Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Their emotions high and their deadlines tight, reporters at ringside struggled to capture how the universe had just been realigned. “Some day the sphinx will talk, the pyramids will crumble, the oceans will stand still,” Joe Williams wrote. “Something loosely akin to that was recorded … under a frowning sky at the Yankee Stadium last night. And so today you will read that the greatest upset in ring history took place, that the impossible happened, that the condemned man electrocuted the warden.” To Grantland Rice, the atom had just been taken apart. Then there was Robert Perrier of L’Auto, who’d counseled Schmeling to practice all those different dives. “Had I found God himself shaving in my bathroom, or if I were to walk down Fifth Avenue and find the Eiffel Tower in place of the Empire State Building, I think I would be less surprised than at witnessing what I did last night at the Yankee Stadium,” he wrote.

  Listening to the fight was such torture for Anny Ondra that she often left the room, gauging her husband’s fortunes from periodic peeks at the Goebbelses’ faces. Once the direction of the contest became clear, though, a photographer captured her—smiling, with fists clenched—as she sat by the radio and listened, with her friends Joseph and Magda hovering protectively at her side. “For your wonderful victory, which we have experienced tonight on the radio, my most heartfelt congratulations,” Goebbels quickly cabled Schmeling. “I know that you have fought for Germany. Your victory is a German victory. We are proud of you. With best wishes and Heil Hitler.” “In the twelfth round, Schmeling knocks out the Negro,” he wrote afterward in his diary. “Wonderful. A dramatic, exciting fight…. The White man over the Black man, and the White man was a German. His wife is magnificent. The whole family delights in joy. Don’t get to bed until 5 a.m. I’m very happy.” A crowd gathered outside Goebbels’s home, where Ondra spent what little remained of the night. Her husband telephoned her there after the fight. Hitler contacted her, too. “For the wonderful victory of your husband, our greatest German boxer, I must congratulate you with all my heart,” wrote the Führer, who also sent her flowers. Goebbels ordered that for those who hadn’t managed to stay up to hear it live—or who, like him, wanted to hear it all over again—the fight would be rebroadcast throughout Germany at seven the next night.

  In the meantime, all of Germany celebrated. The straitlaced German newspapers offered only meager descriptions, but a Frenchman in Berlin who’d listened to the fight in a bar on the Kurfürstendamm described the scene as it unfolded. “What joy, what deliriousness,” he wrote. “Everyone is talking about this victory that many had not even dared to hope for. The working class, the late-night workers, the police, the housekeepers are all happy about Max’s success. And here come the street vendors running at full speed shouting ‘Special edition! Colossal! Colossal!’” The excitement spilled over into the next day. “All of Berlin is joyful,” he wrote then. “On the bus, in the street, at the butcher, the bistro on the street corner, the conversations go on and on.” Near the Berlin zoo, he watched someone deck a man who was now claiming to have predicted a Schmeling victory when in fact he’d picked Louis. “The aggressor moved back, as proud as if he were Max himself, and said to his opponent ‘that’s how Louis stayed on the ground,’” he wrote. “The press has exploded with joy—there is no room left for information or day to day politics…. The special editions all sold out quickly this morning; I know a certain street vendor who did a golden business on this magnificent day…. Nobody is talking about the Olympic Games and politics anymore. That is all secondary and not very important.”

  A reporter for one of the Chicago papers was crushed in the mad rush to the dressing rooms and had to be carried away on a stretcher. In Schmeling’s quarters, pandemonium bordering on hysteria prevailed. La Guardia, too, nearly got trampled. Joe Jacobs strutted in, his shirt drenched and his cigar cocked “at a million-dollar angle.” It was his moment, too: a time to celebrate, and, at least as important, to settle some old scores. “Where’s all dem guys? Where’s all dem guys?” he shrieked. “Dem name-da-round guys? Dem name-de-punch guys? Dem name-de-minute guys? Youse newspaper guys, youse experts, whad’ya got to say now about my Maxie? He knocked out the superman! You hear? What’s that make him? You wouldn’t listen to me, would ya? Little Joey, back in the dough! You hear that? Nothing’s too good for us now!” In between sentences, he kissed Schmeling wildly. “I’m even with the world! I’m even with the world!” he shouted.

  Schmeling, his lips puffed and bleeding, his teeth discolored from blood, his left eye completely closed and his right eye swollen and red, sat on the rubbing table. “I’m so happy. I’m so happy,” he said. “I leave here three years ago beaten by Hamas and now I come back and win. It is very good. And he is very good. Good, man. My, how he can take a punch.” He explained watching Louis fight Uzcudun, and knowing afterward that he could beat him. “I am a proud man,” he said. “I would not have taken this fight if I did not think I, a white man, could beat a colored man.” He said he didn’t blame the Americans for the odds against him; they’d missed his German fights, and still thought him a loser. Not that the odds were a bad thing for Schmeling; a Chicago paper claimed he made more money betting on himself than he had fighting the fight. Never, Schmeling said, had he been scared. Fighting was a profession, he explained, and any man who was afraid had no business in any profession. Had Dempsey or Corbett or Sullivan been afraid? “When Louis hit me low, he hurt me,” he said. “But I made up my mind I would never again win a fight on the floor.” Julian Black came in to congratulate Schmeling, and Schmeling thanked him.

  “Please tell my countrymen at home that this is the greatest and happiest day of my life,” Schmeling told the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger. “At this moment I have to tell Germany, I have to report to the Führer in particular, that the thoughts of all my countrymen were with me in this fight; that the Führer and his faithful people were thinking of me. This thought gave me the strength to succeed in this fight. It gave me the courage and the endurance to win this victory for Germany’s colors.” He said he looked forward to returning to Germany shortly, and that as happy as he was now, he’d be even happier when he could see Hitler. When Hellmis caught up with Schmeling, he wrote, the winner’s first question to him was whether Hitler had been listening. Schmeling greeted his mother and his wife by radio, and then—in a lower voice, as if self-conscious in the crowded dressing room—he appended a “Heil Hitler” at the end. When the Deutscher Rundfunk resumed its normal musical programming, around four-thirty in the morning, it played a song called “I’m Dreaming with Open Eyes.” Throughout Germany, groggy but euphoric fight fans prepared to go to work. In Magdeburg a “wall of people” waited for extras of the local paper as the first rays of sunlight gleamed off the cathedral.

  Schmeling returned to a hotel room filled with noise and drowning in flowers. “We knocked that Brown Bomber right back to where he came from,” Joe Jacobs exclaimed. Bellhops kept bringing in and dumping telegrams—at least eight hundred of them. A friend sat on the sofa and ticked off the senders: “Primo Carnera.” “Ernst Lubitsch.” “Marlene Dietrich.” “George Grosz.” “Douglas Fairbanks.” “Adolf Hitler.” “I was the only one in Hollywood who bet on you,” wrote Sonja Henie. Another telegram—surely a forgery, but reported as fact—came from the graduating class of Lakewood High School. “We could not stand him, either,” it said, referring, presumably, to Lakewood’s recent guest. Many of the telegrams came from the South, often with barbed, racist sentiments. Schmeling insisted he wasn’t interested in such things. The message said to have pleased him most came from St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore, where the young Babe Ruth had lived. But the one telegram he kept atop the pile, the one he read aloud and translated for his audience, was Hitler’s.

  Part of the time, Schmeling relaxed in the bathtub, his eyes closed. Then he mixed. He turned his back on Joe Williams, who had been among those describing the postponement as a stay of execution. But for the most part, he rejoiced. “Germany—it vas going
crazy ven I talked mit my wife on the telephone after der fight,” he said, turning his head and peering through his half-closed right eye to see anyone or anything. “She told me everyone vas avake there.” Jews and Germans, now forcibly separated by law throughout the Reich, commingled freely that night in Schmeling’s suite. “You could understand better what was going on if you spoke both German and Yiddish,” the New York Post stated. “Nazism seemed pretty remote and academic, for the moment, at least.” “Youse guys don’t know nothin’,” Jacobs exclaimed at one point. “You see this mezuzah?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the amulet Jews affix to their doorposts to symbolize the sanctity of the home and wear around their necks for good luck. “Why, I had this in my mouth every time I stepped into the ring between rounds.” But after the fourth, he explained, he no longer needed it. Only around sunrise did Jacobs drive off the last of the well-wishers, and Schmeling got some sleep. He rose around ten, when the reporters began coming back.

  As for Louis, his first postfight memory was being carried to his dressing room and hearing Blackburn say, “Cover up yo’ face, Chappie.” And that was how he arrived, supported by Blackburn and Black, his head buried in a towel. Marva had rushed there, too. “Is he hurt much?” she cried. “Did it spoil his nose?” Louis was deposited on a rubbing table, massaged, and given smelling salts. A doctor pried open his eyes and took a look. For a time, Louis hid his face in his hands and cried. To one observer, the left side of Louis’s face looked as if it had stopped a tractor. But outside a small circle, no one would really know—no photographs were allowed.

  Louis was even more monosyllabic than usual, his jaw too swollen to open. He lay motionless as Blackburn cut off his gloves, and the trainer had to lift him off the table to remove his trunks. He asked Blackburn what had happened. “You just got tagged, Chappie, that’s all,” Blackburn replied. Fifteen or twenty reporters had slipped in before the police barricaded the room, but Louis largely ignored their questions. After a few minutes he was half-carried into a shower. When he emerged, his mind still clouded, he was helped back to his table. “You can’t get to him nohow,” he muttered. “You can’t do it, the way he fights. He fights turned around.” He said he remembered nothing after the second round. “Everything was in a fog,” he lamented. He asked someone to apologize to Schmeling for the low blows, which were really uppercuts gone awry. “I sure didn’t mean to hit him low,” he said. “Guess I musta been arm weary. Couldn’t make my left hooks behave. Couldn’t make nothing behave.”

  “Say, don’t forget that one Max hit after the bell one round,” Blackburn said, as he rubbed ice on Louis. “That was a honey, wasn’t it, Joe?” “No, I ain’t going to retire,” Louis said through puffed lips. “I’m gonna come back.” “That knockout was the best thing that could have happened to the boy,” Roxborough said. “He was beginning to get a little cocky and wouldn’t listen to anybody. Maybe he’ll listen after this.” “Yes, maybe we can tell him sumthin’ from now on,” Blackburn interjected. “He learned a good lesson.”

  So the finger-pointing had started, and Roxborough finally acknowledged what others had suspected. “I don’t want to resort to alibis, but we had a lot of trouble with Joe during the training for this fight,” he said. “It got so bad that he was beginning to tell Blackburn what to do, instead of listening to his trainer. Understand, this is not an excuse for Joe’s defeat, but I saw what was coming.” Louis, it was now revealed, wouldn’t even take minute breaks between rounds in Lakewood, so eager was he to finish up and loaf. He refused to skip rope and punch the bag, claiming that his roadwork and his sparring were enough. Schmeling “did Joe a world of good,” Roxborough concluded. “Joe won’t be so cocky any more.” But if Louis was responsible for his fate, Roxborough gave Joe Jacobs an assist. It was Jacobs, he conceded, who had convinced Mike Jacobs to keep Louis idle until he’d grown rusty. Then, by limiting the bandages Louis could use, he’d stripped Louis’s hands of the necessary protection. Louis had ended up with two sprained thumbs, which had kept him from putting Schmeling away. “Joe Jacobs outsmarted us,” Roxborough conceded.

  Mike Jacobs tried to make the best of the turn of events. “This fight will make him a great fighter,” he said. “Best thing in the world for him.” Besides, the heavyweight division had now been cracked wide open, with innumerable new commercial possibilities. Uncle Mike scribbled pairs of names on the back of an envelope. “Louis vs. Schmeling would draw a million and a half in a return bout,” he said. “There’s Braddock vs. Schmeling … Schmeling vs. Baer… Baer vs. Braddock … Baer vs. Louis… Braddock vs. Louis… plenty of angles now.” Soon, he left Louis’s dressing room for Schmeling’s. Louis’s adoring mob now amounted to four concerned people: Roxborough, Black, Blackburn, and Marva. Outside his dressing room, a small black boy in a jockey’s hat stood and wept.

  They dressed Louis in a gray suit and white sports shirt and put a red-banded straw hat, suitable for shielding him from the curious and the gloating, on his aching, outsize head. He asked someone to tie his shoes. “You mark my words,” Blackburn said as he helped Louis on with his coat. “Chappie will come back from this defeat to be greater than ever.” He was asked if he’d ever expected to see Louis nailed. “Fighting’s a nailing business and I always carried an ammonia bottle with four whiffs in it,” he replied. Marva grabbed her husband and, with a cordon of police protecting them, they walked arm in arm to a car.

  Louis went back to his hotel. “Joe, your head looks like a watermelon,” one of his sisters told him. Marva appeared briefly at what was to have been a victory party. “Poor thing, he is sleeping,” she said stoically. “He is suffering.” Then, shortly before midnight a big car pulled up in front of 805 St. Nicholas Avenue, where Marva was staying, and where a crowd of five hundred people—some sympathetic, others blaming her for the debacle—awaited her. Cheers and jeers followed her as she went inside. “She covered her face with her handkerchief as if to defend herself from the hostile crowd, who an hour before were raising hosannas to her husband,” wrote Roi Ottley in the Amsterdam News. “She tried in vain to hide the tears that streamed down her face.” Marvin Smith, the photographer who, with his twin brother, Morgan, chronicled Harlem, took no pictures of Marva that night, or of anything else documenting Harlem’s desolation; only whites, he later said, photographed Harlem when it was sad.

  Around New York, reactions varied. One theatergoer came out of a Broadway show and heard someone singing “Schmeling made the chocolate drop,” and it was chilling to her, the kind of gloating she’d heard in Germany a few years earlier. At Jack Dempsey’s and Mickey Walker’s, “every man you met had a five or six-to-one wager on the German,” someone wrote, “but not many of them were treating the house.” Gene Tunney strolled into “21” and was instantly besieged for explanations. “Nothing can take the place of experience,” he pronounced. “Max smashed that nigger!” a bartender yelled at the New York hotel where Willie “the Lion” Smith was playing piano. Smith got up, jumped over the bar, and brandished his cane like a baseball bat until the man apologized. New York’s clubs were crowded, but something was off. Louis’s loss had cost the high rollers dearly, one waiter whispered, and the tabs had shrunk proportionately.

  Up and down East Eighty-sixth Street in Yorkville, people marched arm in arm, singing and shouting. Business boomed in Café Hindenburg, the Vaterland, and Jaegers, with buxom fräuleins and waiters in Bavarian outfits carrying overflowing steins through the crowds. A mob fell upon a news dealer selling extras of a local paper: max schlägt joe louis in der 12 runde k.o., the headline screamed. Street fights erupted as people who’d bet on Schmeling demanded payment. Two charwomen who’d collected their two-dollar winnings in pennies scattered them like confetti into the air and onto the street.

  Returning from Yankee Stadium, Schmeling’s party passed through Harlem as quickly as it could. It was no place to be when Louis lost, especially for the man who had beaten him. Those who hadn’t crawled miserably int
o their beds or drunk themselves into a stupor poured out into the streets, for company or consolation or simply by force of habit. “Big black, brown and yellow feet tread in funeral time on the swarming pavements of Harlem,” wrote one observer. Residents “just strolled along … trying to walk it off…. Everybody walking here, there, and anywhere … getting nowhere.” Around anyone attempting to explain what had just happened, crowds gathered. At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 140th Street, a seven-year-old girl holding an old family cake pan suitable for banging out a victory tattoo stood and cried. A block south, three women who’d bet a month’s salary on Louis were, one black reporter noted, “weeping desperately and wearing the most pitifully forlorn expressions I have ever seen.” Langston Hughes walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children and women sitting on the curb, their heads in their hands.

  On every block were four or five patrolmen, with a mounted policeman on each corner. Originally, they’d been sent to control the expected merrymaking; now they were guarding against violence and vandalism, and they couldn’t get to it all. Much of the mayhem was directed against whites who, whether out of bad luck or foolish voyeurism, found themselves in Harlem. Thirty blacks knocked down and kicked a fifty-year-old white WPA worker who’d come uptown for a union meeting. At Amsterdam Avenue and 116th Street, black youths threw stones at whites driving back from the stadium. At 155th Street and Bradhurst Avenue, the windows of buses returning from the fight were smashed. Blacks set upon blacks, too—for denigrating Louis or for betting on Schmeling, or for boasting about those bets, or for trying to collect on them too quickly, before tempers had cooled. “Joe didn’t land a single good punch,” a man declared, and was shot. Wilmer Cooper walked into a bar and charged that Schmeling had reneged on a deal, designed to prolong the fight films, to start battling in earnest only after the fourth round. First Cooper was stabbed, then a blow to his head with an auto jack fractured his skull. All night long, doctors in Harlem hospitals were busy sewing people back together.* One white man who’d unwisely decided to walk home from the fight closed his eyes, pretended he was blind, and, walking stick in hand, “tap-tap-tapped his way” out of Harlem and into safety. Jack Johnson could say “I told you so,” and did; in forty years his jaw hadn’t taken as much punishment as Louis’s had in a single night, he declared upon showing up at the Renaissance Grill with his white wife. He was literally run out of the joint.