When Talese left the paper in 1965 to write books and longer magazine articles, he had one inheritor in place, a reporter in his mid-twenties named Robert Lipsyte. Like Cannon, Lipsyte grew up in New York, but he was a middle-class Jew from the Rego Park neighborhood in Queens. He went from his junior year at Forest Hills High School straight to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1957. After mulling over a career as a screenwriter or an English professor, Lipsyte applied for a job as a copy boy at the Times and, to his astonishment, got it. “They usually said they hired Rhodes scholars in those days,” he said. As a copy boy, Lipsyte admired Talese for his sense of style and innovation, for his ability to squeeze a distinct voice onto the uniform pages of the Times. Lipsyte made the staff at twenty-one when he showed hustle: one day the hunting and fishing columnist failed to send in a column from Cuba, and so Lipsyte sat down and, on deadline, knocked out a strange and funny column on how fish and birds were striking back at anglers and hunters. Lipsyte wrote about high school basketball players like Connie Hawkins and Roger Brown. He helped cover the 1962 Mets with Louis Effrat, a Times-man who had lost the Dodgers beat when they moved out of Brooklyn. Effrat’s admiration for his younger colleague was, to say the least, grudging: “Kid, they say in New York you can really write but you don’t know what the fuck you’re writing about.”
If there was one subject that Lipsyte made it a point to learn about, it was race. In 1963, he met Dick Gregory, one of the funniest comics in the country and a constant presence in the civil rights movement. The two men became close friends, and eventually Lipsyte helped Gregory write Nigger, his autobiography. Even as a sports reporter, Lipsyte contrived ways to write about race. He wrote about the Blackstone Rangers gang, he got to know Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. He covered rallies at which black protesters expressed their outrage against a country that would celebrate blacks only when they carried a football or boxed in a twenty-foot ring.
In the winter of 1963–64, the Times’s regular boxing writer, Joe Nichols, declared that the Liston-Clay fight was a dog and that he was going off to spend the season covering racing at Hialeah. The assignment went to Lipsyte.
Unlike Jimmy Cannon and the other village elders, Lipsyte found himself entranced with Clay. Here was this funny, beautiful, skilled young man who could fill your notebook in fifteen minutes.
“Clay was unique, but it wasn’t as if he were some sort of creature from outer space for me,” Lipsyte said. “For Jimmy Cannon, he was, pardon the expression, an uppity nigger, and he could never handle that. The blacks he liked were the blacks of the thirties and the forties. They knew their place. Joe Louis called Jimmy Cannon ‘Mr. Cannon’ for a long time. He was a humble kid. Now here comes Cassius Clay popping off and abrasive and loud, and it was a jolt for a lot of sportswriters, like Cannon. That was a transition period. What Clay did was make guys stand up and decide which side of the fence they were on.
“Clay upset the natural order of things at two levels. The idea that he was a loud braggart brought disrespect to this noble sport. Or so the Cannon people said. Never mind that Rocky Marciano was a slob who would show up at events in a T-shirt so that the locals would buy him good clothes. They said that Clay ‘lacked dignity.’ Clay combined Little Richard and Gorgeous George. He was not the sort of sweet dumb pet that writers were accustomed to. Clay also did not need the sportswriters as a prism to find his way. He transcended the sports press. Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, so many of them, were appalled. They didn’t see the fun in it. And, above all, it was fun.”
A WEEK BEFORE THE FIGHT, CLAY STRETCHED OUT ON A RUBBING table at the Fifth Street Gym and told the reporters who gathered around, “I’m making money, the popcorn man making money, and the beer man, and you got something to write about.”
The next day, Lipsyte heard that the Beatles would be dropping by the Fifth Street Gym. The visit had been arranged, of course, by the eternally hip Harold Conrad, who was publicizing the fight for MacDonald. The Beatles were in Miami to do The Ed Sullivan Show. Liston had actually gone to their performance and was not much impressed. As the Beatles ripped through their latest single, the champion turned to Conrad and said, “Are these motherfuckers what all the people are screaming about? My dog plays drums better than that kid with the big nose.” Conrad figured that Clay would understand a bit better.
Lipsyte was twenty-six, a card-carrying member of the rock and roll generation, and he saw that for all its phoniness, a meeting between the Beatles and Clay was a meeting of the New, two acts that would mark the sixties. The older columnists passed, but he saw a story.
The Beatles arrived. They were still in the mop-top phase, but they were also quite aware of their own appeal. Clay was not in evidence, and Ringo Starr was angry.
“Where the fuck’s Clay?” he said.
To kill a few minutes, Ringo began introducing the members of the band to Lipsyte and a few other reporters, though he introduced George Harrison as Paul and Lennon as Harrison, and finally Lennon lost patience.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said. But two Florida state troopers blocked the door and somehow kept them in the gym just long enough for Clay to show up.
“Hello, there, Beatles,” said Cassius Clay. “We oughta do some road shows together. We’ll get rich.”
The photographers lined up the Beatles in the ring and Clay faked a punch to knock them all to the canvas: the domino punch.
Now the future of music and the future of sports began talking about the money they were making and the money they were going to make.
“You’re not as stupid as you look,” Clay said.
“No,” Lennon said, “but you are.”
Clay checked to make sure Lennon was smiling, and he was.
The younger writers, like Lipsyte, really did see Clay as a fifth Beatle, parallel players in the great social and generational shift in American society. The country was in the midst of an enormous change, an earthquake, and this fighter from Louisville and this band from Liverpool were part of it, leading it, whether they knew it yet or not. The Beatles’ blend of black R&B and Liverpool pop and Clay’s blend of defiance and humor was changing the sound of the times, its temper; set alongside the march on Washington and the quagmire in Vietnam, they would, in their way, become essential pieces of the sixties phantasmagoria.
For most of the older columnists, however, this PR-inspired scene at the Fifth Street Gym was just more of all that was going wrong in the world, more noise, more disrespect, more impudence from young men whom they could not hope to comprehend. “Clay is part of the Beatle movement,” Jimmy Cannon would write famously a few years later. “He fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles with iron crosses pinned to their leather jackets and Batman and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a check from Dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered style-making cult of the bored young.”
PART THREE
New York, 1963. With Malcolm X.
CHAPTER NINE
The Cross and the Crescent
CLAY UNDERSTOOD THAT TO ANNOUNCE HIS INTEREST IN THE Nation of Islam might jeopardize his chance to fight Liston for the title, but he could not quite restrain himself. Hiding, concealment, lying: that was not his temperament. As a result, his new faith began to leak out in the press, if not as an all-at-once revelation, then step by step, article by article. On September 30, 1963, the Philadelphia Daily News wrote that Clay had attended a Black Muslim rally in town at which Elijah Muhammad delivered his customary three-hour tirade against the civil rights movement and the white race. “Although he said he was not a Muslim,” the article read, “Clay said he thought Muhammad was ‘great.’ ”
What the Daily News did not know was that while Elijah Muhammad was still keeping his
distance from Clay, his most eloquent and best-known minister, Malcolm X, was not. Like so many of the Nation’s recruits in the fifties, Malcolm had come to the sect from urban poverty, crime, and prison. As “Detroit Red,” Malcolm Little had been a bootlegger, a numbers runner, a dope dealer; he’d danced in nightclubs as Rhythm Red; finally, he served time in Charlestown Prison and the Concord Reformatory, where he converted, in 1948, to the Nation of Islam. When Malcolm got out of prison in 1952, he got to know Elijah Muhammad and quickly rose through the ranks of Muslim ministers. None of Muhammad’s followers had ever shown such intelligence and rhetorical confidence. At the annual Savior’s Day rallies, Malcolm often spoke before Elijah Muhammad, and the protégé usually stole the show from the savior himself. Because of his youth, because of his life on the streets and his eventual redemption, because of his discipline, wit, and clear, ringing language, Malcolm was a powerful lure to recruits. He became a symbol of uncompromising strength, authenticity, and virility. Malcolm also dared to challenge Muhammad (subtly at first), urging him to abandon the Nation’s traditional insularity for a more direct engagement in political action. He was not, by any means, the first black nationalist—he had come after Hubert Harrison, Henry McNeal Turner, Martin Delany, and many others—but no one, not even Elijah Muhammad, would popularize the idea of the black American’s African identity with the same power. “While black nationalist and separatist ideas coming from Elijah Muhammad seemed cranky, cultlike, backwaterish, and marginal,” writes Gerald Early, “the same ideas coming from Malcolm seemed revolutionary, hip, and vibrant.”
Elijah Muhammad recognized Malcolm X as a potential rival, but he also saw his value, as a speaker and as an organizer, as a recruiter and as a bridge to the media and the greater world. By the late fifties and early sixties, Malcolm, as the head of New York’s Mosque No. 7, became a fixture in the press; despite the sect’s positions on violence and “blue-eyed devils,” he managed to charm countless white reporters, from Murray Kempton at the New York Post to Dick Schaap, who had moved from Newsweek to the Herald Tribune. “The oddest thing about Malcolm was that, sure, he made speeches calling the white man the devil, but he treated you, one-on-one, with respect and humor, and it never seemed dishonest,” Schaap said. “Why did I like a man who thought I was the devil? I don’t really know, but I did. Maybe some part of me sensed that he would change. And he did.” Elijah Muhammad was more exotic and distant to the white media: with his fez and his long, obscure speeches about the Mother Plane and Muslim cosmology, Elijah did not have Malcolm’s capacity for directness, he did not appeal as easily to the young. This was true for Clay. While Clay had learned his first Muslim lessons from the representatives in Miami and the regional center of Atlanta, he was now enraptured by Malcolm. Clay revered Elijah Muhammad as the divine presence of his new religion, but he connected with Malcolm, as a young man might with a revered older brother. Malcolm was now his spiritual adviser, his Friend and mentor.
“Malcolm X and Ali were like very close brothers,” said Ferdie Pacheco. “It was almost like they were in love with each other. Malcolm thought Ali was the greatest guy he’d ever met and Ali thought this was the smartest black man on the face of the earth, because everything he said made sense. Malcolm X was bright as hell, convincing, charismatic in the way that great leaders and martyrs are. It certainly rubbed off on Ali. The only trouble Ali had with all of this was the idea that all white people were evil. Look at all the white people around Ali: me, Angelo, Chris, Morty Rothstein, the lawyer, the white Louisville Group that put aside a bunch of money so that he had money when he needed it. There were no white devils that he could see. But, again, he took from the Muslims what he needed. The Muslims filled a deep need in him, especially Malcolm X.”
The two men met for the first time in Detroit in 1962. Cassius and his brother, Rudy, were in town to attend a rally at the local mosque. Before it began, the Clays ran into Malcolm X at the Students’ Luncheonette next door. Clay immediately stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Cassius Clay.”
Malcolm had no idea who this handsome young man was. Malcolm had boxed as a kid—he had been interested in all kinds of sports—but in recent years he’d been far too busy to pay any notice to the sports page. Eventually it was explained to him that Cassius Clay was a leading contender for the heavyweight title. And despite Elijah Muhammad’s condemnation of boxing, Malcolm took an interest in this self-assured young man who was showing up at rallies around the country. Malcolm sought Clay out and talked with him about Islam and race, and Clay started confiding in Malcolm—he even confided some of his professional secrets.
“Cassius was simply a likable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster,” Malcolm told Alex Haley for his autobiography. “I noticed how alert he was even in little details. I suspected that there was a plan in his public clowning. I suspected, and he confirmed to me, that he was doing everything possible to con and to ‘psyche’ Sonny Liston into coming into the ring angry, poorly trained, and overconfident, expecting another of his vaunted one-round knockouts.”
By early 1963, Malcolm X was becoming disillusioned with Elijah Muhammad. He saw that for all of Muhammad’s pronouncements about moral rectitude and discipline, he had got at least two of his secretaries pregnant. By way of seduction, Elijah Muhammad told his secretaries that his wife was dead to him—just as the wife of the prophet Mohammad had become dead to him—and he was therefore divinely sanctioned to seek out virgins to spread his holy seed. Agents of the FBI’s fierce counterintelligence operation against the Nation of Islam had known since 1959 about Elijah Muhammad’s various children and had spread word of them through anonymous letters. But the Black Muslims were loyal to the Messenger, and the smear campaign had little effect. Malcolm, a determinedly abstemious man, also saw the financial corruption in the Nation, the amassing of real estate, jewelry, and luxury cars. Malcolm was having his doubts about Muhammad’s declaration of Fard as the Savior Allah incarnate, a claim inconsistent with orthodox Islam; he was even starting to have doubts about the fiery denunciations of the white man as the devil. In time he would begin to talk less of supremacy and more of the need for brotherhood.
In mid-November 1963, Malcolm defied the Nation’s ban on secular activism in the white world when he endorsed a boycott of store owners in Queens who refused to hire black laborers. The Nation’s leadership now saw him as beyond their control; he had to be muffled. A few weeks later, after the assassination of John Kennedy, Elijah Muhammad sent out written orders to his principal ministers to avoid any direct comment on the event. He went out of his way to warn Malcolm by telephone. Elijah Muhammad was not ordinarily tactful about the white leaders of the United States, but he was acutely aware that at that moment, with the country in mourning, the wrong comment, the wrong accent, could damage the Nation of Islam.
A few days later, in Harlem, Malcolm gave a speech at the Manhattan Center describing how, as in the days of Noah and in the days of Lot, the modern white man could expect only calamity as punishment for his sins. After the formal address, a woman in the audience got up and asked a question about the Kennedy assassination. Now Malcolm let loose, saying that the killing represented “the chickens coming home to roost.” White America, he said, had for years used all its resources to put down blacks at home and abroad, and now this was all coming back to haunt its leaders. The Harlem crowd cheered, and, as they did, Malcolm added that as a farm kid, “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad. They’ve always made me glad.”
The quotations appeared in The New York Times the next morning, and Elijah Muhammad immediately summoned Malcolm X to Chicago.
“Did you see the papers this morning?” Muhammad said.
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“That was a very bad statement,” he said. “The country loved this man. The whole country is in mourning. That was very ill-timed. A statement like that can make it hard on Muslims in general. I’ll have to silence you for the next ninety days—so tha
t Muslims everywhere can be disassociated from the blunder.”
“Sir, I agree with you, and I submit, one hundred percent.”
Elijah Muhammad was even more determined to isolate Malcolm than he let on in their meeting. He immediately ordered the sect’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, to run a front-page memorial photograph of Kennedy. “The nation still mourns the loss of our president,” Muhammad told reporters. Muhammad also told his lieutenants to make sure that Malcolm not be permitted to preach at Mosque No. 7 in New York; should he attempt to preach, he should be blocked, physically, from doing so.
“I’m going to strip him of everything,” Muhammad told his Boston minister, Louis X, who would later add the name Farrakhan.
Back in New York, Malcolm suffered his censure as if he had been attacked with a knife, a bludgeon. When he began hearing rumors that he was not merely out of favor with Muhammad but in real peril, that he could be murdered at any moment, he knew enough to take the rumors seriously. “My head felt like it was bleeding inside,” he told Alex Haley. “I felt like my brain was damaged.” His family doctor, Leona Turner, told him that he was suffering from tremendous strain and needed rest.
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