Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Thank you for asking,” she replied. “How? Why, by having his child—that is how. I will have Max Baer’s child. Since I cannot … since we can never…”

  That was when something inside her, like the branch of a sapling, seemed to snap in two. She let go of me, sat on our bed, slumped forward, and wept. I was not surprised by what she had said, or by what she had begun to say, for we had decided long before, and had ever taken necessary precautions, to make certain our love would not bring a new life into this world. So I sat beside her, took her hand in mine, and said that given our place in Max’s life—in the world!—we needed, now more than ever, to exercise caution. We needed not to act from a raw desire for vengeance, as urgent as that desire might be.

  Through her tears, Joleen asked what if not raw desire had our life together been about. Until this moment, she had believed that no matter how dark the way in this life might be, she would always be able to count on me. But now …

  “But now, more than ever, you can,” I said softly. “For I am acting out of a desire beyond the desire that has made us one with the other. I am acting out of a desire to protect you.”

  “From him?” she said. “Do not talk nonsense to me. He is a mere child. Protect me from him?!”

  “Protect you from yourself,” I said.

  “I will have Max Baer’s child!” she declared again and, wiping away her tears, she stood and went to the door. “And now, my husband, there are chores that await, and I must be gone. Do you object?”

  “I love you more than life,” I said. “I always will.”

  “Do not utter banal nonsense in my presence,” she said. “And do not underestimate me. I want vengeance, yes, but knowing me—loving me, as you would have it, and are not, in the biblical sense, knowing and loving one and the same?—you should also know that there is nothing in the smallest digit of my smallest finger or toe that is, or ever has been, self-destructive. During your peregrinations with our lord and master, I have had more than ample time for reflection, and before this day decided that of course I will not have his child—that we will not have his child … not, that is, until he has had a child by another, preferably a white woman to whom he is married. For that is the path of wisdom and safety.”

  “In this I do not think you should count upon having Dorothy serve as your accomplice,” I said.

  “For the honor of bearing Max Baer’s child, there will be no shortage of candidates,” she said. “You can count on that. Do not fret more than is necessary, though, for as enraged as I can be, I can also, as you know better than anyone, be ruthlessly patient.” She came near to me again, breathing her words into my ear: “I can await the day when I will whisper to him as I now do to you: ‘O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother!’”

  “‘Jealousy can be as cruel as the grave,’” I said, speaking words that followed on those in the verse from which she had quoted. “‘The coals thereof are coals of a fire which hath a most vehement flame.’”

  “Ah—but ‘love is as strong as death,’” she responded, reciting a line I had, as she of course knew, taken care to omit. Her mouth on my cheek, her teeth scraping at the corner of my mouth, I knew well the words she would speak next. ‘“When I should find thee without, I would kiss thee—for yea, I should not be despised.’”

  Then, one hand holding fast to the back of my neck, she kissed me full on the mouth.

  On the eve of Max’s second bout with Schaaf, I recalled this moment, and doing so made me realize yet again that what drove Max above all—what enabled him to be the invincible fighter he could often be—were not merely his athletic gifts or his power, but, as with Joleen, the ferocity of his will: the desire, when roused, to triumph over and wreak vengeance upon anyone and everyone who had humbled him, or who threatened to humble him, so that he would not ever in the eyes of others, or, more tellingly, his own, be despised.

  Twenty months earlier, Schaaf had humbled Max. An all-services champion while serving in the navy, Schaaf was more a boxer than a puncher, but on that night, with Dorothy (still married to De Gerson y Baretto) at ringside, Schaaf had mauled Max. Max prided himself on never having been seriously hurt in a fight, and in the dressing room before the fight, in front of an entourage of reporters who doted on him for his style and flash, he had put on his usual show of good-humored nonsense, delighting reporters on that occasion—a first—by ramming into a radiator headfirst to demonstrate the thickness of his skull.

  Once the fight began, however, Schaaf made an increasingly confused Max chase him around the ring (Schaaf was one of the few left-handed boxers Max had hitherto faced), stopping only to sting Max with quick, telling right jabs. By the eighth round, Max’s beautiful face was unrecognizable, and I found myself pleading with him to let me throw in the towel. But Max would have none of it and, remarkably, remained game for the full ten rounds, thereby gaining the respect of many who doubted his courage and stamina simply by being in an upright position when the referee held up Schaaf’s right hand to award him the victory.

  This time, however, before a large crowd at Chicago Stadium, with a string of ten consecutive victories under his belt, and with Dorothy, his wife of seven weeks, at ringside, Max was ready. From the opening bell, he went after Schaaf, pounding him at will while at the same time withholding the ultimate blow in the way a bullfighter weakens a bull with many thrusts of his sword so that one final thrust above the eyes will bring the bull to its knees. After battering Schaaf without mercy for nine rounds, Max waited until there were but two seconds left in the tenth and final round before unleashing his most vicious punch, a brutal right chop to the head that floored Schaaf for the first time that night, and left him, like Campbell, unconscious.

  Max blew Dorothy a kiss and strutted around the ring, yet even while the crowd cheered, and while Schaaf’s seconds dragged him to his corner and worked to restore him to his senses (it would be an exact three minutes, the length of a round, before Schaaf opened his eyes), Max, clinging to me, whispered his fear.

  “Did I hurt him the way I hurt Campbell?” he asked. “Tell me, Horace. Tell me, please. Tell me I didn’t, okay? I was just toying with him, really. He’s an okay fighter, but I carried him tonight, Horace. I didn’t hurt him bad, did I? I could have done him in early, but…”

  “You fought a good fight,” I said. “You were powerful yet merciful.”

  As if I had thrust a knife into his belly, Max pulled away. “Don’t you lie to me, Horace,” he said. “Don’t you ever dare lie to me, do you hear? Do you hear? I ain’t the fool you or anyone else takes me for.”

  Then he turned away and, after blowing kisses to the crowd, went to Schaaf’s corner, embraced him, and told him he was the best fighter he had ever faced.

  A month later, in the same stadium, Max easily defeated Tuffy Griffiths, a fighter who had once won fifty consecutive bouts before being knocked out by the future champion James Braddock, and the newspapers confirmed our hope: that Max would soon be given a shot at the title. Before this could happen, however, we returned to New York City’s Madison Square Garden to watch Schaaf fight Primo Carnera, who was first in line, ahead of Max, for a challenge to the reigning champion, Jack Sharkey.

  Schaaf was as game against Carnera as Max had been in his first fight against Schaaf, but he was clearly not the fighter he had been before his bout against Max. In the eleventh round, Carnera landed a light blow to Schaaf’s chin that, surprisingly, caused Schaaf to go limp and drop to the canvas, where he lay, unmoving.

  He never woke up, and when he died two days later, Max agreed with what the boxing world quickly concluded: that it was not Carnera’s blow that had killed Schaaf, but the savage beating, six months earlier, Max had inflicted upon him. Max brooded on this—on the labels of “killer” and “butcher” that now attached to his name virtually every time it appeared in print—even while his will to be champion became more inflamed. Nor did he shy away from keeping himself in the public eye. Rathe
r the opposite. So that, as he prepared for what would be the major fight of his life thus far, against Max Schmeling at the Yankee Stadium in New York City, he courted journalists as never before—taking me, and his trainer, Mike Cantwell, and his publicist, Sam Taub, with him on endless rounds of newspaper offices, where he entertained reporters with antics that included using Taub for a punching bag and then jamming him into a wastebasket. And two weeks before the bout, he told me, in confidence, of his decision to enter the ring at the Yankee Stadium with a large Star of David emblazoned on the right leg of his boxing trunks, thereby declaring to the world that he was a Jew who was ready to stand up to a German known to be the favorite of the German people’s new leader, Adolf Hitler. “You just watch and see, Horace—this is gonna make me immortal in the eyes of the whole goddamned world!”

  Although Max was only one-quarter Jewish—his father’s father was Jewish, which made him even less Jewish than former champion Jack Dempsey, whose paternal grandmother was Jewish—Max gloried in the way the press took up the story, especially given news arriving from Europe about the oppressive measures the Third Reich was inflicting upon Jews.

  “Hey,” he told reporters in the dressing room before the fight when one of them questioned how Jewish he was, “seems like over there, whether you’re part-Jew or all-Jew, you pay the same price, so you can bet your mother’s whiskers I’m gonna show this Kraut that we Jews know how to take care of ourselves.”

  And when on the night of June 8, 1933, with Jack Dempsey, one of the bout’s promoters, at his side, Max came out of the runway and onto the long, open aisle that led to the ring, some 60,000 people roared their approval. “See what I mean, Horace?” he said to me while waving to the crowd. “My people are here the same as yours would be if you were in the ring against one of those Great White Hope guys the way Jack Johnson was. This city’s full of Jews, and they’re gonna love me even more after I knock the living day-lights out of Hitler’s pillow-boy.”

  Schmeling, who had briefly been world heavyweight champion after defeating Sharkey, and before losing the title to him in a return match, was a fighter who, unlike Max, trained with thoroughgoing efficiency, and did not party at night. The bookmakers had established him as a four-to-one favorite, and these odds served only to inspire Max. “Jews have always been the scapegoats and underdogs,” he told reporters when they asked how he felt about the supposed smart money going against him. “It’s why we learned to fight harder—the more people try to keep us down, see, the more we rise up and conquer. Just like we did against that Pharaoh guy.”

  Max started out on fire—“a human tornado,” the New York Times would call him the next day—but then, as often happened, once he demonstrated he could dominate his opponent, he seemed to become bored, and to merely go through the motions. Before the tenth and last round, however, Dempsey and Cantwell screamed at him that if he didn’t wake up—for Schmeling, plodding doggedly ahead, was landing short punches that had clearly put him ahead on points—he would lose the fight.

  “Okay then,” Max said, and he came roaring out of the corner at the start of the tenth round, going at Schmeling as if it were the fight’s opening round. Within seconds, he had landed a huge right to Schmeling’s jaw that sent the German to the canvas. Schmeling rose at the count of nine, but Max was on top of him with a furious barrage of lefts and rights that had Schmeling stumbling around the ring until Max, holding him upright on the ropes with his left hand, unleashed another devastating right—“This one’s for Hitler!” he announced, loud enough for those in the front rows to hear—that made Schmeling stagger helplessly in retreat, as if drunk, and that left the referee no alternative but to stop the fight and declare Max the winner by a technical knockout.

  Max was ecstatic afterwards, proclaiming to reporters that he would soon become the heavyweight champion of the world, and declaring to me, before he left the stadium to go out on the town with June Knight, his newest sweetheart—a twenty-year old movie star and Ziegfeld Follies headliner—that what he proved in the ring was that he had his people just like I had mine.

  “What I showed out there tonight, Horace, is that we gotta take care of each other the way we been doing,” he said, “because the rest of the world’s always ready and waiting to do us in. Kikes and niggers—we gotta stick together, ain’t I right?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But you are only a kike if you choose to call yourself one. Your people possess a long and rich history, and it behooves you not to make of this history a joke, but to cherish it even as Joleen and I, who are not of your Mosaic persuasion, have learned to do.”

  “Hey,” he said, and he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek. “Don’t you know how to tell it, Horace, and with words to burn. And ain’t you the smartest nigger anyone ever knew—this Jewboy first of all!”

  I pressed the palm of my hand against his chest and pushed him away—we were in the corridor outside the dressing room, and could hear the riotous chanting of fans who waited on the other side of the exit door—and when I did, he grabbed my hand in his own so that for a moment I thought he would try to crush it. Instead, he took it to his chest and pressed it there.

  “Shit, Horace,” he said, his eyes moist. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean nothing—you know that, don’t you? I got nothing for you and your wife but all the love and respect I ever had for anyone. Just ask June here, about how I been talking about you two, and how smart you are and what I been learning from you.”

  “He really loves you like he says,” June said, and gave me a smile such as the one that must have won the heart of Mister Ziegfeld. “So come on out and play with us tonight. Our Mister Max knows how to have a good time better than anyone. Come on out and play with us tonight, pretty please?”

  2 Champion of the World

  Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart. (3:11)

  In the year that followed on Max’s victory over Schmeling—until he fought and defeated Primo Carnera for the heavyweight championship of the world—Max continued to excel at what he loved most: having a good time. It was a year during which we spent most of our time in New York and Los Angeles (where Max purchased a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean), and during which he divorced Dorothy, had highly publicized romances with several movie stars, and starred in his first movie, playing opposite Myrna Loy in The Prizefighter and the Lady.

  Max delighted in the praise he received from critics for his role in The Prizefighter and the Lady, in the women who pursued him because of it (Jean Harlow, relentlessly aggressive, would show up at our home uninvited on evenings when she knew Max was entertaining other women), and, especially, in the news that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Entertainment, had banned it in Germany. That, he declared, was the kind of fame you couldn’t buy.

  It was also a year during which Joleen went through an unexpected and alarming transformation. This was apparent at once when, five months after the premiere of The Prizefighter and the Lady, Max and I returned to Livermore and, entering the cottage Joleen and I shared (this was our first visit home since Max’s triumph over Schmeling), we found Joleen sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing with two cloth dolls. The dolls, which Joleen and I had taken with us when we left Texas, had belonged to our mother, and to her mother before that. Known as pickaninny dolls—a locution that had no derogatory association at that time, being merely a literal reference to Negro children, and deriving from a mixture of Portuguese (pequenino), and Creole (pinkin ningre)—they had lost their original button eyes, most of their looped yarn hair, and the stitchings of their embroidered mouths, so that they were by now of indecipherable age or gender.

  Joleen showed neither surprise nor happiness—no reaction at all, in fact—at our unannounced arrival. She continued to play with the dolls as if we were not there—talking to them, placin
g them in a wooden vegetable crate, covering them with a piece of frayed red-checkered fabric, kissing them, and wishing them pleasant dreams.

  “My ghosts,” she said to Max. And then: “Has my husband told you about my dead brother?”

  My heart stopped briefly, and returned with such a strong thump-thump that I thought Max would hear it. His eyes fixed on Joleen, however, he paid me no attention.

  “Hey—” he said to her, his arms spread wide, “ain’t you got some welcome-home hugs and kisses for us long-lost guys?”

  Joleen took her Bible from the top of a bookcase that was set at right angles, in an L-shape, against the footboard of our bed and an adjacent wall. “You have not answered my question,” she said. She sat, and opened her Bible. “When you have replied to my question, I will reply to yours.”

  “Okay,” Max said. “Sure. So the answer’s no—he never said nothing about any brother.”

  “That is a shameful but correctable omission,” Joleen said.

  “Glad to hear it,” Max said. “So now that I answered your question like you asked, how about those hugs and kisses?”

  “Of course,” Joleen said, and she rose and, as if she herself had become a cloth doll, embraced each of us in a limp, perfunctory manner.

  “Since my husband has been dilatory in telling you of this chapter in our lives—nor, I confess, have I been as forthcoming as I might have been—I will tell it to you,” she said. “But be forewarned: it is not a tale that will inspire joy or hope, and it is one that will surely bring me down with gray hairs to the grave.”

  Max turned to me. “Do you know what the hell’s going on here, Horace?” he asked. “I can understand your wife being pissed at us for being away so long, and maybe it was bad manners to bust in here first thing, but that was just my way of showing how much I missed you, see, and—”

  “You are a child, Max Baer,” Joleen said. “And a fool, which is doubtless why so many adore you, though I do not, for such reasons, count myself among them.”