Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Horace may be brilliant, but he is still a child, Joleen,” I said, my voice rising with my fear that Joleen had once again set out on a journey to places where her better angels dared not go. “Like Max Jr., he is still a boy like other boys, and if…”

  “But he is not like other boys, Horace—can’t you see that?” she said. “He has a mind—and a vision—beyond the ordinary. Have you not noticed how he does not accept things merely because others do, or because others claim they are true? Have you not noticed, when we talk about Joseph and Mary, Jesus and Paul, or Abraham and Isaac, that no matter how enchanted he may be by the stories themselves, he always ends our talks by asking the same question?”

  “Which is—?”

  “How do we know this really happened?”

  “But that’s a question any child would ask—a question you and I asked when we were his age,” I said. “And the answer we were given is the same all children are given: we know it happened—we believe it happened—because the Bible says it did, and because the Bible was written by the hand of God, and…”

  “Oh Horace—was it really?” Joleen said. “And what is served by giving any child words that derive from ignorance and encourage ignorance? Tell me this, my brother: do you truly believe these stories literally took place in the way the Bible says they did, and were written down by that Being or Beings we have been worshipping?”

  “Literally?” I said. “Perhaps not. But there is an essential truth in them that…” I stopped, then continued in a faltering manner: “If we believe … yes … and if we have faith, then the Bible can be our guide and our consolation, but…”

  “Perhaps,” Joleen said. “But even men of God—men of great learning and discernment—have expressed doubts, and have taught us to hearken to the stories and parables as if they were all of them parables—metaphors for living from which we might take meaningful lessons for our lives.”

  “True,” I said. “Yet have you not said that you believe God’s greatest gift to us has been metaphor? And if that is true, and if…”

  Placing a finger upon my lips, Joleen gazed at me as if, once again, as in the years before we knew Max Baer, I was her pupil, and in that moment a wave of sadness washed through me, for I sensed that her decision not to attend church was irrevocably coupled to our love for one another. What I understood in this moment was something I had until now denied: the fact of her shame, and with it her belief in the eternal damnation that awaited her—a destiny that was a direct consequence of deeds she and I had committed once upon a time, and had persisted in committing.

  Softly, I repeated words I had spoken a moment before: “If we believe and have faith, then the Bible can be our guide and our consolation. That is what I believe.”

  “Then do I now have two children?” she laughed. “Or perhaps three, if we count the biggest child of all—our friend and the father of our son’s dearest friend, Maximilian Adelbert Baer. What do you think, my husband? Pray tell me, and please do so without your usual equivocations.”

  “As you wish,” I said. “What I think is that you have, as that child said, lost your good sense. What I think—”

  “Ah, but let us now put aside what you think, and pay attention to what our son thinks. It may be true, as our friend so delicately put it, that I am, now and again, bonkers—a true nut job, yes?—and that my mind does sometimes wander in realms to which, out of a spirit of loving-kindness, I do not invite my beloved companions to join me.”

  “Your munificence is exceeded only by your magnanimity,” I said.

  “And your ill-tempered humor is exceeded only by your bitterness, though your bitterness is surely justified,” Joleen said. “You have, through the years, held your tongue admirably, and have given me the gift of an unconditional love that sometimes exists, when it exists at all, between a mother and child. And you have done this, let us recall, despite the fact that it was I who seduced you. I am grateful to you for your love and loyalty, but what is before us today is not our past, but a decision that will affect our son.”

  “Our son?” I said.

  “Nor have I come to my decision out of pique or the spirit in me that is often contrary for the sake of being contrary,” Joleen continued. “Our son has begun trying to make sense of the stories and commandments he has grown up with, and I find myself no longer capable of defending its irrationalities to him.”

  “But you love the Bible, and always have,” ” I exclaimed. “And it is you who have transmitted this love to our son!”

  “Our son, yes,” she said, and she did so without any trace of bitterness or irony. “I love the Bible, Horace, but not nearly so much as he does, you see, and isn’t that a true gift?”

  “A gift?”

  “In the way we want to know why the sun rises or sets, or the world came to be, just so does our son want to know how these stories came to be and if the people in them really lived once upon a time the way you and I do. That is the gift, Horace, don’t you understand?”

  “No,” I said. And again: “No.”

  Joleen seemed unperturbed by my reply. “I love you, Horace, and so, in my heart you can do no wrong.” She closed her eyes and recited a line from The Song of Solomon we had often recited to one another: “‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.’”

  I nodded assent, but chose not to recite back to her the sobering line that followed upon the one she had recited: “Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.”

  “Just so it has always been,” she said. “From the moment I watched our mother bear you into this world, and soon after—sun-light bathing your face with holy light—when she smiled up at me, and offered you to me so that, as she often reminded me, child that I was myself, I could hold your soft life in my arms while she told me that I now I had a brother I could care for and love for the rest of my days.”

  Joleen pressed her lips to my forehead, and when she did I felt a stirring in my thighs and I was surprised, looking down, to see Horace Jr. there, his face pillowed against my leg.

  “Am I your gift?” he asked, smiling up at me. “Am I?”

  “Yes, my son, you are my gift,” I said, lifting him up and holding him in my arms, “and your mother and I have decided not to go to church this morning so that we might have more time with one another.”

  “Is that so, Mother?” he asked.

  “It is,” Joleen said. “But this afternoon we will read from the Bible to one another, and you may invite Max Jr. to join us. Would you like that?”

  I have set down the story of this day in my son Horace Jr.’s childhood, so that, reading it when I am no longer here, he can learn of matters that, notwithstanding his prodigious memory, he may not fully recall—and so that he may, thereby, better understand his own story, and something of the origins of his career as a Biblical scholar, which career has brought great honor to me and to Joleen as well as to Max, whose early passing from this world did not allow him to rejoice in the full flowering of Horace Jr.’s gifts.

  What Max did rejoice in, however, was the fact of Horace Jr.’s existence, and of having two sons with whom he could set free his boundless exuberance. He would race across fields and meadows, one boy tucked under each arm, both of them shrieking with joy; he would roll around with the boys on the ground while screaming for others to come to his aid; he would have raucous tickling competitions with them, and declare each of them undisputed world champion; he would box with them, sing with them, dance with them, swim with them, and then, when one thought no child—or father—could sustain such rambunctious play a moment longer without collapsing in exhaustion, he would take one or the other of them into his arms, and lavish affection upon that child with gentle kisses and whisperings.

  He would come to our cabin, or to our quarters in his home in Sacramento, lie in bed with Horace, and tell him stories about giant sea creatures and noble ship captains, about imaginary kings and kingdoms, and about brave boys wh
o defended—with swords or bare knuckles—those who could not defend themselves. He would kiss both boys frequently in ways few men did—mouth on mouth—and he would take them on excursions into redwood forests and fishing villages north of San Francisco, or into San Francisco, where they would ride the trolleys, visit the zoo, sail out on fishing vessels, attend baseball games, and go to restaurants, theaters, and boxing gyms where men who adored and doted on Max would adore and dote on Horace Jr. and Max Jr.

  When Max was on the road performing in theaters and nightclubs, or in Hollywood working on a movie, or far from home for a boxing match, a wrestling exhibition, or a publicity stunt, the boys would ask every day, and sometimes several times a day, about when he would be returning home.

  Unlike Mary Ellen and Joleen, however, they were rarely forlorn while Max was away, and I do not recall either of them clinging to what-was-not, or to what they could-not-have; rather, they rejoiced in whatever was there for them to enjoy, whether separately, or with one another.

  During these years, I here note, I enjoyed a moderately successful boxing career of my own, although it was neither my ambition nor my natural gifts, such as they were, that brought about this adventure whose brief life was directly tied to Max’s own final hours as a professional prizefighter.

  When we were on the road for one of Max’s boxing matches, or when he was fighting an exhibition bout, or working as a celebrity referee, he would regularly urge me to put on my boxing gloves and do battle against others so that I could get onto the same card with him, and we could thereby take in a few extra dollars and celebrate our victories together afterwards. I had long ago forsworn any desire to fight professionally, but when everyone else, at home and away from home—Max’s wife, his children, his handlers, his lady friends, his publicity agents, his coterie of journalists from the worlds of boxing, movies, and entertainment—were tearing off as many pieces of him as they could, my desire to draw him closer rose feverishly.

  Then, late one sweltering August afternoon, after sparring together while he was in training for a bout in Jersey City against Pat Comiskey, he lavished praise on me again for my boxing prowess and stamina (he had called it a day when I was barely fatigued), and said he had been mulling over his idea again: that if I would let him book some fights for me, he would make me into a champion too.

  “And how am I gonna do that?” he asked. “Why, by becoming your trainer, and—my reward, right?—getting to work those gorgeous buns of yours off on a regular basis.”

  He roared with laughter at his turn of phrase, but despite his vulgarity, which was of a familiar kind, and which irritated and offended me as, in its public variants, it often did others (he could not not persist in making jokes, often crude, of anything and everything), this time, weary of resisting his recurring propositions, I accepted his offer.

  In the ring, I went by the name of “Frank ‘Long-fingered’ Joleen Jr.,” in order, Max said when he bestowed the name upon me, to do honor to Frankie Campbell and to my wife and son. I fought four-and six-round preliminary bouts at first and, from my years of sparring with Max and Buddy, who were three weight classes above me (I fought as a welterweight, weighing in generally at between 155 and 158 pounds), I had little trouble disposing of fighters in my class. I won my first sixteen fights (including one against a former champion, the aging Jackie Fields), all by technical knockout or decision. I lacked Max’s power, but remained, as ever, possessed of great quickness, good defensive instincts, and the ability to take advantage of my superior reach to score nearly two blows for every one received. By mid-January 1941, according to Ring Magazine, I was the twenty-third ranked fighter in my weight class, and discreet noises were made to Max, and to Ancil Hoffman, who had become my manager, about the possibility, within a year or two, of a title fight.

  Less than three months later, however—on April 4, 1941—fighting in an eight-round bout in New York City’s Madison Square Garden against an up-and-coming boxer named Pete Briscoe, an Irishman as strong as Braddock but with a quickness and killer instinct Braddock lacked, I was knocked down twice in the seventh round, at which point, though I was back on my feet doing nimble skip-steps by the count of four, the referee stepped in, stopped the fight, and declared Briscoe the winner by a technical knockout. I was far ahead on points with both judges, and Max and Hoffman immediately rushed into the ring, and began angrily accusing the referee of being on the take. No matter their protestations, and the crowd’s lusty boos, the fight was over and lost, and with it, my unblemished record.

  Max was the headliner that night, in a return bout against Lou Nova, a young contender who had beaten Max two years before (his only defeat since his loss on points, in 1937, to Tommy Farr in London), having scored a technical knockout against him in the eleventh round of a scheduled twelve-round bout. Max had balked at the decision, and had pleaded with the referee to let him continue, and in this second fight against Nova, he was as game as ever, but also as out of shape as ever, frequently joking with sportswriters before the fight that the only thing that kept him fit during this period of his life were the workouts he put himself through in order to train me. But once again, this time in the eighth round of a scheduled ten rounder, when Nova was having his way and turning Max’s beautiful face to a bloody, swollen mess, the referee stopped the fight, and awarded the victory, by technical knockout, to Nova. This time nobody, Max included, disputed the decision.

  In the dressing room afterwards, winking from a badly swollen left eye, and glancing down at his boxing trunks, Max declared he was still, at thirty-two, a young man whose working parts were in good order, and one with a wife and young son with whom he wished to spend more time. Because he didn’t want to embarrass anyone again the way he had in the two fights against Nova—himself first of all—he was now going on record to announce that sportswriters and fight fans had just been witness to a major historical event: the last time anyone would ever see Max Baer enter the ring as a professional fighter.

  The writers in attendance shouted out their disbelief and disapproval, but Max just grinned through a split upper lip, put his arm around me—I had already showered, and changed into street clothes—and said that his good friend here, who had suffered his first defeat in the ring—“He was robbed, guys,” Max said, “and we all know it”—was the fighter to whom he would devote himself from now on.

  “But that will not be possible,” I said when reporters turned to me, “for like Max, I, too, am a young man with a wife and son I want to be with more consistently than a life in prize-fighting allows, and so, like my friend and mentor, on this night I, too, am hanging up my gloves.”

  This time Max made good on his promise. He never fought professionally again (nor did I), although he would, to raise money for himself or charitable organizations, occasionally dance around the ring with another fighter in an exhibition, and when we spent time at the ranch in Livermore, we would sometimes spar with each other. And when we did, at his urging—in order that I be protected from what he called his “spontaneous eruptions”—I always wore headgear.

  4 War

  I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave no answer. (5:6)

  On January 7, 1942, one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Max enlisted in the army air corps. Although his official title was “athletic instructor,” his main job was to go around the country selling war bonds, and he did this with his usual ebullience, telling cheering crowds that if we wanted to keep the world safe for our children and grandchildren, we had to all pull together to give those damned Nazis the licking they deserved. In many ways his military tour of duty turned out to be a three-year continuation, in uniform, of the life he’d been living: criss-crossing the country with actors, actresses, musicians, and fighters (including Buddy, who had enlisted with Max), and putting on exhibitions and performances (singing, dancing, acting, boxing, wre
stling), and, as ever, clowning around in order to give himself and his audience a good time. There were differences, however: he did it all, he told the crowds, as a grateful employee trying to give his boss, Uncle Sam, a leg up on a world that was in trouble; and he did it, he said each time he took the stage, or entered a boxing ring, for a cause far greater than anything he had ever before fought for in his life.

  Yet there was another difference: while he was going around the country for the army air corps, he and I were, for the first time since we had met on the night of Joleen’s twenty-first birthday, separated from one another virtually all the time. He did come home every second or third month on official two- or three-day leaves, and when he was selling bonds on the west coast he would sometimes arrive in Sacramento (where we lived full-time through most of the war) for an overnight. But he spent his leaves and overnights with his family—Mary Ellen, Max Jr., Buddy, Augie, James Manny, and also, during the last year of the war, Maudie Marian, a daughter born to him and Mary Ellen in March 1944. And during these war years, to my knowledge, he and Joleen spent no time together except in the presence of others.

  Three days after Max enlisted in the air corps, I went to the Port of Embarkation in Oakland (later named the Oakland Army Base) in the hopes of joining the navy. Although, like Max, I was eager to help defend our nation against its enemies, I did not own a birth certificate with either my given name (Joseph Barton), or the name of Horace Littlejohn on it, and so I asked Max if he would write me a letter of recommendation vouching for my date and place of birth (I told him that I was born on September 13, 1911, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana), my current place of residence, my years of service with him, my familial situation (wife and one child), and my reliability and good character.

  Despite the esteem in which Max was held (at his urging, in addition to his letter of recommendation, I brought with me a folder containing newspaper clippings that told of my boxing career), and despite the armed forces’ desperate need for able-bodied men, I was told there were, as yet, no places for colored men in the navy, army, or air corps units stationed at the Oakland facility. An officer, impressed with the letter from Max, assured me the situation was going to change; until it did, however, he recommended I make application to one of several all-Negro units being formed elsewhere in the country, or that I take a position as a civilian employee at the Oakland facility, where I could work either in the kitchens, or as a stevedore, loading and unloading supplies, equipment, and ammunition to and from ships stationed in the harbor.