Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  Like our great grandparents on our father’s side, who, in southeast Louisiana, not far from what is now the town of Burgess Castle, had been house servants to plantation owners (thus, our ability to remain together as family), we too were become house servants, and with privileges, Joleen would remark bitterly, not unlike those of our forbears. But beyond such “privileges,” she had learned from stories passed down to our mother from her mother—privileges that, then as now, were referred to under the rubric of droit du seigneur—there had been one benefit that was a rarity among our people of that antebellum time: literacy.

  In Louisiana in the early and mid-nineteenth century, it had been illegal for a master or mistress to teach a slave to read or to write, and the fact that the mistress of the plantation where our great grandparents had labored—a middle-sized sugarcane enterprise without a grand mansion like those portrayed in popular fiction and film—had defied the law, for reasons unexplained, loomed large in our family’s history, and doubtless contributed to our family’s love of the written and spoken word, to our willingness to express respect and affection for white people, and to trust in the possibility of their fairness and generosity. “It takes a rich cotton planter to make a poor sugar planter,” I recall my father saying, words he believed could apply with accuracy to a multitude of situations.

  The notion of Max Baer as a seigneur, however, Joleen would state—and invariably in a voice laced in equal parts with amusement and bitterness—did strain the limits of one’s imagination, in addition to which neither of us was foolish enough to believe what Max wished us to believe: that Joleen and I had freely chosen the life that was ours.

  “Still, it is wonderful to live in an illusion when the illusion is laden with so many palpable luxuries,” Joleen would say. “Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” I would reply, “for by so believing, we avoid responsibility for the choices we have actually made.”

  “Touché, mon frère,” she would reply.

  As for Max, although he wanted us to believe we were loyal to him because we had chosen to do so—“I know you love me as much as I love you!” he would say—he was never a man to put much stock in, or submit to, dreams or illusions. With the exception of the infrequent times when, as on the night we first met, he drank to excess, he took pride in never euphemizing unpleasant realities, and this was especially true in his attitude toward the craft of boxing.

  Max was famous for his lackadaisical training regimen, even when he was in the final days of workouts for an upcoming fight. No matter the quality of the opponent, after a day of rigorous training what he enjoyed most of all was going out on the town—womanizing, carousing, and then sleeping late in the mornings. “I love to fight and I love to knock guys out,” he would say. “But there are lots of other things I love too, and sometimes those other things are the winners.”

  What he loved above all was having a good time. “That’s the main thing, Horace,” he would say, propped up on an elbow above me, or lying back on a pillow, smoking a cigar, “not to forget to have a good time, right? That’s the main thing, far as I can tell. I mean, I can lie to others—the ladies especially when that makes sense—but I never lie to myself, and that makes the difference because that’s just who I am. Me—Maximilian Adelbert Baer.”

  And Max had been blessed with such exceptional talent—power out of all proportion to his size, stamina that was not vitiated by the high life he favored, and defensive reflexes that kept his face free of welts and scars—that his ability to mix a demanding schedule of victorious fights and an equally demanding social life became the wonder of the boxing world.

  On the night of August 25, 1930, however, when he fought against Frankie Campbell in a ring constructed above home plate in San Francisco’s Recreation Park, a park built a year after the great earthquake and fire of 1907, and a park where the city’s beloved baseball team, the San Francisco Seals, played, his ability to rejoice equally in his sport and his pastimes suffered a tragic setback. The fight against Campbell was for the unofficial title of Pacific Coast champion, and Campbell, whose real name was Camilli, and whose brother, Dolph Camilli, would in later years become a star first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, was an excellent and up-and-coming boxer, admired for his superb footwork.

  Well past midnight on the morning of the fight, Max came to our cottage. He reeked, as he often did at such times, of cologne, sweat, and cigars, but he seemed quite sober, and terribly upset. He sat on a wooden chair, his head in his hands, and told us that early in the evening he had learned that his trusted friend and trainer, Tillie “Kid” Herman, had decamped and was working with Campbell. Max was so distraught that he did not request any private time with either Joleen or myself. He also refrained on that evening, as he did through all our years together, from making any least suggestion that the three of us should engage in the kind of activity à trois that many men were believed, then as now, to value above others (although their preference, in my experience, was more often for two women than for two men), even though I believe Joleen and I would have granted him this wish had he indicated his desire for it. On this evening, however, he desired only consolation, and when the desire for consolation waned, vengeance. What he wanted was nothing less than to destroy Tillie “Kid” Herman. Herman, however, was not his opponent.

  Campbell was, and that evening, in the second round of the bout, after Campbell had clipped Max a glancing blow on the chin, and Max had slipped to one knee, Campbell, assuming Max would stay down for a count of five or six, made the mistake of waving triumphantly to the crowd, which ignited the full fury of Max’s rage. Rising swiftly from the canvas, Max flew at Campbell just as Campbell turned back from the crowd to the ring, and smashed a mighty roundhouse right to the side of Campbell’s head that turned Campbell around in a full circle and sent him sprawling onto the canvas.

  We later learned that between rounds Campbell told Herman, “Something feels like it broke in my head,” but that Herman paid no heed to this, and sent Campbell back into the ring for round three. Campbell seemed fine for the next two rounds, staying away from Max while scoring decisively with swift, sharp jabs. Before the fifth round, however, Herman began taunting Max, jeering at him and calling him a sheenie clown with the brain of an ox, and even before the bell rang for the fight to recommence, Max, eyes blazing, had kicked away his stool and water bucket, pushed me and his other handlers aside, stood, and, pounding his gloves one against the other, chest level, taken three steps forward. I was thrilled to see him like this, for I knew he felt most truly himself in these moments—lost in a reverie wherein his body and hands had a life of their own and he had no idea of what they were doing, and little memory afterwards of what they had done. Thrilled as I was when he was this way, though, I also feared for the other fighter who, in the most literal sense, I knew, would soon, his lights extinguished, not know or recall what had befallen him.

  Max plowed forward like the ox Herman had said he was, and in a matter of seconds had Campbell against the ropes and was hammering him relentlessly, blow after thundering blow, as if Campbell’s head were a speed bag. One of Campbell’s eyes closed and swelled with such swiftness it seemed a hand grenade had been surgically inserted behind it. Herman might have thrown in the towel then, as a responsible trainer should have, but he chose not to. Nor did the referee or attending physician stop the fight as those in the crowd who were not screaming for blood were urging them to do. Only when Campbell’s head clanged against one of the metal turnbuckles that connected the ropes to the ring posts, and it was clear that only the ropes and Max’s repeated blows to Campbell’s head—which had become a bloody, puffed pulp—were holding him up, did the referee step between the fighters. Had he not, Max, so enraged and inspired was he—so lost in the sheer, brute joy of smashing blow after blow at Campbell in a futile attempt to exact a vengeance that would never be his—that he might have gone on throwing punches forever.

  When the referee stepped
in, and Max stepped away, Campbell fell forward face first to the canvas and lay there unconscious while the referee counted him out, after which I rushed into the ring, turned Campbell over, lifted his head, placed a towel under it, and poured water onto his face. Campbell did not stir or open his eyes. We called for an ambulance, and while Campbell lay on the canvas, immobile, for half an hour—the ambulance became stuck in traffic, we were informed—boxing fans crowded into the ring to gawk at him, and neither police nor boxing officials did anything to clear the ring or to initiate other ways of removing Campbell from it. When at last an ambulance from St. Joseph’s Hospital arrived, Max helped carry Campbell out on a stretcher. A few hours later we received a telephone call informing us that Campbell was near death.

  At St. Joseph’s, Max paced the hallway where Campbell’s wife, Elsie, sat, and cradled her and Campbell’s newborn son in her arms. Max offered his hand to Campbell’s wife—offered to cut it off and give it to her—but she only pressed Max’s hand between her own hands. “It’s all right,” she said. “It even might have been you, mightn’t it?”

  Frankie Campbell died at noon the next day, and when he did—we had stayed overnight in the hospital’s waiting room in anticipation of the news—Max broke down and sobbed like a baby. For days, out at the ranch, he was inconsolable, and for years afterwards would wake from nightmares in which he relived those moments when the only thing he knew how to do—to be Max Baer—was to continue to rain down blows upon a strong man made increasingly helpless by these very blows. It was in the near aftermath of Campbell’s death that Max came to accept and depend, almost desperately, upon the loving-kindness Joleen offered him, and in a way that made me realize again, more fully than I wanted to, that although her love for me would remain undiminished, her intimate affections might never again be mine.

  Max was charged with manslaughter by the office of the San Francisco District Attorney, and a warrant for his arrest issued, to which he surrendered. He spent several hours behind bars at the Hall of Justice, but was released on bail in an amount that equaled his take for the fight. Although he was, a few months later, acquitted of charges, the State Boxing Commission banned him from any in-ring activity in California for a full year, a year during which Max fought six bouts out of state—he could not not fight—including three at Madison Square Garden, so swiftly was his reputation—and his value as a drawing card for having killed a man—on the rise. (He donated the purses from these fights to Frankie Campbell’s family, and he did so without seeking publicity. In later years, again without publicity, he helped put three of Frankie Campbell’s children through college at the University of Notre Dame.)

  So distressed was he during this year, however, that he lost four of his half-dozen fights, and it was while I held him in my arms in the early morning following upon the third of these losses—to the Basque and European heavyweight champion Paolino Uzcudun, in a bout in Reno, Nevada, refereed by Jack Dempsey—that he asked if I would promise to do him the honor—“the honor, Horace, please” he kept repeating—to travel with him for all his fights, for he did not know how, during the hours and days between fights, he would survive without me.

  But survive he did, and a month before the first anniversary of Campbell’s death, Max’s innate and unrestrained love of life, and of women, flourishing more with each passing day, prevailed, so that on July 8, 1931, after a headline-producing courtship, he married Dorothy Dunbar (thereby becoming the fifth of her seven husbands), and his love for Dorothy, and marriage to her, seemed to revive him. “I think I love being in love even more than I love knocking guys out,” he said to me on his wedding day, and during his first year of marriage he won all ten of his fights. Although, following the wedding, he and Dorothy quickly began their dance of separating, having affairs with others, and reuniting, the marriage itself, which reinforced in him the belief that he was, despite Campbell’s death, worthy of love, seemed also to intensify and increase his attentions to me and to Joleen.

  It was ever thus, and would remain so for as long as we were with him, we came to realize: the more he loved others, the more he loved us. “The way I see it,” he said in our hotel room after he had, in Oakland, California, a day before the New Year of 1932, defeated the highly-ranked Italian Arthur De Kuh, “the more time I spend in bed with you—the better I am in the ring.”

  And a few months later, when we were staying at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, to which he had shipped ten trunks of clothes and thirty tailor-made suits, so devoted had he become to the night life of the city, and so pleased by the attention given him for his extravagant ways by the press, that he could declare, as if confiding a secret, that he agreed with the sportswriters that he had become, at twenty-one years old, in his own words, “as magnificent a piece of young American manhood you’d ever want to lay your hands on.” It was not merely the natural endowments—his dark skin, deep-set eyes, curly black hair, chiseled chin, and broad shoulders that were his by birth, but something else—the fact that being in love, whether with Dorothy, Joleen, me, or others, had turned out, he said, to be the same as training for a fight: the secret of success lay in repetitions. That was why things were always so good with Dorothy, even when she continued—as she had before she divorced the Spanish diplomat Jaime De Gerson y Baretto to marry Max—to toy with him.

  “She toys with me—sure,” he said. “But that’s okay because I am a toy! And thank the good lord I am, because I love to be played with as much as I love to play, and I don’t have to prove that to you, I bet.”

  So he and Dorothy fought, split up, took on lovers, and got back together, and the more they carried on in this manner, the happier he became, and the better he fought. “What I figured out,” he said to me on the night before his second fight with Ernie Schaaf, on the last day of August 1932 (Schaaf had beaten him badly—perhaps his worst loss ever—twenty months before, in his first bout following on Campbell’s death), “is that when I’m in love it’s like when I’m in the ring, because that’s when time goes whiz-bang and I can’t even tell where my body begins and my mind ends, and vice versa, though with the peanut-sized brain I got, maybe nobody’d be able to tell.”

  What I thought but did not say in response to such remarks was that when it came to love, what concerned me first, last, and always, was the fate of the woman he claimed to love above all others. For what was Joleen to do with herself—with her life!—during the many months Max and I were away, especially since, on the few occasions we did return to Livermore—three in total that first year of his marriage—Dorothy accompanied us.

  Only once, to my knowledge, were Max and Joleen able during that period to be alone together. On that day in mid-July, a month before his second fight with Schaaf, I had served breakfast to Dorothy in the Baer home (Max had earlier announced he was going for a morning run with his brother Buddy), after which I had returned to our cottage in order to ready myself for a sparring session with him. To my surprise—for I did not expect he would chance being with Joleen while Dorothy was at the ranch—I found him sitting on our bed. Joleen stood by the window, her arms crossed above her breasts. Both she and Max were fully clothed, and neither of them was smiling.

  “But you are the best,” he was saying as I entered our cottage. “Like I told you—you’re my number one and only sweetheart.”

  “So are all the others,” Joleen replied.

  “But don’t you know how true it is for me, like I always say—that the darker the cherry, the sweeter the meat?” he said.

  “As far as I can tell,” Joleen said, “the sweetest meat is whatever’s in your mouth.”

  “Well, maybe,” Max said. “It’s true I got a huge appetite.”

  “Then you should go and feed it,” she said, and opened the door to indicate that it was time for him to leave. “My husband and I are entitled to our privacy.”

  And saying this, she turned away from him and kissed me passionately, although, my back to him, I could not tell if Max took no
tice. I extricated myself from Joleen’s embrace as quickly as I could, and by the time I did, he was gone.

  Pushing me away angrily, Joleen swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’” she declared. “And though it may be so, let me tell you this, my brother—I want my share too.”

  “You are upset,” I said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “You surely have reason for your bitterness, and—” I began, but she cut me off by grabbing me by the throat.

  “Are you not curious as to how I will have my share of vengeance?” she asked.

  “Pray tell me,” I said.

  “Pray tell me?!” she said. “‘Pray tell me,’ did he say? Oh you may mock me, brother dear, but I will have vengeance—a great, enduring vengeance that will dwarf all the minor perturbations of this life. Do not doubt me, thee of meager faith. And how? How? Tell me, my love. How will I have my portion?”

  Aware that nothing I could do or say would temper her rage, I remained silent.

  “A tongue hath he, yet he speaks not,” she said, and gripped my throat more forcefully. “How? How long, oh Lord, I must wonder, can this fool—this coward I have called my dearest friend and soul mate—keep from inquiring as to how I will have my share in the time to come?”

  Blood pulsing with increasing force behind my eyes, I considered prying her thumbs upwards with force—of breaking one of them if need be, or of visiting a blow upon her cheek with the back of my hand that would have cracked bone there—yet I was also able in the moment to find a place within me that said: Go slow, Horace. Go slow, my friend, for you dare not add physical pain to the distress of her soul. Be kind if you can. Be kind.

  As if she discerned my thoughts at the very moment they were making themselves known to me, she loosened her hold upon my throat.

  I sucked in quick, shallow breaths of air, and then: “How?” I asked. “How will you have your vengeance?”