After losing a ten-round decision in Germany in late October 1948, the forty-three-year-old Schmeling hung up his gloves for good. Held in an outdoor arena in the British sector of Berlin in weather so cold that the fighters had to keep covered between rounds, the fight was a grim finale to a glorious career. But by now Schmeling had made enough money to buy himself a farm in Hollenstedt, between Hamburg and Bremen, where he began to raise minks and tobacco. When the new West German state was born in 1949, Schmeling quickly moved into its pantheon. Starved for heroes, the fledgling country wasn’t inclined to scrutinize anyone’s anti-Nazi credentials too closely; Schmeling’s record—particularly his never having joined the party and his apparent loyalty to a Jewish manager— more than sufficed. Assisting him were the close friendships he maintained with three of West Germany’s most powerful publishers—Axel Springer, John Jahr, and Franz Burda—who made sure he received an adoring press.
Joe Louis faced a different set of obstacles after the war. For one thing, his old team had broken up. Jack Blackburn died in 1941. John Roxbor-ough went to prison for racketeering. And tired of her husband’s long absences and perpetual womanizing, in 1941 Marva had sued for divorce. The two quickly (and very publicly) reconciled and had a daughter, but in March 1945 the marriage ended. (They remarried the following year, only to divorce once and for all three years and another child later.) But Louis’s most serious problem was debt. All of the abstemiousness and discipline for which he was once renowned had long since disappeared. A soft touch for flashy new clothes, pretty women, people in need, buddies promising him a good time, investors with dubious schemes, and gamblers, he long lived well beyond even his considerable means, forcing Mike Jacobs to float him funds between fights. “They should have called him ‘Can’t-Say-No Joe,’” Manny Seamon, who’d taken over for Jack Blackburn, once said. Then there were the taxes he owed on the two charity bouts. By V-E Day, Louis owed Uncle Mike and Uncle Sam more than $100,000 apiece, and was as much as $350,000 in arrears.
Resuming his ring career seemed to promise a way out. His successful rematch against Billy Conn in June 1946 earned him $626,000, nearly twice any previous purse. But his skills were fading, and after two difficult victories over Jersey Joe Walcott, he retired in 1949. His record was unrivaled: winner of sixty of sixty-one professional fights, fifty-one by knockout; a reign of nearly twelve years; twenty-five title defenses. But money woes soon brought him back to the ring, an aging, flabby facsimile of his former self, and he suffered humiliating losses to Ezzard Charles in 1950 and Rocky Marciano in 1951. After that, he quit for keeps. He had earned $4.6 million for his labors but had virtually nothing to show for it, becoming living proof of the paradox John Lardner had noted at the very outset of Louis’s career: “The rules of arithmetic do not apply to the fight business,” he’d written. “The longer you stay in it, the less you have.” Louis received a pittance from the organization that had bought out Mike Jacobs, dabbled in public relations, and peddled Chesterfield cigarettes, “Joe Louis Punch,” and “Joe Louis Kentucky straight bourbon.” And, for $25,000 plus ten percent of the net receipts, he sold his saga to Hollywood. “The Joe Louis Story,” with Louis playing himself in a few scenes (and a young boxer named Coley Wallace in the rest), opened to indulgent reviews in November 1953. Playing Schmeling was Buddy Thorpe, son of the immortal Jim. There were fears that Schmeling might sue over the portrayal—in which, he claimed, he’d been made to look like a gangster. In fact, those scenes were eventually cut, and Schmeling appeared mostly in historic footage. He was also given a share of the profits.
Louis, still living in Chicago, began refereeing wrestling matches. So, too, oddly enough, did Schmeling, who in 1954 had quietly applied for and received a visa to enter the country, for the first time in fifteen years. His tour would begin in Milwaukee, which, with its ample German population, promised him about as hospitable a reception as any place in America. But making money, Schmeling later wrote, was not his main mission. It was to see Louis—and to clear the air. Schmeling flew to Milwaukee, where he was received coolly. Only begrudgingly did the state athletic commission give him a license. Then a disappointingly small crowd showed up for the match; when Schmeling was introduced, the cheers couldn’t quite drown out the boos. “I don’t believe the people in this country will pay to see Schmeling do anything,” said the promoter, who canceled the rest of the tour. “He is stuck with the stigma of Nazism. The public can’t forget that.” Once again, Schmeling seemed perplexed by the hostility and bemoaned the unfairness of it all; he hadn’t fired a single shot in wartime, he pleaded, and had visited all those GIs. “Twenty-five thousand soldiers can tell you that I did not talk about war or politics, but only about sports and America,” he said.
His visit with Louis proved more successful. As Schmeling later recalled it, he began by trying to explain that he had never been the Nazi ogre he’d been depicted to be, only to have Louis promptly cut him off. “Max, there is nothing to explain,” Louis said. “We are friends. It is all over.” The two ended up shooting the breeze at a black nightclub on Chicago’s South Side. “It wasn’t a bit like old times Sunday when Joe Louis and Max Schmeling got together,” a reporter wrote of their sparsely covered reunion. “For one thing, both parties were much too friendly.” “We were the victims of bad propaganda,” said Schmeling. “There never was any bad feeling on my part.” To Louis, such a rendezvous hardly mattered; he’d never lifted a finger to arrange one. But he was a gentle, sunny soul, and was pleased to play along. Those who lived through the second fight knew better. “The years have softened Louis’ feelings… for he was a vengeful man that night in 1938,” recalled Frank Graham.
En route back to Germany, Schmeling stopped off in New York. It made Milwaukee seem cordial. At Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, Schmeling tried, without success, to be interviewed and photographed. “Maybe a few decadent democrats remember the pictures of him in his Nazi uniform in Crete,” the New York Post theorized. A columnist at the paper, Leonard Lyons, expressed outrage that the U.S. government had let in Schmeling while barring John Gielgud, who had just been convicted in London of soliciting a homosexual. “Is it less reprehensible for Schmeling to have fired on Allied troops in wartime than for someone to be found guilty of a sex offense?” he asked. While in New York, Schmeling had a second reunion, with James Farley, the former state boxing commissioner. Farley was now a top Coca-Cola executive, and he offered Schmeling a valuable distributorship in northern Germany. (In this respect, Schmeling had bested his old rival; Coke had never wanted anything to do with Joe Louis, even in his prime.) The job ultimately made Schmeling a multimillionaire and even more of a member of the West German establishment, as well as a philanthropist. But just as important, it burnished his jolly, avuncular image; though some grew annoyed by his tireless pitches, he became a paterfamilias for a sweet, bubbly, and energetic new Germany.
Schmeling had one more appointment before leaving New York, one that was as important to him as his reunions with Louis and Farley. This one, with a reporter present, was in a cemetery in Queens—with Joe Jacobs. “Joe, here is a friend of yours!” the elderly Jewish caretaker said as Schmeling stood by Jacobs’s headstone. “It’s Max Schmeling! He didn’t forget you.” That was certainly true, for Schmeling continued to invoke their association often. So it was that even posthumously, Jacobs continued to represent—and to sanitize—him. But Yussel could do only so much. After what Gayle Talbot of the Associated Press called his “crowning rejection”—he was discouraged from visiting the training camps where Rocky Marciano and Ezzard Charles were preparing for their championship fight—Schmeling quietly left the United States. He’d probably never return, Talbot theorized. “The Black Uhlan’s return to the scene of his fistic triumphs must have been a disheartening experience, even for a man who never was noted for his delicate sensibilities,” wrote Talbot, who’d been following Schmeling for nearly two decades. “Before he left he fully realized the trip had been a mistake, that h
e could not roll back the years.”
But as well as he knew Schmeling, Talbot underestimated his determination; six years later he was indeed back, and back on the case. In October 1960 the American television program This Is Your Life profiled Louis, reuniting him with Roxborough, Black, and Braddock, among others, along with his siblings, children, and third wife, whom he’d wed after a short-lived second marriage a few years earlier. When his turn came, Schmeling bounded onto the stage to embrace Louis, almost knocking over the program’s host, Ralph Edwards, in the process. “What about this fellow?” Edwards asked him. A beaming Schmeling surveyed Louis, top to bottom. “Well, Joe Louis is a great friend, and the biggest sportsman, the finest sportsman I ever met,” he said. The program was striking for the dignity with which it portrayed Louis, alluding very gently to his tax problems, saying nothing about the most recent and degrading stage of his descent: professional wrestling. By this point, he had also begun taking drugs. “You have lived your life in honor with respect for your fellow man and for God, with great courage and with a great heart,” Edwards told him.* But the show was also a milestone for Schmeling: it was his first appearance on American television, and he had been received courteously, uncritically. In the United States as well as in Germany, he was starting to become accepted.
More skeptical observers still spotted a man in denial. “There is an aura of unreality about Max Schmeling,” one New York sportswriter wrote during this visit. “Somehow it’s a feeling he cultivates, begging belief that there was no Nazi Germany, no war, no blood, nothing but a time when men spent themselves gloriously only in the square arena of boxing.” This antipathy resurfaced a year later, when Schmeling arrived in heavily Jewish South Florida for the third Floyd Patterson-Ingemar Johansson heavyweight title fight. “Max Schmeling invaded Miami Beach, which took some courage, although Max, like sixty-seven million other Germans, was never a Nazi,” Roger Kahn wrote in the Herald Tribune. “As I get the picture, there were never more than five or six Nazis in Germany, but, of course, they worked very hard.” At the same time, old antagonists like Joe Williams of the World-Telegram had to concede that Schmeling was never the Nazi monster he had portrayed him to be.
Though Louis owed Mike Jacobs a fortune, Jacobs, who had a stroke shortly after the war, never pressed the point. “He’s done enough for me,” he told associates. But the IRS hounded Louis, and as it did, Louis’s problems multiplied. Gradually he slid into mental illness, convinced that the Mafia or other dark forces were out to kill him. In 1970 he was briefly committed. Medication made him functional enough to become a $50,000-a-year greeter at Caesars Palace, paid to shake hands with the thousands who still idolized him. But to a younger generation, black and white, Louis was beyond pathetic: he was irrelevant, a relic, superseded by all those younger, hipper black athletes whose paths he paved. Confident, combative, outlandish Muhammad Ali was now their model of a boxer and a black man. Ali only made things worse, dismissing Louis as an “Uncle Tom.”* What Ali did do was save boxing, at least for a time. But when he retired, the sport resumed its long downward slide. Changing tastes, the growing popularity of other sports, the multiplicity of competing titles, the role of television in killing off fight clubs, corruption, and even American prosperity—“There’s no more tough guys around, not enough slums,” the owner of the New York landmark Stillman’s Gym lamented. “The golden age of prizefighting was the age of bad food, bad air, bad sanitation, and no sunlight”—reduced boxing to a secondary sport, making Louis appear even more remote and inconsequential.
After heart surgery in 1977, Louis had a stroke, which left him paralyzed. The following year, Caesars Palace staged a tribute to him. Two thousand people, Schmeling among them, together watched footage of the 1938 fight. Then, as the theme song from Rocky blared over the public address system, Frank Sinatra wheeled Louis into the gigantic hall. It was a night in which sentimentality was outdone by Vegas-style vulgarity; people squirmed as Ali recounted how he’d been warned not to wind up “like poor Joe Louis,” how Louis was broke because he’d surrounded himself with “white people” and “Jews,” and how, while Ali had spoken out on social issues, Louis had remained silent. Then, Howard Cosell droned on so endlessly that Paul Anka never got to sing the special version of “My Way” he’d prepared for Louis. “No one said it out loud,” wrote Michael Katz of The New York Times, “but this was a farewell testimonial to … one of the greatest athletes in history and one of this country’s greatest heroes.”
That was about right. Louis died of a heart attack on April 12, 1981, at the age of sixty-six. One of those babies named for him, the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, gave the eulogy at Arlington National Cemetery; a rabbi, who’d been a boy in Vienna at the time of the second fight, recalled how Louis’s victory gave new hope to the city’s Jews. “For that alone, Joe Louis deserves to be blessed,” he said. Schmeling later claimed to have paid for Louis’s private funeral, a point that Louis’s lawyer later disputed. But dying afforded only a brief respite to Louis’s battered reputation. He slid further into oblivion, commemorated only in down-at-the-heels black Detroit, which named an arena after him and honored him with a statue—in the form of a giant fist—nearby. Only for those who had lived through his glory years did he remain an icon. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, more than one middle-aged African American told a reporter on the streets of Chicago that it was his saddest day since Schmeling had beaten Louis. To mark Nelson Mandela’s birthday one year, President Clinton—knowing how much Mandela loved boxing and that he had even listened to a recording of the second Louis-Schmeling fight while in prison—presented him with an unused ticket to that fight.
But as Louis’s star faded, Schmeling’s grew ever brighter, in part because he became the author of his own story. He wrote three autobiographies, in 1956,1967, and 1977. Though they became increasingly elaborate, and though eminent historians like Joachim Fest assisted him, all were filled with omissions and inaccuracies. In the longest and most ambitious, Erinnerungen [“Reminiscences”], even the date of his own wedding is wrong.* But they stood, and took on increasing credibility, because few Germans were sufficiently skeptical, energetic, or courageous to scrutinize them. And those few got no help from Schmeling; for decades he turned aside all scholarly inquiries, including multiple attempts in the 1970s by the greatest authorities on sports in the Third Reich, Professors Hajo Bernett and Hans Joachim Teichler. “Mr. Schmeling doesn’t answer such questions any longer,” they were informed on postcards from his office at Coca-Cola—if they heard back at all. Visitors to Schmeling’s estate could not get past the gate; instead, they were shunted off to one of his friends, who plied them with autographed pictures and assured them that interviews were quite impossible. In fact, Schmeling talked from time to time to a few friendly journalists, who could be counted upon never to stray from the same predictable, innocuous, and reverential script. And so it was that long after West German, and then German, culture had come to grips with its behavior during the Third Reich, Schmeling held himself aloof. Asked once if he had any regrets, Schmeling said no: he would do everything again in exactly the same way.
Anny Ondra died in 1987; the Schmelings never had any children. But Schmeling remained vital and vigorous. His extraordinary longevity—in part a tribute to his lifelong physical discipline—only burnished his reputation further. The man who was malleable enough to fit into Weimar Germany and the Third Reich with equal ease now became an exemplar of West Germany, of its economic miracle and its fledgling democracy. He was a constant presence on German television, bestowing awards on young athletes. At one point he was named the German sportsman of the century. His image, one observer later wrote, was that of a squeaky-clean Sunday school boy. Apart from the immunity old age generally confers, Schmeling had outlived anyone who knew any better. His legend grew further when, at a tribute in Las Vegas in 1989, the owner of the Sands Hotel, Henri Lewin, offered a story about Schmeling no one had previously known: Lewin was one of
those two Jewish boys Schmeling had sheltered on Kristallnacht. The story quickly became a staple in Schmeling’s biography, right behind the Louis fights. From the cartoonlike Nazi he’d been in prewar America, he became a cartoon figure of a different sort: a righteous Gentile. There were even rumors that a tree had been planted for him at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
The story about the Lewin brothers, along with tales of his loyalty to Joe Jacobs, earned a prominent place in the obituaries when—this time, for real—Max Schmeling died, on February 2, 2005, seven months shy of his hundredth birthday. By the time his death was announced, he had already been buried, with only a dozen or so friends present, thus affording him more of the privacy he had always cherished. It did not matter where the tributes appeared, whether in Berlin or London or New York: now, there was only one verdict on Schmeling, and it was almost uniformly positive. “The embodiment of the decent German who wouldn’t be co-opted by anyone for anything,” wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine. “Our last hero is dead, our only star,” declared Welt am Sonntag. Such comments prompted a caveat from the left-wing Die Tageszeitung, which described Schmeling as “a simple, modest, somewhat naïve and friendly man who wanted to please everyone—and, if it had to be, even the Nazis.” The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, seemed to acknowledge as much in his own carefully phrased statement. Like nearly everyone else, he saluted Schmeling’s athletic proficiency, fairness, and modesty, but he steered altogether clear of politics and said nothing of Schmeling’s behavior during the Third Reich.
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