The Bruiser (2 page)

Jim Tully (June 3, 1886—June 22, 1947) was an American writer who won critical acclaim and commercial success in the 1920s and 30s. His rags-to-riches career may qualify him as the greatest long shot in American literature. Born near St. Marys, Ohio, to an Irish immigrant ditch-digger and his wife, Tully enjoyed a relatively happy but impoverished childhood until the death of his mother in 1892. Unable to care for him, his father sent him to an orphanage in Cincinnati. He remained there for six lonely and miserable years. What further education he acquired came in the hobo camps, boxcars, railroad yards, and public libraries scattered across the country. Finally, weary of the road, he arrived in Kent, Ohio, where he worked as a chainmaker, professional boxer, and tree surgeon. He also began to write, mostly poetry, which was published in the area newspapers.

Tully moved to Hollywood in 1912, when he began writing in earnest. His literary career took two distinct paths. He became one of the first reporters to cover Hollywood. As a freelancer, he was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked) in ways that they did not always find agreeable. For these pieces, rather tame by current standards, he became known as the most-feared man in Hollywood—a title he relished. Less lucrative, but closer to his heart, were the books he wrote about his life on the road
and the American underclass. He also wrote an affectionate memoir of his childhood with his extended Irish family, as well as novels on prostitution and Hollywood and a travel book. While some of the more graphic books ran afoul of the censors, they were also embraced by critics, including H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Rupert Hughes. Tully, Hughes wrote, “has fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries.”

Few Americans saw more of their country than Jim Tully. During his road years, 1901–1907, that view of everything from farms in Ohio and wheat fields in Nebraska to small towns in Mississippi and sprawling California orchards flashed by, usually framed by the steel sides of an open boxcar door. But there was another, less bucolic America of hobo jungles, railroad yards, and back alleys. And it was this America that young Tully called home. And a boy who lived in
that
America depended on his wits and, sometimes, his fists. After half-a-dozen years, he'd had enough. It was time to try life as a citizen. He left the road much as he'd begun: tentative and unsure of where he wanted to go. He'd first worked at a chain factory in St. Marys, and his only real plan when he arrived in Kent, Ohio, was to make his way to the chain factory and secure employment working hot links, the one job for which he might reasonably claim experience. Making chain would be a start, but he wanted more.

He possessed few other skills that would gain him admission to 9–5 life. Having little formal education and being the son of Irish immigrant parents didn't afford him the option of working in daddy's firm or marrying
the banker's daughter and being installed a vice president. Instead, he chose a path favored by immigrants and drifters. He would put on boxing gloves and enter the ring.

Tully's boxing training amounted to little more than sparring in a gym. As he later recalled in the third-person,

It would be, if nothing else, (mostly) honest money.

Tully had met other boxers, past, present, and future, in his travels. And as he embarked on his new profession, he recalled the advice he'd been given by one of them. The great lightweight champion, Joe Gans, advised Tully: “Don't pay any attention to the fellow you fight—just act like he's not in the world.” It proved difficult advice to follow for one without Gans's skills, and Tully's ring career never came close to that of the black legend. Still, for the next several years, Tully earned at least part of his living in the ring. His journeyman ring career ended in San Francisco in 1912.

Years of struggle followed before Tully established himself as a successful writer with the publication of his first book in 1922. But by 1935, Tully's last two books had tanked, and, in the view of many, Tully had peaked as a writer. Beset by personal problems and jaded by the tinniness of Hollywood, Tully was at a crossroads when he met Langston Hughes, a longtime admirer of Tully's work, at a Beverly Hills party. The two writers hit it off, and Tully invited Hughes to come by some time for lunch.

When Hughes called a couple days later, he asked if he might bring Harry Armstrong, a former boxer turned trainer who wanted to write. Tully quickly consented and a date was set. Hughes and Armstrong planned on taking the interurban from downtown Los Angeles to Tully's home, an hour and a half ride. Harry's protege, Henry Jackson, who had even taken his mentor's name and boxed as Henry Armstrong, was free that morning and offered to drive the men and wait in the car. When they arrived, Hughes mentioned that the young boxer was waiting outside in the car and Tully immediately went out to invite Henry to join them.

Like Langston Hughes and Jim Tully, so too does it seem that Henry Armstrong and Tully were destined to meet. In his autobiography,
Gloves, Glory and God
, Armstrong remembered laying awake one night in St. Louis when he felt the irresistible pull of California. It was the heart of the Depression, and neither Henry nor his trainer and running buddy, Harry, had anything like train fare to California. Writing in the third-person, Armstrong recalled,

They caught a west-bound freight train in Carondelet, Missouri, and a few years later washed up at Tully's Toluca Lake door. Tully liked Armstrong immediately. “When he entered the room,” Tully wrote, “I knew at once there was a man in the house.” Armstrong was mostly silent but listened intently as his trainer and Hughes described how tough it was for a boxer to make a living. Tully could only nod in recognition. Armstrong had lost fixed matches with the Mexican fighter, Baby Arizmendi, that he'd clearly won and was as broke in Los Angeles as he had been in St. Louis. “You might see a way out, Jim,” Hughes said. “Henry's beaten him twice and lost two decisions—he's innocent and honest, and it isn't right.” To make matters worse, Wirt Ross, who bought Armstrong's contract when the boxer was a minor, had scheduled him to again fight Arizmendi. Moved by the hobo-turned-boxer's plight, one
he knew firsthand, Tully impulsively raised the possibility of buying Armstrong's contract from Ross. Armstrong was very enthusiastic, leaving Tully to mull it over. Watching his guests leave, Tully regretted not hearing more from the young boxer. “My God,” he later commented, “a great man has been here. Armstrong was the wisest of us all. He saved his breath for the pork chops.”

The prospect of a return to boxing, albeit outside the ropes, was tempting.

It is a measure of how miserable Tully had become that he considered boxing as way out of writing, rather than the reverse. In the end, he came to the conclusion he'd reached more than two decades before and chose writing over boxing. Tully instead promised to speak to Al Jolson, who had both the interest and means to promote a young boxer. Tully's decision not to buy Armstrong's contract seems not to have hurt Armstrong in the least. Armstrong fought another ten years and for a few months in late 1938 simultaneously held the World's Featherweight, Welterweight, and Lightweight Championships. Armstrong was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954.

Boxing was one thing;
writing
about boxing was another. In his 1934
Esquire
essay “The Manly Art,” Tully wrote, “The great book of the prize ring is yet to be written. The man who will write it will be one who has been smeared with
its blood.” While litterateurs as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Hemingway had tried, none had boxed and could hope to really convey what it was like inside the ropes. Two years later, tired of waiting for an honest novel of the ring, Tully decided to write it himself.

By early September he had a first draft and had built up a head of steam in the writing of a novel about a young boxer named Shane Rory. He could feel it in his bones, the boxing novel was going to be good,
very
good. This one would restore his good name and get him the respect that he felt was his due. The past year had been one of survival, but now there was hope and he could finally feel his long depression beginning to lift. Two weeks later he was knocked off the tracks.

Tully's son, Alton, had been arrested for assaulting a 16-year-old girl. It was not the first such incident and the news made headlines across the country. Concerned friends tried to lift Tully's spirits, and it is worth noting that another former drifter-turned-boxer, Jack Dempsey, phoned with the offer of $10,000 to help with legal expenses. Tully was devastated, and work on the boxing novel came to a halt. Instead, he returned to the question he'd faced most of his adult life: What to do about Alton? In the past, he'd come to the boy's defense, but this time, against all paternal instinct and the advice of Alton's attorneys, he insisted Alton plead guilty. This Alton did and was sentenced to San Quentin for one to fifty years.

Tully looked to crawl from the wreckage with a new book. He sounded out Maxwell Perkins, who had become renowned as the editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, on a boxing book but was torn between the novel about Shane Rory or a history of the ring. He felt it necessary to convince the legendary editor that he was not
a has-been. “I've played in bad luck the past few years, and have done considerable movie work, but I'm by no means out of the running as a writer.”

Tully was far from a has-been, but his year-end royalty statement punctuated a bad year.
Ladies in the Parlor
, his previous book, had earned him just $200 in the past six months of 1935. Perkins declined a boxing history but asked to see the novel. Tully returned to the Shane Rory manuscript, now titled
The Bruiser
, he'd been working on before the tribulations of autumn. Perkins was not enthusiastic about the draft he received of
The Bruiser
, and, for the time being, the two went their separate ways.

With a solid draft of
The Bruiser
in hand, Tully began shopping the book around. Having immersed himself in boxing, he flew to New York in April to work with Jack Dempsey on a play based on the legendary champion's life. Waiting for him on his return was a letter with the happy news that his 1934 federal tax return was going to be audited.

Tully first sent
The Bruiser
to Boni, the publisher of two of his earlier novels, who wanted the manuscript so badly that he signed away the film rights. By late June, Tully had misgivings about signing with Boni and his request to be released from his contract was granted. Frustrated with what he saw as Jim's fussiness over publishers, Tully's agent, Sydney Sanders, quit, leaving Jim free to strike his own deal for
The Bruiser
.

Hoping that the
The Bruiser
would make a bigger splash with Simon & Schuster, who had rejected
Ladies in the Parlor
, Tully mailed the manuscript in July to editor and friend H. L. Mencken, who hand-delivered it to Max Schuster. With Tully now years away from having anything like a
successful book, the rejection a few weeks later from Simon & Schuster rattled his confidence. He wrote Mencken, “I am not hurt much, as I have such contempt for the novel, that I know I'm not much good at the writing of one.”

In the end he returned to his old publisher, Greenberg, mailing a draft of
The Bruiser
in late July and signed a contract shortly after. However, Greenberg's insistence that
The Bruiser
have a happy ending gave Tully pause. Greenberg was not alone in finding problems with the book's conclusion. Mencken found the ending “abrupt.”

Whatever the problems with the book's conclusion, Tully was determined that the boxing scenes would be the best ever written. Many writers had written about boxing but none had Tully's experience inside the ropes. Tully even recruited his pal, former heavyweight contender Frank Moran, to shadowbox the final fight and then had Dempsey read the manuscript.

Greenberg got right to work soliciting blurbs from Gene Fowler, Walter Winchell, Mencken, and Frank Scully. He also contacted George Bellows's estate for permission to use his masterpiece,
Stag at Sharkey's
, for the dust jacket. The executor declined but wrote Greenberg, “If I could say yes to anyone it would be you for Mr. Tully's novel.”