The night after the Dresden premiere, the crowds outside the Titania-Palast in Berlin were “downright life-threatening.” Searchlights shot up into the sky; admittance was by invitation only, and but for the Führer, the panjandrums of the Reich were all there: Göring, Goebbels, Hess. When Schmeling entered, Ondra on his arm, he nearly brought down the house. “Hollywood scarcely could have outdone the scene,” Gayle Talbot of the Associated Press was to recall. Bellowing and raving on the soundtrack “like an off-key calliope,” he wrote, Hellmis worked the audience into a terrific lather—so much so, in fact, that it was hard to hear him over the din. “By the time the knockout finally came some of the more excitable Nazi youths were trying to get at Louis personally.” The lights then went up and a smiling Schmeling appeared on the stage. The audience stood and screamed for five minutes. Schmeling took numerous curtain calls, and the police had to escort him to his car. He and Ondra then dined with Hans Hinkel, Goebbels’s protégé in the Nazi propaganda ministry. With the film opening all over town the next day, one German paper theorized that Schmeling’s punches would soon leave all of Berlin “joy-groggy.”
In fact, all Germany would soon be just that. A 1,200-seat cinema in Bremen sold out for the local premiere, and two additional theaters were soon showing it. In Leipzig, “the audience was literally shivering out of excitement.” Its run in Bochum was extended after it broke an all-time attendance record. In Regensburg the audience applauded during the film, something Germans rarely did. Breslau, Danzig, Karlsruhe, Chemnitz, Halle, Ludwigshafen, Erfurt, Saarbrücken, Augsburg, Stettin, Görlitz: everywhere, the reports were the same. More than three million Germans saw Schmelings Sieg in its first four weeks. It was still playing in Berlin in late July, when the Americans arrived for the Olympics. By one account, Schmeling had paid only $20,000 for the German rights to the film but within two years had earned $165,000 from it.*
Schmeling’s popularity at home had reached unimaginable heights. Göring invited him to go hunting. Relations with Hitler remained cordial; when Gallico went to Schmeling’s house in Berlin to interview his old friend for a story about the Louis fight for the Saturday Evening Post, he noticed that a large inscribed photograph of the Führer dominated one room, while the remnants of the mammoth floral arrangement— “decorated with red, swastika-ed ribbons”—that Hitler had sent Ondra after the fight were nearby. “It must have taken three men to lift it,” Gallico wrote. And Schmeling wrote the introduction to a book called Deutscher Faustkämpf nicht prizefight: Boxen als Rassenproblem [German Fistfight not Prizefight: Boxing as Race Problem]. In it the author, Ludwig Haymann, posited that Schmeling’s style—scientific, precise, sophisticated—perfectly exemplified the German temperament. The book was a racist and anti-Semitic tract, stating that Louis had grasped for the heavyweight crown with a disdainful sneer and that Jews, drawn to boxing not by its sporting element but by pure greed, had degraded German concepts of heroism and idealism. Schmeling praised Hitler’s appreciation of boxing and wished Haymann’s book the success he said it deserved.
Schmeling later maintained that, politically speaking at least, all was not well for him at this time. A few days after his return to Germany, he said he had been offered a “dagger of honor” and the title of “Honorary Commander of the SA,” and as someone who disdained politics, he hadn’t known what to do. He said he called Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, and begged off. But anyone in the Nazi hierarchy surely would have realized that allying Schmeling so explicitly with Hitler was professionally counterproductive, even suicidal, abroad; surely it was the work of an unsophisticated, overzealous underling. In any case, by July 1936 it’s hard to see how such a gesture even mattered. Whatever his official status, Schmeling was thoroughly enmeshed with the Nazis, and he was perceived as such on both sides of the Atlantic. That he retained a Jewish manager in the United States may or may not have been an irritant in Berlin, but it was clearly tolerated by those who mattered. Hitler was so proud of Schmeling, Walter Winchell wisecracked, that he was thinking of naming a concentration camp after Joe Jacobs. Only with Goebbels had relations soured; it seemed he’d been in a theater the same night as Schmeling once and had been irked afterward when Schmeling, and not he, had been besieged for autographs.
Schmeling was never the man his most intemperate critics claimed. He was never “Nazi Max,” the man who had supposedly worn a storm trooper uniform during the early days of the regime, whose picture in a brown shirt had been widely displayed in Germany. Nor does anything support the hearty canard—the details of which vary—that Schmeling or Machon carried Nazi flags or uniforms with them when they came to the United States. But Schmeling’s dogged insistence that he was a sportsman rather than a politician made him more useful to the Nazis, not less. It allowed him to do business with Jews in New York, then hobnob with Nazis in Berlin and Berchtesgaden. The Nazis had Schmeling precisely where they wanted him, and while Schmeling always kept his own counsel, he was, to all appearances, content to be there. He had the best of both worlds: he was making enormous amounts of money, was poised to regain the heavyweight crown, and had the approbation of his people and his government. There is no evidence, in anything he said or did at the time, to suggest that he ever agonized over anything. Every athletic hero encountered parasitic “champion chasers,” wrote Pegler, but Schmeling was the first “to discover among the cooties in the seams of his shirt a ruler of a world power.” “The spectacle of the front-running chancellor chasing after a winner, whom he had previously disavowed, and yelling ‘Atta boy, champ, I was with you all the time,’ is the cheapest display of ki-yi sportsmanship in all the history of sports,” Pegler went on—as pathetic as making a model Aryan out of someone who once told Pegler he could well be part Mongolian.
The hostility American Jews felt toward Schmeling before the fight only intensified upon seeing the Nazis embrace him afterward. “When he went back to Germany and tossed himself (figuratively speaking) on Hitler’s manly (?) chest he was through over here,” wrote Doc Daugherty of the Daily Worker.* Giant photographs of Schmeling and Anny Ondra hobnobbing with Hitler popped up throughout New York’s garment district. “It would seem that Schmeling made a mistake in posing for the picture men,” Davis Walsh wrote. “It coupled him with Hitler’s regime, formally and for the first time.” In early July, the Angriff declared that only his fellow blacks wanted to see Louis fight Schmeling again; for everyone else, a Braddock-Schmeling fight for the title was all that mattered. In reality, a rematch against Louis was the only Schmeling fight many American boxing fans, especially in New York, would now pay to see.
ON SUNDAY, JUNE 21, two days after the fight, a group of newsmen stood outside Michigan Central Station in Detroit awaiting the train carrying Joe Louis back from New York. “One nice thing about Joe,” a photographer there said. “He’ll always give a guy a fair break on a shot.” That meant that he would always alight from the same car, so they could pre-focus their Speed Graphics at the standard twelve feet.
But this time a different Joe Louis emerged—“hiding behind everything except a set of false whiskers”—and at a different spot, for the train had slowed down to let him jump off early. Though the day was sunny, he wore a gray topcoat with a turned-up collar that covered much of his face; a straw hat and big blue sunglasses obscured the rest. When he spotted the photographers, he turned away and began running across the tracks. They scrambled in pursuit, trying to salvage a “steal shot”—the kind of picture one usually took of someone entering a jail. One of Louis’s handlers threatened to destroy their cameras and waved his hat in front of their lenses. Louis dived into a cab, and for a split second one could see why he’d suddenly grown so shy: the left side of his face was far too big.
Louis had made himself scarce in New York before leaving. His only appearance was at Mike Jacobs’s office, where he said he had no plans to watch the fight films. “I saw the fight,” he explained. Louis canceled his appearance at the Negro League ga
me in Newark, passing up a plaque calling him “the most outstanding athlete in the country.” Instead, he got himself a drawing room on the Red Arrow, leaving—fleeing, was more like it—New York at five in the afternoon. Less than twenty hours after the knockout, he was heading home to Detroit, and to his mother. The fashion in which Louis slithered out of town could not have been more different from his triumphant arrival but five weeks earlier. “No angels sang as he sat there in the locked compartment, no trumpets lashed the air with shrill effrontery,” one sportswriter observed. “Trumpets are not for idols with the cracked clay still sticking to their feet.” The Detroit Tribune, the local black weekly, welcomed Louis home with an open letter. “Detroit and its people still believe in you,” stated the message, which was signed by, among others, a congressman and a former governor of Michigan. “We believe your greatest victories are yet to come.” For the next couple of days, Louis remained secluded in Roxborough’s apartment. It was there, presumably, that he read a letter from Walter White, urging him to keep a stiff upper lip amid the abuse and second-guessing. “What happened last Friday night does not in the slightest change the attitude of some of us toward you,” White wrote. “The next time you fight Schmeling or anyone else I venture to predict that they will never be able to hit you with rights, or lefts either for that matter.” “I wanted him to know that not all of us were like the rats who desert a sinking ship,” the NAACP leader explained to Roxborough and Black. White himself confessed four days after the fight that his entire family remained “literally ill over the beating Joe took.”
Someone suggested that the Democrats gathering in Philadelphia pass a resolution extending the sympathy of the convention to Mr. and Mrs. Joe Louis of Chicago. Actually, condolences to all of black America would have been more apt.
Some black commentators were calm and philosophical about Louis’s loss. “Joe is human and is just a kid yet,” a black paper in South Carolina said. Others were practical: now that everyone wanted a crack at Louis, he’d make more money. Some were actually grateful to white America for sparing bruised black feelings more than they’d expected. But all this begged a bigger question: What in heaven’s name had happened to Joe?
Few black fans believed that the outcome was as simple as the best man winning; there had to be some other explanation. The Trinidadian calypso duet “Louis-Schmeling Fight” by the Lion and Atilla with Gerald Clark and His Caribbean Serenaders, one of a mounting number of Louis songs, captured the prevailing suspicion.
The Lion sings:
The fight between Schmeling and Joe Louis [Lou-ee]
Is an epoch in boxing history.
The critics said the Bomber lost the fight that night
Because he couldn’t stop Maxie’s smashing right
Though his disappointment he has now faced,
He has been defeated but not disgraced.
To which Atilla replies:
I do appreciate your song,
But on the night of the fight, well, something was wrong,
It wasn’t the same Bomber that we saw
Smashing Baer and Carnera on the floor.
I wouldn’t say it was dope or conspiracy,
But the whole thing looked extremely funny to me.
There were some sober, traditional explanations for Louis’s collapse. One was that he’d grown cocky and incorrigible, just as Roxborough and Black had belatedly conceded. Or he’d succumbed to a “maelstrom of flattery” from so-called friends. Or the city of Detroit was to blame, for its wild parties, close to which Louis’s Lincoln could invariably be found at all hours of the night. Or Lakewood was responsible; its salt air, its heat, its friendly people, and its “Coney Island trimmings” had fatally weakened Louis. The black nationalist Marcus Garvey blamed Louis’s selfishness and narrow-mindedness: while Schmeling felt responsible for all of Germany, to Louis it was all about himself and how much money he would make. “We wish Joe well, but we hope he has learnt a lesson from the fight, that when a white man enters the ring in a premium bout with a black man, he realizes that he has in his hands the destiny of the white race,” Garvey wrote.
For many, Marva was the prime culprit. Within hours of the knockout, her life “would not have been worth two cents in the Avenue,” the New York correspondent for one black paper reported. “Too much Mrs.,” a black actor suggested. A colleague agreed. “He should have married sooner,” he said. “He would have had more time to recover.” Marva had driven a wedge between him and Blackburn. Or Louis had seen too much of her, and too recently and too intimately, maybe even spilling his seed with her the night before the fight. While Schmeling’s wife was safely out of the way in Germany, Louis’s was in Harlem, tempting the natural appetites of a youthful groom at the very moment when he needed his entire reservoir of physical and mental energy. Or, conversely, Louis had argued bitterly with Marva after finding a letter from one of her old suitors. Or Marva should have stuck around Lakewood longer, keeping her husband from attending wild parties on the New Jersey shore or hanging out with all the pretty visitors. One black newspaper saw Marva as a tragic figure, set upon by her husband’s entourage, fans, and jealous women alike. Polls taken after Jesse Owens’s spectacular showing in Berlin six weeks after Louis’s debacle revealed that while Louis remained the more popular of the two, Jesse’s wife out-pointed Marva.
Some of the second-guessers charged that Louis slept too much. Some said Louis simply had an off day. After all, didn’t Babe Ruth sometimes spend an afternoon popping out to the infield? Some saw the hand of God, either beneficent (He was saving Louis for bigger things) or vengeful (He was offended by Louis’s quasi-religious status). But by one estimate, only one black in a thousand considered the fight legitimate; the rest saw something darker. Convinced it was fixed, many refused to pay off their bets. In dispute was only how the conspiracy was carried out, by whom, and how high up it went. Louis hadn’t been Louis at all, but a double. Or he’d been given the evil eye by a “professional jinxer.” Or he’d been a pawn in an anti-Semitic plot to bankrupt the many Jews who’d bet on him. Or Schmeling had double-crossed him on that purported deal to prolong the fight films. Or Blackburn had to pay off his debt to the underworld figure who’d helped him beat his murder rap. But in intensity, popularity, variety, and ingenuity, rumors that Louis had been “doped” dwarfed all the others.
To those inclined to believe it, the evidence was everywhere: that Louis had come into the ring late; that his hair had been disheveled; that he’d had a funny stare in his eyes; that he’d blinked so often; that he’d seemed agitated; that his color had been terrible; that he had suddenly and inexplicably forgotten how to box. How Louis had been administered the dope was more problematic—whether by injection, or on trick bandages, or in his food or water, or on his mouthpiece or the towels with which he’d been rubbed down. Maybe some “slickster” had dropped a “deadening pill” into Louis’s broth. Or Schmeling had put chloroform on his gloves, making Louis sleepy when they passed under his nose, or had had a “daze producing chemical” smuggled in from Germany, or had put something extra, like an iron bolt or lead, into his gloves. In Danville, Illinois, a young Bobby Short heard one of his mother’s friends, a maid in a local department store, speculate that someone had put dope in Louis’s orange juice, or his milk, or his oatmeal. Some blamed lax security at Louis’s hotel, and asked why he’d stayed on the Upper West Side rather than in more friendly and reliable Harlem. Gamblers could have been behind everything; anyone betting heavily on Schmeling, after all, had made himself a small fortune. The Nazis, too, could have been responsible, or Joe Jacobs, clever as he was. Or maybe it was Mike Jacobs, for Louis was actually a bigger draw as a threat to the crown than as champion. Most theories shared one feature: Louis himself was blameless. For him to be complicit was more than even the most deranged conspiracy-monger could contemplate.
Within hours of the knockout, rumors spread that Louis was seriously ill or dead. Once again, switchboards were floode
d. There were reports that seventeen doctors were trying to stop the blood from hemorrhaging in Louis’s head; that Blackburn was in jail; that a doctor had confessed to fashioning some potion that had sapped Louis’s strength, and had subsequently committed suicide. Street-corner agitators accused the white media of suppressing the truth. Coverage in the black press was intense, with the nation’s two most powerful black papers on opposite sides of the issue: while the Pittsburgh Courier became the house organ of the Louis camp, insisting nothing untoward had happened, the Chicago Defender fanned the flames, accusing Louis’s team of an overconfidence and arrogance that allowed people already out to exploit or hurt Louis to pull off their nefarious deeds.
To refute all suspicions, the Courier’s city editor retraced Louis’s movements for the thirty-one and a half hours between the weigh-in and the opening bell, meticulously reconstructing Louis’s naps, meals, and walks, along with what he insisted was his short and entirely platonic interlude with Marva. On the eve of the fight, he had Louis back in his hotel room by eight p.m. and in bed by nine-thirty, with a bodyguard alongside him in a twin bed, two state troopers in the next room, Blackburn and a third officer in another, and two more poised outside their door. Louis’s food was “specially prepared by a friend,” and he drank only “specially prepared bottled spring water” from Lakewood, even in the ring; so tightly corked had it been, in fact, that someone had to get a can opener from the dressing room. (Blackburn had a quicker rejoinder to all such talk. “What kind of dope was used that required twelve rounds before it’s effective?” he asked.) Louis himself tried to lay the rumors to rest. “There was nothing wrong in my fight with Schmeling but his right hand,” he wired the Kansas City Call, which reprinted the telegram on its front page. “Mr. Schmeling is a fine gentleman and a clean sportsman and I don’t like to hear my people takin’ credit away from him by sayin’ I was doped,” he told reporters. Such statements, while clearly sugarcoating Louis’s feelings about Schmeling, impressed Ed Sullivan. “The town is gabbing about Joe Louis…. Not so much about the lacing he took from Schmeling, but rather about the Detroit youngster’s refusal to cook up any phony alibis,” he wrote.
Beyond Glory Page 26