Sweet Thunder Page 27
The fighters stood waiting on the decision as the judges huddled and flashbulbs popped. The twelve-rounder had indeed favored LaMotta. But Robinson’s late rallies in the middle rounds and during the final round had been powerful.
Sugar Ray Robinson—standing beneath the moody and churning sky, his opponent fervently believing he had won or at least fought to a draw, both corners nearly breathless as they strained to listen for the decision—was declared the victor. There erupted more than a smattering of boos. The referee, along with one of the judges, scored it 61–59 for Robinson. But the third official tallied 63–57 for LaMotta. It was the kind of disagreement the two fighters had become accustomed to, and it showed what made their boxing wars so unforgettable. The next day the Chicago Daily Tribune referred to the bout as a “close victory” for Robinson. But two days later, the publication was referring to the judges’ vote as an “unpopular decision.” The Amsterdam News allowed as to how Robinson’s “last ditch stand” in the final round had played a large role in his win. A United Press dispatch referenced a years-long pastime of Robinson’s while summing up all their encounters: “And as in the others, it was Robinson’s superior boxing skill, his speed, his in-and-out punching, that won for the former tap dancer.”
Robinson was full of praise for his opponent afterward. “LaMotta is the toughest man I have ever fought,” he said. Gainford and his corner had noticed a swelling lump behind Robinson’s right ear from a LaMotta wallop and were treating it. “I have fought him five times and hit him with everything I know how to throw but he still stands up.”
The Bull was obviously distraught. He hightailed it back to New York City, but before leaving he confessed: “I thought I won all the way.”
Sugar Ray Robinson decided to stay on in Chicago. Why, there were such good restaurants in the city, so many wonderful spots to hear jazz in and around Bronzeville. Most important, though, he wanted to see the Cubs play in the World Series. Chicagoans spotted him on the streets in the days after the LaMotta battle and called his name; this was hardly unusual for him. He’d been fighting—athletic club, Golden Gloves, professional—nearly a decade now. And he was still only twenty-four years old. For a long time he had recognized his power and personal appeal. His public image may have been practiced, but the magnetism couldn’t be manufactured. He turned to those who called out to him with a tender generosity—like a tap dancer at performance’s end who knows compliments are about to float his way.
There was something else in 1945—in addition to their five bouts—that linked Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta so closely. Neither, at that point, had been given a shot at fighting for a title. They had yet to figure how to navigate the turbulence one had to go through in dealing with promoters, mobsters, publicists, and rival fight camps. They both stood suspended in their title dreams—pummeling each other in the meanwhile. The perceived unfairness bore into them. “The only thing I really wanted was that title,” LaMotta would say of his middleweight hopes. In boxing, the title-holder is king, but you could never become king without a shot at the title and the attendant coronation. Both fighters were impatient, and both saw sinister forces conspiring against them. Robinson would get his shot a year later, though not with Red Cochrane, as he should have, but with Tommy Bell.
The Bull would decide to take a darker—and far more unfor giving—route to his title shot.
INTERLUDE Dreaming Sugar
The little boys of Coney Island had plenty to keep them busy in the late 1940s. They flipped through their comic books, constructed cardboard airplanes while spitting buzzing noises from their mouths, did their arithmetic, drew maps for geography class. The hum of sports, of course, hung heavily in the air. Baseball was beloved, and many of the little boys on Mel Dick’s Coney Island block chirped on and on about the great Joe DiMaggio, their hero. In the local park where they played baseball, they’d swing their bat while howling DiMaggio’s name. But not little Mel. He had another hero, and his name was Sugar Ray Robinson. “I studied everything about him.” There sat twelve-year-old Mel, in 1946, in his bedroom, thumbing through the New York papers, racing to the sports section, reading top to bottom every article about Robinson. He’d neatly fold the articles, stash them away for safekeeping, then retrieve them and read them all over again. A weeks-old article thrilled him anew upon reading it for the fourth and fifth time. It turned into a sweet obsession. The other boys had their baseball phenoms; he had Sugar Ray. He daydreamed, alone, about his hero. “My parents thought I was nuts.”
He was the son of Russian and Austrian immigrants—William, a portrait photographer, and Sonya, a housewife, both of Jewish ancestry. Little Mel was blessed with the gift of gab and a willful personal determination. He had to meet Robinson. Nothing could stop him. From reading the newspapers, he had learned that Robinson often trained at Grupp’s Gym in Harlem. It was quite a trek from Coney Island into Harlem, but he plotted it all out. There was no way he could tell his parents. On the decided day, playing hooky from school, he marched out the front door as if someone, far away, was calling his name. He took a trolley car to the subway station, then the uptown Seventh Avenue train to Harlem, and found Grupp’s Gym. He had a couple bucks; it cost twenty-five cents to watch Robinson train. He paid his quarter and walked up into the gym. He spotted Robinson in the ring, sparring. He stared wide-eyed and found a seat. “Hey, young fella,” said a man who seemed ancient to him. It was Harry Wiley, he’d later discover, one of Robinson’s trainers. He came back the next day, and a third day. By then he’d become noticeable. And on that day, when Robinson finished sparring, he jumped from the ring and angled his way over to the punching bag. He began pummeling it. Mel had no idea what the nods and grunts and gentle smiles coming from all the men gathered about—the boxing gym chorus—meant: the champ looked good, is all. The champ caught the kid—the only white kid who had showed up for three straight days—out of the corner of his eye as he finished with the punching bag and walked right over to him. “Hey, who are you?” Robinson asked. Mel told him his name.
“Where do you live—and do your parents know you’re here?” Robinson wanted to know.
Mel confided that his parents were at home; he said he had come to Harlem to meet him—Sugar Ray Robinson. Robinson chuckled; Harry Wiley chuckled.
“Why?” Robinson asked.
“You’re my hero,” he said. Then little Mel blurted: “And I love you.”
Robinson ran his hands through the kid’s mop of hair. The fighter seemed both moved and tickled.
Sugar Ray turned on his heel and told Mel to follow him. He simply couldn’t believe it. Walking alongside his hero! Robinson plopped himself on a table in the dressing room for his rub-down and asked this just-made friend about home, about school. He asked Mel if there were other boxers he admired. There really weren’t. “He said to me, ‘You ever meet Joe Louis?’” Mel would remember decades later. “I told him no. Then he said, ‘Go over there, will you, and pull that curtain back on the shower.’ So I walk over and pull the curtain back and there is Joe Louis standing in the shower! They all start laughing. I walked right into the shower and shook Joe Louis’s hand!”
It was the beginning of unimaginable events and moments in the life of Mel Dick. Robinson would send gifts out to his Coney Island home: boxing gloves, fight programs, photographs. Mel himself would troop alone into Harlem; he had an open invitation to watch Robinson train. He’d run by his nightclub during the daytime and peer in at the windows. “What I felt,” he says, “was an admiration and love for black people. Because they were so nice to me. That was a special feeling—how they welcomed me. I never worried about anything.” He would dash into his home in Coney Island, pick up the telephone, and call Robinson’s office. “His secretary—I called her Mrs. Phyllis, would answer. She’d say, ‘Hello Mel. How are you?’ And I’d say, ‘Fine.’ I’d say, ‘How’s Ray doing today?’ ‘How much does he weigh?’ ‘Is he ready for the next fight?’ I was trying to impress my friends!”
In high school, when he had begun driving, he’d bring dates by Sugar Ray’s nightclub. He’d stop when he saw the pink Caddy. He’d hop out, run inside, and beg Sugar Ray to come out and meet his date—for the girls never seemed to believe during the ride into Harlem that he really knew the fighter. “And he’d come out to the car and introduce himself to my date! And always just before I’d drive off he’d lean into the car and say, ‘Mel, you be good.’”
He told his famous friend about the local boys’ Coney Island baseball team. They had talent, he swore, but never decent enough uniforms. Sugar Ray bought them new ones. They named themselves the Sugar Rays. The team was all white, save for one tall Negro: Lou Gossett Jr., future Academy Award–winning actor. In his late teens, Mel was a constant guest at Greenwood Lake, the training camp. It was rustic, but to him it was paradise. On his first visit, walking up to the house, he was startled when he heard piano music. Inside, at the piano, sat Sugar Ray himself. “He was pretty good too. He’d play tunes like ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ ‘Boogie Woogie.’ He loved playing.” He goes on about the training camp: “You’d be walking down a road and you’d see Frank Sinatra. On another day Duke Ellington and Miles Davis.”
When Mel proposed to Bobbi, in 1957, he knew there was only one friend he wanted as best man. First Bobbi said yes, then Sugar Ray accepted best man honors. (Sugar Ray declined an invitation to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show because the taping would interfere with the wedding.) “And when he arrived—dressed so beautifully!—he said to me, ‘You see my cufflinks, with the Star of David?’ And then he pointed to his tie clip. And it also had a little Star of David. Then he went to the reception and all these ladies were saying to him: ‘You’re Melvin’s friend—the fighter!’ And he would say, ‘Yes I am. And you are?’ It was something else. He knew how to wow people.”
It would all last—dinner, good seats at the fights, nightclubs, training camps, the birth of children, the mutual family heartaches, the love—until death claimed the great prizefighter.
Who cared that there was a sepia world spinning out there? That there were those—far from the lynch rope, far from the Northern or Southern jail cell or chain gang—who lived and clapped hands and spun records and took high tea and wrote verse, altering their own universe?
The late 1940s were Lena Horne’s European years. She went in search of beauty. “We actually left home because of race and politics,” her daughter would confide.
Lena Horne sailed for London in the fall of 1947 with Lennie Hayton, her beau. (She aimed to marry Hayton in Europe, far away from the contentious eyes of Americans.) In postwar London, she sipped tea, looked gorgeous against the chill, and stood agog at the rebuilding efforts. War veterans talked to her about her music—those Artie Shaw sessions! She wowed audiences at the London Casino, a theatrical venue. Among her admirers were English actor James Mason and the poet Dylan Thomas: her beauty seemed to transfix both. But where to marry? Tabloid reporters seemed to be everywhere in London. Paris beckoned. She played the Club des Champs-Elysées there. Her audiences were spirited. French entertainers sought her out—Yves Montand and Edith Piaf among them. A district mayor in Paris married Lennie and Lena; Lena wore Balenciaga. She phoned daughter Gail in America and told her to keep the marriage secret. When she herself was back on native shores, Lena Horne was invited to sing at Truman’s Inaugural Ball. She enjoyed the moment, but, in time, McCarthyism began to engulf the country. She had befriended activist Paul Robeson; she knew where it was all going. So she sailed again for Paris, “dripping ermine” aboard ship. Paris was a springboard for other European destinations—Monte Carlo, Glasgow, Edinburgh. She sang in swank clubs; she dressed beautifully, much of her attire purchased from couture designers. Her circle of friends grew: Noël Coward, photographer Robert Capa, Marlene Dietrich. She piqued their curiosity; she could see it in their eyes. Paris enchanted her, and she enchanted Paris. Some nights she could be heard singing at Club Galerie, backed by a small ensemble of French musicians. “It was a special club,” Herbert Gordon, one of the Galerie’s cofounders, would explain. “Artists were invited there to express themselves and to meet other artists, mostly Americans, but also Danes, French, Swedes, who would come there to discuss art and music, and to exchange ideas … You had to be hip and sensitive.” Life magazine caught up with Horne and her husband in Paris, and they appeared in its July 10, 1950, edition. They were photographed outside a Paris café. In gazing at the picture, it remains nearly impossible to avert one’s eyes from Horne, dressed as she was in her “quadruple pearl choker, Jacques Fath suit, and seriously frivolous French hat.” Even on a distant shore, she remained the queen of sepia America.
It is little wonder the beautiful Lena Horne fell prey to the lure of big-time prizefighting. Negro America’s biggest celebrities came from its ranks. She dated Joe Louis and befriended Sugar Ray.
In sessions that spread over 1948 and 1949, the young man with the trumpet picked some musicians—Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke among them—and made some recordings for Capitol Records. They were lovely and tender. “I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices, and they did,” Miles Davis would remember. Among the tunes were “Hallucinations,” “Godchild,” “Move,” and “Darn That Dream.” Those were the beginnings of the landmark Birth of the Blues album. Now when he was nodded at by other musicians, there was reverence in those nods. Like Lena, Miles Davis also headed for Paris: He landed there in early 1949, his first foray abroad. He and some fellow musicians played the Paris Jazz Festival and drew applause. And he met notables—Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre. He fell in love with Juliette Gréco, a bohemian and well-known singer. He might as well have been in a fevered dream: “Even the band and the music we played sounded better over there. Even the smells were different. I got used to the smell of cologne in Paris and the smell of Paris to me was a kind of coffee smell.” But every Paris dream seems to end and he was back on American soil before the decade closed.
He would claim that a bone-deep loneliness for his Paris lover pushed him toward heroin. Seen on New York street corners—shaking, snot dripping from his nose—Miles Davis seemed to be sabotaging his splendid gifts. He could die, drifting away on somebody’s stained sofa. But he had a need to see Sugar Ray Robinson up close, and when he saw him in the ring, he believed his salvation lay in what Robinson had shown: discipline, fearlessness. He liked the beauty of movement merged with the fearlessness. So he began to hang out with the great prizefighter, who was himself a softie for musicians, whether struggling with demons or not. Robinson tutored him, introduced him to sparring partners, welcomed him to his nightclub. Miles began to fill his dope-hungering spells with sober hours at the gym, watching fighters, watching Sugar Ray. As Sugar Ray danced in the ring, Miles stared quietly, convincing himself he was seeing beauty and music and jazz—just in another dimension. An acquaintance would recall accompanying Miles on visits to the gyms: “Miles didn’t go there to be seen. He went there to watch—watch the boxing and to see that courage and loneliness …”
In that sweet-smoky world of sepia America—off the beaten path, but all the more buoyant for being so—Langston Hughes reveled in his renown. On April 24, 1947, he attended the opening of the Gershwin Memorial Room on the campus of Fisk University in Nashville. He stayed around to do some lecturing, reciting his own poetry in a mellifluous voice. The students were quite delighted to see, up close, any published Negro author. He couldn’t touch down in a Southern city without well-heeled Negroes and liberal whites offering to host a tea party on his behalf—and there he would be, alighting from an auto, climbing steps into strangers’ homes, regaling them with stories of Manhattan and the Apollo Theatre as books were pushed under his nose to autograph. His honey-colored skin shone; his hair was swept back in that marcelled fashion, just like Billy Eckstine’s, just like Sugar Ray’s. Like Horne, he wasn’t immune to political currents: In the coming months, Red baiters would hound him out of several speaking engagements be
cause of his affiliation with and sentiments toward radical organizations. Backed into one corner, he came out swinging from another and proceeded to write more operas, ballets, and librettos to keep his bills paid. He was delighted when Gwendolyn Brooks—he had helped get her first poem published in Negro Quarterly—received the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her book, Annie Allen. “Practically everybody is going to Rome or Paris these days but us,” Hughes sighed to a friend in 1950. But there was much to keep him smiling: In 1950 he was interviewed for the first time on national TV to talk about his book Simple Speaks His Mind, a collection of his newspaper columns. (It would eventually sell an impressive thirty thousand copies.)
Hughes’s 1950 television introduction came the same year Sugar Ray Robinson made his own debut on national TV. Robinson’s was on November 8 in Chicago in a bout sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon. He was matched against San Antonio native Bobby Dykes, eight years his junior. Dykes had made his reputation with a feared right hook. He entered the ring first; Robinson kept the crowd waiting. Down in the dressing room, his cornerman Pee Wee Beale was doing what he did best—tending to Robinson’s hair. And when Robinson pushed back the hood of his robe after finally entering the ring, his hair indeed looked as if he had just come from a salon. Robinson outweighed Dykes by ten pounds, but that was hardly the only advantage: He was also quicker and more elusive. By the second round Dykes was bleeding from the nose. By the eighth he looked genuinely bewildered. Robinson’s punches seemed to come out of nowhere; several times he leaned forward on his left leg while his right leg was crooked in the air—like Astaire in mid-pirouette—and delivered left hooks. Other times he yanked his head left to right as Dykes’s blows landed in open air. He was toying; perhaps mocking. It was both theatrical and professional; in this bloodiest of sports, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He did not appear to want to leave the stage. The announcer deemed it “the mark of a true professional” that Robinson would not inflict unnecessary damage; the longer the fight went, the more it seemed merely a showcase for Robinson’s wide arsenal. It had been a sensational way to introduce himself to the TV audience. And there would be more engagements to follow.