Max Baer and the Star of David

by Jay Neugeboren

  Less than a year before, to support his wife and three children, Braddock had been working on the docks for five dollars a day and, when there was no work, had suffered the humiliation of going on relief. Following a leave-taking from boxing of nine months, he had, upon only two days notice, been given a chance to be a setup for a boxer on the rise named “Corn” Griffin, against whom he scored a surprise technical knockout in the third round, and after which, between stints as a dock worker, he had defeated two other good fighters, John Henry Lewis and Art Laskey, in a series of elimination bouts that had earned him his shot at Max.

  On the night of the fight, Braddock came out fighting, and Max came out clowning. Max’s old habit—letting his hands drop to his sides either to hitch up his trunks, or to tempt the other fighter to attack—became a weakness Braddock exploited relentlessly. And Max was, simply, tired, his fatigue due in large part to having locked everyone out of his dressing room before the fight in order to have his pleasure with one of his new lady friends, an event that made reporters gleeful, and Hoffman insane with rage. And in the ring, he seemed surprised that no matter what he did—moving in circles around Braddock, flicking away jabs with a stiff, outstretched left arm, or faking a jab and then trying to move in with a series of uppercuts—Braddock just kept coming, his head burrowed into Max’s shoulder while he pushed Max around the ring, backing off now and then in order to land solid lefts and rights, and then coming at Max again.

  Between the fifth and sixth rounds, Max whispered to me that he didn’t know how he could knock Braddock out (which he saw as his only hope, since Braddock was far ahead on points and, as Max continued to tire, would doubtless increase his lead), because he was pretty sure he had broken his right hand. But whether he had broken the right hand and/or the left (after the fight, it turned out that he had, in fact, broken the right hand and badly damaged the left, information Max never revealed to the press), and whether he did or did not care about winning (Jack Dempsey was livid afterwards, writing in the New York Times about Max’s “miserable defense of his title,” and about how his “dilly-dallying and clowning had finally caught up with him”), he did summon up what stamina he had left, and fought his heart out in the final rounds of the fifteen-round bout, rounds in which neither he nor Braddock had the legs or power left to put the other fighter away.

  Thus did James J. Braddock became the new heavyweight champion of the world—a hero to boxing fans, as well as to all who, in those Depression years, knew what it was like to be down and out, and to have to take charity in order to provide for their families. Max was gracious in defeat, praising Braddock, saying he knew he deserved to lose, and adding that he now planned to retire from boxing and raise white-face cattle on his ranch in Livermore.

  Sixteen days after the fight, on June 29, 1935, Max and Mary Ellen Sullivan were married in the Washington, DC, home of Justice F. Dickinson Letts, who presided over a private ceremony I attended, and soon after, as Max had promised, he and Mary Ellen moved west to the Baer ranch.

  His promise to retire from boxing, however, was short-lived. Although he continued to fight against the very best fighters in the world—Joe Louis, Lou Nova, Buck Rogers, and “Two-Ton” Tony Galento, among others—and to defeat all of them, with the exception of Joe Louis, who, in the presence of 95,000 people in the Yankee Stadium, destroyed Max in four rounds in the most punishing defeat of Max’s career—he devoted himself increasingly to his life with Mary Ellen, and to his career on stage and screen. He developed a vaudeville routine with his friend, the former light-heavyweight champion Max “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom, which they performed in many venues, including nightclubs Rosenbloom owned; he acted in movies—nearly two dozen of them in the ensuing years, including Humphrey Bogart’s final movie, The Harder They Fall, whose main character, “the champ,” was based on Max, and in the first-ever live ninety-minute television drama, Requiem for a Heavyweight; and he also earned numerous pay days as a disc jockey, a wrestler, and (as Jack Dempsey had done) a celebrity referee for both boxing and wrestling matches.

  Then, on December 4, 1937, within a year and a half of their marriage, he and Mary Ellen became the proud parents of a son: Max Baer Jr. And Max Baer Jr.’s arrival in the world, which preceded Horace Jr.’s by a half year, changed our lives yet again, and forever, for until Max Baer Jr.’s birth, Joleen had continued to live in the unlit caves of her melancholic disposition. The only thing that seemed to brighten her days during these years had been books, and the acquisition of books. Our cabin overflowed with them—in bookcases I built and secured against walls, on wide-board planks under windows, and in boxes stored in our closet, above our kitchen cabinets, and under our bed—and the few times I saw light in her eyes, or heard lightness in her voice, were the times she would, with uncharacteristic timidity, ask if I had the time to listen to a passage she had come across in one of her books and thought I might find of interest. I would do so willingly, of course, and would from time to time suggest that perhaps she could renew her plan to be a teacher and thereby transmit her love of literature to others. No matter how tentatively or diplomatically I made such a proposal, however, she would respond each time by saying, “Oh no—that is not meant to be,” after which she would return to her reading, her chores, and her brooding. From the instant Mary Ellen handed the newborn Max Baer Jr. to her, and Joleen held him in her arms, however, she was born again into the woman she had been before the beast of darkness had made her prisoner to his foul authority.

  What seems curious, in retrospect, is that even as Max seemed, following upon his marriage to Mary Ellen, a changed man, frequently (and publicly) renouncing his life as a fighter in favor of his life as a husband and father-to-be, yet did he continue to fight, and to fight with greater frequency than ever. In the eighteen months between his defeat by Braddock and the birth of his son Max Jr., Max fought twenty-two fights, losing only twice (once to Louis, and once to British heavyweight champion Tommy Farr), scoring knockouts eleven times, and technical knockouts four times.

  Since Max was not in need of money—he earned considerable sums from movies and vaudeville, from refereeing and public relations stunts (while Ancil Hoffman, investing wisely for him, doled out allowances so that Max’s extravagances would not do him in)—I must conclude that, no matter his words about not liking to fight and not wanting to hurt others, yet did he truly love the sport known as the “sweet science.”

  And he loved the life that came with the sport: he loved the money; he loved the crowds; he loved the reporters; and he loved the nightlife and the ladies. To the surprise of many, as I have noted, he rarely consumed significant quantities of alcohol (our first meeting with him being an exception) because, he explained, he did not like to dull his senses, and—more important—his ability to remember, the morning after, just how good a time he had had the night before.

  I also believe that he loved the fighting itself far more than he admitted or knew. I believe he loved being lost in an elemental passion for hitting and being hit—in the licensed savagery permitted when, before cheering and bloodthirsty fans, he was free to inflict violence upon another man without the least need to temper the violence with mercy—and he also loved the gratification that came with practicing a craft at which he was a master, and which, like the act of love, and the ecstasy of being in love, fed his desire to take as much pleasure from life as possible, so that the extended moments in which he could give free rein to his power and his desires, whether in the ring or in his romances, served to enhance and heighten his love of life itself.

  The only fighter I have ever known who rivaled him in the sheer joy he took when in the ring—in the way he taunted and danced around his opponents (sometimes performing soft-shoe tap routines); in the way he “played possum”—pretending to be hurt, then surprising an opponent with a flurry of rapid-fire blows; in the way he let his guard down so as to invite the other fighter to attack; in the way he laughed when an opponent had landed a good blow against him;
in the way he delighted in bantering with reporters before, after, and during bouts; and, most of all, in the joy he took from being able to give boxing fans a great, good time—was a fighter I had the privilege of seeing in action but once (four years after Max’s passing), and whom Max, alas, never did see: a man whose physiognomy and coloring were not unlike my own, descended as we both may have been, to judge by appearances, from the legendary Falconhurst slaves—the great and distinguished champion Muhammad Ali.

  3 Scenes from Childhood

  Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves. (7:12)

  Horace Littlejohn Jr. was born at eight minutes before six on the morning of May 30, 1938. I count this the happiest moment of my life, for I sensed on that morning that our son’s birth would redeem for Joleen, even more than Max Jr.’s birth had, those hours and days of her life that had been lost to the dusky vapors of her depressive humors. Max and his wife, Mary Ellen, along with Buddy Baer and Max and Buddy’s mother, Dora, were there with us, as was a local midwife, Miss JoAnna Butler, whom Max had fetched shortly before midnight the evening before, when, upon visiting us after he put Max Jr. to sleep, as was his habit most evenings, he saw that Joleen had gone into labor, and that she was, though valiantly denying it, in considerable pain.

  Horace Jr. weighed six pounds two ounces at birth—nearly three pounds less than Max Baer Jr. had weighed at his birth—and he was, miracle of miracles, born with fingers and toes noticeably longer than seemed natural for a child of his size. His skin was a ruddy, somewhat splotched mocha brown, and he arrived with a full and impressive head of black curls, the curls made slick by the liquids that had accompanied him on his journey from the womb. Although Joleen, exhausted from her labors, showed nothing but a childlike contentment in holding her son close to her and having him, within minutes of his birth, suckle at her breasts, I expect she may have been as relieved as I was that Horace had not come into our world with the fair skin or facial features that would have suggested to attentive observers the true nature of his parentage.

  And just as Abraham regarded Ishmael, son of his concubine Hagar, as his true son, so did Max Baer regard Horace Jr. as his son (though without acknowledging this to others). But whereas Abraham’s wife, Sarah, childless until Ishmael was a young man, was jealous in the extreme of Hagar and Ishmael, and had Abraham banish them into the wilderness of Beersheba, an act intended by Sarah to cause their deaths (which deaths would, without God’s merciful intervention, have surely occurred), neither Max nor Mary Ellen showed anything but love and kindness toward Horace.

  And Max Baer Jr. loved our son Horace Jr., and our son Horace Jr. loved Max Baer Jr., and they grew up together on the Baer ranch and, later on, in the home Max and Mary Ellen made for themselves in Sacramento, where Joleen and I also came to reside in order that we might continue to serve in their employ. Not knowing they were true brothers, and without those envies and resentments that in families too often transform natural affections into less generous feelings, Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. became great, good friends to each other even as brothers sometimes are.

  The years that followed, during which the boys grew from childhood to young manhood, and, when each was eighteen years old, left home—Max Jr. for Santa Clara University, and Horace Jr. for the University of California at Berkeley—were, in the large, good and fruitful years, and I feel confident in stating that we all would have agreed, without the need to express the thought in words, that these were years informed by that rarest of entities: family happiness. And this was due, above all, to who they were—to the fact that Max Baer Jr. and Horace Littlejohn Jr. were living incarnations of a truth to which many are blind: that who we are in our time on earth is not determined merely by the biological vector produced by the coupling of a man and woman, but by something else—by that essence within each of us that, independent of our parenting and/or our up-bringing, is an irreducible and eternal self that is I-and-no-other.

  Both boys were, in my estimation, possessed of intelligence beyond that of their parents, and both boys, early on, though as gifted as their coevals in matters athletic and academic, distinguished themselves at different activities. Max Jr., for example, considerably taller, more sturdy, and more outgoing than Horace, was highly proficient at football and baseball, and later on as an actor in theatrical productions, whereas Horace, possessed of remarkably quick hands and feet, and a nimble facility with words, excelled at basketball and track, and was the leading orator on his high school debate team. It was in their finely tuned sensibilities, however, that they were most alike. They were, each of them, fair-minded concerning others, including those against whom they competed, infinitely curious about the world, and—always, always—innately kind, taking to heart a saying from Philo of Alexandria (known also as Philo the Jew), taught to them by Joleen, which Horace Jr. translated as follows (and which he has on occasion recited for me in the original Greek): “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

  Both boys learned to read before they entered school, and grew up loving to talk about what they read. And they both took delight in telling stories, whether the stories were recountings of tales read, accounts of actual adventures, or invented. And in their storytelling they were ever observant of, and attentive to, those around them—to Max, Joleen, and Mary Ellen; to aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents; to schoolmates; to visitors and guests from the worlds of boxing and entertainment—just as they were to the wonders of the natural world—to the animals, gardens, fields, lakes, streams, and forests that, due to Max’s ongoing financial success, surrounded them throughout their growing up and their coming of age.

  In setting down my memories, it has been my primary purpose to tell the story of Max Baer’s life, and, in particular, of the love my sister Joleen and I had for him, and knew with him. Although tempted to indulge a desire to reminisce about events from the lives of Horace Jr. and Max Jr., especially their early years, I will leave the telling of such tales to them, knowing that my son, Horace Jr., for one, is more gifted than I in the making of stories, and in making sense of stories. I will, however, tell of an event in Horace Jr.’s childhood that proved significant to his lifelong passion for the study of Scripture.

  During the years we lived in Livermore, Mary Ellen took Max Jr. with her every Sunday morning to nearby St. Peter’s Holy Roman Catholic Church, where he had been baptized, and, when we lived in Sacramento, to All Souls Church of the Sacred Heart, where, at seven years of age, he received first Holy Communion, accepting Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. And during these years, Joleen and I took Horace Jr. with us several times a month to the Church of Our Holy Saviour, a house of worship attended by people of color.

  The last time Joleen, Horace Jr., and I attended church as a family, however—or rather, the first of many Sundays upon which we would no longer attend church as a family—occurred two Sundays before Christmas of 1942 (and four and a half months after Max and Mary Ellen’s second child, James Manny Baer, was born).

  Horace Jr. and I were already dressed in our Sunday best when Joleen announced that she had made a decision not to go to church on this morning, or ever again. Horace Jr. protested at once, but Joleen commanded him to hold his tongue, and to wait in the cabin while she talked with me—we were spending the weekend at the ranch in Livermore—and, taking me by the hand, she led me outside.

  “Where the beast of darkness once made his home,” she announced in words she had clearly prepared earlier, “the true spirit of the Lord now lives.”

  “And so?” I asked.

  “And so I no longer feel a need for others, whether priests, ministers, or ministering angels, to intercede for me with our Lord,” she replied. “I have, on this day, ceased forever to be a churchgoing woman.”

  “That may be,” I said, “and I know that when you have resolved to do somethin
g, there is little chance of my persuading you to change your mind. But what about Horace? You saw how upset he was by your decision. He loves going to church, and looks forward to it all week long. He loves the singing—he loves being with other children—and—”

  “This afternoon I will tell him the story of the destruction of the Temple,” Joleen said, her voice an uninflected monotone, “and I will explain to him how the Hebrew people survived and sometimes flourished, as they do to this day, despite suffering and persecution, once they no longer had a holy temple, and once their caste of priests no longer had power over them.”

  I felt lost—or, more exactly, that Joleen would soon be lost to me unless I could find a way to draw her back home, although I wondered if anything I said or did would make a difference, for I sensed that her precious beast of darkness, disguised this time as the spirit of the Lord, was once again luring her into a dusky isolation that could destroy all the good that, since the births of Max Baer Jr. and Horace Jr., had been ours.

  I spoke the words that came to me. “I know how much pleasure and comfort your books give you—your reading of the Bible and of books about the Bible—and that these are matters that have intrigued you as, from time to time, they have intrigued me,” I said. “But I wonder what use such knowledge can be for Horace—what sense any child can make of such notions.”

  “Ah, but today I will tell him the story celebrated at this season in temples and homes throughout the world—the story of the victorious rebellion of the Maccabees against the Romans,” Joleen said. “I will tell him of the restoration of the Temple—of the miracle of the lights—and I will teach him to trust in Our Lord by trusting to his own good heart.”