King of the World Read online

  Norman Mailer arrived after the press conference had started. He had been up all night drinking at the Playboy Mansion, and the more he had drunk, the more he had buttonholed people there about how to promote a rematch and make it a multimillion-dollar score. He himself would help promote the fight. He even insisted that he could prove Liston had not really won the fight in Chicago, that Patterson had gotten up off the floor and “existentially” beaten Liston in the ninth round. Mailer had had a great deal to drink.

  “It was a revolutionary theory, I have to admit that,” Jack McKinney, a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Daily News and a close friend of Liston’s, told me. “We were at the Playboy Mansion practically all night, and every time Norman would lay this on me I’d move away a little further. I guess he saw me as a special conduit to the Liston people. I didn’t want to insult him, but what can you say?”

  Instead of getting some sleep between the party and the news conference, Mailer spent a couple of hours chatting up the chambermaid and then went to the hotel ballroom where Liston was scheduled to appear. He took a seat fairly close to the front of the room. But it turned out that he didn’t have the proper credentials, or so the hotel officials believed, and they asked him to leave. Mailer insisted that he had been asked to speak at this press conference and began arguing,

  “If you don’t leave, we’ll have to remove you by force,” one of the security officers said.

  “Remove me by force,” Mailer insisted. Before they could do the job, a reporter for the Times asked Mailer (as if to compound the peculiarity of the moment) for a statement.

  “Yes,” Mailer said. “I came here prepared to make a case that I am the only man in this country who can build the second Patterson-Liston fight into a two-million-dollar gate instead of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar dog in Miami. I wish to handle the press relations for this second fight. For various and private reasons I need to make a great deal of money in the next two months.”

  And with that a security guard put his hand on Mailer’s shoulder and asked, “Would you come with us?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll have to carry you out.”

  “Carry me out.”

  Norman Mailer was thus carried out of the ballroom on a chair looking like the Hebrew emperor of ice cream. By the time he argued his way back upstairs and into the ballroom, Liston had taken his place at the dais and was answering the usual sort of postfight questions. Was he ever hurt? (No.) Would he fight all comers? (Of course. Bring ’em on.) What about the past? (What about it?) Jack McKinney felt that some of the reporters were trying to bait Liston, trying to get him to act the role of the boor, the thug. “Sonny’d been burned by these guys so many times,” McKinney said. “He had what you call ‘mother wit,’ a black concept, meaning the innate sense you are born with, what you inherit from your mother. If there had been some way of measuring Sonny’s IQ in that way, he’d be in the Mensa range. The whites would be shocked but in the West Philly poolrooms they knew it was true, though he could be stupid sometimes, naive. Every question seemed loaded to him and so he was being careful.”

  Then Mailer stood up to speak. Some of the sportswriters, red-meat conservatives like Dick Young of the New York Daily News, who were protective of their prerogatives as members of a confraternity and made nervous by Mailer’s standing in the literary world, started muttering. They didn’t consider Mailer one of them. He was a novelist, an art guy, not a fight guy. Some of them thought of Mailer as a Greenwich Village freak, a fool, the same guy who had stabbed his wife with a penknife just two years before. But Mailer was not about to be dissuaded, and he started to repeat the fancies of the night before, his notion of a Patterson victory, his plans for promoting a rematch. The muttering in the room grew louder. The champion, who didn’t know Mailer, seemed curious, if not entirely amused.

  “Well, I’m not a reporter but I’d like to say—” Mailer said.

  Now someone tried to shout Mailer down.

  “Shut the bum up!”

  “No,” said Liston, “let the bum speak.”

  “I picked Floyd Patterson to win by a one-punch knockout in the sixth,” Mailer said, “and I still think I was right.”

  “You’re still drunk,” Liston said, reasonably.

  While some of the reporters hooted at him, Mailer got up and walked behind the dais, as if to continue the conversation with Liston one-on-one. A couple of Liston’s men blocked his way and advised the author never to approach Mr. Liston from the rear. Mailer waited while Liston attended to some other questions, then, circling around to the front of the champion, picked up where he had left off.

  “What did you do,” Liston said, “go out and get another drink?”

  “Liston, I still say Floyd Patterson can beat you.”

  “Aw, why don’t you stop being a sore loser?”

  “You called me a bum,” Mailer said.

  Liston laughed. “Well, you are a bum,” he said. “Everybody’s a bum. I’m a bum, too. It’s just that I’m a bigger bum than you are.” Liston stood up and extended his right hand. “Shake, bum,” he said.

  Mailer pulled Liston in close by the hand and said, “I’m pulling this caper for a reason. I know a way to build the next fight from a two-hundred-thousand-dollar dog in Miami to a two-million-dollar gate in New York.”

  “Say, that last drink really set you up,” Liston said. “Why don’t you go and get me a drink, you bum?”

  “I’m not your flunky,” Mailer said.

  Mailer thought he had gained Liston’s respect, and the sound of Liston’s laughter tickled him, too. “The hint of a chuckle of corny old darky laughter, cotton-field giggles, peeped out a moment from his throat,” is the way Mailer put it in his Esquire article.

  Actually, Liston was not tickled at all. After it was over, he kept referring to Mailer as “that drunk” and “the son of a bitch who was trying to ruin my press conference.” He had wanted to make a decent impression on the reporters, but, as it happened, the memorable story, the one that would dominate the papers, was Mailer’s, not his.

  LISTON SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY RELAXING, EATING, AND watching television with Geraldine, his friend Jack McKinney, and his entourage. McKinney wouldn’t say so, but he was worried about how Liston would be received back in Philadelphia. The mayor, James H. J. Tate, had sent a telegram full of congratulations but containing unmistakable hints of condescension, even a warning: “Your feat demonstrates that a man’s past does not have to dictate his future. I know all Philadelphians join with me in extending best wishes for a successful reign and that you will wear the crown in the fine tradition of Philadelphian champions before you.”

  Liston had no reason to expect a great outpouring of affection from the people of Philadelphia. Not long before the Patterson fight, he had gotten himself in just enough trouble to solidify his jailbird image. Late one night, Liston was driving with a friend from the neighborhood in Fairmount Park. They saw a woman driving a black Cadillac, and Liston’s friend assumed the woman was a prostitute. Liston caught up with the Cadillac. The woman, who was actually employed by the board of education, pulled over, thinking Liston was a police officer, Just then, a squad car pulled up. Liston panicked and took off at sixty-five miles an hour. Time and again, since moving to Philadelphia, Liston had gotten in minor scrapes with the police; he had even been arrested for standing around on a street corner. Every police officer in the city had a picture of Liston on his sun visor. As it turned out, the case against Liston for the “lark in the park” was a bust—the various charges were either dismissed or ended in acquittal—but the publicity, especially in the local papers, the Inquirer, the Bulletin, and the tabloid Daily News, made him out to be, once again, an unrepentant thug. And so, after the fight, when Liston called home for a report on the attention he was getting, a friend read him Larry Merchant’s scathing column in the Daily News: “So it is true—in a fair fight between good and evil, evil must win.… A celebration for Philadelphia’s f
irst heavyweight champ is now in order. Emily Post probably would recommend a ticker-tape parade. For confetti we can use shredded warrants of arrest.”

  Liston was scheduled to leave Chicago for Philadelphia the next day, and while he slept, McKinney stayed up half the night working the phones, trying to arrange for a decent reception. But after talking to a series of sources in City Hall, he realized that Mayor Tate had decided to stiff Liston.

  The next afternoon, on the plane, Liston asked McKinney to sit with him, and as they ate lunch, Liston described how he planned to conduct himself as champion and what he would tell the people and the press in Philadelphia. He talked about how he would listen to Joe Louis’s fights on the radio as a kid and how the announcer would say Louis was a credit to his race, to the human race—the old Jimmy Cannon line—and how that made him feel warm inside. He said he wanted to meet the president and win over the NAACP even though they had all been rooting for Patterson to win,

  “There’s a lot of things I’m gonna do,” Liston told McKinney. “But one thing’s very important: I want to reach my people. I want to reach them and tell them, ‘You don’t have to worry about me disgracing you. You won’t have to worry about me stopping your progress.’ I want to go to colored churches and colored neighborhoods. I know it was in the papers that the better class of colored people were hoping I’d lose, even praying I’d lose, because they was afraid I wouldn’t know how to act.… I don’t mean to be saying I’m just gonna be champion of my own people. It says now I’m the world’s champion and that’s just the way it’s gonna be. I want to go to a lot of places—like orphan homes and reform schools. I’ll be able to say, ‘Kid, I know it’s tough for you and it might even get tougher. But don’t give up on the world. Good things can happen if you let them.’ ”

  In front of almost any other reporter, Liston would never dare be so reflective as he was now with McKinney. The others, he felt, always turned his past against him. But he was relaxed with McKinney, McKinney was a character around town, a kind of Philly Renaissance man, who wrote about sports and classical music, who took up boxing and even sparred once with Liston. As McKinney listened to Liston, he thought he was sincere, and it killed him to think of the hurt he was about to experience. By the time the plane was in its landing pattern, McKinney was at the point of tears, filled with rage and frustration.

  The plane landed. The door opened. Liston came out first and looked down at the tarmac. McKinney saw Liston’s Adam’s apple move and his shoulders shudder. There was no crowd on the tarmac, no welcome at all, only a desultory ground crew doing its job. Liston adjusted his tie and put on his hat, a trilby with a little red feather in the band. “You could see Sonny literally deflate like a balloon with the air letting out,” McKinney said. “It was a good forty-five seconds or a minute before he finished taking in the whole scene, confirming to himself that there was nothing there, and then the next thing you know, his back stiffened and his shoulders rose again, as if he was saying to himself, ‘Well, if this is the way it’s going to be …’ It was amazing. There wasn’t even a tertiary flunky from City Hall, much less the mayor and the key to Philadelphia.”

  Liston met briefly with a few reporters inside the terminal and headed for home. On the way to West Philly, he turned to McKinney and said, “I think I’ll get out tomorrow and do all the things I’ve always done. Walk down the block and buy the papers, stop in the drugstore, talk to the neighbors. Then I’ll see how the real people feel. Maybe then I’ll start to feeling like a champion. You know, it’s really a lot like an election, only in reverse. Here I’m already in office, but now I have to go out and start campaigning.”

  After a few weeks, it was clear to Liston that there would be no endorsement from the NAACP. There would be no parade. There would be no invitation to the White House. His hopes faded to bitterness. “I didn’t expect the president to invite me into the White House and let me sit next to Jackie and wrestle with those nice Kennedy kids,” he told his sparring partner Ray Schoeninger, “but I sure didn’t expect to be treated like no sewer rat.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mr. Fury and Mr. Gray

  YEARS LATER, WHEN LISTON WAS SPENDING HIS TIME WITH thumb-breakers and casino rummies in Las Vegas, he sensed his life heading toward oblivion. The history of fighters is the history of men who end up damaged: the great Sam Langford at the beginning of the century barred by the “color line” from fighting for the title and left blind and broke; Joe Louis strung out on cocaine and running from the IRS; Beau Jack shining shoes at the Fontainebleau Hotel; Ike Williams fleeced by the mob and in debt to the government; “Two Ton” Tony Galento wrestling an octopus and boxing a kangaroo to make a living. Liston knew he could expect no better. “Someday they’re gonna write a blues song just for fighters,” he once said. “It’ll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell.” From start to finish, Liston’s life was a mean one run by careless people, and so a mournful blues, an instrumental just as he arranged it, seems right.

  The incident at the Philadelphia airport was no false harbinger of his reign as champion. Liston could forget about adoration, he could forget about recognition from all but hard-core boxing fans who now judged him indomitable. Muhammad Ali would rise above his sport after mastering it, but Liston was pure boxing and, in the eyes of the public, only boxing. He was also a source of mockery, the tabloid joke of his day. Many felt free to use the full range of racist tropes to have their laughs. He was the goon, the ape, the beast, the monster of nightmares; he was the dangerous creature you paid to see in his roped-off cage. Jim Murray, a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, wrote that realizing Liston was now champion was “like finding a live bat on a string under your Christmas tree.” Arthur Daley, the columnist on the New York Times sports page and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, wanted his readers to know that Liston was even more horrible than they could readily imagine. “The public instinctively dislikes Liston, and that’s grossly unfair,” Daley wrote. “The average fan doesn’t even know the man. One really has to know Liston to dislike him with the proper intensity. He’s arrogant, surly, mean, rude, and altogether frightening. He’s the last man anyone would want to meet in a dark alley.” Esquire played with the idea of Liston-as-Antichrist when George Lois, the art director, dressed him up as a glowering Santa Claus—an image that became the most famous cover in the history of the magazine.

  John Carbo (wearing glasses) at the Elizabeth Street police station following his arrest. Detective Nicholas Barrett, of the district attorney’s office, is at right.

  As feared as Liston was now in the ring (two minutes and six seconds!), he could be mocked without fear of reprisal. No one felt freer to do so than the tribe that owned him. Liston was once at a hotel in Los Angeles and ran into an acquaintance, Moe Dalitz, one of the most powerful mob figures in Las Vegas and late of the bootlegging business. As a joke, Liston made a fist at Dalitz and cocked it. This is an old and friendly convention of boxers, and yet, by way of reply, Dalitz turned to Liston and said, “If you hit me, nigger, you’d better kill me, because if you don’t, I’ll make one telephone call and you’ll be dead in twenty-four hours.” Liston did not reply. Dalitz was a Mafia god in Las Vegas, a link to the Teamsters. In such company, Liston knew his place.

  One of the few columnists who tried to see Liston’s ascent to the championship as anything other than an offense to American society and the tender sensibilities of its citizens was Murray Kempton of the New York Post. Kempton was a mandarin among the street columnists, schooled in subjects as various as Etruscan mosaics and the internal politics of the Five Families. Kempton visited sports rather as a duke descends on the fens; he did it rarely, but with panache and a sense of history. In Liston he saw a man “whose experience with American society has been confined to the Teamsters Union, prison, and the sport of boxing.” With his nineteenth-century prose, Kempton managed a sneer at those who would judge prizefighting and its champions with the airs of a moralist. “The
Negro heavyweights, as Negroes tend to do, have usually given that sense of being men above their calling,” he wrote. “Floyd Patterson sounded like a Freedom Rider. We return to reality with Liston.… We have at last a heavyweight champion on the moral level of the men who own him. This is the source of horror which Liston has aroused; he is boxing’s perfect symbol. He tells us the truth about it. The heavyweight championship is, after all, a fairly squalid office.…” Kempton was under no illusion that Liston was some sort of choirboy manqué; nevertheless, he managed to find reformist possibility in the champion’s nastiness. Liston, he wrote, “has already helped us grow up as a country because he is the first morally inferior Negro I can think of to be given an equal opportunity. He will help us grow up further if he destroys the illusion that a man whose trade it is to beat another man senseless for money represents an image which at all costs must be kept pure for American youth.”

  Unlike some new champions, Liston did not assume his office a total stranger to the public. He had been on television often enough, beating up the likes of Eddie Machen, Cleveland Williams, and Roy Harris, but he had made his most vivid personal impression appearing as a witness in 1960 before the Senate subcommittee on antitrust and monopoly, chaired by Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee. Kefauver’s political career had taken an enormous leap in 1951 after he chaired a series of hearings on organized crime. As a result of the clamorous publicity he attracted after those hearings, Kefauver made a run at the Democratic nomination for president in 1952 before losing out to Adlai Stevenson. In 1956, Kefauver joined Stevenson on the losing Democratic ticket.

  Boxing was a more limited target than organized crime, certainly, but still a fairly obvious one, splashy, hard to miss. The perfidy of the business was well known. Throughout the fifties, to read Dan Parker in the New York Daily Mirror or Jimmy Cannon in the Post was to scan a bill of particulars against a dirty game run entirely by mobsters—mainly Italian and Jewish mobsters. After the war there was not a single champion who was not, in some way, touched by the Mafia, if not wholly owned and operated by it. Kefauver (with substantial help from his chief counsel, John Gurnee Bonomi) intended to prove the case and instigate a reform of boxing.