At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  Before Dad flew to Africa, he had purchased a beautiful brick house on Woodlawn Avenue and arranged for it to be gutted and renovated. The plan was for him to move in with Belinda and the children, of course. But this was before something—having nothing to do with Mom—changed between them. But change it did, and this change, not surprisingly, was met with resistance by Belinda. Especially when the press started writing that my father had publicly introduced my mother as his wife in Manila before his separation was officially announced. It was already reported that Belinda’s anger had manifested as a large scratch across my father’s forehead. But the truth is the fight they had in Zaire had nothing to do with my mother—or my father’s indiscretions (which Belinda recently admitted publicly). Mom left it out of her letters home and never spoke of it—but the infamous scratch can be seen in old photographs.

  July 4, 1975

  Dear Mom and Dad, and everyone,

  Muhammad has decided to stay here in Kuala Lumpur for two more months. His next fight is in the Philippines (Manila) with Joe Frazier, and since we’re already over here he doesn’t want to go all the way home. (He said he’s sending you a check by Howard Bingham. If he forgets, I’ll mail it or something. I’m going to call in a few days after I’m sure Howard is there.) I’m sending some things I bought here in Malaysia. (The fight in Manila isn’t until October 1st. We’re going there a week before the fight.) The watch is for Dad. Also, the navy-blue lounge shirt. The black shirt is for Tony. The royal-blue shirt is for Leonard, and the red one is for Steven. The silver chains are for Leonard and Steven also. The jewelry boxes are for Mom, Diane, and Michelle. You have to fight over which color you want. There’s a chance I may be able to come home before the fight, but I haven’t asked him yet. He might not let me go.

  Love, Veronica

  I reached for another article. This one from the Daily News, Saturday, September 27, 1975. My mother and Belinda were featured in a split photo. The headline grabbed my attention: “Manila Thrilla: Ali Shuffle Leads to Domestic Scuffle.” This should be interesting, I thought. I read the small print below the photo: “Veronica Porche and Belinda Ali—two sides of a triangle?”

  Dick Young, sports editor of the Daily News, wrote:

  Muhammad Ali’s wife, Belinda, showed the heavyweight king her own version of the Ali shuffle today, just five days before he defends his title against Smokin’ Joe Frazier. The statuesque Belinda flew into Manila at dawn, and out again at sunset, after a shouting match with Ali over whether she is still champion or just another contender in his household. The source of the butterflies-and-bees conflict between the Alis is Veronica Porche, nineteen . . . who has been his constant companion for more than a year, and who has been introduced as his wife in recent days.

  “Belinda was supposed to fly to Manila with us,” my mother told me. “But she decided to come later and didn’t tell your father what time she’d be arriving that day.” These were details Mom felt Belinda strategically left out of her comments to the press. “I think what upset her was the fact that nobody believed she was his wife when she arrived because I was there with your father.”

  When Dad met Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, who was known for having an attractive wife, my father shook his hand and said, “You have a beautiful wife.” Mom was standing behind Dad with some of the members of his entourage. After looking at my mother, President Marcos smiled at Daddy and said, “From the looks of your wife, you’re not too far behind.” Joe Frazier, who was also there, chuckled. My father said nothing.

  “I’m going home to my family” is all Belinda said to reporters as she boarded a 6 p.m. flight back to Chicago, but during a stopover in Honolulu she had more to say: “He can see who he wants to see, but he’s still married to me . . . I’m not the jealous type—not one woman, not two, not six are going to come between me and Ali.” She denied any rift between them and added that she’d be waiting to welcome him home after the fight.

  Belinda had arrived in the Philippines capital twelve hours earlier and, after my father failed to meet her at the airport, went directly to the twenty-first-floor suite of his downtown hotel.

  “We have something to talk about,” she told him. And from there a shouting match ensued, ending with Belinda storming out of the hotel, headed for the airport.

  Later, after knocking around a sparring partner in a heavy pre-fight workout, my father attempted to downplay the trouble, telling reporters it was “just publicity.”

  “My wife [Belinda] drives two Rolls-Royces and two Cadillac Eldorados,” he said. “She is fixing up a sixteen-room mansion in Chicago. She has a couple of million dollars in the bank. She has four beautiful children. She has a couple of farms . . . She knows she’s my wife.” Then, very softly, almost inaudibly, he said, “She knows I love her.”

  I believe he loved her. My father was bluntly honest, which could be confusing at times, but he did care about Belinda; she was the mother of his children. I think my mother understood that.

  Reporters from around the world buzzed with conversation about whether the spat would affect his chances against Frazier on Wednesday.

  “It was the closest to death I’ve ever felt,” my father said after winning the fight. “In the tenth round it’s worse, and I have this feeling I’ve never had before in the ring—I’m close to death and every punch is taking me to the grave. Joe Frazier brings out the best in me. God bless him.”

  I skipped ahead and read the last two paragraphs of the article:

  Today’s prelude to Ali’s promised “Thrilla in Manila” with Frazier has apparently been a long time brewing. Ali, Belinda, and Veronica have appeared together often in the past year, with Ali insisting that the two women were close friends. But it was learned last June that Ali had asked for Muslim consent to take a second wife under Islamic code, only to be turned down because of a possible conflict with American bigamy laws.

  Before that, in Zaire a year ago, while training for the George Foreman fight, Ali showed up one day with a scratched face and accompanying rumors that Belinda, a “karate expert,” had clouted him. Whatever was going on, it apparently reached the boiling point in the last 10 days as Ali seemed to flaunt Veronica before the public.

  It was not my father’s intention to keep two wives. Dad was just trying to figure out a way to move forward with his life, without losing my mother, or hurting and embarrassing Belinda and their children by revealing the reason he wanted to divorce her in the first place.

  Perhaps the most unusual and shocking detail to me about my parents’ courtship was discovering that, in the beginning, Belinda traveled with them. On one occasion she was pictured wearing a matching dress with not only my mother but also Dad’s fourth wife and widow, Lonnie, who was eighteen at the time, a year younger than Mom. When I first saw the photos, my mouth dropped. What in the world were they all doing together? And wearing identical clothes, no less. They looked like triplets. I laughed out loud. If I’m being completely honest, my first thought was, Daddy was a smooth operator, like Casanova! Who else in history has been photographed with their past, present, and future wives, all smiling agreeably, like old friends—when the past wife was in the process of, reluctantly, becoming the former. Unbelievable, right? For a moment, I considered going to tell Kevin about it, to see his reaction, but I was pulled back to the clippings.

  The next page was torn. I couldn’t make out the date or headline: “My intention was always to marry her . . .” Obviously, I know that my dad is referring to his affair with my mother. Remember how he had already made headlines in Manila, Philippines, after journalists started reporting that he had publicly introduced Mom as his wife? Well, before then, in photos and press releases, she was said to be his wife’s cousin—a tale Belinda told, out of embarrassment, I imagine. Mom told me about how Belinda would sometimes introduce her to people that way when they were together. My father was traveling the world with another woman—my mother—whom he intended to leave her for. But Belinda wasn�
�t ready to let go. She would fight to remain “Mrs. Muhammad Ali.”

  One month after the Manila fight, Belinda gave an interview for the October 30 issue of Jet magazine entitled “Muhammad Ali’s Wife Talks About Marriage Strains,” in which she stated, among other things, she would rather share my father than lose him. But she only gave a fragmented piece of the puzzle, a fraction of a complicated and multilayered truth. She said nothing about the phone call or her proposal regarding my mother.

  “We were in your dad’s hotel room in Las Vegas when the phone rang,” my mother explained. “Your father was lying in bed, and I was in the living room. He answered the phone, sat down in a chair, and motioned for me to pick up the other line near the sofa.

  “‘It’s Belinda,’ he whispered, with one hand over the receiver. ‘Pick up the phone. You have to hear this.’

  “I remember him sitting there, in a chair with his back against the wall. His mouth wide open, as Belinda made her confessions. She asked for forgiveness, then offered to let him have another wife if he didn’t divorce her.”

  My father convinced my mother Belinda’s proposal would be good for him. “Just for a while,” he promised. “So I don’t have to give her all my money.” A few days later he said, “I’ll fly Lonnie into town, to take some of the attention off you.” Lonnie’s mother, Marguerite Williams, and my paternal grandmother were good friends and lived next door to each other. So, naturally, Lonnie saw a lot of my father over the years; somewhere along the way the two of them had formed their own relationship. Hence the photograph with the matching dresses.

  Dad, Mom, and Belinda made a few public appearances together, but for the most part they lived separately and only traveled together a couple times. My father unintentionally fueled the gossip and confused the public further after he posed for a 1975 cover of People magazine, pictured at home with Belinda and the kids. With limited and biased information, the press continued to portray Belinda as a victim, Dad as a womanizer, and my mother as the villain, often reporting she was twenty-five when she was only nineteen.

  The following year, at a White House dinner hosted by President Ford for Jordan’s King Hussein, my father dropped another bombshell. As Jet magazine remembers, “He kicked the Capital’s gossip into high gear when, perhaps in jest, he said within earshot of a reporter, ‘I have to leave . . . My wife is about to give birth.’” As the reporter stated, those who knew my father and his wife Belinda, knew they’d been living apart for months and she wasn’t pregnant.

  Belinda, still refusing to file for the divorce, seemed to be content with letting the public think my father was having a meaningless affair, even though she had privately agreed to the arrangement.

  My mother was photographed holding hands and eating ice cream with Belinda’s daughters Maryum and twins Jamillah and Rasheda, and her son, Muhammad Jr. I can only imagine what the public thought, not knowing the whole story.

  You might have read about it when it happened. It was big news, so much so that Barbara Walters even mustered the nerve to ask my father about it in an old interview, questioning why he had a baby (me) with my mother, Veronica Porche, while still legally married to Belinda Boyd.

  “My intention was always to marry her and be a gentleman,” he explained. “To make it respectable and dignified.” When Barbara pressed, he shifted in his seat. “Why are you pickin’ on me? A lot of men fool around. A lot of men have other women on the side. I’m no different.”

  As I mentioned, my father was always bluntly honest. I’m told Barbara turned red with shock. No wonder she never added this to the list of her greatest interviews. Years later, the movie Ali would touch on the subject. Judging by my father’s reaction, and what he said as we watched the film together one afternoon at his Michigan home, it wasn’t an accurate portrayal of the events leading up to his divorce from Belinda, nor how he approached my mother in Zaire. The scenes are broken pieces of a large complicated puzzle and only a few people know the truth—or how to fit it together.

  It was a humid day in August 2003 when Daddy and I watched the film. We had just returned from visiting Barnes & Noble, one of our favorite weekend pastimes. I set our bags, full of quote books and leather-bound journals, down on the kitchen floor, turned the television on, and made my father a turkey sandwich with swiss cheese, mustard, and onions. Dad was sitting in his armchair eating his second piece of sweet-potato pie, and I was beside him enjoying a bowl of my favorite ice cream, Häagen-Dazs butter pecan, when he told me.

  “That’s not what happened,” he said as Will Smith and Nona Gaye acted out the scene where Belinda confronts my father about my mother in the hotel room in Africa. “This movie makes it look like your mother broke us up, but I wanted a divorce before I ever met your mother.” Then he gave his reasons. Details I have kept to myself.

  Every family has its secrets. Ours is no different. But they aren’t my secrets to tell.

  Over the years, the media coverage of my parents’ courtship and personal life was overwhelming. Book publishers and reporters constantly pursued my mother. She always graciously declined to share her side. I asked her once why she kept quiet, why she never defended herself.

  “There was no way to clear my name or your father’s without hurting people or revealing things about Belinda he didn’t want the world to know,” she said. “So we both remained silent.”

  But the questions kept coming.

  “What do you think people misunderstand about you?” Marilyn Funt asked my mother in a 1978 interview, which I’ll share in greater detail later. “The public thinks you broke up his marriage.”

  “The press has so distorted his divorce,” said Mom, “and since we don’t talk about things like that, no one will ever know the truth . . .”

  Belinda finally filed for divorce after I was born in 1976, freeing my father to marry my mother after nearly two years of waiting. I think maybe she was hoping he would eventually tire of Mom. I guess she never considered how much he really loved her.

  In my mother’s storage, I found a collection of professional photographs that she’d had taken of my father and his children by Belinda. The five of them are smiling in the living room of Fremont Place. Mom even posed with them in a couple of images. She bought the girls beautiful ruffled dresses, and Muhammad Jr. was given a black suit. When I look at the pictures, I’m reminded of the porcelain dolls displayed on our bedroom shelves—the ones my mother never let us play with. It was their first summer visiting us at Fremont Place.

  Because Belinda had moved to Los Angeles to pursue her film career, the children had been living with their grandparents, even before their parents’ divorce was final. But despite that, after my father left Chicago, Belinda never let them come to visit him in Los Angeles. I guess, in the beginning, she didn’t want them around my mother, especially after Dad had married her. Her wounds were too fresh.

  In time, she relented, and my siblings spent their first summer at Fremont Place, swimming in the pool and watching movies in our third-floor media room. Including, of course, Dad’s favorite, Dracula, starring Christopher Lee. We ate breakfast at Carnation’s on Wilshire Boulevard. And drove around Los Angeles in his Rolls with the top down.

  Regardless of the circumstances that caused the demise of my father’s tumultuous relationship with his second wife, my mother often said that if she could go back, she would have done things differently. “I would have flown straight home from Africa,” she once told me, “gone back to school, and waited until his divorce was final.” But she didn’t. Simply stated, my father liked beautiful women, and he liked to be married, and I’m glad, because my siblings and I are all here.

  * * *

  I skimmed through the Los Angeles Sentinel from Thursday, June 2, 1977: “The future Mrs. Ali—Veronica Porche—is set to become the third Mrs. Ali at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on June 19th. Miss Porche and the champion have been one of the most-talked-about couples in the world since their first meeting prior to Ali’s titl
e fight with George Foreman . . .”

  I read another article, published in The Star a year later: “Muhammad Ali has surprised friends—and two former wives—by saying the greatest moment of his life was finding Veronica Porche, the woman who became his third wife.”

  I scanned the stack of newspapers on the table beside me, looking for related headlines, and came across another old issue of Jet, from May 6, 1976—three months before my birth. I opened the magazine and saw a beautiful photo of Belinda. The headline read: “Khalilah Ali (aka Belinda) Breaks Out on Her Own.” This should be interesting, I decided. Belinda gave a series of interviews over the years, promoting her acting career and accusing my mother of ruining her life. I wondered if this was one of them. I flipped through the pages, searching for the article, but its place was already marked. Mom must have read it long ago.

  As I started to read about Belinda’s plans for her future, living without my father, to my surprise she finally admitted the truth that she had long denied—that Mom had nothing to do with the impending divorce.

  “The marriage was already in trouble . . .” Belinda finally admitted. “And not because of any Veronica Porche.”

  My eyes were growing weary—flapping and fluttering, two butterflies struggling to stay afloat in turbulent skies. I’d been up since 7 a.m. and it was now just before midnight. A yawn escaped me as I reached for the glass of water on my nightstand. Just a few more, I told myself. I’ll read a few more, then I’ll go to sleep.

  I picked up the July 7, 1977, issue of Jet magazine. I had set it aside earlier because it featured my parents’ wedding: “Muhammad Ali Takes a Beautiful Bride.” I leafed through it, reading random clips aloud, as if my spoken words were a divine ritual that would somehow transport me back in time.

  New Beginnings

  Ali was smitten with Veronica. I remember once, on a television show, he said she was the best thing that ever happened to him . . . But then (after twelve years together) things soured between Ali and Veronica. He got sick, and some people say she treated him bad. But I don’t fault Veronica as much as others do. Ali was hard to live with at this point in his life. He’s different now, but back then he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Things fell apart, but don’t blame it all on her. In my view, if Ali had treated Veronica right, she’d probably still be his wife today.