Blood Brothers (18 page)

Baldwin's comments echoed the sentiments of his book
The Fire Next Time
, a searing indictment of America's history of racism. Writing in labyrinthine sentences, he fiercely articulated the anger and alienation of black America. “The so-called American Negro,” he wrote, “remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being.”
⁴²

His message carried overtones of Malcolm's speeches and Elijah Muhammad's sermons. In the second of the book's two essays, Baldwin recounted his Sunday afternoon visit with Elijah at the Chicago mansion
in the summer of 1962. Before his meeting with the Black Muslims, many Americans thought of Baldwin as an integrationist, though he never embraced such a label. In the age of television, he emerged as a celebrity writer turned activist,
the
literary voice of the black experience, a poet of the blues.

At the mansion, Baldwin sat nervously at a large dining table for nearly thirty minutes, chatting with Elijah's aides while they waited for him to arrive. When Muhammad entered the room, everyone rose from the table. “Something came into the room with him—his disciples' joy at seeing him, his joy at seeing them,” Baldwin wrote. Studying Muhammad, Baldwin recognized that the “central quality in Elijah's face is pain, and his smile is a witness to it—pain so old and deep that it becomes personal and particular only when he smiles.” That agony etched onto his face derived from the haunted memories of his boyhood, growing up with eleven siblings in a poor family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, hearing frightening stories about slave drivers abusing his grandparents, and seeing a bloodied black teenager “dangling from a tree limb” when he was just ten years old.
⁴³

As Elijah lectured on American history and the affliction of blacks at the hands of whites, Baldwin realized that he couldn't refute him. When Kenneth Clark asked him about the appeal of the Nation, he admitted, “When Malcolm talks or the Muslim ministers talk, they articulate for all the Negro people who hear them . . . their suffering, the suffering which has been in this country so long denied. That's Malcolm's great authority over any of his audiences.”
⁴⁴

In Baldwin's view, what made Malcolm so potent politically, so sinister, was that when he spoke, he told black people the brutal truth. Malcolm made them confront their fears about whites, about the source of their powerlessness. Without acknowledging their past, he said, they could never sustain meaningful change. When he talked about the solution to ending their suffering, black people believed him because they had lived his words.

For the first time, Baldwin declared, America had legitimate reason to fear the Black Muslims. If whites failed to eradicate the conditions that created the Nation, if they failed to cleanse the country of hatred, then America might not survive. “A bill is coming,” he warned, “that I fear America is not prepared to pay.”
⁴⁵

Chapter Eight

THE GREAT PRETENDER

            
One forgets that though a clown never imitates a wise man, the wise man can imitate the clown.

—MALCOLM X

I
n November 1961, Roy McHugh, a young reporter from the
Evansville Sunday Courier and Press
, finally got the assignment he wanted—a feature story on undefeated Kentucky boxer Cassius Clay. He left town early, driving 120 miles from Evansville, Indiana, to Louisville. At the local hotel where Cassius and his group were lodging, McHugh called Angelo Dundee from the house phone. “Come on up,” Dundee said. “Cassius is here. You can get acquainted.”
¹

When he got to Clay's room, the boxer was nowhere to be found. Dundee was the picture of contrition. Cassius had left to avoid the interview, he said. “He's shy, you know. Newspapermen scare him to death.” Almost before McHugh could digest the news, Clay rolled out from under a bed and bounced to his feet laughing like “a smooth-cheeked adolescent prankster.”

McHugh spent the rest of the day with Cassius, listening to his unconventional “trash talk” and wild predictions. The reporter was so captivated that he returned to Louisville a year later to gather material for a longer feature for
Sport
magazine. Again he spent the day with Cassius, riding in the backseat of his pink Cadillac while Cassius's brother Rudy chauffeured the two around the town. They stopped for gas and a car wash, a haircut, a bite at his parents' home, an evening outing at a bowling alley, and a late-night snack at Big Boy. McHugh watched Clay mooch money (mainly from him) for gas and food, flirt with women, and work a crowd at the bowling alley—greeting diners, shaking hands, and kissing babies. “‘Listen folks,' his body language said, ‘I'm running for heavyweight champion, and I'd appreciate your vote.'”

In 1963, the Louisville Sponsoring Group, Cassius Clay's management team, sent him to England to fight heavyweight contender Henry Cooper. By shipping him to London, they also hoped to distance Cassius from Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Clay came off the canvas to win the fight, but the LSG lost their bid for control over his personal life.
Associated Press

It was a delightful adventure for the sportswriter. Cassius seemed to be genuinely open and friendly, as transparent as a picture window. But there were several disquieting moments. Rudy was clearly uncomfortable driving a white man around the black section of Louisville. He was solemn, seldom speaking to McHugh unless he was asked a direct question. Even then, his answers straddled the line between brevity and rudeness. Whenever they got out of the Caddy, at the parents' home in
Mont Clair Villa or the Champion Lanes bowling alley, Rudy would disappear into another room.

Rudy's attitude toward the day's activity was an easy read. Only once, silently and secretly, did Cassius reveal his inner thoughts. Twice during the day, Clay ordered stops at the San-Se-Re—“Sanitation, Service, Relaxation”—barbershop, where he put coins in a jukebox and chattered with a barber whom he called “Country Girl.” At one point, when McHugh was looking in another direction, Cassius and Rudy made “derisive gestures” toward him, pantomiming their true feeling about the white reporter. In a room full of mirrors, however, McHugh had eyes in the back of his head.
²

Deception, of course, was essential to Clay's profession. It was what separated contenders from ham-and-eggers. The moves Clay made in the ring—all the feints and shifts and creation of openings and avoidance of punishment—were the results of deception. Even outside the ring, deception was essential to Clay's rise to prominence. His outrageous acts, his poetry routines, and his constant boasting hid more than they revealed. As long as he was talking, no one asked what he was thinking. As long as he spent so much time in public, few people wondered what he did in private. He showed only what he wanted others to see—but gradually, what he wanted others to see was changing.

I
N THE WEEKS
after Clay defeated Doug Jones, the Louisville Sponsoring Group became steadily more concerned about reports of his political activities. It was bad enough that he had told Pete Hamill that he had no use for the NAACP and no desire to meet civil rights icon James Meredith. But even more alarming, he used language reminiscent of the Nation of Islam to justify his opinions. It was, he argued, just “human nature to be with your own kind.” These views contrasted sharply with the benign message of the LSG. While Bill Faversham, the leader of the group, claimed that Cassius's “idea of a big time is four scoops of ice cream and a double orange juice,” Clay was beginning to take controversial social and political stands. The group's leaders believed that he was advancing into dangerous territory at the same moment that he was reaching his biggest paydays.
³

Although Faversham knew little about the Nation of Islam, the few things he did know rang like a fire bell in the night. Most white
Americans regarded the Nation as a hate group, a weird cult that believed in spaceships and “blue-eyed devils.” Clay's association with the organization seemed as dangerous as playing with matches in a munitions factory. It threatened to blow up the LSG's investment and Cassius's title plans.
⁴

Faversham and LSG lawyer Gordon Davidson refused to intervene in Clay's personal or religious beliefs. They managed his career and business affairs, not his life, but they agreed that a change of scenery was a good idea. A match outside the United States would remove Cassius from the gaze of suspicious reporters and the influence of his Black Muslim associates. Although there had been negotiations for matches against Floyd Patterson and George Chuvalo in the United States, on April 10 Clay unexpectedly accepted a deal to fight British heavyweight Henry Cooper in London on June 18. For months he had claimed there were only two greats in the world: Britain and himself. Now the two could take stock of each other.
⁵

Clay invaded England on May 27. From the moment his TWA flight touched down and he made his way through customs, he confirmed all the worst British notions of brash, overconfident Americans. Soon after his arrival, he verbally attacked his popular opponent. “Cooper's a tramp, a bum and a cripple not worth training for. If he talks jive I'll take him in five,” he announced.
⁶

His bombast helped him achieve his goal: building interest in the match. Whatever else they thought of him, British sportswriters agreed that “Gaseous Cassius” was a breath of spring for a sport suffering through a long winter. Peter Wilson, the famed
Daily Mirror
columnist, noted, “There has never been anything quite like it. He came, he saw . . . and he talked.” Contributing a stanza of his own, he wrote:

       
Boxing poet Cassius Clay

       
Hit the City yesterday,

       
Posing, shouting, full of action

       
Selling Clay, the big attraction.
⁷

Moving from one publicity stunt to the next, Clay received front-page treatment. Not even the sensational sex-spy scandal involving Secretary of State for War John Dennis Profumo and “showgirl” Christine
Keeler was able to best Cassius's show. With his combination of charm and genuine wit, he dazzled British reporters. But every so often he stopped clowning and jiving and became serious. At those moments, the teachings of Malcolm X—indeed, his very words—rolled effortlessly off Clay's tongue.
⁸

The depth of his political opinions and awareness surprised some reporters. “I know wise people,” he said quietly to a group of reporters. “I learn from them.” He took what his mentors taught seriously. All the public saw was an act. The role he played was not
who
he really was. “A wise man can act a fool. But a fool can't act like a wise man,” he mused.
⁹

But what manner of a wise man was Clay? Certainly he was different from other American athletes and entertainers. He eschewed marches and integration, and argued for the complete inequality of the sexes. “The word man means master,” he said. “The animals, the trees, the chickens, everything was put here for man. Woman is for man. I see women leading men to the dance floor. That's wrong. The man should lead the woman. The man is master.” And, he claimed, he knew who God was and when the world would end. “You're a tough man to cope with if you know that.”
¹⁰

The serious Clay mystified reporters more than Cassius the clown. Who was he? Who were the wise people with whom he spoke? What were the sources of his beliefs, if in fact he believed what he said? The journalists had interviewed Floyd Patterson, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, and other black celebrities, but they had not heard any of them speak like Cassius Clay.

N
OR HAD THEY
seen antics quite as flamboyant as his. Days before the weigh-in, he had already overstayed his welcome. “Cash has run out of gas,” headlined the
Daily Mirror
. Even the normally laconic Cooper, whose comments had the hard edge of oatmeal, observed, “Surely by now Clay knows that everyone in Britain, including me, hates his guts.” But just in case he had a circle of silent supporters, he alienated them too with his weigh-in performance at the London Palladium. Before two thousand curious spectators who had queued up for the event on a chilly, rainy day, he made a mock-royal entrance wearing an ankle-length red-and-white satin robe with “
CASSIUS CLAY THE GREATEST
” stitched on the back. Strutting about the stage, he
opened his hand wide, displaying five fingers, the number of rounds he predicted the fight would last.
¹¹

Unquestionably, Clay had offended, angered, and outraged millions of Britons. “There won't be more than a handful of people hoping to see him win,” judged Wilson. “Yet this astonishing young Negro has done more to restore world-wide interest in boxing than any individual . . . since the palmist days of Joe Louis.”
¹²

Clay's entrance for the match in Wembley Stadium was even more elaborate than the weigh-in. Preceded by a band of Coldstream Guardsmen and an assortment of British and American soldiers and wearing an ornate crown, he entered the ring to the sound of trumpets and boos. It was a circus act. A stunned BBC announcer chirped that it was “ridiculous”; the American had “cheapened the game.” But Clay only smiled at the waves of jeers and heckles. “The noise he heard was in direct proportion to the number of tickets he sold (35,000) and his take of the gate (about $60,000),” wrote Huston Horn of
Sports Illustrated
.
¹³

The temperature was in the low sixties, and although the rain had stopped, a thick band of low clouds hung in the bruised sky above Wembley. There were no stars visible in the heavens, but there were dozens at ringside. The most famous was Elizabeth Taylor. At the height of her fame and beauty—
Cleopatra
had just premiered in New York—she attended the match with her lover and costar Richard Burton and received what appeared to be a personal bow from Cassius.
¹⁴