Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  When asked if rumors were true that he’d taken up with Dorothy Dunbar again, he said that he thought their having been separated seven times was enough. “Besides,” he laughed, “I’m too young to get married again.”

  Then Max put on a fawn-colored gabardine suit, a brown-and-white striped shirt, a brown-and-white striped necktie, a new pair of tan toe-cap oxford shoes, and, with Buddy, Jack Dempsey, Jerry Cassell, me, and the rest of our entourage, he went out on the town—to the Stork Club, Toots Shor’s, the Cotton Club, and other favorite haunts, where, on that night, and all day the next day, and on the days and nights that followed, he rejoiced in the good wishes of others—Jews especially, who claimed him, with his blessing, as their champion—the first Jewish heavyweight champion ever—and where, for all those fortunate enough to know him, his boundless energy and spirit transformed New York City into a New Jerusalem of joy—a pleasure dome of luxurious indulgences unlike any I had known before, or have known since.

  When, ten days later, the time came to pack up and head cross-country for Livermore, he surprised me with the news that we would, for a while, be parting ways. Mickey B. Friedman, who had been Max’s stand-in during the making of The Prize Fighter and the Lady, would take his place on the west-bound train while Max slipped away, disguised as a bearded Bible salesman, and headed south for Washington, DC. There, his public words about marriage notwithstanding, he was going to pay court to a woman he’d met a few months earlier, Mary Ellen Sullivan, and see if she was who he believed she was: the girl of his dreams who was going to make the great dream of his life come true.

  “But your dreams have come true,” I said. “You’re the heavyweight champion of the world, in addition to which you have already met, several times over, the girl of your dreams, and have even married one of them…”

  “Ah, but none of them till now have made my heart do somersaults the way she does,” he said. He kissed me softly on the cheek. “You know me well, Horace—you and your wife know me better than anyone—so I can level with you the way I can’t level with anyone else, but the real dream is to be the champ, which I’ve done, but also to be the champ with a woman I love by my side—a woman who can help me bring some fabulous baby Baers into the world. And guess what? I think I found her!”

  I congratulated him without voicing my skepticism, and I wished him well on his journey. I said that I had been favorably impressed with Miss Sullivan when we had met her at the Willard Hotel in Washington, where she was the manager of its coffee shop. She had a sweetly sassy way about her that had endeared her to us both, so that I could truthfully say to Max that, like him, I had become fond of her.

  “And you know what it’s gonna be like, me and her and baby-makes-three out at the ranch—what I figured out, dumb me?”

  “Pray tell me,” I said.

  “Why, it’s gonna be so wonderful, it’s gonna be almost—” he paused “—unbearable! That’s how wonderful it’s gonna be! Completely and totally un-baer-able! Get it?”

  Then he laughed, embraced me again, and while he did, my thoughts turned to Joleen, and to how news of Max’s new lady-love—or of the possibility of marriage to this woman—might affect her. When he asked if I realized that what he was giving me was “a genuine and undisputed heavyweight championship Baer hug,” though, I could not help but pull him close to me and wish him well.

  Upon my return to the Baer ranch, I found Joleen to be as she had been before: quiet, sullen, distant. She performed her chores well and efficiently, and was respectfully affectionate with me in ways a wife was expected to be with a husband, but other than perfunctory exchanges—about the weather, about work accomplished and work still to be done—and muted expressions of congratulation on Max’s triumph, along with token inquiries as to his whereabouts and plans, she showed little interest in anything beyond the essentials of daily living: eating, working, sleeping.

  On the third day of my third week back home, however (Max was still, as far as anyone knew, in Washington, DC), I returned to our cabin from a sparring session with Buddy on what was, for California in summer, a refreshingly mild late afternoon in July, to be greeted by a strange aroma. Joleen was sitting on the floor at the foot of our bed, in the dark—I mistook her, at first, for a shadow—her face covered with what seemed to be gray powder, but which, I saw upon closer perusal, were ashes.

  The crate in which she had kept her dolls was bare.

  I knelt beside her and instead of asking what she had done, I phrased my question, and concern, as a statement: “You have burned your dolls,” I said.

  “You are a wise and observant brother,” Joleen said.

  “But why—and why now?”

  “Why? In order that my ghosts truly be ghosts,” she said. “Why now? Because you are home, and I am safe again. I know you will protect me.”

  “Protect you from what?”

  For the first time since I had returned to Livermore, she smiled at me, and when she did I felt my heart surge with a love for her that I had for some time forsworn.

  She took my hands in hers and kissed them. “The dark beast that has been pursuing us has made its home in my heart,” she said. “Therefore—in this way—will I keep him from making his home in yours.”

  “Because you love me?” I said.

  “Because I love you,” she said.

  She rose from the floor and, her arms around my neck, her body warm against mine, she recited a verse from The Song of Solomon: “‘We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts; what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?’”

  I answered, as did the brothers in The Song of Solomon: “‘If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver; and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.’”

  “Yes,” she said, and she kissed me lightly on the lips. “And now lie down with me, my brother—lie down with a woman in whose heart the dark beast, whose vile desires will not be denied, rejoices.”

  Max returned to the ranch the last week in August, ebullient as ever, and bearing news: first, that he had agreed to fight an exhibition bout against King Levinsky in Levinsky’s home town, Chicago. “Levinsky’s a real hundred per cent Yid, not like me,” Max said, “so that every Jew west of the Mississippi, and then some, are gonna show up, and the Kingfish and I are gonna give them a show they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.”

  His second, happier piece of news, about which he swore Joleen and me to secrecy, was that within a year, after he’d fought a few exhibitions to build up the gate for the first defense of his title, and to lay away some loot for the Baer babies who would soon be running around the ranch, he and Mary Ellen Sullivan would tie the knot.

  Joleen offered him her hand. “Congratulations,” she said. “I trust she will prove worthy of you.”

  “Hey,” he said, moving to embrace Joleen, who stepped away and began dusting our books with an invisible cloth. “No need to pout or be glum, Joleen. This won’t change nothing between us.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “You will still be you, and I will still be me, and Horace will still be Horace.”

  “But Mary Ellen and me will be married!” Max exclaimed. “And then the four of us will start in making families, and our babes will play with each other and become friends too.”

  “And perhaps the beast in my heart that you took for your own, will destroy your dreams,” Joleen said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Max said. “We ain’t got no beasts around here—hogs and cows, and some horses now—gorgeous horses for my father, from the purse Carnera brought in, which is his dream come true, see—so what’s this you’re talking about—?”

  Joleen pushed Max against the wall, and kissed him passionately in a way that made me fear she would sink her teeth into him.

  Then she took a step back, and began dusting the walls.

  “Hey—thanks,” Max said. “I mean, I guess that’s the way you people congratulate friends
when they bring good news.”

  “I think not,” I said, and I took Max by an arm—seized it—and turned him toward me. “I think Joleen is suffering from what is known as a melancholic disposition, and I think she means what she says about the destruction of your dreams. I think we need to be discreet about how and when we reveal our wishes to her.”

  “My husband is a wise man,” Joleen said, and she waved her phantom cloth at Max so that motes of dust seemed to emanate from it, gray specks that floated weightlessly in the waning light of day.

  Max nodded. “I’m sorry for your troubles, Joleen,” he said. “I love you like I love my own mother—like I love Horace—like I love—well—all the people I love. But I’ve known people in life who’ve had the black willies and believed they’d never be happy again, but I’m here to tell you that you’re gonna be happy again, and you and me and Horace are gonna have good times like always.”

  “May your words find their way into God’s cold, unforgiving heart,” Joleen said.

  “You got that right,” Max said. “And I swear to you that though me and Mary Ellen are gonna get hitched and call it marriage because it will be marriage—we’re doing it—I’m doing it—mostly so I can bring some baby Baers into this crazy world.”

  “How sweet,” Joleen said. “Have you inquired of them, and gained their approval for your decision?”

  Max took a deep breath before he spoke again. “And here’s something I been thinking and hoped I wouldn’t have to say out loud,” he said. “But what I want is for things to be on the up and up with us the way they’ve always been, because compared to what I’ve known with you two, what I have and expect to have with Mary Ellen is more like a contract, okay? I mean, compared to what I have with you, like I said, it’s just what I guess you’d call a long-term mutual arrangement.”

  “But legalized.”

  “That’s for the kids we’re gonna have!” Max shouted. “Don’t you understand anything I’ve been saying?!”

  “I understand everything you’ve been saying,” Joleen said.

  “Let me put it this way then,” he said, and I saw that, fists clenched, he was trembling. “Mary Ellen is a good woman, and I know you and Horace are gonna like her—love her, I hope—but you’ll always—always always—be first in my heart.”

  “What heart?” Joleen said, and saying this, she walked out of our cabin, and toward the fields where his father’s new horses were grazing.

  Three days before the new year of 1935, Max entered the ring against King Levinsky at Chicago Stadium for what was to be the first of five exhibition fights. Although Max could lose his championship title in such an exhibition bout if (and only if) an opponent were to knock him out, the object of such exhibitions in those days was to provide a first-rate show for boxing fans while bringing in good money for promoters and the champion. And traveling around the country and having good times between championship bouts was the ideal life for Max. Levinsky, however, who had defeated fighters such as Jack Sharkey and Tommy Loughran, and who was managed by his sister, Lena “Leaping Lena” Levy, had ideas Max had not anticipated.

  When the bell rang for round one, and the fighters met in the middle of the ring, Max laughed and, as if preparing to annihilate Levinsky with a single punch, performed an elaborate windmill windup with his right arm, at which point Levinsky stepped forward and slammed the hardest right hook he could to Max’s jaw.

  Max, playing along, wobbled around the ring as if he’d been hurt badly, then thrust his chin forward to give Levinsky an easy target, whereupon Levinsky again punched Max in the jaw. “Hey!” Max screamed at him. “We’re supposed to be having fun!” So they danced around together for the first round, Max keeping Levinsky away with nifty jabs and nimble footwork, but when, at the start of round two, Levinsky strode to the center of the ring, and gestured mockingly for Max to come and get him, Max had had enough. “That’s it,” he said to Cantwell, and he charged at Levinsky, and pounded him—left right, right left, left right—then finished him off with a crushing right that sent Levinsky to the canvas, where he was counted out, and from which he had to be carried to his corner.

  “He thought he could sneak in and make himself king,” Max said to reporters afterwards, “but I turned that blowhard into a dead fish.” And when the reporters peppered him with questions about his romances, and asked if it was true that he was engaged to one of his new sweethearts, not Mary Ellen Sullivan, but Mary Kirk Brown, a New York café society lady, he laughed. “I know many girls,” he said, “many lovely girls. But I think I shall still order à la carte for a while.”

  And so he did. He courted many ladies, and he also continued to court Mary Ellen Sullivan, traveling to Washington, DC, when we were nearby, and sometimes when we were not, and twice hiring private planes to get him there so that the two of them could work at persuading her family, who were devout Catholics, to accept Max as a son-in-law.

  In mid-February, Max fought and won a second exhibition bout, in San Francisco’s Dreamland arena, this time against Stanley Poreda, a heavyweight contender who’d beaten both Carnera and Schaaf, all proceeds from the fight, Max’s purse included, going to a trust fund Max had set up for Frankie Campbell’s widow and son. And Max’s generosity extended beyond the Campbell family, and his own family: he loved giving away money the way he loved having a good time. He would get two hundred and fifty dollars in a cash allowance from Hoffman (who tried in vain to control Max’s extravagances), and give it away within an hour to a bum on skid row, or a guy in line at a soup kitchen. Several times I watched him give down-and-outers the very shirts and jackets off his back. “He has a heart bigger than his body,” his sister Maudie once said to me, and it was true. And he was as generous to others—to his parents especially, for whom he bought a new home near Oakland, in the East Bay town of Piedmont—as he was to his brothers and sister, to Joleen and me, to Mary Ellen, and, as ever, to himself. He bought clothes, cars, and gifts for everyone—he was a great free spirit, and as this first (and only) championship year drew toward its end, what I began to understand was that he was freer than ever because, having had one of his dreams come true—becoming heavyweight champion of the world—he could let go of parts of his life that had led to the championship—the training, the deal making, the fights themselves—and, quite simply, do what he wanted.

  After he had moved his parents to Piedmont, Max kept Twin Oaks mainly, he told others, so that Buddy, Augie, and Maudie could continue to enjoy it, but his real reason was so that Joleen would have a place in which to live that felt familiar, and in which she felt safe, for in that sublimely carefree and happy year—a year in which he fought only exhibition matches—the only dark cloud that shadowed his life, as it did mine, came from the fear that the beast Joleen claimed had made its home in her heart might persuade her to leave this world and join her brother James.

  Max and I returned to Livermore on four other occasions that year, and each time we did, the first thing Max did was to visit Joleen, who remained as she had been—sad, brooding, silent. Still, Max was able to coax her into taking long walks with us on the property, and what surprised me was that he did not force conversation upon her, or ever—a sign of a sensibility few could have guessed at—ask her how she was feeling, or why she was sad, or what he could do to help. He simply attended to her and, now and then, told her of some incident that had occurred during our travels—usually a comic incident in which he had played the fool.

  When the three of us picnicked in meadows where the horses and cows grazed, he would talk about places we had seen and good times we had had, and about how, win or lose in defense of his title (for he had reluctantly agreed, in April, to fight, again in Long Island City’s Madison Square Garden Bowl, against a journeyman heavyweight named James J. Braddock, who had lost twenty-one of his eighty-three fights), he was looking to get out of the fight game so he could make more movies, play the nightclubs, and, most important of all, start a family he intended to raise rig
ht here on the ranch.

  “You don’t have a mean bone in your body, do you, Max?” I recall Joleen saying to him one afternoon in May when we were enjoying a midday picnic under a stand of pecan trees in the ranch’s furthest meadow.

  “That’s what my mom always said,” Max said.

  “Yet in the boxing ring you compensate for this deficiency of character admirably,” Joleen said.

  Max laughed. “I like the way you put it,” he said. “But yeah—if it’s for all the marbles, then I gotta make sure I get the other guy before he gets me. Only…”

  “Only what, Max?”

  “Only I still think about that poor kid Campbell and what I did to him,” Max said. “It’s not like me, you know.”

  “But it is,” Joleen said. “We are what we do, after all, though your mother has often said that, grateful as she is for the good life you have brought to the family, she can never get used to seeing you as the man you have become since you were, she claims, a somewhat shy, even cowardly boy who never liked fighting.”

  “That’s true enough,” Max said. “But it’ll be over soon. I won’t ever throw no fight—I’m not a quitter, you can bet your life on that—but if—and it’s not the only reason—but if it can help you back to the Joleen you used to be, then that’s gonna help me do what I was gonna do soon anyway, which is to walk away from it all.”

  “What you do or don’t do will not alter who I am or how I choose to lead my life,” Joleen said, starting to walk away. “I will always love you, Max Baer—whether you fight or don’t fight, or whether you win or you lose.”

  Max prepared for his fight against Braddock even more lackadaisically than he had for the fight against Carnera. Still, he entered the ring as a ten-to-one favorite. Braddock, who had a reputation for being a plodder—slow-footed and slow-witted—was by now considered what we called “a tomato can,” meaning a washed-up fighter against whom an up-and-coming fighter might build a reputation, or a champion might fight in order to stay in shape and to keep the money rolling in.