Max Baer and the Star of David Read Online Free PDF Page B

Plaza Hotel in New York City, to which he had shipped ten trunks of clothes and thirty tailor-made suits, so devoted had he become to the night life of the city, and so pleased by the attention given him for his extravagant ways by the press, that he could declare, as if confiding a secret, that he agreed with the sportswriters that he had become, at twenty-one years old, in his own words, “as magnificent a piece of young American manhood you’d ever want to lay your hands on.” It was not merely the natural endowments—his dark skin, deep-set eyes, curly black hair, chiseled chin, and broad shoulders that were his by birth, but something else—the fact that being in love, whether with Dorothy, Joleen, me, or others, had turned out, he said, to be the same as training for a fight: the secret of success lay in repetitions. That was why things were always so good with Dorothy, even when she continued—as she had before she divorced the Spanish diplomat Jaime De Gerson y Baretto to marry Max—to toy with him.
    “She toys with me—sure,” he said. “But that’s okay because I am a toy! And thank the good lord I am, because I love to be played with as much as I love to play, and I don’t have to prove that to you, I bet.”
    So he and Dorothy fought, split up, took on lovers, and got back together, and the more they carried on in this manner, the happier he became, and the better he fought. “What I figured out,” he said to me on the night before his second fight with Ernie Schaaf, on the last day of August 1932 (Schaaf had beaten him badly—perhaps his worst loss ever—twenty months before, in his first bout following on Campbell’s death), “is that when I’m in love it’s like when I’m in the ring, because that’s when time goes whiz-bang and I can’t even tell where my body begins and my mind ends, and vice versa, though with the peanut-sized brain I got, maybe nobody’d be able to tell.”
    What I thought but did not say in response to such remarks was that when it came to love, what concerned me first, last, and always, was the fate of the woman he claimed to love above all others. For what was Joleen to do with herself—with her life!—during the many months Max and I were away, especially since, on the few occasions we did return to Livermore—three in total that first year of his marriage—Dorothy accompanied us.
    Only once, to my knowledge, were Max and Joleen able during that period to be alone together. On that day in mid-July, a month before his second fight with Schaaf, I had served breakfast to Dorothy in the Baer home (Max had earlier announced he was going for a morning run with his brother Buddy), after which I had returned to our cottage in order to ready myself for a sparring session with him. To my surprise—for I did not expect he would chance being with Joleen while Dorothy was at the ranch—I found him sitting on our bed. Joleen stood by the window, her arms crossed above her breasts. Both she and Max were fully clothed, and neither of them was smiling.
    “But you are the best,” he was saying as I entered our cottage. “Like I told you—you’re my number one and only sweetheart.”
    “So are all the others,” Joleen replied.
    “But don’t you know how true it is for me, like I always say—that the darker the cherry, the sweeter the meat?” he said.
    “As far as I can tell,” Joleen said, “the sweetest meat is whatever’s in your mouth.”
    “Well, maybe,” Max said. “It’s true I got a huge appetite.”
    “Then you should go and feed it,” she said, and opened the door to indicate that it was time for him to leave. “My husband and I are entitled to our privacy.”
    And saying this, she turned away from him and kissed me passionately, although, my back to him, I could not tell if Max took notice. I extricated myself from Joleen’s embrace as quickly as I could, and by the time I did, he was gone.
    Pushing me away angrily, Joleen swiped at her mouth