Johnson stood a moment, gazing out at the crowd from beneath the towel, listening to the chants. He was glad he’d lost, he told Tom Flanagan. “Now all my troubles will be over. Maybe they’ll let me alone.”
Later he issued an official statement. His hat was off to Willard, he said; he’d been beaten fairly by “youth and condition.” Then he added, “I have no complaint to make excepting this. While I was champion … I made a great many enemies most of whom hated me for no other reason than that I am a Negro. These persons have gotten vindication in my defeat and I hope they obtain full enjoyment out of it.”
Mounted cavalry with drawn sabers escorted Jess Willard’s automobile back to Havana. Hundreds of people lined the road into town. Thousands crowded the streets of the city. They, too, waved white flags and handkerchiefs tied to sticks. “At one point,” the New York Times reported, “a group of negro children who evidently had heard that Johnson was the victor waved black flags at the white champion, who was much amused.” A huge crowd waited in front of his hotel. They pelted him with flowers, patted his back, chanted his name. As darkness fell, much of the city was illuminated in his honor.
At nine o’clock that evening, Curley and Frazee were still in the ticket office at the racetrack counting the proceeds when there was a knock on the door. It was Johnson, all alone. They invited him in for a drink.
Curley asked him how he felt. “Pretty blue,” he said. “I haven’t any kick coming. I met a young big boy and he wore me down. I didn’t dream there was a man alive who could go fifteen rounds with me once I started after them.” He thought Willard would be champion for a long time; he was just too big for ordinary heavyweights to hurt. “And here’s something you didn’t know,” he said. “Jess ruined my golden smile.” He moved nearer to the light, parted his bruised lips, and showed the gap where two of his gold-capped teeth had been knocked out. “It was a left crack … that did it. I felt them drop down on my tongue and my pride wouldn’t let me spit them out. I knew what a howl would go up if they saw them in the sunlight, so I did the next best thing, I swallowed them.”
Tiny Johnson refused to believe that her son had lost. “It can’t be true,” she said. “My son licked, knocked out? No, siree.” The Chicago American printed a lurid pink special edition with the headline WILLARD CHAMPION! Whites who waved it along South State Street found themselves in trouble: three were hospitalized; twenty-five Negroes were taken to the station house. “Every white man should be happy,” the evangelist Billy Sunday said; his wife attributed Johnson’s defeat to “too much booze and too much Paris.”
Newspaper reaction fell along predictable lines. Johnson’s old friend James Weldon Johnson paid tribute to the loser in the New York Age:
Johnson fought a great fight, and it must be remembered that it was the fight of one lone black man against the world…. The white race, in spite of its vaunted civilization, pays more respect to the argument of force than any other race in the world. As soon as Japan showed that it could fight, it immediately gained the respect and admiration of the white race. Jack Johnson compelled some of the same sort of respect and admiration in an individual way.
Some other black editors were less charitable. “For some years past,” said the Chicago Broad Ax, at least temporarily tired of defending its hometown favorite, “Jack Johnson has been a great menace to the colored race, greatly assisting to retard their progress along many lines of honest endeavor, and no doubt that there was great rejoicing among sober and industrious colored people over his defeat.” The Kansas City Sun hoped that Johnson, the “extravagant reveler and maker of race hated,” would simply disappear, while the Washington Sun blamed his downfall on his unwise “connubial connections” with white women, his failure to seek “some worthy colored woman” with whom to share his life.
Most white papers expressed their pleasure at Willard’s victory. “The Ethiopian has been eliminated,” said the Detroit News. “There will never be a black heavyweight champion … at least as long as the present generation endures.” Willard seemed to agree: within hours of winning the title, he said that just as he had never fought a black man before he faced Johnson, he would never do so again.*
“It is a point of pride with the ascendant race,” said the Chicago Tribune, “not to concede supremacy in anything, not even to a gorilla. The fact that Mr. Willard made it possible for many millions of his fellow citizens to sit down to their dinners last night with renewed confidence in their eight inch biceps, flexed, and their twenty-eight inch chests, expanded, is his peculiar triumph.”
On April 7, most of the fight principals, including the new champion, his entourage, Jack Curley, Harry Frazee, and Johnson’s own seconds and sparring partners, boarded the steamer Governor Cobb headed for Key West and home. Jack Johnson came aboard to say goodbye. He seemed cheerful enough shaking hands and joking with the fight crowd he knew so well. He took Willard aside and told him he hoped good luck would follow him all of his life and urged him to take care of himself and his money. But when the allashore warning sounded and he had to walk back down the gangplank, there were tears in his eyes. “I wish I was going back to the States,” he said to a friend. “It’s hard to be exiled this way.” Jack Curley called it “the saddest thing I ever saw in my life. Beaten and a fugitive from his own country, it broke him all up to see our happy crowd headed for the land of the free.”
The return of the new champion to the United States inspired an orgy of white self-satisfaction. Every vessel at Key West was decked with flags when the Governor Cobb steamed into the harbor. Navy vessels blew their whistles. So many cheering, pushing whites crowded the wharf that rope barriers and wooden barricades fell as the new champion made his way down the gangplank. “If he had saved the country,” wrote Robert Edgren, “he could hardly have received more frantic applause from the white citizens of Key West.”
A reporter for the Baltimore American rode along on the special train that carried Willard north toward Manhattan, where he was to appear on Broadway at Hammerstein’s Victoria for ten thousand dollars a week—twice as much as Jack Johnson had been paid at the same theater after he won the title.
Not a station along the East Coast Railroad line is there that was not crowded to meet the big train. Even stations that are passed without notice have their crowds, who [hope] for a fleeting glimpse of big Jess. Small boys and girls, boys and girls a little bigger, youths and maidens, young men and older girls, fathers and mothers, even grandfathers and grandmothers, rushed to the station in all sorts of vehicles to shake the hand that shook the laurels off the brow of Jack Johnson.
The elation of the Southern people at Willard’s victory is emphasized here and there. One old woman at Folkston, Ga., pushed in a box of strawberries surmounted by a bunch of violets. Another had a suckling pig which she wanted to present. Jess had to pass up the pig but [his sparring partner] Jim Savage grabbed it for his Jersey farm and stuck it in the baggage car.
Jack Curley was aboard as well, trying to manage relations between the new champion and his public. It wasn’t easy. Only Jim Jeffries seems to have been less enthusiastic about his fame.
Men, women and children besieged the train, clamored for a sight of Willard, roared with his praises, swept police lines aside in an almost hysterical effort to get close to him.
And Willard? Willard sulked in his sleeping compartment in a private car and was deaf to every plea that he show himself!
“But Jess,” I begged of him, “you must come out. This is a wonderful tribute to you. I’ve never seen anything like it. These people want to see you. If you don’t come out, they’re likely to tear the car apart to get at you.”
“Let ’em tear it apart, then. If I had got beaten they wouldn’t want to see me.”
“No, and if you had got beaten you wouldn’t be signed up for a tour at $10,000 a week, either. Think that one over.”
“I have. But that’s different. I’ll take their money but I don’t want any part of them.”
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At every stop from Key West to New York I had to face the multitudes and explain to them, as best I could, why their hero could not oblige them to the extent of stepping out onto the observation platform and waving his hand at them.
“The champion is resting.”
“The champion doesn’t sleep well on trains and had a bad night. He’s just fallen asleep.”
Meanwhile, Walt Mason, the versifier who had lampooned Willard’s skills before Havana, now ridiculed the loser.
Alas, poor Johnson, badly whipped,
And of his wreaths and honors stripped;
When he appeared in yonder ring
He was that ring’s unconquered king;
And when he left it, sick and sore,
He was a has-been, nothing more,
And all the country felt relief
When Brother Johnsing came to grief;
No words encouraging he heard;
No breasts with sympathy were stirred,
But all were glad to see him slump
Before Jess Willard’s cultured thump,
And e’en the men of his own race
Exulted in his loss of place.
’Twas not because his skin was brown
That men rejoiced when he came down.
But Johnsing, since he gained his fame,
Seemed destitute of sense of shame,
And laughed with foul, unholy glee,
At all the claims of decency.
An outcast from his native land,
And by most other countries banned,
He’ll skulk, since from the height he’s hurled
Along the edges of the world,
A blot on every decent scene,
A leper with the sign, “Unclean.”
A man all morals can’t defy
And with that sort of thing get by;
And when he falls as fall he must,
Rejoicing follows long disgust.
Jack and Lucille Johnson would wander along the edges of the world for the next five years, turning up here and there in newspaper stories, most of which were either slanted to demonstrate that the ex-champion was enduring the proper punishment for his alleged misdeeds, or fostered by Gus Rhodes and Johnson himself to make their sometimes desperate scramble seem like a sort of royal progress.
From Havana they sailed to Spain, then made their way to Paris, where a reporter asked Johnson if he’d returned to France in order to enlist. “Man, for me war is over,” he responded. “I am at peace for the first time in years.” Another newsman reminded him that the French called the shell hurled by a big German siege gun the “Jack Johnson” because it caused so much damage and yielded so much black smoke. That alone, the reporter said, would ensure him a place in history. Johnson shot back, “Wasn’t I in history before the war?”
In late May, Johnson moved on to London where he expected to begin a tour of British theaters, narrating films of his fight in Cuba. But when he and Lucille got there, there was no film to show. Jack Curley had failed to send it to him. Their relationship had gone sour after they’d said goodbye to each other on the wharf at Havana.
Curley claimed it was all Johnson’s fault. The trouble began, he said, moments before the Willard fight, when Johnson had produced a last-minute surprise for him and Harry Frazee. A lawyer hired by Johnson had stepped into the ring, Curley said, with a contract demanding the champion be given 51 percent of the fight film proceeds, not the one third he’d agreed to beforehand. If Curley and Frazee wouldn’t sign, Johnson explained with a grin, he wouldn’t fight. “‘Oh, hell,’” Curley remembered Frazee saying, “but he took the contract and using my back for a writing desk, signed it.”
The promoters were furious. “It was very irregular of Johnson to insist on this new division,” Curley continued, “so I was greatly amused and thought the ends of justice had been served when Mr. Frazee and Mr. Fred Mace, the moving picture man, loaded Johnson’s trunk with old films and sent him away to London where he called in a distinguished audience of theater people who wished to book the film for their houses and showed them a lot of views of the Havana fire department and comedy policemen chasing pickpockets through revolving doors.”
Johnson’s account was very different. He had carried no cans of film to London, he said. Instead, before he left Cuba, Curley told him they hadn’t been developed yet and promised to send copies to him as soon as they were ready. When they didn’t turn up, he cabled Curley asking where they were. “He replied they were on their way,” Johnson wrote. “I watched eagerly for their arrival, and when they did arrive, I was astounded to find they were blank—that they had never been on a spool.” He cabled Curley again. The promoter said Fred Mace was to blame; the real film was its way. Again, it did not arrive.
Johnson began haunting the American Express office in London, convinced he was being “flim-flammed,” that Curley and Frazee were likely to send the film to someone else in an effort to rob him of his rightful share in the proceeds. Sure enough, he wrote, a round-faced hustler named E. A. Weil, who had served as Curley’s “treasurer” in Cuba, turned up one day to claim two cans of film. The ex-champion strong-armed Weil, commandeered the film, and began exhibiting an eight-minute, carefully edited version.
But he was bitter. The title he’d fought so hard to win and hold was gone, and he was still an exile; Curley’s efforts to persuade the government to relent and allow him to come home without fear of imprisonment had come to nothing, and he had convinced himself his old friend had never even tried.
Johnson now began to blame Curley for everything that had gone wrong, to plot a way to get back at him—and maybe even get some more money for himself at the same time.
On June 9, he fired off a cable to Curley and Frazee.
YOU SIGNED CONTRACT TO PAY ME $50,000 TO LAY DOWN TO WILLARD WHICH I DID. YOU NEVER KEPT YOUR PROMISE. I DID. NOW YOU MUST PAY ACCORDING TO CONTRACT. LITIGATE ALL YOU LIKE. I WILL PUT MY CASE BEFORE ANY COURT AND PRESS IN THE WORLD.
JACK JOHNSON
There was no such signed contract, of course. Curley and Frazee shot back that if he were to make such false charges public, they would sue him for libel and attempted blackmail.
Johnson answered on the eleventh.
BLACK MAIL PROPOSITION RIDICULOUS. WANT PAYMENT FIRST MONEY WAS TAKEN.* WILLARD, AS FIGHTER, A JOKE. IF YOU [HAVE] CONFIDENCE HIS ABILITY TO BEAT ME WILL BET $25,000. WINNER TAKE ALL AND PURSE MONEY.
JOHNSON
When the editor of John Bull, the British magazine that had exposed the machinations behind the 1914 fight with Frank Moran, got hold of the telegrams and reprinted them, Curley and Frazee claimed they were phony. “To say that Johnson has wired for his lay-down money is a lie of the worst kind,” Frazee told the press. “Why, he’d be insane to do anything of the kind. He owns an interest in the moving pictures, and they are doing a big business in England. Johnson has sense enough to know that any such action would be a confession of wrongdoing that would kill the pictures.” Curley said if the former champion really wanted a rematch with Willard he could have one—but only if the referee declared all wagers off before the bell rang, so Johnson couldn’t make any money betting against himself. Johnson did not respond.
From Jack Johnson’s point of view, the Great War, like everything else that stood in his way, was a personal affront. Not long after he moved on to England, in late May, to exhibit the films of the Willard fight and undertake another tour of music halls, German zeppelins began bombing London. The South London Theater at Elephant and Castle, where he was appearing, “became a favorite target for air-raiders,” he wrote. One evening after the show, he and Lucille climbed into his car and started off across the city for their rented home at Haverstock Hill. It was a tortuous drive, he remembered, because the streets were littered with rubble and shattered glass. Then the bombing began again.
Between blasts of bombs which were falling all around us, we could hear the whir and swish of a Zeppelin overhead. I speeded the
car up in an effort to get outside its bombing radius, but was surprised to learn that no matter how fast I traveled or in what direction I turned, the bombs were close upon us. It was then I learned with considerable alarm that the Zeppelin was following us. My car was a white Benz, and must have loomed up conspicuously to the raiders, who found it a tempting target. They persisted in the chase until I reached home, and I scrambled under shelter with all the haste I could summon. It was a miracle that we were not blown to bits. How we escaped I do not know. When we were under shelter, the Zeppelin did not desist, but remained over that section of the city for a long time, dropping countless bombs.
Lucky for Haverstock Hill, perhaps, Johnson and Lucille soon left town to play provincial towns with a new revue called Seconds Out. Johnson sparred and performed feats of strength, as he always had. But he also exchanged comic patter with a diminutive British straight man. Lucille appeared onstage now, too, performing a ragtime “oyster-shell dance” while her husband played the bass viol. And he made occasional gestures toward the Allied cause: leading the audience in choruses of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”; sending three footballs and half a dozen pairs of boxing gloves to Tommies on the Western Front; exhorting a crowd of four thousand in front of the Royal Exchange in Glasgow to join the British army.*
But he sold fewer and fewer tickets and began once again to act erratically. At the Hippodrome in Preston in October business was so bad that Jack du Maurier, the company’s road manager and Johnson’s onstage sparring partner, quit and demanded his back pay and train fare back to London. Instead, the ex-champion punched him in the eye. In a pub, undercover agents overheard Johnson make drunken remarks they considered pro-German. He was arrested for cursing a London bobby who had told him he had to move his car. A printer sued him for failure to pay for theatrical posters, which he claimed had failed to do him justice. And there was talk that he’d made advances to chorus girls during an appearance at Northampton.
Unforgivable Blackness Page 51
