Max Baer and the Star of David by Jay Neugeboren Read Free Book Online Page A

and pressed it there.
    “Shit, Horace,” he said, his eyes moist. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean nothing—you know that, don’t you? I got nothing for you and your wife but all the love and respect I ever had for anyone. Just ask June here, about how I been talking about you two, and how smart you are and what I been learning from you.”
    “He really loves you like he says,” June said, and gave me a smile such as the one that must have won the heart of Mister Ziegfeld. “So come on out and play with us tonight. Our Mister Max knows how to have a good time better than anyone. Come on out and play with us tonight, pretty please?”

2 Champion of the World
    Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart. (3:11)

    In the year that followed on Max’s victory over Schmeling—until he fought and defeated Primo Carnera for the heavyweight championship of the world—Max continued to excel at what he loved most: having a good time. It was a year during which we spent most of our time in New York and Los Angeles (where Max purchased a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean), and during which he divorced Dorothy, had highly publicized romances with several movie stars, and starred in his first movie, playing opposite Myrna Loy in The Prizefighter and the Lady.
    Max delighted in the praise he received from critics for his role in The Prizefighter and the Lady , in the women who pursued him because of it (Jean Harlow, relentlessly aggressive, would show up at our home uninvited on evenings when she knew Max was entertaining other women), and, especially, in the news that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Entertainment, had banned it in Germany. That, he declared, was the kind of fame you couldn’t buy.
    It was also a year during which Joleen went through an unexpected and alarming transformation. This was apparent at once when, five months after the premiere of The Prizefighter and the Lady , Max and I returned to Livermore and, entering the cottage Joleen and I shared (this was our first visit home since Max’s triumph over Schmeling), we found Joleen sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing with two cloth dolls. The dolls, which Joleen and I had taken with us when we left Texas, had belonged to our mother, and to her mother before that. Known as pickaninny dolls—a locution that had no derogatory association at that time, being merely a literal reference to Negro children, and deriving from a mixture of Portuguese ( pequenino ), and Creole ( pinkin ningre )—they had lost their original button eyes, most of their looped yarn hair, and the stitchings of their embroidered mouths, so that they were by now of indecipherable age or gender.
    Joleen showed neither surprise nor happiness—no reaction at all, in fact—at our unannounced arrival. She continued to play with the dolls as if we were not there—talking to them, placing them in a wooden vegetable crate, covering them with a piece of frayed red-checkered fabric, kissing them, and wishing them pleasant dreams.
    “My ghosts,” she said to Max. And then: “Has my husband told you about my dead brother?”
    My heart stopped briefly, and returned with such a strong thump-thump that I thought Max would hear it. His eyes fixed on Joleen, however, he paid me no attention.
    “Hey—” he said to her, his arms spread wide, “ain’t you got some welcome-home hugs and kisses for us long-lost guys?”
    Joleen took her Bible from the top of a bookcase that was set at right angles, in an L-shape, against the footboard of our bed and an adjacent wall. “You have not answered my question,” she said. She sat, and opened her Bible. “When you have replied to my question, I will reply to yours.”
    “Okay,” Max said. “Sure. So the answer’s no—he never said nothing about any brother.”
    “That is a shameful but