between the fifth and sixth rounds, Max whispered to me that he didn’t know how he could knock Braddock out (which he saw as his only hope, since Braddock was far ahead on points and, as Max continued to tire, would doubtless increase his lead), because he was pretty sure he had broken his right hand. But whether he had broken the right hand and/or the left (after the fight, it turned out that he had, in fact, broken the right hand and badly damaged the left, information Max never revealed to the press), and whether he did or did not care about winning (Jack Dempsey was livid afterwards, writing in the
New York Times
about Max’s “miserable defense of his title,” and about how his “dilly-dallying and clowning had finally caught up with him”), he did summon up what stamina he had left, and fought his heart out in the final rounds of the fifteen-round bout, rounds in which neither he nor Braddock had the legs or power left to put the other fighter away.

Thus did James J. Braddock became the new heavyweight champion of the world—a hero to boxing fans, as well as to all who, in those Depression years, knew what it was like to be down and out, and to have to take charity in order to provide for their families. Max was gracious in defeat, praising Braddock, saying he knew he deserved to lose, and adding that he now planned to retire from boxing and raise white-face cattle on his ranch in Livermore.

Sixteen days after the fight, on June 29, 1935, Max and Mary Ellen Sullivan were married in the Washington, DC, home of Justice F. Dickinson Letts, who presided over a private ceremony I attended, and soon after, as Max had promised, he and Mary Ellen moved west to the Baer ranch.

His promise to retire from boxing, however, was short-lived. Although he continued to fight against the very best fighters in the world—Joe Louis, Lou Nova, Buck Rogers, and “Two-Ton” Tony Galento, among others—and to defeat all of them, with the exception of Joe Louis, who, in the presence of 95,000 people in the Yankee Stadium, destroyed Max in four rounds in the most punishing defeat of Max’s career—he devoted himself increasingly to his life with Mary Ellen, and to his career on stage and screen. He developed a vaudeville routine with his friend, the former light-heavyweight champion Max “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom, which they performed in many venues, including nightclubs Rosenbloom owned; he acted in movies—nearly two dozen of them in the ensuing years, including Humphrey Bogart’s final movie,
The Harder They Fall
, whose main character, “the champ,” was based on Max, and in the first-ever live ninety-minute television drama,
Requiem for a Heavyweight
; and he also earned numerous pay days as a disc jockey, a wrestler, and (as Jack Dempsey had done) a celebrity referee for both boxing and wrestling matches.

Then, on December 4, 1937, within a year and a half of their marriage, he and Mary Ellen became the proud parents of a son: Max Baer Jr. And Max Baer Jr.’s arrival in the world, which preceded Horace Jr.’s by a half year, changed our lives yet again, and forever, for until Max Baer Jr.’s birth, Joleen had continued to live in the unlit caves of her melancholic disposition. The only thing that seemed to brighten her days during these years had been books, and the acquisition of books. Our cabin overflowed with them—in bookcases I built and secured against walls, on wide-board planks under windows, and in boxes stored in our closet, above our kitchen cabinets, and under our bed—and the few times I saw light in her eyes, or heard lightness in her voice, were the times she would, with uncharacteristic timidity, ask if I had the time to listen to a passage she had come across in one of her books and thought I might find of interest. I would do so willingly, of course, and would from time to time suggest that perhaps she could renew her plan to be a teacher and thereby transmit her love of literature to others. No matter how tentatively or diplomatically I made such a proposal, however, she would respond each time by saying, “Oh no—that is not meant to be,” after which she would return to her reading, her chores, and her brooding. From the instant Mary Ellen handed the newborn Max Baer Jr. to her, and Joleen held him in her arms, however, she was born again into the woman she had been before the beast of darkness had made her prisoner to his foul authority.

What seems curious, in retrospect, is that even as Max seemed, following upon his marriage to Mary Ellen, a changed man, frequently (and publicly) renouncing his life as a fighter in favor of his life as a husband and father-to-be, yet did he continue to fight, and to fight with
greater
frequency than ever. In the eighteen months between his defeat by Braddock and the birth of his son Max Jr., Max fought twenty-two fights, losing only twice (once to Louis, and once to British heavyweight champion Tommy Farr), scoring knockouts eleven times, and technical knockouts four times.

Since Max was not in need of money—he earned considerable sums from movies and vaudeville, from refereeing and public relations stunts (while Ancil Hoffman, investing wisely for him, doled out allowances so that Max’s extravagances would not do him in)—I must conclude that, no matter his words about not liking to fight and not wanting to hurt others, yet did he truly love the sport known as the “sweet science.”

And he loved the life that came with the sport: he loved the money; he loved the crowds; he loved the reporters; and he loved the nightlife and the ladies. To the surprise of many, as I have noted, he rarely consumed significant quantities of alcohol (our first meeting with him being an exception) because, he explained, he did not like to dull his senses, and—more important—his ability to remember, the morning after, just how good a time he had had the night before.

I also believe that he loved the fighting itself far more than he admitted or knew. I believe he loved being lost in an elemental passion for hitting and being hit—in the licensed savagery permitted when, before cheering and bloodthirsty fans, he was free to inflict violence upon another man without the least need to temper the violence with mercy—and he also loved the gratification that came with practicing a craft at which he was a master, and which, like the act of love, and the ecstasy of being in love, fed his desire to take as much pleasure from life as possible, so that the extended moments in which he could give free rein to his power and his desires, whether in the ring or in his romances, served to enhance and heighten his love of life itself.

The only fighter I have ever known who rivaled him in the sheer joy he took when in the ring—in the way he taunted and danced around his opponents (sometimes performing soft-shoe tap routines); in the way he “played possum”—pretending to be hurt, then surprising an opponent with a flurry of rapid-fire blows; in the way he let his guard down so as to invite the other fighter to attack; in the way he laughed when an opponent had landed a good blow against him; in the way he delighted in bantering with reporters before, after, and during bouts; and, most of all, in the joy he took from being able to give boxing fans a great, good time—was a fighter I had the privilege of seeing in action but once (four years after Max’s passing), and whom Max, alas, never did see: a man whose physiognomy and coloring were not unlike my own, descended as we both may have been, to judge by appearances, from the legendary Falconhurst slaves—the great and distinguished champion Muhammad Ali.

Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves. (7:12)