Authors: Mark Kram
Burt remembers the coldness of Frazier at the Night of a Thousand Stars, a ceremony for athletes at Radio City in New York. Everyone was there: Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Dr. J., Wilt Chamberlain, Mickey Mantle, and so on. “I was helping Joe get dressed,” says Watson. “So many names there. And there was Ali, over
in a corner by himself, no one talking to him. DiMaggio looked over, then quickly turned away. But Joe kept a view of him out of the corner of his eye. You know those vests for formal dress? Ali had it in his hand and was trying to tie it around his neck like a tie. I wanted to help him. But I couldn’t, not with Joe there. So I finish with Joe, and show him his place in line. I go back, and Ali’s still trying to tie the vest around his neck. I gotta tell ya, I almost lost it, looking at him. I went over and said: ‘Here, lemme help you, champ.’ I put the vest on properly, then his jacket. He mumbled something and left. Had Joe seen that, I’d’ve been out of a job.”
Watson got caught in the financial crossfire between Joe and Florence, and got fired for it. “I hold no grudge,” says Burt. “He’s a lonely, bent guy in some ways, close and then not close, cheap and then not cheap. He trusts no one. Ali’s influenced Joe so much he’s determined the man he is today. A couple of ghosts, if you ask me. One is still in the ring in Manila, the other doesn’t even know there was a Manila. It was a bad reckoning for both, that day.”
Frazier had years before tried to break a sword on the head of Eddie Futch, too; not easy to do. Eddie had opposed his return with Jumbo Cummings and drew Joe’s anger when Eddie, as just an adviser, told Joe that Marvis was too green to face Larry Holmes. Joe told others: “He never did anything for me except collect fifteen percent of my purse. Eddie can’t train nobody. He was just there to wipe me down.” This was not about Marvis, Eddie knew, it was the Frazier-Ali thing, that last round in Manila that Joe wouldn’t forget. Eddie bided his time.
In Vegas for the Marvis-Holmes fight, they went on a radio show together. Eddie refused to confront him, then Joe got bolder and bolder, until Futch opened up on him. He told him of his relationship with Yank Durham, how Yank followed what he said on all matters. “But Yank was my friend and your manager,” he said, “and I never
wanted to take credit. I made more money than you think.” By now, Frazier was off balance, he was hearing new information. “And why did you call me every time a decision was needed?” Eddie asked. Joe backed off, and they just skirted the edges of Manila, neither now wanting to escalate the argument. Even so, when Frazier was in a mood usually brought on by a comment about Ali, he would excoriate Futch. He had been too soft to have been in charge. Yank would have sent him out for the fifteenth in Manila. “Don’t talk to me about Eddie Futch,” Joe said. “He became a big hero with the press. Such a caring man. Don’t talk to me about him.” Nobody had; it was as if he had been talking to himself.
Frazier seemed to have become increasingly unpopular in Philly. Marvis and Joe’s daughter Jacqui, a lawyer, handle his business, and they have alienated the local press and organizations with their demands attached to access and money. For his part, he feels the press gives him no respect. He was much ridiculed over an action he took concerning a land deal Cloverlay made long ago. Joe had received $80,000 from the syndicate as his share of the sale. Now, he was claiming in a suit that he had been robbed of the land. He sent letters to seven hundred homeowners, for years entrenched in a township, saying that he owned the land and wanted payment for it. They had a lot of fun with that one, some of them parading with signs reading: “Hey, Joe, we won’t go!” It was a frivolous action that reinforced the idea that he was none too bright.
In 1998, at 3:30
A.M
., he was arrested for driving under the influence. He was acquitted the same year. Then he filed a civil suit against the city for racial profiling. At trial recently, Joe took the stand. “What have I done to deserve this?” he asked. “Philadelphia police and I have grown up together.” He began to sob. He said he had had root canal surgery earlier in the day, and he was taking pain medicine, cough drops and Listerine to keep his mouth fresh. Handcuffed, he said, he
was made to kneel for thirty minutes in back of the police car, causing pain and aggravation to old boxing injuries. The cop said he had bloodshot eyes, “slurred speech” (an upset there; did he expect to hear an ancient Greek orator?), and was incoherent. “He swayed back and forth,” the cop said. “It appeared he was going to fall over.” A witness for Joe testified that he “stumbled” because he had had a toe amputated. The jury, six whites and two blacks, returned with a defeat for Joe, quickly short-circuiting a sellout of the Merck Manual of Symptoms to potential DWI candidates.
Burt Watson was asked if Joe might have been drinking. “I don’t know,” Watson said. “He has a lot of serious health problems. I don’t think he drinks much anymore.” He was also asked about Gypsy Joe Harris, how he later emerged in Frazier’s life. “Joe,” he said, “always had a soft spot for Gyp. He felt bad about his life. Homeless. Just short of being totally blind. He was kicked out of the gym over and over for having drugs and booze. He finally kicked cocaine, and Joe let him back in to help train fighters. Joe said: ‘The first time I see a bottle…you’re out.’” Did Joe help him with money? “I guess so,” Burt said. “But sometimes Joe never looked to help people close to him. Anyway, he was kicked out again, and several days later he was seeking to get back, and he died of a heart attack just steps from the gym door, damn near in Joe’s arms.” Frazier should have been thankful to Gyp. If it was true that Joe had been blind in his left eye his whole career, that Gypsy knew and never sold him out as he so easily could have done out of bitterness over his own aborted career. With one word, Joe would never have come to be haunted by Ali or Manila, would have been sentenced for life to chopping heads off of cattle.
I
n the late eighties, Ali was in Utah in political support of conservative senator Orrin Hatch, which meant he showed up in a crowd and
waved; he was certainly not politically literate. He had the urge to move while staying at his inn, went outside, looked up at the jewelry of the big night sky, and began walking. He could see the cars, not many at 3
A.M
., crawl toward him on the blacktop, until their headlights would fill up his eyes, and they’d swoosh by and vibrate his body. It was “scary” out there, he said. “So dark. A wolf out there? Wild dogs? Can’t see anything. Gotta look down at the white line in the middle of the road. Soooo quiet, it’s really scary.” On the way—where was he going?—he’d kneel and pray for his mother, or do exercises. Five miles out, he turned back for his hotel, arriving with the sun coming up. What was he doing out there? Any guess will do. It may not even have happened, could be he just wanted to tell himself a scary story.
What he was doing with Orrin Hatch, a politician who at one time would have put him in Leavenworth on bread and water, was not much clearer. Ali’s life now, beyond the circus, seemed a cratered dreamscape. And out of each crater popped a manipulative figure to lead the most dedicated of followers, an unorganized manipulator himself (any scheme used to gather his attention), into a newer reality. The old entourage was a child’s diversion, a game compared to the new ones that jerked his strings. Arthur Morrison, among others, comes readily to mind, Ali’s deal-a-minute sidekick for a while, who ended up in a Manhattan court trial for making threatening phone calls to former girlfriends and bomb threats to institutions, including a police station. Ali, the seeming professional friend of the accused, did not testify for him, though he would for many others, including Mike Tyson. Ali and Morrison had been together in cologne, shoe polish, and powdered milk business, all of which lost money—other people’s. But Morrison dropped Ali’s name while on the stand, repeatedly bringing up their unproductive trip to Iraq in 1990 to secure the release of hostages held by Saddam Hussein as human shields. Arthur was found guilty and sentenced to seventeen years.
But Morrison was a piker next to Richard Hirschfeld, the reason why Ali was out there allied with Senator Hatch. Hirschfeld was a fast talker, a lawyer who liked to play with a yo-yo, had extensive Middle East connections, and was generally viewed and passed off by himself as one of those endless men with the secrets in Washington, almost an international Harry Lime in
The Third Man
—without the false penicillin. The SEC knew him well. He had been in front of its tribunal a number of times for allegedly improper business dealings, and in 1986 was permanently barred from practicing before the SEC. He was a close friend of Mohammad Fassi, the Saudi sheik who had shot to fame with a wild divorce and his talent for painting genitalia on the statues on his Beverly Hills lawn. He was also a good friend and lawyer to Ferdinand Marcos, whom he secretly taped. Marcos had been driven from the Philippines, and now, according to Hirschfeld, was mounting an invasion of the country. He took the tapes to Capitol Hill. Marcos claimed a breach of lawyer-client association and extortion. Nelson Boon, a partner with Ali and Hirschfeld in an auto factory construction, said: “Hirschfeld uses Ali as a prop, a door opener to big operators.”
In June of 1988, the
Washington Post
ran a news account of Ali, out of nowhere, talking to one of its reporters on the phone. He appeared to have a hard grasp of politics, current states’ rights issues, and federal judgeships being contested. Noses of reporters who had known Ali for a long time began to twitch, particularly that of Dave Kindred, a columnist for the
Atlanta Journal.
How could this be? Ali had had the political insight of an infant. Kindred investigated. What or who was behind the new Ali, the wily Washington lobbyist who seemed to have the ear of everyone from Strom Thurmond (their only common ground was Dr. Mendenica) to Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter? Specter’s wife even baked Ali a double-chocolate–mousse pie. For a while, Ali was known only as a
brilliant phone presence to the senators—that is, until he began to show up on Capitol Hill.
When he materialized, the senators, confronted by the empty shell of Ali, sought running room, guarding their flanks with comments like, “Well, he’s just quiet,” or “sometimes he doesn’t take his medicine.” One of Sam Nunn’s aides, noting Ali’s listlessness and Hirschfeld’s rat terrier presence of aggressive quizzing, wondered: “Is Ali being carted around like a puppet?” Senator John Warner’s press secretary, Peter Loomis, said: “Hirschfeld did all the talking. Ali was yawning. He could barely focus his eyes.” Ali and Hirschfeld had spent the entire summer on Capitol Hill. What were they after, or more likely, what was Hirschfeld after? Ali had had a suit seeking $50 million in damages from a “wrongful conviction in the 1967 draft evasion case.” It was defeated, and now Hatch and others, like W. C. Fields with the Bible, were looking for loopholes to remedy it. Some of the senators even suspected that Hirschfeld, who reportedly could do a flawless impression of Ali, had impersonated Ali in their prior telephone conversations. When confronted with these suspicions, Ali vascillated on the alleged fraud. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout politics,” he said. Then, on the Capitol steps in front of the press, he later denied the allegation and said he had trust in Hirschfeld. “I have no bosses,” he said. “I’m the boss.” Hirschfeld also denied the allegations. From the day he joined the Black Muslims, that has to be one of the big self-delusions of all time. Through Ali, Hirschfeld had sought the damages and to make himself an indispensable broker to the Republican Party.
Thomas Smith, a Detroit lawyer involved in the auto factory deal, cut to the center of Ali, saying: “Ali baffles me. I don’t know how I feel. He’s gullible and easily led by Hirschfeld. At the same time, I perceived Ali laughing at everybody. He’s so aloof. He doesn’t care enough about people. Ali seems to be in a world by himself, and he looks out of it at you once in a while.” Wilfred Sheed, in his long ago
book on Ali, had him pegged right, too. “He wants to tell everything, and he wants to hide everything. There is evidence to support every Ali theory. This is confusion of Ali’s creation. He insisted that today’s truth is better than yesterday’s…. He likes to take a piece of make-believe and will it into reality.” He was getting a lot of help now, from his fourth wife, Lonnie, a graduate of Vanderbilt and daughter of the traveling companion to Ali’s mother, certain quarters of the press, and a lawyer-writer Boswell who seems insistent on making the public believe that, next to Martin Luther King, Ali is the most important black figure in the last half century. Whew!
When, in fact, he was the double of Faye Greener, in Nathaniel West’s novel
The Day of the Locusts:
“None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the red plush of the chair. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions was that they didn’t really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure. It was as though her body recognized how foolish her words were and tried to excite her hearers into being uncritical. It worked that night; no one even thought of laughing at her. The only move they made was to narrow their circle about her.”
Kindred noted the similarity to the lives of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and John Lennon, all “passive and vain,” who relinquished their lives to others in so many places, saying they’d be right back and then forgetting where they put those lives. Ali was just wandering when he and Veronica divorced. She got the big house and $750,000; Ali the dining table inscribed in Arabic. Herbert said he told Ali, above all, to get a prenuptial agreement, but “she talked him into tearing it up.” At this time, it was becoming apparent Ali needed someone to take care of him. With Lonnie, he had married a “new boss.” At first
he had the habit of taking off in his Winnebago, stopping in college towns to set up a card table and hand out Muslim pamphlets; very unprofitable. Understandable (when one nourishes the soul), among the fifty most marketable athletes, the market has an aversion to billboards in decline. All of that would end with Lonnie and her tight circle of pushers.