At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  “What are you two doing?” she asked. “You should be in bed by now.”

  Mom realized something was off.

  “Cruella,” Mom said.

  She lay there snoring.

  “Cruella!” she said louder.

  Cruella jumped up and quickly straightened her shirt but had no time to hide the empty wine bottle on her nightstand. She slipped out of bed and stumbled across the room to my mother. Laila and I giggled watching her.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Of course not,” she said, pushing loose strands of hair out of her face as she tried to regain composure.

  “Pack your bags first thing in the morning,” said Mom, then she grabbed our hands and walked out of the room.

  “No!” she said, stumbling down the hall behind us. “I love these bastards!”

  “What did you say?” asked Mom.

  Rushing toward her, she shouted, “I love these bastards!”

  Laila and I watched wide-eyed as Mom pushed Cruella back and held her by the shirt against the wall. “Don’t ever call my children bastards!”

  Our jaws dropped. Laila and I looked at each other in disbelief. Aggression in any form was out of character for both my parents.

  Dad had immense patience with me, but when his temper erupted, it was out of nowhere. We called it the Papa Cash temper, after his father, Cassius Clay Sr. The temper would vanish as suddenly as it surfaced. It was the small things that would set it off, like me jumping on the sofa after he’d asked me to stop. Or playing with scissors after he’d told me they were dangerous. But he never lost it over the big stuff, like the time I pushed my fist through my bedroom window (I had been sent to my room for submerging my brother Muhammad Jr.’s head under the water too long), or playing in his Rolls and putting the car in reverse. Or, most notorious of all, putting Laila in the dryer and turning it on. He reprimanded me, of course. But when people complained, all he ever said was, “She’ll grow out of it.”

  But I had never seen my mother lose her temper—not ever!

  “I’m sorry!” said Cruella.

  Mom let go of her shirt and motioned for Laila and me to go into her room. Cruella followed, sniffling and groveling. She fell onto Mom’s bed crying, wrapping her arms around both of us as if we were lifesavers keeping her afloat.

  “Please, Veronica, give me another chance . . . I love them.”

  I remember thinking her breath smelled like nail-polish remover and her clothes were damp and sticky. She had been a terrible governess. She never let me have popsicles when Daddy was away. She never let me keep my night-light on and told me the bogeyman would come get me if I was a bad girl. And she never let me play in my Wonder Woman costume.

  “Take that off, child,” she’d say. “It’s not Halloween!”

  Still, as she sat there that night in my mother’s bedroom, begging and professing her love for us, I felt sorry for her.

  But it was too late. Her fate was sealed the moment my mother discovered her drunk.

  To say I was happy Cruella was gone would be an understatement. For weeks, I came straight home from school and put on my Wonder Woman outfit.

  13

  After Fremont Place I don’t know what became of Cruella, but years later, when I was in my twenties, I spotted her walking through the Culver City mall in Los Angeles. She looked the same, dressed in black, shirt buttoned to the top, and her hair was pulled back into a slick bun with the same gray streak—just like she wore it when I was a little girl.

  I watched her walk past and said nothing.

  Looking back, what I remember most about the day Mom fired Cruella was a feeling. As Laila and I stood there watching our mother defend us, I remember thinking, Mom really does love us. For a long time we didn’t believe she did. As I mentioned, she often ate alone, was off riding horses, practicing opera in her room, or running errands. She rarely came into Daddy’s office. When she was there, she didn’t play on the floor with us very long, or sit on the sofa and watch television with us. If she did, I have no memories of it. She often seemed preoccupied and busy. And when I was around her, sometimes she appeared understandably frustrated by my presence.

  I remember her taking me to Griffith Park to ride ponies and shopping at Bullock’s department store on Wilshire Boulevard. She used to rush out of the store embarrassed as I hollered and screamed at the top of my lungs when I couldn’t have what I wanted. Dad had a different reaction to my tantrums. He’d holler and scream right back at me, mimicking my behavior. Sometimes it worked. I’d stop in the middle of my fits and stare at him as though he was the crazy one. He’d just smile at the people staring at us, sign autographs, and say, “She’ll grow out of it.”

  But I must admit, my mother was kind and gentle, and she has many wonderful qualities. She took the time to do special things for us, but I never really felt her love as strongly as I felt my father’s. I guess Dad’s constant displays of affection, in contrast to my mother’s quiet, shy nature, may have had something to do with it.

  “Marge told me she overheard your father say something in front of you and Laila once—that I act like I love my horses more than him and my children.”

  I guess Mom never considered that maybe her absence—not being around or spending quality time with us daily—was what nourished the seed of this deeply rooted feeling I had about her. I guess it was easier for her to believe it was the comment Dad made.

  I remember Marge, the executive secretary, with her scratchy voice and thick glasses, always reporting the happenings around Fremont Place to my mother.

  “Veronica, I wanted to talk to you about the help. Doris [the housekeeper] has been acting up again . . .”

  “What now?” asked Mom.

  “She’s refusing to wear her uniform. Abdel caught her throwing it into the trash.”

  I referred to Abdel as my father’s butler, but I’m not sure what he was really. I guess he was an assistant. He answered the door and hung out in my father’s office, fetching him coffee, escorting guests, and catering to Dad’s every need, driving around town with him, even traveling with him on occasion. He was a strange, thin, quiet man with stiff gray hair. I remember his pockets were full of Jolly Ranchers, which I accosted him for every morning.

  “After breakfast, Hana,” he’d say. “Sugar in the morning will give you worms.”

  But I knew better. And I knew how to get what I wanted. He quickly offered me two pieces of candy if I stopped trying to pull off his toupee.

  “Daddy would never have said you loved your horses more than us, knowing we were listening,” I told her. “You know Daddy has never and would never speak badly of you, especially in front of us. If he said it, it was out of pain—not intentional.”

  She could have told me the same of my father a hundred times and I wouldn’t have believed it because his actions and my memories proved otherwise. I used to measure how much he loved me by the length of time he spent lying with me in the morning, telling me stories and showering me with kisses.

  Daddy must really love me! I remember thinking as he lay beside me even after I told him I wet the bed. It’s the quality of time they spend with us—the feelings their little acts of love create—that form our overall opinions of our parents.

  Though Mom seemed to live a separate life at times, there are moments that stand out in my memory—occasions when she made time for us, when I felt important to her.

  I remember her sitting Laila and me down on the blue silk bench at the foot of her bed and reading us a book about the birds and the bees. It was the beginning of a tradition. She had bought a series of twenty-four books called Value Tales. The stories taught moral and ethical life lessons through the experiences of significant people in history: The Value of Believing in Yourself, The Value of Sharing, The Value of Honesty, The Value of Kindness, The Value of Humor . . . She read one to us every Sunday afternoon.

  But the most memorable lesson, about the birds and the bees, didn’t come from t
he Value Tales book set. Mom sat us down on the bed that morning and opened a little pink book. She began by describing the proper terms for the male and female anatomy. I remember the tight feeling in my stomach as I held in my laughter. When she read the various names for a woman’s chest, “Breasts, boobies, bosoms . . .” I fell onto the floor kicking and screaming, repeating the word that had sent me into my uncontrollable fit of laughter. “Bosoms!” I wailed. “Bosoms!”

  Laila followed. Before long, Mom burst into laughter too.

  That’s when I became obsessed with boobs. “What is that?” I asked one morning as Mom got dressed.

  “It’s a bra,” she said.

  “What is it for?”

  “It helps keep a woman’s breasts up.”

  “When will I get some?”

  “When you’re older,” said Mom.

  “How old? When I’m eight?”

  “No, when you’re a woman,” she said.

  Laila (right) and me (left) in our parents’ bedroom.

  “When will I be a woman?”

  “When you can wear a bra,” she said.

  And with that, an idea formed. I figured out a way to become a woman when I was just seven years old. I knew boobs were soft and round, like the dough that Edith, the cook, made our dinner rolls from. I used to sit on the kitchen island at Fremont holding my Cabbage Patch Kid doll in one hand and a pickle in my other, watching Edith prepare our meals. She’d get a large bowl and stir water, white powder, and eggs into a mixture.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Flour . . .”

  The next day after school I came home, went into the kitchen, and poured water, flour, and eggs into a large bowl and started stirring.

  “What are you making?” asked Edith, placing a bag of groceries on the counter.

  “BOOBIES!” I said.

  She watched amused as I molded the large dough balls into lopsided circles, powder and yoke smeared on my clothes and face. When the dough was firm, I put them into my shirt and then I frowned as my homemade boobs fell straight to the ground. I hadn’t learned about gravity.

  “You need a bra,” said Edith, firing up the stove. “To keep them up.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, remembering what Mom told me.

  I ran upstairs and hid my boobs in my dresser drawer. I’d have to figure out a way to get into Mom’s closet unnoticed, which was the catalyst for my getting caught buck naked under the coffee table.

  * * *

  I waited patiently under the coffee table, unaware of the drama that would unfold around me. I’d been missing for nearly an hour before it was over. Everyone was frantic with worry. My father called the police, an ambulance, and the fire department. He was always overreacting to such things. When Laila slipped and slashed her chin on the swimming-pool steps, the house was filled with medical personnel, and when I cut my hand after falling on a piece of glass—playing hide and seek with Dad in the second-floor hall—he rushed me to the hospital.

  Sneaking out of my bedroom at dawn for one of my morning adventures might have gone smoothly had I not gone back for my mother’s fluffy French slippers. Laila and I were obsessed with Mom’s wardrobe, particularly her shoes. We’d slip our little feet into her oversized one-inch heels and parade around our father as he worked.

  On weekends, Dad let us stay up late watching television and playing dress-up. He watched warmly as we frolicked cheerfully around the room—our faces painted, hair flowing wild, looking like Diana Ross and Tina Turner, as usual draped in our mother’s clothes, pretending to be grown-ups. With one hand on my hip, I circled around his desk.

  “Do I look pretty, Daddy?” I asked.

  “As pretty as your mother!” he always said.

  “Do you think my hair is long like Mommy’s too?” I asked, twirling my curls around my little fingers the way I noticed grown ladies doing on daytime television.

  “It’s longer than Mommy’s!” he fibbed, filling my heart with pride.

  Cruella, the governess, used to watch soap operas. Days of Our Lives, One Life to Live, and General Hospital were usually playing when Mom and Dad were away. Cruella was so busy hollering at Erica Kane, or Luke and Laura for making such a—as she put it—“fiasco” of their lives, that she rarely noticed me sitting beside her, my eyes wide, mesmerized by the drama and glamour.

  “Out, child!” she’d holler when she eventually spotted me. “Your eyes are too young for this nonsense!” After scurrying me out, she’d immediately return her attention to the show, unaware that I was still watching from around the corner.

  Looking back, it’s no wonder I had such a flare for drama. When Laila and I put on our Wonder Woman outfits, we’d spin cartwheels around the room like Lynda Carter, the beautiful heroine fighting for justice, love, peace, and gender equality. She possessed an arsenal of magic weapons, including the Lasso of Truth, a pair of indestructible bracelets, and, my favorite, a tiara that served as a projectile and in some stories an invisible airplane. Wonder Woman was our favorite show. Day after day, we’d come home from school, slip into our sparkling red-and-blue suits, and act out our favorite scenes using our father as a target. We must have driven him crazy, but he never showed it.

  Getting back to my nudity incident: as familiar voices called out my name, the longer I took to utter the words “Here I am,” the more calcified the words became. Like a deer caught in the headlights, I was frozen in silence. With good reason—after all, I was buck naked!

  You’re probably wondering how I got myself into that predicament. Looking back, it’s rather funny: It was 5:30 and Mom, Laila, and Cruella were still asleep. As usual, Dad was downstairs working in his office. I knew this because my bedroom was directly above it. I used to press my ear against the floor, listening for any trace of him: his footsteps, his cough, the television, or the squawking of my mother’s parrots, repeating their habitual “Bock, bock—I’m The Greatest! Bock, bock” whenever Dad entered the room. When I heard the faint sound of his voice talking on the phone, my adventure began.

  I wanted to put on something pretty to see Daddy. Naturally, I snuck down the hall to the place where all the beautiful things—including bras (which my little hands were not allowed to touch)—were housed. My mother’s closet.

  Quiet as a mouse, I tiptoed around her bed as she slept. It was on my way out that it happened. I was treading toward the staircase, fully adorned in Mom’s fine clothes and drenched in her Chanel perfume, when I heard the Big Bad Wolf—Cruella.

  “Haaaana . . . where are you, child?”

  “Shit!” I yelped, freezing like a squirrel about to become roadkill. Cruella was up and she was hunting—for me. Shit! Shit! Shit! It was my new favorite word; I’d learned it a few days earlier, when my mother accidently blurted it out after stubbing her toe on the bathroom door. “Shit!” she’d cried out, catching herself as quickly as she said it. But it was too late. Like most little people, I retained information like a sponge, particularly the bits I was not supposed to hear. Cruella had washed my mouth out with soap a dozen times because of it. I might have forgotten about it had Mom not made the common grown-up mistake of tipping me off to the fact that my little ears had chanced upon a forbidden word.

  “Haaaaana?” Cruella called again, her voice growing agitated.

  “Shit!” I quickly slipped out of my mother’s clothes: the stockings she told me I couldn’t wear, the silk blouse she asked me not to put my sticky fingers on, and the one pair of shoes she never let me play in.

  “Haaaaaana!”

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” I whispered, running buck naked down the hall and into the second-floor sitting room, where I made a kamikaze dive under the coffee table, finding refuge there until all the worried voices had faded into the background.

  Ironically, it was Cruella’s call that I finally answered. “Here I am,” I uttered meekly. The Wolf had never looked happier to find me.

  The next morning a latch was put on the top of my bedroom door.
“To keep you from wandering into the streets,” Cruella explained. But I knew better. She was trying to avoid the headache of having to search a thirty-room mansion for a determined little girl cleverly plotting to spend the day with her father.

  Long before the coffee-table incident, Cruella had tried every trick in the book to keep me from reaching Dad on school-day mornings: first there was the stocking she tied from my bedroom doorknob to the staircase. It was a tight squeeze, but I slipped through. Next, there was the doorstop she wedged beneath the outside entrance to my room. I used a hanger to dislodge it. Then came the lock at the top of my door. I climbed the bookshelf and pulled down the latch. Finally, she attached a string of bells, hoping the ringing would at least alert her to my impending escape. But, like a little Houdini, I managed to break free, unnoticed. Nothing could keep me from my father.

  One incident shines vividly in my memory. One morning Cruella searched high and low for me, but I was nowhere to be found. I was already hiding in the back seat of my father’s Rolls-Royce. It wasn’t until after Dad drove past the guard, out the Fremont gates, and onto the Miracle Mile that I finally peeked. Houses, trees, and road signs were rushing past. I was free! My uncombed hair flowed wildly in the breeze as I cruised down Wilshire Boulevard with my father. Hearing my giggles in the back seat, he pulled into the Carnation’s restaurant parking lot. When the car was parked, I jumped up from behind, “Surprise!”

  “Aaaaahh!” he hollered, pretending to be frightened. Kissing my little face, he carried me into the diner for turkey bacon and scrambled eggs. During and after our meal he took pictures with adoring fans, shook hands, and signed autographs. Then he picked me up and headed back to the car as people gathered around him like moths to a flame. I understand how they felt; my father was like a light that constantly drew me too. Even when he was tired, he turned no one away. Every autograph was signed, every smile returned.