Still, there was some unfinished business. One item was the Angriff’s pool. Not one of the thirty thousand entrants had called for Louis in the first round, but four intrepid souls had picked him in the second. The pot was divided among twenty people, each of whom received 10 Reichsmarks each. The magazines, with their longer deadlines, also weighed in. Louis was now the honest world’s champion, said the Reichs-sportblatt. Volkssport und Leibeserziehung claimed that Schmeling had actually been too smart, relying excessively on strategy and not enough on instinct. “Two minutes determine the work of five years,” Thoma wrote in Box-Sport. “There could hardly be a greater tragedy in sports.” He pushed for a third fight. And if the Americans wouldn’t hold it, he asked, then why not the Germans? “Since here, as is well known, Negroes are not lynched and Jews are not shot, the fight can take place without difficulty,” he wrote. He urged against writing Schmeling off: it was just not the Nazi way. “National Socialism is not a creed professing the success of the moment; it is not jingoism,” he wrote. “Serious work is rewarded with serious recognition, even at times when success is elusive.” The Hitler Youth certainly weren’t writing Schmeling off; always, its magazine stated, he would “keep his place in the heart of the youth.” That said, the promised second installment of a feature on Schmeling never appeared.
On June 29, Goebbels decreed that “it is now time to stop with the picture reports about Schmeling, his fight, and his private life.” The ban would extend to coverage of Schmeling’s return to Germany. Hellmis, meantime, remained in New York; Parker suggested he was afraid to return home. Unable to write any more about Schmeling, he turned to New York itself, and why every third boxer there wore the Star of David on his trunks, “even if he looks like a Norwegian sailor.” Soon, Hellmis put off to sea. This trip would be very different from his epic journey two years earlier, when he’d felt an almost divine calling to tell Schmeling’s story. For all his vigilance about what Schmeling ate and drank, Hellmis had neglected to look out for himself, and shortly before he left, someone slipped him a Mickey Finn; he was sick for two days. Several took credit for the deed, but Joe Jacobs’s claim was the most credible. “I got even with that big Nazi bum,” he said later.*
Schmeling’s condition stabilized quickly enough for the hospital to discontinue its daily bulletins. His room was so filled with flowers that extra bouquets were distributed in the wards. But his spirits remained low. His face was still bruised and it hurt whenever he moved, something the nurses had to help him do. “A man who had been run over by a steam roller could not have suffered more,” wrote Al Monroe, who visited him a week after the fight. To Monroe and others, Schmeling now insisted that he never intended to claim a foul, but only that the kidney punch was illegal in Europe. As for the other punches, Louis had hit him as hard in the first fight, and he had handled it just fine. “He could have hit me on the head or the stomach, but it had to be there,” he complained.
The Bremen was to set sail around midnight on July 2, a Saturday. Seeking to elude the press, Schmeling arranged to leave the hospital quietly twenty-six hours earlier. He was taken by stretcher to the pier on West Forty-sixth Street, and by the time the press knew anything about it, he had been installed on board, with guards surrounding his stateroom. Few people were sorry to see him leave. He’d be back, Joe Williams predicted, because he had “a lyrical enthusiasm for the American dollar.” But he’d never fight Louis again, because Louis could beat him any night of the week. Before leaving, Schmeling had several accounts to settle. He owed money to Jack Dietz, the owner of the 1936 fight film. He also owed Mike Jacobs, Uncle Sam, Madison Square Garden, and Steve Dudas. Dietz and the United States marshall boarded the Bremen early Saturday morning to make sure Schmeling paid up. By Parker’s calculation, $153,000 of Schmeling’s $174,000 take was already spoken for, and that didn’t count training expenses, hospital bills, Machon’s fees, or Joe Jacobs’s cut, however skimpy that might have been.
His business done, Schmeling met with reporters. He was propped up in his bed, dressed in blue pajamas with red piping; his back was fixed tightly with adhesive, his left eye still “in mourning.” “I haff moved from one prison to another only this iss a nicer chall, because it iss moving toward home,” he said. Again, he said he had no plans to retire: “There is vork to be done. Great vork.” Again, he stressed that he’d gotten a bad break. All he wanted was “anozzer chance.” The Nazis ordered cautious coverage of his plans. “Since Schmeling’s future sporting activities are not yet certain, one is warned against taking up reports about supposedly firm plans and new agreements,” the press was told.
A nurse would accompany Schmeling during the crossing, as would Machon. Also on board was a German sports reporter named Carl Otto Haymann, who neatly summed up his experience thus far. “We traveled seven thousand miles for—poof!” he said. Schmeling was again bringing back footage of the fight; Machon, the ship’s captain, and four of Schmeling’s friends watched it at sea. But confined to his cabin, Schmeling could not, and it was surely just as well. He owned the German rights to this film, too, but its commercial prospects were bleak. “The Nazis will break down no doors trying to get a peek at the movies showing their hero being punched into a protoplasmic mass,” wrote Shirley Povich of The Washington Post.
Ondra called the ship several times to check up on her husband, and to plead with him to retire. Sitting up in his bed, a phonograph playing swing music in the background, Schmeling told a reporter that he’d radioed officials in Bremerhaven, asking that no reception be held for him. His wishes dovetailed nicely with the regime’s: the more low key, the better. The Bremen docked in Cherbourg on July 8 and reached Bremerhaven the next day. Among those meeting Schmeling were his wife, his mother, and one of Tschammer und Osten’s representatives. Schmeling was not on a stretcher; “that would never have done,” he explained. Instead, the two women helped him down the gangplank and toward the boat-train to Berlin, where a special compartment had been readied for him. Schmeling complained of dizziness, probably from having been in bed so long. Asked about the fight, he said he appreciated the fairness of the Yankee Stadium crowd. “A few intimates emitted a heil or two,” wrote an American reporter with no knowledge of Schmeling’s request. “There is either a tacit verboten on Max in Germany or else a definite order to play down this dark-browed Aryan who lost to a Negro.” An equally cheerless welcome greeted Schmeling in Berlin, where just two dozen people—friends, newspapermen, photographers—awaited him at the Zoo station. “That’s certainly one thing the Germans of today have to learn: how to be good losers,” another American reporter wrote.
Schmeling said he planned to enter a hospital the next day to complete his cure, but beyond that he’d make no statement. Five days later, he checked out of the clinic, telling Thoma that his career was not yet over. To allay reports that Schmeling had killed himself, the propaganda ministry directed German magazines to print pictures of him; in mid-July Box-Sport put him and his wife, walking together down a street, on its cover. “Today, Schmeling has more friends in America than before, and Joe Louis hasn’t won any new ones since his doubtful victory,” the magazine wrote. “Anywhere else, and under any other ring rules, Joe Louis would have been disqualified.”
Immediately following the fight, Box-Sport said it awaited the fight films with “burning curiosity,” presumably to document Louis’s perfidy. When Thoma saw them, necessarily while still in New York, he suggested that the fateful kidney punch had been excised by “the all-powerful Mike Jacobs and his friends.” There’s no evidence this is true. But rather than using the film to prove Schmeling’s point, Goebbels barred it outright. “[Schmeling] is brutally beaten,” he told his diary after screening the footage. “Can’t be shown publicly.” Asked why the films were not distributed, the German news agency explained that they had arrived “too late.” Reports soon surfaced that the Nazis were showing doctored fight films, with footage from the two fights interspersed. The resulting pastiche suppose
dly showed Schmeling winning handily (the first fight) until the kidney punch (the second fight). Roxborough complained to the American ambassador in Berlin, Hugh Wilson, whose investigation revealed that no fight films, real or doctored, were being shown in Germany.
With Schmeling out of commission, boxing promoters launched yet another search for a “white hope.” “The hunt is on,” Ring reported in September. “Hundreds of managers and scouts throughout the world are on the lookout. The lumber camps are being combed. The C.C.C. [Civilian Conservation Corps] camps are being scoured. There is a sharp lookout in every gymnasium where boxing is followed for the young man who some day may come up as did Louis and be able to survive the flaying fists of the Bomber.” It was a vain wish, Fleischer conceded six months later— “No champion was ever as far removed from the available opposition as this somber socker”—but also an entirely unnecessary one: “Gone are the days of the white hope hysteria when every muscle-bound truck driver, stevedore, laborer or what-have-you was looked upon as a potential savior of an harassed humanity,” he wrote. And that was the glory in Louis’s story: it offered hope not just to his own people and nation, but to a much larger constituency, too: “In a world tormented by a tidal wave of intolerance,” Fleischer said, “the American attitude toward Louis stands out like a beacon of hope on a stormy night.”
That may all have been true. But soon, there’d be no need for fighters, at least in the ring, nor would there be much cause for hope of any kind. Not even the mighty Joe Louis could prevent the catastrophe to come.
* Two Gary residents, a white woman named Florence Nehring and Joseph Pitts, a black barber, had listened to the fight—she at her home, he at his barbershop. Each then went out to reconnoiter. Whites near one commercial strip began pelting the car carrying Pitts and two of his friends with tomatoes and eggs. Pitts got frightened, opened the door, and brandished a revolver, which went off accidentally. After ricocheting off a wall, the bullet hit Nehring in the abdomen. Hundreds of angry whites then swarmed around Pitts’s car; cries of “Lynch the nigger!” filled the air. A policeman pulled him to safety, but whites turned over the car with the other men still inside; one rioter tried puncturing the gas tank with an ice pick and setting the car on fire. Fearing he’d be lynched—the crowd had swollen to more than two thousand people—authorities took Pitts to a remote jail. “Prizefights between white men and Negroes always supply enough dynamite for an explosion,” the local newspaper observed. Gary’s black weekly apologized to its white neighbors: “We have, as a whole, tried to so conduct ourselves as to merit the respect of the white people of Gary, and their attitude toward us has been so exceptional, that we blush with shame at this lapse of good sense,” it stated. Nehring ultimately died and Pitts was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment; he spent five years in jail before his sentence was commuted. He later became head of the local branch of the NAACP.
* The towel reputed to be the one Machon threw, now in the Smithsonian Institution, is almost certainly an impostor.
* Szlengel, who went on to become the unofficial poet of the Warsaw Ghetto, was killed in the uprising there in April 1943. He was not yet thirty years old.
† But surely the most novel interpretation of the outcome came from W. C. Fields. “It simply bears out what I’ve always contended,” he told Ed Sullivan. “A kidney needs a good alcoholic lining to stand up under wear and tear. Schmeling was the victim of clean living. I dare say that if Louis or any other professional slasher dealt me such a blow that their hands would crumple from the impact. As a result of long and serious drinking, I’ve developed protective ripples of muscles over my kidneys.”
* In another nearly equally plausible version of the story, it is Machon to whom Jacobs slipped the Mickey Finn.
Epilogue
FOR JOE LOUIS if for almost no one else, the legendary second Louis-Schmeling fight faded fast. “I thought that would be the happiest moment of my life, the night I knocked out Smellin’ and got my revenge,” he noted a few months later. “And when I did, somehow it didn’t seem important any more.” For the next few years, he had more trouble finding decent opponents than beating them. One of his victims was another of Joe Jacobs’s charges, Tony Galento; Jacobs accused Louis of having had a gadget in his glove the night he’d crushed Schmeling—a charge he quickly recanted. By September 1939, Jack Blackburn pronounced Louis the greatest heavyweight ever. After that, Mike Jacobs kept Louis extremely busy; he had eleven fights in 1940 and 1941 alone. His roster of undistinguished rivals was famously dubbed “The Bum-of-the-Month Club.” Only Billy Conn, who had Louis beaten on points in June 1941 until foolishly going for a knockout late in their fight, put Louis to any kind of test. “It may be impossible for any Negro to be altogether happy in the U.S. but Louis probably comes as close to this ideal as any other member of his race,” Life magazine declared in the spring of 1940.
Even before Pearl Harbor, Louis had signed up for the peacetime draft, and his patriotic deeds following America’s entry into World War II only broadened and deepened his appeal. In January 1942, he donated all his winnings from a title defense against Max Baer’s younger brother, Buddy, to the Navy Relief Fund, to be given to the families of fallen sailors. Louis had “laid a rose on Abraham Lincoln’s grave,” former New York mayor Jimmy Walker said afterward. He then enlisted in the still-segregated army. In March 1942, Private Joe Louis told a New York audience, “We’ll win, ’cause we’re on God’s side,” a slogan that made its way into songs and posters. Then he again put his title on the line for charity, this time against Abe Simon for the Army Relief Fund. Louis’s qualms about American racism didn’t lessen his patriotic ardor. “There’s a lot wrong with our country, but nothin’ Hitler could fix,” he said. But he would not box before segregated crowds on American military bases, complained to the War Department about the poor treatment of black soldiers, and defended a black private named Jackie Robinson following his altercation with a southern cracker. Footage of Louis in basic training appeared in a government documentary called The Negro Soldier. The film also noted that while Louis was serving his country, Schmeling was serving his, as a paratrooper in the Wehrmacht. Once again Louis and Schmeling had squared off, the narrator solemnly declared, “this time in a far greater arena and for much greater stakes.”
Schmeling had hoped to resume his boxing career upon recovering from his injuries in the Louis fight. In July 1938, Machon announced that Schmeling would resume his training as soon as his doctors approved. That September, the Reichssportblatt reported that Schmeling and Ondra were in Berlin, “as happy and gay as one can be,” notwithstanding reports to the contrary abroad. Six weeks after the fight, Schmeling was invited to the Harz Mountain town of Benneckenstein to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the local chapter of the Nazi Party, and his friend and Goebbels’s deputy, Hans Hinkel, accepted his invitation to go with him. That never happened, but no high-ranking Nazi would have ever even considered accompanying anyone who was in official disfavor. That September Schmeling again attended the annual Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg, as he often had, and met with Goebbels as well. Though mentioned far less often in the German papers—as a boxer who wasn’t boxing, he was doing little worthy of mention—the Nazi press continued to praise him. The magazine of the Hitler Youth described him as a role model to German boys; Box-Sport pronounced him “as popular as ever, because he went down as a fighter.” Celebrating Schmeling was different from acknowledging what had happened to him, though; when the Reichssportblatt listed the monthly athletic highlights of 1938, the Louis-Schmeling fight was omitted.
Schmeling would not have remained in official favor had the authorities known that on the night of November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht, when the Nazis destroyed Jewish businesses and synagogues throughout Germany and sent thousands of Jewish men to concentration camps—he picked up two Jewish teenagers, sons of an old friend, drove them to his hotel suite in Berlin, and sheltered them there for several
days, until the worst excesses subsided. While Schmeling the public figure had always been oblivious of or indifferent to the larger symbolic importance of what he did, Schmeling the private citizen was capable of acts of courage and compassion toward particular individuals, which by their very nature remained unsung. In fact, Schmeling himself never talked about it, or even cited it on his behalf once the war was over. And though it is hard to find other specific examples, his helpfulness to the victims of Nazi persecution is said to have intensified as Hitler’s atrocities worsened.
Any official unhappiness with Schmeling stemmed initially from comments attributed to him in the Western press later in 1938, following reports that Goebbels had been roughed up by friends of the husband of Lida Baarova, the Czech actress with whom the propaganda minister was said to be having an affair. It was lucky for Goebbels that he had never tried to play around with Anny, Schmeling was quoted as saying, because he would have broken Goebbels’s neck. There were reports that for those remarks Schmeling had been thrown into a concentration camp, but he soon made plans to return to New York, and to attempt to fight Louis again. “I am Joe Louis’s master,” he declared before sailing from France in January 1939. “I proved it once and I’ll prove it again.” Guessing precisely why Schmeling was making the trip “provides boxing with its best puzzle since Max Baer sold 108 percent of himself,” the Chicago Tribune observed; Bob Considine called it “the strangest and perhaps the most sinister trip ever taken by an athlete.”
The assumption was that the Nazis wanted him to prove he had not been imprisoned, though if that were really the case, they had no illusions it would work. “The fact that Schmeling is allowed to travel not only domestically but also outside the borders should silence all the lies about his ‘disappearance’ or ‘death,’” the 12 Uhr-Blatt declared. “Schmeling’s trip will surely bear some results, but rabble-rousers and the Jewish criminals will certainly come up with a new lie.” Or he had debts to settle with the owners of the 1936 fight films, or he wanted to tend to the money he’d squirreled away, or he wanted to borrow more of it from Mike Jacobs. Schmeling said simply that he wanted to see some friends and a few movies, and take a vacation. “I am not what you say in bad with the government,” he declared upon arriving in New York in early February, noting that Hitler had sent him a telegram after the Louis fight. Never, he insisted, had he criticized Goebbels, either publicly or privately. Once again, he didn’t want to discuss politics; when a New York paper quoted Schmeling asserting that Hitler didn’t speak for all Germans, he denied ever saying such a thing and demanded a correction. Schmeling was happy to talk boxing, though, and he claimed he could beat Louis in a rubber match. Few took him seriously—“The reporters looked at each other and smiled, but not so Schmeling could see them,” one wrote—and fewer still hankered, as Schmeling clearly did, for such a fight. That included Joe Jacobs. Reporters noted that his fierce loyalty to Schmeling had netted him little more than “chicken feed and a million enemies among his own race,” and that the German “had done everything except kick the little guy down a flight of stairs to prove that he no longer valued his services.” But now Jacobs had a weapon more potent than a Mickey Finn with which to exact his revenge, arranging for Louis to fight a client who respected him and paid him appropriately—Galento—rather than one who did not. Jacobs “considered that he had squared accounts with Max,” one reporter observed. “He whooped it up for several days, and the drinks were on him.” Schmeling and Jacobs did not see each other on this trip, nor ever again.
Beyond Glory Page 46