In January 1916, the Home Office ordered Jack Johnson to leave the country under the Aliens Restriction Act. He did his best to stay. He called upon Sir Hiram Maxim, the American-born inventor of the Maxim machine gun, who was now a British citizen, hoping he would help. Maxim passed him along to Lord Lonsdale, founding president of the National Sporting Club and Britain’s preeminent sportsman. Lonsdale received him at his home in Carlton House Terrace and said something polite about doing what he could. When a footman appeared with the ex-champion’s coat, Lonsdale held it for him. “Let me help you, Johnson,” he said. The former champion never forgot Lonsdale’s aristocratic courtesy but neither Lonsdale nor Maxim nor anyone else could alter the decision of the Home Office.
On March 2, 1916, the Johnsons and Gus Rhodes left England for neutral Spain, where they would spend the next three years. He first staged a series of exhibitions against unknowns in Madrid and Barcelona, for which he continued to bill himself as “Champion of the World.” One of his opponents was an old friend, the British expatriate Dadaist poet, Arthur Cravan, whom he fought in the bullring in Barcelona on April 29. An eccentric alcoholic and sometime thief, he had caroused with Johnson in Paris and had boxed a little in France—where he claimed the light heavyweight title after his opponent failed to turn up—but he had never faced anyone remotely as skilled as the former champion, and he was terrified. His solution was to crouch and cover up, making himself as tiny a target as possible. Since a movie camera was filming the proceedings and there was hope at least a little money might be made by exhibiting it, Johnson toyed with him until the start of the sixth and final round.
The poet Blaise Cendrars left an account of what happened then:
[Cravan] contented himself with turning round and round trembling visibly. The Negro prowled around him like a big black rat around a Holland cheese, tried three times in a row to call him [to] order by three kicks to the rump, and then in an effort to loosen [him] up, the Negro thumped him in the ribs, cuffed him a bit while laughing, encouraged him, swore at him, and at last, all of a sudden furious, Jack Johnson stretched him out cold with a formidable punch to the left ear, a blow worthy of a slaughterhouse.
It was soon clear exhibitions alone wouldn’t pay the Johnsons’ bills. They opened a Barcelona café and costarred in a Spanish film, a seven-reel costume melodrama called False Nobility. The former champion played a mysterious strongman who helps a deposed princess regain her mythical kingdom. Lucille played the heroine. The film itself has long vanished, but a surviving still shows Johnson in evening clothes, cheerfully hoisting a villain high above his head.*
Johnson tried bullfighting, too, with the help of the great matador Joselito, though it is not clear whether his appearances were burlesque performances or the real thing.
He also lent his name to a Barcelona advertising agency which, according to a Defender story by Gus Rhodes, sent him on an extraordinary journey in early 1917.
JACK JOHNSON CAPTURED BY AUSTRIAN SUBMARINE
FIGHTS CAPTAIN SINGLE HANDED; U-BOAT BLOWN UP
PUGILIST IS RESCUED AFTER THREE DAYS
Gibraltar, by way of London, Feb. 22—Jack Johnson, America’s world champion pugilist, passed through Gibraltar, en route to Barcelona, Spain, aboard the Aguinaldo Alfonso.
Jack Johnson, Jan. 15, with passports signed by King George of England, left Barcelona, by way of France and England, arrived at Archangel, Feb. 3, crossed through Russia and into Roumania and secured signatures for his World’s Advertising Corporation. Crossing through Italy, he embarked for the return journey and was captured by an Austrian submarine. Jack, single-handed, subdued the Austrian captain and blew up the submarine and was rescued after drifting three days, by the Spanish freighter Aguinaldo Alfonso, and was landed at a Spanish port. Johnson has returned safely to Barcelona, Spain, having secured all rights from Allied capitals for his World’s Advertising Corporation. He has cornered all important hotel, railroad, steamboat and street car advertising rights, and has secured all English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Roumanian rights. He has also secured rights from Buenos Aires. Jack Johnson is now located at 30–32 Rambla Del Centro, Barcelona, Spain.
How much of Rhodes’s report was true it is impossible now to say, and it may be significant that Johnson himself makes none of these claims in his own highly colored 1927 autobiography. In any case, advertising did not hold him long; he blamed what he called Barcelona’s “ancient ways of doing business” for the fact that his “undertaking was not a very flourishing one.”
Through it all, one friend remembered, Johnson remained almost lordly. If a reporter turned up asking for an interview, he would mutter, “One of those bloody pressmen” and make him wait, and whenever a bill was presented, he waved it away, saying, “Mañana, mañana,” and then would add contemptuously, “Asking money from the champion of the world!”
On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the war. Johnson’s first impulse was to flee Europe for Mexico, where several wealthy men seemed willing to underwrite a series of boxing matches. When that didn’t pan out—he was using the notoriously unreliable Arthur Cravan, who had now moved there, as his middleman—he and his companions shifted to Madrid, where he approached Major John W. Lang, the American military attaché, with a proposition. The Allies suspected German submarines were secretly being fueled and supplied along the Spanish coast. Since Johnson was traveling from town to town, performing his strongman act and staging exhibitions against his nephew, he said he was ideally equipped to gather reliable information about their comings and goings. Lang took the gamble and agreed to pay some of Johnson’s expenses.
Johnson would later make much of his wartime adventures as an undercover agent. He had taken “numerous risks,” he wrote, “including the traversing of rough water into dangerous and out-of-the-way places …, infested not only by possible war enemies but by smugglers and others engaged in outlaw practices. Then, too, there was the danger of capture by the enemy and of death by promiscuous shooting which frequently took place between the furtive craft in those waters…. For my work and the information I obtained I received due recognition from the officials under whose instructions I operated, and I had the great satisfaction of being of service to my native country, even though I was in exile.”
In fact, Johnson’s career in espionage lasted only a few weeks. It ended when Major Lang accused him of padding his expense accounts and Johnson quit.
On March 17, 1918, Tiny Johnson died in Chicago. She was seventy-four and hadn’t seen her favorite child for almost five years. “For a brief time in the heyday of the career of her son,” wrote the Washington Post on the nineteenth, “Mrs. Johnson knew a prosperity and notoriety such as seldom comes to a colored ‘mammy,’ but the curious who gazed at the house on Wabash Avenue today saw the mute testimony of fallen grandeur, a sign reading, ‘Boarders Wanted.’” Johnson sent what he could to his sister to help pay for the funeral, but he was unable to be there himself.
His mother’s death seems to have made him more anxious than ever to go home. That spring, he wrote to the friends and acquaintances he thought might have influence in Washington. Emmett J. Scott, Booker T. Washington’s former second-in-command, was now special assistant to the secretary of war in nominal control of “Negro matters” in the military. Frank S. Armand, a mutual friend and fellow Texan, wrote Scott on Johnson’s behalf to say the former champion was now “very anxious to wipe out his past record” and “win back the good opinion of the American people that he lost by reason of indiscretions” by serving in the U.S. Army in France. In exchange, Armand hoped Johnson could be “pardoned of the crime that is charged against him.” If Scott could help Johnson, Armand said, “you will be doing a service for the entire race everywhere.” Scott sent the letter along to the Justice Department for its comments. Meanwhile, Johnson himself wrote to former New York congressman Fiorello La Guardia, now an army officer in Europe, volunteering to serve. “I am as good an American as anyone living,�
� he said, “and naturally I want to do my bit. I fairly believe I wasn’t fairly treated at home. All I ask now is a chance to show my sincerity. America is my own country. There’s no position you could get for me that I would consider too rough or too dangerous.” All La Guardia needed to do was guarantee him a pardon when the war was over. La Guardia could make no such promise, and the Justice Department told Emmett Scott it saw no reason to “do anything for a man who is a fugitive from justice until he gives himself up.”
His country continued to reject him. His finances had collapsed. He was reduced to barnstorming Spanish theaters and bullrings with reliably nonviolent opponents like Gus Rhodes and “Blink” McCloskey—a weary veteran so-named because, before the bell rang, he carefully removed his glass eye and handed it to his cornermen for safekeeping.
One day that spring, the U.S. consul in Málaga wrote the American ambassador in Madrid that Johnson had dropped in to see him, asking that “the Hotel Regina where he is staying” be notified that “he would meet his bill for board. In this connection, he informed me confidentially that he was employed by Major Lang and that he expected money from him.” The consul told the former champion he was not aware of any such underground activity, and in any case “this consulate [is] unwilling to make guarantees for anyone.”
American undercover operatives and informants now ghosted after Johnson wherever he went, reporting to Major Lang what he was doing and saying. The ex-champion spent most of his time with “down-and-outs, cheap gamblers, pimps and prostitutes,” one said. “There are in Madrid a crowd of so-called Americans, Spaniards, and shady characters of other nations who, having no visible means of support, most of whom appear to have a resentment against the English, French, and U.S. Officials for not providing them with passports so they can leave the country…. Johnson is surrounded by a set of cheap admirers and parasites, principal among whom are a Spaniard named Sanchez (locally called ‘Spex’), who claims Norfolk, Va. as his home, and one Veleau (George Velois) who hails from Toledo, Ohio, and various other young sports of the type which can be found any night in Chelito’s ‘Cabaret del Amor’ at 31 Calle Teutan. They are all hand in glove with the German element.” In January of 1919, the same operative dined at Johnson’s home with Lucille, Gus Rhodes, a Spanish woman named Sánchez, and Otto, a German wrestler. There, he plumbed the depths of the ex-champion’s rancor. Johnson claimed Britain, not Germany, had started the war; that the Allies had been the first to use poisoned gas; that he knew firsthand who in Madrid was helping to supply German submarines and where off the coast of Málaga it was being done. The agent asked him why he hadn’t reported what he knew to the embassy. “Report? Hell, I offered them my services and they gave me a little job and kicked about my expense accounts, so I stopped dealing with them….” But if he’d done so, surely the government would have allowed him to return home “in honor.” “To hell with them,” Johnson said. “I would not believe any promises they would have made me. The Germans treat me as a man and my wife as a lady.”
On February 17, 1919, in a story headlined JACK JOHNSON BROKE IN SPAIN, Henry Wales of the Chicago Tribune reported how the former champion was doing. His main source was the American jockey Guy Garner, who said he’d found
the Negro … looking pretty seedy, wearing a shabby old fur coat, which he boasts cost five thousand dollars but he does not say how long ago. Every little while one of Mrs. Johnson’s diamonds disappears, presumably going to the pawnshop.
A few days ago, Johnson fought an interned German U-boat sailor, whom he nicknamed Bill Flint of Brooklyn, at Madrid. In the first round the sailor poked Jack in the fat stomach, worrying the Negro, but in the second round the German walked straight into Jack’s stiff arm, turned around three times, and dropped like a dead man for the count. Jack said afterward he would not take on another tough guy like that….
The Spaniards don’t like prize fighting or horse racing much, preferring a gory spectacle like a bullfight. Even when [King] Alfonso attends the races there are only a handful of spectators and at none of the Johnson fights are there more than a couple of hundred fans.
Johnson announces he has got the recipe for a wonderful patent medicine that will remake his fortune, but at the same time tries to borrow money, explaining that his agents in America are holding up his money and says he still owns Chicago tenements….
The hotel at Barcelona where Johnson stayed during the time he was running bullfights there is holding his personal property, including much of his wife’s clothing. Johnson formerly lived at the Ritz and Palace hotels in Madrid but now he is barred owing to the nonpayment of bills. When he enters the Palace grillroom or bar, where the biggest cabaret and dancing ballroom are continually going full blast, the head-waiters frequently approach him with folded bills on plates asking payment of old accounts. Johnson merely waves them aside or kids them if they speak English.
Two days after that article appeared, Johnson did what he so often did when his debts caught up with him—he fled, this time to Havana. There, he upset the boxing world again. Jack Curley had paid eloquent tribute to Johnson the last time he’d been in Cuba. “I found [him] a man before, during and after the fight,” he’d said then. “It doesn’t make any difference what he’s done outside the ring, he was a brave, game, generous warrior inside of it. He is the first man defeated since John L. Sullivan who has been man enough to acknowledge defeat without a hue and cry of being tricked and doped out of his title.” Curley already knew he had spoken too soon.
On March 13, 1919, Johnson released a signed statement to the Associated Press’ man in Havana. In it, he claimed again that his fight with Jess Willard four years before had been a put-up job, and that he’d been the victim of a double-cross, planned and carried out by Jack Curley and Harry Frazee. Lucille had advised him against surrendering his title to Jess Willard, but Johnson had overruled her. He felt he’d had no choice:
Everyone knows how anxious I was to straighten out the little Chicago difference. I would have done almost anything in reason to be able to visit my mother, who was old and feeble….
Then [he and the promoters] figured on the best round to lose in, and agreed upon the tenth. They were to give the word in the first three or four rounds if Willard could make a good showing.
[But at] the end of the tenth round Willard’s showing had been so poor it was necessary to continue the fight further. The signal agreed upon was given in the twentieth round [when Lucille was supposed to have gone and collected Johnson’s final payment, then returned and signaled that the money was in her hands], but I considered Willard’s showing so poor I was forced to wait until the twenty-sixth before carrying out the agreement….
He signed the letter “Jack Johnson, Champion.” He’d been paid well for lying down, he said now, but Curley and Frazee had failed to keep the part of the bargain that had mattered most to him. He had not seen his mother again before she died, was still an exile, still open to arrest the moment he tried to go home.
For those who’d never understood how a big, clumsy, comparative beginner like Jess Willard could have beaten a master boxer like Johnson, two factors lent his story additional plausibility. First, some at ringside had always believed an exhausted Johnson had simply given up rather than endure further punishment. Johnson himself had frequently said that boxing was a business; that if he ever felt he was going to lose he would find a way to make a graceful exit rather than endure unnecessary punishment. (“I’ll quit before I take a beating,” he once told Gunboat Smith.) Then, too, the federal ban had kept Americans from seeing the film of the fight in which it is clear that Johnson had tried hard to beat his challenger, that he was hit hard by Willard, and that he had tried just as hard not to fall down, clutching at the younger man as he slid to the canvas. Instead, they’d become familiar with the single iconic photograph that hung in saloons and barbershops and other places where white men gathered. It seemed to show Johnson taking his ease on the canvas, his arm raised as if he we
re shading his eyes from the Cuban sun. To them, the knockout had always looked like a fake, and now Johnson’s “confession” provided a kind of confirmation.
Curley and Frazee once again denied the charges. Tom Jones, Willard’s former manager, reminded people that Johnson had tried to bet ten thousand dollars on himself the day before the fight he supposedly knew he was going to lose. But Jess Willard himself may have provided the best argument for the 1915 bout’s authenticity: “If Johnson throwed that fight, I wish he’d throwed it sooner. It was hotter than hell down there.”
The Cuban government evidently believed Johnson, and a warrant was issued for his arrest for fraud. He quickly moved on to Mexico, his party’s passage paid by Mexican businessmen interested in promoting boxing there. It was new territory for him and for the fight game, and when he reached Mexico City on March 26, 1919, it seemed like old times. Some two thousand people greeted him, shouting, “Bravo, Jack!” and “Viva Johnson!”; a mariachi band blared its welcome, and an awed newspaperman compared his luggage to that carried by operatic tenors: eighteen trunks that “contained 90 suits, 50 pairs of shoes, and the entire output of a necktie factory.”
Johnson would make Mexico City his base of operations for the next eleven months. It was an armed camp. The country where he had chosen to light was no less turbulent than it had been when he was barred from reaching Juárez four years earlier. General Carranza was president, but much of the countryside was still held by others—Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and Carranza’s former ally, General Álvaro Obregón, who was now determined to overthrow him and institute reforms promised under the Constitution of 1917.
Gus Rhodes assured the readers of the Defender that the life he and the Johnsons led there was splendid: Johnson is “a constant companion of the most prominent military dignitaries and political leaders,” he wrote.
Unforgivable Blackness Page 52
