At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  My father used to say that most of his knowledge came from talking to people on the street, old men, wine heads and drunks—people who were once scientists and doctors but who lost their way or went crazy and ended up on the corner.

  “People don’t realize how much gold and wisdom is out in the streets,” he once said. “In ghettos or in places where you don’t think it is.”

  He sometimes quoted scripture, telling all who’d listen, “When God comes, he will come as a thief in the night.” Meaning we wouldn’t recognize him. Then he’d tell the story about the old man he met when he was a teenager: “He had all white hair and a long beard,” he’d say. “He was sitting on a street corner holding a wine bottle. I walked past him one day after training. ‘Please give me a dollar,’ said the man.

  “I stopped and I looked at him, and he looked at me. When I handed him the dollar, he looked at me long and hard, then he shook my hand and said, ‘I will bless you.’”

  He wasn’t saying the man was God, but he wondered, “How do you know that isn’t God out here walking around to test you, just to see what you will do?”

  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I could appreciate why my father was always talking to us about drugs and alcohol. Neither of my parents drank. Mom would sometimes have a few sips of wine on Thanksgiving, but that was the extent of her drinking. The closest my father ever came to experimenting with drugs was sniffing gas once when he was a teenager.

  I think maybe seeing his father coming home drunk and arguing with his mother was enough to turn him off drugs and alcohol entirely. My mother’s parents weren’t drinkers either, so, aside from my aunts Diane and Michelle sneaking an occasional cigarette, for the most part we were surrounded by clean-living adults.

  Laila tried smoking weed and used to sneak the miniature liquor bottles out of Dad’s hotel fridge when we were young teens, but I never so much as took a sip of alcohol until I was in my early twenties. It was a glass of wine, and I remember thinking it tasted like nail-polish remover; I didn’t like the warm, fuzzy feeling in my chest. I’ve always stayed away from drugs in all forms. I’m not sure if it’s in my genes or had something to do with my father’s constant lecturing, but I never had any interest in drugs or alcohol. Not even an occasional glass of wine. Even now, when my friends order fruity intoxicating drinks, my order is always the same: “Diet Coke with lemon, please.”

  Dad always had a way of keeping us spiritually conscious—aware of the little things most people didn’t notice. And he taught me early in life to treat all people with equal respect.

  “The heart accommodates the heavens and the earth, all the seas and all the land,” he said on one of his recordings. “The greatness or smallness of a man does not depend on his outer things. Regardless of a man’s title, wealth, rank, or position, if his heart is not great, then he cannot be great . . . But if his heart is great,” he continued, “then he remains great under all circumstances. Rich or poor. Great or small.”

  These were the lessons he taught, the simple wisdom that nature told and etched into his soul. “Always remember, it is only the heart that makes us large or small . . .”

  I looked at the Mercedes parked in the front of the house and wondered who was visiting Daddy this time, then I waved goodbye to Kim and Karen and walked up the driveway. The week before, I’d come home to find Mr. T, best known for his role on The A-Team, sitting on the sofa in my father’s den. He was wearing his signature gold chains around his neck, with his infamous Mohawk. I recognized him immediately. “What’s up, Mr. T?” I said, walking into my father’s office. “Where’s the rest of the A-Team?” I must have driven him crazy asking him to repeat his signature line from the show: “I pity the fool!” Again, and again. He always did.

  “I pity the fool!”

  As we walked through the front door that afternoon, Laila ran off to find my mother. As usual, I only had one thing on my mind—my father. I raced off to where I knew he’d be waiting to sweep me into his arms. He wasn’t in his office, so I ran into the kitchen, where Edith, the cook, was preparing lunch. Turkey sandwiches and lemonade.

  “Are you hungry, Hana?”

  “No,” I said, grabbing a pickle and a popsicle from the refrigerator. “Where is Daddy?”

  “Upstairs, resting. Go comb your hair. He has—” Before Edith could finish her sentence, I ran out of the kitchen, straight upstairs into the guest bedroom where Dad usually took his daytime naps—a habit he’d acquired from years of training and fighting.

  I pushed open the bedroom door. “Daddy . . .” I began, wanting to tell him that I’d swum a width of the pool all by myself. “Daddy, I . . .” I stopped dead in my tracks. My father was lying in bed, under a white sheet with one hand behind his head, and sitting in a chair beside him was the unmistakable figure of Michael Jackson. Politicians, actors, even most singers might have been unrecognizable to my young eyes, but the King of Pop? He was one of my favorites, pure and simple. I was never the type to be a fan of anyone, even as a child, but this was two years after Thriller and Michael was a megastar. I didn’t have any posters of MJ pinned on my wall or a pile of magazines with him on the cover, but I’d been performing his “Billie Jean” act for my father for months, and the fact that he was now at my house, sitting in the bedroom with us . . . It was enough to send me into a hysterical fit.

  Michael was lifting his black fedora hat, showing my father his white bandages. He’d been injured filming a Pepsi commercial when pyrotechnics had set his hair on fire. It was a massive news story. And some believe that the painkillers he was given at that time eventually contributed to his addiction to anesthetics, which ultimately led to his death in 2009.

  I stepped out of the room for a minute and closed the door. “Michael Jackson!” I screamed. “Michael Jackson!”

  Laila came running out of my mother’s room. “Where is he?” she asked.

  “In there,” I pointed. “With Daddy!”

  My mother had already told her. She had changed into her pink dress with the white ruffles. I was still in my swimsuit and shorts, my curly hair reaching in all directions, as if I’d just stuck a fork in an electric socket! Michael probably thought I looked like the beast that swallowed Tokyo. And if he didn’t already, he would before he left—especially after the question I asked him. But that was still an hour or so away. In this moment, I hadn’t marked him with any lasting impression of me. To him, I was still just Muhammad Ali’s eight-year-old daughter. A wild little girl excited to find Michael Jackson in her house.

  Dad used to visit the Jacksons at their house in Encino. He’d bring his black briefcase and perform magic for them. Sometimes Michael came to the house when we were at school and sat on the sofa in Dad’s office, where so many celebrities and politicians who the world admired came to admire him. I think he was their guiding light, the man the stars looked up to.

  “Hana, do you know who this is?” asked Dad as Laila and I walked back into the room. “This is the most famous singer in the world.” I stood there for a second, with my mouth wide open. I knew exactly who I was looking at.

  As Michael sat smiling at me, with his hat in his hand, I couldn’t stop staring at the white bandages wrapped around the top of his head.

  “Hi, Michael Jackson,” said Laila.

  “Hello.”

  “What happened to your head?” I asked.

  “I had an accident,” he said.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not anymore.” He smiled.

  I smiled back, then quickly shut the door and ran around the house, screaming to anyone who would listen that Michael Jackson just smiled at me and was in my daddy’s bedroom. José, our neighbor’s housekeeper’s son, didn’t believe me. Sara, the teenager who lived up the street who Mom let babysit us sometimes, didn’t believe me. Lora and Felisha, the two girls I sometimes played with, didn’t believe me. And the man sitting in his red sports car across the street couldn’t be convinced either.

  I we
nt back in and out of the room again at some point before Michael left. I wanted to call Kim and Karen to tell them who’d been at my house when they’d dropped me off.

  “Karen!” I shouted. “Guess who’s here?”

  “Who?”

  “Michael Jackson!”

  “Liar!” she said.

  “It’s true!” I said.

  “Hana said Michael Jackson is at her house,” Karen said in the background.

  “Sure he is,” shouted Kim, probably rolling her eyes.

  “He’s here!” I said again. “Upstairs with Daddy, eating a sandwich . . .”

  Their loss, I thought.

  After the excitement settled, I went back upstairs and jumped on my father’s bed. I don’t remember what they were talking about, but for the next hour or so I lay next to Dad, staring at Michael, wondering what really happened between him and Billie Jean.

  The first time Michael came to the house I was too young to remember. My mom had invited him back to Fremont Place as a surprise for my father. Mom casually mentioned years afterward that while we were still living at Fremont she used to eat at a vegetarian restaurant called the Golden Temple, a quaint little place on Third Street, a ten-minute drive from the house. After leaving Jane Fonda’s workout studio on Robertson Boulevard she would stop there for lunch. Michael Jackson was usually the only other person eating there. Eventually he and Mom sat together—until Michael hired the chef to work for him privately and the restaurant closed. One day my grandmother was there with Mom, trying to sell Michael Avon cosmetics over lunch. I can only imagine the look on my mother’s face! Michael was sweet and nice about it, but Mom was embarrassed.

  On other visits to Fremont Place, he brought a friend, Emmanuel Lewis, with him. Emmanuel was an actor from the sitcom Webster, which I watched. Another time Michael brought his pet monkey, Bubbles, with him. I wish I could go back and relive the moment—tell you exactly what was seen, felt, and said. But I was just a little girl. And at the time I had no idea who Michael Jackson was. That all changed, of course, after I saw his ground-breaking video Thriller. I closed my eyes on the scary parts—especially when he turns into a werewolf—but I must have watched it a thousand times. I started playing his music every day after school, and came home and practiced my moonwalk for Daddy and his friends.

  As I got used to the idea of having Michael Jackson in my house, I started drilling him about his Thriller video.

  “Michael Jackson,” I said, scooting to the edge of the bed, “how did you turn into a werewolf?”

  “They used a lot of makeup and masks.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “No, it didn’t hurt.”

  What I remember most about Michael was his kindness. He was very patient, soft-spoken, and moved with a gentle, graceful pace.

  When it came time for Michael to leave, I followed him out the back patio door. He and my father paused as they chatted. They were standing in the middle of the driveway where Sheba and Sampson usually lay, sprawled out in front of the steps that led to the swimming pool.

  “Michael Jackson, wait!” I shouted after he said his final goodbyes to my father. “I want to ask you something.” I had a question that couldn’t wait any longer.

  He turned to me and smiled softly. “Yes, Hana?” he said.

  “Michael,” I said, “why do you talk like a girl?”

  Laila gasped. Half shocked, half embarrassed.

  There was a pause. “Well,” he said, looking up at the blue sky, “I guess God made me that way.”

  Then he turned and walked away.

  The next weekend James Anderson, my father’s bodyguard, brought his boys over to play with us. When I told them what I had said to Michael, Jamal looked at me wide-eyed.

  “You fool,” he said. “Now he’s never coming back!”

  “I just wanted to know why he talks that way,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I don’t care if he doesn’t come back,” I fibbed. “I like Prince better anyway.”

  In the 1970s James Anderson went almost everywhere with Dad. He was a very kind man with beautiful eyes, and he stayed married to the same woman, Zenobia, his entire life. James had five sons, the oldest of whom was J. J. The twins, Jamillah and Rasheda, had a crush on J. J. Anderson, and I was no different. And I didn’t mind he was seven years older than me. One Christmas he chased me around the tree when we were all having a sleepover at his house and his towel fell off. We had just come from the swimming pool, and I had done something to agitate him. I saw everything down south, but no one would believe me. I especially enjoyed telling Rasheda, as she was one of J. J.’s biggest admirers. Unlike Jamillah, Rasheda was aloof, which I think he liked.

  Like Daddy use to say, “What you resist, persists, and what you persist, resists.” He always loved giving us advice, especially about boys. “It’s nature to chase what’s running from you and to run from what’s chasing you,” he clarified.

  I started going to my father for advice when I was twelve, after he’d given me his version of the birds and bees lecture. It was different from the one my mother had given me when I was seven. Dad was married to Lonnie by then, and they were in Los Angeles on business.

  For nearly two decades, starting in 1987, Harlan J. Werner handled marketing and licensing for my father. Dad was in town for one of his sports collectors’ conventions at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim when he first gave me the lecture about respecting my body and keeping it covered.

  “Everything that God made valuable is covered and protected . . . you should be covered too.”

  As usual, I stayed behind in the hotel room with my father as Laila and Lonnie went shopping for shoes. I didn’t like the idea of him being alone. He didn’t mind it—he was at peace with himself and enjoyed reading, writing, and signing Islamic pamphlets, hoping to spread the message and clarify misunderstandings about his faith. I sat beside him, putting all the signed ones in a neat pile and handing him the blank ones.

  “People will save this and read it,” he said. “Because my signature is on it.”

  We ordered room service, apple pie and two scoops of vanilla ice cream, and watched TV. Dad asked me if there were any boys I liked at school. I told him yes. We talked and joked about it for a while, then he looked at me seriously.

  “Hana, I can tell you this now because you’re getting older,” he said. “You’re pretty and shaped nice, so a lot of boys are going to like you. And they’ll brag about it because you’re my daughter.” He shifted in his seat. “The worst thing you can ever do is get on your knees like a dog and suck some boy’s dick. That’s the worst thing you can do.”

  My eyes popped out of their sockets. Dad was always blunt and talked about things most parents avoided, especially fathers. But he caught me off guard that day. We both burst into laughter.

  “But seriously . . .” he said. “Always respect yourself and your body.”

  It was some of the best advice he ever gave me. And I took it.

  My friends were always whispering around me. I would walk into the homeroom and hear them exchanging stories about what they did in the closet with boys while playing spin the bottle over the weekend. Or how they snuck into their parents’ liquor cabinet or smoked weed at the party they’d been to. I guess they thought I was a goody-two-shoes—or worse, that I’d judge them.

  My first kiss came at eighteen, and I lost my virginity to the same boy—my boyfriend—two years later, one week before my twentieth birthday. And I told my parents all about it. Laila was shy and kept her personal business to herself. But I was an open book. I went straight home and told my mother, then I called Dad the next morning. Mom ran through the house covering her ears. But Dad was always eager to listen and bestow his valuable advice, and I cherished every conversation.

  “Daddy, I did something last night.”

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I touched his private parts, but I didn’t put my mouth on it,” I assured him.

  “T
hat’s not so bad,” he said.

  Okay, so I chickened out. I didn’t tell him I’d had sex. He figured it out before I could. A few months later I walked into his hotel room and Dad looked at Lonnie and said, “She’s screwing!”

  “How did you know?” I asked, stopping in my tracks.

  Daddy always had a sixth sense. I think he was a little psychic. Sometimes he’d say that a plane was going to crash, and the next day a plane crashed. Once we were at the stoplight on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax in Los Angeles, where the rapper Biggie Smalls was gunned down. My father knows nothing about rap or the tragic incident. At the time, it had been almost a decade since it had happened. Even if he had known, he wouldn’t have remembered the details or where it had happened. As we sat waiting for the light to change, Dad asked, “Have you ever heard of someone called Biggie Smalls?”

  “Daddy, he was a rapper—he was killed on this corner ten years ago.”

  Eyes wide, he said nothing.

  “Did you know who he was?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “How did you know his name?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just came to me.”

  Things like that happened all the time. Then there was the matter of his fights. He used to predict the round his opponent would fall in. Mainly to sell tickets and entertain people, but twenty-six of his predictions—the rounds he said he’d KO his opponent in—came true. He only stopped because people were approaching him in the streets telling him how they bet their houses and cars on what he’d said, how they’d lose everything if he was wrong.

  My father never believed he was psychic. He just didn’t put much faith or energy into such things. But I always believed he had a gift.

  * * *

  Swimming was something we did a lot of in the summers. It was especially fun when my siblings were visiting. When we got together with Howard Bingham’s sons, Dustin and Damon, and the Anderson boys, it was heaven on earth. J. J. would put me on his shoulders and jump to the bottom of the pool in the deep end and stay down there for five seconds.