Without even talking with George Little, Johnson signed up.† Rickard then discovered that a promoter named Jack Gleason had made a similar secret arrangement with Sam Berger, and Jeffries had already accepted a signing bonus of $10,000, twice the sum Rickard had promised Johnson. To keep his scheme afloat, Rickard agreed to become Gleason’s partner and pledged a second $5,000 bonus for Johnson so that both fighters were treated equally.
With everything already settled behind the scenes, the formal opening of the bids at Myer’s Hotel in Hoboken, New Jersey, on November 30 turned into a sort of dumb show, with Johnson and Berger pretending to give careful consideration to each of the offers made by the biggest promoters in boxing: Rickard; Uncle Tom McCarey and his Los Angeles rival Tuxedo Eddie Graney; and Phil King, the American representative of Hugh D. McIntosh.* The champion pretended not to understand all the details. He had only a grade-school education, he said, and asked for twenty-four hours to look over the offers. Tom McCarey eagerly volunteered to explain things to him. “That’s all right, Mr. McCarey,” Johnson answered, “but I believe what the good book says; I believe I’ll help myself.”
He already had helped himself, of course, and so had Jeffries. Tex Rickard and Jack Gleason got the formal nod the following day, amid angry charges of double-cross from their rivals. The site remained to be chosen. Johnson didn’t care where the fight took place, provided it was north of the Mason-Dixon Line. “I was born and raised in the South,” he said, “and I happen to know how a colored man stands in that section.” If he were to beat Jeffries there, he continued, “I think I would be the one to be carried out of the ring…. If I can’t get a match where I know my life is perfectly safe whether I win or lose, I will not fight at all.”
Rickard would eventually pick San Francisco, where he and Gleason would build a brand-new stadium at Eighth and Market Streets to seat the thirty thousand customers they were confident would pay to see the contest they had begun to tout as the real “Battle of the Century.”
The Rickard publicity machine lurched into action. Even the choice of referees made headlines. The editor of the New York Morning Telegraph asked the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, to officiate: “I was much inclined to accept this honorable invitation,” Doyle wrote in his memoirs, “though my friends pictured me as winding up with a revolver at one ear and a razor at the other. However, the distance and my engagements presented a final bar.” Johnson thought former president Theodore Roosevelt, himself an ardent amateur boxer, would be a good choice; he wasn’t interested, either, though he did look forward to the contest.† Frederick G. Bonfils, editor of the Denver Post, thought the coming fight so momentous, he wanted not one but two reporters at ringside, “the most eminent black man” and “the most eminent white man we can find.” Booker T. Washington and William Jennings Bryan both said no.*
Despite Rickard’s best efforts, rumors spread almost immediately that the fight was fixed and that Johnson had agreed to lose. The champion dismissed the idea out of hand: he’d resisted such offers when he was poor, he said; why would he entertain them when “I’ve got … money enough to live on if I never fight again?” Jeffries was indignant:
I have never faked the public, nor am I starting now…. Johnson knows that I hate the ground he walks on, that I consider him an accident in the championship class, and that I propose to give him the worst beating ever given any man in the ring. There has been no frame-up—there will be none.
But the fact that the two fighters were to split two thirds of the film rights added plausibility to the rumors. “It is no exaggeration to say that the entire world will await a pictorial representation of the fight,” said Moving Picture World.
With good light and a battle of, say, thirty well fought rounds, and the unmistakable victory of Jeffries, these pictures should prove in the current locution, a “gold mine.” This is the wish … of hundreds of millions of white people throughout the world.
[But] … if Johnson wins? It is commonly believed that the pictures would then be of comparatively little value, especially among the white section of the community.
By winning, then, Johnson would actually lose money. To some, his willingness to take that gamble meant he must also have been willing to throw the fight. The rumors would persist until the day Johnson and Jeffries entered the ring.
Jim Jeffries had done so well on his first theatrical tour, he decided to undertake another before he started training in earnest, this time under the management of Jack Curley and the flamboyant Chicago impresario H. Harrison Frazee, then known as the “king of the one-night stands” for the arduous but profitable vaudeville tours he organized.* Frazee and Curley guaranteed Jeffries one thousand dollars a week plus a hefty portion of the gross receipts to head an all-star “Living Wonders” troupe of boxers and wrestlers and play theaters across the country.
At first, things didn’t go well. Jeffries hated the daily grind, grew tired of shaking hands and signing autographs and trying to control his appetite and his drinking. He missed his wife, too, and cursed himself for signing a contract that was earning him much less than he’d received earlier in the year from William Morris. When the show pulled into Toledo, he threatened to quit, and it took all of Curley’s persuasive powers to get him to stick it out—plus the promise that he’d be pocketing ten thousand dollars a week once they left the jaded East and began to play western towns whose citizens were starved for entertainment of any kind.
Jeffries stayed on board, and when Curley left the show shortly before it came to its end in Minnesota in February, the ex-champion shook his hand. “Jack, I’m grateful to you for two things,” he said. “The first is that you persuaded me to go through with the tour when I wanted to quit. The second thing is that not once on the trip have you talked ‘nigger’ to me.”
The hourly reminders of Jeffries’ responsibility as the rescuer of the white race had begun to wear on him. Scores of letters from anxious admirers arrived every day. “Jim, please, for our sakes, wallop the big Smoke good and hard,” wrote a group of American sailors aboard a battleship off Okinawa. A Muncie, Indiana, man offered to show him “how to whip the nigger.” The actress Ethel Barrymore said she hoped Jeffries would kill “the black bluff.” The Bodega Club of Deadwood, South Dakota, assured him the whole town was pulling for him to “smash the coconut off the dinge.” After a while, Jeffries ordered all letters from strangers dumped into the trash, unopened.
Only one time during the tour, Curley remembered, “was there the slightest reference to Johnson in any conversation between us.” Leaving Sioux City, Iowa, one night, Curley was in the upper berth and Jeffries was reading down below when suddenly he crumpled up his newspaper and threw it to the floor, cursing.
Curley asked what was the matter.
“There’s an article in there about how the skunk [his invariable term for Johnson] can beat me. All I want is to get him into the ring and smash his black face.”
Jim Jeffries’ second tour turned out to be another financial triumph: Frazee and Curley wrote him a check for $112,500, more than two million in today’s dollars.
By contrast, Jack Johnson’s more or less simultaneous vaudeville tour would yield mostly chaos. After the bids for the big fight were opened, Johnson stayed on at Barron Wilkins’ Little Savoy. A small-time theatrical impresario named Barney Gerard visited him there in mid-December, hoping to work out a contract for a string of vaudeville appearances—a few days as star of a touring show called the Atlantic Athletic Carnival, followed by seven weeks with a burlesque revue, Follies of the Day. The Jeffries fight was still more than seven months away, and there was no reason not to make as much money as possible in the interim.
Gerard would play only a minor role in the drama of Johnson’s life, but government investigators later interviewed him at length, and his testimony offers an important backstage glimpse into the champion’s troubled private world. On that first visit, Gerard was introduced to Hattie McClay as Mrs. Jac
k Johnson. But a week later, when he turned up again to close the deal, another white woman was introduced as the champion’s wife. Gerard was baffled until a little man with a big, battered nose, who said his name was Sig Hart, took him aside and offered to explain things. Hart was a former bantamweight and flashy full-time sport from Chicago—his nickname was “the little fashion-plate”—who had known Johnson since his first visit to that town. He had a shady reputation: one sportswriter called him “a diminutive trouble-maker”; another said Hart was never happy “if not embroiled in something”; and during his boxing days at least one purse had been withheld from him for taking a too-obvious dive. But he was now a permanent part of the champion’s entourage, acting as valet, fixer, court jester, and companion in nighttime adventures. Hart, Gerard remembered, warned him “not to make mention of the woman I had seen on my previous visit. This woman now present was supposed to be [Johnson’s] real wife.”
The woman now present was Etta Duryea, whose friendship with Johnson had clearly progressed beyond telephone calls. Like the other women with whom he lived from time to time, she kept her true identity to herself so far as possible, and very little reliable information about her survives. After her relationship with Johnson ended in tragedy, the New York World would run a leering account of her life, filled with gossip and half-truths. “It was notorious that Johnson had fascinated other white women,” it said, although “none, to be sure, [was] of her breeding.” That part, at least, was true.
Etta Terry Duryea had been raised in the midst of a kind of comfort and luxury that, until he won his title, neither Jack Johnson nor any of the women who had previously traveled with him had ever known. She was born in 1881 in her family’s summer home in the fashionable Long Island community of Hempstead. Her father was the superintendent of Young, Gerard & Co., a Brooklyn firm that milled door frames and window sashes and decorative mouldings. And she had married into a family still better-off and better connected. Clarence E. Duryea was the son of a wealthy real estate man who enjoyed yachting and rode with the exclusive Meadow Brook Hunt, whose members over the years had included William K. Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and Elliott Roosevelt. She’d met him when his horse came up lame while following the pack and he’d walked the limping animal up the drive to the Terrys’ door and asked her if he could water it. She said he could and brought him a glass of water for himself as well. Struck by her beauty, he’d asked if he could call again, beginning a courtship that ended with a June wedding in her family’s Brooklyn parlor in 1903. Both seem to have been stagestruck. She played the piano and sang. He sang, too, well enough to have been a tenor soloist at the Garden City Episcopal Cathedral. Against the wishes of both their families, who thought show business beneath them, they tried the theater without much success. After four years or so, according to the World, the two drifted apart; “Mrs. Duryea began to be seen at race tracks without her husband” and was soon a favorite among what the paper called “white sporting men.”
Glamorous, well-spoken, and unattached, she brought a new elegance and refinement into Johnson’s life, made the hats and furs and dresses and diamonds he provided for her look as if they had been made for no one else. Many years later, his old sparring partner Gunboat Smith still couldn’t get over the fact that Johnson’s new companion was “a highly educated woman.” And in part, perhaps, because of Etta’s background and bearing, Johnson seems to have been more taken with her than he had been with any of her predecessors; he also seems to have been willing to overlook episodes of what he may have initially dismissed as moodiness but which was really early evidence of the depression that would eventually consume her.
Belle Schreiber and Hattie McClay bitterly resented Johnson’s special treatment of this newcomer. Both were fearful she would displace them in the champion’s affection—and cut them off from his generosity. They had quarreled with each other over Johnson in San Francisco but in the end made peace. As sporting women, they had no real reason to expect fidelity from the men who paid them for their company.
Etta felt differently. She was accustomed to better treatment than her rivals had ever known, and once she had committed herself to the champion, she saw no reason to accept his customary faithlessness without a struggle. For his part, Johnson seemed to think he would be able somehow to keep all the women in his life happy—and willing to tolerate the continuing presence of the others. But not even Jack Johnson could manage that. The result would be almost perpetual disorder.
It began right after Christmas, and again Barney Gerard would be on hand to see it. For the first time in seven years, Johnson was to be with his family for the holidays. He had a home of his own now, a handsome turreted three-story brick house at 3344 South Wabash in Chicago he had bought for his widowed mother for ten thousand dollars. Two of his sisters, Lucy and Jennie, and his young adopted brother, Charles, would eventually live there, too. “Jack Johnson was one of the two happiest persons in Chicago yesterday,” the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin reported afterward. “His mother was the other.” A newspaper photographer caught a glimpse of this holiday idyll inside the Johnson home: George Little and a Johnson niece look on as the champion embraces his mother and his “wife” of the moment, Hattie McClay. A Christmas tree hung with tinsel occupies one corner of the room, and at its foot a bright-eyed nephew sits astride a hobbyhorse surrounded by shiny new toys.
A couple of days later, everything changed when Belle Schreiber and her younger sister turned up unexpectedly from Milwaukee. They brought still more unexpected news: Belle was pregnant, or so she said. The baby was Johnson’s. According to her later testimony, he was pleased: “He wanted me to have it. He asked me to have this child and not to do anything to get rid of it.”*
A little later that day, Barney Gerard happened by. He’d just come in from New York and wanted to make sure Johnson would be ready to start his vaudeville tour on New Year’s Eve as scheduled. Johnson received him cordially, then quietly asked a favor. A young lady was coming to call, he said. Would Gerard please pretend she was his friend, not Johnson’s? Gerard agreed to go along. But when Etta Duryea arrived moments later, the showman had no opportunity for playacting. Both Belle Schreiber and Hattie McClay recognized Etta immediately as Johnson’s “girl friend from Brooklyn” and threatened to “beat her up” if she didn’t leave.
Etta fled. Johnson brought her back and moved her belongings into his mother’s house. He and Belle had a long private talk, after which she and her sister left again for Milwaukee, carrying what Gerard remembered being told was “a large amount of cash.” Belle would bear no child. No one knows whether she aborted it or suffered a miscarriage, or if it ever existed at all. Johnson’s lawyers would later speculate that her dramatic announcement had simply been a last-ditch bid to retain her position as the most important “Mrs. Jack Johnson.” If it was, it failed. Johnson had, as Gerard said, “changed wives.” From now on, Etta Duryea would be Mrs. Jack Johnson, and Belle would find herself relegated to the secondary role Hattie McClay had been playing when she first caught Johnson’s eye.
As he started on his vaudeville tour in the dead of the midwestern winter, the champion had plenty of masculine company: Barney Gerard and George Little, Sig Hart and Abe Ahrens, all came along. But without steady female companionship he found the road intolerable. In Terre Haute, Indiana, he refused to appear onstage in tights because there was no heat in the theater. When the manager responded by calling in a constable to attach his belongings, Johnson climbed on top of his trunks and threatened to “hit the first man who touched them,” backing down only when reinforcements arrived. He left George Little behind to negotiate the return of his luggage and moved on to Cleveland, where he was made to dress in the cellar; blacks were not allowed in the dressing rooms. When a taxi driver refused to carry him in Boston, he smashed the windows of the cab. In the same city he pulled a gun and threatened to shoot Sam Langford after his perennial challenger cornered him in a bar and suggested he and Johnson go down into t
he cellar and see who was the better man.
He eventually persuaded Belle Schreiber by telephone to join him in Boston to keep him company, but they had a violent quarrel soon after she got there—her maid, a black woman named Julia Allen, later alleged that he hit her with an automobile tool, badly bruising her side—and she left him. He gave her money for her train ticket, but she refused to say where she was going. “We were not on good terms,” she remembered. A madam in Cleve-land turned her away. So did one in Pittsburgh. “They didn’t want me because I was Jack Johnson’s white sweetheart,” she remembered. “Bad as the places were, I was too bad to remain in them.” She was drinking absinthe heavily now, and had begun using drugs.
Alone in New York in the early morning hours of January 20, Johnson got into more trouble. After finishing his last show at the Bowery Theater, he stopped in at Barron Wilkins’ place. Sitting at a table near the bar were two sporting women and a little drunk named Norman Pinder, who boasted he’d known the champion for years. The women, eager to meet Johnson, loudly insisted that Pinder offer to buy his old friend a beer. Pinder said he’d be glad to do it.
Johnson declined. He never drank anything but wine, he said.
“Don’t pull that stuff on me,” Pinder shouted. “I knew you when you drank beer out of a growler and were glad to get it.”
There were more words. Johnson knocked the little man down, kicked him as he lay on the floor, piled a chair and a table on top of him, and pulled a revolver halfway out of his pocket before his friends could calm him down—or so Pinder would later claim. The police arrested the champion in his dressing room the following evening and charged him with assault. When an officer asked why he’d hit the smaller man so hard, Johnson answered, “Honest to heaven, Mister, I wish I’d hit him harder. He’s been casting reflections about me ever since I hit town.”
Unforgivable Blackness Page 24