Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  Bob Arum told the story of traveling with Ali to Mexico, where their hosts presented them with a roomful of gorgeous women to choose from. In one interview, Arum said that Ali took six women back to his room, while Arum took one. In another interview, Arum said Ali took three women. In either case, Arum’s story ends the same way every time. A few hours later, Ali sent a messenger to Arum’s room saying Muhammad wanted Arum’s girl, too.

  Belinda thought she could handle it. Most of the time she did handle it. She booked hotel rooms for the mistresses and occasionally invited them to go shopping with her. But over time, as the affairs piled up, as flings with women like Wanda Bolton and Veronica Porche evolved into long-term relationships, as children were born to some of these women, as sexually transmitted diseases got passed around, Belinda said, “the love I had for him started dwindling, fading away, fading away.”

  She blamed Ali, of course. But she also blamed Ali’s father, Cash Clay, for setting a bad example. She blamed Herbert Muhammad for his cavalier attitude toward women and for suggesting that the Nation of Islam sanctioned marital infidelity. She blamed the all-male domain of boxing. She blamed the men in Ali’s entourage, particularly Lloyd Wells, a pimp in a white yachting cap, who supplied the boxer and others in his training camp with a steady stream of women, many of them prostitutes. She blamed the culture of celebrity too, which seemed to say that men of wealth and power were entitled to anything they wanted anytime they wanted, especially where sex was concerned. She blamed American society in the 1970s, when sex outside of marriage became something close to the norm, when women asserted their desires more boldly, when divorce rates and drug addiction surged, and when Donna Summer recorded the disco hit “Love to Love You Baby,” a song that included sixteen minutes of passionate moaning and inspired rumors that Summer had been masturbating during the recording session, which is just what she appeared to be doing in the photo on her album cover. But most of all, Belinda blamed Ali.

  Belinda and Veronica had crossed paths but never met in Zaire. Their first meeting came in Las Vegas, shortly before the Ron Lyle fight. The day after their introduction, the women were standing on a patio at the Tropicana Hotel, looking over a railing at the neon-lit Vegas Strip. Belinda said she’d had a dream about Veronica. In the dream, Veronica had fallen from a railing just like the one they were leaning on now, landed on her face, and died. Veronica took it as a warning.

  Upon returning from Zaire, Veronica had moved to Chicago to be close to Ali. He had just purchased a twenty-eight-room Tudor mansion in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, at 4944 South Woodlawn Avenue, across the street from the home where Elijah Muhammad had lived. The house was so big that, eventually, Herbert Muhammad would keep an office there. While it was under renovation, Ali and Belinda kept an apartment in the penthouse of a building Ali owned, but Veronica got the impression that Belinda had the place to herself. Ali seldom stayed with his wife, she said. The children lived with Belinda’s parents. Ali purchased a condominium in Chicago for Veronica.

  One day in June, Ali invited Belinda and Veronica to join him in Boston, where Ali was scheduled to deliver a speech to Harvard’s graduating seniors. Before leaving on the trip, Belinda and Veronica stopped at a Muslim restaurant to get steak sandwiches and went to Belinda’s apartment to eat. Belinda unwrapped the sandwiches in the kitchen while Veronica waited in the living room. Soon after, as they boarded their plane, Veronica became sick to her stomach. She spent the entire flight in the airplane’s lavatory. “She didn’t get sick, but I did,” Veronica recalled.

  Ali’s friend Howard Bingham also made the trip to Boston, snapping pictures along the way. One of Bingham’s photos, which seemed innocent enough at the time, captured the complexity of Ali’s romantic life. In the picture, Ali stands near a nondescript glass door. He wears a pinstriped suit and striped tie. Three women stand to his left. They are, from right to left, Veronica Porche, wearing large hooped earrings, a white purse over her shoulder, one hand holding the other in front of her stomach; Belinda Ali, dressed all in white, clutching a manila folder, her right hand reaching for Ali’s arm, her eyes turning to the camera as it flashes; and, next to Belinda, an eighteen-year-old Louisville woman named Lonnie Williams, wearing glasses and gazing in the direction of Veronica. Lonnie was fifteen years younger than the boxer, but she had recently had an epiphany: “I knew I was going to marry Muhammad,” she said. “I was just a kid in school, and I had things I needed to do, but I knew . . . The thought was like an umbrella, always over my head.”

  Her epiphany would prove accurate, but at the time of the photo Belinda was still married to Ali and had no intention of divorcing him. Veronica considered herself already married to Ali, but she was waiting for him to get a divorce so she could make it official. Lonnie would have to wait.

  In Bingham’s photo, Ali betrays no hint of discomfort as he stands beside his second wife, his future third wife, and his future fourth wife. His shoulders are loose. His hands rest by his sides. His mouth is open slightly as if he’s speaking. His eyes are wandering to his right, away from the three women. At what — or at whom — he’s gazing, no one knows.

  Ali told Veronica that he had a good reason for welcoming Lonnie. Belinda didn’t want to grant Ali a divorce, and in her frustration, she often lashed out at Veronica. By introducing Lonnie to the mix, Ali hoped that Belinda would have a new target for her anger. “He said Lonnie would be a third wife and then all the pressure wouldn’t be on me,” Veronica recalled. In hindsight, she said, it sounds crazy.

  She paused and laughed.

  “However,” she said, “it did work.”

  During his lecture at Harvard, an audience member asked Ali for a poem. He thought about it for a moment, leaned into the microphone, and recited what may have been the greatest rhyme of his life, his complete autobiography in two syllables:

  “Me! Wheeeee!”

  About two weeks later, Ali took Belinda and Veronica with him to Malaysia for his fight against Bugner. Ali made no attempt to hide the fact he traveled with both women. The three of them shared a suite with two bedrooms in Kuala Lumpur. Ali told Belinda: “Every two nights, I’ll take you as my wife, you’ll stay with me for two nights. Veronica stays in that room. And when those two nights is over, you’ll go to that room and Veronica will stay with me two nights.” When Ali didn’t want to sleep with either of them, he said, Veronica and Belinda would share the suite’s second bedroom, which contained twin beds.

  Once again, Belinda accepted the conditions imposed by her husband. “I’m biting my teeth, going, ‘Is this really happening to me?’ ” she recalled.

  She took Veronica shopping, trying to help her dress more like a proper Muslim, she said. Belinda bought Veronica a silver perfume amulet for four hundred dollars. She tried to turn her rival into an ally. After about a week, though, when people in Malaysia began to mistake Veronica for Ali’s wife, Belinda lost patience. She told Ali that Veronica had to go.

  But Veronica stayed.

  Veronica hated the way Belinda treated her, and she wished Ali would have defended her, wished he would have told Belinda to knock it off, or would have made a complete break with Belinda and initiated the divorce proceedings. But he wouldn’t do any of those things. Still, she stayed. “It was totally unfair to me,” Veronica recalled years later, “but I remember thinking, ‘Well, it’s too late. I’m in love. Love supersedes everything.’ I was that idealistic.”

  Before his fight with Bugner, Ali had spoken again of retirement. But no one believed him at all. Everyone knew that Don King had already begun negotiating for Ali to fight Joe Frazier for a third time, perhaps in Madison Square Garden, perhaps in the Philippines, where authoritarian leader Ferdinand Marcos was as eager as Mobutu had been in Zaire to improve his public image by palling around with Muhammad Ali. No man in the world provided more powerful propaganda.

  Filipinos adored Ali, but there wasn’t all that much excitement about Ali-Frazier III, the feeling being
that Frazier was washed up after having been bounced around by Foreman like a beach ball.

  Still, Ali was the biggest attraction in the sport. He was not only on top of the boxing game; he was at the top of the list of celebrity athletes, a category he had virtually invented. He was a superstar, as big as they came. His autobiography, written with Richard Durham, was in bookstores, selling well and getting strong reviews. Soon, there would be a movie based on the book and starring none other than Muhammad Ali as Muhammad Ali. “It’s going to be big,” Ali said of the film, “like ‘Godfather.’ ‘The Magnificent Seven.’ They could make ten films from my life.”

  Ali’s autobiography was not only the work of his coauthor, Richard Durham, and his editor, Toni Morrison; it was also very much the creation of Herbert Muhammad, who wound up sharing the copyright. The book presented Ali as a boxer, a rebel, and a proud Muslim, and Durham was granted creative license to get the job done.

  One of his fictional anecdotes proved particularly compelling. At some point several years after his return to Louisville from the 1960 Rome Olympics, Ali had lost his gold medal. He didn’t know how it had happened. One day he had it, and the next he didn’t. It might have been stolen or misplaced, according to his brother, Rahaman, who said he helped hunt for it. But Durham used the lost medal to fashion a fable. As Durham told it, Ali flung the gold medal into the Ohio River because he was upset at having been turned away at a whites-only restaurant and chased from the restaurant by a white motorcycle gang. Clay was, in fact, denied service at a Louisville restaurant, and he was indeed angry that such a thing could happen even to an Olympic hero. But no gang of bikers chased him, and there’s no evidence to suggest he threw his medal in the river. He certainly didn’t do so in 1960, as his autobiography suggests, given that photographs show him holding the medal as late as 1963.

  After the book’s publication, Ali admitted at a press conference that he had lost the medal, not thrown it in the river. He also admitted that he hadn’t read Durham’s work. Nevertheless, the myth of the medal tossed in protest would live on for decades to come.

  Ali-Frazier III was set for October 1, 1975, in Manila. Ali was guaranteed $4 million; Frazier would collect $2 million.

  Three weeks before the fight, Newsweek reporter Pete Bonventre received an assignment from his editor: go to Manila with Ali, get past the showmanship, get past the sports-page clichés, and dig for the truth about the man.

  Most of the reporters covering Ali were sportswriters. Many had been covering him for years. They loved Ali, and they were familiar with his antics, as well as with his cast of supporting characters. By sending Bonventre, Newsweek hoped to get the outsider’s perspective and, perhaps, to get past the hagiography already clinging to Ali.

  Bonventre loved Ali, too. “Here’s this guy,” the reporter said, “this magnetic force, who’s probably the most famous guy in the world, and he’s telling reporters, ‘Open your notebooks and I’ll fill them up.’ I mean, how could you not love a guy like that?”

  Bonventre traveled to Manila ahead of the pack of sportswriters to get time with Ali and his merry band of men. Bonventre watched one day as a Filipino man presented Ali with a scroll that had been printed with beautiful calligraphy and decorated in silver and gold. Ali signed it, rolled it up, and bowed as he handed it back.

  “Thank you,” the Filipino man said. “You are now the godfather of my child.”

  Ali turned with a wide grin to Bonventre.

  “How do you like that!” he said, proud as could be.

  Still, it didn’t take long for the reporter to see that Ali’s world had changed, and not for the better. Ali arrived in Manila with thirty-eight “handlers,” a number that did not include his girlfriends. In addition to Veronica, Ali’s old high-school girlfriend Areatha Swint had made the trip to Manila. “You couldn’t be around a man like that without the she-wolf pack,” Swint recalled years later. “There’s was no way you let that get under your skin.”

  Bonventre described the change in Ali’s world this way: “Solemn Muslim guards have given way to street-wise hustlers. Liberals who cherished him as a symbol of pro-black, anti-war attitudes have been replaced by wry connoisseurs of his pure showmanship. Even Ali’s women, invariably beautiful and black, have now been brought out of the back rooms of his life and openly flaunted.” While this was not a hard-hitting investigative piece, it was very much in the spirit of Watergate, when journalists were challenging authority, knocking over idols, and, to use a catchphrase popular at the time, telling it like it is.

  Bonventre reported what other reporters had long known, that Ali now seemed “unfettered by marital convention,” and that Veronica Porche was known to everyone in the fighter’s camp as “Ali’s other wife.” A photograph accompanying the article showed “Baby-sitter Veronica” walking hand in hand with three of Ali’s four children — May May, Jamillah, and Rasheda. The reporter also wrote about the cruel, “almost Nixonian” way that Ali pitted the men in his entourage against one another, once even forcing two of his followers to climb into a boxing ring and duke it out for his amusement.

  Bonventre wasn’t the only reporter who’d decided that Ali’s adultery should no longer be a private matter. After an encounter between Ali and Marcos at the presidential palace in Manila, Ali’s affair with Veronica became impossible for reporters to ignore.

  At the palace, Marcos had his wife, Imelda, by his side. Veronica accompanied Ali.

  “You have a beautiful wife,” Ali told Marcos, smiling at Imelda.

  “From the looks of yours,” said Marcos, “you’re not far behind.”

  Joe Frazier snickered at the remark, and Veronica wasn’t sure whether to take it as an insult.

  Ali did not attempt to correct Marcos.

  Journalists reported on the incident, saying that Ali had introduced Veronica to Marcos as his wife. It wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough to make things uncomfortable. Dave Anderson of the New York Times asked Ali if he had taken two wives.

  “No, we ain’t gonna go against the law of the land,” Ali said, making a veiled reference to the fact that Islamic law permitted him to have more than one spouse. “But ain’t she beautiful?”

  Back in the United States, photos appeared in newspapers of Veronica and Ali at the Philippine presidential palace. Belinda surely knew that Veronica was in Manila. But it was one thing to know about his affair and another to see it making international news. Belinda got on a plane, flew to Manila, and interrupted her husband in the middle of an interview. The couple retreated to Ali’s bedroom, where Belinda shouted, knocked over furniture, and threatened to break Veronica’s neck the next time she saw her.

  “I’m not wanted here,” Belinda told reporters in Manila. “Muhammad Ali doesn’t want me here. Nobody wants me here. I’m not going to force myself. I don’t like an impostor coming in and taking over my family after eight years and destroying my life.”

  With that, Belinda went back to the airport and flew home.

  “You really couldn’t blame her,” Areatha Swint said.

  Ali told Bonventre he had no intention of letting mundane domestic matters interfere with his work. He was on a divine mission. “It ain’t no accident that I’m the greatest man in the world at this time in history,” he said. Allah had chosen him for a reason.

  “It’s time for me to face another test,” he told Bonventre. “Things have been going too good lately. Allah must make me pay for all this fame and power . . . Allah’s always testing you. He don’t let you get great for nothing.”

  Later, in an interview with the New York Times, Ali defended his right to sleep with as many women as he liked and hinted that he was spending time with others in addition to Veronica and Areatha. “I got three or four lady friends here,” he said. “I can see some controversy if she was white, but she’s not. But the only person I answer to is Belinda Ali and I don’t worry about her . . . This is going too far. They got on me for the draft. They got on me for my re
ligion. They got on me for all sorts of things. But they shouldn’t be able to get on me for having a girlfriend . . . The only person I worry about if I do something wrong is Wallace Muhammad. If my wife catches me with ten women at a party, kissing them, that don’t bother me, just so I don’t get in trouble with Wallace Muhammad.”

  44

  Ali-Frazier III

  Two days before the fight, Ali was stretched out on a couch in his dressing room, giving himself a pep talk. There were reporters in the room, but they weren’t gathered around, and Ali didn’t seem to care if any of them were listening. His words flowed in a stream of consciousness: “Who’d he ever beat for the title?” Ali asked, referring to Joe Frazier, of course. “Buster Mathis and Jimmy Ellis. He ain’t no champion. All he’s got is a left hook, got no right hand, no jab, no rhythm. I was the real champion all the time. He reigned because I escaped the draft and he luckily got by me, but he was only an imitation champion. He just luckily got through because his head could take a lot of punches.”

  If he wasn’t conducting an interview and if he didn’t care whether anyone was listening, why did Ali feel compelled to run through this evaluation of Frazier’s evidently meager skills and qualifications? Was this how he entertained himself? Was this the way he soothed his own doubts?

  Once again, in the buildup to the fight, Ali had been merciless in his treatment of Frazier, questioning his intelligence, his manliness, and his blackness. Ali had waved a small rubber ape and called Frazier a gorilla and pretended to box a man in a gorilla suit. He had rhymed endlessly and unimaginatively about the gorilla and the “Thrilla in Manila.” “He not only looks bad! You can smell him in another country!” Ali held his nose. “What will the people in Manila think? We can’t have a gorilla for champ. They’re gonna think, lookin’ at him, that all black brothers are animals. Ignorant. Stupid. Ugly. If he’s champ again, other nations will laugh at us.” He dropped low, let his knuckles hang by his knees, and jumped around, snorting like an ape. At one point, Ali aimed an unloaded pistol at Frazier and pulled the trigger four or five times. Frazier claimed it was a real gun — “I know enough about guns to know that,” he said — but Ali said it was a toy.