At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  “Not ever?” the reporter asks.

  “We have our arguments, over silly things,” he clarified. “Like, you know, we have to go out in an hour and she isn’t ready.”

  “That’s because you wake me up late,” my mother objected. “And you want to be punctual, on time, right up to the minute.”

  They both laughed. It was true. Dad was always on time, early mostly—sometimes waiting to welcome guests coming to meet him. I can still see him standing in the doorway, anticipating their arrival, waving, as they pulled up the drive.

  Unlike most celebrities, who make a show of concern for the public but really feel people are intruding on their lives, my father never resented the intrusion; he welcomed it. He regularly turned down security detail and interacted freely with the crowds that approached him. He was the same with the media and reporters. As sports writer Michael Katz said, “He liked attention; he knew how to get it; and he accepted writers as part of his world.”

  Perhaps one of the most endearing aspects of my father’s character was his unshakable faith—his belief that God was his bodyguard. “Allah watches over me,” he once said. “If I walk into a stadium with thousands of people, no man can keep somebody from shooting me . . . I can’t be worrying about things like that. A man filled with fear doesn’t live and enjoy life.”

  My father’s love for people was extraordinary. I would come home from school to find homeless families sleeping in our guest bedrooms. He’d see them on the street, pile them into the back of his Rolls-Royce, and bring them home with him. He’d buy them clothes, take them to hotels, and pay the bills for months in advance.

  “I’m going to help you clean up and find a good job,” he’d say.

  Some people accosted him for money—and whatever he had in his pockets he’d give to them. “Service to others is the rent we pay for our room in heaven,” he’d tell me.

  His generosity was legendary. At the house on Woodlawn in Chicago, homeless women showed up at 2 a.m. with babies in their arms. People would ring the bell and burst into tears when he answered the door, and he cried right back at them. He used to sit me on his lap, look into my eyes, and quote the great poets: “Hana, if you can stop one heart from breaking, you shall not live in vain. If you can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, or help one fainting robin into his nest again, you shall not live in vain.” His words will forever echo in my conscience.

  It’s also true that my parents rarely argued. They got along well. Dad feared that if a couple quarreled they’d end up divorced. He never liked confrontation; elevated voices made him uncomfortable. You could see it in his expression. I’ve always suspected it had something to do with his parents, Papa Cash and Mama Bird, witnessing their arguments when he was a child. But I’ll get to them later.

  The only time I remember my father raising his voice at my mother was after she’d gently slapped my hand for doing something she’d repeatedly asked me not to do: rummaging through her makeup drawer, breaking the head off her designer Yves Saint Laurent red lipstick after pressing it too hard against my puckered little lips, or spilling her Chanel perfume on her silk negligée. Maybe I had rubbed styling grease on my hair, then laid my oily head on her French lace pillows. Whatever my mischief that day, my father’s loud roar of “Don’t ever hit her!” startled us both.

  Neither of my parents were disciplinarians. Whenever my mother tried to give us a spanking, Laila and I would grab the opposite end of the belt in her hand and end up in a tug of war that resulted in the three of us sprawled out on her bedroom floor laughing uncontrollably.

  When my father reached his limit, he’d take off his belt and shout “Aaaaaaaaaaaahh” as he pretended to whoop us but hit the seat of the sofa we were sitting on instead. Dad always had a flair for the dramatic. My mother would hear us screaming from his office and run down the stairs. “Stop it, Muhammad,” she would say. “You’re scaring them.”

  It’s funny, how the things we worry about never happen—or cause our greatest pain. It’s the events we never see coming that turn our world upside down.

  “No, we never fight.” He smiled at the reporter and my mother.

  “Since I’ve known him, he’s always been traveling,” my mother said, sighing. “I have a dream that one day Muhammad will hang up his gloves for good so we can live at home like ordinary people.”

  “Yeah, I want that,” my father added meekly. “Being at home, cutting the grass. Maybe go out and do some fishing, huh. Just living an ordinary life together . . . I want that.”

  But it was a dream that would never come true, and our life was far from ordinary.

  We lived in a four-story mansion with a full staff of rotating nannies, housekeepers, and cooks. Laila was always threatening to run away from home. At four years old, she’d toss her belongings into plastic garbage bags and drag them down the hall, pouting.

  “I’m going now!” she’d say. “I’m running far, far away from here!” She made it past the front door once—all the way down the street—before my mother caught up with her, running after her in mulberry silk and high heels, her long hair sailing behind her.

  “Where are you going, Laila?”

  My sister felt like she was living in a glass house—a beautiful doll on display—with no escape. I was a daddy’s girl; Laila wasn’t. She was sweet, quiet, and shy, and at times she could be excessively dramatic. She once locked herself in her bedroom and threatened to jump off the balcony. I don’t know why, really. But she always calmed down after getting what she needed most—our mother’s attention. Laila was never that close to our father. She never felt as comfortable with him as she did with our mother. Daddy was always in his office entertaining, on the sofa performing magic tricks, or sitting behind his grand desk talking on the telephone or telling jokes, enjoying being the center of attention. Laila dreaded being called into the middle of it all. But I loved it. I used to sit at his feet beaming up at him, watching, listening, soaking it all in.

  “I’M BIG BUSINESS!” he’d say, going over his many offers, leafing through a stack of loose papers on his desk. “I’m writing lectures, I’ve got to train for fights, I’ve got causes, I’ve got television appearances, I’ve got to meet the ambassador of France, I’ve got to go on Face the Nation . . . I’ve got problems like everybody else. I’ve got a lot on my mind . . . Yeah, I get tired. Ford does too. The pope of Rome does too. But they got to keep going just like I do . . .”

  He was always inviting the outside world in. All anyone had to do was tell the guard at the gatehouse, “I’m here to see Muhammad Ali.” He never turned anyone away. He’d talk to them for hours and give them a tour of the house. He even invited a fan from the United Kingdom, a stranger named Russ Routledge, who became a friend, to stay with us in our home for two weeks, driving the lucky man around town with him every day.

  “Bring your camera with you,” he’d remind Russ as he prepared for the trip. “We’ll take pictures so everyone will see you were really here, with Muhammad Ali.”

  The house was always full of guests, friends, fans, and hangers-on. Like Laila, my mother didn’t like it and would retreat to a quiet sunroom in a far corner of the house. She had created a private sanctuary where she could be alone. Laila’s escape was her bedroom. Neither of them felt safe in the open atmosphere at Fremont Place. For them, it was like living in a glass castle, and the feeling my little sister remembers most as a child is loneliness. She knew our father was a big-hearted man who loved and adored her, but she didn’t enjoy being smothered with excessive hugs and kisses, especially in front of strangers.

  “Hana never complains about my kisses,” he said to her one evening after dinner.

  “Then give her all your kisses.” She shoved him and ran to her room.

  “I’ve had 150 fights,” my father continues in the interview with my mother. “I’ve been fighting since I was twelve . . . I’ve got one more coming up. It should be my last one.”

  But it was never the las
t one; there was always one more fight. He talks about a new movie, Freedom Road, in which he plays a former slave who rises to a seat in the US Senate. “I’m a black Clark Gable,” he jokes with the reporter, then moves in close, as if to whisper a secret but instead shouts in her ear. “I’m still ‘The Greatest’!”

  7

  In early October of 1978, when the leaves began to turn in Natchez, Mississippi, at the old Belmont Manor plantation, the cast and crew braced themselves as my father walked onto the set. He practiced his lines as he passed the wooden slave shacks erected for filming. Dad played Gideon Jackson, an ex-slave turned Union soldier who fought his way into the US Senate. The drama was a six-hour miniseries for NBC called Freedom Road. My father considered the mythical character a kindred spirit.

  “He’s not afraid,” Dad said to Dick Russell, a journalist on the set with People magazine. “He stood up [for what he believed], like I did with the draft board and by becoming a Muslim. And he’s got an idea for freedom and justice for all people . . . He’s the kind of man I would have been if I was living then. Actually, it’s good I wasn’t,” he added with a smile, “’cause I’d probably have been dead quick!”

  As a fighter, my father had always been a supreme “actor,” but he had never attempted to play another character. Before Dad played Gideon Jackson, the most excited he’d been about a film role was in 1977 when he’d played himself in a screen version of his autobiography, The Greatest.

  “I’m going to be the greatest movie star of them all,” he announced to the press as he embarked on his new career. “Charlton Heston, John Wayne, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman—yeah, they’re all in trouble with me around.”

  His acting method had always been exaggeration. Now he had to learn a much subtler approach. According to my mother, he started preparing for the role while training to fight Leon Spinks.

  “It’s a serious film,” said the producer, Zev Braun, in the same issue of People. “But it took a guy like Ali to really make it work. It’s almost as if it had to wait for Muhammad Ali to be created.”

  Zev Braun lived around the corner from us in Fremont Place. I used to run to his house after school to play with his daughter, Sue, and beg him for ice cream. He always let me search his freezer for popsicles and eat whatever sweets I could find in the pantry. He was a kind and patient man, and is still married today to the same woman, Mayling.

  The production of Freedom Road was based on the 1944 bestselling book by Howard Fast. Throughout the filming, Daddy wanted to know exactly what was happening at all times. He thought acting was boring and had no problem expressing it.

  “I memorized three pages of dialogue,” he said to Mom one night after filming. “But it took seven days to shoot it . . .” While my father was a natural actor, and his co-stars marveled at his ease on the set, he wasn’t built to do it professionally. He didn’t like the punishing film schedule; all of the rehearsing and waiting around in between takes and having to reshoot the same scenes, again and again, standing in one place.

  “This is boring! I don’t know how you do it,” he said to his friend and co-star Kris Kristofferson one day after filming. But, as usual, Dad found a way to keep things interesting. Between scenes he held center stage, performing his magic tricks for the cast and crew.

  “Watch this, watch this, it’s gonna shock you,” he said, wide-eyed, whipping out a deck of cards. “Maaaaan, did you see that?” he gushed after the trick. “I studied that one for six months. I got my little show together. My ropes and cards. When I travel the world, I’m gonna show all the people . . .”

  When he was really bored, he messed with the guards on set, who happened to be white. Shaking his script at them, he furrowed his brows, biting his lower lip. “They call me a nigga in this script!” he said through clenched teeth, raising his fist. “Did you call me a nigga?”

  “No! No!” said the guards, unaware he was joking.

  I think it was my father’s way of dealing with the discomfort and pain he’d grown up with. He never understood how a word could hold so much power. This was his way of dethroning it. The NAACP didn’t approve, and in the years to come he’d receive a letter from them asking him to refrain from telling sensitive jokes in public. Especially in the White House. He liked to tell presidents one of his favorites. I can picture him sitting in the Oval Office with presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama.

  “What did Abraham Lincoln say after a four-day drunk?”

  “I freed the who!?”

  My father meant no harm. I think he was using humor to cope with the sting of prejudice he experienced throughout his life. That and he simply liked to make people laugh. After receiving the NAACP’s letter, my father refrained from telling his jokes in most places. But in 2005, when we were at the grand opening of the Muhammad Ali Center in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, I noticed that whenever Dad was around President Clinton, with whom he shared a special bond, he was often smiling and whispering in his ear.

  Ironically, the actor George Hamilton invited Dad to dinner one night after filming. I’m not sure how it came about. I think the connection was through the director, Zev. George’s son told us the story a couple years ago, when we were on Celebrity Family Feud together. He casually walked over and told us about the time his father had my parents over for dinner and made a pork roast, unaware that Muslims don’t eat pork.

  “To make matters worse,” he said, “after your father left, someone burned a cross on our lawn.”

  I was only two years old at the time—too young to remember—but I spent a lot of time on the set of Freedom Road, riding around on Kris Kristofferson’s shoulders, tugging on his shirt and hair. I still have the photos of us together. Dad wanted Kris to advise him, so he was always around—even on his days off. One afternoon, when Kris was innocently getting his hair cut outside his trailer, Dad snuck over, then he dropped to his knees and gathered Kris’s shorn hair from the ground and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he walked over to a group of teenage fans and distributed the pieces as Kris pleaded in the background.

  “I like to see common people happy,” Dad told the reporter on set. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to meet celebrities.”

  “I knew he was going to do something to embarrass me,” Kris said when he was back in his trailer. “Muhammad is an amazing man. In some ways, he is as simple as a child. But in other ways, to me, he’s inscrutable. Like a sphinx.”

  There was never a dull moment with my father around. Another time, when everyone was hanging out around the set, Dad rushed over to the telephone. “I’ll show you another nice guy,” he told the reporter, then he dialed a long-distance call.

  “Kris! Kris! I got somebody here I want you to talk to,” said Dad. On the other end of the line was one of my father’s favorite actors, Count Dracula himself. Dad smiled with delight as Kris took the phone shyly and asked, “Is this Christopher Lee? Oh God, it is! I’m knocked out just listening to you . . . Hey, great to meet you, over the phone even.”

  Daddy took back the receiver and said, “You’ve got Kris Kristofferson blushing!”

  Then he made another call to Freedom Road’s executive producer, careful to disguise his voice. “You shall die tomorrow if you don’t get that nigga out of that top role,” he said theatrically. He allowed a moment of stunned silence, then he laughed and said, “This is Ali!”

  Kris, seated on the sofa, shook his head at the reporter. “Zev will have a coronary before this is over.” In the background, Dad was asking about the day’s work. “Was it good? I really acted good, huh?” When he hung up the phone, he announced to the room, “They’re going crazy over the rushes!”

  My father was having the time of his life. Especially when John Travolta flew down in his customized DC-3 to help my father with his lines. John was sitting ringside with my mother when Dad whooped Leon Spinks and won back his title for an unprecedented third time. He gave Dad dancing lessons during breaks in shooting and joked ab
out how no one would believe that Muhammad Ali couldn’t dance.

  “I didn’t know it would be this hard,” said John.

  “I only dance in the ring,” said Dad.

  It was true. In the ring he was elegance personified, but in real life he had two left feet.

  “Go back out and walk in like you did in Saturday Night Fever, John!” Dad told him once.

  And so he did. As reporter Dick Russell observed, John kicked up dirt, treading charmingly as Dad cried: “Go, John! Dance, John! Look at that! Maaaan! Maaaan! Veronica, come over here, show her too, John!”

  “People say John doesn’t usually act like that,” Mom later told the reporter. “But he was really excited. Jumping up and down. Around Muhammad, he’s like a little kid.”

  Later that night, Dad had John dancing with the people in the lobby of his Natchez motel. Life was always a little outrageous when my father was around; he had fun with his fame and the fame of his friends, but he never took it for granted, and he didn’t make any demands on set—other than allowing my mother and me, an administrative assistant, and his photographer, Howard, to be there with him. The usual fight entourage was absent.

  I’m told our family quarters in Mississippi had a palm-shaded pool I liked to splash around in. Dad would put his hands beneath me, keeping me afloat, as I lay flat on my belly in the water, kicking and spattering, thinking I was swimming on my own.