Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  I watched him, when he had finally got one, trot along beside the cab to the canopy and then help the cabbie load the luggage into the trunk. Then he ushered the woman into the back seat and shut the door, and I followed him into the lobby.

  "Rocky Graziano," I said, and I gave him my name. He picked up the phone and talked into it and turned back to me.

  "You can go right up," he said. "It's 16-G, like in Graziano."

  Not B, like in Barbell a, I was thinking, walking to the elevator. He was born Rocco Barbella, one of seven children, three of whom died in infancy, of an alcoholic, often unemployed father and a mentally and emotionally disturbed mother who was in and out of institutions. While he was running from the Army, he took the name of one of those he used to run with in the streets.

  "Whatever became of the original Graziano?" I had asked him the last time I had seen him, some dozen years before now.

  "In the can," he said, "doing twenty to thirty. He was like a three-time loser. You know?"

  I knew that while he was fighting, Irving Cohen had made him buy annuities, and that, beyond that, he himself had been doing very well. I would catch him occasionally on TV with Martha Raye, once with Cesar Romero and Margaret Truman. His autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, had headed the bestseller lists, and off it they had made the movie starring Paul Newman, who caught the sullen moods but not the exuberance that made the fighter exciting just walking down the street.

  "I just made The Big One," he told me that day.

  "The Big One?" I said. "What's that."

  "A million bucks."

  "You're worth a million?" I said.

  "Yeah," he said. "My accountant just told me. How about that?"

  When I got off the elevator now he was standing there in a black knitted, short-sleeved sports shirt, gray slacks, and black loafers. The lines in his face were deeper, the full head of hair was still black but graying at the temples. We shook hands, smiling at each other and voicing greetings. He led me down the hall to the apartment where, when he opened the door and led me in, a dog, light-brown and knee-high, came toward me, it's head going and sniffing at me and blocking my way.

  "He won't hurt you," he said. "He's a Lab."

  "Lab's don't hurt you?" I said, the dog still sniffing at me.

  "Yeah," he said. "C'mere, Plumber! The guy who give him to me is in the plumbing business, so I named him Plumber."

  He led me through the small foyer and into the living room. Sunlight was coming through sliding glass doors that open onto a terrace, and he motioned me toward the sofa with a coffee table in front of it. As he sat down in a chair across the table from me, we could hear a metallic rattling coming from beyond the dining area in what I presumed to be the kitchen.

  "Excuse me," he said, getting up. "It's Plumber. He wants me to give him some water."

  He got up, and I could hear him filling the pan. As he came back and sat down I could hear the dog lapping the water.

  "Every morning," he said, "he gets me up six o'clock, six-thirty. He wants me to take him out, so I take him out. I go to sleep early, like nine, ten o'clock. You want a beer?"

  "No," I said, "but thanks."

  "I don't eat," he said, "but I'm drinkin' twenty beers a day. "No pasta, no bread, no candy, no ice cream, but I'm drinkin' beer."

  "You look good," I said. "I've talked with Norma on the phone. How is she?"

  "My Jew?" he said. "Good. She's fine."

  "You were lucky," I said. "You married a Jew and you had a Jewish manager, and they made you save your money."

  "You're right," he said. "That's right, my wife and my manager."

  "How are the girls?" I said.

  Audrey must have been about three when he fought Zale in Chicago. She was in a crib in one of the bedrooms of that hotel suite there, and after the fight the noise of the celebration in the sitting room awakened her and she began to cry. When he went in to her and bent over the crib, she looked up at that face with the swelling around one eye and the bandage above the other.

  "Daddy, what happened?" she said.

  "You see what I mean now?" he said. "Stay out of the gutter."

  "Audrey's good," he said now. "Her husband manufactures watches, and they got a boy two and a half named Aaron—Aaron Weissman—and they live downstairs. Roxie's husband manufactures cloth in the garment center, and they got a boy, Allen, about ten."

  The dog was at the door now, barking.

  "Plumber!" he said, and then to me, "Somebody must be in the hallway. He'll stop in a minute, but you got to see this."

  He got up and walked toward the glass doors. On the floor, to one side, was a bronze statuette of a boxer, poised to throw a straight right hand.

  "It looks like a Joe Brown," I said, kneeling to examine it. "I don't mean the ex-lightweight champ, but the sculptor in residence at Princeton University."

  "You got to write this," he said. "Muhammad Ali. They give him this, the Garden did, for somethin'. He said, 'I ain't gonna take it. That's a white man.' "

  "It is," I said.

  "So he don't take it, and I'm at the Garden and Teddy Brenner tells me the story and I said, 'I'll take it.' I took the plaque off, but it's a guy gettin' ready to throw a right hand, and I used to throw a right hand."

  "I'll say you did," I said.

  That right hand and the anger he put into it against all those opponents who, to him, personified the society against which he was making his fight made him the fighter he was. He had put it in words in his dressing room in the Chicago Stadium after he had knocked out Zale, and he was still unwinding and they had him in a corner, their pencils and papers out and making notes.

  "I wanted to kill him," he said. "I got nothin' against him. He's a nice guy. I like him, but I wanted to kill him."

  Sixteen months before, he had fought Marty Servo in the Garden. Servo had just knocked out Freddy "Red" Cochrane to win the welterweight title, but this was over that weight, and now in the second round Servo had already been down twice and Gra-ziano had him against the ropes. With his open left glove under Servo's chin he was holding Servo's head up, and with his right he was clubbing him again and again until Servo went down the third time and they stopped it.

  After I had written my piece and got back to the apartment, I still hadn't got rid of it. One of the reasons we write is to try to unburden ourselves of the weight of what we see and hear and feel, to get it all out, but the brutality and viciousness of that haunted me so that for hours I tossed, unable to get to sleep.

  Two years later, after that press conference in the Capitol Hotel, Graziano and Irving Cohen and Teddy Brenner and I were going out to eat. The fighter was leading us down Eighth Avenue, walking with those quick, nervous, swinging strides.

  "Where are we going?" I said to Irving Cohen.

  "We're going to that place where Marty Servo tends bar," Irving said. "Rocky likes him, and he always tries to bring business into the place."

  Servo was never a fighter again after that beating. He had to give up his welterweight title and the security it could have brought him without ever defending it, and now, when we walked into the place, he was standing behind the bar. He had on a white jacket, and when he saw us his face brightened and he leaned over the bar to shake hands. When he shook hands with Graziano he smiled and faked as if to hook with his left. Graziano leaning over the bar, stuck his left hand under Servo's chin as he had that night, and he faked to throw the right. Then the two of them dropped their hands and laughed.

  "Every once in a while," I was saying to him now, and we were seated again, "I see you on a TV commercial. Do you do a lot of those?"

  "Oh, jeeze," he said, "I done Coldene. I done Brioski. American Motors. Chrysler Motors. Cadillac. I do Ford Motors. What's that breakfast thing?"

  "I don't know."

  "Post Cereals," he said. "Lee Miles Transmissions. I do mostly television, so friggin' many. Then I just do verce-over—voiceover—for Honeycomb Cereal."

  "Y
ou must have a good agent," I said.

  "I got no friggin' agent," he said. "I'm a free lance. I do the "Mike Douglas Show" twice a month. I got a contract. Let me get a friggin' cigar. You want a cigar?"

  "No," I said, "but thanks anyway."

  When he came back he had the cigar, lighted, in his mouth. He handed me a glossy print of a picture taken of himself with Richard Nixon in the White House and a leather-bound folio.

  "That's a movie I made with Frank Sinatra in 1967," he said. "They give me the script. Then I do a lot of convention shows. Olin Mathieson. Pearl Burey . . ."

  "Brewery?"

  "Yeah. Country Club Malt Liquor. Commercials, and they have a convention. Then I lecture at colleges and high schools."

  The last time I had seen him he had told me that, in schools, he gave talks on juvenile delinquency, and that he had just lectured on criminology at Fordham University. I asked him what he said.

  "I spoke to all the kids who were graduatin'," he said, "and a lot of elderly people, like professors and priests."

  "But what did you tell them?" I said.

  "You know what it is," he said. "I start out, whether I'm talkin' about criminology or juvenile delinquency, and I say, 'You know, I'm so glad my father took the boat, because this is the best country in the world, and if there was another country like this one, I'd be jealous.' "

  "Then what do you tell them?" I said.

  "I say, 'If you're a juvenile delinquent, two things will solve your problem. All you need is a good alibi and a good lawyer.' Then I tell 'em about the guys I knew went to the chair, and I tell 'em about Somebody Up There Likes Me, how they made the movie and about the book."

  "So these days," I was saying now, "what do you tell them when you lecture?"

  "I say, 'I'm very glad to be here on this occasion. I couldn't be with nicer people.' Then I give a couple of jokes, like a comedian. I'm a comedian. I think I am."

  "I'm remembering," I said, "something that Irving Cohen's wife said to me once. I've forgotten her name."

  "Jean," he said. "They live in Arizona now."

  "It was the night before the Zale fight in Chicago," I said. "She had stopped by the suite in that hotel, and at one point you stood up. You walked across the room to go into the next room, and she said to me, 'You know, there's something about that boy. There's an electricity, a vitality, about him, so I have the feeling that, whatever he does, he'll make a success of it.' "

  "She said that?"

  "Yes, and she was the first one to spot it. I used to think of that when I'd see you on TV with Martha Raye. You were lucky twice in your life and in two careers. As a fighter you came along in Tony Zale's time, and you two meshed like gears, and made great fights. Then in television, who else could you have made such a partnership with but Martha Raye?"

  "Yeah," he said. "That's right."

  "How did she discover you?"

  "She didn't discover me," he said. "It was her writer, Nat Hiken. A guy calls my manager. I was in Stillman's, and the guy comes over. He says, 'My name is Nat Hiken. You got an agent?' I said, 'I got a friggin' manager named Irving Cohen.' He says, 'We're lookin' maybe to put you on the Martha Raye show. We're looking for a boy friend for Martha Raye.'

  "What Nat Hiken told me was some guy says, 'Get some stupid guy like Rocky Graziano.' Nat says, 'Why not get Rocky Graziano?' The guy says, 'He can't talk. He can't read.' Hiken says, 'I'll go see him.'

  "I go to his office. I meet Marlon Brando, and they give me a friggin' stupid script. Big words I can't pronounce. Hiken says, 'Don't worry. The public doesn't know what the script is.' I go on and the guys are sayin', 'Great! Great!' I was playin' myself."

  "You always did," I said, "and I've often thought that it all goes back to Frank Percoco, and that two-bit piece. If he doesn't break that swelling under your eye, you don't see. If you don't see, you don't win the title. If you don't win the title, none of this happens."

  "Yeah," he said, "and they did the identical same thing in the picture Rocky. Since the picture came out, kids nine or ten think I'm that Rocky."

  "And I've never heard," I said, "of twenty-five cents that was parlayed into as much as that quarter Frank Percoco happened to have in his pocket. What's he doing now?"

  "He's retired," he said. "He's got a little house on Staten Island he bought about thirty years ago."

  "And Whitey's gone," I said, "and he saved your life that night."

  "Yeah," he said.

  It was after the fight, during that celebration in that hotel suite. The fighter had walked into that bedroom when he had heard the child crying, and he had bent over the crib and talked to her. Then, because it was so stifling hot and humid there, he had walked to a window to open it wider. As he tried to raise it, Whitey, walking into the room, started to do it for him. At that moment the window flew up and the fighter fell forward over the sill, and Whitey grabbed him around the thighs as he was about to plunge the ten stories to the street. Had he gone to his death, I am sure they would have surmised in the papers, the climate of public opinion being what it was at the time, that he had double-crossed the mob by beating Zale and been thrown or pushed, because another of his managers was Eddie Coco, who had a record of twelve arrests and known mob connections.

  "And Eddie Coco," I said now. "The last I knew, he was doing twenty to life for killing that parking lot attendant in Miami."

  "He got out," he said, "but he's back in again."

  "What for this time?"

  "He got caught shylocking. He was on light parole."

  "I'm remembering," I said, "when you ran out on that Apostoli fight in California. No one knew where you were, and I got Irving Cohen to get Terry Lulu and Bozo Costantino and Al Pennino to find you for that press conference. What are they doing now?"

  "Terry Young got shot and killed," he said. "Lulu's still got the bar at Thirteenth Street and Second Avenue, and Al Pennino is workin' on the docks."

  "And you've moved about three miles north."

  "But it's still the East Side," he said. "I say I had three careers. A robbin' career, a fightin' career, and an actin' career. Listen. Can we do this in a restaurant?"

  "Sure," I said. "Anywhere you say."

  "I got to save my table," he said, getting up.

  "But before we go," I said, "can you just show me around for a minute?"

  "Sure," he said, sliding open the glass door to the terrace and leading me out. "We got four-and-a-half rooms, and we got this wrap-around terrace, and we got all these plants and these trees here and . . ."

  He had led me back through the living room again and into the foyer. He was starting into the bedroom.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "I want to see these paintings."

  On one wall of the small foyer there were a half dozen framed oils. One was a copy of Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror and there was another of his Three Musicians, and there was a French Impressionist street scene.

  "Where did you get these paintings?" I said.

  "I done 'em," he said, and then, indicating them, "Rocky done this one. Rocky done that one . . ."

  "These two are Picasso copies," I said.

  "Yeah," he said. "I copied them, when I couldn't afford to buy 'em. I like his painting."

  "What about this street scene?"

  "Like in Greenwich Village," he said. "My grandmother and grandfather had a place on Bleecker Street, and I done that."

  "These are good, Rock," I said. "They really are."

  "Yeah," he said. "I draw fairly well, like a fighter, but it comes out good."

  "It does," I said, "but I didn't know you could paint."

  "When I was in the reformatory," he said, "I went to art school. I learned to mix colors, and I paint friggin' good."

  "I'm impressed."

  "Then I got all these books," he said, sweeping an arm toward the book shelves. "I got letters from Presidents. I got more plaques than Jesus Christ. I got them all in the what-do-you-call-it—the basement?"


  "Right."

  "Listen," he said. "We got to go."

  "Sure."

  He led me out and I followed him to the elevator. He pushed the button and we waited.

  "I've just been up to Brockton," I said, because I knew he and Rocky Marciano had been close friends. "I saw his mother and his brother Peter."

  "Yeah," he said. "How are they doin'?"

  "They're doing all right," I said, and the elevator had come and we got in and started down, "but they can't find Marciano's money."