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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Budd Schulberg's celebrated novel of the prize ring has lost none of its power since its first publication more than fifty years ago. Crowded with unforgettable characters, it is a relentless expose of the fight racket. A modern Samson in the form of a simple Argentine peasant is ballyhooed by an unscrupulous fight promoter and his press agent and then betrayed and destroyed by connivers.
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Seitenzahl: 571
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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The Harder They Fall
BUDD SCHULBERG
For Vicki, Ad, Ben, for Saxe and Bernice, and for Jimmy, Paul and Fidel, who helped
‘I sorrow’d at his captive state, but minded Not to be absent at that spectacle.’
– JOHN MILTON, Samson Agonistes
Contents
INTRODUCTION
by Budd Schulberg
This novel was written in the bad old days of the fight game (in the late 1940s) when Frankie Carbo – the Mob’s ambassador to the world of the Sweet Science and Boxing Commissioner Without Portfolio – called the shots. He seemed to have a corner on the middleweights, and there was a time when Mr Carbo and Co. could decide who should wear the crown and who should be denied, no matter how deserving. In the year this book appeared, Jake LaMotta, the celebrated ‘Raging Bull’, was technically and most suspiciously knocked out by Billy Fox, in the fourth round of a contest boxing writers had great difficulty describing with a straight face. Fox was enjoying a season of happiness as an undefeated, coming champion, and anybody who questioned his string of victories was apt to find a gun gently nuzzling his temple. The stakes were high and ‘the boys’ played rough. Jake was second only to Sugar Ray Robinson as the middleweight of his day but apparently he owed the boys a favour, and the tough banger from the Bronx went out with a whimper when the word came down that it wasn’t his night.
In the early fifties, when TV was taking over the fight game, the young white college kid from Michigan, Chuck Davey, was just what the money-boys needed to bring in a new class of fight fans for the new age of national television. For the bobby-soxers, Chuck Davey was Frank Sinatra in boxing trunks. Middle-class mothers took him to their hearts. He enjoyed four years without a defeat, his hair rarely mussed as the former national collegiate amateur champion danced nimbly around and won decisions over a series of name pugs who were rendered strangely unpugnacious when they faced clean, neat, well-spoken, and oh-so-white Chuck Davey. Finally, in a bout with Kid Gavilan, ‘with the handcuffs off’, as they say in the cynical fight game, the flashy but thoroughly professional ‘Keed’ from Camagüey exposed Davey as the unsuspecting fraud he really was.
One could recite a litany of fixed fights arranged by the Frankie Carbos who have made their odiferous contribution to the game legendary boxing writer Jimmy Cannon called ‘the slum of the sports world’. One of my favourites was the Gavilan-Johnny Saxton fight for the welterweight title in Philadelphia with Mr Blinky Palermo, another Commissioner Without Portfolio, nurturing his champion, Mr Saxton. Anyone who sees boxing as a brutal sport would have been reassured that evening, when the usually aggressive Gavilan was rendered totally passive and the two fighters performed what I described ‘a hitless mazurka’, with the decision in Saxton’s favour so bizarre that my report began: ‘Johnny Saxton may be an orphan, but no one can say he lacks for cousins in Philadelphia …’
The piece was titled ‘Boxing’s Dirty Business Must Be Cleaned Up Now’, and when SportsIllustrated took out a full page in the New York Herald Tribune, running it verbatim, my reward for telling hard truths was to be banned from the Mecca of Boxing, Madison Square Garden.
Four decades later, the fight game is as desperately in need of reform – make that a thorough housecleaning – as it was in the Carbo-Palermo days. Don King – the promotional genius who studied Shakespeare and Machiavelli in the slammer after the fatal stomping of a Detroit numbers runner who made the mistake of welshing on a transaction – controls the heavyweight championship as totally and cynically as Frankie C. once ruled the middleweights. His controlee is Iron Mike Tyson, sprung earlier this year from three years in the pen in Indiana on charges of raping a black beauty contestant. Although inactive for four years, Mike won instant recognition from the World Boxing Association and the World Boxing Council as their No. 1 Contender. For his ‘Welcome Home’ comeback debut, Mike was fed an Irish hulk from Boston whose record of 36 and 1 was impressive until you checked out the opposition, a sorry line-up of professional losers. Don King quickly added a catchy nickname, ‘Hurricane’, to Peter McNeeley, and rushed the unskilled kid into prime time, with a record pay-per-view charge of fifty dollars. Seven seconds into this travesty, the wind was gone from the Hurricane as he fell from a glancing blow to his inviting Celtic chin. A minute later, McNeeley’s manager, said to be not unacquainted with Boston wise guys, jumped into the ring to save his hapless entry.
‘Toro Molinas’ come in all colours and nationalities. There is Frans Botha, the ‘White Buffalo’ from South Africa, who was ranked No. 2 by the WBA and No. 1 by still another entry in the ever-thickening alphabet soup, the International Boxing Federation, with the German Axel Schulz as No. 2. And who is Frans Botha? A softly padded gentleman from the white suburbs of the Transvaal who went into the recent Schulz fight undefeated, 35 and 0. Thirty-five wins over nameless and shameless ‘opponents’. His fight, or slow dance on the shilling ground, with Schulz in Germany for the ‘vacant heavyweight championship of the world’ left an aroma that reminded me of the Primo Carnera days of the thirties when poor Primo, the 270-pound circus giant from Italy, was building his undefeated record over an impressive list of roundheels and overnight pacifists, winning the championship from a suspiciously tamed Jack Sharkey.
Watching Botha lumber through his lacklustre twelve rounds with Herr Schulz, gasping for breath after six rounds, and losing the last six to the more agile and slightly more accomplished Schulz, staggering through the final round as if he had trained in a German beer hall, only to have his hand outrageously raised in ‘victory’, I found myself thinking again of my victim/champion Toro Molina. The only injuries inflicted in this alleged combat took place after the decision when three ladies were struck by the flying beer and champagne bottles that filled the air as the frustrated German fans staged a full-scale riot.
Caught up in this drama on television, I couldn’t help wondering if the judges had been threatened, or bribed, or just considered it better wisdom to go along with Don the King, who had just left behind him in New York a hung jury, unable to decide that King had bilked Lloyds of London by claiming $350,000 in training expenses to Julio César Chávez after a training injury cancelled a Chávez title fight. Chávez swore in court that he never saw that tidy six-figure sum, and King’s former accountant, a Mr Maffia, testified that he had been ordered to pad the Chávez expenses that Sr Chávez never received. In that case both the prosecutors and the boxing press thought that the law had finally caught up with the Teflon Don. But there he was in the German ring, heroically dodging bottles and embracing his exhausted White Buffalo, who when queried on his future plans said, ‘I want to thank Mr King. Mr King give me my big chance. Whatever Mr King says, I do.’
Tim Witherspoon, Mr King’s champion in the eighties, could warn him that Mr King bilked him of at least a million dollars, and dropped him like a counterfeit C-note when his services were no longer needed. As the bottles littered the ring where the once-respected ‘heavyweight championship’ had been trashed again, I could see the King scenario unfolding, a nineties reflection of the scenario in the novel that follows. Today there are at least three ‘heavyweight champions’ – Frank Bruno, WBC; Bruce Seldon, WBA; now Frans Botha, IBF. The three together don’t add up to one deserving title-holder. Mike Tyson could make $25 million for fighting each one of these ‘Toro Molina champs’, and the big winner once again will be Don King, who stands to make even more millions than Tyson if things go according to plan, as they have a habit of doing for this Machiavelli of the Mass Media. Years ago I had described the fight game as ‘show business with blood’; but I hadn’t foreseen a business so inflated that if a Tyson fight could gross $70 million for an eighty-nine-second farce, a $100 million worldwide gross for even a bogus title fight awaits him in ’96.
When this novel was first published, it was considered the strongest indictment of the fight game ever written. Strange, coming from a writer who has loved and followed it all his life. It still cries out for the reforms I called for when the book appeared. ‘Boxing’s Dirty Business Must Be Cleaned Up …’ I’m no longer so sure about that ‘Now’. So I keep waiting, and hoping, and meanwhile I’m on my way down to see Mike Tyson in a rollover against Buster Mathis Jr. I saw Buster Mathis Sr, who couldn’t punch either, so I know what to expect. Well, gentle readers, as we used to call you, read on and weep. Read on and hope. And maybe one of these days we’ll rescue a fascinating sport, full of brave warriors and honest practitioners, from the gutter which it still finds so congenial and profitable.
Brookside, New York
December 1995
CHAPTER ONE
When I came into the story I was having a quiet conversation over a bottle of Old Taylor with my friend Charles the bartender at Mickey Walker’s, the place Mickey hasn’t got any more at 50th and Eighth Avenue, right across the street from the Garden. I like Charles because he always serves up a respectable two-ounce whisky and because of the talks we have about old-time fighters. Charles must know as much about the old days as Granny Rice. He must be sixty or seventy years of age, with baby-pink skin and hardly a wrinkle in his face. The only giveaway to his age is his spare white hair that he insists for some reason on dyeing a corny yellow. He’s seen a lot of the fighters who are just names to me – legendary names like Ketchel and Gans and Mexican Joe Rivers. One of the last things he did before he left London (a faint cockney echo lingers in his speech) was to see the famous Peter Jackson-Frank Slavin fight at the National Sporting Club. This afternoon, as on so many other afternoons, we were back in the crucial twentieth round, and Charles, with his hands raised in the classical nineteenth-century boxing stance, was impersonating the dark-skinned, quiet-spoken, wonderfully poised Jackson.
‘Fix the picture in your mind, sir,’ Charles was always saying. ‘Here’s Jackson, a fine figure of a man, the first of the heavies to get up on his toes, faster than Louis and every bit the puncher. And here in front of him is solid Frank, a great rock of a man who’s taken everything the black man had to offer and had him on the verge of a kayo in the early rounds. They’re locked for a moment in a furious clinch. Jackson, who’s made a remarkable recovery, a miraculous recovery, sir, breaks away and nails old Frank with a right that travels just this far—’ Charles demonstrated, reaching over the bar and rapping me sharply on the side of the jaw – ‘just that far.’
At this point in the battle Charles switched sides. He had been in vaudeville once, and during the early days of the Depression he had picked up a couple of bucks playing butlers on Broadway. He should be paying regular dues to Actors’ Equity because he’s acting all the time. Now he was the staggering glassy-eyed Slavin, reeling back from Jackson’s short punishing blow. ‘Fix the picture in your mind, sir,’ he repeated. His chin was resting on his chest and his body had gone limp. ‘His hands are at his side, he can’t raise his head or lift his feet, but he won’t go down. Peter Jackson hits him again, and Frank is helpless to defend himself, but he won’t go down. He just stands there with his arms at his side, waiting to be hit again. He’s made quite a boast of it before the fight, you see, sir, that there’s no nigger in the world good enough to make Frank Slavin quit to him. I never use the word “nigger” myself, you understand, sir, I’m just trying to give you the picture as it was. In my business, you see, sir, I judge a man by the colour of his deeds, not the colour of his skin. This Peter Jackson, for instance. A finer sportsman never climbed through the ropes than this dark gentleman from Australia.’
Now Charles was Jackson again, magnificently proud and erect as the crowd waited for him to finish off his battered opponent. ‘But at this moment, a memorable thing happened, sir. Instead of rushing in and clubbing the helpless Slavin to the canvas, Jackson stood back, risking the chance that Slavin with his bull-strength might recover, and turned to the referee. You could hear his calm, deep voice all the way back to where I was sitting, sir. Sounded more like a preacher than a fighter, he did. “Must I finish him off, Mr Angle?” he said. “Box on,” said Mr Angle. Black Peter turned back to his man again. In spite of all those taunts about the colour of his skin, you could see he had no stomach for the job. He tapped Frank on the chin once, twice, three times – little stiff punches that would put him away without breaking his jaw – and finally on the fourth, down went old Frank, cold as the proverbial mackerel, for all his boasts. And all the gentlemen who had come to the Sporting Club to see the white man get the better of the black couldn’t help rising to their feet and giving Jackson one of the longest rounds of applause that had ever been heard in the Sporting Club.’
‘Give me another shot,’ I said. ‘Charles, you’re wonderful. Did you really see the Jackson-Slavin fight?’
‘Would I lie to you, Mr Lewis?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You told me you were one of Joe Choynski’s handlers the time he fought Corbett on that barge off San Francisco. Well, over on Third Avenue I found an old picture of Choynski and Corbett with their handlers just before the fight. You don’t seem to be in it.’
Charles uncorked the Old Taylor again and poured me another one. ‘You see, a man of my word,’ he said. ‘Every time you catch me in an inaccuracy, Mr Lewis, I buy you a drink.’
‘An inaccuracy is an accidental mistake,’ I said. ‘What I caught you in, Charles, was a good old-fashioned lie.’
‘Please, Mr Lewis,’ said Charles, deeply offended. ‘Don’t use that word. I may on occasion, for dramatic emphasis, fib. But I never lie. A lie is a thief, sir, and will steal from anybody. A fib just borrows a little from people who can afford it and forgets to pay them back.’
‘But you actually saw this Jackson-Slavin fight?’
‘Say “bout”, sir, the Jackson-Slavin bout. You’d never hear a gentleman calling a boxing contest a fight.’
‘Here on Eighth Avenue,’ I said, ‘a gentleman is a fellow who calls a woman a broad instead of something else.’
‘It is unfortunately true,’ Charles agreed. ‘The gentlemen in the pugilism business are conspicuous by their abstinence.’
‘That includes me in,’ I said. ‘What do I owe you for this week, Charles?’
‘I’ll tell you before you leave,’ Charles said. He never liked to talk about money. He would always scribble the amount on the back of a tab and then slip it under my glass like a secret message.
A sharply dressed, nervous-looking little man stuck his head in the door. ‘Hey, Charley – you seen the Mumbler?’
‘Not today, Mr Miniff.’
‘Jeez, I gotta find him,’ the little man said.
‘If he shows up I’ll tell him you’re looking for him,’ Charles told him.
‘T’anks,’ said Miniff. ‘You’re m’ boy.’ He disappeared.
Charles shook his head. ‘It’s a sad day, Mr Lewis, a sad day.’
I looked at the big oval clock over the door. A little after three. Time for Charles’s over-the-bar address on the decline and fall of the manly art. ‘The people who come into this place,’ Charles began. ‘Grifters, chisellers, two-bit gamblers, big-time operators with small-time minds, managers who’d rather see their boys get killed than make an honest living and boxers who’ve taken so many dives they’ve got hinges on their knees. In the old days, sir, it was a rough game but it had some … some character to it, some dignity. Take Choynski and Corbett fighting on that barge. Skin gloves on Choynski, two-ouncers on Corbett, to a finish. No fancy percentages, no non-title business, just winner take all, may the best man win. A man squared off for his own pride in those days. He was an athlete. If he made a little money at it, fine and dandy. But what have we got today? Champions with mobsters for managers who stall for years fighting over-weight bouts because they know the first time they climb into the ring with a good man it’s goodbye, championship.’
Charles turned around to see if the boss was watching and had one himself. The only time I ever saw him take one was when we were alone and he got going on this decline-and-fall thing.
He washed his glass and wiped it clean, to destroy the evidence, and looked at me steadily. ‘Mr Lewis, what is it that turned a fine sport into a dirty business?’
‘Money,’ I said.
‘It’s money,’ he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘Money. Too much money for the promoters, too much money for the managers, too much money for the fighters.’
‘Too much money for everybody except the press agents,’ I said. I was feeling sorrier for myself at the moment than I was for the game. That’s what the bottle always did to me.
‘I tell you, Mr Lewis, it’s money,’ Charles was saying. ‘An athletic sport in an atmosphere of money is like a girl from a good family in a house of ill fame.’
I pulled out the gold-banded fountain pen Beth had given me for my birthday, and made a couple of notes on what Charles was saying. He was made to order for that play I was going to write, the play on the fight game I had been talking about so long, the one Beth seemed to be so sure I was never going to finish. ‘Don’t spill it all out in talk,’ she was always saying. Damn Beth and her bright sayings. If I had had any sense I would have found myself a nice dumb broad. But if I could only set the play down the way I felt it sometimes, in all its sweaty violence – not a nine-dollar bill like Golden Boy – no violinists with brittle hands, no undigested poetry subtle as a train wreck, but the kids from the street as they really were, mean and money-hungry, and the greed of the mobsters who had the game rigged; that was the guts of it and I was the boy to write it.
One solid job could justify all the lousy years I had frittered away as a press agent for champions, deserved and otherwise, contenders and bums, plenty of the latter. You see, that play would tell Beth, I haven’t really fallen so low as you thought. All the time it seemed as if I were prostituting myself by making with the adjectives for Honest Jimmy Quinn and Nick (The Eye) Latka, the well-known fistic entrepreneurs, I was actually soaking up material for my masterpiece. Just as O’Neill spent all those years as a common sailor and Jack London was on the bum.
Like O’Neill and London. It always made me feel better to make those notes. My pockets were full of notes. There were notes in every drawer of my desk at the hotel. The notes were kind of an escape valve for all the time I wasted getting loaded, cutting up touches with Charles, sitting around with the boys, going up to Shirley’s, and ladling out the old craperoo about how old Joe Round-heels, who couldn’t lick my grandfather and who had just been put away in two over at the Trenton Arena, was primed (I would be starving to death without that word primed) to give Jack Contender the fight of his life.
‘What are you doing there, Mr Lewis?’ Charles said. ‘Not writing down something I say.’
A good bartender, Charles never pried into his customers’ affairs. But he was beginning to break down with me because he liked the idea of getting into my play. I wish Beth had as much faith in me as Charles. ‘You know what you ought to do, you ought to quit leaning on your elbows and get to work,’ she was always saying. But Charles was different. He’d tell me something and then he’d say, ‘You ought to put that in your play.’ We talked about it so long that my work of art came to have a real identity. ‘If you’re going to put me in your show,’ Charles would say, ‘please call me Charles. I like to be called Charles. My mother always called me Charles. Charley sounds like – a puppet, or a fat man.’
The door swung open and Miniff popped his head in again. ‘Hey, Charley, still no signa the Mumbler?’
Charles shook his head gravely. ‘No signa the Mumbler whatsoever, Mr Miniff.’ Charles was a snob. It gave him pleasure to exercise his talent for mimicry at the expense of his ungrammatical clientele. Miniff came in and climbed up on the stool next to mine. His small feet didn’t reach the footrest at the base of the stool. He pushed his brown felt hat back on his head desperately. He ran his hands over his face and shook his head a few times, his fingers covering his eyes. He was tired. New York is hot when you run around all day.
‘Have one with me, Miniff,’ I said. He waved me off with a small, hairy hand.
‘Just the juice of the cow,’ he said. ‘Gotta keep my ulcer quiet.’ From his breast pocket he took a couple of short, stubby cigars, shoved one into his mouth and offered the other one around.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘If I smoked those six-for-a-quarters I’d have ulcers too. If I’m going to have them, I want expensive ulcers, bottled in bond.’
‘Listen,’ Miniff said, ‘it ain’t the hemp. It’s the headaches I got. Nervous digestion.’ He drank his milk carefully, letting it trickle slowly down his throat for maximum therapeutic effect.
‘Jeez, I gotta find the Mumbler,’ he said. The Mumbler was Solly Hyman, the matchmaker for St Nick’s. ‘I looked everywhere already, Lindy’s, both of them, Sam’s. Up at Stillman’s I hear Furrone can’t go Tuesday. Gotta bad toot’. Jeez, I gotta guy to take his place. My bum’ll look good in there.’
‘Who you got, Mr Miniff?’ Charles said, still mimicking.
‘Cowboy Coombs.’
‘Oh, my God,’ I said.
‘He can still go,’ said Miniff. ‘I tell ya he c’n stay three-four rounds with the shine, maybe go the limit.’
‘Cowboy Coombs,’ I said. ‘The grandfather of all the bums.’
‘So he ain’t no Tooney,’ Miniff said.
‘Fifteen years ago, he wasn’t Tunney,’ I said.
Miniff pushed his hat back an inch or two on his forehead. His forehead was shiny with perspiration. This Cowboy Coombs thing was no joke. It was a chance to hustle a fast fifty. The way Miniff works he picks up some down-and-outer or some new kid from the amateurs and he angles a spot or two for him, if he can. It’s strictly quick turnover. If the bum goes down, Miniff can’t do anything more for him anyway. If the kid is good, smarter managers with better ‘ins’ always steal him away. So for Miniff it’s mostly a substitution business, running in a bum or a novice at the last minute, so the box office doesn’t have to buy the tickets back, or picking up a quiet C by arranging for one of his dive-artists to do an el foldo.
‘Listen, Eddie,’ Miniff said to me, working all the time, ‘Coombs has got a wife and five kids and they gotta eat. All he’s been doin’ is spar work the last year or two. The bum needs a break. You could maybe write up something in one of the rags about him. How he got canned for settin’ the Champ down in a workout …’
‘That’s not the way I heard he got canned,’ I said.
‘All right, all right, so it happened a little different, maybe the Champ slipped. I suppose you never write stuff it ain’t a hunert per cent kosher!’
‘Mr Miniff, you impugn my integrity,’ I said. The stuff a guy will write to pay his rent and keep himself in whisky! The things a guy will do for 100 bucks a week in America! Eddie Lewis, who spent almost two years at Princeton, got As in English, had a byline in the Trib and has twenty-three pages of a play that is being systematically devoured by a little book club of hungry moths who can’t tell a piece of literature from a square meal.
‘Go on, Eddie, for a pal,’ Miniff pleaded. ‘Just one little lineroo about how the Cowboy is back in great shape. You could work it into almost any colyum. They go for your crap.’
‘Don’t give me that Cowboy Coombs,’ I said. ‘Coombs was ready for the laughing academy when you had to talk through a little hole in the door to get a drink. The best thing that could happen to Mrs Coombs and those five kids is for you to climb down off Mr Coombs’ back and let him go to work for a change.’
‘Aaaah,’ said Miniff, and the sound was so bitter it could have been his ulcer talking. ‘Don’t sell that Coombs short. He c’n still lick half the heavyweights in the business right now. Whadcha thinka that?’
‘I think half the heavyweights in the business should also climb back on their trucks,’ I said.
‘Aaaaaah,’ Miniff said. He finished the milk, wiped his lips with his sleeve, pulled some of the wet, loose leaves from the end of his cigar-butt, stuck it back between his teeth again, pulled down the brim of his old brown hat, said, ‘Take it easy, Eddie, see ya, Charley,’ and got out in a hurry.
I drank slowly, letting the good warm feeling fan out gradually from my belly. The Harry Miniffs of the world! No, that was taking in too much territory. America. Harry Miniff was American. He had an Italian name or an Irish name or a Jewish name or an English name, but you would never find an Italian in Italy, a Jew in Palestine, Irishman in Ireland or an Englishman in England with the nervous system and social behaviour of the American Harry Miniff. You could find Miniffs everywhere, not just the fight game but show business, radio, movies, the rackets, wholesale houses, building trades, blackjack unions, advertising, politics, real estate, insurance – a disease of the American heart – successful Harry Miniffs, pushing their way to the top of steel institutes, oil combines, film studios, fight monopolies; and unsuccessful Harry Miniffs, born with the will but not the knack to catch up with the high dollar that keeps tempting them on like a mechanical rabbit which the whippet can’t catch unless the machine breaks down, and can’t eat if it does.
‘The last one in the bottle, Mr Lewis,’ Charles said. ‘On the house.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You’re an oasis, Charles. An Eighth Avenue oasis.’
Someone in a booth had dropped a nickel in the juke slot. It was the only good record in the box, the Bechet version of ‘Summertime’. The haunting tone of Sidney’s clarinet took over the place. I looked around to see if it was Shirley. She was always playing it. She was sitting in a booth by herself, listening to the music.
‘Hi, Shirley, didn’t hear you come in.’
‘I saw you was talking with Miniff,’ she said. ‘Didn’t want to interrupt a big important conversation like that.’
She had been around for ten or twelve years, but there was still a little Oklahoma left in her speech. She came to town with her husband, Sailor Beaumont – remember Billy Beaumont? – when he was on the up swing, after he had licked everything in the West and was coming to New York for a shot at the big time. He was the boy who crossed the wise money by going in on the short end of 10-1 to win the welterweight title. He and Shirley rode pretty high for a while. The Sailor was an unreconstructed reform-school graduate from West Liberty who threw most of his dough into such routine channels as the fleshpots, the ponies and the night spots. All the rest went for motorcycles. He had a white streamlined motorcycle with a sidecar on which, if you were good at reading print cutting through downtown traffic at sixty miles an hour, you could make out the words ‘Sailor Beaumont, the Pride of West Liberty’. That’s the kind of a fellow he was. Lots of times, especially in the beginning when they were still getting along together, I remember Shirley riding in that sidecar, with her dark red hair flying out behind her. She was something to look at in those days, before the beers and the troubles caught up with her. You could still see some of it left, even with the crow’s feet around the eyes and the telltale washed-out look that comes from doing too many things too many times. She still had something from the neck down too, even if her pin-up days were ten years behind. She was beginning to spread, just this much, in the rump, the belly and the bust, but there was something about the way she held herself – sometimes I thought it was more in her attitude toward men than anything physical – that made us still turn around.
‘Have one with me, Shirley?’ I called over.
‘Save it, Eddie,’ she said.
‘Not even two fingers, to be sociable?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe a beer,’ Shirley said.
I gave Charles the order and went over to the booth. ‘Waiting for anyone?’
‘For you, darling,’ she said, sarcastic. She didn’t bother to look at me.
‘What’s the matter? Hung?’
‘Aah, not really, just, oh, the hell with it …’
Shirley was in a mood. She got that way every now and then. Most of the time she was feeling good, a lot of laughs – ‘What the hell, I’m not getting any richer and I’m not getting any younger, but I’m having fun.’ But once in a while, especially when you caught her alone in the daytime, she was this way. After it got dark and she had had a few, it would be better. But I’ve seen her sit there in a booth for hours, having solitary beers and dropping nickels in the slot, playing ‘Summertime’ or ‘Melancholy Baby’ or another of her favourites, ‘Embraceable You’. I suppose those songs had something to do with the Sailor, though it always struck me as profane to associate the tender sentiments of those excellent lyrics with a screwball slugger like Beaumont. He’d lay anything that stood still for thirty seconds. If Shirley ever asked for an explanation she got it – on the jaw. He was one of the few professionals I ever knew who indulged in spontaneous extracurricular bouts in various joints, a practice which did not endear him to Jacobs Beach and brought him frequently and forcibly to the attention of the local gendarmerie. When he finally had a blowout on that hotcha motorcycle of his and left in a bloody mess on the kerb at Sixth Avenue near 52nd Street what few brains he had salvaged from ninety-three wide-open fights, the people who took it hard could be counted on one finger of one hand, and that was Shirley.
She reached into her large red-leather purse, took out a little white bag of fine-cut tobacco, carefully tapped it out onto a small rectangle of thin brown paper with a practised hand. She was the only woman I had ever seen roll her own cigarettes. It was one of the habits she brought with her from the hungry years in West Liberty. While she twirled the flat wrapper into an amazingly symmetrical cylinder, she stared absently through the glass that looked out on Eighth Avenue. The street was full of people moving restlessly back and forth in two streams like ants, but with less purpose. ‘Summertime,’ she sang under her breath lackadaisically, a snatch here and a snatch there.
The beer seemed to do something for her. ‘You can draw me another one, Charles,’ she said, coming up out of her mood a little, ‘with a rye chaser.’
After all these years, that was still one of the pub’s favourite jokes. Shirley looked at me and smiled as if she were seeing me for the first time.
‘Where you been keeping yourself, Eddie? Over in Bleeck’s with my rival again?’
This had been going on for years. It had been going on so long there probably was something in it. Shirley was all right. I liked the way she was about men. She never really let you forget that there were anatomical differences between you, and yet she didn’t make a conflict of it. I liked the way she had been about Sailor Beaumont, even if he was a wrongo. There were so many American wives who gave most of their energy to trying to make their husbands vice-presidents or head buyers or something. Twice a week they did him a big favour. That was called being a good wife. Shirley, if she hadn’t fallen in love with an irresponsible, physically precocious kid who came in wide-open but had a knockout punch in his right hand, would have made somebody in West Liberty an exceptional wife instead of making Eighth Avenue an exceptional madame.
‘Favour us with your presence this week, Eddie,’ she said. ‘Come in early and I’ll have Lucille fry us some chicken and we’ll play a little gin.’
‘Maybe Friday night, before the Glenn-Lesnevich fight,’ I said.
‘That kid Glenn! A jerk thing Nick did, bringing him along so fast,’ Shirley said. ‘Those overgrown boys who get up in the heavy dough because they can sock and can take it – thinking they’re King of the May because they got their names in lights outside the Garden, when all they got is a one-way ticket to Queer Street. Glenn draws four good gates to the Garden because the customers know he’s going to try, gets himself slapped around by men he’s got no business in the same ring with, goes back to LA to be a lousy runner for a bookie or something, and the manager gets himself another boy. That’s what he did with Billy. Nick Latka, that crumb!’
‘Nick isn’t so bad,’ I said. ‘Pays me every Friday, doesn’t look over my shoulder too much, kind of an interesting feller, too.’
‘So is a cockroach interesting if it’s got Nick’s money in the bank,’ Shirley said. ‘Nick is marked lousy in my book because he don’t look out for his boys. When he has a good one, he’s got the dough and the connections to get him to the top, but down under that left breast pocket, he’s got nothing there for the boys. Not like George Blake, Pop Foster. Their old boys were always coming back for a touch, a little advice. Nick, when you’re winning nothing’s too good for you. You’re out to that estate over in Jersey every weekend. But when you’re out of gas, that’s all, brother. You got about as much chance of getting into that office as into a pay toilet without a nickel. I know. I was all through that already, with Billy. And how many has he had since Billy? And now Glenn. And next week maybe some skinny-legged speedball from the Golden Gloves. They’re so pretty when they start, Eddie. I hate to see ’em run down.’
Now that Billy was gone, I think Shirley was in love with all fighters. She loved them when they were full of bounce and beans, with their hard trim bodies moving gracefully in their first tailor-made full-cut double-breasteds with peg-top trousers narrowing at the ankles in a modified zoot. And she loved them when the shape of their noses was gone, their ears cauliflowered, scar tissue drawing back their eyes, when they laughed too easily and their speech faltered and they talked about the comeback that Harry Miniff or one of his thousand-and-one cousins was lining up for them. Lots of ladies have loved winning fighters, the Grebs, the Baers, the Golden Boys, but it was the battered ones, the humiliated, the washed-ups, the TKO victims with the stitches in their lips and through their eyelids that Shirley took to her bosom. Maybe it was her way of getting Billy back, the Sailor Beaumont of his last year, when the younger, stronger, faster boys who did their training on Eighth Avenue instead of on 52nd Street were making him look slow and foolish and sad.
‘Well, first one today,’ Shirley said, and tossed it off, exaggerating the shudder for a laugh.
She reached into her purse again and took out a very small Brownie snapshot, slightly overexposed, of a well-set-up kid grinning under a ten-gallon hat.
‘New picture of my kid the folks just sent me.’
While I took a dutiful hinge at it she said, ‘He’s the image of Billy. Isn’t he a doll?’
He did look like Beaumont – the same overdevelopment from the waist up, with the legs tapering down nicely. On his face was a look of cheerful viciousness.
‘He’ll be nine next month,’ Shirley said. ‘He’s with his grandparents on a ranch near home. He wants to be a veterinary. I don’t care what he does, as long as he stays out of the ring. He can be a card player or a drummer or a pimp if he wants to. But, by God, if I ever hear that he’s turning out to be a fighter like his old man, I’ll go home and kick his little annyfay for him.’
CHAPTER TWO
When I am in a pub and the phone is for me I am never too happy about it. It means the natural rhythm of my day is about to be interrupted by the unexpected. Shirley had gone back to the place, ‘to make a new girl feel at home’, as she put it, and Beth had dropped in to pick me up. She was annoyed because I was slightly swizzled when she came in. Beth wasn’t WCTU or anything, but she liked me to do my drinking with her. She thought I wasted too much time shooting the breeze with Charles and Shirley and the other characters. If my job didn’t take up all my time, she said, I should plant myself in the room at the hotel and try to finish that play.
The big mistake I made with Beth was that once when I had her up to my room – in the days when I still had to impress her – I showed her that unfinished first act. Beth didn’t have too much to say about it, except for wanting me to get it done. That was the trouble with Beth: she always wanted me to finish things. I proposed to her once in a drunken moment and I think secretly she always held it against me for not mentioning the proposal again when I sobered up. I guess she just wanted me to finish whatever I started.
When I first met her, Beth was fresh out of Smith College, where her Phi Bete key had been good for a $25-a-week job with Life, in their training squad for researchers. Everything she knew came out of books. Her old man taught Economics at Amherst and her old lady was the daughter of a Dartmouth dean. So when I first began to tell her about the boxing business, she thought it was fascinating. That’s the word she used for this business – fascinating. This fight talk was a new kind of talk for Beth, and all the time she was professing to despise it, I could tell it was getting to her. Even if only as a novelty, it was getting to her and I was the ideal interpreter of this new world that repelled and attracted her. That’s how I got to Beth myself. I was just enough of a citizen of this strange new world to excite her and yet – since Beth could never completely recover from her snobberies, intellectual and otherwise – there was just enough Ivy still clinging to me, just enough Cottage Club, just enough ability to relate the phenomenon of prizefighting to her academic vocabulary to make me acceptable.
I think my talking about trying to write a play on boxing gave her a justification for being interested in me, just as it seemed to justify my staying in the game.
But this is taking us back a year and a half. It’s almost another story. In the story I am telling here, Beth is miffed again – her impatience with me had been increasing lately – and somebody wants me on the telephone.
It was Killer Menegheni. Killer was a combined bodyguard, companion, masseur and private secretary to Nick. I don’t really think the Killer had ever been responsible for anybody’s funeral, but the legend had sprung up that the Killer would have been a featherweight champ if he hadn’t killed a man in the ring his third time out. I had looked it up, but no Menegheni, and the Ring Record Book almost always gives the boys’ right names in parentheses under their professional names. Nat Fleischer, that eminent historian, had never heard of him either. So you could take heavy odds that the Killer’s alleged mayhem had no resemblance to any character living or dead, as they always say.
‘Hey, Eddie, d’ boss wants ya.’
‘Now, goddamit, Killer,’ I said. ‘I’m with a lady. Can’t a man settle down to a little companionate drinking without Nick putting his hounds on me?’
‘The boss wants ya to get your ass up here,’ Killer answered. Take away those three- and four-letter essential Anglo-Saxon words and Mr Menegheni would have to talk with his fingers.
‘But this lady and I have plans for the evening,’ I said. ‘I don’t have to come running every time Nick lifts a finger. Who does he think he is?’
‘He thinks he’s Nick Latka,’ said the Killer. ‘And I never seen d’ day he wasn’t right.’
For the Killer, that was considerable repartee. ‘Say, you’re pretty sharp today,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ the Killer said. ‘I scored with that redhead from the Chez Paris last night. Just seventeen years old. Beauteeful.’
The Killer, only five-six in his built-up shoes, was always flashing us the latest news of his daily conquests.
‘You would make a good leg-man for Krafft-Ebing,’ I said.
‘I ain’t changing places with nobody. I do all right with Nick.’
‘Well, I’m glad you’re happy,’ I said. ‘Pleasant weekend, Killer.’
‘Hey-hey-hey, wait a minnut,’ the Killer said quickly. ‘This deal what the boss wants to see you about. It must be very hot. I’ll tellum yer on yer way up.’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you can tell him for me’ – O Lord, the fear that eats into a man for a hundred bucks a week – ‘I’ll be up in fifteen minutes.’
I started back to the booth to break it to Beth. She was always turning down good things to keep Saturday night for me. Saturday nights we’d usually hit our favourite spots together, Bleeck’s and Tim’s and when we wanted music, Nick’s for Spanier and Russell and Brunis, and Downtown Café Society, when Red Allen was there, and J.C. Higginbotham. Sunday morning we’d wake up around ten, send down for coffee and lie around with the papers until it was time to go out for lunch. Beth would kick about the News, the Mirror and the Journal because she was a pretty hot liberal as well as a snob, but some of my best plants were picked up by the tabs and I liked to read the Journal for Graham, one of the town’s oldest and hardest-working sports writers.
I don’t know if it was love with me or not, but I’ll put it this way: I never slept with anybody I was so glad to see in the morning as Beth Reynolds. I’ve known other girls who were more beautiful, more passionate or more experimental, but who turned out to be a drag in the morning. With Beth, having a drink, seeing a fight, listening to Spanier, going to bed, nursing each other’s hangovers, arguing about Wolfe and getting sore at some new stupidity of some old senator’s – it was all one, all good, all close, and when you are pushing into your middle-thirties and beginning to need a slow count to get up in the morning, that outweighs the dime-a-dozen ecstasies.
Not that Beth wasn’t exciting enough, in her own way. She met you with a small, intense passion that seemed surprisingly wanton for a girl with a pretty-plain schoolteacher face, who couldn’t see very well without her glasses. I hadn’t been her ‘first man’ (Beth’s words, naturally, not mine), for that honour had been reserved for an Amherst boy from a distinguished Boston family who had been madly and incompetently in love with her. He had made such a mess of things, apparently, that she had shied away from further intimacies until I came along. I don’t quite know yet how I got her to try again. She just decided it for herself one evening. It was the night we had gone back to her apartment after I had taken her to see her first fight. I think she always distrusted me a little for helping make it so successful. That academic, puritanical background didn’t stop her from enjoying herself. It just prevented her from respecting herself for what she had allowed herself to do. That’s why when she took off her glasses and the other encumbrances, she was wanton. For only the true Puritan can know that delicious sense of falling from grace that we call wantonness.
More than once, in my cups, I had proposed that we make an honourable girl of Beth. She didn’t approve of the way we were living, but she always preferred to wait and see if a similar offer would be forthcoming under the influence of sobriety. But somehow I could never quite muster up enough marital determination to make a legitimate proposal without the nudge of friendly spirits. The closest I could ever come was to say, with what was meant for levity, ‘Beth, if I ever marry anyone, it’s got to be you.’
‘If you insist on prefacing all your proposals with the conditional conjunctive,’ she had answered, ‘you will end up a lecherous old bachelor and I will end up married to Herbert Ageton.’
Herbert Ageton was a playwright who had written militant proletarian dramas for the Theatre Union back in the early thirties, when he was just out of college and hardly knew how to keep his pipe lit. Much to his horror and indignation, MGM had bought one of his radical plays, and brought him out to adapt it. When he got up to two thousand dollars a week he was analysed at one hundred dollars an hour by a highly successful female practitioner who made him realise that his proletarian protest against capitalism was only a substitute for his hatred of his father. Somehow the signals got crossed and he came out still hating his father but feeling somewhat more kindly toward capitalism. Since that time he had only been on Broadway twice, with symbolic plays about sex relations which all the critics had panned and all the studios had scrambled for. They turned out to make very good pictures for Lana Turner. Or maybe I was just jealous. Herbert used to call Beth from Hollywood all the time. And every time he came to town he took her to 21 and the Stork and the other meeting places of good-time counter-revolutionists and their opposite numbers.
‘Baby,’ I said, when I got back to the booth, ‘this is lousy, but I’ve got to go up and see Nick a minute.’
‘A minute. Nick and his minutes! You will probably end up out in Jersey at his country place.’
That had happened once and Beth would never let me forget it. I had left a message for her at Walker’s, but by the time it got through she had taken an angry powder.
‘No,’ I said, ‘this is strictly business. If I’m not back in one hour …’
‘Don’t make it too drastic,’ she said. ‘If you’re back in one hour it will be the first time. You know I could have gone out with Herbert tonight.’
‘Oh, Jesus, that again.’
‘How many times have I told you not to say “Jesus”? It offends people.’
‘Oh Je—I don’t mean Jesus Christ. I just mean Jesus Ageton.’
‘He’s an interesting guy. He wanted me to have dinner at 21 and then come back to his hotel and hear his new play.’
‘What hotel? Don’t tell me. The Waldorf?’
‘Hampshire House.’
‘The poor kid. Have you ever slept with anybody in the Hampshire House?’
‘Edwin, when I get you home tonight, I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap.’
‘Okay, okay, be evasive. Sit tight, honey. I’ll go up and see what the Big Brain has on his larcenous mind.’
The office of Nick Latka wasn’t the tawdry fight manager’s office you may have seen on the stage or that can actually be found along 49th Street. It was the office of a highly successful businessman who happened to have an interest in the boxing business, but who might have been identified with show business, shirts, insurance or the FBI. The walls of brown cork were covered with pictures of famous fighters, ball players, golfers, jockeys and motion-picture stars inscribed ‘to my pal Nick’, ‘to a great guy’, ‘to the best pal I had in Miami’. On the desk was a box of cigars, Nick’s brand, Belindas, and pictures in gold-plated frames of his wife when she was a lovely brunette in a Broadway chorus, and their two children, a handsome, conceited-looking boy of twelve in a military-school uniform, who took after his mother, and a dark-complexioned girl of ten who bore an unfortunate resemblance to her father. Nick would give those kids anything he had. The boy was away at New York Military Academy. The girl went to Miss Brindley’s, one of the most expensive schools in the city.
No matter how he talked in the gym, Nick never used a vulgar word in the presence of those kids. Nick had come up from the streets, rising in ordinary succession from the kid gangs to the adolescent gangs that jimmied the gum and candy machines to the real thing. But his kids were being brought up in a nice clean money-insulated world.
‘I don’t want for Junior to be a mug like me,’ Nick would say. ‘I had to quit school in the third grade and go out and hustle papers to help my old man. I want Junior to go to West Point and be an Air Corps officer or maybe Yale and make a connection with high-class people.’
Class! That was the highest praise in Nick’s vocabulary. In the mouth of a forty-year-old East-Side hood, who had been raised in a cold-water flat and wore patched hand-me-downs of his older brother, class became an appraisal of inverted snobbery, indicating a quality of excellence the East Side could neither afford nor understand. A fighter could run up a string of six knockouts and still Nick’s judgement might be, ‘He wins, but he’s got no class.’ A girl we’d see in a restaurant might not be pretty enough to get into the row at the Copacabana, but Nick would nudge me and say, ‘There’s a tomato with class.’ Nick’s suits, tailored by Bernard Weatherill, had class. The office had class. And I remember, of all the Christmas cards I received, picking out one that was light brown with the name tastefully engraved in the lower right-hand corner in conservative ten-point. That was Nick’s. I don’t know how he happened to choose it or who designed it for him, but it obviously had class.
If Nick thought you had it, he could be a very respectful fellow. I remember once he was chairman of a benefit fight card for the infantile-paralysis fund and had himself photographed turning over the take to Mrs Roosevelt. This picture, autographed by Eleanor, hung in a position of honour over his head, right next to Count Fleet. The boys used to get a laugh out of that. You can imagine the gags, especially if you are a Republican and/or have a nasty mind. But Nick wouldn’t have any of it. Anybody throwing them low and inside at Mrs R. was sure to get the back of his hand. And it wasn’t just because Nick’s partner was Honest Jimmy Quinn who had the Tammany connections. Mrs Roosevelt and Count Fleet belonged up there together, the way Nick saw it, because they both had class.
Nick had made a good living prying open the coin boxes of nickel machines when most of us were home reading the Bobbsey Twins and he had already escaped from the Boys Correction Farm when you and I were still struggling with first-year Latin. By dint of conscientious avoidance of physical work, a nose for easy money and constant application of the principle Do Unto Others As You Would Not Have Them Do Unto You he had worked himself up to the top of a syndicate that dealt anonymously but profitably with artichokes, horses, games of chance, women, meat, fighters and hotels, a series of commodities which in our free-for-all enterprise system could be parlayed into tidy fortunes for Nick and Quinn, with large enough chunks for the boys to keep everybody happy. But he was still a sucker for class, whether it was a horse, a human being or a Weatherill sports suit.
The reason he kept me on the payroll, I think, was because he thought I had it too. He had the self-made man’s confusion of respect and contempt toward anybody who had read a couple of books and knew when to use me and when to say I. But whenever he was with me I noticed he cut the profanity down to those words he just didn’t have any respectable synonym for. Even Quinn, who had worked himself up through a logical sequence from ward boss to high-level rackets, didn’t always get the velvet-glove treatment. And when Nick was dealing with what he considered his inferiors, fighters, other managers, bookies, collectors, trainers, honest but intimidated merchants, the only way to describe his talk would be to compare it with the vicious way Fritzie Zivic used to fight, especially when he was sore, as in the return match with poor Bummy Davis after Bummy had got himself disqualified for conduct even less becoming a gentleman than Zivic’s.
Probably the biggest mistake that Nick had ever made in picking class was very close to home. It was his wife Ruby. When Nick was in the liquor business back in Prohibition he had sat in the same seat for George White’s Scandals twenty-seven times because Ruby was in it. Where Ruby had it over the rest of the line was she was beautiful in an unusually quiet way, like a young matron who would look more at home in a Junior League musical than in a Broadway leg-show. On stage, so the boys tell me, even in the scantiest, she carried herself with an air of aloof respectability which had the actual effect of an intense aphrodisiac. The other girls could dance half naked in front of you and, if you thought about anything, you’d wonder how much it would cost. But seeing Ruby with her black lace stockings forming a sleek and silken path to her crotch was like opening the wrong bedroom door by mistake and catching your best friend’s sister.
That’s the effect Ruby had on Nick. And the physiological accident that gave Ruby Latka an austere beauty was accompanied by a personality adjustment that developed a quiet, superior manner to go along with the face. The combination drove all other women out of Nick’s life. Until then he had been giving the Killer competition, but from the first time he had Ruby he lined up with that small, select group who believe in monogamy and that even more select group who practise it. In fact, the first three years of his marriage Nick had it so bad he hardly ever bothered to look at another woman’s legs. Even now, in an environment which, to put it euphemistically, smiled on adultery, Nick never cheated on Ruby unless it was something very special and he was a long way from home. But the ordinary stuff that was always there, the showgirls and the wives who float around the bars when their husbands are out of town, Nick never bothered with. The ones who simply wouldn’t have minded never got a play, and the ones who had already made up their minds almost always got the brush. Most of it was the way he felt about Ruby. But what made it easier was the way he worked. He was all the time working, in the clinches, between rounds, always moving in, throwing punches, heeling, butting, elbowing, like Harry Miniff, only it was done on the top floor of a great office building and it wasn’t for nickels but for very fancy folding money.
There was a glutton’s hunger for money in him. Maybe it was the pinched childhood, the gutter struggle, the fearful itch of insecurity that drove Nick on to his first hundred thousand and his second. And now, without even letting him sit down to catch his breath and enjoy himself a minute, he was pushing toward his third. If it hadn’t been for Ruby, Nick would never have had that place in Jersey with the riding horses and the swimming pool and the terraced barbecue pit. Ruby, who had been a working girl all her life, found no trouble at all in double-clutching into a life of leisurely hedonism. Nick would enjoy a swim when Ruby nagged him into it. He liked to get some of the boys out for the weekend and sit up until Sunday morning, playing pinochle. But it’s hard to relax when you’re possessed by a lean, sharp-faced kid from Henry Street who’s always got an eye out to pry the back off another coin machine.
