by Jonathan Eig
If Elijah Muhammad was torn between the Koran and his accounts receivable, Ali’s interview with Cosell pushed the sect leader back to the Koran, moving him to recapture some of the high moral ground he had lost. At the same time, Elijah may have been sending a message to Herbert, who had never been as religiously observant as his father would have liked and who had the most to gain financially if Ali returned to boxing. If sport and play were corrupting anyone, it was Herbert.
“I Called My Manger Herbert Muhammad today,” Ali wrote on a sheet of lined yellow paper, “and he told me that he Could No Longer be My Manger. Because his father T.H.E.M. [The Honorable Elijah Muhammad] and the Muslims through the Country, Could Not be with Me in Returning to the Ring.”
Here was Ali, still only twenty-seven years old. His devotion to the Nation of Islam had insulated him from some of American culture’s insanity. Ali would be nowhere near Woodstock in the summer of 1969, for example. He had kept his distance from the Black Panthers, who, at times, seemed to be engaged in an armed revolution against the U.S. government. But in other ways, Ali’s new religion had done as much if not more than boxing to shape his life. He had given up his first wife for his religion. He had changed his name, risked prison, sacrificed millions of dollars, and turned his back on friends and relatives. He had even sent his friend Bundini Brown packing, albeit temporarily, because Bundini had upset Muslim leadership. And now the man who had inspired Ali’s actions, the man he worshiped as a prophet of God, was casting him aside, telling him he was no longer welcome as a Muslim because he refused to abandon boxing. It must have been bewildering.
Back in 1964, the Nation of Islam had kept the boxer’s membership secret, fearing the bad publicity that would come if Cassius Clay had lost to Sonny Liston. Now, it failed to back a disciple in his time of need. Even as Ali maintained a moral stand based on the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad himself backed away from the boxer. Perhaps the Nation of Islam didn’t need Ali anymore, now that he wasn’t making money. Radio stations all over the country broadcast speeches by Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, and their message was spreading into the mainstream. The Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, boasted that its circulation was growing rapidly. The Temptations scored a hit record with “Message from a Black Man,” a song that not only carried a title similar to that of Elijah Muhammad’s book but also included lyrics that the Messenger would have endorsed: “Yes, my skin is black,” the song begin, “but that’s no reason to hold me back.” But Ali, no cynic, praised the Messenger’s decision. He said the punishment was fair. He said he understood his mistake and would do everything he could to atone for his sin and regain his teacher’s trust. “All that funnin’ and fightin’, runnin’ around, bein’ on television, is over,” he said. “Now I’ll concentrate on prayin’, studyin’ hard and learnin’ to be a better Muslim minister.”
Although his words seemed sincere, his actions in the months ahead would prove inconsistent. In October 1969, Ali announced that he would act in a Broadway musical, something that certainly seemed to contradict the wishes of Elijah Muhammad. The musical, Buck White, was adapted from a play written by a white man, Joseph Dolan Tuotti, with songs by Oscar Brown Jr., who was black. The play purported to take place at the meeting hall of a Black Power group called B.A.D., whose initials stood for Beautiful Alleluja Days. Ali was guaranteed a weekly salary in addition to a percentage of the box-office gross. The play’s producer, Zev Bufman, whose earlier stagings had included Mame and Plaza Suite, said he had never paid an actor as much as he paid Ali. The actor’s name — “Cassius Clay a/k/a Muhammad Ali” — would appear above the title of the play on the marquee for the George Abbott Theatre.
In Buck White, Ali would don a beard and an Afro wig to play a decidedly non-Muslim black activist, Buck White, as he sang the Dylanesque lyric, “Yeah, that’s all over now, Mighty Whitey. We can’t bear no more. We don’t care no more.”
Ali didn’t see any problem with the play because, as he said, “It is wrapped up with black people comin’ together . . . unitin’ to stand up and do for self, clean up self, respect self.” He boasted that he had turned down an invitation to play the boxer Jack Johnson in another Broadway play, The Great White Hope, because he didn’t want to act in romantic scenes with white women. At least in Ali’s mind, the logic cohered. He wasn’t a member in good standing of the Nation of Islam, so it didn’t matter if Elijah Muhammad approved of his theatrical debut. And if he were permitted to rejoin the Nation and learned that Elijah objected to his Broadway work, he had an option in his contract that would allow him to quit the play.
When the production opened, critics treated Ali kindly, saying he sang and acted reasonably well, and that his great energy and enthusiasm made up for any lack of polish. But beyond Ali’s performance, the play was not well received, and Buck White closed after only seven performances.
The newspaperman Robert Lipsyte witnessed another humiliation. One night he walked with Ali back to his hotel. When Ali couldn’t open the door to his room, the hotel manager explained that it had been locked because Ali owed $53.09.
When you’re the champ, Ali said, seemingly surprised, they never make you pay right away.
He was out of boxing and out of the Nation of Islam. He was a new father. As opposition to the Vietnam War grew, he became more of a political figure than he’d ever been, with an opportunity to reach new audiences and address new issues. This might have been a time of reflection for Muhammad Ali, a time of reassessment, had he been inclined to such things. But, if anything, this period of uncertainty in Ali’s life seemed to inspire more selfish behavior.
Despite Elijah Muhammad’s warning, Ali continued to pursue opportunities to box. In the fall of 1969, Herbert Muhammad, Angelo Dundee, and Howard Cosell worked together on a plan to have Ali fight Jimmy Ellis in a television studio. The fight would be broadcast live, but there would be no tickets sold. Cosell would get fifty thousand dollars for brokering the deal, according to an FBI memo dated December 8, 1969. The men believed that if the fight were held privately, with no paying audience, it would require no approval from a state agency or boxing commission. It’s not clear why they abandoned the effort.
At the same time, Ali surrounded himself with a growing assortment of questionable characters, including members of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 12, located in Philadelphia, which the FBI labeled “the gangster mosque,” where members were involved in “narcotics, contract murders, bank robberies, fraudulent credit card and check schemes, armed robberies, widespread extortion and loan sharking activities.” And, apparently for the first time, he began having sex with women other than his wife. According to one member of the Philadelphia mosque, Ali carried on an affair with his ex-wife, Sonji. He also maintained a long-running affair with his first love from Central High School, Areatha Swint, who changed her name to Jamillah Muhammad. “He was a man who did what he wanted to do,” Swint recalled.
But Belinda had the impression there was no one special, that he slept only with an assortment of prostitutes and one-night stands. Belinda caught him kissing women in the nooks and crannies of the George Abbott Theatre and in the halls of the Hotel Wellington, where she and Ali were living while he rehearsed for the play.
“He knew it was wrong,” Belinda said years later. “As long as he was having fun he didn’t care. I was battling against the hypocrisy, the chauvinism . . . I thought growing up if I was good and loyal my husband would be good and loyal. I was totally wrong. Totally wrong.”
Maybe it was her experience with the Nation of Islam, where everyone knew that Elijah Muhammad had cheated on his wife, or maybe it was her exposure to Herbert Muhammad, who had long had an active sex life beyond his marriage; maybe it was seeing the way her husband craved attention and the way women fawned over him, but for whatever reason, Belinda was neither surprised nor crushed by her husband’s behavior.
“I knew things like this would happen,” she recalled years
later. “I was prepared to [accept] that, as long as he don’t bring it in my home, I don’t care what he does. I’m not his mother . . . I’m not going to tell him what to do. But I did tell him, it’s not good for you to do that. You’re trying to build up your reputation, and I’m trying to build a family reputation around you so you look good in the eyes of the people.”
He didn’t listen.
“I had no control over him then,” she said years later.
Even when it happened more than once, she never considered leaving him. Where would she have gone? What would she have done? She was young and taking care of a child, and she loved him. “No, I didn’t want to, I wasn’t going to leave him,” she said. “We had something to do, and I said I was going to help him. I knew we was going to go through some trials like this. I knew it was going to happen because of who he is and he’s weak and I tried to make him strong. I tried to stand by him and stuff like that. He said, ‘I’m just weak.’ And he would tell me, ‘I’m just weak, man. I’m just grateful you’re not jumping off leaving me.’ I said I’m not going to leave you. I said we got children. I’m not going to let no woman destroy my marriage. I’m not going to let that happen. And he would say, ‘I don’t love these people, it was just bam, bam, thank you ma’am. I ain’t in love with nobody.’ And he would tell me that. I said as long as you ain’t in love with nobody, fine. But he took advantage of that. He took advantage. He just loved sex. He was a sex addict . . . He would bam, bam and he gone, he done.”
Ali apologized when he was caught. He cried. He proclaimed his love for Belinda. The sight of this enormous man sitting on the edge of the bed, his shoulders slouched, tears streaming down his cheeks, never failed to move her. But then he would do it again. At times, Ali was so callous he would ask his wife to arrange his extramarital affairs, to book hotel rooms for his mistresses, to take care not to disturb him when he was with one of the other women. “And then he’d tell me, ‘I’ll use that against you,’ ” she recalled. She took that to mean that if she filed for divorce, Ali would tell the world his wife was complicit in his affairs, that she was practically his pimp. “I figured, let him sow his oats. Let him get it over with. You get tired of that shit after a while. I was a young girl. I didn’t know what to do . . . And so he made me help him. He said, ‘You supposed to do everything I tell you, you’re my wife. Look at Herbert, he got women and stuff.’ He said, ‘If you help me, then you’ll be doing something no wife would do.’ ” He made it sound like a compliment, a testament to her fidelity, proof of her love. Only the greatest and most loyal of wives would help her husband have sex as often as he wanted with all the women he wanted.
“Ali had a dark side, an evil side,” Belinda said. “He manipulated me to do that. It was called manipulation. I didn’t know what manipulation meant . . . I thought by my husband telling me everything, I thought he was being true and honest. I didn’t like it, but he conned me to do certain things.”
She tried telling her parents, but they didn’t believe her. She saw no point in telling anyone else. “Everybody else knew,” she said. “They watched him. They knew Ali, what he was doing. I didn’t have to tell nobody, but there was no way I could talk to people. I had to hold all that in . . . I had to do a lot of stuff all by myself. I had to deal with it all by myself.”
Early in 1970, before her twentieth birthday, Belinda discovered she was pregnant again, this time with twins.
28
The Greatest Book of All Time
In the spring of 1970, Ali began work on his autobiography, promising, of course, that it would “outdo everything that’s ever been written.”
Random House paid an advance of more than $200,000 for the memoir, assigning one of its most talented editors, Toni Morrison, to shepherd the project. Richard Durham, the former editor of Muhammad Speaks and a writer with a longtime interest in Marxism, agreed to write the book based on a series of extensive interviews with Ali.
“The public doesn’t know too much about me,” Ali said at the press conference announcing his book deal. At first, the remark seemed funny, considering that Ali was perhaps the most widely publicized man on the planet and had been telling his own story virtually without pause since he first gained fame as an Olympian a decade earlier. But how well did the public really know Ali? How well did Ali know himself at age twenty-eight? Who was he? What did he hope to become? The questions no longer hung about him in the vague way they hang about most men and women. Now the questions demanded answers in writing.
Was he Muhammad Ali or Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.? It was difficult to say. He had been born Clay and taken the name Ali, but he had never legally changed his name in the six years he had been calling himself Muhammad Ali. The paperwork had been too much trouble. And then Elijah Muhammad had taken away the name, saying that as far as the Nation of Islam was concerned, Cassius Clay was Cassius Clay again. Ali, meanwhile, continued to call himself Ali.
Was he the heavyweight champion of the world? He’d won the title by defeating Sonny Liston and defending it successfully, but boxing officials had stripped him of his crown, saying a Muslim draft dodger was not entitled to be the sport’s titleholder. Yet the champ continued to call himself the champ.
Was he a boxer? A war protester? A leader of the Black Power movement? A humble follower of Elijah Muhammad? Who was he? What did he want? Like others, he wanted money, attention, sex, adventure, and power. He wanted to be special, and he wanted to be seen as special by people around the world, especially black people. “Who’s the champ?” he asked audiences wherever he went. “Who’s the champ?” He repeated the question until the answer came in the form of a chant: “Ali! Ali! Ali!”
Constantly craving attention wasn’t easy. It forced him into endless contradictions. It turned him into a fighter who said he didn’t care to fight, a writer who didn’t write, a minister without a ministry, a radical who wanted to be a popular entertainer, an extravagant spender who said money meant nothing to him, a dietary ascetic who guzzled soft drinks and sold greasy hamburgers to his fans, an antiwar protester who avoided organized demonstrations even when President Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia provoked the largest student strike in the nation’s history, and a religiously devout and demanding husband who openly cheated on his wife. As the 1970s began, Ali’s desire to be all things to all people would send him on a wild ride as he sought to define himself in his own life, in the public’s eye, and in the pages of his biography.
Fortunately for Ali, the political and social dynamic was changing, and forces beyond his own control also defined him. When he had won the heavyweight championship as Cassius Clay, he had been merely a promising boxer with manic energy and a loud mouth. When he had joined the Nation of Islam, he had become a prominent member of the most radical wing of the black movement in America. When he had refused the draft and been banned from boxing, his position in American society shifted again. Thousands of other draft-age young men followed his example and evaded military service, although most of them did so without risking imprisonment. Some fled to Canada. Others enrolled in graduate study. Those with clout called in favors. Of course, many young Americans lacked the clout and the money to avoid the draft. They didn’t have a team of lawyers to file appeals in court, as Ali had. These young men faced the unpleasant choice of running away, going to jail, or accepting enlistment. Ali was no ordinary demonstrator. Still, as millions of Americans protested the war, the boxer’s actions seemed less treasonous and more courageous, especially among young white protesters. After the demonstrations at the 1968 Olympics and countless other protests by black athletes, the sight of an outspoken black athlete no longer shocked. Mainstream black leaders such as Julian Bond and Ralph Abernathy, who had once disdained Ali, began to cheer him. As other black activists grew more radical, the Nation of Islam seemed less frightening. When boxing officials denied Ali the right to box and the government revoked his passport, even some of the white sportswriters who had criticized the fighter
questioned whether he was being singled out unfairly because of his color and his religious and political beliefs. It wasn’t that Ali moved toward the mainstream but that the mainstream moved toward Ali.
Years later, the writer Stanley Crouch would compare Ali to a bear. When he was a newly minted Muslim calling white people devils, Crouch said, Ali was a real bear, deadly dangerous and impossible to control. But as Ali found popularity, the boxer began to behave more like a circus bear, one that flashes its teeth and claws but only threatens harm.
In the spring of 1970, Belinda and Muhammad moved to Philadelphia, mostly so Ali could entertain business and entertainment opportunities in New York. In August, Belinda gave birth to twins, Jamillah and Rasheda.
His life in the early months of 1970 lacked structure. He no longer rose early each morning to exercise. His calendar contained few appointments. Ever since Elijah Muhammad had expelled him from the Nation of Islam, Ali had stopped attending Muslim rallies or prayer meetings, although he continued to pray at home several times a day.
Some of Ali’s friends wondered if he would leave the Nation of Islam rather than wait for Elijah Muhammad to grant forgiveness. The Nation of Islam was growing weaker. Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party captivated young black men more than Elijah Muhammad, who turned seventy-three in 1970 and had begun to lose key members from his inner circle. Accusations of corruption dogged the organization. Karl Evanzz, in his biography of Elijah Muhammad, said that expelling Ali may have been the best thing the Messenger ever did for the boxer. Just as the Nation of Islam was beginning to self-destruct, Ali gained distance from the organization, yet another example of the great luck and timing that had marked his life to date.