Was it indeed an act? Was some of it? For onlookers, it was hard to know. Bob Goodman, the public relations man, said no one possessed the promotional acuity of Ali. He slipped in and out of personas as if he were picking costumes out of an old trunk. “But I doubt if Frazier ever was into it,” said Goodman. “That was not him.” Frazier had a hot button, and when Ali pushed it yet again on a television talk show in Philadelphia on September 22, 1969, the hostility between the two boiled over. Frazier just happened to be tuning in when Ali referred to him as a flat-footed, slow fighter with no class. Frazier called him the following day and challenged him to a showdown at the Twenty-Third PAL (or so Ali stated in his version of events). Ali contacted the local papers and radio stations and told them he would be there by 4 P.M. for what he called “the greatest title fight in the history of a gym.” As Ali and Frazier changed into their boxing gear in the locker room, hundreds of people pushed their way into the gym. They stood on windowsills, clung to the banister, and climbed up on the shoulders of others. Hundreds more who could not get in stood outside on Columbia Avenue. Faces pressed against the gym window. Car horns blared as traffic came to a standstill.
“Go out to the park and do your fighting,” ordered Police Sergeant Vince Furlong. More police appeared on the scene.
“I came here to rumble!” Ali howled.
Friends surrounded Frazier, holding him back as he exclaimed: “He came here to run me out of my hometown! If I don’t take him on now, he’ll be trying to run me out of my own house next.”
Ali yelled, “He wants to show he can whip me. He says he’s the champion. Let him prove it in the ghetto, where the colored folks can see it.”
Seventy-five hundred people showed up at Thirty-Third and Diamond Streets, on the edge of Fairmount Park. Or was it ten thousand? As Ali drove up in a red convertible, they were perched in trees, along the fences, and on utility poles. Ali picked up a bullhorn and announced: “This is the biggest thing since the moon walk!” (Which, by the way, had occurred only two months before.) But Frazier was still back at the gym, pissed off at how “Clay” had raised sand in his crib but persuaded by Durham to simmer down. Upon hearing on the radio of the fisticuffs that were brewing, Durham had hopped into his car and sped over to the Twenty-Third PAL. He told Joe to go home, that there would be no brawling with Ali until both of their signatures were on a contract. Durham said, “I would have carried him out on my back before I’d let him fight Clay like that.” Word reached Ali at Fairmount Park that Frazier would not be joining him.
“Everybody over here,” Ali said, calling the crowd to order. “We just got word that Joe Frazier may not show up. Here he has won all the white man’s titles, but he’s afraid to fight the real champion.”
From somewhere in the rear, a fan shouted, “You tell him, baby.”
“So this is your Philadelphia champion,” Ali scoffed. “Here I am, haven’t had a fight in three years, twenty-five pounds overweight, and Joe Frazier won’t show up? What kind of a champ can he be?”
Tensions heightened the following day. Ali and Frazier agreed to do a taping of The Mike Douglas Show, during which Douglas sat between them; funnyman Soupy Sales occupied the seat on the end. As Douglas poked and probed with loaded questions intended to stir up some version of the war of words that had occurred the day before, asking Frazier what he called him (“I call him Clay”) and did he ever call him Champ (“He was the Champ. I’m the Champ now”), Ali sat with his head down, oddly pensive. When Frazier said he would fight him any time, Ali replied, “Seven days from the fight, you’ll be a weak old ghost.” Douglas appeared unsure if he should laugh or dive under his chair. At the end of the segment, Joe and Ali had to be separated from having it out onstage. Was this a gag? Some piece of agreed-upon choreography for daytime television? The studio audience gasped. Outside, the two went at it again before a crowd of bewildered pedestrians. As two members of his entourage held him back, Ali threw a looping right hand that caught Frazier on the shoulder. Frazier stripped out of his jacket and lunged at Ali but was wrapped up by Yank. When Ali threw another right hand, it inadvertently struck Durham, who held his hand up to his eye and yelled, “You crazy mothafucka!” Ali then backed off and someone dragged Joe away.
Joe was livid. That evening, he got in the car with Gypsy Joe and drove out to confront Ali, who was staying with Coxson in the house he would buy four months later. Gypsy Joe gave a version of what happened to his brother, Anthony Molock, and a separate account to my father.
Ali had two Muslims with shoulder arms on either side of him when he came to the door. “My, my, we had some fun today,” Ali said. He invited Joe and Gypsy in.
“Right here’ll do,” Frazier said. “And it weren’t no fun for me. Showin’ me up like that. Right here in my hometown. Callin’ me names.”
“Just fun, Joe,” Ali replied. “Gotta keep my name out there. Don’t mean nothin’ by it.”
“Coward? Uncle Tom? Only one I’ve been Tommin’ for is you! Names like that ain’t just fun. Those sorry-ass Muslims leadin’ you on me. It gonna stop right now.”
“Don’t talk about my religion,” Ali said. “I can’t let you do that. Go home and cool down.”
“Ain’t ever gonna be coolin’ down now. Fuck your religion. We’re talkin’ about me. Who I am.” Frazier held out his hand. “This is black. You can’t take who I am. You turn on a friend for what? So you impress them Muslim fools, so you be the big man.”
Ali said they were done talking and turned back into the house. Frazier called after him, “That’s it, get the fuck outta here. Hide behind your shooters. You and me, it’s comin’.”
Chapter Six
“Give Me a Hamburger”
Joe and Frank Rizzo, 1971. Philadelphia Inquirer, staff photo by Joey Adams
The White Sands Motel sat at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Margate, New Jersey, hard by the six-story seaside attraction “Lucy the Elephant.” In his room on a Friday evening in the spring of 1969, prior to his bout with Dave Zyglewicz in Houston, Joe lounged on the bed in his efficiency apartment and watched This Is Tom Jones, the weekly variety show starring the Welsh pop idol who had soared to international fame with chart-toppers such as “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “It’s Not Unusual.” As women young and old in the studio audience squealed in something close to carnal frenzy, Jones leaned over and gave a fan in the front row a peck on the cheek, then turned on his heel and shimmied across the stage. Wearing a black tuxedo instead of his customary splayed collar with a gold pendant nestled in a copse of chest hair, he wiggled his posterior in a way that was so salacious for the day that the camera afforded the viewers at home only an occasional glimpse of his gyrating lower anatomy before it zoomed back up to a less turbulent altitude. Joe scoffed.
“What do women see in him?” Joe asked.
Denise Menz looked up from what she was doing and shrugged. “He’s sexy,” she said. “Kind of.”
“Kind of? How?”
“The way he moves is kind of sexy.”
“He calls that dancing?” Joe scoffed. “He should be ashamed of himself. Let me tell ya, he’s no Elvis Presley.”
Cute and bubbly with a head of red hair, Denise Menz had grown up in Vineland, an agricultural community halfway between the Jersey Shore and Philadelphia. She was the oldest of three children born to John Franklin Menz, a successful bar and restaurant owner, and his wife, Marie, both of whom were by-the-book Catholics. Active in the Cumberland County 4-H program, she won Best in Show as a teenager with her five-year-old quarter horse, Coppertone. “I loved that horse,” she would remember. “She would do anything for me. Anything.” Upon graduating from Our Lady of Mercy Academy, where she was a prom queen runner-up, Denise enrolled in the Traphagen School of Design in New York City. Off on her own and out from under the scrutiny of her parents, she quickly stopped attending classes, found a job, and fell into “the party life.” When she became acquainted with Joe at the City Squire in March 1968, she
was immediately taken with him and was quietly thrilled when he invited her to attend the Ramos bout that June at Madison Square Garden. “To show you what I knew then, I thought every fight was held at Madison Square Garden.” At the Cloverlay party that was held afterward at the City Squire, she and Joe chatted only briefly. But it was not long before she received an invitation to join him at a Fourth of July party that Durham had planned. It was there that the conversation between the two deepened, and Joe asked her out on a date. She said yes, knowing but not taking into account the implications of his marriage. She would remember that she saw only the twinkle in his eye, saying years later: “I was very young and naïve. You have to remember that.”
Casual observers would come to think of her as his girl Friday, doer of assorted secretarial jobs and chief cheerleader. Insiders would know from early on that the relationship had developed into far more than that. But he was careful not to draw attention to it, and she went along. Given how society still frowned upon interracial affairs in the 1960s, it would not have gone well for Joe if it became common knowledge that he was engaged in one. Beyond the certain havoc that it would have caused at home—including the potential of a divorce—it surely would have undercut his efforts to build a commercial brand and perhaps impacted his bookings with the Knockouts. “He would have been ruined,” Denise said. But reporters during that era seldom strayed into shadowy corners of the lives they covered. When they did, it was only because it was unavoidable, such as when Ali showed up at a press event at the Presidential Palace in the Philippines with his inamorata (and later third wife), Veronica Porche. Second wife Khalilah flew into a jealous rage in his hotel room, just as New York Times reporter Dave Anderson showed up for a scheduled appointment with Ali and overheard the commotion from the hallway. When it came to privacy, Frazier was careful not to let his guard down the way Ali often did, which betrayed his creeping paranoia toward the press. Although Frazier had a friendly rapport with the writers and photographers who covered him—genuinely so—he cautioned Denise not to let them get too close.
As the years unfolded, an attachment evolved between them that became progressively more complicated. Early on, she would sit by the phone and anticipate his call each morning when he finished up his roadwork. And it always came. When she was still living with her parents, she would come up with excuses to visit him in Philadelphia. With the help of her father, she secured a job in Center City with a commercial decorator. She moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the small Delaware County community of Colwyn, where Joe would often stop by for dinner. Along with T-bone steaks and fried chicken, she became skilled at preparing classic southern fare, including pig ears and ham hocks. None of it was any good for his blood pressure, which was high and would be an ongoing problem for him through the years. When she overheard him speak of his fondness for chitlins, a soul-food delicacy prepared from pig intestines, she scoured the city in search of a place that sold them. She found them in a grocery store in Southwest Philadelphia. “They came in a gallon box,” Denise would remember. “I figured I would cook them up and surprise him.”
From that expression of ardor sprang nothing short of a culinary fiasco. According to Denise, the instructions on the box indicated that the contents were “pre-cleaned,” so she just assumed that she could prepare them without giving them a thorough scrubbing. As Joe’s sister-in-law Miriam Frazier could have told her, given her expertise in the preparation of holiday raccoon, this lapse would prove to be critical. Upon pouring the chitlins into a pot with chopped onions and vinegar, she soon became aware of a horribly foul odor. “I remember thinking, ‘How can anyone eat this stuff?’” Denise would say, unaware that the particles that emerged in the simmering broth were not “seasoning,” as she supposed, but excrement. As soon as Joe turned into the parking out, he sniffed the air just once and knew exactly what it was. Inside, he opened the pot, grimaced, and asked Denise: “Did you clean these?” Hurriedly, he wrapped up the pot, a pan, and the utensils she had used in a garbage bag, which he dragged outside and heaved into a trash bin. He then sprayed the apartment with a can of deodorizer and lit perfumed candles. On their way out to dinner later, there was a waste management truck in the parking lot, summoned by gagging neighbors who were concerned that there had been a sewer leak. Joe teased her about it for years.
Whenever she would hear that Joe had another bout lined up, she would grow eager with anticipation at the commencement of another training camp. At the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, the White Sands Motel on the Jersey Shore, and elsewhere, she would have him to herself for uninterrupted periods that became increasingly precious. Though Joe usually had a chef in camp, she would occasionally cook for him at the White Sands, where Joe had an efficiency apartment with a kitchen. To pass the hours, they would walk on the beach, throw darts, and spin records from an inventory that included the singers Sam Cooke and Al Green; Dr. King and the Reverend C. L. Franklin; and comedians Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham (“Here come da judge!”) In keeping with the hoary wisdom that sexual activity robbed a boxer of his legs, Denise claimed that Joe observed a vow of celibacy in the weeks and days leading up to a bout. He had been schooled in this by Durham, who had his fighters double up in hotel rooms on the road and keep the bathroom door open so neither could slip inside and masturbate. “Joe was just so committed to his career,” Denise said. “But that was fine with me, as long as I had him with me.” He would kneel at his bedside and say his prayers, the way a small child would, and he would read to her from his Bible, interrupting himself during passages to interpret Scripture. “He believed in all of the Ten Commandments except the ones dealing with adultery,” said Denise. “He told me, ‘The Lord don’t care about that.’” When boredom set in, they would occasionally hop in the car and roam the streets in search of another car with which to drag race.
“We were in Margate City on the Jersey Shore during the off-season, late at night, and we pulled up beside a Plymouth Road Runner at a stoplight,” Denise began. “Joe had a Caprice with the biggest engine that Chevy made. He flipped his sunglasses down so no one would recognize him and looked over at the other driver. Joe nodded. The other driver nodded. When the light changed, Joe had no sooner hit the gas than all that was left of the other car was two disappearing taillights. He was gone! Joe looked at me and said, “Damn! Go out tomorrow and buy me a Corvette with four on the floor, a Hurst shifter, and a heavy-duty clutch.’ I was laughing so hard I doubled over.”
Restlessness invariably got the better of Joe. For as long as those close to him could remember, he had to be on the move, often getting in his car or even a dreaded plane whenever the urge came over him. Although he loved his children and took seriously his obligation to see to their welfare, he felt hemmed in by the sameness of domestic life. Occasionally, as the four walls began closing in on him, he would engage in quarrels at home late at night as a pretext to storm out of the house in search of action. Beyond whatever creative outlet singing provided him, it gave him access to a parallel world free of boundaries, of drinking and laughter and casual assignations with the opposite sex. Women gravitated to him, all manner of women, the way they did to athletes of far lesser stature, and he would oblige them, unheeding of any trapdoors that he might encounter by doing so. Ego coupled with singular intensity had catapulted him from the backwoods of South Carolina to athletic stardom, yet it would be ego alone that impelled him to think that he could conduct himself as he pleased sexually and not pay an extraordinarily high price that would be shared by all. Gloria Hochman, the author and wife of Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stan Hochman, would come to know Joe fairly well and wondered if his attraction to Denise had to do in some small part with the fact that it enabled him to “thumb his nose at society and say, in effect: ‘If I want to date a white woman, I can do that.’” But Gloria quickly added, “He had genuine affection for her, as she did for him.”
Amid the ups and downs of the passing years, Denise wou
ld think of herself variously as his confidante, lover, business partner, and, occasionally, indentured servant. Charged by Frazier with running his office, she kept the books, lined up caterers, helped him choose his wardrobe, decorated the gym and the upstairs living quarters, and even did loads of laundry. To the unknowing public, she would have appeared no more than a loyal and dedicated employee. Wherever Joe appeared, it seemed that she was never far away, in later years going behind him and asking some young fighter Joe had just scolded for some slipup: “Can I get you something to eat?” Friends referred to the two of them as George and Gracie, the old comedy duo that featured George Burns as the straight man to the daffy Gracie Allen. “I was George and he was Gracie,” said Denise. “We played off each other.” Joe appreciated her intelligence and liked her spirit. Unlike other women with whom Joe would have affairs, she chose not to have children with him because he could not offer her a commitment. While he frequently lavished her with gifts, she did not ask for any support other than the small salary that was due her for the job she performed. In fact, in later years she would share with him the money she earned from a seafood carryout business she and her brother Jay owned that later became a three-hundred-seat restaurant and bar. Some who were close to him said that “she was the only one who gave to instead of took from Joe.” Accordingly, Denise said, “I would have done any single thing in the world for him.” His daughter Weatta observed, “She loved him unconditionally.”
And she would do so always. Even as she understood that she was involved with a married man, she could not bring herself to part from him for any extended period. Her friends would tell her, “Think of all the men you could have.” But Denise told them, “I have a Rolls-Royce. Why drive a Volkswagen?” But there would be episodes of turbulence between them with the emergence of other women in his later years, four of whom he had babies with. “It was the only thing we ever fought about,” she said. “I knew I was the other woman, but not that there were other women.” Across the years, there would be periods of separation, but always followed by a reconciliation, with Joe always turning up again and swearing that he would behave. And Denise would forgive him, telling herself that his youth had been foreclosed upon by the early arrival of responsibilities and that he needed his freedom. Only years later would she have him to herself, even if just briefly.
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