Max Baer and the Star of David (5 page)

“Pray tell me,” I said.

“
Pray tell me?!
” she said. “‘Pray tell me,’ did he say? Oh you may mock me, brother dear, but I
will
have vengeance—a great, enduring vengeance that will dwarf all the minor perturbations of this life. Do not doubt me, thee of meager faith. And how?
How?
Tell me, my love. How will I have
my
portion?”

Aware that nothing I could do or say would temper her rage, I remained silent.

“A tongue hath he, yet he speaks not,” she said, and gripped my throat more forcefully. “
How
? How long, oh Lord, I must wonder, can this fool—this coward I have called my dearest friend and soul mate—keep from inquiring as to
how
I will have my share in the time to come?”

Blood pulsing with increasing force behind my eyes, I considered prying her thumbs upwards with force—of breaking one of them if need be, or of visiting a blow upon her cheek with the back of my hand that would have cracked bone there—yet I was also able in the moment to find a place within me that said: Go slow, Horace. Go slow, my friend, for you dare not add physical pain to the distress of her soul. Be kind if you can. Be kind.

As if she discerned my thoughts at the very moment they were making themselves known to me, she loosened her hold upon my throat.

I sucked in quick, shallow breaths of air, and then: “How?” I asked. “How will you have your vengeance?”

“Thank you for asking,” she replied. “How? Why, by having his child—that is how. I will have Max Baer’s child. Since I cannot … since we can never…”

That was when something inside her, like the branch of a sapling, seemed to snap in two. She let go of me, sat on our bed, slumped forward, and wept. I was not surprised by what she had said, or by what she had begun to say, for we had decided long before, and had ever taken necessary precautions, to make certain our love would not bring a new life into this world. So I sat beside her, took her hand in mine, and said that given our place in Max’s life—in the world!—we needed, now more than ever, to exercise caution. We needed not to act from a raw desire for vengeance, as urgent as that desire might be.

Through her tears, Joleen asked what if not raw desire had
our
life together been about. Until this moment, she had believed that no matter how dark the way in this life might be, she would always be able to count on me. But now …

“But now, more than ever, you can,” I said softly. “For I am acting out of a desire beyond the desire that has made us one with the other. I am acting out of a desire to protect you.”

“From
him
?” she said. “Do not talk nonsense to me. He is a mere child. Protect me from
him
?!”

“Protect you from yourself,” I said.

“
I will have Max Baer’s child
!” she declared again and, wiping away her tears, she stood and went to the door. “And now, my husband, there are chores that await, and I must be gone. Do you object?”

“I love you more than life,” I said. “I always will.”

“Do not utter banal nonsense in my presence,” she said. “And do not underestimate me. I want vengeance, yes, but knowing me—
loving
me, as you would have it, and are not, in the biblical sense, knowing and loving one and the same?—you should also
know
that there is nothing in the smallest digit of my smallest finger or toe that is, or ever has been, self-destructive. During your peregrinations with our lord and master, I have had more than ample time for reflection, and before this day decided that of course I will
not
have his child—that
we
will not have his child … not, that is, until he has had a child by another, preferably a
white
woman to whom he is married. For that is the path of wisdom and safety.”

“In this I do not think you should count upon having Dorothy serve as your accomplice,” I said.

“For the honor of bearing Max Baer’s child, there will be no shortage of candidates,” she said. “
You
can count on that. Do not fret more than is necessary, though, for as enraged as I can be, I can also, as you know better than anyone, be ruthlessly patient.” She came near to me again, breathing her words into my ear: “I can await the day when I will whisper to him as I now do to you: ‘O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother!’”

“‘Jealousy can be as cruel as the grave,’” I said, speaking words that followed on those in the verse from which she had quoted. “‘The coals thereof are coals of a fire which hath a most vehement flame.’”

“Ah—but ‘love is as strong as death,’” she responded, reciting a line I had, as she of course knew, taken care to omit. Her mouth on my cheek, her teeth scraping at the corner of
my
mouth, I knew well the words she would speak next. ‘“When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee—for yea, I should not be despised.’”

Then, one hand holding fast to the back of my neck, she kissed me full on the mouth.

On the eve of Max’s second bout with Schaaf, I recalled this moment, and doing so made me realize yet again that what drove Max above all—what enabled him to be the invincible fighter he could often be—were not merely his athletic gifts or his power, but, as with Joleen, the ferocity of his will: the desire, when roused, to triumph over and wreak vengeance upon anyone and everyone who had humbled him, or who threatened to humble him, so that he would not ever in the eyes of others, or, more tellingly, his own, be despised.

Twenty months earlier, Schaaf had humbled Max. An all-services champion while serving in the navy, Schaaf was more a boxer than a puncher, but on that night, with Dorothy (still married to De Gerson y Baretto) at ringside, Schaaf had mauled Max. Max prided himself on never having been seriously hurt in a fight, and in the dressing room before the fight, in front of an entourage of reporters who doted on him for his style and flash, he had put on his usual show of good-humored nonsense, delighting reporters on that occasion—a first—by ramming into a radiator headfirst to demonstrate the thickness of his skull.

Once the fight began, however, Schaaf made an increasingly confused Max chase him around the ring (Schaaf was one of the few left-handed boxers Max had hitherto faced), stopping only to sting Max with quick, telling right jabs. By the eighth round, Max’s beautiful face was unrecognizable, and I found myself pleading with him to let me throw in the towel. But Max would have none of it and, remarkably, remained game for the full ten rounds, thereby gaining the respect of many who doubted his courage and stamina simply by being in an upright position when the referee held up Schaaf’s right hand to award him the victory.

This time, however, before a large crowd at Chicago Stadium, with a string of ten consecutive victories under his belt, and with Dorothy, his wife of seven weeks, at ringside, Max was ready. From the opening bell, he went after Schaaf, pounding him at will while at the same time withholding the ultimate blow in the way a bullfighter weakens a bull with many thrusts of his sword so that one final thrust above the eyes will bring the bull to its knees. After battering Schaaf without mercy for nine rounds, Max waited until there were but two seconds left in the tenth and final round before unleashing his most vicious punch, a brutal right chop to the head that floored Schaaf for the first time that night, and left him, like Campbell, unconscious.

Max blew Dorothy a kiss and strutted around the ring, yet even while the crowd cheered, and while Schaaf’s seconds dragged him to his corner and worked to restore him to his senses (it would be an exact three minutes, the length of a round, before Schaaf opened his eyes), Max, clinging to me, whispered his fear.

“Did I hurt him the way I hurt Campbell?” he asked. “Tell me, Horace. Tell me, please. Tell me I didn’t, okay? I was just toying with him, really. He’s an okay fighter, but I carried him tonight, Horace. I didn’t hurt him bad, did I? I could have done him in early, but…”

“You fought a good fight,” I said. “You were powerful yet merciful.”

As if I had thrust a knife into his belly, Max pulled away. “Don’t you
lie
to me, Horace,” he said. “Don’t you ever
dare
lie to me, do you hear? Do you
hear
? I ain’t the fool you or anyone else takes me for.”

Then he turned away and, after blowing kisses to the crowd, went to Schaaf’s corner, embraced him, and told him he was the best fighter he had ever faced.

A month later, in the same stadium, Max easily defeated Tuffy Griffiths, a fighter who had once won fifty consecutive bouts before being knocked out by the future champion James Braddock, and the newspapers confirmed our hope: that Max would soon be given a shot at the title. Before this could happen, however, we returned to New York City’s Madison Square Garden to watch Schaaf fight Primo Carnera, who was first in line, ahead of Max, for a challenge to the reigning champion, Jack Sharkey.

Schaaf was as game against Carnera as Max had been in his first fight against Schaaf, but he was clearly not the fighter he had been before his bout against Max. In the eleventh round, Carnera landed a light blow to Schaaf’s chin that, surprisingly, caused Schaaf to go limp and drop to the canvas, where he lay, unmoving.

He never woke up, and when he died two days later, Max agreed with what the boxing world quickly concluded: that it was not Carnera’s blow that had killed Schaaf, but the savage beating, six months earlier, Max had inflicted upon him. Max brooded on this—on the labels of “killer” and “butcher” that now attached to his name virtually every time it appeared in print—even while his will to be champion became more inflamed. Nor did he shy away from keeping himself in the public eye. Rather the opposite. So that, as he prepared for what would be the major fight of his life thus far, against Max Schmeling at the Yankee Stadium in New York City, he courted journalists as never before—taking me, and his trainer, Mike Cantwell, and his publicist, Sam Taub, with him on endless rounds of newspaper offices, where he entertained reporters with antics that included using Taub for a punching bag and then jamming him into a wastebasket. And two weeks before the bout, he told me, in confidence, of his decision to enter the ring at the Yankee Stadium with a large Star of David emblazoned on the right leg of his boxing trunks, thereby declaring to the world that he was a Jew who was ready to stand up to a German known to be the favorite of the German people’s new leader, Adolf Hitler. “You just watch and see, Horace—this is gonna make me immortal in the eyes of the whole goddamned world!”

Although Max was only one-quarter Jewish—his father’s father was Jewish, which made him even less Jewish than former champion Jack Dempsey, whose paternal grandmother was Jewish—Max gloried in the way the press took up the story, especially given news arriving from Europe about the oppressive measures the Third Reich was inflicting upon Jews.

“Hey,” he told reporters in the dressing room before the fight when one of them questioned how Jewish he was, “seems like over there, whether you’re part-Jew or all-Jew, you pay the same price, so you can bet your mother’s whiskers I’m gonna show this Kraut that we Jews know how to take care of ourselves.”

And when on the night of June 8, 1933, with Jack Dempsey, one of the bout’s promoters, at his side, Max came out of the runway and onto the long, open aisle that led to the ring, some 60,000 people roared their approval. “See what I mean, Horace?” he said to me while waving to the crowd. “My people are here the same as yours would be if you were in the ring against one of those Great White Hope guys the way Jack Johnson was. This city’s full of Jews, and they’re gonna love me even more after I knock the living day-lights out of Hitler’s pillow-boy.”

Schmeling, who had briefly been world heavyweight champion after defeating Sharkey, and before losing the title to him in a return match, was a fighter who, unlike Max, trained with thoroughgoing efficiency, and did not party at night. The bookmakers had established him as a four-to-one favorite, and these odds served only to inspire Max. “Jews have always been the scapegoats and underdogs,” he told reporters when they asked how he felt about the supposed smart money going against him. “It’s why we learned to fight harder—the more people try to keep us down, see, the more we rise up and conquer. Just like we did against that Pharaoh guy.”

Max started out on fire—“a human tornado,” the
New York Times
would call him the next day—but then, as often happened, once he demonstrated he could dominate his opponent, he seemed to become bored, and to merely go through the motions. Before the tenth and last round, however, Dempsey and Cantwell screamed at him that if he didn’t wake up—for Schmeling, plodding doggedly ahead, was landing short punches that had clearly put him ahead on points—he would lose the fight.

“Okay then,” Max said, and he came roaring out of the corner at the start of the tenth round, going at Schmeling as if it were the fight’s opening round. Within seconds, he had landed a huge right to Schmeling’s jaw that sent the German to the canvas. Schmeling rose at the count of nine, but Max was on top of him with a furious barrage of lefts and rights that had Schmeling stumbling around the ring until Max, holding him upright on the ropes with his left hand, unleashed another devastating right—“This one’s for Hitler!” he announced, loud enough for those in the front rows to hear—that made Schmeling stagger helplessly in retreat, as if drunk, and that left the referee no alternative but to stop the fight and declare Max the winner by a technical knockout.

Max was ecstatic afterwards, proclaiming to reporters that he would soon become the heavyweight champion of the world, and declaring to me, before he left the stadium to go out on the town with June Knight, his newest sweetheart—a twenty-year old movie star and
Ziegfeld Follies
headliner—that what he proved in the ring was that he had his people just like I had mine.

“What I showed out there tonight, Horace, is that we gotta take care of each other the way we been doing,” he said, “because the rest of the world’s always ready and waiting to do us in. Kikes and niggers—we gotta stick together, ain’t I right?”