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  Then Sugar Ray Robinson came on the show. Despite his earlier comments, he defended W.W., proclaiming him “an ally of black people.”

  Winchell refused to appear.

  The flap continued: There was a ridiculously long newspaper series on Winchell—twenty-four installments—full of critique and gossip, which appeared in the New York Post following the Stork Club incident. Among other caustic remarks, it referred to Billingsley as “Winchell’s valet.” It also said, in part, that Winchell had a thin skin and suffered from paranoia. Winchell complained bitterly not only to allies about the series, but also to the NAACP, claiming the organization was ruining him. He said if he waltzed back into Harlem that his “blood would flow in the streets.” Robinson sought to rein in Winchell’s paranoia, but it didn’t help. As for Josephine Baker, her nightclub engagements across America began to dry up. So she packed her Dior dresses and gallivanted about the world: Argentina, Cuba, back to Europe. She burned her American bridges by denouncing the country of her birth. She began adopting homeless children. The music still wafted from within the Stork Club, but Billingsley was soon besieged by pickets protesting working conditions. Reporters, gossip columnists, and radio broadcasters found other stories to cover—namely the upcoming presidential election.

  His support of W.W. had been a rare political move on Sugar Ray Robinson’s part. He was an apolitical celebrity. While he considered himself a Democrat, he saw no need to advertise it. He felt for Baker and her plight—if only she had simply come uptown to Sugar Ray’s!—but Winchell had been a longtime friend. For the most part, Sugar Ray believed justice was best served from the center of the boxing ring: The hooligans who had jumped Barry Gray knew better than to come near him. When Winchell had cautioned against a visit to the Stork, Robinson heeded the warning: He would not have his pride wounded. He had, of course, his own haven. He was a far more egalitarian proprietor than Sherman Billingsley—hipster whites, French, Greek, Ethiopians, all came through the front door of Sugar Ray’s. In the aftermath of the Baker incident, Billingsley tried to alter his image even as he was enduring public humiliation and getting several bomb threats. He invited Eartha Kitt to the Stork. She refused; she was spotted on occasion, however, having a high good time at Sugar Ray’s. So he had his own kind of Stork Club, where the likes of E. Simms Campbell, the estimable Esquire artist, could come and relax without fear that his pride would be insulted; where Adam Clayton Powell and his piano-playing wife, Hazel Scott, could spread their glamorous smiles among a kind of sepia royalty; where Billy Eckstine and Duke Ellington could come and just be themselves, sharing all those intimate details about the doings of Negro America—details that never reached the Stork. It was the entertainers who intoxicated Sugar Ray as they came through the doors of his club. He seemed transfixed listening to their tales of performing on the road; it sounded like fun, moments of pure joy. Musicians on a stage; dancers sashaying. Boxing was not joyful; he made it look joyful, but it was a painful exercise. The dark reality was that he took an awful lot of hits. It was the chink in the armor of being a great fighter: Sugar Ray Robinson, the champion, simply took too many punches. He escaped a great many because of his quickness; but a great many he did not. He was already wondering about his future.

  He saw time in the mirror, especially on nights like September 27, 1950, inside Yankee Stadium.

  Joe Louis had come out of retirement to face Ezzard Charles, the reigning heavyweight champion. Louis, who hadn’t fought since June 1948, was fighting because he owed back taxes. Charles pummeled Louis relentlessly; Louis lumbered about the ring like a giant trapped in a haze of fog. Before the fight, Louis’s training regimen had been lackluster. In the ring now, he was clearly overweight; boos rang out from the stands. At the end of the fourteenth, he nearly collapsed, stung by Charles’s blows. His cornermen helped Louis from his stool to begin the final round. Charles seemed to be holding back from finishing off the iconic figure. In 1948—not quite two years after Jimmy Doyle’s fate at the hands of Sugar Ray Robinson—Sam Baroudi died from injuries suffered in a bout with Charles in Chicago. Many felt Charles had lost his killer instinct, leveling off in late rounds when he could have knocked out opponents. So too it seemed with Louis. At the defeat, Louis’s eyes welled up. Sugar Ray shadowed his old Army buddy down in the dressing room, helping him put his clothes on. Anguished moans erupted from Louis: He couldn’t find his damn shoes. Robinson finally found them and helped the old champion put them on. Sugar Ray—wiping the still-seeping blood from Louis’s face—felt “it was like trying to console an old blind man.”

  The reporters finally came in. They started firing their questions. Then it got quiet, as if they were all suddenly out of breath. Louis scanned the room. His own tears had dried, but now he saw the tears of others—namely Sugar Ray’s. It seemed to touch him. “What’s the use of crying?” he said softly. “The better man won. That’s all.” Robinson couldn’t shake the night: “I didn’t want to make the same mistake Joe Louis had.” Tony Cordaro, a reporter for The Des Moines Register, would write of the Louis-Charles bout: “It seemed a terrible punishment to take for the income tax.” Louis had not left boxing, boxing had left him. Thirteen months later, Louis fought the dangerous Rocky Marciano in New York City. Rocky knocked him out in the eighth round. Afterward, Sugar Ray was again by the former heavyweight champion’s side, whispering in his ear, trying to shield him from the klieg lights. It was the unspectacular coda to the great ring career of Joe Louis Barrow.

  There were times when George Gainford, Harry Wiley, and others would stand back and watch Sugar Ray Robinson: descending the plank of an ocean liner; shaking the hands of everyone from little children to royalty; chatting with Duke Ellington and Lena Horne; smiling from behind the bar of his very own club; slipping into view behind the wheel of his Cadillac, his name flying from the mouths of pedestrians—Sugarray! Sugarray! Sugarray!—and imagine he was among the happiest men on earth. They chuckled during those times when he casually mentioned retirement, musing about entertainers and dancers—the Nicholas Brothers, Buck and Bubbles, Dinah Washington, Cootie Williams—and the lives they led. How could anyone walk away from being boxing royalty? Gainford and Wiley wondered. They chalked Robinson’s threat of retirement up to idle chatter, fallout from all those lovely chorus girls and dapper jazzmen constantly coming into his nightclub, feeding his beyond-boxing dreams.

  When he posed for photographers in those halcyon days of the early 1950s, he looked not like an athlete but a man of leisure. Sugar Ray Robinson was now one of the kings of sepia America, rolling in a rich man’s mist: dinners at the Waldorf; up-close tickets to big sporting events; swaying on dance floors at those charity balls. Sometimes he’d be spotted standing on a Manhattan street corner, in repose, chatting with some anonymous soul. He’d be holding his fedora by his fingertips, as if he just might flip it into thin air, daring it not to circle back to him. The Negro magazines, especially the ones who fancied themselves arbiters of style and fashion (Ebony, Our World), were eager to write him up. But so were the editors of Life and Holiday and Time. Time magazine would feature him on its cover in a 1951 edition, a moment of undeniable proof that he had crossed over into a new light with a bewitching combination of brute strength and silkiness. He convinced himself—not unlike Lena, Langston, and Miles—that the fifties would conform to him and not the other way around. There were hints he wanted to try Hollywood. He had been quietly conferring with entertainment agents. But then Paris called. Cocky brawlers an ocean away wanted a chance at him. So he set sail for the Old World—and a new decade.

  1951

  around (a part of) the world in fifty days

  IN APRIL OF 1951, Sugar Ray Robinson was thinking of Paris. The long boulevards and chic cafés; those swank nightclubs and wonderful men’s clothing shops. Before he could set sail there were a couple of detours: There was an April 5 engagement with middleweight Holly Mims in Miami. Sugar Ray settled for a decision in the tenth. Four days later, he
found himself in Oklahoma City to face Don Ellis. It would be the only fight in that state during his entire career. Robinson didn’t linger in Oklahoma City either: Ellis was the victim of a first-round knockout.

  The great prizefighter was gallivanting about Paris when this Time magazine hit the stands back home. In Manhattan the issue sold out within hours.

  It was the European promoter Charlie Michaelis who persuaded Robinson to come to Paris. Michaelis promised a string of bouts that would keep Robinson busy through the summer—while allowing time for plenty of enjoyment and relaxation. Robinson couldn’t resist. He informed Michaelis, however, there would have to be first-class accommodations for his entourage, which seemed to balloon by the month. Michaelis agreed to Robinson’s demands, and made a request of his own: He thought it would be wonderful if Robinson would arrive with his pink Cadillac. The request perplexed the fighter. He wondered how he would get it there. Michaelis suggested it could come on the same ocean liner that would be bringing Robinson over. “I will pay the shipping charge,” he declared, chuckling.

  Michaelis went about securing bouts for Robinson. Within a short period of time, he had most of the fights lined up; the lone exception was a possible bout in London. Neither Robinson nor Gainford expressed any worry about the opponents—even if each one happened to be quite well known on the European continent.

  The bonhomie and conviviality of traveling jazz bands had entranced Sugar Ray Robinson so much he sought to duplicate it with his own entourage. The disparate personalities in his group were akin to an ad hoc road family. He had been the only boy in a family of sisters and had spent hours and hours alone in his youth. Now he relished company, the mingling of laughter and the sight of familiar faces. Some members of his entourage, however, had jobs, duties to carry out that kept Robinson’s stylish image at peak form. So there was a barber, a golf pro, a trainer, a dietician, a secretary. Now and then casual acquaintances—a nightclub owner from another city, a fellow middleweight—would be invited to join, leaving them absolutely thrilled. Don Ellis may have been a first-round knockout victim in Oklahoma City, but he smiled when Robinson invited him on his European excursion. The Robinson entourage, at any given time, could number upwards of a dozen. No one had to be instructed to dress appropriately; they took their cues from the elegant Robinson himself. The men were seen in fine tweed suits and two-toned shoes; the women in silk dresses, heels, and eye-catching hats.

  In the days leading up to his late April excursion, Robinson made the ritual stops by his Manhattan businesses. He was a hands-off businessman, taking joy in the hum inside his barbershop, lingerie shop, and nightclub. The movement of so many bodies, the jangling noise from the cash register, convinced him business was good.

  A caravan of automobiles made its way to the Manhattan dock for departure. Fight managers had been spooked by the airplane death of Marcel Cerdan, and many began insisting their fighters travel by ship going abroad. (Robinson’s pink Caddy eventually disappeared into the ocean liner’s storage area. Gainford’s black Cadillac was also part of the cargo.) Before boarding, he shook hands and smiled all around. There were plenty of well-wishers—old church members, newsmen, fight fans—to send Robinson and his group off. Ship stewards were astonished at the mountain of luggage. Robinson had packed an assortment of suits. Also, two tuxedos. One was a traditional cut; the other a black tux with tails.

  In one sense, this was a different Paris than the one Robinson had visited six months earlier. Parisians had grieved mightily at the loss of Cerdan in that plane crash, and the playing of any Edith Piaf recording continued to summon painful feelings. Robinson, of course, had defeated LaMotta, whom the French loathed because he had not only defeated their Cerdan, but he was the fighter whom Cerdan had been en route to fight again when his plane went down. In the minds of the French, Robinson had avenged Cerdan’s nation-shattering death. Unbeknownst to Sugar Ray Robinson, as he sailed toward France, he had become a national hero.

  A Negro photographer, who had used all his gifts and photographic talents to get hired by Life magazine, got himself a plum assignment in the magazine’s Paris bureau. He covered fashion but convinced his editors that Robinson’s arrival in Paris would be quite a worthwhile story.

  Gordon Parks’s life was so rough and incandescent he may as well have popped from an old Western daguerreotype. He was born in 1912 in the dusty town of Fort Scott, Kansas. His father was a dirt farmer. When his mother died in his youth, he was dispatched to St. Paul to live with relatives. There, he found work playing piano—he had a natural ear—in a whorehouse. Thin and dark, he wore his hair slicked back, à la Rudy Valentino. He was a hepcat with ambition, only lacking a direction in which to take it. He hit the road, landing in Sugar Ray’s Harlem in the late 1930s.

  He eventually left Robinson’s Harlem and found work as a waiter on the North Coast Limited train. At stops on the line, he scooped up magazines left by passengers. In one, he couldn’t lift his eyes from the pages and pages of photographs: “They were of migrant workers. Dispossessed, beaten by storms, dusts and floods, they roamed the highways in caravans of battered jalopies and wagons between Oklahoma and California, scrounging for work. Some were so poor that they traveled on foot, pushing their young in baby buggies and carts.” The pictures had been taken by Farm Security Administration photographers—Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans among them. Those photographers had gotten their jobs because of the benevolence of the Roosevelt administration and the genius of Roy Stryker, a onetime economics professor who was given a mandate to document rural America. And when Stryker’s photographers hit their stride, they found themselves making landmark documentary pictures of white and Negro life in small towns and out-of-the-way places all across the country: Negro workers on a Louisiana plantation; shoeless white schoolchildren in Breathitt County, Kentucky; Negroes snapping their fingers in a juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi; white migrant workers in Belle Glade, Florida. It was America—desperate and hungry and drifting and surviving. The images had a huge impact upon Parks. Inside a Minneapolis pawnshop, he forked over $7.50 and walked out with a Voigtlander Brilliant camera. In 1938 a local camera store displayed some of his fashion photographs in their window. Marva Louis—wife of Joe Louis—spotted those pictures and encouraged him to come to Chicago.

  In Chicago, Parks got enough work to draw the attention of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. The Rosenwald group gave cultural fellowships to enterprising writers and artists. Parks, to his astonishment, received one in 1940. The fellowship took Parks to Washington, D.C., in 1941 and a prized position as a photographer with the Farm Security Administration. But Parks quickly began to loathe Washington and its racist rituals: store clerks who refused to serve him, restaurants directing him to the back door, theatre ushers telling him yet another show was sold out when he knew differently. Stryker, the FSA head, told him to turn his camera against inequality. “You have to get at the source of their bigotry,” Stryker said.

  In the very office where Stryker and his team were headquartered, Parks noticed a black cleaning lady one evening, swish-swishing her mop down the hall. The lady had gray hair, wore a plain dotted dress and severe eyeglasses. Her name was Ella Watson and she was poor as nickels. Parks struck up a conversation. He spotted a big American flag hanging from a wall. He asked Watson if he could take her picture. She was holding a mop in one hand and a broom in the other when the flash went off, her gaunt face staring outward almost as if she had forced herself out of the fabric of the flag itself. The photograph, called “American Gothic,” was a sensation, and Parks’s reputation began to rise.

  Parks spent several years freelancing for Vogue and Glamour magazines, among others, while living in Manhattan. He befriended novelist Richard Wright and E. Simms Campbell, the Esquire illustrator. He shouted into the ring at Madison Square Garden while watching Sugar Ray’s bouts and eventually introduced himself to the fighter. In 1948 he became the first Negro photographer at Life magazine. Within a
year and a half, he had gotten himself that Paris assignment. And when Sugar Ray Robinson and his entourage arrived at Le Havre on his way to Paris on May 2, Parks was there with his camera—along with a beaming crowd of French fans. They wanted to see the fighter who had whipped LaMotta, thus assuaging some of the pain about their Marcel Cerdan. As soon as Robinson came into view, he recognized the four-feet-four-inch figure dashing toward him wearing a wraparound coat and broad smile: It was Jimmy Karoubi, a midget whom Robinson had met on his earlier visit to the country and who had served as Robinson’s translator and all-around man Friday. (Members of Robinson’s entourage often wondered about his fascination with midgets. But Robinson had arrived in Harlem as the last embers of vaudeville were still visible. Midgets were creatures of vaudeville and carnivals. Sugar Ray’s sometime Harlem chauffer, Chico, was also a midget: Chico sat on two phone books in the driver’s seat when he was driving Robinson around. He also carried a pearl-handled pistol. “Chico was a badass dude,” says Drew Brown, whose father would come to work with Robinson in later years. “He just happened to be a midget.”) Now, with Robinson’s arm flung down and around his shoulder, the diminutive Jimmy couldn’t help but add an extra dash to the exuberant sway of Robinson’s band of merry travelers. Ship attendants began unloading the heaps of luggage that belonged to the Robinson party. Finally, after the pink Cadillac was unloaded, the group decamped to the upscale Claridge Hotel.