Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times wins the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, and I stand in for the champion. Hugh McIlvanney, doyen of sports writers, makes the presentation.

  At first, believing Ali would eventually arrive, we postponed things day by day, but we were chasing rainbows. The night of the dinner came and we went ahead without our guest of honour, Henry Cooper doing his best to fill in and explain to the hundreds of guests. I was reminded only recently (in the aisles of the London Book Fair) by Chris Rushby, who was the supportive Smith’s buyer and our guest at the dinner, that Cooper ended his announcement by saying that if anybody wanted their money back or had a problem, they should ‘see me’. Nobody moved. At the Stringfellows launch it fell to me to explain the situation to the disappointed throng, and I even invited the many journalists present to help track Ali down. At the crowded London signings Tom Hauser was left to sign alone, battling on valiantly while the press had a field day. ‘Ali held in Abu Dhabi’ screamed one headline, above the claim ‘Advisers have poisoned his mind’. The Daily Express ran a picture of Ali sitting with four men in Abu Dhabi under the legend ‘Revealed: The mystery men behind Absent Ali’, while the Manchester Evening News was even more sensational: ‘Ali mystery as wife pleads for safe return’. The Guardian, The Times, the Evening Standard and The Observer all ran stories. Even more damaging was a statement from a so-called Ali spokesman announcing, ‘Muhammad Ali will not come to London. He does not support the book anymore,’ which Lonnie assured us was not the case. It was a nightmare, and although the book appeared in the bestseller list for a week, had fabulous reviews and won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, it quickly vanished. The only fortunate thing was that we had sold the paperback rights to Pan for a goodly sum, which at least helped to underwrite the advance we had paid.

  However, Muhammad Ali was a man of surprises, as many an opponent in the ring had quickly discovered, and he still had an ace or two up his sleeve, as I was to discover the following spring when Lonnie Ali contacted me. She’d phoned to say he’d be in England to open a restaurant in Manchester, and if we wanted him to stay on and promote the book, he would do so. I conferred with Thomas Hauser and Howard Bingham, and both said the same thing: ‘This is Muhammad’s way of apologising.’ We held a council of war, took a deep breath, went back to the drawing board and arranged the whole thing again – a charity dinner, signings around the country, everything, giving the shops we’d let down last round the first option on signings. Only Selfridges declined. All this, of course, was a massive undertaking for a small publisher, and it was absolutely a matter of all hands on deck. Our editor Louise Dixon put aside her editorial load to help with the signings and publicity, and her photographer husband Roger covered the tour extensively, getting many excellent and exclusive pictures. Our accountant, David Pickin, also valiantly pitched in.

  The tour would start in Manchester, since that was where Ali would be for the restaurant opening, but before that the people who were backing it invited us to a small buffet dinner for him in their home, on the edge of London. And there, in an armchair in their sitting room, was the fabled Muhammad Ali. He might have had trouble speaking, but I was the tongue-tied one as Carole and I went over to introduce ourselves. I’d heard all his outbursts and perorations, laughed at his ‘poems’, watched all his legendary fights – the Thrilla in Manila, the Rumble in the Jungle, even going with my doctor cousin Ted Stonehill to watch the first great fight with Joe Frazier live at the Dominion cinema in Tottenham Court Road – a fight so electric with drama, tension and excitement that Ted actually took his own pulse at one stage of the proceedings. (I later told Ali that and he looked at me in amusement. ‘Took his own pulse!’ he repeated, wide-eyed, flashing that famous Ali smile.) Surely this couldn’t be Muhammad Ali sitting here now? But it was, and talking away to us at great speed. Who said he couldn’t talk? He could, but the problem was that his speech was slurred so it was very hard to make out what he was saying, which was embarrassing. Gradually, though, we started to tune in and I mumbled back the kind of platitudes he must have heard a thousand times.

  We drove home in a daze and prepared ourselves for the first signing and the rest of the tour. I couldn’t have imagined the roller-coaster ride we were in for as we arrived at the Manchester hotel where Ali was staying. Everything was very calm. He was resting and Tom and Howard were waiting for us in the lounge, together with Max Clifford, who was publicising the restaurant launch. Clifford and I had a long conversation and discussed ways he could help to augment our own publicity for Ali. Later, I came very close to signing Clifford for an autobiography – in fact, the contract was agreed, the book announced in the trade press and initial work begun when he threw a tantrum about something or other and withdrew. It was our good fortune, as it transpired. He seemed to have forgotten this when he phoned in the summer of 2002, asking if we would take on Cheryl Barrymore’s frank story of life with her former husband, Michael, whose career she had masterminded. We agreed to do so after several meetings with her and Clifford in his Bond Street office. The book, Catch a Falling Star, was finished and more or less ready to go, and Clifford offered to handle the serial rights, selling them virtually sight unseen for a very large sum. In those days it seemed he had only to pick up the phone for the coins to start rolling in. The last time I heard from him was when we were about to publish a spoof diary of Simon Cowell, written by his brother Tony. Clifford was looking after Simon’s publicity at the time and wanted to make sure his client was happy with the content – I think the rather upbeat blurb he saw in our catalogue had alarmed him. It was as well we did since Simon hadn’t seen the final text and when he did was rightly concerned that it focused too much on The X Factor and the people involved with him on the show. As he said to me, ‘I have to go on working with them!’ We had several discussions on the phone, as a result of which Tony adjusted the text so it became the tongue-in cheek ‘secret’ diary of Simon’s childhood years, still good fun, though much safer and far less commercial.

  As we waited in Ali’s hotel for him to appear, we got an inkling of what was to come, as a long queue of taxis had formed outside, their drivers loitering in the lobby, vying for the privilege of driving Ali to St Ann’s Square for the signing at Waterstones. When Ali came down, hugging us as if we were old friends, we were told, ‘There’ll be a large crowd outside the shop, so get him inside as quickly as possible.’ But had anyone ever been able to control the great Ali (except perhaps Herbert Muhammad)?

  There certainly was a crowd in the square, a very, very large crowd chanting, ‘Ali, Ali’ as he stepped slowly out of the taxi that had won the honour of transporting him… but instead of going into the shop, he turned and walked straight into the middle of the throng, raising his arms to silence them. Now, Ali loved magic tricks, and one of his own was to ‘levitate’, and this he did as the crowd applauded, believing he actually was defying gravity. It was something I was to see him do on several occasions, and you had to watch those feet very closely – those famous flashing feet that had once moved at the speed of light – to see how he did it. Then, suddenly rounding on a large man at the front he snarled, ‘Did you call me a nigger?’, raising his fists as the man backed away. Just as suddenly, now smiling, he turned his attention to a middle-aged black man, saying, ‘You look like Joe Frazier,’ raising his fists again. And with that, doing the famous Ali shuffle with remarkable agility, he smiled, waved and finally went into the bookshop as the crowd cheered. It had been ‘showtime’, one of his favourite words. He was in that shop for several hours, everyone wanting a photo with him, and those pre-signed bookplates came in very handy. We sold some 600 books that Sunday afternoon, a pattern that was to continue. Now we knew why we’d been told to ‘just take him to places’, as the cameras flashed and there were stories all over the Manchester papers and on the local news stations.

  For the repeat dinner Bernard had organised, to be chaired again by Henry Cooper, Ali’s wife Lo
nnie and their ever-smiling, ever-polite, beautiful twin daughters came over, which created a marvellous family atmosphere. Far from not being able to speak, Ali suddenly got up and related a long and unusual folk story, then turned towards Henry Cooper and said, ‘He hit me so hard he jarred my ancestors back in Africa,’ shook his hand and sat back to enjoy the other speakers – Cooper, Thomas Hauser and that doyen of sports writers, Hugh McIlvanney. Then it was back on the road – Austicks bookshop in Leeds first, where the crowds matched those in Manchester and we nearly lost Ali when someone invited him to pray at a mosque and he disappeared with a group of people. I jumped into my car to follow, but only succeeded in crashing into the bookshop while trying to turn too quickly in the cramped parking area at the back!

  We were supposed to be going on to Nottingham but nobody knew where Ali had been taken, and I began to fear that we had another Abu Dhabi scenario on our hands. We went from mosque to mosque, but Leeds seemed to be a city of mosques and we eventually gave up, driving off to Nottingham and praying that someone with him had details of where he was supposed to be. There were no mobiles in those days. We’d only been at the shop for a few minutes when a smart Mercedes drew up and out stepped a smiling Ali, cool as anything. Nothing would surprise me from then on. The signing went on so long and the crowds were so dense that we had to have a police escort to get us out of town.

  The ride from Bentalls department store in Kingston to Harrods a few days later was equally memorable, as I drove him through Balham and Brixton, which have large black communities, and Ali put his head out of the window, waving to passers-by, who waved back, startled. Surely Ali was the most recognisable man on earth, and of course a great black hero. It was on that short drive that Ali, the man who was supposed to be so brain-damaged that he couldn’t communicate, began to talk about racial segregation and the problems he had had as a youth in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was born. ‘You can’t ever have known prejudice,’ he said to me, and I told him that as a Jew, I had, at school, and his response was, ‘Ah, but that’s not the same as being black, when your very colour identifies you at once, and people refuse to let you into a hotel or restaurant and turn violent if you dare to try – until, that is, you become heavyweight champion of the world,’ he added, smiling. No wonder people loved him.

  Waiting for us at Harrods was the store’s owner, Mohamed Al Fayed, and kilt-wearing Scottish pipers who piped us through the store. Once the photos had been taken, Fayed seemed to disappear very quickly as Ali and Hauser got down to the business of signing books. There were over 1,200 people at the signing, and one smartly dressed, wealthy-looking woman was so overcome as she approached Ali to get her book signed that she fainted. At the previous book signings, Muhammad and Tom had been given a gift as a ‘thank you’ for coming, generally a book or a pen. At Harrods, after the very long signing, the representative took everyone to a back room where some sandwiches and bottles of mineral water were set out on a long table, and then asked, ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’ ‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘the other day I was in your food hall and you had the best lemon bars I’ve ever tasted.’ The representative asked him if he’d like some to take back to his hotel, and when Tom said he would, someone was dispatched to get a box. Ten minutes later the Harrods representative placed a nicely wrapped box of lemon bars on the table in front of him. ‘That will be nine pounds twenty pence,’ she said. And that was it, not even a flower for Lonnie, who had been there all afternoon with the twins, talking to people in the long queue as they waited patiently.

  As well as being full of surprises, Ali was both generous and caring, as became clear when we set off for a lunchtime signing at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, which was to be followed by an evening signing in Birmingham, with me driving and Ali sitting next to me. After a while, he carefully opened his briefcase and produced several Bibles, turning to the back and handing one to Carole, who was sitting between Tom and Howard Bingham, and asking her to read a passage about King David and his archers. He then asked her to read the same passage from another Bible, pointing out a large discrepancy in the number of archers given in the two editions! Following this, he asked me if I could arrange for him to have a discussion about the Bible with someone at Oxford. By this time we were approaching the city and I told him that it was a little late to organise anything. But then I hit on an idea and said I was friendly with a rabbi who knew all about his religion, having been a rabbi in India, and if he would like me to I could try to arrange for them to meet when we got back to London. He asked me to go ahead. The man I had in mind was Rabbi Hugo Gryn. Only the Sunday before we’d been together at a mutual friend’s house, and we had been talking about Ali and the forthcoming tour, Hugo telling me he’d watch all his fights and was a great fan. He too was a remarkable man. Born in Czechoslovakia, he had survived Auschwitz, which perhaps explained his warmth and humanity and his renowned ability to empathise with people. He was also a leading voice in inter-faith dialogue.

  While Tom and Muhammad dealt with the long queues at the front of the bookshop, I went round the back and phoned the surprised Hugo. ‘You’ll think I’m crazy,’ I said, ‘but I’m with Muhammad Ali in Oxford and he’d like to meet you and discuss the Bible.’ As it happened, Ali and his entourage were staying at the Cumberland Hotel, which was very close to Rabbi Gryn’s synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street, and we arranged to meet at the hotel the next day, Friday, at 5 p.m., before the evening Sabbath service. When I returned to the front of the shop, Ali handed me a note from a man who ran his fan club in England, apologising for not being at the signing and explaining that his mother had just died. ‘Where is this?’ asked Ali, pointing to the address at the top of the note, and after checking I told him it was about eight miles from Oxford. ‘We’ll go there when we’ve finished here,’ responded Ali. I pointed out that we were expected in Birmingham. ‘We’ll go there and then we go to Birmingham,’ he said firmly.

  The address in question was near Abingdon, and when we arrived at the estate where Ali’s friend lived we were greeted like royalty: people were hanging out of their windows, and one felt that if they’d had warning there would have been flags and balloons. We stopped outside a modest house and, following Ali inside, offered our condolences and then left the two men alone to talk. After about twenty minutes or so, Ali emerged. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Now we go to Birmingham.’ ‘That was a very kind thing to do,’ I told him. ‘You’ve made someone feel a lot better.’ ‘No,’ said Ali, pointing to his heart, ‘I feel better,’ and off we drove.

  What a drive it was. Once we got onto the motorway to Birmingham, Ali, sitting next to me again in the front of the car, fell into a deep sleep. Then suddenly his fists began to pound the dashboard as he started to cry, ‘Joe Frazier, Joe Frazier’, louder and louder, his punches landing with increasing ferocity. I tensed, and someone in the back said, ‘Hold the wheel tightly, it could get worse’ – and it did. Slowing down and moving to the inside lane, I clasped the wheel as tightly as I could as the punches and cries of ‘Joe Frazier, Joe Frazier’ continued. Carole was sitting forward now, anxiously joining in the ‘Hold tight’ chorus. Slowing still more, I took a deep breath and snatched a glance at Ali – and he looked back at me and winked! He’d been wide awake and having me on all the time. All I could do was laugh with relief and resolve to get someone else to do the driving next time. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to be in the ring with him when those large fists were landing real blows!

  Birmingham, never a successful town for signings in my experience, came and went with several hundred books sold, and the next day, when he was to meet Hugo Gryn, we went at lunchtime to Leadenhall Market in the City, where the narrow streets leading to the bookshop were packed with people trying to reach it. The signing went on and on, and by the time we got back to the hotel it was 5.30 p.m. and Rabbi Gryn had given up on us and left. I felt terrible, and literally ran to the synagogue to apologise. ‘Well,’ said Hugo, ‘the servic
e doesn’t start until seven, so let’s go back to the hotel.’ We went up to Ali’s room and he welcomed Hugo warmly and thanked him for coming. Then he brought out his Bibles and pointed out the discrepancies in the text. Hugo tried to explain that it was the work of different scribes, so figures could easily have been varied. ‘Are you saying it is not the word of God?’ responded Ali with alarming force. ‘No,’ responded Hugo, ‘I’m not saying that, but humans, fallible humans, were the intermediaries, recording it all at a later date.’ The discussion went on amidst a warmth and feeling of mutual respect I found moving. Indeed, when Hugo left to take the Friday evening Sabbath service, I wondered whether Ali would have liked to join him, but we had a dinner date with Bernard Hart, I reminded him, as he got up to embrace Hugo. An appearance by Muhammad Ali in West London Synagogue would have turned a head or two!

  Towards the end of the tour we went to Scotland for two signings, taking the early morning flight to Edinburgh for a lunchtime event at Waterstones, and then on by train to Glasgow, returning to London on the last flight back. It was far too ambitious, and we had totally underestimated the length of time everything would take, as the queues in Edinburgh stretched around the streets of that lovely city. Fortunately, Ali had spent his time on the flight signing bookplates, but even so the mountain-high piles of Tom’s 700-page books went down slowly as they both signed, everyone wanting a photo with the champ. We had to be on the train to Glasgow at 3 p.m., and I looked anxiously at my watch as the queue hardly seemed to shorten. A car was standing by but we knew we’d never make it as it raced us to the station fifteen minutes late… Miraculously, there was the train, kept waiting by the stationmaster, who’d been alerted to his famous passenger. No one seemed to mind – on the contrary, there was a great cheer as the car roared in and Ali stepped out, waving. Where this apparently sick man got his stamina from I can’t imagine, for we were all collapsing around him. And on the train, more bookplates came out and he willingly signed away, as he did for people on the train who came asking for an autograph. Glasgow, of course, is a boxing city, and the crowds matched those of Edinburgh. We were there for several hours, and I know some people were disappointed, since we couldn’t expect the plane to wait for us, but we took addresses and made sure that signed copies were sent to all those who had ordered them.