PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
Gay Talese is a bestselling author who has written eleven books and has contributed to The New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper’s and Esquire, where the title piece of this collection first appeared. He lives in New York City.
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
This collection first published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © Gay Talese, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1989, 1996, 1997
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978–0–141–19416–5
VOGUEland (1961)
Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-Aged Man (1962)
Peter O’Toole on the Ould Sod (1963)
The Loser (1964)
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (1966)
Mr. Bad News (1966)
The Brave Tailors of Maida (1989)
Ali in Havana (1996)
Origins of a Nonfiction Writer (1997)
(1961)
Each weekday morning a group of suave and wrinkle-proof women, who call one another ‘dear’ and ‘dahling,’ and can speak in italics and curse in French, move into Manhattan’s Graybar Building, elevate to the nineteenth floor, and then slip behind their desks at Vogue – a magazine that has long been the supreme symbol of sophistication for every American female who ever dreamed of being frocked by Balenciaga, shod by Roger Vivier, coiffed by Kenneth, or set free to swing from the Arc de Triomphe in maiden-form mink.
Not since Sappho has anybody worked up such a lather over women as have the editors of Vogue. With almost every issue they present stunning goddesses who seemingly become more perfect, more devastating with the flip of each page. Sometimes the Vogue model is leaping across the page in mocha-colored silk, or piloting a teak-tipped ketch through the Lesser Antilles, or standing, Dior-length, in front of the Eiffel Tower as racy Renaults buzz by – but never hit her – as she poses in the middle of the street, one leg kicking, mouth open, teeth agleam, two gendarmes winking in the background, all Paris in love with her and her dinner dress of mousseline de soie.
At other times the Vogue model is wearing ‘never-out-of-season black’ on the Queensboro Bridge with a white cat crawling up her back, a cat she presumably leaves home when she later jets down to Puerto Rico to lunch with Casals while being watched from the hills by native women holding naked children – women who smile at her, admire her silk tussah skirt (‘Nantucket nipped’), love her as she spikes up the nine-hole course inside the fortress of old El Morro.
While these fashion models in Vogue are merely stupendous, the socialites photographed for that magazine are rich, beautiful, indefatigable, vivid, vital, brilliant, witty, serve on more committees than congressmen, know more about airplanes than Wolfgang Langewiesche, thrive on country air and yet are equally at home in the smart poker parlors of Cannes; they never age, fade, or get dandruff, and are also (in the words of Vogue’s battery of sycophantic caption writers) ‘amusable,’ ‘exquisite,’ ‘delicate,’ ‘fun,’ and ‘smashing.’
In one Vogue issue, for instance, Mrs. Loel Guinness, photographed before she sashayed from Lausanne to Palm Beach, was described as ‘vivid, vital, amusing.’ And, in another issue, Mrs. Columbus O’Donnel possessed a ‘quick, amused sparkle,’ Queen Sirikit of Thailand was ‘amusable, exquisite,’ and the Countess of Dalkeith was ‘ravishing’ and as effulgent as Lady Caroline Somerset – herself a ‘delicate moonbeam beauty.’ Mrs. Murray Vanderbilt, last year a ‘slender brunette with direct, heartbreaker eyes, and a soft, open laugh,’ this year is a ‘beauty with a strong sense of purpose’ – her purpose being to fly to Paris to have her portrait painted by ‘jaunty, rakish’ Kees Van Dongen on a Tuesday, and then fly back to New York the same night, ‘investing,’ as Vogue said, ‘only 23 hours, 45 minutes.’
Should there be that extraordinary case when a celebrated woman in Vogue is not a ‘rare beauty’ – as, for instance, when she is almost homely – she is then described as ‘wise’ or ‘filled with wisdom’ or reminiscent of heroines in exquisite, vital novels. Madame Helene Rochas ‘looks rather like the heroine of a novel by Stendhal.’ And, should Vogue make mention of a non-Vogue type, such as Ingrid Bergman, who spends little money in the cosmetics industry, she is credited with having a nose which is ‘rather generous.’
The noses of Vogue heroines are usually long and thin, as are the noses of many Vogue editors – noses they can look down upon their generally shorter, younger, and less-sophisticated Condé Nast relatives at Glamour magazine, also located on the nineteenth floor of the Graybar Building. But it is usually quite simple to tell the two staffs apart because the jeunes filles at Glamour, in addition to possessing a high quota of noses that Vogue might dismiss as ‘eager, retroussé,’ are also given to wearing shirtdresses, college-girl circle pins, smiling in the elevator, and saying, ‘Hi.’ A Vogue lady once described the Glamour staff as ‘those peppy, Hi people.’
One day a few years ago a wide-eyed, newly hired Vogue secretary went bouncing into an editor’s office with a package, and said, ‘Hi’ – at which the editor is supposed to have cringed, and finally snapped, ‘We don’t say that around here!’
‘Everyone at Glamour of course hopes to work her way up to the Vogue staff of grim vigilantes,’ says the writer Eve Marriam, once a fashion copy editor at Glamour. ‘But it rarely happens. Vogue has to be careful. The upcomer might use the word cute instead of panache; she might talk about giving a party instead of a dinner; or describe a suede coat ‘for weekending with the station-wagon set’ rather than ‘for your country home.’ Or talk of going to a jewelry store instead of a bijouterie. Most maladroit of all, she might talk in terms of a best buy rather than an investment, or a coup. Or refer to a ballgown as – one shudders to think of it – a formal.’
One has only to leave the elevator and enter the nineteenth floor to experience a sudden sensation of being in Vogue. The floors are black and star-studded, and the spacious outer room is tastefully furnished with a ‘delicate, amusable’ receptionist with a British accent – perchance in keeping with the magazine’s policy of spelling many words the British way: colour, honour, jewellery, and marvellous (pronounced MAA-vellous!).
To the rear of the receptionist is a curved corridor leading to Vogue’s editorial offices. The first office, that of the Beauty Editor, smells of pomades and powders, rejuvenators and other fountains of youth. Beyond this point, and around a second curve, are a half-dozen offices of other editors, and dividing them is the large, noisy Fashion Room. From nine till five the Fashion Room and the offices around it throb with the shrill, exuberant voices of fifty women, the incessant ring of telephones, the blurred image of leggy silhouettes shooting past, their heels clacking with élan. In one corner, the Fabrics Editor picks at silk swatches; in another corner, near a window, the Shoe Editor ponders what’s next in ‘smashing’ footwear; in still another corner, the Model Procurer flips through a filing cabinet that contains such highly classified data on models as which will pose for corset ads, which have the best legs, which have clawlike fingers (ideal for modeling gloves), and which have small, pretty hands (ideal for making small, expensive perfume bottles seem larger).
From the nearby offices of an editor named Carol Phillips (‘delicate, amusable, pure-profiled beauty’) can be heard the well-bred titters and talk of other Vogue tastemakers who stand, arms akimbo, toes pointed out, in front of Mrs. Phillips’s desk. Inevitably their chatter blends with the dialogue that ricochets through the corridor, making it at times most difficult for the Baron De Gunzburg, a senior fashion editor, to concentrate fully on the London Times crossword puzzle that a messenger fetches for him each morning from the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square. The Baron, who is called ‘Nickkee’ by Vogue ladies, and who makes his 7s in the European-style 7, is a former dancer with a Russian ballet and a onetime actor in a German film called The Vampire. (In the film he played a poet who spent two weeks in a casket before getting a chance to murder the vampire; nowadays the Baron is rarely without a black tie, and it is said that once, while entering a Seventh Avenue elevator without specifying his choice of floors, he was immediately whisked up to the floor of a tailor who made uniforms for undertakers.)
Upstairs from the Baron, in one of the few offices occupied by Vogue on the twentieth floor, Feature Editor Allene Talmey, whom editorial director Frank Crowninshield once described as a ‘Soufflé of Crowbars,’ bats out her famous column ‘People Are Talking About’ – a collection of items that she and other Vogue ladies are talking about, and think everybody should be talking about. She writes:
PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT … the present need for the Greek word, bottologia, meaning much speaking, or vain repetitions, as used by St. Matthew (6:7) …
PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT … the christening presents given to the daughter of the great Austrian conductor, Herbert von Karajan …
PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT … Takraw, a game beautiful to watch …
PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT … hummingbirds …
PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT … the Eastern half of the world.
While some of Vogue’s critics contend that the magazine’s literary policy can be summed up with ‘When in Doubt, Reprint Colette,’ it must be said in Vogue’s behalf that it has printed work by some excellent writers, among them Marianne Moore, Jacques Barzun, Rebecca West, and Allene Talmey. And yet one of Vogue’s former art directors, the inimitable Dr. Mehemet Femy Agha, once said, ‘Although Allene is wonderful, I’ve often told her she’s like a piano player in a whore-house. She may be a very good piano player, but nobody goes there to hear music. Nobody buys Vogue to read good literature; they buy it to see the clothes.’
Among the first to see the clothes is the Baron De Gunzburg, who, having finished the London Times crossword puzzle, is now in the Garment Center on Seventh Avenue reclining in a posh divan in the showroom of the clothier Herbert Sondheim, who is giving Vogue magazine a private preview of Sondheim’s spring frocks. Sitting next to the Baron is another Vogue editor, Mildred Morton (‘pure-profiled blonde with slightly bored, raised eyebrow’).
‘You are the first persons in the entire world to be seeing these,’ says Mr. Sondheim, a short, rather stout, gravel-voiced man who rubs his hands, smiles from ear to ear.
A moment later a blonde model appears from behind the curtain, prances toward the Baron and Mrs. Morton, and coos, ‘Number 628.’
The Baron writes down the style number in his Hermès leather notebook and watches her twirl around and then walk back through the curtain.
‘That’s pomecia,’ says Mr. Sondheim.
‘Expensive?’ asks Mrs. Morton.
‘Pomecia cotton is about $2.50 a yard,’ Mr. Sondheim says.
‘Number 648,’ says a second model, a brunette, who slithers past Mrs. Sondheim, dips, then twirls around in front of the Baron De Gunzburg.
‘Awfully smart,’ says the Baron, letting his fingers give the model’s pomecia evening dress a professional pinch. ‘I just love the slashed coat.’
Mrs. Morton raises her right eyebrow.
‘Are you getting away this winter?’ the Baron asks Mr. Sondheim.
‘Probably,’ he says. ‘Palm Beach.’
The Baron seems unimpressed.
‘Number 624,’ announces the brunette model, appearing again with a flourish of frock, a dip, a spin.
‘Wonderful texture, pomecia,’ Mr. Sondheim says, quickly getting businesslike again. ‘Furthermore, it doesn’t crease.’
‘Like the other two better, don’t you, Nick-kee?’ asks Mrs. Morton.
The Baron is silent. The model twirls in front of him again, then stands with her back to him.
‘What is your number?’ the Baron asks, in a clipped British tone.
‘Numba 639,’ she shoots back over her shoulder. The Baron writes it down and then watches the model disappear behind the curtain to the clatter of plastic hangers.
Five minutes later, Mr. Sondheim’s collection has been shown, and the Baron gives him the style numbers of the dresses Vogue wishes to have photographed and shown exclusively. Mr. Sondheim is delighted to comply, for having clothes appear first in Vogue’s editorial pages almost guarantees their successful sale.
It all started back on December 17, 1892, when ‘quiet, clubby’ Arthur Baldwin Turnure (Princeton ’76), husband of one of America’s first lady golf bugs, founded Vogue magazine. By 1895 he had created a sensation by displaying in his magazine the dresses and underwear to be worn by Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt on the occasion of her marriage to the Duke of Marlborough.
In 1909 Vogue was purchased by Condé Nast, under whom it flourished as never before, and no other magazine in the fashion field has ever been able to challenge it. Harper’s Bazaar, which has always been less conservative – ‘It goes one rhinestone too far,’ a Vogue lady explains – does not provide its readers with quite so much of what Mary McCarthy calls ‘Democratic snobbery.’
Some years ago Miss McCarthy, who did a rather extensive study of women’s fashion magazines for the Reporter, concluded that as one descended through the less chichi magazines – such as Charm, Glamour, Mademoiselle – one found more genuine solicitude for the reader and her problems – ‘the pain of being a B.G. (Business Girl), the envy of superiors, self-consciousness, awkwardness, loneliness, sexual fears, timid friendliness to the Boss, endless evenings with the mirror and the tweezers, desperate Saturday social strivings (“Give a party and ask everyone you know”), the struggle to achieve any identity in the dead cubbyhole of office life.’
And in another study of female magazines, this one done in Social Forces by two sociologists, Bernard Barber of Barnard College and Lyle S. Lobel, then of Harvard, it was stated that while the symbols of prestige in Vogue were ‘sophistication and chic,’ these same symbols were scorned by the respectable, PTA-types on the Ladies Home Journal, where there ‘is a distaste for “high style,” for what is “daring” or “unusual.”’
But above Vogue’s ultrachic level, according to the sociologists, there looms an even more-envied class of women: the unfashionable ‘old money’ rich.
‘At this top-most level, where there is little need to compete for status through consumption,’ wrote Barber and Lobel, ‘women may even maintain a certain independence of current changeful “fashion.” Their quality clothes can remain roughly the same for several years … Even eccentric, like the old ladies on Beacon Street in Boston.’
Describing the Vogue level, they continued: ‘In the social class just below the “old money” families we find most of the “high fashion,” Paris-conscious style leaders. Since they are aware of the class above, perhaps trying to gain entrance into it, these women seek to combine opulence with “quiet elegance.” “Fashion copy” for this group stresses the pose of assured distinction, effortless superiority, and inbred elegance.’
Before Vogue magazine can display its pose of assured distinction and elegance, of course, it must summon its high-fashion models and have them photographed by fashion photographers, and on this particular afternoon Vogue’s colour photography sitting was being held in the penthouse studio of the noted photographer Horst Horst, a marvelous spot overlooking the East River. In the studio, while Horst Horst adjusts his German, Japanese, and Swedish cameras, his Chinese houseboy tacks enormous sheets of balmy sky-blue cardboard to the wall, creating a summery background. In the middle of the floor, in front of a box of flowers, is a plush stool of warm, hazelnut brown on which the model will sit. In the adjoining dressing room, Vogue’s Mrs. Simpson, while awaiting the arrival of the model, Dorothea McGowan, does needlepoint from a Matisse pattern.
‘I’d go mad, mad without this,’ Mrs. Simpson says of her needlepoint.
In another corner of the dressing room, Vogue’s wardrobe mistresses press a half-dozen Galanos chiffon gowns that the model will wear. Finally, ten minutes later, Dorothea McGowan, a tall, pale girl, lunges in with her hair in curlers. Immediately she removes her coat, unhinges her hair, dashes for the mirror, and quickly begins to stroke her canvaslike facial skin with a Japanese paintbrush.
‘Which shoes, Mrs. Simpson?’ she asks.
‘Try the red ones, dear,’ Mrs. Simpson says, looking up from Matisse.
‘Let’s go,’ calls Horst from the other room.
Within a few minutes, after expert facial painting, Dorothea transforms herself from the pale, gangling Brooklyn girl she had been upon entering the studio into a sophisticated ageless woman about to pose for her seventh Vogue cover. She walks confidently into the studio, stands fifteen feet in front of Horst, stretches her calf muscles, spreads her legs slightly, places hands on hips, and prepares for her love affair with the camera.
Horst Horst, hands caressing his tripod, crouches and is about to shoot when Mrs. Simpson, standing on the sidelines like a duenna, shouts, ‘Wait.’ And the trance is momentarily broken as Mrs. Simpson says, ‘Her nails look terrible.’
‘Do they?’ asks Dorothea, no longer the confident woman but now again the girl from Brooklyn.
‘Yes, do you have your nails with you?’
The model goes into the dressing room to put on her false nails and then returns in front of the camera. Mrs. Simpson, satisfied now, returns to her needlepoint in the next room, and the Chinese boy places a fan in front of Dorothea, blowing her chiffon dress into her thin, lean body.
Dorothea throws her head back.
‘Oh, such a rich feeling when the fan blows,’ she titters.
‘Do something with your leg,’ Horst says.
She bends it backward, opens her mouth. And Horst’s camera goes click. Then she leans down against the stool, lips puckered. Horst goes click.
‘Oh, that’s good,’ Horst says. ‘Do it again’ (click).
Dorothea smiles (click); opens her mouth (click); wider, a big O (click).
‘Hat’s coming off.’ She giggles.
‘Just smile, don’t grin,’ he says (click). ‘Make a long neck.’
She stretches (click).
‘That’s my girl,’ he says (click).
‘Yesss,’ he repeats slowly (click).
And now, without any directions from him, she automatically strikes different poses, each one punctuated with a click; her face now bitchy, now primed for love, now blazy-eyed, now as demure as a Vassar virgin’s. And Horst all the while is saying, excitedly behind the camera, ‘Yesss’ (click), ‘Yesss’ (click), ‘Yesss’ (click).
‘What are these little flowers?’ Dorothea asks finally, breaking out of the mood.
‘Azaleas,’ Horst says, lighting a cigarette. Dorothea pulls off a large rhinestone ring from her right hand, places it on her left, and then says, ‘You know, if you take a ring off one finger and put it on another finger, it still feels like you have it on the first finger.’
Horst Horst looks at her in mild wonderment. Then Dorothea goes to change her dress. And the Chinese boy, built like a speed swimmer, turns off the fan and quickly changes the background from blue card-board to pink. When Dorothea returns, Mrs. Simpson is back for another look.
‘Dorothea,’ Mrs. Simpson says, ‘you have little hairs sticking out in the back of your neck.’
‘Oh?’ Dorothea says, touching her neck.
Dorothea, turning toward the dressing room, notices the pink background, and her face becomes alive with anticipation.
‘Oh,’ she exclaims, ‘I have pink … pink, PINK!’
(1962)
‘Hi, sweetheart!’ Joe Louis called to his wife, spotting her waiting for him at the Los Angeles Airport.
She smiled, walked toward him, and was about to stretch up on her toes and kiss him – but suddenly stopped.
‘Joe,’ she said, ‘where’s your tie?’
‘Aw, sweetie,’ he said, shrugging, ‘I stayed out all night in New York and didn’t have time –’
‘All night!’ she cut in. ‘When you’re out here all you do is sleep, sleep, sleep.’
‘Sweetie,’ Joe Louis said, with a tired grin, ‘I’m an ole man.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but when you go to New York, you try to be young again.’
They walked slowly through the airport lobby toward their car, being followed by a redcap with Joe’s luggage. Mrs. Louis, the third wife of the forty-eight-year-old former fighter, always meets him at the airport when he is returning from a business trip to New York, where he is vice president of a Negro public-relations firm. She is an alert, pleasingly plump woman in her forties who is a very successful trial lawyer in California. She had never known a prizefighter before she met Joe. Previously, she had been married to a fellow lawyer, a Phi Beta Kappa – a man she once described as being ‘exposed to books, not to life.’ After her divorce, she vowed she wanted a man ‘exposed to life, not to books.’
She met Joe in 1957 through an introduction from a West Coast lady friend, and, two years later, to the surprise of her courtroom associates in Los Angeles, she married him. ‘How in the hell did you meet Joe Louis?’ they kept asking, and she usually replied, ‘How in the hell did Joe Louis meet me?’
Arriving at the car, Joe Louis tipped the redcap and opened the door for his wife. Then he drove past palm trees and quiet neighborhoods for a few miles, and finally turned into a long driveway that flanks an impressive, ten-room, Spanish-style house that is worth $75,000. Mrs. Louis bought it a few years ago and filled it with Louis XV furniture – and eight television sets. Joe Louis was a television addict, she explained to her friends, adding that he even has a set in his bathroom above the tub; the set is placed at such an angle that Joe, when taking a shower across the room, can peek over the shower curtain and see a reflection of the TV screen through a strategically placed mirror.
‘Television and golf,’ Mrs. Louis said, helping to carry her husband’s things into the house, ‘that’s Joe Louis today.’ She said this unruefully, and, later kissing her husband on the cheek, she suddenly seemed a lot less formal than she had at the airport. After hanging his coat in the closet, she quickly put on a kettle for tea.
‘Cookies, honey?’ she asked.
‘Nah,’ he said, sitting slope-shouldered at the breakfast table, his eyelids drooping from lack of sleep. Soon she was upstairs, turning down the covers of their gigantic bed, and five minutes later Joe Louis had plunged upon it and was fast asleep. When Mrs. Louis returned to the kitchen, she was smiling.
‘In court, I’m a lawyer,’ she said, ‘but when I’m home, I’m all woman.’ Her voice was husky, suggestive. ‘I treat a man right, I treat a man like a king – if he treats me right,’ she added, pouring herself a glass of milk.
‘Each morning I bring Joe breakfast in bed,’ she said. ‘Then I turn on Channel 4 so he can watch the Today show. Then I go down and get him the Los Angeles Times. Then I leave the house for court.
‘By 11 A.M.,’ she continued, ‘it’s time for him to tee off at the Hillcrest Country Club, and, if he plays eighteen holes, he should be finished by three o’clock, and will probably drive over to the Fox Hills Country Club for eighteen more. But if he isn’t hitting the ball right, he’ll stop after eighteen and go buy a bucket of balls and hit ’em for hours. He don’t buy regular balls – no, not Joe Louis! – he buys the Select balls, the best, which cost $1.25 a bucket. And he’ll hit – if he’s real mad – two, three, or four buckets full, $5 worth.
‘Some nights he comes home, all excited, and says, “Well, sweetheart, I finally got it today! After all these years playing golf, I just realized what I been doing wrong.”
‘But,’ she said, ‘a day later he may come home, all made from throwing clubs, and say, “I’m never gonna play again!” I’ll say, “But, honey, you told me yesterday you had it!” He’ll say, “I had it, but I didn’t keep it!”
‘The next morning it might be raining, and I’ll say, “Sweetheart, you gonna play golf today? It’s raining.” And he’ll say, “It rains on the course, but it don’t rain on the players.” And off to the golf course he goes.’
Joe Louis’s present wife, Martha, is as different from his first two wives as he is from Martha’s Phi Beta Kappa husband.
Joe’s first wife, Marva, a sleek Chicago stenographer whom he married in 1935 and remarried in 1946, belonged to his lush years, to the years when he blew most of his $5-million boxing fortune on trinkets, jewels, furs, trips abroad, gambling on the golf course, poor investments, lavish tips, and clothes. In 1939, a year in which he had already purchased twenty suits, thirty-six shirts, and two tuxedos, he also hired tailors to create clothing styles of his own invention, such as two-tone floppy green trousers, suit coats without lapels, and camel’s-hair jackets with leather piping. When he was not training or fighting – he won the title by knocking out James J. Braddock in 1937 – Joe Louis was doing the town with Marva (‘I could make her laugh’) or was gambling as much as $1,000 a hole at golf, a game that two sportswriters, Hype Igoe and Walter Stewart, introduced to him in 1936. ‘One guy built a house in California with the money he took Joe for,’ an old friend of Louis’s said.
Joe’s second wife, Rose Morgan, the cosmetics and beauty expert to whom he was married from 1955 to 1958, is a stunning, curvesome woman dedicated to her prosperous business, and she refused to stay up all night with Joe. ‘I tried to make him settle down,’ she said. ‘I told him he couldn’t sleep all day and stay out all night anymore. Once he asked me why not, and I told him I’d worry and wouldn’t be able to sleep. So he said he’d wait till I fell asleep before going out. Well, I stayed up till 4. A.M. – and then he fell asleep.’ Rose was also disenchanted with him in 1956 when, in an effort to make some money toward the $1 million he owed the government in back taxes, he began touring as a wrestler. ‘To me, Joe Louis was like the president of the United States,’ Rose said. ‘How would you like to see the president of the United States washing dishes? That’s how I felt about Joe wrestling.’
Joe’s third wife, while having none of the obvious sex appeal of his first two, has succeeded where they had failed because she is wiser than they, and because Joe was ripe for taming when he fell in love with Martha. She seems to be many things to him: a combination lawyer, cook, mistress, press agent, tax consultant, valet de chambre, and everything but caddie. And she was obviously pleased recently when her friend, the singer Mahalia Jackson, noticed the closets bulging with Joe’s belongings and remarked, ‘Well, Martha, I guess he’s finally ready to settle down; this is the first time in his life he’s got all his clothes under one roof.’
It does not seem to matter to Martha that she got Joe Louis in his declining years – at a time when he weighs 240 pounds, is going bald, is somewhat less than prosperous, and no longer possesses the quick reflexes either to hit or pick up checks. ‘There’s a soul about this man, and a quietness that I love,’ she said, adding that her love has been returned. Joe even goes to church with her on Sundays, she said, and often appears in court to watch her handle cases. Though he neither smokes nor drinks, Joe still goes to nightclubs occasionally to hear some of the many musicians and singers he lists among his friends, she says, and she is aware of the number of women who still find Joe Louis sexually appealing and would consider a night with him time well spent. ‘If those sort of women like living on the side streets of a man’s life,’ Martha said, ‘I wish them well. But I am his wife, and when I come on the scene they got to get the hell out.’
Martha is aware, too, that Joe Louis still is friendly with his former wives – who, after getting divorced from him, went to polar extremes in choosing their future husbands. Marva, after leaving Joe, married a doctor in Chicago. Rose followed her divorce from Joe with a marriage to a lawyer. When Joe is in Chicago, he often calls Marva (the mother of his two children) and sometimes goes over for dinner. When in New York, he does the same thing with Rose. ‘Joe Louis never really cuts off a woman,’ Martha observed, more amused than piqued. ‘He just adds another to his list.’ Actually, Joe has been responsible for his three wives getting acquainted with each other, and he is delighted that they get along. He introduced his first wife to his present wife at the Patterson-Johansson title fight in New York, and on another occasion he arranged to have his present wife’s hair done by his second wife – free.
Joe Louis had told me all about this earlier in the day on the plane during our flight to Los Angeles from New York (where I had spent some time following him around Manhattan and watching him function as a public-relations executive). ‘I called Rose on the phone,’ Joe had said, ‘and told her, “Now Rose Morgan, don’t you charge my wife,” She said, “No, Joe, I won’t.” That Rose Morgan is a wonderful woman,’ Joe mused, shaking his head.
‘You know, I been married to three of the finest women in the world. My only mistake in life was getting divorced.’
‘Why did you then?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘in those days I wanted to be free, and sometimes I just wanted to be alone. I was crazy. I’d go out of the house and stay weeks without coming home. Or maybe I’d stay home in bed for days watching television.’
Just as he blames himself for the failure of his first two marriages, so does he accept the blame for all of his other difficulties, such as his inability to hold on to his money, and his negligence in paying taxes. During his last visit to New York, some old boxing friends were saying, ‘Joe, if only you were fighting today, you’d be making twice what you did in the old days, with the money fighters now get from closed-circuit TV and all.’ But Joe Louis shook his head and said, ‘I ain’t sorry I fought when I did. In my time, I made $5 million, wound up broke, and owe the government $1 million in taxes. If I was fighting today, I’d earn $10 million, would still wind up broke, and would owe the government $2 million in taxes.’
Such remarks, simple yet mixed with an almost absurd sense of humor, were delivered often by Joe Louis during the hours I followed him in New York – much to my surprise.
Rightly or wrongly, I had imagined that this middle-aged hero would merely be a flabby version of the rather dim-witted champion that Don Dunphy used to interview over the radio after the knockout of another Great White Hope – and I had assumed that Joe Louis, at forty-eight, would still hold his title as perhaps the most quiet athlete since Dummy Taylor, the Giant’s pitcher, who was a mute.
Of course, I was aware of those few, famous Joe Louis remarks – like the one about Billy Conn: ‘Maybe he kin run, but he can’t hide’; and Pvt. Joe Louis’s answer in World War II when somebody asked how he felt about fighting for nothing: ‘I ain’t fighting for nothing, I’m fighting for my country.’ But I had read, too, that Joe Louis was incredibly naïve – so naïve that in 1960 he agreed to do public-relations work for Fidel Castro. I had also seen recent news photos of Joe posing outside courtrooms with Hulan E. Jack, the ex-Manhattan borough president who tried to conceal gratuities concerning the remodeling of his apartment. And once Senator John L. McClellan hinted that Louis had received $2,500 for sitting for two hours at the bribery trial of James R. Hoffa; although there were denials all around, the undeniable image of Joe Louis then was that while he was a ‘credit to his race – the human race,’ he was now probably a debt to everybody else.
And so it was with some unexpected elation that I found Joe Louis to be an astute businessman in New York, a shrewd bargainer, and a man with a sense of humor often quite subtle. For instance, as we were boarding the plane at Idlewild Airport for Los Angeles and I had to exchange my tourist-class ticket for first class so I could sit next to Joe, I casually asked him how the airlines could justify the forty-five dollar difference in price. ‘First-class seats are up in front of the plane,’ Louis said, ‘and they get you to L.A. faster.’
The day before, I had seen Joe Louis argue some extra money out of New York television executives who are doing a television show on his life.
‘Hey,’ Joe said, carefully reading every word of the contract before signing it, ‘this says you’ll pay my plane ticket from L.A. to New York and back, and my hotel bill, but what about my living expenses when I’m here?’
‘But, Mr. Louis,’ one executive said, nervously, ‘we never discussed that.’
‘Who’s gonna pay? How ma gonna eat?’ Louis asked, his voice rising with irritation.
‘But, but …’
Louis stood up, put the pen down, and would not have signed at all had not the president of the television company finally said, ‘Okay, Joe, I’m sure something can be worked out.’
Assured that it would, Louis then signed, shook hands with everyone, and left the office.
‘Well,’ he said, on the sidewalk, ‘I won that round.’
Then he added, ‘I know what I’m worth, and I don’t want less.’ He said the movie producers of Requiem for a Heavyweight wanted him to appear as a referee but only offered him a fee of $500 plus $50-a-day living expenses. Though the whole part would have kept Louis on the screen only forty-five seconds, Louis said it was worth a fee of $1,000. The producers said that was too much. But a few days later, Louis said, they called him back. He got his $1,000.