Sweet Thunder Page 16

  Sometimes, though, he looked at his life as if through a split screen. On one half the life he currently led, and on the other, a life that entranced him—the life of a dancer-musician. He began taking dance and music lessons from Jarharal Hall, who operated a popular Manhattan music studio. (Hall, who had the copper features of someone of Indian descent, moonlighted as an entertainer; there were many who admired his silky singing voice.) Beyond the applause he garnered from the boxing ring, Robinson would always be dazzled by the way a gifted entertainer commanded attention: It was the alchemy of Duke Ellington’s band, of Billie Holiday’s voice, of Charlie Parker’s blowing, that caused him to constantly marvel.

  Along with Billy Eckstine, Esquire magazine’s E. Simms Campbell, Duke Ellington, and crooner Billy Daniels, among others, Robinson was named to a list of “Outstanding Male Dressers” in Manhattan in 1946. They were all men who looked as if they weren’t trying, and yet they appeared joyfully splendid in their dress. It gave them the look of being effortlessly elegant. (Langston Hughes received an honorable mention on the list.)

  In welcoming them all into his world—his nightclub, and also his newly opened barbershop, which sat next door—Robinson beamed. You could spot Lena Horne sitting at the bar, or Langston Hughes. Or hear the bark of newspaperman Walter Winchell. Robinson’s nightspot benefited mightily from being within walking distance of the popular Hotel Theresa. The hotel was home for many traveling jazz musicians as well as the leggy showgirls who danced at the Apollo Theatre. Many of the female entertainers who stayed at the Apollo had a special request for young Charlie Rangel, who was a hotel desk clerk before his political career took hold. They wanted to get over to Sugar Ray’s, but it was dark outside, and they didn’t want to walk unescorted; and he’d tell them he didn’t even know if Robinson was over at the bar, telling them Sugar Ray might be on the road for a fight, or he might be in training. But they didn’t care; they were in dressy attire and the night was young and they demanded he escort them. “Bar hopping was so important at that time,” recalls Rangel. “When I was a desk clerk at the Hotel Theresa, I stayed sharp, and when the lady dancers and entertainers needed an escort to go bar hopping, they’d ask me. We went to the Baby Grand, Sugar Ray’s, Jock’s, the Red Rooster. You’d go to Sugar Ray’s with these ladies, and I’d tell them they probably weren’t going to see him, but they wanted to go anyway.”

  The Harlem poet Langston Hughes was an habitué of Sugar Ray’s nightclub. He also dreamed of roles Robinson might play in one of his theatrical productions.

  Robinson’s barbershop stocked the finest hair tonics; Negro men of a certain class—Robinson, the poet Langston Hughes, jazzmen Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge, men in urban locales all over the country—were partial to having their hair “marcelled,” which meant a greasy concoction was applied overnight to give it both a sheen and a wavy appearance. It was a time of suits and silk ties, of hair that shined like molasses, of Yardbird’s horn and Duke’s baton; of jazzmen strolling through the lobby of the Hotel Theresa in their Nunn Bush shoes; of Gus Levine over at Sugar Ray’s nightclub signaling, with the dip of the sun, that it was time for the lights over the awning to be turned on.

  Sugar Ray Robinson’s barbershop seemed to draw as many names as his nightclub. “Duke Ellington used to come into the barbershop and say hello to everybody,” recalls Edward Allen, the New York dentist and jazz aficionado. One afternoon in the barbershop, Allen turned to look through the window and saw a commotion going on outside. Men and women had gathered in a semicircle. Cars were slowing. “Outside on the sidewalk,” he remembers—still a thrill in his voice all these decades later—“Sammy Davis Jr. was trying to outdance John Buck of Buck & Bubbles!”

  It was a time when you could be stopped dead in your strolling by that one-of-a-kind Cadillac coming your way. In the late 1940s there were an estimated two million cars crisscrossing Manhattan intersections every day. But there was only one flamingo-colored Cadillac, because there was only one of its kind in existence, and it had been special-ordered by Sugar Ray. It was a convertible, and it had whitewall tires, and the hubcaps were as silvery as new coins, and he’d wave, and if he were stopped at a light, he’d shake a hand, then caution the soul to please get out of the street, and they would, turning this way and that way, following him with stunned eyes as he cruised out of view. “Sugar had gone down to Miami and fell in love with the color pink,” says Frankie Manning, the Savoy dancer who often spotted Robinson at the nightclub.

  He patrolled the city in his Caddy, rolling from Sutton Place to Gramercy Park, from the Bowery to Chinatown, from Greenwich Village back up Sixth Avenue—above the rumble-rumble of subway trains beneath him—onward through the golden glow of the trees in Central Park, past Grant’s Tomb, along 125th Street and over the Triborough Bridge. His violent hands rested softly on the steering wheel. “That car was the Hope Diamond of Harlem,” its owner mused. “Everybody had to see it or touch it or both to make sure it was real. And to most of them it literally was the Hope Diamond because if skinny little Walker Smith could come off the streets to own a car like that, maybe they could too.”

  Not many months before the war-scarred and jazz-soaked 1940s would come to a close, an eloquent writer by the name of E. B. White, chronicling New York City, wrote: “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.” He went on: “At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem.”

  In the spring of 1949, Holiday magazine, in an impressive issue devoted to New York City and its culture, food, politics, and fashion, dispatched young writer Ann Petry to essay Harlem. Petry’s versatility astonished: She’d been a pharmacist and an actress; she had also studied at the Harlem Art Center—all that before turning to writing. In 1945 she received a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. She used the $2,500 prize money to finish her novel, The Street, which was published in 1946 to raves. (Its heroine lived and struggled in Harlem.) But it wasn’t Petry’s prose—fine enough—that distinguished the Holiday spread. Nor was it the accompanying poetry of Langston Hughes with its requisite lyricism—“Golden girl/in a golden gown/in a melody night/in Harlem town …” Instead, it was the rapturous photography of George Leavens that stunned the eyes. His camera, on the opening page, landed right outside Sugar Ray’s nightclub and it seemed to linger as the neon jumped from the page. The red lettering of the famous fighter’s name shone atop the awning, which stretched from doorway to near the curbside.

  In those magic years it is clear that Sugar Ray Robinson has transcended his sport. With his image in national magazines evoking style and grace—and the reflections in the mirror of his nightclub tossing about the images of Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Jackie Gleason, Billy Eckstine, Charlie Parker, and others of their pedigree—he has ushered in a new way to think of the fighter and his prowess. He unashamedly confers as much with George Gainford, his fight manager, as he does with Jarharal Hall, his dance and voice teacher.

  There are nights when he roams about. He runs into acquaintances from his youth, boys who are now grown men but whom he once sparred with over at Salem Crescent, the gym of his youth. Only they didn’t make it, because the sport did not allow for the untalented to prosper. Some went into athletic work, some into church affairs, still others into manual labor. And there are those clearly suffering, looking him up and down, commenting on his attire and prosperity, telling him about the sound of his fights on the radio one moment, then the next about their hard-luck stories. He will slip a little money over, promise free
drinks, a haircut, a meal. “He was generous to a fault,” remembers Robert Royal.

  Sometimes, as quietly as he can, he checks on the competition. It amuses him that there are three nightclub establishments owned by boxing champs—or former champs—operating in Harlem: Joe Louis’s and Henry Armstrong’s and his own. But it is Armstrong who, after their handshake and pleasantries exchanged in the moonlight, stays on Sugar Ray’s mind.

  Years earlier, he’d hung around Madison Square Garden—poor as pennies, yet dreaming and dreaming—watching Henry Armstrong in the ring, bobbing his own head against Armstrong’s punches; then following Armstrong and his silky robe through the throngs and stopping, just staring when he couldn’t get any closer; then bouncing back down into the Salem Crescent gym the next morning, swearing to himself he was going to be just like Henry Armstrong, and pleading with George Gainford to explain to him what made Henry Armstrong so great; what, exactly, made him Henry Armstrong, a three-time world champion. You might even say—as Dizzy had said of Charlie Parker—that Henry Armstrong was “the other half” of young Walker Smith’s heartbeat.

  At first his life was full of the American song of pain and heartache—groveling to put food in his belly—and then came that dizzying whoosh that brings unexpected glory. It’s a wonder, though, that fever or flood didn’t erase him from the landscape, spilling him into the masses of the forgotten.

  He was born in Mississippi in 1912, the first year of the great floods that would haunt and drown that landscape for months. Negroes suffered the worst—there were cries they were used as human sandbags—but the misery seemed bottomless for both races. With the fear of floods, the lurking web of slavery, and pangs of hunger, his family fled Mississippi in his youth.

  In St. Louis, the young and impish Henry Armstrong played children’s games along the riverbank. Sensing some kind of lyricism in life, he wrote poems in his quiet moments. Another Missourian, Samuel Clemens—aka Mark Twain—might have loved him, the way he lit out for the territory, across America and through Mexico, battling and finding his way as a professional fighter. During the menacing shadow of the 1930s Depression, young fighters like Walker Smith—aka Sugar Ray Robinson—and many, many others all about the country uttered his name with a reverence that became almost mystical.

  a lovely set up for the old man

  BETWEEN JUMPING ROPE, pummeling the punching bag, and sparring, the young fighters inside New York City’s Salem Crescent Athletic Club were forever discussing recent professional bouts—the knockouts and the fifteen-round slugfests that had taken place downtown at Madison Square Garden. They heard the day-after commentaries from shoeshine men, from subway riders and men on stoops, from grocery store clerks and aging city dwellers. For there was nothing like the day after a memorable battle at the Garden—the reactions became a type of city music all its own, unsolicited soliloquies that hummed all day long from borough to borough around the great metropolis. And inside Salem Crescent, it gave the young pugilists even more inspiration to pay close attention to trainer George Gainford and to Roy Morse, the founder of the club and himself a product of the city’s streets. They’d run farther, skip rope longer, do additional sit-ups—anything to keep them imagining that one day they’d become part of the citywide verbal jousting that followed evening radio broadcasts and fight headlines. Sometimes Gainford and Morse would cadge tickets for their young charges to get into the big fights down at the Garden. The boys were impressionable young fighters, and they all had heroes. Young Walker Smith described the great Henry Armstrong as “my boyhood idol.”

  In 1937, the year before the unmatched success that brought him triple title ownership, Henry Armstrong fought twenty-seven times. He fought three times each during March, July, August, and September of that year—a backbreaking feat for any mortal. Not only were there twenty-seven bouts, but there were twenty-seven victories; all but one of them won by knockout. Millions marveled at his feats. In black-and-white newspaper photos, he seems a little tyro in billowing black trunks—he stood a mere five feet five—but his gaze was steely. Henry Armstrong never complained about the relentless schedule set up for him by Eddie Mead, his manager at the time. He simply packed his bags and pushed himself through the months and seasons, believing that given the distance he had come in life, it would have been ungrateful to complain about anything as he stood awash in boxing glory.

  He was born in 1912 in Columbus, Mississippi, the eleventh of Henry and America Armstrong’s children. (The kids hardly knew what to make of the raised eyebrows when strangers heard their mother’s first name.) The Armstrongs were sharecroppers. Which meant they picked cotton, lived practically hand to mouth, lit kerosene lamps at night, obeyed the rules of segregation, and prayed as if Jesus Christ lived right alongside them in their log cabin. Their most consistent visitors were traveling evangelists. Desperate as their circumstances were, Henry’s mother never turned an evangelist away from the dinner table. Little Henry resented the Scripture-quoting men scooping up corn bread and tomatoes and chicken, knowing he’d be hungry later in the night and much of the food would be gone. Because of his small size, family members called him Rat. The little boy went for long walks in the woods; he was prone to having visions and dreaming. One night he dreamed that he was “being led across a river of water by an angel—and such an angel!” Armstrong would recall. Young Henry’s father moved to St. Louis with his older sons in 1915, and months later sent for his wife and the younger children, who had stayed in Mississippi. They gathered at the train station, embarking on their journey to Missouri, surrounded by friends and relatives there to bid them goodbye. Gospel songs began to flow from the throats of those gathered—“Lead, Kindly, Light,” and “On My Way to the Kingdom Land,” among them.

  Henry Sr., who had found work in a packing plant, settled the family into a brick house on the South Side of St. Louis. In grade school, little Henry was astonished at all the schoolyard fights he witnessed. Fighting and scrapes seemed to be a natural and beguiling pastime in his new surroundings. Gangs of youths stalked, neighborhood to neighborhood. Henry—short but stout—wrestled with young enemies. Then, as he grew, he switched to hitting with his fists. He purchased a pair of boxing gloves and offered to take on all comers, the pair of gloves thrown over his shoulders as much a dare as a gunslinger’s holsters. The death of his mother was a blow that changed everything. There were mouths to feed and he wanted to help his father. He worked in a bowling alley, he scrubbed cement stoops for small change. He graduated high school with a proud honor: He’d been named poet laureate of the graduating class.

  The poet laureate found work quick enough, driving stakes for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. He wasted little time in telling railroad workers about his dream to box. Aging men who worked for the railroad—and who had once boxed themselves—regaled him with stories of their own ring ventures. He didn’t know which tales to believe, but the utterances excited him. Henry bought a sandbag and trained while circling it in his basement. Laid off from railroad work, he washed dishes. Laid off from washing dishes, he found work in a hat store. A trainer noticed Henry working out at the colored YMCA in St. Louis. Spotting potential, the trainer entered him in local AAU contests. (He started out fighting under the name Melody Jackson—thus the name, in later years, of Armstrong’s Melody Room nightclub in Sugar Ray’s Harlem.) In Missouri he became an AAU champion. Henry moved to Pittsburgh with another fighter and manager hoping to better his prospects, and in 1931 he won his first two pro bouts. But the earnings were meager, and he found himself back in Missouri. He was soon invited out to the West Coast, and he began dreaming of what California might have to offer: “Oranges falling like manna from heaven … luscious nights under the star-studded dark blue dome of heaven … $5,000 purses … classy clothes and a diamond ring …”

  Utilizing his experience of railroads and railyards, Henry Armstrong—without sufficient funds to catch a train or plane—tramped his way to California. It was not an easy trek. Brakemen ha
d been specially trained to watch out for hoboes: “They weren’t friendly to hoboes, and they were downright dirty in their handling of Negro hoboes, striking at those who were slow in getting off the train at their command,” Armstrong would remember. Armstrong and his traveling mates hopped from train to train, survived mostly on bologna and crackers, and finally made it into that big, open, and bountiful land of California. They slept at missions as Henry sought out fight gyms during the day. Impressing trainers at the local Main Street gym, Armstrong was soon back in the ring. A roundhouse right had become his specialty. “It was neither jab nor hook, nor swing,” Armstrong would explain. “It had less preliminary, but more consequences, than any of them. And the glove traveled only a few inches in its round trip.” Between 1932 and 1934, Armstrong—fighting all his bouts in California save for three in Mexico City—amassed thirty-two victories against four losses and five draws. (In Mexico City he fought in outdoor bullfighting rings; the locals, furiously attached to their own homegrown fighters, pelted him with orange peelings.) He was soon known as a West Coast sensation from Mississippi—never mind his lengthy wanderings and his arrival by freight train. Nat Fleischer’s Ring magazine took note of Armstrong, placing him sixth in its 1934 rankings.

  By 1936 Armstrong had a new manager in Eddie Mead. Mead had been managing fighters since the 1920s. He was a tough character, once accused of having placed an iron bar inside one of his fighter’s gloves. (Mead was a close consort of actor George Raft, who was in turn known for his ties to gangsters. Mead knew of Armstrong’s star-filled eyes and made an introduction.) On August 4, 1936, Armstrong defeated Mexican-born Baby Arizmendi in Los Angeles. He was named California-Mexican featherweight world champion. The honor meant little east of the Mississippi, but what Armstrong did in the following year—those twenty-seven bouts and twenty-seven victories, winning his first world championship—meant everything. It meant his name was suddenly on the lips of Walker Smith Jr. and the other young souls inside Manhattan’s Salem Crescent Athletic Club.