Max Baer and the Star of David (2 page)

I was with Max Baer when he fought and defeated Frankie Campbell and delivered blows that, according to the physician’s postmortem, set loose Frankie Campbell’s brain from its skull and was the cause of Frankie Campbell’s death. I was with him when he fought and defeated Ernie Schaaf in a bout that left Schaaf unconscious; I was with him when he received the news that Schaaf had died during a bout with Primo Carnera; and I was with him when sportswriters, the famed Jimmy Cannon and Grantland Rice among them, reported what many of us, including Max, believed to be true: that Schaaf’s death was due to damage previously inflicted by Max. These incidents, which earned Max the reputation of “killer,” affected him profoundly—broke his heart, in truth—for there never was, in my experience, a kinder, more gentle man, or one who, when not grieving for men he had hurt (myself included), gloried in life as fully and with as much exuberant love as did Max Baer.

I was with Max when he made the decision, before his bout against Hitler’s boxer, Max Schmeling, whom he crushed utterly, to adorn his boxing trunks with the Star of David, an emblem he would wear proudly for the remainder of his boxing career, and I was with him when he defeated the Argentinian behemoth, Primo Carnera, for the heavyweight championship of the world. I was with him, too, when, one day short of a year later, he lost this title to James J. Braddock.

I was with him when he married Dorothy Dunbar (a socialite and actress famous at the time for her role as Jane in an early Tarzan film), and I was with him through their numerous and highly publicized separations and reunions. I attended to him faithfully during his liaisons with some of our loveliest ladies of the silver screen—Greta Garbo, Mae West, and Jean Harlow among them—which liaisons supplied regular copy for the gossip columnists. I was at his side when he married Mary Ellen Sullivan, and with Mary Ellen and Max when each of their children—Max Baer Jr., James Manny, and Maudie Marian—was born—and I was, of course, with my sister Joleen when she gave birth to Max Baer’s son, Horace Littlejohn Jr., who, given that I was known to all as Joleen’s husband, was assumed to be my son.

On the night we first met Max Baer, as on previous occasions when we were together in public places, Joleen and I employed the fiction that we were husband and wife. We persisted in the deception in this instance so that we might gain employment with Max, and—a prospect dimly sensed, if at all, on that evening—come to live a life marked by privileges known to few whose origins were similar to ours. For while Max Baer’s life was the object of much public scrutiny, our domestic life—Joleen’s, Horace Jr.’s, and mine—was informed by a dearly cherished sense of privacy, albeit this privacy derived initially from a lamentable but necessary secrecy that, if betrayed, would have cast deadly shadows not only upon our lives, but upon Max Baer’s life as well. That we were people of color in the employ of white folks played no small part in our ability to remain private—to not be seen by others—a situation well known to people of color who served white people during that era.

Although Joleen’s exceptional beauty and fierce intellect made many men, Max Baer’s friends among them, pay her admiring and sometimes lewd attentions (as they did, though with less frequency, to me), in his service we were, for the most part, no more noticeable to others than the brooms, dustmops, laundry baskets, and serving dishes we utilized, a fact Joleen would comment on occasionally, noting, for example, that when, after a bath or shower—or between rounds of a boxing match—I served as Max Baer’s towel holder, I was not so different, even to Max himself, from the towel holders secured to bathroom walls except that, she said, I was considerably more mobile. For as kind and generous as Max could be, he was not without a self-absorbed vanity that frequently blinded him not merely to the ways others perceived him, but to the very fact that others existed.

I will speak now of how I met Max Baer on the evening that forever changed my life and that of my sister.

The year was 1929, the day and month, Thursday, October 17, a week before the stock market crash on what would become known as “Black Thursday,” and the day upon which Joleen and I celebrated her twenty-first birthday.

Joleen had, the previous spring, received a certificate of graduation from California State Normal College in Alameda, and was working in San Francisco for a wealthy Japanese family as a domestic while she prepared for licensing examinations that would enable her to become a full-time teacher in the public schools of San Francisco. She and I shared a small apartment not far from the Presidio, in a section of the city called Polish Town that, despite its name, was home mostly to recent Russian immigrants, a fair number of them Jewish. I worked as a day laborer, standing in line each morning with others, mostly Asian, though some were of Irish, Spanish, or Negro extraction, in the Mission Bay section of the city, at the corner of Third and Sixteenth Streets, waiting there to be picked up for a day on the docks where I would sort, cut, gut, clean, and box fish. In the evenings, though irregularly, I attended classes at a local public high school in order that I might secure a high school diploma. On days when there was no work, and on evenings when I had no classes, I trained at a local boxing gymnasium, honing skills that had, earlier in life, when Joleen and I lived in Kinnard, Texas, with our parents and siblings (two sisters, three brothers), earned me several amateur titles and, by wagers Joleen placed discreetly on my bouts, enough money to allow us, when Joleen turned seventeen and I was but a month shy of fifteen, to leave home and make our way to California so that, far from our family, who we truly were to each other might not be discovered, for if it had, we would have lost what was most dear to us in the world while bringing down shame, humiliation, and disgrace upon our selves and upon those who loved us and whom we loved.

Throughout the years of my adolescence, notwithstanding the fear and anxiety our intimacy engendered, I was able to benefit from Joleen’s knowledge of and sensitivity to language, and from her exquisite skill at being able to transmit this knowledge, though I was initially resistant to book learning. Like my brothers, of whom I was the youngest, I saw book learning as an essentially female endeavor. In addition, I could not see how, given that I was a man of color, gaining an education, or even a college diploma, would serve as a viable means of making my way in the world. The sure way to do that, I believed, lay in my physical prowess—my strong back, my keen reflexes, my lightness of foot, and, above all, the wicked quickness and strength of my hands, the fingers of which were unnaturally long and which, after my arrival in San Francisco, had earned me the sobriquet “Long-fingered Littlejohn.”

This was, in fact, the way Max Baer first addressed me while Joleen and I were eating our dinner on the evening of October 17, 1929.

We had chosen Perfidie, a restaurant on Russian Hill renowned for its elegant French fare and for the fact that its owners, who claimed descent from Russian nobility, spoke to one another and the staff solely in French. Perfidie was also one of the few fine restaurants that did not turn away individuals of color. Although we were, perforce, obliged generally to be frugal, we also, as on this evening, would occasionally pander to our desires out of all proportion to our means and to our station. Joleen, in a silver-gray, full-length, strapless evening dress, her long, black hair held in place by a forest-green silk scarf, was aglow with pleasure, as well as from the effects of champagne, a full bottle of which we had nearly finished before our entrées arrived. I wore white linen slacks and—Joleen’s gift to me for my nineteenth birthday—a matching long-sleeved white linen shirt with barrel cuffs. Although the restaurant prided itself on the legend that Perfidie was a place where, as in Paris, married individuals could have romantic dinners with companions to whom they were not married, and do so without creating unwelcome gossip or scandal, my own sense was that Joleen and I were perhaps the only couple there that evening whose intimate life had anything in common with the restaurant’s name or legend.

“You’re ‘Long-fingered Littlejohn,’ ain’t you?” Max Baer said when he came to our table.

“I am,” I said. “And who might you be?”

Max turned a chair around and, straddling it, rested his large forearms upon the chair’s back.

“I’m Max Baer,” he said, “and I’m a fighter too, hey—won all five of my professional fights so far, four by knockout. I heard about you at Silvio’s, where I work out, and I’m in the market for a sparring partner with quick hands.”

“While it’s true that I have at times trained at Silvio’s,” I said, “I have recently made a decision not to enter the ring, either as an amateur or professional, for the foreseeable future.”

“Whoa Nelly,” Max said. “You got some fancy gift of gab for a nigger. You didn’t pick up lingo like that in any ring I been in, I can tell you that much. But hey—I can pay you good. I got money rolling in these days, with more coming.”

“The allure of monetary gain will not affect my decision,” I said.

“So okay then, if that’s the way it’s gotta be,” Max said. “Good-by and good luck to you.” He stood and started to move away, then turned back and, with exceptional tenderness, caressed Joleen’s cheek. I stood at once in preparation for a confrontation, but Joleen showed no reaction to his uninvited gesture, nor did she give any sign that she required my intervention, and a short while later, Max desisted in his attentions to her, and once again made as if to leave. He turned back a second time, however, pivoting sharply on one foot and shooting a swift right toward my chin.

I stopped it with my own right hand and retained his hand in mine.

“You’re quick all right,” he said when I released his hand. I sat, and he sat down between us. “I see how you earned your nickname. But listen to this: here’s a new one I just heard—‘Confucious say that man who fish in other man’s well often catch crabs.’ Get it?”

Neither Joleen nor I laughed. Max punched me on the shoulder. “I got more where that came from,” he said.

“We were enjoying a private dinner,” Joleen said.

Max lifted Joleen’s left hand, upon the third finger of which she wore the wedding band we had purchased at an F. W. Woolworth Five and Dime. We had taken to this ruse because we found that when we were in public establishments, men, seeing the ring, were less likely to make unwelcome advances upon her person than if we identified ourselves as brother and sister. This deception, I note, is the opposite of one the patriarch Abraham used when he believed himself and his wife Sarah to be in hostile territory: to ingratiate himself with those of whom he was wary, he declared that Sarah was his sister.

“Well, I ain’t married yet, though I got women banging on my door all hours of the night and day,” Max said. “And I ain’t against hooking up with a good lady some day and making a few good-looking baby Baers too, but here’s the thing of it: Watching from the bar, I said to myself, now there’s a pair of gorgeous kids sweet on each other the way I’d like to have somebody sweet on me. And vice versa. But now that I know what’s up, I gotta say that you two sure make marriage look like a swell thing.”

“It has been that until your untimely arrival,” Joleen said.

“So here’s another one,” he said. “‘Confucious say that wife who put husband in doghouse soon find him in cathouse.’”

“Your vulgarity is exceeded only by your rudeness,” Joleen said.

“True, true,” Max said. “Sometimes, like now, I try too hard, and you know why?”

“No,” Joleen said, “but I’m certain you will tell us.”

“Because I want everyone to like me,” Max said. “
Everyone!
Crazy, right? It’s my Achilles’ heel, for sure, except when I’m in the ring. The other guy may be the nicest guy in the world, but once the fight starts, we don’t know each other. Once that bell goes ding-dong, all I care about is him feeling the power I got here.”

Saying this, he made a fist, offered it to Joleen, and opened it slowly. “Okay,” he said, letting out a long breath. “I apologize. I’m butting in where I ain’t been invited, but when I saw you two looking into each other’s eyes the way you do—and both of you so goddamned beautiful!—I never seen a couple, black, brown, white, or yellow, as beautiful as you, and I just wanted…”

He turned away. “You wanted what?” Joleen asked.

“I just wanted to be near you, is all,” he said. “I wanted to drink in some of what you give off that makes you so beautiful.”

“That’s all?”

“I wanted to touch you,” he said.

“Yes,” Joleen said. “And—?”

“And I had to come over and maybe get a chance to feel your skin against mine, maybe just in my fingers—”

“Please, then,” Joleen said, and she set her hand upon the table, close to where Max’s hands were resting. Max hesitated, his eyes those of a child seeking permission. I showed nothing.

Max chewed on his lower lip, looked at Joleen’s hand and, very gently, placed his right hand on top of hers.

A moment later I let my hand rest on top of his.

He spoke to me: “When I got closer and saw your hands—kind of freakish, a guy your size, you don’t mind my saying so—I guessed who you were right off, so I just kept on coming.” He rubbed a finger along the curve of Joleen’s wedding band. “And hey, maybe
this
is the ring for me—not that other one, where people get hurt, though I guess married people can hurt each other too.”

Joleen stared at me, nodded slightly, and I discerned her meaning.

“Perhaps I can spar with you on occasion,” I said to Max. “Given your reputation for reckless power, however, I will insist that we use twelve ounce gloves and wear headgear.”

“You got a deal,” Max said, leaning forward. “But now I got an even better one. My family, we moved out to Livermore where we got a ranch—cattle, hogs, sheep, and stuff—and we could use some help. We call our place Twin Oaks Ranch, and we’d pay okay, you’d get room and board for free, the country air ain’t bad—free too—and we could get to know each other and become friends.”

“I intend to become a schoolteacher,” Joleen said. “To that end, I am preparing for the licensing examinations here in San Francisco.”