Max Baer and the Star of David Read online

  MAX

  BAER &

  THE STAR OF

  DAVID

  Also by Jay Neugeboren

  FICTION

  Big Man

  Listen Ruben Fontanez

  Corky’s Brother (stories)

  Sam’s Legacy

  An Orphan’s Tale

  The Stolen Jew

  Before My Life Began

  Poli: A Mexican Boy in Early Texas

  Don’t Worry About the Kids (stories)

  News from the New American Diaspora and

  Other Tales of Exile (stories)

  The Other Side of the World

  1940

  You Are My Heart (stories)

  The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company

  NONFICTION

  Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey

  The Story of STORY Magazine (editor)

  Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival

  Transforming Madness: New Lives for People

  Living with Mental Illness

  Open Heart: A Patient’s Story of Life-Saving Medicine and

  Life-Giving Friendship

  The Hillside Diary and Other Writings (editor)

  The Diagnostic Manual of Mishegas

  (with Michael B. Friedman and Lloyd I. Sederer)

  Copyright © 2016 by Jay Neugeboren

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages may be excerpted for review and critical purposes.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is typeset in Monotype Sabon. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

  Designed by Barbara Werden

  Portions of this book in somewhat different form have appeared in Commonweal, Jewish Fiction, and Blunderbuss.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Neugeboren, Jay.

  Max Baer & the star of David / Jay Neugeboren.

  pages; cm

  Issued also as an ebook.

  ISBN: 978-1-942134-17-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978--1942134-18-3

  1. Baer, Max, 1909–1959—Fiction. 2. Jewish boxers—United States—Fiction. 3. African Americans—Relations with Jews—Fiction. 4. Paramours—Fiction. 5. Incest—Fiction. 6. Biographical fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Max Baer and the star of David

  PS3564.E844 M39 2016

  813/.54

  Printed in the United States of America

  16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Mandel Vilar Press

  19 Oxford Court, Simsbury, Connecticut 06070

  www.americasforconservation.org | www.mvpress.org

  for Jerry and Lenore

  Contents

  Foreword

  1 | Star of David

  2 | Champion of the World

  3 | Scenes from Childhood

  4 | War

  5 | Enchanted Hills

  6 Brothers

  Coda

  Foreword

  When, on November 21, 1959, in Garden Grove, California, Max Baer, a former heavyweight champion of the world, died at the age of fifty, my father, Horace Littlejohn, was at his side. Thirty-six years later, on June 11, 1995, in Canastota, New York, when Max Baer was posthumously inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, I was there, standing beside Max Baer’s eldest son, my half-brother, Max Baer Jr. By this time, Max Baer Jr., who had no knowledge that I was his blood relation, had become an actor best known for his role as Jed Clamplett’s nephew, Jethro Bodine, in the television show The Beverly Hillbillies (in which show the ill-fated Sharon Tate, murdered along with four others by followers of Charles Manson, played an employee of Beverly Caterers), and a man as celebrated by the public as his father had been.

  I was born on May 30, 1938, a half year after Max Baer Jr. came into this world, and I grew up with him during the years my father was Max Baer’s “Man Friday,” and my mother, Joleen Littlejohn, was Max Baer’s housekeeper and tutor to his children. My parents were people of color, my father’s skin a rusty brown-black with tones of violet lending it a slightly luminescent caste, and my mother’s coloring, which I had the good fortune to inherit, a rich shade of mocha-brown that, in summer, took on a pale gossamer-thin veil of crimson. Known to one and all as my father Horace’s wife, my mother was, in actuality, my father’s sister, and it was not until the day I came of age, on May 30, 1956, that she informed me this was so, and that it was Max Baer, and not Horace Littlejohn, who was my biological father. She also, on that day, swore me to secrecy concerning this matter. “Incest,” she declared, and with her endearingly mordant wit, “was but an infrequent and rarely talked-about pastime in our family.”

  She hoped I would understand that although Max Baer acknowledged privately that he had fathered me—thus his liberality in allowing me to be playmate to his children, and his generosity in providing for me an education equal to theirs—it was Horace Littlejohn who was more truly my father, since it was he who, with her, raised me and was instrumental in the cultivation of those skills and values that have enabled me to live a life of not inconsiderable achievement.

  Educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago Graduate School, Union Theological Seminary, and Christ College, Oxford, I hold two doctorates (one in classics, and one in medieval European history), along with a master’s degree in divinity. I am fluent in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and have become a biblical scholar of some note, with two slender, well-received books, and a fair number of published essays, the majority of which concern The Song of Solomon (more accurately, The Song of Songs, Which is Solomon’s, although Solomon had no hand in writing it). I have also written extensively on two related texts, Ecclesiastes and The Book of Job, which texts, like The Song of Solomon, remain at odds in theme, content, and philosophy with all other canonical texts, and whose inclusion in the Hebrew and Christian Holy Bibles remains an anomaly that has provided me, as it has other scholars and theologians, with many happy hours of inquiry and speculation.

  Despite the rabbinical attempt to transform it into an allegory of God’s love for Israel, and Christianity’s attempt to transform it into an allegory of Christ’s love for the church, The Song of Solomon is, has been, and will ever be a poem in praise of the natural world (God’s name, in fact, does not appear in the text), and of physical love between a young man and young woman. That I was, early on, enormously taken with it was doubtless influenced by my mother’s extreme devotion to it—to its reveling in the sensual joys of young love—along with the presence, during my childhood and coming-of-age, of Max Baer, who was second to no man or woman I have ever known in his capacity to delight in corporeal pleasures.

  As will be seen from the manuscript to which this note is prefatory, I inherited from my father, along with an openness to sybaritic indulgences (my parents, if less visibly or flamboyantly, also sought out and knew, as the document here attached reveals, a considerable range of worldly pleasures), a style of expression some might regard as mannered, but a style—more exactly, a sensibility—that prepared me well for studies in classical rhetoric, and for being able to set down from time to time, with, I trust, a clarity and vividness comparable to his, experiences and thoughts I have deemed worthy of preservation.

  In his lifetime, Max Baer was renowned for possessing the most powerful right hand in the boxing wo
rld. He was also considered something of a clown, this reputation enhanced by his career in films and in vaudeville (where he performed comical routines with the ex-boxer, “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom). It would be more accurate, however, to see him not as a comic figure but as a man of biblical stature, a claim I do not make lightly. Like King David, Max Baer was a great warrior who represented and advanced the cause of the People of Israel at a time when they were subject to oppression, humiliation, and the threat of annihilation. Like King David, Max Baer was a great admirer and lover of women, and like King David and other biblical figures, beginning with the first patriarch, Abraham, he often loved several women concurrently, his wife included, while fathering children by his wife and others. More: like King David, who declared that his love for King Saul’s son, Jonathan, was “wonderful, passing the love of women,” Max Baer, too, gloried in his love for another man even while news of that love had the power to bring him low. And like King David, who made a covenant with Jonathan that was to prevail through all generations so that death would never divide them, and who honored this covenant by adopting Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth as his own following upon Jonathan’s death in battle, Max Baer, in effect, adopted his lover’s son, although he did so without formalizing the relationship, or revealing that the son was his own. Like King David, too, Max Baer was responsible, by the exercise of his God-given power, for the deaths of innocent men.

  It is now seven years since I passed the proverbial three score and ten, and I have recently received from my physician the unwelcome news that I will not in all probability live to pass three score and ten by a sum of eight. I have therefore completed the preparation of the accompanying text, “The Max Baer I Knew,” dictated to my mother by my father before his passing on September 22, 1999, when, his eyesight failing, he could no longer see well enough to set down the story himself, and given to me by my mother before her passing seven months later, on April 17, 1999.

  Quotations at the beginnings of chapters, from the King James version of The Song of Solomon, are of my choosing, as are the chapter titles. I have edited the text for minor matters of spelling, punctuation, and consistency, but have changed nothing substantive. I commend it to readers with the words of a common Latin valediction often attributed to Ovid: finis coronat opus, which I translate freely as: May a grand work crown a good life!

  Here, then, my father’s story, in his own words.

  HORACE LITTLEJOHN JR.

  Sacramento, California

  30 May 2015

  MAX

  BAER &

  THE STAR OF

  DAVID

  1 Star of David

  I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk; eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved. (5:1)

  I was with Max Baer when he fought and defeated Frankie Campbell and delivered blows that, according to the physician’s postmortem, set loose Frankie Campbell’s brain from its skull and was the cause of Frankie Campbell’s death. I was with him when he fought and defeated Ernie Schaaf in a bout that left Schaaf unconscious; I was with him when he received the news that Schaaf had died during a bout with Primo Carnera; and I was with him when sportswriters, the famed Jimmy Cannon and Grantland Rice among them, reported what many of us, including Max, believed to be true: that Schaaf’s death was due to damage previously inflicted by Max. These incidents, which earned Max the reputation of “killer,” affected him profoundly—broke his heart, in truth—for there never was, in my experience, a kinder, more gentle man, or one who, when not grieving for men he had hurt (myself included), gloried in life as fully and with as much exuberant love as did Max Baer.

  I was with Max when he made the decision, before his bout against Hitler’s boxer, Max Schmeling, whom he crushed utterly, to adorn his boxing trunks with the Star of David, an emblem he would wear proudly for the remainder of his boxing career, and I was with him when he defeated the Argentinian behemoth, Primo Carnera, for the heavyweight championship of the world. I was with him, too, when, one day short of a year later, he lost this title to James J. Braddock.

  I was with him when he married Dorothy Dunbar (a socialite and actress famous at the time for her role as Jane in an early Tarzan film), and I was with him through their numerous and highly publicized separations and reunions. I attended to him faithfully during his liaisons with some of our loveliest ladies of the silver screen—Greta Garbo, Mae West, and Jean Harlow among them—which liaisons supplied regular copy for the gossip columnists. I was at his side when he married Mary Ellen Sullivan, and with Mary Ellen and Max when each of their children—Max Baer Jr., James Manny, and Maudie Marian—was born—and I was, of course, with my sister Joleen when she gave birth to Max Baer’s son, Horace Littlejohn Jr., who, given that I was known to all as Joleen’s husband, was assumed to be my son.

  On the night we first met Max Baer, as on previous occasions when we were together in public places, Joleen and I employed the fiction that we were husband and wife. We persisted in the deception in this instance so that we might gain employment with Max, and—a prospect dimly sensed, if at all, on that evening—come to live a life marked by privileges known to few whose origins were similar to ours. For while Max Baer’s life was the object of much public scrutiny, our domestic life—Joleen’s, Horace Jr.’s, and mine—was informed by a dearly cherished sense of privacy, albeit this privacy derived initially from a lamentable but necessary secrecy that, if betrayed, would have cast deadly shadows not only upon our lives, but upon Max Baer’s life as well. That we were people of color in the employ of white folks played no small part in our ability to remain private—to not be seen by others—a situation well known to people of color who served white people during that era.

  Although Joleen’s exceptional beauty and fierce intellect made many men, Max Baer’s friends among them, pay her admiring and sometimes lewd attentions (as they did, though with less frequency, to me), in his service we were, for the most part, no more noticeable to others than the brooms, dustmops, laundry baskets, and serving dishes we utilized, a fact Joleen would comment on occasionally, noting, for example, that when, after a bath or shower—or between rounds of a boxing match—I served as Max Baer’s towel holder, I was not so different, even to Max himself, from the towel holders secured to bathroom walls except that, she said, I was considerably more mobile. For as kind and generous as Max could be, he was not without a self-absorbed vanity that frequently blinded him not merely to the ways others perceived him, but to the very fact that others existed.

  I will speak now of how I met Max Baer on the evening that forever changed my life and that of my sister.

  The year was 1929, the day and month, Thursday, October 17, a week before the stock market crash on what would become known as “Black Thursday,” and the day upon which Joleen and I celebrated her twenty-first birthday.

  Joleen had, the previous spring, received a certificate of graduation from California State Normal College in Alameda, and was working in San Francisco for a wealthy Japanese family as a domestic while she prepared for licensing examinations that would enable her to become a full-time teacher in the public schools of San Francisco. She and I shared a small apartment not far from the Presidio, in a section of the city called Polish Town that, despite its name, was home mostly to recent Russian immigrants, a fair number of them Jewish. I worked as a day laborer, standing in line each morning with others, mostly Asian, though some were of Irish, Spanish, or Negro extraction, in the Mission Bay section of the city, at the corner of Third and Sixteenth Streets, waiting there to be picked up for a day on the docks where I would sort, cut, gut, clean, and box fish. In the evenings, though irregularly, I attended classes at a local public high school in order that I might secure a high school diploma. On days when there was no work, and on evenings when I had no classes, I trained at a local boxing gymnasium, honing skills that had, earlier in life, whe
n Joleen and I lived in Kinnard, Texas, with our parents and siblings (two sisters, three brothers), earned me several amateur titles and, by wagers Joleen placed discreetly on my bouts, enough money to allow us, when Joleen turned seventeen and I was but a month shy of fifteen, to leave home and make our way to California so that, far from our family, who we truly were to each other might not be discovered, for if it had, we would have lost what was most dear to us in the world while bringing down shame, humiliation, and disgrace upon our selves and upon those who loved us and whom we loved.

  Throughout the years of my adolescence, notwithstanding the fear and anxiety our intimacy engendered, I was able to benefit from Joleen’s knowledge of and sensitivity to language, and from her exquisite skill at being able to transmit this knowledge, though I was initially resistant to book learning. Like my brothers, of whom I was the youngest, I saw book learning as an essentially female endeavor. In addition, I could not see how, given that I was a man of color, gaining an education, or even a college diploma, would serve as a viable means of making my way in the world. The sure way to do that, I believed, lay in my physical prowess—my strong back, my keen reflexes, my lightness of foot, and, above all, the wicked quickness and strength of my hands, the fingers of which were unnaturally long and which, after my arrival in San Francisco, had earned me the sobriquet “Long-fingered Littlejohn.”

  This was, in fact, the way Max Baer first addressed me while Joleen and I were eating our dinner on the evening of October 17, 1929.

  We had chosen Perfidie, a restaurant on Russian Hill renowned for its elegant French fare and for the fact that its owners, who claimed descent from Russian nobility, spoke to one another and the staff solely in French. Perfidie was also one of the few fine restaurants that did not turn away individuals of color. Although we were, perforce, obliged generally to be frugal, we also, as on this evening, would occasionally pander to our desires out of all proportion to our means and to our station. Joleen, in a silver-gray, full-length, strapless evening dress, her long, black hair held in place by a forest-green silk scarf, was aglow with pleasure, as well as from the effects of champagne, a full bottle of which we had nearly finished before our entrées arrived. I wore white linen slacks and—Joleen’s gift to me for my nineteenth birthday—a matching long-sleeved white linen shirt with barrel cuffs. Although the restaurant prided itself on the legend that Perfidie was a place where, as in Paris, married individuals could have romantic dinners with companions to whom they were not married, and do so without creating unwelcome gossip or scandal, my own sense was that Joleen and I were perhaps the only couple there that evening whose intimate life had anything in common with the restaurant’s name or legend.