Max Baer and the Star of David Read online

  “I stepped in front of James. My Uncle Charles then grabbed my father’s arm, and snatched away the whip. We were family, he declared, and he would not permit any harm coming to us on the Lord’s Day. For a brief moment, I was heartened, but then Charles seized James roughly, and told him that it was not a son’s place to tell a father what he could and could not do to a wife or daughter. The children of a man’s loins, along with the wife who had begat those children, he declared, were a man’s property and, thus, obliged to do his will.

  “Our father howled in triumph, and walked away, leaving us unharmed, but on the following Sunday, after church services, when James was gone off with his brothers to rest and smoke in the fields, our father found me with my mother, and began whipping us with a willow switch. I tried to protect my mother, who was helpless before his attack, and for so doing received numerous cuts across my arms, breasts, and back. When James returned and found us huddled together, our mother barely conscious, he tended to us, after which he went and found our father, who had neither whip nor switch in hand, and he beat our father until our father’s face was unrecognizable.

  “Later, when we were asleep—sometime after midnight—our father began banging upon the inside walls of our cabin with a rake and yelling ‘Fire! Fire! Our house is on fire! Run for your lives!’—and though his words were slurred by drink, they were, we quickly saw from clouds of smoke rising around us, true. And so we grabbed what possessions we could, fled from our home, and watched flames consume our dwelling. Neighbors soon arrived, and we did what we could—the women and children forming a bucket brigade, the men digging a trench between our house and the house in which Uncle Charles and his family lived—yet it was only when, the first light of dawn showing on the eastern horizon, and our cabin now become blackened timbers and ash, that I realized I had not seen James among us throughout the ordeal. Nor had I heard his voice.

  “I made my way through the ruins to the far side of our home, where we kept our hog and chickens, all of whom, to my surprise, had been set free, and I found James there, sitting in a chair to which he had been tied with rope, his mouth a black oval of charred fabric. I fell to my knees, embraced my brother’s scorched legs even while aware of the sweet fragrance of his burnt flesh, and before I could scream or weep or know what to do, my father’s hands were upon me, lifting me up, muttering words about the vengeance of the Lord, and then, with hands wrapped in rags, tearing away the ropes that bound James to the chair, and pulling the blackened cloth from his mouth, after which he pushed what was left of James to the ground, shouting: ‘James! James! I have found my son James! Oh help me! Help me! I have found my son James!’ And when others arrived, he continued to cry out, ‘Oh James, my son, my son … Oh James, my son!’”

  “I didn’t know, Joleen,” Max said. “I am just so sorry—so terribly sorry…”

  I was about to echo Max’s words when I suddenly realized that what Joleen had been describing had never occurred. While she was telling her story, though, I believed it since it did not seem possible that anyone could simply have made it up.

  “We kept a supply of lye powder on the east side of our cabin, the lye buried in a tight metal container, away from the animals, for lye powder when exposed to the air could quickly turn to liquid,” Joleen continued. “We used the lye powder—the flakes—for the making of soap, for the cleaning, twice yearly, of our kitchen utensils, and, when we mixed it with water and mineral oil, for the care and straightening of our hair. We were warned early in life, and repeatedly, of how dangerous lye could be if allowed to penetrate skin or eyes, and whenever we retrieved it from the ground, we put on thick gloves and covered our faces.

  “And so on a broiling summer day ten days after we had buried James, I pleaded dizziness and fatigue while working in the fields, and returned home—we were by then living in a room behind Aunt Carrie and Uncle Charles’s house—knowing I would, except for our mother, be alone there. My mother tended to me with washcloths and a bittersweet drink made of tea leaves and ginger root, and then she lay down in a cool spot in our cabin—as cool a spot as one could find—and I talked her to sleep, telling her what I did not believe to be true: that James was resting with the angels in heaven and smiling down upon her.

  “I dug out the lye and prepared a liquid solution, which I placed in a clay jar, for lye could eat through glass, and I hid the jar under branches beside a pecan tree not far from the table that was set outside the kitchen where, in the shade of large blackjack oaks, we ate most of our meals during the hot summer months.

  “After Uncle Charles said grace, I retrieved the clay jar, and carried it to the table as if bearing food. My father actually smiled at me when I stood beside him—a rare event, and I do not deign to guess what it was in that moment that caused him to look at me in a kindly manner—and when he did, I opened the jar and, speaking words I had previously rehearsed—‘This will enable you to see—oh yes, to see the evil you have done to my brother James!’—I flung the lye into his face.

  “He clawed at his eyes, fell to the ground howling, and while my Aunt Carrie and the others crowded around him, I backed away from the table. Nobody moved to touch me, or to hold me, or strike me, or question why I had just done what I had done.”

  “Jesus!” Max exclaimed. “Jesus F. Christ, Joleen…”

  “Jesus had nothing to do with it,” Joleen said.

  “Dear God, Joleen…” I began, and was about to ask how she could have committed such an act, but a sly smile at the corner of her mouth reminded me that she was inventing this tale in order, or so I reasoned, for Max to believe she had once had a brother who was no more, and who, alive or dead, was not me.

  “And so I left home, and found work and shelter where I could, until I had the good fortune to meet Horace, whose love for me and faith in me enabled me to find a better road than the one I had been on,” Joleen said. “The years that passed between my leaving home and meeting Horace are but a dream now, whatever the true events of those years may have been. What you should know about them, however, is that the one great and enduring regret that was born then, and that has stayed with me ever since, is that we did not, James and I, before his passing from this world, give and take pleasure from one another in the manner we have known.”

  Max backed away as if retreating from a fighter who had rocked him with punches to the gut and was moving in to finish the job. “You really are a nut job,” he said. “Like I said before, you’re bonkers—totally bonkers, and mean to boot.”

  “Those were not the words you spoke before,” Joleen said.

  “Yes or no, you’re still a loon,” Max said, and, turning away from Joleen, grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled my face close to his. “So tell me this, Horace—this crazy woman—is she really your wife?”

  The mad, bewildered look in Max’s eyes was so wild I feared he might sink his teeth into my face. I seized the hand that held me and pried it away.

  Max looked at his hand as if surprised to see it there. Then, shaking his head from side to side, he spoke to me in a low, slow voice: “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Horace—I get carried away sometimes, right?—but what I mean is—did you know any of this stuff before you married her—what she wanted to do with James—with her own brother?”

  “Not in the way I have learned today,” I said. “But…” I paused, while Max’s eyes implored me to tell him something—anything!—that would allow him to make sense of what he had heard. “I have always known of my wife’s love of the Bible,” I continued “—and have sometimes sensed that although the tales from the Bible are religious in nature—written by God, or to praise God—her love of Bible stories—of The Song of Solomon, which is her favorite—has had more to do with the pleasure human beings give and take from one another when they are in love.”

  “That’s good news,” Max said. “Not to make light of your brother’s death, Joleen, but I can buy what you’re saying about regret. I can buy that big-time.”


  He chucked me gently on the cheek, then took Joleen’s hands in his.

  “I’m real sorry for your loss, and for what you lived through,” he said to her. “So what I’m gonna do, see, is when I fight the fight that’s gonna make me heavyweight champion of the world, I’m gonna dedicate the fight, and my victory, to your brother James. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

  Max was true to his word. While he trained for the championship fight against Carnera, who had won the title a year earlier by knocking out Jack Sharkey with an uppercut that, according to those at ringside, never touched Sharkey’s jaw, he talked about James every day. “I’m gonna win the fight for James, and for your wife,” he would say. “I’m gonna turn that simple-minded lug to ashes—and when I say ashes I don’t mean the kind they haul away after a night with a lady friend.”

  Carnera, however, fifty pounds heavier and five inches taller than Max, was an early favorite, the bookmakers setting the odds against Max at more than two to one, and with reason. Following on his victory against Schmeling, Max was having too good a time to be bothered by working out regularly. Once the championship bout was scheduled—a first for him—Max went an entire year without fighting a single fight. And while Max was staying away from the ring, Carnera was busy defending his title, going the distance of fifteen rounds against two excellent boxers—Paolino Uzcudun, former European heavyweight champion, and Tommy Loughran, former world light-heavyweight champion—thereby demonstrating how seriously he took his conditioning, and the responsibility to be a fighting champion.

  Six weeks before the title fight, we set up our training camp in Asbury Park, on the New Jersey shore, but beginning with our first day there Max was more interested in the women who walked the boardwalk than in his speed bag or sparring partners. Even when William Brown, a member of the New York State Boxing Commission, arrived to see if rumors he was hearing were true—that Max was turning our training camp into a circus—Max continued to be Max. When Brown threatened to cancel the fight, and declared Max “a bum,” Max laughed. “I got some ancient wisdom for you, my friend, to help you with the little woman you got waiting for you at home,” he said to Brown, when a group of reporters had gathered around. “And here it is: ‘Confucious say that foolish man give wife grand piano, but wise man give wife upright organ.’”

  A few minutes later, as if to prove how fit he was, Max, already in a dapper outfit—blue blazer, fawn-colored slacks, black-and-tan dancing shoes—proceeded to lift his brother Buddy, who weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds, above his head, spin him around, set him down, and do so without even breathing hard. The following afternoon, Max held court as he did most afternoons, and when a writer who had been covering Carnera reported that Carnera was in top-notch condition, Max said that was fine with him, because it meant he’d get more credit when he licked him. “Listen, if it wasn’t meant for me to be heavyweight champion of the world, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “No kidding.” And then, quietly, what he had said to me in private, but had never said to others: “I don’t like fighting, you know.”

  Astonished by Max’s statement, the writers tried to get him to explain what he meant, but the only thing Max did was to repeat what he had said, without apology, and to add, as if he were talking about going out to buy a cup of coffee or a morning newspaper, that if the main idea was to go out there and knock the other guy down—well, he could do that.

  “So if you bozos don’t have any more questions,” he said, “I’m gonna head out now and show my brother how to have a good time in this town.”

  At the weighing-in ceremony four days before the fight, Max, arriving late, and in his finest white linen outfit, sat down next to Carnera, who, stripped to the waist, was sitting on an examining table. Max winked at the reporters, plucked a hair from Carnera’s chest and held it up for all to see. “He loves me!” he proclaimed. And before Carnera could respond, Max had plucked a second hair from Carnera’s chest. “Aw,” he said, “he loves me not…”

  In truth, although I enjoyed Max’s antics, like others, I was concerned, for not only was he seemingly disinterested in the fight itself, but the part of him that feared inflicting harm on others was showing itself forth with alarming frequency. Before sleep each night and upon waking each morning, he talked with me about Joleen and her brother James. How could it be, he would ask, that human beings could hurt one another in the ways they did. How could it be that a father could burn his own son to death, and how could a good woman like Joleen live with the knowledge she had made her own father—despicable and deserving of punishment though he was—blind? Then, sensing my unease about his readiness for the upcoming fight, he would reassure me, saying that there was nothing to worry about because he knew exactly what he was doing and why. When he entered the ring against Carnera, he was going to be thinking not of what he had done once upon a time to Campbell and Schaaf, but of what Joleen’s father had done to James, and this would enable him to be every bit the monster Carnera was said to be.

  Despite constant pleas from his trainer, Cantwell, and his manager, Hoffman, to attack his sparring partners, when he had one of us on the ropes (I continued, occasionally, to spar with him), or had stung one of us with a crushing blow that left us helpless, Max would simply back away. When a reporter accused him of lacking the requisite “viciousness” to be a true champion, Max replied with a simple statement, and without the least bravado: “Hey—I feel great. I’m no gymnasium fighter, see—so I don’t want to hurt any of my sparring partners.” He shrugged, and continued in a low, even voice: “But I’ll go after Carnera all right. You can count on it. I’m going to be the champion, and don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

  Before dawn on the day of the bout, his head resting on my chest, Max said that although what he’d been saying—that he didn’t like boxing, and that he didn’t want to hurt others—was true, because of what he’d done to Campbell and Schaaf, who would ever believe him? So what he wanted to know—the only thing that truly mattered to him—was this: if he won the fight in memory of Joleen’s brother, would she understand that he’d done what he’d done not out of some eye-for-an-eye thirst for revenge, but out of love and respect for her, and a desire to ease her pain?

  On the evening of June 14, 1934, while more than seventy thousand raucous fans in the Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City waited for the championship bout to begin, the same men said to have paid for Sharkey’s magical fall to the canvas against Carnera entered our dressing room, informed Max that they represented Owney Madden’s interests, patted bulges in their jacket pockets, and said that Madden was seeking assurances that by the end of the evening Carnera would still be heavyweight champion of the world. Max, on the massage table, face down, getting a rubdown, didn’t even look up. “You take care of this, okay, Jerry?” he said, and Max’s bodyguard, Jerry “Iron Neck” Cassell, opened his jacket to reveal the pistol he kept in his waistband. “Get out,” he said, and Madden’s men, seasoned thugs that they were, did. As soon as they were gone Max sat up and said something other fighters in similar situations had said before him—words first made famous by the great Barney Ross—“What are they gonna do—kill me?” he laughed. “Hey—everybody dies.”

  An hour later, to deafening cheers and thunderous foot stamping, Max climbed through the ropes and entered the ring, and he did so wearing a silk robe not with his own name on its back, but with the name “Steve Morgan,” the character he had played in The Prizefighter and the Lady, embroidered there. And on his trunks, as in the fight against Schmeling, but on the left leg this time, was a glistening, coal-black Star of David.

  Despite all those who had doubted his conditioning and his will, or perhaps to shame those who had questioned both, he proceeded to destroy Carnera, knocking him down three times in the first round and three times again in the second. Carnera stumbled around the ring like a drunken clown, trying in vain to protect himself, and grabbing onto the ropes constantly, thereby leaving his large body open to t
he lightning fury of Max’s blows. Between rounds, Max joked with people at ringside, and waved to the crowd, and once, when he had leveled Carnera with a one-two combination—a solid smash to the gut, and a clean right hook to the jaw—and Carnera, falling, had pulled them both to the canvas, Max shouted out for all to hear, “Hey—last one up’s a sissy!”

  In the tenth round, Max hammered Carnera to the canvas three more times, and begged the referee, Art Donovan, to end the fight. “Hey Art,” he said. “Please stop it. Please? Carnera’s helpless.” Despite Max’s plea, Donovan let the fight continue. In the eleventh round, however, when Max had, without savagery but with crisp efficiency, floored Carnera yet two more times, Donovan, who would later claim it was Carnera who asked him to stop the fight, was left with no choice but to step between the fighters (Carnera, sobbing away afterwards, something no one had ever seen a champion do, denied he had made the request, and swore he would never have given up). Seconds later, the ring announcer took Max’s right hand in his own, raised it high, and declared Maximilian Adelbert Baer the new and undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

  The crowd chanted its approval—“Max! Max! Max!” they cried out again and again—and Max skipped around the ring, blew kisses to everyone, and even performed a quick, graceful soft-shoe dance of the kind he’d done in The Prizefighter and the Lady. In our dressing room a few minutes later, he continued to have the time of his life, joking with reporters and, with mock seriousness, telling them he was truly glad he hadn’t been up to commissioner Brown’s conditioning standards or there might have been a real tragedy in the ring. And when reporters asked him who his current sweetheart was—Jean Harlow or June Knight, Bee Star or Shirley La Belle—Max declared that his only sweetheart was his mother.

  “And what a sweetheart she is,” he went on. “Wouldn’t think of suing me for breach of promise. And boy, what an advantage that is since dames have already cost me more than a hundred thousand bucks!”