Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

  Would he agree that some of his books are fuelled on sex, I ask.

  ‘Which gas station, Shell, Texaco, BP? That’s not a comment about me. It’s a comment about you. No one accuses a dirty novelist of being dirty. Only the serious ones. It comes back to you. It’s your attitude.’

  ‘I was thinking particularly of Another Country’

  ‘I’m sure. Someone told me there were 189 sexual encounters in Another Country. It’s a love story, involving several people who try to love each other.’

  Presently he’s working on a new novel about a young girl in Harlem who is expecting a baby. The novel is about her watching the world her baby will be born into, he says. A world that is not a civilisation.

  The conversation becomes very involved, and I don’t truly understand what he’s trying to tell me. For some reason I mention that he appears to be polarising everything we are discussing. He becomes quite excited, talking almost evangelically. He once was an evangelist preacher.

  ‘You talk about polarisation as though I was never on a Virginia plantation working for you, picking your cotton, building your railroads and your cities and letting you sell my sons. When you talk of polarisation it’s because the tide has turned. It was always polarised. You polarised it. You invented the word black. I didn’t. And you pretended you were civilised and I was not. You’re confronted with a bill that no one can help you pay. The bill of your history. And you’re going to have to pay it. If it isn’t faced there’s no hope for you.’

  ‘Nor for you either?’

  ‘Oh no. You are the the minority. The world is not white.’

  ‘Nor black.’

  ‘It’s not white. The Chinese weren’t considered yellow, nor the Indians brown. They were treated like niggers. Yes, my dear, let me point out to you that there are not many people who would tell you this. I’m accused of hating white people. But that is not true. If I did I wouldn’t talk to you at all. The dangerous people are the street sweepers, the bus drivers, the porters.’

  Does he see no hope for us?

  ‘That depends upon you.’

  ‘And you.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve paid my dues. I can no longer come to you. It’s very difficult for people to become disentangled from their history.’

  ‘But I always feel great hope when I see the social progress that has taken place in my lifetime …’

  ‘No, darling,’ he says. ‘Don’t fool yourself. Try to tell that to a black kid of seventeen.’

  ‘But I have such faith in human nature. When a man falls down in the street five people rush to pick him up.’

  He looks at me disdainfully. ‘Yes, I know. But those same five people would stone that man to death, especially if he were after their jobs.’

  So far as he is concerned the interview is over and he begins to tell stories about his times in the South with Dr Martin Luther King.

  ‘Once I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, and Martin had warned me never to arrive in Birmingham after dark, but I got on the wrong plane. So when I got there I didn’t know what to do, and sat down on my typewriter. I wanted to go right across town to the black district where I was to stay, but in Birmingham in those days you just didn’t call a taxi if you were a black man. There was a city law which said that white drivers couldn’t take black men.

  ‘So I asked a black porter if he could get someone to call a taxi for me from the black part of town. But after forty minutes of sitting there it hadn’t come. And everyone was watching me. And I was watching them, too.

  ‘Then suddenly a cab pulls in, with a white driver, and he offers to take me. And then I really am in trouble. Because I know I have to go on a long dark car journey, past a lot of trees, and to a black man in the South trees are things to be frightened of, but if I don’t go I have to stay at the airport and maybe there are some trees around there, too.

  ‘So I decide to go with him. And he was a really nice man. We both wanted to talk, but we just weren’t able. We had no point of communication. It was very sad …’

  ‘And you know,’ says brother David. ‘All that cat saw when he drove into that airport and saw you sitting there, was food for his wife and kids …’

  POSTSCRIPT I don’t think James Baldwin liked me very much.

  October 1971

  Muhammad Ali

  Muhammad Ali, stretched horizontally across the three first-class seats of the train compartment, was asleep: a great blue-black whale, beached and bored and riding on this Ali Special from Euston to Manchester.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. Momentarily the whale allowed his eyelids to flicker the tiniest, meanest gesture of welcome, before settling back into the repose of the unconscious. The gentleman who had organised our meeting made some final request that I make it quick, rather as one may ask a hangman to spare the condemned the misery of time, and left us alone.

  Muhammad made no sign of waking up to be interviewed. He was off to preach the virtues of Ovaltine to the people of the North and probably he was preserving all his energy for that. Or maybe the rigours of the Nigerian tour he had just completed had been too much for him. Touring Nigeria the Ali way can be very vigorous, they tell me. At any rate, he clearly wasn’t prepared to waste more than the minimal amount of energy on me.

  (Even General Gowan of Nigeria had short shrift from Muham-had. ‘I used to do some boxing,’ said Gowon conversationally. ‘What did you box?’ asked Ali. ‘Apples or oranges?’)

  But, I reflected, I was—someone had said earlier—a lucky man to be on the train at all, sitting there with Mr Ali, and all those executives from that nightcap company, all with their razor-smooth cheeks, and nicked necks, and shining lace-up shoes, orthodox shirts and suit jackets just that much too big around the neck. And everyone shining with corporate image and product loyalty.

  So here I am, with Ali, wondering what he did with the charisma this morning, puzzling about how to even get him to notice that I’m there, and finally, settling for the sleep talker that he turned out to be.

  Now thirty, and, technically, I suppose, the former heavyweight champion of the world, he’d still be as pretty as he delighted in telling us all those years ago, if he weren’t so fat around the face these days. But pretty or not, champ or deposed, he remains the super-hero.

  To me, boxing is the most bestial of pursuits, and the idea of two gorillas clouting each other daft before a crowd of blood-hunters does nothing for my ideas about the innate nobility of man. But with Ali, boxing became almost a sport. Where Sonny Liston or Joe Frazier’s methods were to hack, hack and hack away, rather like a man felling a Giant Redwood, Ali in his way turned boxing into a game of evasion. The idea now was not to get hit, and his best moments, for me, were when he was wriggling himself out of some disastrous position against the ropes, or playing tick and pat-a-cake with sixteen-stone Neanderthal men.

  Ali was the hero: the cowboy in a white hat who would beat all the bullies, the man who was prepared to resist the draft before it became fashionable — ‘I ain’t got nothin’ against them Vietcong,’ he said, (but who really expected that the Pentagon would have been so inept in its public relations as to make Ali a martyr by sending him as fodder to Vietnam); and the man who was finally canonised by the sportsmen of Madison Square Garden when they stripped him of his title. He became a hero because he was an individual.

  And here am I now, sitting with this super-hero. And being polite and all that, the way you are with super-heroes. And wondering how in hell to wake the great whale up.

  Best, I think, to start off with some elementary stuff about boxing, and, like a man feeding a juke box with a shilling, I put the simple straightforward questions and wait for the record to start spinning its answer.

  ‘Was Frazier always as inarticulate as he is now?’ I ask. ‘Or did you scramble his brain a bit?’

  Ali, neat in his pale blue shirt, dark grey suit and with his calf high boots neatly to attention on the floor beside me, remains motionless. And I wait, until e
ventually his larynx reaches down for some reserves of strength and the music begins to play.

  ‘Naw. He was always like that. Dim. And one mo’ thing, too. He’s ugly.’

  ‘I heard he may never fight again.’

  ‘Yeah I heard that, too. But I hope he’s all right. I know I gave him a good whupping but I hope I didn’t whup him that bad.’

  Thinking I’ve heard this tune before, I try for another song, and push home another coin into the soporific Wurlitzer.

  Would he ever like any of his children to become boxers?

  ‘Nah. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers. Never boxers. For me boxing was the best thing I could have done. It was the only way I could get rich. But if I could, I’d have been a great doctor or something like that.’

  What will he do after he retires, which he’s promised to do after he regains his title, which will, he thinks, probably be sometime next year.

  ‘I’ll stay at home, and mow the lawns and spend some time with my family. I’m really tired of fighting, of being a boxer.

  ‘I’ll retire from the ring and dedicate my life to the freedom of the negroes in America. That’s a great job. I’m a Muslim minister and I’ll go round converting them to Elijah Muhammad. I’ll unite them, and free them mentally. We have to build a whole nation for ourselves. A separate nation. We can’t live with white Americans. It’s impossible. The cultures are too different. We’ve been there six hundred years and it’s time enough to know that we can’t live together. We wanna be free from the white man.’

  ‘But are you not playing the white man’s game by getting up there and fighting another black man in the ring for the white man’s profit?’

  ‘Nah. We git money, too. And I can use it as a platform to convert the people.

  ‘I don’t hate the white man. I know the white man. I don’t hate snakes and tigers because I know them. But their natures are different, and so is their singing and dancing. Some white people can’t live together. Some White Russians can’t live with Jewish Russians. White Englishmen can’t live with white Turks. White Scotchmens can’t live with white Dutchmens. Black men don’t want to be with nobody but ourselves.’

  Wasn’t he very frightened when he refused to be drafted?

  ‘No. I was frightened of God if I did join the army. I don’t fear no man. But I think the man who goes to war should be more frightened than the man who goes to jail. In jail he eats and sleeps. He dies in war. That makes sense, don’t it? I have a poem about it. Goes like this:

  Better far from all I see

  To die fighting to be free

  What more fitting end could be.

  Better surely than in bed

  Where in broken health I’m led

  Lingering until I’m dead.

  Etc.

  Etc.’

  ‘Did you write that by yourself?’

  ‘I’m not only a great boxer. I’m a genius. I ain’t just a dumb negro boxer. I’m a great writer, too. I’ve got lots more. It’s all being published soon. The biggest book in the history of publishing.’

  Eventually I turn to the question of money.

  ‘Well I’m worth about two million dollars right now. I always stay in big suites.’

  ‘Frazier stayed in a little hotel room when he was here.’

  ‘Maybe he’s wise. Maybe he’s saving it for the winter. Big suites don’t mean nothin’. Right now I’m investing in real estate. It’s the only way.’

  At that moment I was interrupted. ‘Would you mind…?’ asked one of the gentlemen promoters. I would, but what was the point?

  For a fraction of a second, Ali’s eyes opened a mere slit, enough for him to lift his arm, and reach hold of my hand, in a dismissal shake.

  He should be a good interview when he wakes up: if he ever wakes up.

  POSTSCRIPT When we got off the train at Manchester, I purposely mingled with the welcoming crowd to see whether Ali would betray the fact that he had been peeping during our chat and betray some recognition when he saw me. He didn’t. I stood right in front of him, and he smiled as though meeting me for the first time, anxious to wear the right public face.

  Now he is rumoured to be brain damaged, and his speech is certainly slurred, which, if true, is a tragedy. Whatever you think about boxing you must admire Ali for taking on the Draft Board. He opposed the war in Vietnam well before it was fashionable to do so.

  November 1971

  Peter Fonda

  Captain America is a very rough, scruffy beggar, with two fingers up to the Establishment, wherever he may find it, another two up to the dictates of fashion (even by hippie standards he’s unfashionable) and a whole fist of fingers more that bellow his rage at the Hollywood system of making films. He’s Peter Fonda — the little brother with the big mouth, now a man of thirty-one who talks with all the rhetorical persuasiveness of a very clever politician, but who never says anything you’re likely to hear coming out of the mouth of any successful politician.

  He is in London to promote his new film The Hired Hand (his follow-up piece to Easy Rider) which has suffered from a crossfire of mixed reviews. One incident, in Little Big Mouth’s battle with Hollywood, should give you a pretty fair idea of what sort of character he is.

  ‘I was in Idaho making my next film when a friend at Universal called and said that after the Time and Newsweek reviews, which were very bad, the studio had decided to try a hard sell campaign, and put up a big poster on Sunset Strip which said “Peter Fonda Rides Again. Living Hard and Riding Fast Across the West.” Well you know I couldn’t believe it. I chartered an aeroplane and within two and a half hours I was back in Los Angeles.

  ‘And believe me I really looked like a madman, black from 120 degrees of sun out there, and my hair and beard all untrimmed. And I said “I want to see Wasserman” — the head of Universal. I was ready to blow up the whole studio. You’ve gotta believe me. I myself am non-violent but some of my friends are not so nonviolent.

  ‘I’m like a maniac, with my knife out in my hand. And then in walks Dennis Hopper, who’s also having some trouble with them over his film, The Last Movie, which they don’t like. And he sees I’ve got my knife, and I know he’s got his, and I say “let’s go cut ‘em up”. And the secretaries are looking terrified because we both have this reputation for being totally insane, which I don’t really mind.

  ‘You know we really figured to freak them out, and they had never got me out of that place so fast, ever, hustling Dennis off into some other room.

  ‘But it matters so much to me. If people were to see that they would get the wrong idea of the film. They’d be cheated. The poster came down the next morning. It’s my film. It’s like taking a Picasso from his blue period and saying “Well, we like blue, but we also like red, so we’re going to put a little red in here.”’

  After that experience he decided to make his next film with his own money, so that no one would have any rights to alter anything, or to upset him in any way. Every penny he’d earned out of Easy Rider went into it, and when he found that some of the camera equipment he had hired was jamming, he took out a revolver and shot a camera to pieces before sending it back to the hiring company with a request that they never send him bad equipment in future. He got new cameras, without a word of protest, by return of post.

  After years of family turbulence, the Fondas (Henry, Jane and Little Big Mouth) appear to be as friendly as they’ve ever been, with dad going off to San Francisco to protest against the testing of America’s latest method of superkill (which is quite a change for a firm LBJ supporter) and Jane running around shouting ‘power to the people’.

  ‘You know I love Jane, but when she comes on with all that I say “so okay, you’re a communist, a socialist or whatever. But how much did you get for Klute? Was it four hundred thousand dollars? Come on, Jane, don’t give me any of that bullshit.”’

  With an IQ of 160-plus, his young life was one disturbance after another, resulting in his dropping out of school a
t fifteen and going to live with his aunt in Nebraska, where he became the only boy in an all-girls school. ‘After one week there was so much shenanigans going on that they made me have private tuition.’

  We’re having lunch in the Dorchester, Little Big Mouth drinking Bloody Marys and asking for roast beef — which he’s amazed to find they don’t have — and raging on about the way the government do things without his permission and then come into his life uninvited.

  ‘One day two FBI officers came to my house. I agreed to meet them at my office — which is a completely non-office.

  ‘Inside my office one of them was looking at my copying machine, wondering what kind of underground subversive literature we copied on it, and trying not to look at my secretaries who are both incredibly beautiful, or at the poster of Nixon on one wall smoking a joint. On one seat a “connection” sat rigid with fear. He’d maybe come to sell me five pounds of grass and finds himself facing the FBI.

  ‘Anyway when I got there I began insulting them and my lawyer, who also came, was trying to shut me up. They were completely thrown by everything. They’re used to having guys shoot at them and all that, but not guys insulting them. And then they finally asked me if I knew where Angela Davis was. I mean … Angela Davis! So I called them a lot of other names, and then they said perhaps Jane would be able to help. Then I threw them out. My lawyer was having a fit.’

  But why does he bother antagonising the Establishment so much?

  ‘I don’t. They come into my life. All I do is to go around saying that we should pay no attention to the President and Congress. When Nixon became President I tore up my draft card, and sent it to him with instructions for him to shove it up his ass.’