That February, Johnson’s old friend Nat Fleischer published the first issue of a new boxing magazine called The Ring. Not long afterward, Johnson came to call at Fleischer’s New York office. He wanted advice, he said. He’d written a detailed account of how he had thrown the Willard fight in order to get home to see his ailing mother. The New York Mirror had offered him two hundred dollars for it, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to sell it so cheap. What did Fleischer think he should do? Actually, Johnson had written nothing, may never have even spoken to the Mirror; he was just looking for some quick money. Fleischer offered him $250—fifty more than the Mirror had allegedly promised—and Johnson returned a week later with an eighteen-hundred-word “confession.” The editor put it in his desk drawer and declined to publish it during Johnson’s lifetime because he didn’t want to further damage the ex-champion’s reputation.
That reputation needed help. The American Burlesque Association canceled its twenty-week contract with him because he refused to appear in some of the theaters it had booked. In May, when he returned to Chicago for the first time since his release from prison to play the Avenue Theater with a new All-Star Vaudeville Company—“in which all the performers except myself were white,” he wrote—Bill Bottoms made good on his threat to sue him for the money he’d advanced him while in Leavenworth. The police department forced the cancellation of an engagement in Passaic, New Jersey, when they learned he was to appear onstage “surrounded by 30 white women.” The troupe disbanded, and when Johnson earned four hundred dollars fighting an exhibition with a second-rater named James “Tut” Jackson in Washington Court House, Ohio, he had to turn over most of the money to his angry ex-employees. Someone then set him up in a brokerage office at Forty-ninth and Broadway in New York City. Perhaps understandably, it did not stay open long.
In February of 1923, he was working in New York as a $250-a-day sparring partner for Luis Angel Firpo, a cocky young heavyweight from Argentina with fourteen early-round knockouts behind him, whom the Broadway columnist Damon Runyon had already dubbed “the Wild Bull of the Pampas.” Firpo was preparing for a fight with “KO” Bill Brennan, who had almost taken Jack Dempsey’s title two years earlier, and Tex Rickard was already thinking that big money might be made someday from a Dempsey-Firpo fight. But when the fight crowd was invited down to McLevy’s gymnasium on Twenty-sixth Street to see the newcomer go through his paces with the ex-champion, the temptation to show up his opponent proved more than Johnson could resist, just as it had when he’d worked with Kid Carter twenty-two years earlier. Firpo rushed at Johnson, only to find himself punching thin air or trapped within the grinning forty-four-year-old’s encircling arms as he bowed to the ringsiders—who broke into applause. As the bell rang ending the first round, he patted the youngster on the rear end. Firpo was furious. So was Rickard, who saw to it that Johnson was fired and refused entry to the gym so long as the Argentinian hopeful was training there.
A few weeks later, Johnson sailed to Havana, where he puffed his way to victory over two nonentities and then was fined for having failed to train. He was still wistful for the ring, he told the press. “I am forty-five years old. But them are 45 mighty light years. I would like to box Mr. Dempsey for about six rounds to no decision. My, how I could show what kind of a champion he is! And Firpo, what I wouldn’t do to Firpo. But I guess Jack ain’t never going to get them chances. I’m a business man now.”
A year earlier, the owners of the New Douglas Theater in Harlem, where Johnson’s ill-fated five-reeler For His Mother’s Sake had flickered into brief life, had announced that they were going into partnership with him to turn an old second-floor dance hall into a glittering new cabaret. The renovations had been completed by the spring of 1923, and the thousand-square-foot Café de Luxe had been fitted out with what a handout called ten thousand dollars’ worth of “beautiful decorations à la Parisienne.” Johnson’s “partner” in this enterprise—actually, his employer—was Budd Levy, the mob-connected proprietor of a chain of New York billiard parlors and bowling alleys. According to a handbill that advertised the café, more than one thousand “bowlers and sporting men” attended its opening. Twenty performers and two jazz bands entertained nonstop, and Johnson acted as master of ceremonies. He was a conspicuous presence at the club, greeting the customers, moving from table to table, sometimes playing his bass with the band, just as he had a dozen years earlier in his own Café de Champion.
The Café de Luxe was a hit—so much of a hit that representatives of the British-born gangster Owney Madden decided to take it over as the ideal spot to peddle his “Number One” beer to white customers thirsty for a taste of Harlem good times. By the end of the year, Madden’s men were in charge, the club’s décor had been altered once again to suit its new name, the Cotton Club, and Johnson soon found himself back on the road, sparring, performing feats of strength, and telling bad jokes in stage dialect that had little to do with the way he really talked: “As a prize-fighter, I’m a runnin’ fool. I started running after Tommy Burns, and run from one end of the world to the other. Oh, boy! I was runnin’. And before you could tell, I had done run clear over here.”
In February 1924, Lucille Cameron Johnson sued her husband for divorce, citing “evidence involving Johnson and other white women,” according to the New York Times. He did not contest her suit. Johnson’s own account of what happened between him and the wife who had endured exile with him was characteristically opaque:
Echoes of the old wrath which my mother-in-law, Mrs. Cameron nursed for me, came out of the past, and Lucille, after twelve years of a marriage that had been a happy and successful one, obtained a divorce in New York City…. Our love, after the many years of trials and tests through which it endured, was destined to fade. She had been in my life longer than any other woman and … was always loyal and steadfast.
Lucille’s departure may have had more of an impact than his ghosted words suggest. He began drinking heavily again and turned over his car four times during the year, walking away from one accident near Elgin, Illinois, with a scalp wound that required twenty stitches.
He was not alone long. That autumn, he attended the races at Aurora, Illinois, and was introduced to two middle-aged white women from nearby Waukegan, Irene Marie Pineau, and her friend Helen Matthews. Both were impressed by what Pineau recalled as Johnson’s “gentlemanly and courteous manner of speaking. He was a great deal more courtly than most men one meets.” The following February, she sued her husband for divorce, and she and her friend began seeing Johnson together. “Miss Matthews and I became quite friendly with Mr. Johnson,” Pineau continued, “and our friendship progressed rapidly, until it became an issue as to which one of us he liked best. It so happened that I was the favorite one…. The day came when I would have defied the world, and anybody in it, to separate us.”
In June, Johnson was hospitalized with appendicitis. She nursed him day and night. They were married in Waukegan in August of 1925. “There could not be a man of any race,” his bride said, “more worthy of being loved and honored than is my husband.”
For one afternoon in a bullring at Nogales, Mexico, in May of 1926, it seemed that Johnson might somehow still revive his ring career. His opponent was Pat Lester, an Arizona-born twenty-four-year-old hopeful who was being brought along by Johnson’s old acquaintance Spider Kelly. Lester had banged out seventeen wins in and around San Francisco over small-time fighters with names like Truck Hannah, Bombo Chevalier, and Frenchy the Coal Man, but the ringside reporter for the Universal Press Service was probably laying it on a little when he called Lester “the best heavyweight in the West.”
Certainly, he had never faced anyone like Jack Johnson. Many years later, a sportswriter named David Beardsley remembered what he’d seen from ringside that afternoon: “Lester had youth, some finesse and a lot of bulk. He was half Johnson’s age and before the fight he … seemed concerned about his elderly rival’s health.” Johnson seemed unconcerned about anything. He sat serenely in the shade of an
umbrella until the referee began his instructions, then leaned forward, winked at the crowd, and held his glove to his ear as if too old to hear what was being said. Lester kept up furious shadowboxing while waiting for the bell. Johnson stood with his hands on his hips and his back to his opponent, surveying the steep tiers of spectators that rose to the top of the bullring wall.
At the bell, Lester rushed at the ex-champion as so many had before him. Johnson sidestepped, hit him three times, and tied him up. Johnson’s stance, Beardsley remembered,
was identical with [that] of the old London prize ring, lead foot just touching the scratch on the turf between the two fighters, body tilted as far back out of danger as waist muscles allowed, hands advanced, of course, in the prevailing style. Swaying straight back from an opponent’s head shots is supposed to be a cardinal sin. I have known only two fighters to get away with it—Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali.
“Archaic as this stance was,” wrote Beardsley, it made Johnson seem impregnable.
Although Lester threw a lot of punches, and with good steam, Johnson’s forearms, elbows, shoulders were always a split second ahead, or Jack’s open gloves would fall with feather touch on Pat’s biceps and rob his chugging hooks of all power.
Johnson would let his front foot slide forward until it was inside his opponent’s lead foot. Then a sudden lunge and the old boy was on target. He had a trick that all but decapitated the bulging-jawed Lester about three times. He would rest his right forearm, glove up on Pat’s chest, then drive upward with a thrust that began all the way back in his right buttock….
Lester was doubly frustrated. He couldn’t cope with this senior citizen either in science or strength. Photographers called out “Bring him over here, Jack.” This was when Johnson was holding aloft the struggling and almost tearful Lester, his body one vast blush.
Between rounds, Johnson would stay on his stool until the rushing Lester was standing over him, then he would rise [and render] futile everything Lester threw. Johnson was hit just three times in the whole fight—body blows that h-u-u-r-t. But aside from that the old gentleman had a good time.
The fight went fifteen rounds. According to Beardsley, Johnson won every one of them. After the referee raised his hand, Johnson asked the ringside reporter from Universal Press to be sure to say that he was “back on the boards” and eager to fight Dempsey “or any other heavyweight.”*
But Johnson was now forty-eight years old. Three weeks after beating Pat Lester, he faced Bob “the Alabama Bearcat” Lawson in the bullring at Juárez. This time, he was knocked down in the seventh and refused to come out for the eighth, claiming he’d been fouled. The referee disagreed and gave the decision to his young opponent on a technical knockout. In July, Johnson lost a ten-round decision to Battling Norfolk. In September, he lost again, to Brad Simmons at Ponca City, Oklahoma. “Johnson used his old-time tactics of twitting his adversary in an effort to make him mad,” Simmons’ manager remembered, “but this had no effect. Johnson did not have the wind.”†
In October of 1926, Paul Robeson opened at the Comedy Theater on Broadway in a play based loosely on Johnson’s career. Called Black Boy, it was written by Frank Dazey and Jim Tully, himself a former hobo and onetime club fighter. It was not a flattering portrait. In the first act, Black Boy wanders into a training camp a self-styled “peaceable nigger,” who turns out to have a terrific wallop. A promoter who calls himself “Square Deal”—clearly a reference to Hugh “Huge Deal” McIntosh—turns him into a champion. In act 2, the critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times, the protagonist is shown surrounded by “‘white buzzard’ hangers-on at his Harlem apartment and with Irene whom he worships as a white woman.” (So as not to offend the sensibilities of white theatergoers, Irene was played by the light-skinned but safely Negro Fredi Washington.) In the third act, Atkinson continued, the playwrights chronicled the collapse of their protagonist’s “tinsel paradise,” but not before “they devote one scene to a drunken jollification on the eve of Black Boy’s last bout, Negro musicians whoop up the jazz, Irene dances a Charleston, Black Boy sings, every one drinks, and dissipation flows like a tidal wave.”
Paul Robeson got good notices, but the play lasted just a few weeks. The Pittsburgh Courier expressed regret that Broadway audiences had been treated to yet another portrayal of the Negro as an “ignorant, perverse child …[by whites] who evidently know … extraordinarily little of the psychology of Aframericans.”*
The Johnsons agreed. The following April, Jim Tully wrote a once-over-very-lightly history of blacks in boxing for Vanity Fair. In it, Tully lauded his old friend Joe Gans for what he called his “humility and spirituality.” But he dismissed Johnson as a “primitive” who, because his “capacity for affection was still that of a levee negro,” had been unmoved by his first wife’s suicide. Johnson had silently endured similar assaults in the past. But this was too much, and his new wife rose to his defense in a letter to the editor that eventually served as a preface to Johnson’s autobiography:
Must a man, because of his color, be disparaged and ridiculed by every white man who takes pen in hand to scribble a story for the already over-prejudiced people? … You writers from whom words and stories flow so glibly, most times do not look beneath the surface to see the facts …
Have you any idea of the hours of misery and sorrow that Jack Johnson spent over this tragedy? Must he wear his heart on his sleeve for all the world to see? Is not accepting misery stoically a form of bravery? I think so….
He is quiet and gentle-spoken, contrary to your statement of his being “primitive.” And in his head is more knowledge than most men can boast of.
Tully claimed that because Etta Johnson had married a black man, she had “seldom appeared [in public] without a shamed expression.” Jack Johnson now had a wife, Irene Johnson continued, “who goes about with … a look of happy confidence and love in her eyes.”
Two months later, Nat Fleischer, who had seen them all from Jim Corbett to Gene Tunney (who had taken Dempsey’s title the previous summer), wrote that Jack Johnson had been the best counterpuncher and the best defensive fighter, the most crafty boxer and the possessor of the best uppercut in his division—and was therefore the “best all-around heavyweight in history.” It was a view that Johnson devoutly shared and that Fleischer never saw any reason to change.
In July 1927, Johnson published his American autobiography, Jack Johnson—In the Ring and Out, in which, with the help of a ghostwriter named Bill Sims, he sought to redeem his reputation and recast himself as the man his most ardent admirers had wanted him to be. His Jack Johnson never told a lie and rarely lost a fight unless he’d wanted to; he had treated all women with respect and thought it best that young ladies not be permitted to go to nightclubs; he preferred “the splendid compositions of the old masters” to the “clever syncopation” of jazz—and urged his readers to eat more fruits and vegetables.
The book did not sell, and in Chicago in October, he was evicted from his apartment, and forced to file for bankruptcy. Among his outstanding bills, he said, was the $2,500 balance on $11,000 worth of jewelry he’d bought five years earlier, trying to keep Lucille from divorcing him. “I would have been able to pay my debts by receipts from a barnstorming trip,” he explained, “but we hit a row of rainy days and nights, and had to call our exhibitions off.”
He was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in September of 1928 when an Associated Press reporter asked him if he was going to continue boxing. “My next fight will be in politics,” he said. “I am going to enter the ring on behalf of Al Smith, Democratic Presidential candidate.” The Democrats were not pleased. The Catholic governor of New York was already viewed with suspicion by a good many of the white Protestant southerners without whom the Democrats could not win; an endorsement by Jack Johnson would do nothing to help bring them around. Senator Carter Glass of Virginia dashed off a letter to the Democratic National Committee chairman, John J. Raskob, asking if anyone had spoken to
Johnson about organizing the Negro vote in the South. Raskob was quick to respond. “The story of Jack Johnson being authorized to speak on behalf of the Democratic National Committee,” he said, “is cheap Republican propaganda. Johnson has no connection with this committee in any capacity.” Johnson professed to be deeply wounded and came out for Herbert Hoover. “If the Democrats are so opposed to my working for them,” he told a black reporter, “what can we expect if they win?”*
In the spring of 1929, a young reporter named James Thurber came to call on Johnson, on assignment for the “Talk of the Town” section of the New Yorker. As he always had, Johnson cooperated with the press—and, as nearly always happened, the final result was a condescending blend of truths, half-truths, and stereotypical distortion. Its title was “Big Boy.”
The tall, somewhat paunchy, but still erect figure of Jack Johnson may be seen about Broadway these days. He walks proudly. He never forgets his gloves. His step is a little less springy, and his face no longer gleams in the ebony and gold splendor which admiring Londoners compared to a “starry night” almost twenty years ago when he was the rage over there. He might pass for thirty-five. He was fifty-one on his last birthday. People turn to look at him as he walks majestically about the town, but most of them probably do not recognize the man many experts call the greatest heavyweight of them all. It is different from the day in 1911 when he sailed into New York on the Kronprinzess Cecile with a white valet, a white secretary, a limousine, a touring car, two racers, boasting of the prodigious amounts of his weekly hotel bills abroad. Crowds followed him around in the years of glory, but the once famous champion and notorious bon vivant has fallen on less glamorous days. He is not broke, but he is not affluent. Wealth he never hoarded. The fifty-one hundred dollars he got for boxing Philadelphia Jack O’Brien before the war, for instance, he spent in four days, on dinners, a ring, and an auto. Now, he is eager to sell stories of his life for money. Unlike the ordinary celebrity, he has not one but three autobiographies in mind, the story of his fights, the story of his loves and the story of his travels. If you are interested in buying these works, you can get the lot of them for one hundred thousand dollars. Jack Johnson lives in Harlem, gets around to the prize-fights, takes in the shows, some of which he sternly criticizes as immoral.
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