Max Baer and the Star of David Read Online Free PDF

St. Joseph’s, Max paced the hallway where Campbell’s wife, Elsie, sat, and cradled her and Campbell’s newborn son in her arms. Max offered his hand to Campbell’s wife—offered to cut it off and give it to her—but she only pressed Max’s hand between her own hands. “It’s all right,” she said. “It even might have been you, mightn’t it?”
    Frankie Campbell died at noon the next day, and when he did—we had stayed overnight in the hospital’s waiting room in anticipation of the news—Max broke down and sobbed like a baby. For days, out at the ranch, he was inconsolable, and for years afterwards would wake from nightmares in which he relived those moments when the only thing he knew how to do—to be Max Baer—was to continue to rain down blows upon a strong man made increasingly helpless by these very blows. It was in the near aftermath of Campbell’s death that Max came to accept and depend, almost desperately, upon the loving-kindness Joleen offered him, and in a way that made me realize again, more fully than I wanted to, that although her love for me would remain undiminished, her intimate affections might never again be mine.
    Max was charged with manslaughter by the office of the San Francisco District Attorney, and a warrant for his arrest issued, to which he surrendered. He spent several hours behind bars at the Hall of Justice, but was released on bail in an amount that equaled his take for the fight. Although he was, a few months later, acquitted of charges, the State Boxing Commission banned him from any in-ring activity in California for a full year, a year during which Max fought six bouts out of state—he could not not fight—including three at Madison Square Garden, so swiftly was his reputation—and his value as a drawing card for having killed a man—on the rise. (He donated the purses from these fights to Frankie Campbell’s family, and he did so without seeking publicity. In later years, again without publicity, he helped put three of Frankie Campbell’s children through college at the University of Notre Dame.)
    So distressed was he during this year, however, that he lost four of his half-dozen fights, and it was while I held him in my arms in the early morning following upon the third of these losses—to the Basque and European heavyweight champion Paolino Uzcudun, in a bout in Reno, Nevada, refereed by Jack Dempsey—that he asked if I would promise to do him the honor—“the honor, Horace, please” he kept repeating—to travel with him for all his fights, for he did not know how, during the hours and days between fights, he would survive without me.
    But survive he did, and a month before the first anniversary of Campbell’s death, Max’s innate and unrestrained love of life, and of women, flourishing more with each passing day, prevailed, so that on July 8, 1931, after a headline-producing courtship, he married Dorothy Dunbar (thereby becoming the fifth of her seven husbands), and his love for Dorothy, and marriage to her, seemed to revive him. “I think I love being in love even more than I love knocking guys out,” he said to me on his wedding day, and during his first year of marriage he won all ten of his fights. Although, following the wedding, he and Dorothy quickly began their dance of separating, having affairs with others, and reuniting, the marriage itself, which reinforced in him the belief that he was, despite Campbell’s death, worthy of love, seemed also to intensify and increase his attentions to me and to Joleen.
    It was ever thus, and would remain so for as long as we were with him, we came to realize: the more he loved others, the more he loved us. “The way I see it,” he said in our hotel room after he had, in Oakland, California, a day before the New Year of 1932, defeated the highly-ranked Italian Arthur De Kuh, “the more time I spend in bed with you—the better I am in the ring.”
    And a few months later, when we were staying at the