Sweet Thunder Page 39

  Joe Scott, a onetime vaudeville performer, played straight man to Robinson in their stage routine.

  Sugar Ray: “Do you know the three quickest ways of communication?”

  Joe: “No, what?”

  Sugar Ray: “Telephone, telegraph, and tell a woman.”

  It was corny, but they all laughed anyway.

  A couple of numbers later, he vanished again, this time returning in a midnight blue formal jacket with matching satin pants. The parade of sartorial surprises delighted his audience. He continued to joke from the stage, but only as prelude to yet another tap routine. For his eleventh and final scene, he appeared dressed in top hat, white tie, and tails. At the end of that number—signaling show’s end—he spun about the stage with unalloyed joy. He introduced members of his act. He pumped his fighting fists. His Army buddy Joe Louis was on his feet, soon joined by everyone else in the house. He bowed like a child who had just starred in the school play.

  They mobbed him, rushed to his dressing room, told him how marvelous he had been. The critics who were there were mostly boxing writers who had come out of curiosity. They were kind, if cautious, with their remarks. Some of the praise was of the backhanded variety: “The guy is a superb clotheshorse,” wrote Lewis Burton in the New York Journal-American, “but if you are going in for horses, Native Dancer is a better bet.”

  But it didn’t matter! Smoke and mirrors! The stuff of show business! Robinson’s publicity machine went into overdrive, sending out reports of the opening night filled with gushing comments from audience members. But show business—as Ralph Cooper and Henry Le Tang certainly knew—was more than just a crowd of well-wishers inside one Manhattan nightclub; if Robinson was going to succeed as an entertainer he would have to get out and perform across the country. So he hit the road. He made TV appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Kate Smith Show, his hosts fawning over him.

  He played the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Jack Benny and Louis Armstrong caught the show. (Wherever Robinson performed, if there were other celebrities in the area, they would try to catch his performance. It was an old show business law: celebrity begat celebrity.) Vegas tourists looked at him bewildered: He was a black entertainer who didn’t sing; he tapped, but didn’t exactly remind anyone of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Some of those tourists wanted to jawbone with Robinson about boxing, but he wanted to hone the show, refine the dance steps. Refinement in Robinson’s mind was an elementary thing, however: Quicker movement of the feet, remembering exit left or exit right. The sublime nature of stage shows—where movement and improvisation were second nature, where the comfort level of the performers was never doubted by audience members—had often taken years to reach a level of perfection. Robinson had dreamed of this moment, and he was inside the dream. But dreams so often had a fantastical element. Robinson kept waiting for perfection to come, and night after night, it was evident it was eluding him. He wanted to see the looks on the faces of audience members that he himself had on his own face when watching the likes of the Nicholas Brothers or Buck and Bubbles—serene gratification, unalloyed joy. Ralph Cooper, the impresario, had seen some of the flaws in Robinson’s act but kept them to himself. Boxing greats, as he knew, possessed huge egos. (Cooper had cackled at Joe Louis’s awkward forays into entertainment as well.) Sugar Ray would retire to his hotel room, dialing up Edna Mae, his sisters, anyone who would listen, imploring them to help him get better quicker. But they were not in his shoes, and they could only offer words of encouragement. In boxing, if Robinson suffered a bad round, he knew he’d recover a round or two later. He had the comfort of strategy and power. Onstage, however, he was showing a mighty small allowance of comfort, and audiences began sensing it.

  Robinson moved on to Pittsburgh where he put on four shows during the New Year’s Eve celebrations of 1952–1953. Variety noted that those shows cost $20,000 to stage, and made only $5,000. Robinson recoiled at the figures. He read the reviews alone in his hotel rooms, taking the harsh critiques like body blows. Suddenly he began to feel smaller. Negro boxing champions were gods of their communities. Sugar Ray hadn’t known this type of irrelevance since he had been little Walker Smith Jr. He moved on to the Chicago Theatre in Chicago—on a bill with Louis Armstrong—and there were plenty of old fight fans and Bronzeville residents who came out to see the pair. Among the Chicago guests was Robert Villemain, the French fighter Robinson had beaten in a tough fifteen-rounder back in the summer of 1950. It didn’t seem to matter to Sugar Ray that there was more discussion of clothing than act; before long it was announced that Robinson would be going on a national tour with the Count Basie Orchestra and the Dominoes, a much-lauded vocal quintet. It all made him giddy and left him with the false sensation that his act would somehow right itself in the hurly-burly heat of publicity.

  Sugar Ray Robinson found himself rolling on a bus with Count Basie, yakking about Duke Ellington and Lena Horne, about juke joints that specialized in barbecued ribs, about hotels that were kind to Negro performers, about drummers and saxophonists. It was a dream come true.

  But the great prizefighter was not accustomed to second billing. He imagined perks, the kind he’d gotten used to as a professional fighter. He found himself running his own errands, fetching his own laundry. Show business on the road could be grueling. “Most of the time we were doing one-night stands and when our show ended,” Robinson would recall, “we’d jump into the Count’s big bus and ride all night to our next stop. We were hot and smelly and trying to sleep on that bus.” These caravan shows often involved several groups, and the performances could last well past midnight. Robinson had not had a chance to meet many of the musicians—save the marquee names, many of whom he had met during their forays in and out of Manhattan over the years—until the trip was under way. On his sojourn with Basie, he got into an altercation with one of the traveling valets: The man had been showing up late; Robinson insisted on precision and threatened to dock his pay. While standing in the wings one evening preparing to go out onstage, Robinson turned to find the valet had walked up on him with a .38 pistol. He had tired of Sugar Ray’s complaints.

  “You not so tough now,” the angry valet said. Robinson’s face suddenly creased with worry. The tone of the valet’s voice convinced him it was no joke.

  “Say it again, Robinson, say what you said before and I’ll blow your head off.”

  The music cue came up and Robinson went out onstage, wondering if he would be shot—shot like Abe Lincoln inside a theatre. A stagehand finally got the pistol away from the valet. Robinson was fierce when he finally came offstage. The valet, of course, was quickly fired and also saved from a Robinson pummeling. Sugar Ray was realizing that show business could be as wicked as the shadowy fight game.

  One of the benefits of being Sugar Ray Robinson was that heralded groups like the Count Basie Orchestra were inclined to take him on. Additionally, Robinson had the cachet to pluck songwriters and freelance musicians at his whim. There were squabbles about billing—in ads put out by Robinson’s people, he would be touted as the main attraction, with his illustrious tour mates mentioned as afterthought. Some musicians wouldn’t work with him. But more worrisome than the arguments about billing was the criticism that was picking up speed. It was notable after a return to Manhattan for an engagement at the Band Box. The place was packed that night. In the crowd were crooner Johnny Hartman, and Sammy Davis Jr., a genuine song-and-dance man who had been performing since childhood. Robinson was now, for the most part, handling emceeing chores. It was little surprise that the criticism rattled him: “Even his closest friends saw pretty soon that Sugar was out of character in a nightclub as an entertainer,” the Chicago Defender opined. “His bag of parlor tricks wasn’t heavy enough to keep him going as a $15,000 a week entertainer.” Robinson had added Margie McGlory, a drag queen, to his show; she did wicked impersonations of, among others, Nat King Cole and Lena Horne. (Sammy Davis Jr., who also did impersonations, could be heard guffawing at McGlory’s verbal t
echnique at the Band Box.) After the show, Sammy rushed backstage like a gaunt bull, showering Robinson with praise. But Robinson didn’t escape opening night criticism. Sugar Ray, wrote one reviewer, “fairly dazzles the customers with a flashy tap routine which somehow makes you forgive him for almost boring you to death with constant references to his former fistic triumphs.” The reviewer also chided Robinson for what he thought to be lackluster monologues between acts, claiming Robinson needed new writers to “streamline his antebellum chatter routine.” For now, promoters ignored the weak reviews and kept booking Robinson. Christmas of 1953 saw him and his revue booked into Harlem’s famed Apollo (“Worlds Greatest Colored Shows”). “Once I had the act down pat,” Robinson claimed, “I didn’t have to rehearse too much.”

  But therein lay the problem and the reason more critics started to pounce: Exact and precise performances depended on rehearsal, and lots of it. Audiences who had seen Robinson had also seen the likes of the Step Brothers and the Will Mastin Trio with young Sammy Davis Jr., just two of the acts soaring during that golden age of tap. But those other groups had honed their dance routines over years and years of being on the road. They were masters at improvisation and the ad lib, but that came in large part from hard work and practice. Though Robinson’s fame secured him a position with marquee-name traveling acts—Louis Armstrong, Count Basie—it also gave audiences a chance to compare him to those performers, and he paled next to them. Robinson’s act seemed to be in a state of perpetual flux. The machinery never seemed well oiled. Cues were missed. There was indeed a kind of gloss to the act, but it lacked that jaw-dropping authority of movement and precision that the best acts had down cold. Against the backdrop of a mediocre show, Robinson’s constant change of wardrobe began to seem a kind of shtick. Edna Mae would watch her husband perform and sometimes shake her head. She had danced at the Cotton Club; she knew timing and movement. The Chicago Defender was just one of the publications that began to take aim at Robinson’s stage appearances. The paper offered that Robinson “had to be bailed out of trouble in Detroit, and laid whopping eggs in Chicago and Philadelphia.” Just twelve months into his show business career, the Defender called Robinson “just an average dancer,” and insisted he would have to struggle mightily to convince theatergoers otherwise. The criticisms set off speculation that Robinson would soon be running back to the ring. He denied having any such plans. But he did welcome any and all testimonials from fellow entertainers.

  Robinson shared a bill with Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters in the late spring of 1954. McPhatter assured the press that Robinson was a “gentleman on and off stage.” There had been silly little arguments between Robinson and producers. George Gainford had handled these things in Robinson’s boxing life, but Gainford was not around, biding his time instead at Manhattan fight gyms, hoping for another discovery. News of Robinson’s tussles with management traveled out along the theatrical grapevine, leaving him with a bruised reputation. Robinson felt he needed a strong rebuke for his critics, so he spoke up himself: While in Chicago for an engagement at the Regal Theatre, Robinson had an assistant fetch him a typewriter. He then wrote an article—“Sugar Ray Punches Back”—answering those who had labeled him “a second rate entertainer.” His answer to his critics, published in the Chicago Defender, is a defense reflex, exposing a thin-skinned entertainer for the world to see. He wrote that he did not feel at all that his “star in the entertainment world is on the wane.” Rather, he argued: “I am making more money in show business today than I was a year ago when I began.” He claimed that his crowds had grown bigger in each venue—hardly the analysis of theatre critics across the country—and that he was being well accepted in his new line of work: “I have been very happy to note that, from all indications, in my salary checks and the box office figures, I have finally been accepted not only as Sugar Ray, the champ in the ring, but as an entertainer.” One might well pity the entertainer who feels the need to defend his performance in print. And yet, Robinson did have something of a bead on the realities of show business. “One thing I realize is that where there’s lots of smoke there is some fire. So maybe the criticism will make me a better person because, while I contend that most of it is untrue, maybe it has opened my eyes to some of the mistakes I’ve made and am still making.”

  Sugar Ray continued to dance merrily along. The brightly lit marquees, his name in large lettering, had blinded him to other signs. The planned three-night engagements were amended to one-night affairs; expected sellouts were now shows where there were empty tables. He convinced himself it would all change for the better. He relished the advisers he had access to in choosing gifted singers and musicians to accompany him on the road. He felt like Billy Eckstine, like Nat King Cole, getting agents on the telephone, hiring their singers, promising fine accommodations. This was the world of the Esquire men of his youth. While appearing at the Club Oasis in Los Angeles, Robinson chose Patty Ann, a much-talked-about singer in 1954, (her hit was “Midnight”) to join his show for a spell. Ann, who had already appeared with the Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan bands, had a fine and tender voice. While in Los Angeles, Robinson desperately wanted to meet with Hollywood executives to talk about his life story coming to the screen. Hollywood had released The Joe Louis Story a year earlier, and it doubtless encouraged Robinson in the belief that his saga might be next. The Louis film starred, among others, John Marley, Paul Stewart, James Edwards, and the lovely Hilda Simms. An unknown by the name of Coley Wallace played Louis. Physically, Wallace resembled the young Louis, but the novice simply could not act. The picture was a commercial and critical flop. Little wonder Robinson got the runaround from Hollywood. Soon his movie project faded from view.

  By September Robinson was playing abroad in one of his favorite haunts. In Paris the French came out to see him because of his boxing fame, but then they howled with laughter because they considered his show awful. To cut overhead, his act had been pared down; now he was performing solo, backed by a few musicians. Onstage, alone, grappling to keep an audience entranced, he suffered badly. He added new routines—furiously jumping with a rope, as if that were show business. His rudimentary French didn’t get across to Parisian audiences; he couldn’t compete with the constant clink of glasses and nightclub chatter. Sugar Ray finally hired a translator, but by then it was too late. The critics had mauled him, were still mauling him. “I cannot say I am sore at the press,” Robinson said, feeling sore. “Just disappointed. I am sorry I couldn’t be understood.” He tried a philosophical outlook to assuage his wounds. “I guess they expected me to come out in boxing shorts and beat the bag a few times and things like that.” Whatever they expected, one thing was painfully clear to him: “They simply didn’t dig my dancing or comedy.”

  Close observers of Sugar Ray Robinson in Paris would have noticed a familiar figure now keeping company with the fighter. It was George Gainford, seen huddling often with Robinson. The sightings gave rise to a natural question: Was Sugar Ray Robinson now in serious discussions about a ring comeback? Big George Gainford hardly heaved himself all the way across the ocean to take in the sights. Robinson had sent for him to privately discuss fighting again. “He realized his act had no depth outside of spectacle,” Arthur Barnes says of Robinson. And there was something else, adds Barnes: “He was missing everything about fighting.”

  Actually, it frightened Sugar Ray Robinson how far he had fallen from being prized and revered. Commoners had threatened him backstage; theatrical critics laughed at him; the sportswriters no longer mentioned him, save in passing. World champion Negro fighters of the 1940s and 1950s were easily the highest-paid Negroes in America. But away from that earning power, it took less than a few steps for the Negro boxer, or professional Negro League baseball player for that matter, to find themselves inching toward the same playing field as the average Negro wage earner. Robinson had seen far too many ex-fighters in Harlem cadging loans from loan sharks. He would play out the remaining dates in his entertainment cont
ract, but he would begin plotting a comeback, using Gainford as his conduit to New York boxing officials. Edna Mae—her lingerie shop right next to her husband’s nightclub—had also instructed Gainford to deliver another type of news to Robinson: There was trouble in Sugar Ray’s paradise.

  While Robinson had been on the road, his businesses in Harlem had suffered. The occasional employee petty theft had ballooned into a consistent activity. Gainford, himself one of Robinson’s business associates, had told Robinson what his accountants had told him: Robinson’s businesses were hemorrhaging. The nightclub, the hair salon, and Edna Mae’s lingerie shop were all losing money. His losses had added up to a staggering quarter of a million dollars. In the past, Robinson’s presence, even if sporadic, had ensured the oversight of his enterprises, but now he was on the road for months, obsessed with song and dance, his businesses being run into the ground. There were, as well, overdue taxes. But those weren’t the complete catalogue of Robinson’s woes: Augusto Coen, a bartender at Robinson’s nightspot who had once fought under the name Gus Levine, was arrested and charged with selling heroin to undercover operatives. Federal authorities announced that none of the sales had taken place at Robinson’s club, but, publicity-wise, it was a nasty scar that the club would have to bear. (Coen received a two-year suspended sentence.)