Tomorrow-Land (15 page)

A week after the Beatles'
Ed
Sullivan
debut, Mary C. Dillion of Ridgefield, Connecticut, a young fan of both the Beatles and the World's Fair, mailed Moses a suggestion: Wouldn't the Beatles make “a wonderful addition” to the Fair? She noted how their Carnegie Hall concert was sold out—20,000 fans were turned away from the 2,870-seat concert hall, in fact. Perhaps, she wanted to know, could Moses use his enormous clout and “ask them” to play the Fair? “Please write me and tell me what you think of my idea.” He did.

Two days later, Moses mailed his curt response:

 

Dear Miss Dillion:

 

Absolutely nothing doing.

 

Sincerely,

Robert Moses

 

But before the World's Fair was over, Moses would realize that his young correspondent was right. The Beatles would eventually play Flushing Meadow and prove two things in the process: One, that they were, without question, the biggest pop stars on the planet; and two, they wielded far more influence among young audiences than Moses or his World's Fair.

15.

I don't have to be who you want me to be. I'm free to be who I want.

—Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, February 27, 1964

 

I don't care what Cassius Clay says, “You are the greatest!”

—Fan letter to Robert Moses, April 1964

 

In January 1964 Robert Moses, in a moment of uncharacteristic humility, told the
New York Herald Tribune
that “the most I can possibly expect is to be remembered for a very short time as the Archie Moore of public works.” The simple, innocuous comment, like many things Moses did, served multiple purposes. In one sentence he paid homage to his friend Moore, the former light middleweight boxing champion who had a prestigious career that spanned decades, while also passing subtle judgment on the current state of boxing, a sport that was then still a beloved American pasttime. By 1964 Moore had hung up his gloves after a lifetime in the ring; he was part of the sweet science's old guard, representative of another era. Moore had been defeated in November 1962 at the hands of boxing's future: a young brash pugilist unlike any other named Cassius Clay.

For millions of Americans, the twenty-two-year-old bronze-skinned Clay was a nightmare; for millions of others, he was the realization of a dream whose time had finally come. A former Olympic gold-medalist, at six feet, three inches and two hundred pounds, Clay was graceful in the ring and entertaining outside of it. He was handsome, even beautiful, and full of pseudo-poetic bravado, a man who playfully—and repeatedly—referred to himself as “the Greatest.”

While in Miami
,
during a brief break in their tour, the Beatles filmed their third consecutive appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
before dropping by the Fifth Street Gym, where Clay was training. Like the Fab Four, Clay was an ascendant star never far from a microphone. But when the Beatles arrived for a quick photo op with the boxer, they were
annoyed to be kept waiting. “Where the fuck's Clay?” Ringo shouted to no one in particular. As the quartet headed for the door, the Louisville Lip appeared, winning over the Liverpool Lads with his infectious wit.

“Hello there, Beatles!” he boomed as he entered the gym. “We ought to do some road shows together. We'll get rich.” As photographer Harry Benson recalled, “Clay mesmerized them.” Used to being the most irreverent guys in the room, the band had met their match. Not that Clay was impressed. After the Beatles left, the young boxer turned to a reporter and asked, “So who were those little faggots?”

Whatever he thought of them, Clay was
new,
just like the Fab Four. Clay was no Jackie Robinson. As the second basemen for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the first African American to break Major League Baseball's race barrier in 1947, Robinson endured the worst racist taunts imaginable from both fans and players, at times even his own teammates. And he endured them mostly in silence. The Dodger executives who had signed him insisted that was the only way, which ultimately made him a target of criticism by Black Nationalists. “Robinson was the white man's hero,” Malcolm X pointedly told reporters with Clay at his side.

But 1964 America was a new era, and Clay was a new type of sports hero. He would not—he seemingly could not—keep quiet. He had fought—and talked—his way to a shot at the heavyweight championship of the world in late February. To claim the title, however, he had to defeat reigning champ Sonny Liston, who was as mean and vicious inside the ring as out. A surly illiterate gambler and ex-criminal with connections to the Philadelphia mob, Liston, it was said, could also punch harder than anyone else. If most Americans didn't know what to make of Clay, they knew what to think of Liston: He was a thug.

In 1962 he had squashed the reigning champ, gentleman pugilist Floyd Patterson—who had the backing of both President Kennedy and the NAACP—in a first-round knockout. Liston epitomized everything that was ugly about the sweet science. “We have at last a heavyweight champion on the moral level of the men who own him,”
New York Post
columnist Murray Kempton wrote. Considered “the meanest man alive,” Liston was photographed in a Santa Claus cap for the December 1963
cover of
Esquire
. It was meant to be both a thought-provoking comment on race in America and a joke, but some Americans weren't ready for such humor—not even
Esquire
's sophisticated readers, many of whom wrote angry letters or cancelled their subscriptions. “We got a ton of hate mail,” recalled George Lois, the Bronx-born Madison Avenue maestro who had conceived and shot the cover, one of dozens he would create throughout the 1960s to ensure that
Esquire
was the most important journalistic chronicler of what was
new
in American culture.

No one gave Clay a chance. By February 25, the day of the fight, Liston was an eight-to-one favorite. Maybe that's why Clay avoided his opponent for most of the fight, dancing around the ring, using his superior speed. By the third round, he had landed enough shots to slice open the skin above Liston's right eye. However, by the fourth, Liston had nearly punched Clay into submission. Fighting on, Clay made his opponent chase him around the ring again, wearing him out; by the sixth, Clay had taken the lead. Then the unthinkable happened. As the seventh round started, Liston refused to continue. He spit out his mouth guard and just sat in his corner, giving up. Cassius Clay was now the heavyweight champion of the world.

The shock of Clay's victory would quickly be overshadowed. Two days later, when a reporter asked him if he was a “card-carrying member of the Black Muslims,” Clay, as expected, spoke his mind. “I believe in Allah and peace,” he declared. “I don't try to move into white neighborhoods. I don't want to marry a white woman. . . . I'm not Christian anymore.”

The next day, while he and Malcolm X ate breakfast at the Hampton House, a black motel in segregated Miami, he elaborated to a group of white sportswriters: Yes, it was true, he was a member of the Nation of Islam, and as the heavyweight champion of the world, that meant he was rejecting white American society and its God. What's more, he was rejecting the entire concept of integration, the prize that the civil rights movement had been fighting and dying for, just a month after President Johnson had met with Martin Luther King Jr. and Roy Wilkins at the White House to reaffirm his personal commitment to pass the stagnant civil rights bill—“without a word or a comma changed,” Johnson told
them. (King and the others feared the president had called the meeting to tell them he was watering down the bill.)

Now, at this pivotal moment in race relations in the United States, the newly crowned boxing world champ was rejecting leaders of both races and embracing a religious group on the fringes of American society, an organization that many considered a hate group—
The Hate That Hate Produced
—and feared was bent on overthrowing the government. What's more, Clay had forsaken his Christian name; from now on, as the world would soon learn, he would be known as Muhammad Ali. In just two years, the world of boxing—a sport still at the heart of American life—had gone from the gentlemanly Patterson to the thuggish brute Liston to Ali, the disciple of a black separatist sect. “[He] is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known, the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him,” Malcolm X told reporters. To many whites, the prediction sounded like a threat.

If it was all just a bit too much for many Americans, maybe it was because there were so many other cultural touchstones challenging the status quo. The same month, February 1964, that introduced the Beatles and Clay/Ali to the nation, American institutions and traditions were seemingly under attack in movie theaters, on the bestsellers list, and on Broadway. A new movie had recently opened, one that took a humorous take, an extraordinarily
dark
humorous take, not only on the American military and the Cold War, but on the very notion of nuclear war—the prospect of which had been horrifyingly real during the Cuban Missile Crisis just fifteen months earlier.

Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
reduced Cold War anxieties and America's containment policy toward Soviet Communism to pure theater of the absurd. The film challenged—and openly ridiculed—Americans' notion of themselves. They were the nation that had won World War II, defeating Hitler and his Fascist cronies, and now were in the process of stopping the worldwide spread of Communism. In 1964 American soldiers were holding the line in Berlin, and a decade after having stopped totalitarianism at the border of North Korea, were now in the process of doing
the same in Vietnam. Just as
President Kennedy had promised to the world, America was paying any price, bearing any burden, and opposing any foe. Americans were the good guys.
Weren't they?
In 1964, that last rhetorical question was as new to millions of Americans as the music of the Beatles or the bravado of Ali.

The film's cowriter, Terry Southern, had also made headlines with his best-selling novel
Candy,
a modern retelling of Voltaire's
Candide
. The novel's young, all-American heroine isn't asking what she can do for her country. Instead, she has sex for sex's sake, like millions of American women utilizing the birth control pill, which had become available just a few years before.
Candy
was another humorous take—a satire really—on a largely verboten topic: sex.

Candy
was published by Grove Press, the same New York City publishing house that had issued the first uncensored American version of D. H. Lawrence's 1929 novel,
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
in 1959, provoking a lawsuit that eventually ended the US Post Office's ban of the book. Grove was run by a literary-minded provocateur from Chicago named Barney Rosset, who would wage a seemingly one-man war on censorship in the United States, publishing
Naked Lunch,
William S. Burroughs's dystopian dreamscape of a novel, in 1962. The
Naked Lunch
saga would end in another victorious court case for the publisher and for freedom of expression.

The year before
Lunch,
Rosset had published Henry Miller's banned 1934 novel,
Tropic of Cancer,
which was considered obscene by US authorities for its unabashed depiction of sex, and no doubt for its rejection of American values. Miller, like the protagonist in
Cancer
(also named Henry Miller), left his native New York broke and utterly disgusted with the American way of life. Living in Paris, Miller leads the life of an art-(and sex-)obsessed bohemian. (“What really got me,” Rosset confessed decades later, “was the anti-American feeling that Miller had. He was not happy living in this country and he was extremely endowed with the ability to say why.”) The book was a talisman and inspiration for disaffected postwar writers like the Beats and Norman Mailer, who viewed it as a serious work of literature. Then in June 1964, after sixty
court cases in twenty-one states, the US Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the book had “redeeming social value.”

Walls were being broken down in American society, and quickly. On Broadway James Baldwin's play,
Blues for Mr. Charlie,
loosely based on the killing of Emmitt Till—a fourteen-year-old black boy who was kidnapped, mutilated, and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 by two white men for allegedly flirting with a white female shopkeeper—also opened in February 1964. The horrific case—Till's mother insisted on an open coffin so the country and the world could see what the murderers had done to her son—was a transformative moment in the civil rights movement. The shocking death inspired poems by Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, an essay by novelist William Faulkner, and a 1962 song from Bob Dylan. But now here on Broadway—the Great White Way—was a painful drama picking at the scab, so soon after the shocking deaths of the four little girls in Birmingham (to whom the play was dedicated, along with Medgar Evers).

But the far more controversial play of the season was
The Deputy,
which opened around the same time. Written by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, the drama questioned Pope Pius XXII's silence during the Holocaust, portraying the aristocratic pontiff as indifferent to Nazi war crimes. Conservative Catholics were outraged. Leading the charge was New York's powerful Cardinal Francis Spellman, who had become a one-man crusading army against the blasphemies and moral degradations of Hollywood dating back to Elia Kazan's 1956 film,
Baby Doll
, and against Roberto Rossellini's
Il Miraclo
(
The Miracle
), in which a peasant woman is impregnated by an itinerant wanderer that she believes is a saint. Spellman, who was at one time powerful enough to earn the moniker “the American Pope,” saw
The Deputy
as “an outrageous desecration of the honor of a great and good man.” Here was another form of popular entertainment—the Broadway play—fronting an attack on another venerable institution: the Roman Catholic Church.

Although Catholics were a minority religion in America—only four years earlier, John F. Kennedy's Catholicism had been seen as a massive obstacle to his chances at winning the White House—Spellman
had been a dominant force in New York City for decades. He wielded immense influence among Gotham's ruling elite. He was a close political ally of both Mayor Wagner, who appointed the cardinal's cronies to his administration, and Moses, who was instrumental in helping the cardinal acquire the Manhattan real estate to create Fordham University's Manhattan campus near Lincoln Center (even though the move forced the eviction of hundreds of working-class families). Without Spellman, there wouldn't have been any Vatican Pavilion or
La Pietà
in Flushing Meadow.