CHAPTER NINE

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THE BLACK MAN GARBED IN BLACK

ON JUNE 5, 1911, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Johnson set sail for England. With them went a Negro chauffeur named Charles Brown and two sparring partners, Monte Cutler and Walter Monahan, as well as a pair of racing cars, twenty trunks, and a small safe containing Johnson’s cash and his wife’s jewels.

“There was consternation at the offices of the North German Lloyd Steamship company,” the New York Times reported, “when it was discovered that the chief engineer’s room on the Kronprinz Wilhelm … had been booked by an outside agency for ‘Mr. John Johnson and wife.’”

“Is it the colored pugilist?” an officer was asked.

“We are afraid it is” was the reply.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Do? We can’t do anything, the passage is booked and the money is paid.”

Barron Wilkins came to see the Johnsons off. So did many other friends and several reporters, including one working for the Washington Post. The Johnsons’ cabin was filled with flowers.

Mrs. Johnson was not visible at first. Over in the corner was a well-equipped jewelry establishment. Mr. Johnson moved it and this revealed the background of the store as his white wife. On her left hand reclined a small carload of diamonds. Her shirt waist front was littered with similar decorations, but the fingers of her right hand were almost bare. Even to be liberal one could hardly say she had more than $8,000 there. While her protector exuded conversation she daintily picked at $8 worth of toast and coffee. She was not feeling chipper.

“If you had paid a large sum of money for a nice stateroom on the upper deck of the Kronprinz Wilhelm,” the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin asked on June 6:

and then had figured on having a nice neighborly party in the large cabin that you did not feel you could afford and suddenly were confronted with Jack Johnson and his wife beating it to the dining room when the gong sounded for dinner, wouldn’t it make you wish some white hope was on board to make him eat in his stateroom?

What the New York Times called “the delicate question” as to whether the Johnsons—who had paid $750 for their first-class passage—would be permitted to dine alongside their fellow passengers was finally resolved by the chief steward, who set up a small table for them in the dining saloon at the foot of the companionway leading from the promenade.

In the end, stormy seas kept the Johnsons in their stateroom at most mealtimes. But they did take arm-in-arm walks on deck, and Johnson was amiable even when asked the most intrusive questions.

Why did he wear a ruby on one hand and an emerald on the other?

“I always dress port and starboard when at sea,” he explained with a grin. “Because in the night when I’m out on deck and it’s dark, people can see the lights and tell whether I’m coming or going.”

Scores of passengers turned out each morning to watch him spar in the ship’s gymnasium: “No race prejudice came to hinder the curious from watching him at work,” wrote one shipboard correspondent. “All of those on board took a chance on losing caste and race supremacy by taking in the show.” And the champion generously bought drinks for everyone who would drink with him. “I wish we’d seen more of him,” said one man described as a “Canadian millionaire.” “He is unobtrusive and his intelligent conversations are worth listening to.”^*

Johnson met the British press at Plymouth wearing a crisply cut brown suit, brown gloves, and gleaming patent leather boots, one of twenty new outfits he’d had specially tailored in Chicago at a cost of $3,480—roughly $64,000 in today’s terms—so that he could look his best in London during the festivities surrounding the coronation of King George V.

He looked forward to the kind of mostly warm British reception he had received during the days when he was pursuing Tommy Burns. Everything he and Etta did in London made news. Reporters followed them to their fashionable rented flat near Shaftesbury Avenue, and pursued the champion’s car to “Messrs Hamilton, the well-known jewelers in the Strand,” where Johnson startled the clerk by stripping off all his jewels, flinging them on the counter “like so many lumps of coal,” so that they could be cleaned and polished, then hurrying off again without even waiting for a receipt.

Throngs gathered outside the Johnsons’ flat every day. British boxing writer Trevor Wignall called on Johnson there and never forgot two things about his visit: the “crowds of women obstructing the passage-way” in hopes of getting inside, and his remarkable conversation with the champion once he’d pushed his way through them.

It ranged from politics to astronomy and it ended with Johnson requesting me to strike him with all my might in the stomach. This came about as the result of a paragraph he had read in one of the newspapers [alluding] to an alleged weakness in his mid-section…. He requested me to judge for myself by punching him. I did so: striking his stomach was like hitting a piece of corrugated iron.

A writer for Boxing came away impressed as well. Although Johnson was “a big slate-coloured mass of humanity,” he was otherwise very different from the man portrayed by “negro-haters,” a “merry, unaffected, shrewd and likeable man” who offered his “views on life in a carefully reasoned, philosophic fashion which affords instant proof that there is not only plenty of brain inside that shaven skull of his but that that brain has also undergone careful cultivation.” Johnson was a fine swimmer, an expert driver, and a skilled musician who played classical duets with his wife, a “most excellent pianist”; Il Trovatore was his favorite opera, and he never let a day go by without listening to the Miserere on the gramophone that went with him everywhere.

And when the Johnson’s took their special sixty-dollar grandstand seats in Piccadilly for the coronation procession on June 23, cheering Londoners gathered around to gawk and cheer. “It got me, it was so grand,” Johnson told a reporter after the royal procession had passed. His only regret, he said, was that the king hadn’t fought for his crown “instead of just happening to be born in a palace.”

A few days later, one newspaper reported, the Johnsons strolled into the Trocadero restaurant for lunch and found Jim Jeffries and his wife, also in London for the coronation, already seated there.

The fighters saw each other, but Jeffries glared stonily in the other direction and refused to recognize Johnson. The noise of the gay restaurant immediately ceased. Johnson avoided a scene. His wife scintillating with diamonds, he passed Jeffries and took a table at the farther end of the room. Jeffries appeared highly uncomfortable and hurriedly finished his meal and departed, leaving Johnson laughing over his wine.

On the afternoon of July 4, the British press was invited to the Oxford Music Hall to see the champion spar onstage. He had just signed with a British promoter named James White to fight Britain’s best heavyweight, an Indian Army veteran named “Bombardier” Billy Wells, whom the Police Gazette accurately described as “a good second-rater.” The bout was scheduled for October 2 at the Empress Theater at Earl’s Court. Once Johnson had beaten Wells, he said, he planned to undertake a tour of British overseas outposts—India, the Straits Settlements, Australia—organized by his old associate Hugh McIntosh. While he was about it, he added, he would “polish off all the white trash and niggers … lying around loose,” including Sam McVey and Sam Langford. Then, with no further worlds to conquer, he would retire.

The idea behind the performance before the press, according to the London Times, was “to break [in] Johnson lightly, so as not to frighten the enormous numbers of ‘the Fancy’ who had assembled to inspect the terror of their profession.” First, an orchestra played while films of the champion’s training camp at Reno flickered on a vast screen, “swift, beguiling, pictures of Johnson, in various stages of domesticity, feeding chickens and playing with a baby.” Then the screen was rolled up to reveal Johnson in the flesh, sparring with Monte Cutler against a sylvan backdrop. The Times continued:

[Johnson] was about five or six stone heavier than the well-trained pugilist of the films. [I]n a year or so, if he does not take better care of himself, he will become too “streaky” (to use Jem Mace’s phrase) ever to get back into hard condition and will degenerate into a vast, human punching bag. For all that, he gave an engaging display of artistry in the three short easy rounds with his sparring partner, who thumped away to the best of his ability. All the great gifts of the great boxer born and made were there, the panther-like glide in and out of distance, the straight infallible left, and the power of timing an antagonist to the third place of decimals. He does not withdraw into himself like the average American boxer … but stands up… and makes the most of his height and reach. It was pretty to see how, in every little mix up, he contrived to be inside the unhappy Cutler who could never get away without taking both body blows and hooks to the head….

On the other side of the Atlantic Johnson passes for a “flash nigger,” a type not to be encouraged by those who have kept ten millions of black men in subjection to the dominant race. In private life, however, the conqueror of Jeffries is an amiable person with a fund of quaint humour and a sportsmanlike trust in human nature (as long as it is not a question of dollars) which reconciles one to his golden teeth and the multitude of diamonds which cause him to resemble a starry night. It is to his credit that he feels at home in England, which he believes, not without reason, to be inhabited by a race of sportsmen.

Afterward, a reporter asked the champion if, when he entered the ring overseas, he saw himself as fighting for his country.

“Fight for America?” Johnson answered. “Well, I should say not. What has America ever done for me or my race? Here I am treated like a human being.”

“Are you going back to America?”

“Not until I have to, and then as soon as I get through I am coming right back here.”^*

The following day, July 5, Johnson rented a flat at Luxborough House, an apartment-hotel in Paddington, just off Regent’s Park. Etta was to spend the next few weeks there while Johnson toured provincial music halls. To keep her happy in his absence, he ordered an $18,000 royal blue limousine with $2,500 worth of interior fittings, including “a solid gold arrangement” of flasks and cigarette boxes. Brown, the chauffeur, stood ready to drive her anywhere in the city she wanted to go.

It didn’t work. Left alone to brood, Etta retreated into depression. There were angry arguments whenever Johnson came home. Neighbors complained. On July 22, the landlady ordered the Johnsons to vacate the premises, weary of what she called the champion’s “lively conduct.” They told her they would go, but when she returned to clean the flat on August 5 she found Etta still inside, pleading that she was too ill to move. The flat was “filthy,” the landlady said, and she would later collect thirty-seven pounds from Johnson for smashing her crockery.

The couple shifted to a hotel near Piccadilly the next day. Two weeks later, Johnson suddenly canceled his theatrical tour, telling the press his wife was suffering such “great nervous prostration that the attending physicians fear for her life.”^* They would proceed to Paris instead, he said, where he would train while staying close to her bedside.

It was actually Johnson who feared for her life, and with good reason. She had tried—or threatened—to hurl herself from the window of their hotel room. And, if a later interview with her mother is to be believed, it was Johnson’s insistence on shifting to Paris that had helped drive her to it. Etta had bitterly opposed the move, perhaps because she feared that her husband would prove unable to resist the city’s pleasures. “Before she left for Paris,” Mrs. Terry said, “she told me she would rather die than go.” They went anyway, but from that moment on, Johnson would live with the constant fear that his wife might harm herself.

Johnson knew that Negro boxers had been big attractions in Paris since his old rival Sam McVey had begun fighting exhibitions there in 1907. And the French fascination with them had only intensified after McVey and Joe Jeannette staged a grueling “finish fight” in which they knocked one another down a total of thirty-eight times before the battered McVey, no longer able to see his opponent, was forced to quit after the forty-ninth round. Sam Langford’s arrival to fight McVey in the spring of 1911 further excited Parisians: one sporting magazine headlined its coverage LE CHOC DES DEUX SAMS (The Clash of the Two Sams), and the French press was filled with overwrought stories about black American heavyweights—their power and dark skin and supposed exoticism.^†

Now the French press welcomed the heavyweight champion back to Paris as the greatest of them all. He made the most of it. After checking into the Grand Hotel, he invited the French reporters—over whom he towered—up to his suite to watch him bathe and dress before making his first appearance onstage at Magic City in Montmartre. They were suitably awed. One pronounced him “as handsome as a Congolese Apollo.” Because he was naked, wrote another, one could admire his chiseled arms and shoulders, and his legs, so “beautiful and slender.” A third, watching as two valets helped him into evening dress and carefully put all his diamonds in place, compared him to an African king. This private display made the champion two hours late for his performance at Magic City, but the crowd in evening dress cheered him anyway as he sparred gracefully with the handsome young French favorite, welterweight Georges Carpentier.

For the next few weeks Johnson continued his nightly exhibitions at Magic City and worked out each afternoon in front of paying crowds at the Pelican Boxing Club on the Rue des Acacias as well. All his appearances were well attended, but it was clear to boxing insiders that Johnson wasn’t working very hard. The reason was simple: Bombardier Wells was genial and good-looking and much loved by his British fans, but he was also inexperienced, fatally unenthusiastic about finishing his opponents, and the frequent victim of a sort of stage fright that made him dangerously vulnerable in the early rounds.^* Johnson did what he could to build up the gate, praising the Bombardier’s courage to any British reporter who would listen, talking with a straight face of his opponent’s youth and speed and science, pretending always that he faced a serious challenge. But he was fooling almost no one. And when an American writer took him aside and asked about his lax training, Johnson let his guard slip a little.

“How about your training?”

“For Wells?” he smiled. “I don’t have to do much trainin’. I never did have to train much. I didn’t train but a month for Jeffries …”

“How about Wells?”

“I’ll beat him easy.”

Photographs published in the French papers that month show the Johnsons having what looked like a wonderful time: watching the balloon races at Saint-Cloud, Johnson in a handsome suit and straw boater, Etta in furs and a vast hat set off with a white egret feather at least a foot and a half long; seated in their new ninety-horsepower Thomas Flyer racing car somewhere in the French countryside; laughing together as they help clear a herd of sheep from their path in the Bois de Boulogne.

But behind closed doors, things remained tense and troubled. Etta’s gloom had not lifted. Women waited for Johnson at the Grand Hotel, just as they had haunted the sidewalk outside their first London flat, just as she had feared they would, and she knew that Magic City was surrounded by all the temptations of Pigalle. Hattie McClay, Johnson’s companion on his first visit to the City of Light, had never felt that she could interfere with his nighttime adventuring. Etta was determined to do so. She was his wife and so insisted that they move out of town and that her husband come home to her every night, to a furnished house in the quiet suburb of Neuilly. Johnson did so, but reluctantly. Soon a newspaper story quoted unidentified sources close to the champion as saying that Etta’s “watchfulness” was keeping him from “seeing ‘the sights’ and spoiling his good time. They hint that he is somewhat peevish with Mrs. Johnson, too…. Jack is giving up Paris rather than fall out with her.”^*

On September 23, Johnson and his wife headed back across the Channel. They were on their way to a new training camp in Epping Forest on London’s northern edge to make final preparations for the big fight, now just nine days away. Every one of the ten thousand seats in the Empress Theater had been sold. But as the Johnsons settled into their new quarters, there was growing reason to believe the bout would never take place.

The heavyweight championship had been caught up in the intricate world of British ecclesiastical politics. The Reverend F. B. Meyer—the charismatic young Baptist secretary of the Free Church Council, a coalition of churches that did not conform to the doctrines of the Church of England—had been looking for a national issue around which its members could rally. A recent campaign to ban the works of Karl Marx and the American economic reformer Henry George had failed. Meyer hoped a crusade against the evils of prizefighting in general and the Johnson-Wells contest in particular might be just the thing.

On Sunday, September 15, he signed a letter calling on all Nonconformist clergymen to devote the following Sunday’s sermon to arousing the public’s conscience against a spectacle that was sure to be bloody and degrading, sullied by gambling and high stakes and meant only to “gratify that craving for the sensational and the brutal which is inconsistent with the manhood that makes a great nation.”

Clergymen all over Britain followed Meyer’s suggestion and called for the fight to be stopped. So did the fifth Earl of Lonsdale, president of the National Sporting Club, though for a different reason. The bout would be a mismatch, he said; sending Bombardier Wells into the ring against Jack Johnson would be like matching a two-year-old against a three-year-old.

Still, the editor of Boxing was confident that what he called the “Sackcloth and Ashes Brigade” would fail in the end to stop the bout. Boxing remained the best possible test of British manhood, he argued; it would be a sign of weakness to ban it.

Then race was injected into the debate. George Swinton, a London County councillor, started it. A fight between “a white soldier and a black champion,” he said, was likely to spark “quite unnecessary trouble,” and he urged Winston Churchill, the home secretary, to keep it from taking place. The Rev. J. H. Shakespeare, secretary of the British Baptist Union, raised the stakes still further. If the fight went forward, he wrote to the London Times, “white and black will be pitted against each other in anger, revenge and murder, especially in those lands like America in which the negro is the gravest of all problems….

There can be no greater disservice to the negro race than to encourage it to seek glory in physical force and in beating the white man. Booker Washington is incessant in the cry to his people, “Educate, educate.” Slowly, they are climbing the steep path but every voice which exalts animal passion in them is that of an enemy. It matters not to us if an Englishman is beaten, for we have proved our place in the realm of courage, endurance, service, art, and learning. But to a race which has not as yet achieved glory it is a crime to turn its ambitions to such glory as can be found in the prize ring.

The Rev. Meyer now felt free to include race in his bill of particulars as well. “When white opposes black it is not a game of skill,” he told the press, “for the black nature has more fire in the blood than the white and has more passion…. It introduces the element of animalism.”

Still others now saw the proposed contest as a threat to the empire itself. R. W. Rose-Innes, a South Africa–born Briton, explained the problem as he saw it to readers of the Times:

We have hitherto … attempted with success … to maintain the supremacy of the ruling caste—viz, the European element. To affect this by weight of numbers is, of course, impossible, but there are other means. Surrounded, as we are, by natives in all stages of civilization, from the sea to the Zambesi, we seek to establish our supremacy, by force of character and by codes of conduct … based upon principles that we can stand up for and defend.

To attempt to do this by precept, if not backed by example would be futile and worse than futile, for we should be held up to scorn and derision by the natives who think—and there are many such—and who draw conclusions and comparisons.

How can we look them in the face when such a fight is permitted to take place in the heart of the Empire? …

Why pit black against white at all, and why do so with all the odds in favour of the black man? And why permit the contest to take place in London before a European audience and with official sanction? The baneful effects will be felt far beyond the spectators who witness the fight. It will make the position of the white man more difficult still in distant parts of the Empire.

Johnson was disgusted. English preachers knew nothing about boxing, he said, and even less about black people. Boxing simply pitted one individual against another. It had nothing to do with race. But still more Nonconformist clergymen had rallied to Meyer’s cause, and many of their Anglican counterparts now felt called upon to join them. On September 20, the archbishop of Canterbury himself wrote to Churchill, urging him to halt the fight. The bishops of London, Oxford, Ripon, Durham, and Truro echoed his call. They were joined by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, as well as the Lord Mayor of London, and the headmasters of Rugby, Dulwich, Mill Hill, and Taunton schools.

On September 24, Churchill gave in. “I have made up my mind to try to stop the Wells-Johnson contest,” he told his wife. “The terms are utterly unsporting and unfair.” The director of public prosecutions promptly took out summonses against Johnson and Wells, their managers, and promoter James White. All five were ordered to appear at the Bow Street Court of Summary Jurisdiction to answer the home secretary’s charge that they planned a “breach of the peace.”

The following morning, Johnson was getting a rubdown after his first morning’s workout at the Royal Forest Hotel in Chingford when a detective-sergeant from Scotland Yard knocked on the door. “Come right in,” the champion called out. “You’ve got a summons for me. I know who you are or you might have had a rough time.”

The detective advised Johnson to hire a solicitor. The champion thanked him for his advice but said he’d prefer to speak for himself.

So many people gathered outside the court on the morning of September 28, eager to have a look at the champion and his challenger, that traffic in Bow Street came to a halt. Johnson’s automobile had to inch its way to the curb. Etta sat beside him, one newspaper reported the next day, dressed in “a Paris costume of dark brown, with a long ermine fur and many diamonds.”

The Daily Mail reported every detail of the morning’s proceedings.

From the moment when Jack Johnson, with his retinue of secretaries, sparring partners, and massage men behind him, shouldered his way through the multitude and entered the court he was the dominant figure of the proceedings. All the interest concentrated on this huge coloured boxer with his golden smile, which shone round on everybody, including the Rev. Meyer. It was apparent that even Mr. Marsham, the magistrate, behind his official bearing was amused by the … champion.

Johnson, Wells, their handlers, and James White stood shoulder to shoulder before the bench. When they were told to be seated, Johnson alone remained on his feet.

During the opening statement by the Solicitor General [Sir John Simon], Johnson leaned easily against the rails of the dock behind him, letting his eyes wander in search of acquaintances, and when he caught a familiar face his upper row of gold teeth flashed out in his capacious smile. When he had occasion to speak he leaned toward the magistrate. His words were clear; his sentences as straight to the point as one of his “left-hand leads.”

When the solicitor general misspoke, saying that “Jackson” held the heavyweight title, the champion interrupted, “‘Johnson,’ if you please.”

Sir John bowed to acknowledge his error, then went on to argue that the proposed fight was a financial matter rather than a sporting venture; a violent contest, not a scientific exhibition, meant “so [to] reduce the other [man] that when he was knocked to the ground he could not rise.”

The first witness for the government was Superintendent McIntyre, the police officer in charge of the Earl’s Court area, whose testimony was to be based on his reading of newspaper accounts of prizefights. The magistrate asked Johnson if he objected. He did.

Yes, I object because these papers printed in England are no authority upon contests in America. In these records, which the honourable solicitor holds in his hand, it is said Jack Johnson fought Jim Scanlon 14 rounds. The contest only lasted eight rounds; the records are wrong.^* From these records the witness is simply refreshing his mind. Reading a paper refreshes his memory of things he has perhaps never known.

The objection was overruled, and the officer was allowed to testify as to his belief that the upcoming match would constitute a breach of the peace.

“I want to cross-examine him now,” Johnson said as soon as the policeman had finished. The magistrate—whom Johnson carefully called “His worship”—again advised him to leave that work to the better-qualified “legal gentlemen” present.

The champion thanked the “honorable solicitors” but went ahead on his own.

“Are you familiar with Queensberry rules?”

“No I am not.”

“Did you say I knocked Tommy Burns out in the fourteenth round?”

The officer turned pages in his bound volume of newspapers.

“I object to your looking at that book every time I ask you a question,” Johnson said sharply. “You are simply refreshing your memory.”

The officer apologized, saying he’d meant to say only that the fight ended in fourteen rounds. There had been no actual knockout.

“He admits he made a mistake,” said the magistrate.

Johnson went right on: “Why do you say that when Jack Johnson and Mr. Wells box on October 2 there will be a breach of the peace?”

“I said I feared there might be.”

“Did Sam Langford and Bill Lang [when they fought at the National Sporting Club in London] cause a breach of the peace?”

“I do not know.”

“Did you see that fight?”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen any championship contest?”

“No.”

“Then you have no idea what they are like.”

“No.”

With a dismissive wave, Johnson turned to the magistrate and said, “The witness can go now.”

His cross examination had been “a sharp, swift attack, very skillful for one not experienced in courts,” according to the Daily Mail, but in the end it made no difference. While the magistrate’s court had been in session, the London Metropolitan Railroad, which owned the land on which the Empress Theater stood, had persuaded the High Court to issue an injunction against the promoters of the contest.

There would now be no championship purse, no return to Australia, no victory tour of imperial outposts.^* Instead, Johnson and his wife would live out of trunks for nearly three more months, moving around the Continent and back and forth across the Channel while he performed in theaters and cabarets for smaller and smaller fees. Rumors began to spread that Johnson was penniless, that he had had to pawn his wife’s jewels to pay their passage back from Paris to London and had been forced to travel third class. Back in the United States, Tex Rickard told the press he thought the champion had gone through more than $100,000 since Reno.

Johnson bravely denied it all in an open letter to his old friend Tad Dorgan. “Does this appear like a man who is broke?” he asked. “I can write a check any day in the week for $100,000. Besides this, I have property in the way of automobiles and jewelry. I value my cars at $25,000 and jewelry at $60,000, and I have a few thousands in my pocket. Outside of that, I’m kind of shy.”

The champion’s indiscreet remarks about how much better he was treated overseas than at home, unwisely delivered in London on America’s Independence Day, had been reprinted widely in the States. So had subsequent stories about the Bombardier Wells debacle and the Johnsons’ domestic diffaculties. And in December, when the Chicago Tribune’s H. E. Keough learned that the champion was finally setting sail for home, he typed out some doggerel aimed at putting Johnson in his place.

And so you’re coming home, Jack, to settle down for life,

Resolved forever to eschew the pugilistic strife.

Your title, we suppose, Jack, you mean to let it lapse,

Or pass it on to Langford, or to Fireman Flynn, perhaps,

O, well, you’re twenty-one, Jack, and free—and though not white,

We’re not inclined to interfere—do what you think is right.

You’ll find that when you return, Jack, no prejudice obtains

Against the colored person with a normal set of brains,

Who picks his line of going, understanding all the while

That a stingy inch of license does not contemplate a mile.

If you will cut the pace, Jack, below the second speed,

We’ll try to get ourselves to think your presence here we need.

But if you come in strong, Jack, the way you used to come,

You’ll find you’ll be as welcome as a crutch or a bum.

If you will flaunt again, Jack, the garish and bizarre

As if you do not realize just who and what you are;

If ever you repeat, Jack, the things you used to do,

We’ll try to make it plain, Jack; this is no place for you.

The Johnsons landed at New York three days before Christmas, bringing with them an English valet and sometime secretary named Joseph Levy; Charles Brown, their American chauffeur; plus a Pomeranian named Baby, three cars, fourteen trunks—and a mountain of debt. The European journey, meant to add to the champion’s fortune, had depleted it. Jack Johnson needed to make some money.

Once again, Jack Curley turned up to help provide it. Like Johnson, he had recently had his ups and downs. His hopes for a lucrative victory tour by Jim Jeffries had been dashed by Johnson’s victory at Reno. In September of 1911, he’d put on a hugely successful wrestling show at Comiskey Park in Chicago, a two-out-of-three fall grudge match between George Hackenschmidt, the “Russian Lion,” and America’s favorite, Frank Gotch. Curley sold ninety thousand dollars’ worth of tickets and took home fifteen thousand dollars as his share. “The American won,” Curley recalled, “the championship remained in this country—and all was right with the world.” Then rumors began to fly: Hackenschmidt had wrenched his knee in training; Curley had insisted that the bout go on anyway because he’d already spent his share of the advance sale; the match had been a fake. No arrests were ever made, and Curley indignantly dismissed all the complaints as “synthetic squawk.” But the Illinois legislature banned professional wrestling in the match’s aftermath, and Curley found himself back in the fight game.

He was still the manager of record for Jim Flynn, whom Johnson had knocked out five years earlier. Curley had largely lost interest in Flynn after that fight. But while Johnson was overseas, the hard-hitting “Pueblo Fireman” had banged out four knockouts. Curley reassessed his man’s money-making potential and got him a fight with young Carl Morris, whom the papers were hailing as the first serious white heavyweight challenger to come along since what some writers called the “tragedy” at Reno.

The hunt for a “white hope” hadn’t been going well. Size now seemed to be everything. If a white fighter with sufficient skills couldn’t be dredged up from somewhere, the argument went, surely one could be found who was simply big enough to make victory inevitable.

The veteran Ohio sportswriter William A. Phelon, who had been at ringside since the end of the bare-knuckle era, explained the folly of their reasoning:

Nowadays every manager who has unearthed a white hope brags mainly of his enormous size. “My man is 6 feet 4, and weighs 245 pounds,” is the one and only argument they seem to use when proclaiming the virtues of a new protégé. They seem to think that a champion must be a mastodon—that he must be at least as large as Jim Jeffries, last of the great white champions—and any boxer around the 170-pound mark is regarded with pity and derision by these impresarios. It is the Reign of Fat—not even the Reign of Beef and Brawn—and these elephants are a sight to look upon. They are immense, bovine, amiable-faced young men, clumsy and shambling, falling over their own feet—the sort of monsters whom the old-time football coaches used to play guard positions. The strength is there, of course, but they don’t know what to do with it. They can hit a dreadful blow, but they don’t know how, when, or where to hit. What earthly good are they, excepting to wallop one another.

There had been some genuinely freakish entries in the white-hope sweepstakes. An eight-foot-tall vaudeville attraction named George Suger made headlines briefly, one writer likening him to a “playful skyscraper”; and Fermin Arrudi, Suger’s counterpart from Spain, who weighed four hundred pounds, was briefly considered a possible challenger, though his sole qualification seemed to be that he’d once eaten eleven dozen eggs at a sitting.

Carl Morris appeared to be the most plausible contender. He was a big, amiable twenty-four-year-old railroad engineer from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, who had supposedly jumped down from his cab on the day Jeffries lost to Johnson, vowing, “I’m going to quit this job right here. I’m going to be a fighter and whip the Negro sure.” He stood six foot four, weighed 240, and was billed variously as the “Sapulpa Giant” and the “Original White Hope” (though he was only an honorary Anglo-Saxon, since he had some Cherokee ancestors). He scored seven early-round knockouts in a row in his native state. Two of his victims—Marvin Hart and the man who handed Tommy Burns his first defeat, Mike Schreck—were celebrated if long past their prime. When Curley and Flynn challenged him to fight at Madison Square Garden in September of 1912, the Oklahoma oilmen who backed him eagerly accepted.

A few writers worried that Morris might be being moved along too fast, but the New York Evening Sun was rapturous when he arrived.

A WHITE HOPE IN THE MAKING

CARL MORRIS AND HOW HE TRAINS AT ALLENHURST

AN UNUSUAL MAN

HE IS MIGHTY OF BODY AND PLEASANT OF FACE

HAS A WISE MODESTY

SAYS HE IS NOT ABLE TO BEAT JACK JOHNSON TODAY

He wasn’t able to beat Jim Flynn, either. Morris was big and he hit hard, but he was slow and clumsy, too, and utterly unprepared for the kind of onslaught an old pro like Flynn could still mount on a good night. In what the Los Angeles Times called “the bloodiest fight ever seen in this city”—so bloody the referee had to change his shirt after the fifth round—Carl Morris’ career as a serious contender ended and Jim Flynn’s was reborn.^*

On the strength of this much-headlined victory, Curley recalled, “I immediately launched a boom for Flynn as the logical contender for Johnson and took him on tour at the head of a troupe of fighters and wrestlers.” The tour opened—and closed—in Oklahoma; even in Choctaw and Muskogee few proved willing to pay good money to see the conqueror of Carl Morris shadowbox. An easy win over a California journeyman named Charlie Miller added nothing to Flynn’s luster. And when he went to Salt Lake City for a December 27 bout with Tony Caponi—another second-rater he’d already beaten—and Curley’s old friend Billy Porter, sporting editor of the Herald-Republican, refused to help publicize the mismatch, even Curley did not put up much of an argument.

But then his luck changed again. Flynn knocked out the hapless Caponi early, just as Porter had scornfully predicted he would, but Porter wasn’t there to see it. He’d started drinking in a bar across the street early in the evening, and by the time the main event began was too drunk to leave his stool. His job was now in peril. Curley, convinced that he could still snatch a public-relations triumph from an otherwise meaningless evening, hurried to the newspaper office, told the night watchman that Porter had sent him, commandeered a typewriter, and banged out a blistering assault on everyone involved in the one-sided fight, including himself. Then he signed Porter’s name to the story and handed it to the compositor.

When it appeared in the next morning’s paper, Billy Porter was badly hungover but deeply grateful for Curley’s apparently selfless act. “What a friend!” he kept saying, “What a friend!” How could he ever repay him? By interviewing him for the paper, Curley said. “Gladly,” Porter answered. “That’s the least I can do.” Porter’s interview with Curley was reprinted all over the country. In it, the promoter issued still another challenge to the champion. Flynn was so sure he could beat Johnson, Curley said, that he would fight him for free.

Curley got back to Chicago three days later and was attending a New Year’s Eve party at the College Inn when he got a call from the champion just before midnight. “Come right out to my house to a real party,” Johnson said. “There are a lot of your friends here who want to see you.”

The promoter hailed a cab. When it pulled up in front of 3344 South Wabash, the champion was waiting in the doorway. He embraced Curley and ushered him inside. “Gentlemen!” he said to the other guests, black and white. “Meet your old friend Jack Curley! I have just accepted his offer to defend the heavyweight championship … against Jim Flynn!”

“Accepted my offer!” Curley wrote later. “I hadn’t made an offer!” He did so right away: thirty thousand dollars (again, the sum Tommy Burns had insisted on for fighting Johnson) plus eleven hundred dollars for travel and training expenses and one third of the film rights for a forty-five-round contest to be held on July 4, 1912, two years to the day after Reno.

Johnson eagerly accepted. His troubles were multiplying. Most were trivial annoyances of the kind to which he’d long since grown accustomed: his sister Lucy’s landlord was suing him for $110 in back rent; the Elite Laundry Company won a judgment against him for three months’ worth of unpaid bills; a young woman named Ruth Mehl filed suit for damages, claiming he had permanently injured her when he swatted his specially rigged punching ball out into the audience at Chicago’s Plaza Theater.

But then in mid-January, Etta’s fifty-eight-year-old father, David Terry, died after a long illness in Brooklyn. He had not spoken or written to his daughter since learning of her secret marriage to Jack Johnson. Etta was devastated. She thought it best not to attend his funeral, but she had once been close to him, and after his burial in Hempstead, on Long Island, she made a private visit to Brooklyn to see her mother. “I begged her to stay with me,” Mrs. Terry remembered.

But even as I begged her I could not give her assurance that all her old associates would forgive her [for marrying Johnson]. I begged her not to go back to the life she was living. I begged her to stay—just with me. But she just kissed me, and said she was afraid that would not do—could not be thought of. And she went away.

Three weeks later, on February 10, the Terry family’s hometown paper, the Brooklyn Eagle, carried a story headlined CHAMPION JOHNSON WED FORMER MRS. DURYEA, WELL-KNOWN IN HEMPSTEAD. The Johnsons had been married more than a year and had managed to keep Etta’s identity a secret all that time. But someone in the clerk’s office in Pittsburgh had got hold of their marriage license application and gone to the authorities and then the press with it, suggesting that Johnson had lied when he said he’d never been married previously. If not, who were all those women he’d introduced as “Mrs. Jack Johnson” over the years?

Similar stories appeared in papers all over the country in the next few days. The Washington Post reported that Etta had once been “one of the popular society girls” of Hempstead, “a pronounced brunette, particularly attractive. It is generally understood that she would have inherited a portion of the estate of her grandmother, Mrs. James P. Whaley. She probably will now be ignored.”

Reporters badgered the champion for further details. When a writer for the New York Herald called him at home in Chicago, Johnson refused to say anything about Etta’s family or previous life. “Who she was before I married her concerns nobody but me,” he said, “and I’m not bothering my head about it.” He also refused to answer any questions about what the Tribune called his “alleged previous marriage … to a negress” except to say that “in the presence of my wife, my mother and my sister, who are all sitting here, I want to say I never was married until I married this woman.”

Four days after that, Secret Service agents knocked on Johnson’s front door. They had a warrant for a diamond necklace. Since his hoboing days, Johnson had often been at odds with local law enforcement. Now, for the first time, the federal government was interesting itself in him. Sometime soon after their return from Europe, he and Etta had attended a party at which she showed off her husband’s latest gift, a necklace of fifty-five white diamonds. He boasted to the other guests that he had paid nearly two thousand dollars for it in London and had managed to get it past the customs inspectors unseen. Word got around. Someone alerted the Treasury Department. The Johnsons now faced smuggling charges. He offered to pay four thousand dollars—twice the purchase price—to have the charges dropped. The Treasury Department refused. Arraignment before the U.S. Customs commissioner was set for July.

Reeling from all these blows, Johnson returned to the vaudeville circuit, traveling with Etta through the Midwest this time: Omaha first, then St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. There, when no hotel would house them, the manager of the Century Theater and his wife moved out of their upstairs apartment so the Johnsons could have somewhere to sleep. But on opening night, a long line of would-be ticket buyers was kept waiting in the cold along Twelfth Street long after showtime. Etta had tried to kill herself again, this time by swallowing carbolic acid. A doctor was called. Her stomach was pumped. Johnson refused to go on until he was sure she would recover.

The Johnsons struggled on—to Indianapolis, then Louisville, and Cincinnati, where a 128-pound housepainter named Joe Clark ran out into the street and punched the champion in the head as he drove past. A reporter asked Clark why. “Just did it because I don’t like him,” he said. He was not arrested. In Pittsburgh, on April 24, Johnson was leaning out of his car to shake hands with black admirers when a truck sideswiped him. It may have been deliberate; the truck kept going. Johnson’s car was smashed. He was thrown to the ground, pulled tendons in his back, and, on doctor’s orders, had to postpone the start of his training for Jim Flynn.

Meanwhile, Jack Curley looked for a site for the fight. He had hoped to hold it at Madison Square Garden, but Frank O’Neill, the New York state boxing commissioner, vowed that Johnson would never fight in his state so long as he was in charge. “I guess that’s discrimination for you,” the champion said. “As an American citizen why have I not the same right to box in New York as anyone else?” He was particularly incensed that other black fighters like Joe Jeannette and Sam Langford remained free to fight there. Clearly, the commissioner’s ban was purely personal.

Eventually, Curley settled on Las Vegas, in the brand-new state of New Mexico. Once a thriving trading center on the Santa Fe Trail, then a haven for tuberculosis patients, Las Vegas had recently been eclipsed by nearby Albuquerque. Town boosters believed that a title fight would help restore some of its former glory and were willing to put up a $100,000 guarantee to make it happen. “Las Vegas will be the cynosure of the world’s eye on July 4,” said the Las Vegas Optic and Livestock Grower.

If Flynn should … redeem the glory of the white race, Las Vegas will be regarded as having performed a patriotic service indeed, which the entire Caucasian people cannot fail to appreciate and reward. Sooner or later, some American state and town would have to do it, and why should not Las Vegas, New Mexico, accept the chance to become the most popular city in the civilized world?

By the time Johnson, Etta, and their entourage got to Las Vegas on May 26, Jim Flynn had been in residence for nearly three weeks, and the white citizens of the town had taken him to their hearts. He was invited to use the handsome Montezuma Castle Hotel as his headquarters, asked to lead the grand march at a dance held in the armory and to throw out the first ball at the local baseball team’s opening game.

To train Flynn, Curley had hired Tommy Ryan, the former middleweight and welterweight champion, and then had spread the story that Flynn was battering his sparring partners so badly that they regularly had to be replaced. Flynn assured the press that he would fight Johnson differently this time—outbox him, force the champion to come to him. Once he’d restored the title to the white race, he added, he’d be “a bigger man than Taft, and running neck and neck with T.R.”

Johnson just smiled. Flynn would touch him only twice, he promised: once when they shook hands and again when he tried “to hold on to keep from being knocked out.” The original plan had called for the champion to live and train at the Forsyth Ranch, six miles from town. He lasted just two days there. Coyotes interrupted his sleep, he said, and there weren’t even any trees. Instead, he shifted into town, “where I can see people and where they can see me”; that way, “there will be no stories told of me fooling away my time.”

The Johnsons moved into a two-story house in the Mexican-American neighborhood called Old Town. Crude bleachers and a thirty-foot training platform were banged together in the yard so their new neighbors could see the champion spar every afternoon at a dime a head.^*

After an anonymous note signed “K.K.K” arrived, telling Johnson to LIE DOWN OR WE’LL STRING YOU UP, he tucked a revolver into his pants and hired an armed guard to patrol the yard at night, just as he had at Reno.

Otherwise, the life the Johnsons led in Las Vegas was comparatively tranquil. Their legal troubles seemed far away. So did the temptations of the big city. Etta had her husband to herself at least part of every day. A cameraman caught the Johnsons breakfasting together on the porch of their rented home, Johnson absorbed in the sporting section of the newspaper, Etta gazing warily into the lens.

After at least sixteen years of it, Johnson was weary of training—he would enter the ring against Flynn twenty-five pounds heavier than he was when he faced Jeffries—and he was rarely content to stay on his porch for long. “He may be seen at any time of the day driving around in his big touring car,” reported the Optic, “his rah-rah hat turned up in front and down in the back and his diamonds glittering like headlights on the California Limited.” He drove out of town to shoot prairie dogs, mired his car in mud one day, and tried to race a train the next, terrifying Curley, who feared that the champion—and his own potential profits—would end up at the bottom of a canyon. Johnson went along with publicity stunts, eating the better part of two watermelons sent to his camp by a Florida admirer as the press looked on, and picking up an extra six hundred dollars for sparring onstage at the Elks Theater in Santa Fe.^* And he delighted in the attention his clothes drew in the dusty little town: “Johnson continues to dress up in his dandy togs,” the Optic reported. “He looks like a Rah! Rah! Kid from some Ethiopian College with his fancy duds and loud hosiery.” When the national press began turning up a few days before the fight, he and his trainer Tom Flanagan had a good time roaming through town with scissors, snipping off the ends of sportswriters’ ties.

Curley’s outdoor stadium—built at the town’s expense and never completely paid for—was made to hold 17,950 fans. But Las Vegas, New Mexico, was a long way to go to see a fight that seemed sure to be one-sided, and when the afternoon of the fight arrived, fewer than four thousand turned up.

Both men were to drive to the arena. Johnson refused to get into his car until Curley handed him his promised $31,100 in cash and he had a chance to count it.

When the two men were finally in the ring, Flynn spotted Etta seated in the crowd. He broke away from his handlers, leaned over the ropes, and said in a loud voice that since she was a white woman she really ought to cheer for him. She didn’t answer, but her husband was not amused. When the referee, Ed Smith, sporting editor of the Chicago American and one of the few writers willing to give Johnson a fair shake in print, brought the boxers together for their final instructions, Johnson refused to take Flynn’s hand.

At the opening bell, Flynn returned to his old ways, rushing at Johnson, trying to bull his way inside. Johnson alternately jabbed him and tied him up. By the middle of the second round, there were cuts over both of Flynn’s eyes and he was gulping blood. “Time and again,” one ringsider recalled, Johnson would “stick out his big black stomach that looked like an inflated bass drum and invite Flynn to punch at it. But every time the white man was foolishly lured into this trap he was peppered with a series of stinging lefts and rights to the face which … continued to disfigure his already awesome countenance.”

Johnson smiled and laughed and kept up a running conversation with Etta. A spectator shouted for Johnson to end it. “Wait a minute!” he shouted back, and brought more blood from Flynn’s nose. By the sixth round, the challenger had grown so frustrated by Johnson’s ability to smother him that he began employing what he apparently considered his secret weapon—his skull—trying repeatedly to slam his head into the point of the taller man’s chin. When Ed Smith warned him that he would be disqualified if he kept it up, Flynn shouted back: “The nigger’s holding me. He’s holding me all the time,” and went right back to butting. “Flynn’s feet were both off the floor time and again with the energy he put into his bounces,” noted the New York Times. “Sometimes he seemed to leap two feet into the air in frantic plunges at the elusive jaw above him.”

Johnson continued to evade Flynn’s angry leaps—and to punish him mercilessly—until Captain Fred Fornoff of the New Mexico Mounted Police, a revolver strapped to his side, stepped in and stopped the bout in the ninth. He said it had turned into “a slaughter and a merely brutal exhibition.” Smith then awarded Johnson the fight because of the challenger’s repeated fouling. Afterward, Johnson told reporters he would have knocked Flynn out a second time had he stuck to fair fighting and not acted “like a billy goat.”^*

Cynics—and there were a lot of them—once again suggested that Johnson had simply carried Flynn in order to make the fight films more lucrative. The champion, said his old rival Joe Jeannette, was now just a “motion picture fighter.” Johnson didn’t care what anyone thought. Within moments of his victory, he, Etta, and their party crowded into his touring car and roared off toward Albuquerque to catch the train for Chicago. With them went the $31,100 Jack Curley had handed over, plus $5,000 more the champion had won betting on himself.

Somewhere along the way, distressed perhaps by the idea of returning to Chicago and the distractions that were sure to consume her husband when he got there, Etta tried to jump to her death from the window of their sleeping car. Johnson dragged her back inside. As soon as they got home, he hired two maids to be with his wife day and night to keep her from harming herself.

In San Francisco a few days later, Sunny Jim Coffroth, who had bought the western distribution rights to the fight films, held a private screening for sportswriters and boxing insiders at the Miles Brothers motion picture establishment on Mission Street. When the lights came up again, most of the invitees had been struck by the same thing that had impressed ringsiders: the contemptuous ease with which Johnson had handled his smaller, bullheaded challenger. But two of the shrewdest among them thought they’d seen something else. W. W. Naughton of the San Francisco Examiner had been writing about Johnson for at least eight years, while the trainer Spider Kelly’s memories of the fighter went all the way back to the summer of 1901, when they’d barnstormed together through the mining towns of Colorado. Naughton conceded that the champion had deserved the decision, but Flynn, he wrote, had been the better trained and more energetic of the two—“full of fight and ginger at all times”—while Johnson had seemed to tire after the sixth, content to stall for half of every round, clinging to the “under-sized fireman like a creeper to a fence” and hoping to win on a foul. Kelly was still more blunt: “When Johnson boxes again, no matter where it is, I will be at the ringside to bet against him. He has had his day.”^*

Johnson may privately have agreed. He’d been talking of retirement for months, had even mused that he might oversee a tournament among the least implausible white hopes and then hand his title over to the winner without a fight, just as Jim Jeffries had done, to Johnson’s disgust, seven years before. “I’ve got sense enough to know that Old Dame Nature is going to take the speed and strength away from Jack Johnson the same as she did to Sullivan, Jeffries and the rest of them,” he told a visitor not long after he got back to Chicago. “When a man gets to my age the training grind gets to be too much of a strain.” “No sir,” he told another visitor, “this pitcher is through going to the well.”^†

Besides, he now believed he’d found a way to support himself and his wife in something like the manner to which both had become accustomed. There was nothing new in his plan to go into the saloon business: John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett, Jim Jeffries and Tom Sharkey and Spider Kelly and Joe Gans had all tried their hands at it.

But Johnson’s Café de Champion at 41 West Thirty-first Street, between Armour Avenue and Dearborn Street and just south of the wide-open Levee, was going to be something else again. With help from several silent partners, including the Heilman Brewing Company, which supplied the café’s beer, he had transformed the old Palace Theater into a three-story showcase for himself, a glowing backdrop against which he could present himself as the man he had always wished he could become: elegant, sophisticated, surrounded by friends and admirers, whatever their race.

Every newspaper in town, white and black, covered the grand opening on the evening of July 10. To the Chicago Tribune, Johnson was “the white man’s despair,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd that began gathering at noon and eventually grew so large it halted streetcar traffic reminded its reporter of “the coal bin of the wise purchaser in midsummer.” Street vendors peddled novelties. The best-selling item, the Chicago Defender reported, was “a miniature frying pan with a piece of bacon in it,” symbolizing the “bacon” Johnson had brought home with him from Reno.

The doors were scheduled to open at nine. As the sun went down, workmen were still laboring frantically to finish up the interior. The wine and liquor arrived late, and Johnson himself lent a hand, unloading the trucks and carrying cartons inside. Then, he had rushed home to dress.

Meanwhile, the doors opened and the crowd began to push its way inside. There were “three drink-dispensing parlors,” according to the July 11 Examiner: the grillroom on the main floor, with a gleaming mahogany bar, mosaic-tile floor, gilt-rimmed silver spittoons said to have cost sixty dollars each, and walls hung with oversize portraits of the champion and Etta; the Pompeiian Room, in which singers, dancers, and an orchestra offered a nonstop show; and a private second-floor room for more intimate dining. Johnson and his wife were to live in a large, richly furnished third-floor apartment, which would offer Etta shelter from the continuing hostility of her mother- and sisters-in-law.

No nightspot quite like it had ever been seen in Chicago, certainly none that welcomed black patrons as well as white ones. It was always Johnson’s intention, he said, that “in my cabaret the races [would have] an opportunity to come in contact.”

Each opening-night customer received a handsome green-and-gilt-covered, thirty-two-page souvenir program that explained what it called the “Why and Wherefore” of his establishment. The Café de Champion was meant to be a headquarters for Johnson’s “many acquaintances and friends throughout the civilized world,” it explained. A lengthy tribute to his “Many Sides” attested to the champion’s wit and musicianship, his skills as swimmer and horseman, wrestler and automobile driver. A separate section proclaimed his devotion to his mother “an inspiration to every race in every clime.” There were advertisements for Johnson-related products—“The Johnson-Flynn Feature Film Co.,” “Jack Johnson Drives a Chalmers,” “Our Champion Jack Johnson Clear Havana Cigars”—alongside notices for Levee establishments run by Johnson’s sporting friends, including the Marquette Club, a “Swell Café with Private Dining Rooms for Private People,” and Roy Jones’ Casino at Wabash and Twenty-first.

At nine forty-five a great cheer went up as Johnson and his mother pulled up in his red limousine. Policemen ran interference as they made their way inside. Two minutes later, the grinning champion raised his hand and shouted to the orchestra leader, “Let ’Er Go!” just as Billy Jordan had shouted at him and Jim Jeffries to begin the big fight at Reno. “La Paloma” was the first selection, followed by the “Barcarole” from Tales of Hoffmann. But according to the Examiner, things soon heated up:

Owing to the audience cabareting down the aisles the promised cabaret show was abandoned. Lena Leanor, the “Southern Oriole,” made the audience stand on the chairs when she sang “All Night Long,” accompanied by a “modified” turkey trot (modified being placed in quotation marks so the police won’t recognize the dance).

“Although many of the daily [white] newspapers delighted in quoting the champion in ‘dis and dat,’” said the Defender, even they had been forced by the crowds attending the opening of his café to concede that “Mr. Johnson [is] the most popular man in the city of Chicago.”

Ada Smith certainly felt that way. As “Bricktop,” she would one day run a cabaret of her own in Paris that was a magnet for black and white celebrities, but in 1912 she was still just a nervous light-skinned, red-haired teenager from West Virginia, new to the Chicago black belt and working her first cabaret job as a singer and dancer in the back room of Roy Jones’s Casino. One evening Johnson dropped in to see Jones and stayed on to watch the show. He was “surrounded as always by friends, fans and hangers-on,” Brick-top remembered, and “you could feel the electricity in the air. The entertainers put a little extra into their performances, and whatever I sang must have pleased him. The ‘no entertainers at the tables’ rule was suspended for me when Roy Jones said, ‘Ada, the Champ wants you to join his party.’” Johnson was kind, attentive, and encouraging. “There were reasons why his smile was so famous,” she remembered. “It reflected the real champion, the warm, generous, impulsive, wonderful, loveable man. That smile gave him a handsomeness his looks didn’t really deserve.”

When he offered her a job at his new café, she jumped at the chance. There were eight pieces in the orchestra that played in his Pompeiian Room, she remembered, and six or seven singers took turns performing with them.

You began your song from the platform, then started down and went from table to table. At each table—there were about forty—you stopped and sang a half a chorus…. You carried a little skillet—the “kitty”—and the customers would drop money into it. It was nice to hear the tinkling sound of coins, but even nicer when the money was a bill and made no sound at all. Any time you got to the table where the Champ was sitting, you knew you were going to get a lot of that silent green money in your skillet. Big bills, too. People naturally showed off for the Champ.

So did the entertainers. Each performer had his or her own special tribute to the boss. Bricktop’s was a ragtime tune the Whitman Sisters had introduced on the black vaudeville circuit:

You do the Teddy,

and you do the Bear,

but when you do the Jack Johnson [fists up in a winsome boxer’s pose]

kid you’re there!

Whenever she sang it for him, Johnson was good for a fiver.

He was a wonderful man [said Bricktop]. I never saw him once being ordinary or vulgar. When he hit the door of the place at night, the millionaires from Lake Shore Drive and everybody else would all be screaming, “Jack come over here!” He would just stand there with his big, wonderful self and say he’d be right over. Sooner or later he’d hit all the tables, having a drink at each. He never drank anything but champagne. He cleverly covered up for his lack of education by letting other people do the talking. There was always a twinkle in his eye, as though he was saying, “This is all a funny game, isn’t it?” He wasn’t a bowing man.

Nor was he a faithful one. His old acquaintance Tad Dorgan once dropped in from San Francisco to spend the day and watched as a series of women made their way up to the private dining room where Johnson often held court. “I made it seven in twelve hours,” Dorgan told the sportswriter Al Stump, “not counting repeaters.”^*

Johnson’s attention lingered longest on two women at the café. One was Ada Banks, the club’s “star songstress,” a classically trained soprano from Texas who had toured for three seasons with the vaudeville team of Williams and Walker. “She was a good-looking, brown-skinned girl with a lovely … voice,” Bricktop remembered. “The rumors [of a romance] must have been true because she was a haughty big-timey girl who … paraded around like she was too good for us.” (The rumors were true; Banks’ husband, a dining car waiter for the Pennsylvania Railroad, would eventually sue Johnson for twenty-five thousand dollars for alienation of his wife’s affections.)

The other woman was Lucille Cameron, a pretty, blond eighteen-year-old from Minneapolis who caught Johnson’s eye when she visited the Café de Champion with a friend shortly after it opened. He put her on his payroll at one hundred dollars a week, and took her for automobile rides from which they didn’t get back till morning. He would one day claim she’d simply been his “stenographer” and “a companion to his wife,” but few believed it.

Two days after the grand opening, Johnson and his wife were arraigned before U.S. Commissioner Charles Buell for smuggling Etta’s diamond necklace into the country. “The pugilist regarded the proceedings as a joke,” reported the Chicago Examiner. “When arraigned he chewed on the end of a big black cigar and kept his straw hat on and raised his left hand to be sworn. The bailiff rushed to his side, pulled down his arm, snatched the cigar from his mouth and his hat from his head.” Johnson stopped smiling and raised his right hand. Etta looked frightened. The Johnsons were each released on a five-hundred-dollar bond. If found guilty, they faced up to two years in federal prison.

Later that evening, their ex-chauffeur Charles Brown dropped by the café. He had been called to testify before the federal grand jury as to what he knew about the smuggled necklace. When Johnson demanded to know exactly what he’d said, Brown refused to answer. He’d been sworn to secrecy, he said. The champion slapped him, and members of Johnson’s entourage kicked Brown into the street. He pressed assault charges. Johnson was arrested and bailed out again, for five thousand dollars this time.

He was still not unduly worried. The line between lawbreaking and law enforcement in Chicago was always hard to discern, and he was used to paying his way out of trouble. Every city official who had anything to do with the Levee District was on the take, and Johnson had always been willing to shoulder his share of the cost of doing business—one thousand dollars a week in his case just to keep his club open. And even though his break with George Little had damaged his relations with the political machine that ran the First Ward, he seems to have feared no one. When several thugs called on him to pass the word that their bosses thought the presence of white women in his establishment was bad for the neighborhood, he threw them down the stairs. He paid his protection money; he didn’t have to listen to anyone’s advice.

Why should he assume that federal officials would be immune to the same enticements that made city and state officials cooperative? Johnson believed that his personal charm and the power of his celebrity could win over anyone. All they had to do was to get to know him. And so one evening that summer, he arranged for a friend of his, a bail bondsman and sometime courthouse fixer named Sol Lewinsohn, to shepherd a party of six into his café. They included Assistant U.S. District Attorney Harry A. Parkin; Charles F. DeWoody, chief of the Justice Department’s Chicago office; and DeWoody’s younger brother, Wade, who happened to be in town and was eager to “see the sights” of the Levee. Johnson greeted them all warmly and, after several rounds of drinks on the house, led them upstairs to his private dining room, where a chicken dinner had been prepared by his chefs. Johnson seated himself between Parkin and Charles DeWoody. “I am going to get fixed for life now,” he said as he raised his glass to his new friends. “I surely feel as safe now as though I was home and in bed.” Lucille Cameron, not Etta, acted as his hostess that evening, and at three or so in the morning, she joined Johnson and his guests as they piled into two of his cars, headed for the lakefront, and raced each other up and down Michigan Avenue until dawn.

Johnson had not exaggerated the power of his personality, but he had underestimated the complexity of the challenge he faced from the federal government. Treasury as well as Justice handled smuggling cases like his. And while Parkin and DeWoody may have had a good time in his company, their first allegiance remained to their superiors in Washington.

The Café de Champion continued to flourish. One evening in early September a reporter for the Chicago Defender accompanied a band of five black big spenders as they wove their increasingly cheerful way down State Street, moving from one bar to the next. Their host was a prominent South Side attorney, Beauregard F. Moseley. The climax of their tour was Jack Johnson’s black-and-tan.

The Café de Champion, both on the main and second floors, was crowded to its fullest capacity with men and women of both races mixed in together and all seemed to be having the time of their lives….

Champion Jack Johnson, in an easy quiet manner, and with a mild voice, walked around … and cordially shook hands with all of his white and colored guests and before sitting down he eased up in the corner of the café reserved for the entertainers, reached for his “Bull Fiddle,” the very same fiddle he practiced on at Reno, Nev., prior to putting James J. Jeffries to sleep in that city, July 4th, 1910, and assisted the orchestra to play several lively and catchy selections, much to the great delight of his many patrons.

Jack Johnson, without any question about it, is smooth goods or a smooth article; and he knows how to get the money, or the “bacon,” as he calls it, and he is doing his part in his own way in helping to solve the “Race Problem.”

Many very beautiful pictures hang on the walls … including the life-sized picture of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, which is encased in a fine and very heavy gold frame.

Etta Johnson’s portrait gazing up in apparent adoration at her husband was an important part of the club’s décor, but she herself remained a sort of prisoner, confined to the apartment on the top floor, aware of her husband’s pursuit of other women but unable to do much about it, constantly watched as well as waited on by the two maids, Helen Simmons and Mabel Bolden, he had hired to keep her from harming herself. The death of her father had added to her sense of isolation, and she may have in part blamed herself for it.

A neighbor remembered hearing her complain that she had become a recluse and a social outcast. Her family felt itself disgraced by her. Most whites scorned her. She had grown used to that. But “even the Negroes don’t respect me,” she said. “They hate me.” She could see no way out.

On August 12, sitting alone in her room, Etta Johnson wrote a note to her mother in Brooklyn.

My dear Mother:

I am writing this and am going to have Jack put it in his safe, so if anything should happen to me there will be no hard feelings left behind me. I would send this letter to you only I know much you worry and I do not want you to know how sick I really am.

Jack has done all in his power to cure me but it is no use. Since papa’s death I have worried myself in[to] my grave. I haven’t been worrying about papa’s loss, only over some horrible dread—I don’t know what.

I want to be buried here in Chicago. Never try to take my body to Hempstead only to be a mark for curiosity-seekers—let me rest for once.

With love and always the sweetest to you,

I am your loving daughter,

Etta

She slipped the letter into an envelope, sealed it up, and locked it away.

Nearly a month later, on the morning of September 11, a furrier called at the café to say that the new winter furs Etta had ordered were ready to be tried on—five thousand dollars’ worth, including a twenty-five-hundred-dollar sealskin coat. Mrs. Johnson seemed strangely “disinterested,” her visitor remembered; she said she might come to the shop that afternoon but never turned up.

Depression had enveloped her again. Seeking to raise her spirits, her husband bought her a train ticket for a trip out west. Ed Smith’s wife was heading back to Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the evening of the twelfth to be with her tubercular daughter, who was undergoing treatment at a local sanitarium. Johnson urged Etta to go along. She had been relatively content there, away from the turmoil that always seemed to surround him. Perhaps she could be happy there again. A rest in the sunshine would do her good.

But that evening Etta suffered another attack of “nervous prostration” and said she wasn’t well enough to go. Johnson drove to the railroad station to change the tickets. When he got back to the café about ten thirty, police vans were parked at the curb and people were milling around the entrance. As he pushed his way through the crowd, someone told him something had happened to his wife.

He vaulted up the stairs.

Etta was lying on their bedroom floor in her nightdress, a revolver by her side. Her “horrible dread” had evidently overwhelmed her. There was a bullet hole in her temple. She was still breathing. Her eyes were fixed and staring, but her lips were moving soundlessly.

The distraught maids took turns telling Johnson what had happened. As soon as he had left, they said, Etta had telephoned her sister-in-law Lucy and asked her to come over. It had struck them as odd, since she and her husband’s family rarely spoke. They had helped her dress for bed. She asked them to pray with her. All three women knelt. The maids left the room. She closed and locked the door.

Bricktop was performing in the private dining room on the second floor that evening. “I was singing Sheldon Brooks’s ‘All Night Long’ when a shot rang out,” she recalled. “Everything came to a standstill in the private dining room. No one heard it on the first floor and the orchestra kept playing.”

A bartender broke down the door. Someone called the police.

Johnson followed along behind as Etta was lifted onto a stretcher. He held a big white handkerchief to his eyes. “That woman has been troubled with nervousness for two years,” he told a newspaperman as he climbed into the ambulance. “Ain’t got no more to say. I’m going to the hospital.”

Etta died at Provident Hospital at about three in the morning.

A coroner’s inquest was held at a mortuary on South State Street that afternoon. Johnson was the most important witness. He testified that he had himself sometimes felt suicidal since winning the title. He had broken down after beating Jeffries, he said—“although it has not been known generally”—and only Etta’s selfless nursing had kept him from being institutionalized. He was afraid it was that ceaseless devotion that had finally destroyed her will to live. She had tried to kill herself several times before, her father’s death had added to her unhappiness, and Johnson had hired two maids “just to prevent her from doing what she did.” Reports of trouble between him and his wife did him an injustice, he added. “I thought the world of her and she thought the world of me.”

The jury ruled Etta’s death a suicide.

   •   •   •

Later that afternoon, a reporter for the Chicago Examiner joined the throng gathered outside Johnson’s home.

Wabash Avenue [he wrote] was crowded with people, black and white, rich and poor, who were neither the friends of the living nor mourners for the dead. They were sightseers. “Well, I guess Jack’s lost his lucky horseshoe,” said a Negro, and that was typical of the sympathy he could get from his own race. Fashionable people in their automobiles switched over from Michigan Avenue, millionaires who have seen Johnson fight and now wanted to see his “knockout.”

The champion stood in an open first-floor window, gazing out at the crowd. The newspaperman made his way across the lawn to speak to him. A friend of Johnson’s had remarked that, for all her finery and jewels, Etta had been profoundly lonely. The reporter asked Johnson about it. “Yes, she was lonesome,” he answered. “We were both a little lonesome, I guess. But God, how we loved each other—and how lonesome I am now.”

“Never had Johnson looked so dark,” the reporter wrote. “He was a black man garbed in black.”

“There’s one thing I’ll never get over,” said Johnson as he stared down into the street. “She had a message for me—and I couldn’t get it. Understand that? Can’t you see how I feel? When my head was right down close to hers and I begged her to speak to me—then to see her lips tremble and twitch a little—but no message—Oh, for God’s sake go away and leave me alone.”

Motives for suicide rarely make sense to anyone but the desperate people driven to it. Even those left behind who loved and thought they knew them best never fully understand. The circumstances of Etta’s life had undoubtedly been hard. She was often betrayed and sometimes abused by her husband. She was lonely, scorned by whites and blacks alike. Everybody stared. But what else may have been at work beneath the surface—what emotional wounds and chemical disturbance helped deepen her despair and strengthen her resolve to end it all—is unknowable now.

At the time, however, a host of strangers were quite sure they understood and only too eager to offer explanations. The New York World’s account was gaudier than most, but the argument it made was echoed on editorial pages all over the country. Etta’s death had been the preordained outcome of a union between a white “girl of gentle breeding” and a “negro with … shining gold teeth and diamond-bedecked fingers.” At first, it said, she had “seemed actually unconscious of all this.”

She even publicly flaunted herself with the big, notorious negro. When she did not remain impassive before the sneers of even the painted women she encountered at cafés and racetracks and notorious motorcar roadhouses, she spiritedly returned them.

This was at first. But gradually the stings sunk to the woman’s heart. She was a woman without a race. She was on occasion even ostracized by the women in the cheap burlesque shows in which her husband punched a bag.

And the negro women were as pitiless. They were jealous of her possession of the negro hero and Croesus; they were even honestly contemptuous of her superior race….

Ostracism was the inevitable penalty of this ill-assorted marriage, as it is of marriages between white men and negro women. Political equality under the Constitution is one thing, but a degree of social equality admitting of the intermarriage of the races is impossible.

The New York Times was no friendlier to miscegenation than was the World, but Johnson’s obvious grief did elicit at least a modicum of pity from its editors.

While it cannot be said that [Johnson] will have anything like general public sympathy because his venture in miscegenation has come to an end [only] a little more dreadful than was confidently to be expected from such a violation of the social proprieties, still his apparently sincere grief over the suicide of the white woman who married him will have its effect in mitigating judgment of him. It at least shows that he is not the entirely callous animal that a Negro prize-fighter is supposed by most to be…. His display of emotion may be racial rather than personal [but] animal or not, he is not callous.

Etta’s funeral was set for noon on Saturday, September 14, at St. Marks A.M.E. church at Fifteenth Street and Wabash Avenue. Jack Curley had stepped in to make the arrangements. Thousands of curiosity seekers again surrounded the Johnson home that morning, and police had to clear a path from the front porch to the waiting hearse. The onlookers fell silent as the front door opened and six pallbearers, picked from among Johnson’s closest friends both black and white, carried the gray casket down the front steps. The champion was right behind it, his arm linked with that of Etta’s widowed mother, so distraught that she had difficulty walking on her own. Mrs. Terry, with her younger daughter, Eileen, had come in from Brooklyn the night before. “My daughter,” she explained to a reporter, “begged me not to put her out of my heart and I did not.”

Why her daughter had married Jack Johnson was a “mystery” to her, she would tell another newsman, “although Etta was never right in her mind, and I have attributed many things to that fact. And I believe her suicide came at a period, not of temporary madness, but of ultra-lucidness. I believe that for one brief moment the mental fog lifted from her, revealing the position to her in all its hideousness. In the revolt which followed, she shot herself.” She had asked Johnson to allow her to take Etta’s body home to be buried with her father, but he had refused. Etta had been his wife, he said. They had loved each other, and someday he wanted to be buried next to her.^*

Scores of cars fell in line behind the hearse, including a big touring car filled with reporters from all the Chicago dailies, and another from which a movie cameraman ground away.^†

The church was small and stifling, the scent of flowers overpowering. Johnson’s sister Jennie fainted. Jack Curley had to carry her outside. The choir sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and Etta’s own favorite anthem, “Take the Name of Jesus with You.” Ada Banks, the entertainer whose relationship with Johnson was common gossip at the Café de Champion, sang a hymn. The pastor, Reverend John H. Robinson, gently chided those among his parishioners who had questioned Etta’s devotion to her husband. “Is there anyone in this church who can be so cruel as to deny the star of hope to the weary one?” he asked. “Is there anyone who cannot let the great mantle of charity cover the call of a disquieted heart?” The black-owned Chicago Broad Ax was harsher:

Many colored women who in the past had bitterly denounced Jack Johnson for his marriage were dead anxious to occupy the seats of honor in the church … and to be ahead of everyone else during the progress of the funeral…. If these women [had] extended the hand of love, friendship and sympathy to Mrs. Johnson in her lifetime instead of belching forth indiscriminately loud slurring remarks in relating to her marriage, she might be living today.

At the end of the service the casket was opened once more so that Johnson and his mother-in-law could kiss Etta’s brow. Then it was closed and blanketed with flowers for the journey to the cemetery. HUSBAND TO ETTA, read Johnson’s floral tribute, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

The cortège moved away from the black belt toward the North Side and Graceland Cemetery, the beautifully landscaped final resting place of Chicago’s elite. Governors of Illinois and mayors of Chicago were buried there; so were many of the city’s leading merchants and industrialists: Philip Armour, Marshall Field, Potter Palmer, George Pullman. Johnson had purchased plots for himself and his wife. It was the sort of company he thought they should keep. And he had already commissioned a $3,500 stone monument to mark the spot.

As the mourners filed back to their cars from the gravesite he spoke to a reporter. “It’s over,” he said. “That’s all I can do.”

^* Memories of the newspaper fuss made over Johnson’s traveling first class on an ocean liner would become confused with reports of the sinking of the Titanic the following spring, and the legend grew that Johnson had been refused passage on the fatal voyage. Blind Lemon Jefferson performed a song about it that was later recorded by Huddie Ledbetter—Leadbelly. In it, Johnson is refused passage by the Titanic’s captain, who says, “I ain’t hauling no coal.” When Johnson hears that the ship has gone down, he dances on the dock with glee.

^* On August 25, Johnson made a second appearance at the Empress Theater to drum up interest in the bout. Among those who came up afterward to shake his hand was twenty-year-old Manuel II of Portugal, who had just lost his crown when the cities of Lisbon and Porto voted to establish a republic. Someone asked Johnson how it had felt to meet an ex-king. “Sir,” he answered, “I tried to put him at his ease…. I’ve never been hard on a guy just because he’s fallen.”

^* This last-minute decision would cost him $7,500 for breach of contract.

^† When the San Francisco promoter Sunny Jim Coffroth visited Paris in 1911, a French reporter asked him why battles between superb fighters like these drew such big crowds in France and such small ones back home. “For one simple reason,” Coffroth said: “blacks are detested in America.” McVey spent almost four years fighting in France, then three more in Australia, where Langford also spent the best part of two years. (Claude Meunier, Ring Noir, p. 37.)

^* American observers differed as to his skills. Jim Corbett, ever hopeful that Johnson would be defeated, said he believed Wells was the white man who could “dangle the scalp of the illustrious darky.” The American heavyweight Frank Moran, on the other hand, called Wells “all chin from the waist upwards” and would prove it by knocking him cold in 1915. (Dartnell, Seconds Out, p. 21.)

^* She did not entirely cramp his style, apparently. “Paris!” he told a reporter on his return to the United States. “There’s the place that makes an old man young and a young man old. Only Cook County, Chicago, has it beaten.” One evening at the Café de l’Opéra, he said, he “danced the Turkey Trot and the grizzly bear from midnight until dawn.” Both dances were officially illegal in Chicago. (Police Gazette, January 13, 1912.)

^* The record was wrong, as Johnson said, but the actual number seems to have been seven.

^* Back in the summer of 1910, one of Jack Curley’s London promotions had nearly suffered the same fate. He had brought the American wrestler, Dr. B. F. Roller, across the Atlantic to take on an Indian grappler, the Great Gama, at the Alhambra Theater. On the eve of the match, Curley remembered, he received a summons from the Foreign Office. There, a pleasant young man told him he’d allow the match to go on since it had already been announced, but henceforth “there must be no more matches between Indians and Caucasians in England. The danger that the Indian might triumph was inimical to the security of Great Britain’s hold on the subject races. It would not do to get it into the heads of these races that one of their numbers could humble a white man at anything. Did I understand? I did.”

Several “Indian potentates in … huge and colorful turbans looked on from boxes” at the theater the next evening, Curley wrote, but “the match, sad to relate, did not last long. Gama, having completed what apparently was a prayer ritual in his corner, grunted once or twice and, with a cry, leaped at Roller, hurled him to the mat, flattened him …, and broke three of his ribs.” (Curley, “Memoirs.”)

^* Morris stayed in the game for thirteen years, derided sometimes as the “Sapulpa Bleeder.” He won more fights than he lost—even beating Jim Flynn twice in 1914—but he also served as a hapless name “opponent” for up-and-coming youngsters like Jack Dempsey, who took just fourteen seconds to knock him out in 1918.

^* One of those who worked with him during the hot afternoon sparring sessions was a very young Harry Wills. “I was still growing,” Wills remembered, “but I already had a right hand to the body that I thought I could hit anybody with. I was working with Johnson one day and sure enough, I nailed him…. I got cocky and in the next round I tried the same thing again. Old Jack reached down and caught my fist like you catch a ball and grinned at his wife who was sitting at the ringside.”

^* He canceled a similar engagement in Albuquerque when no hotel in that town would give him a room.

^* A few days before the bout, Tommy Ryan had suddenly walked out of the Flynn camp, telling the press only that the challenger was overweight and sure to lose. Curley had then explained the embarrassment away by saying that Flynn had found Ryan too dictatorial. But after the fight, Ryan offered a fuller explanation: “If ever a man deliberately trained to fight a foul fight…, Jim Flynn was that man. You have heard the stories about Flynn’s partners being disabled? Well, they were disabled through the same sort of thing as Flynn attempted to pull on Johnson. He practiced butting and fouling, and it was a surprise to me that he did not bite Johnson when he got into the ring.” (Boxing August 3, 1912.)

^* In the end, no one would make money from the motion pictures Naughton and Kelly watched that day. On July 31, Congress passed a law barring the interstate shipment of it and all other prizefight films. The bill, sparked by films of the Johnson-Jeffries bout, had languished on the Hill for two years until the prospect of the Johnson-Flynn contest breathed new life into it. The notion that the American public was about to see yet another film of a black man battering a white one was more than most congressmen could endure. “No man descended from the old Saxon race can look upon that kind of contest without abhorrence and disgust,” Congressman S. A. Roddenberry of Georgia said on the House floor. “I call attention to the fact that the recent prize-fight which was had in New Mexico presented, perhaps, the grossest instance of base fraud and bogus effort at a fair fight between a Caucasian brute and an African biped beast that has ever taken place.”

^† Following the Flynn bout, Johnson was reported to have asked his old friend Rube Foster, now managing the Chicago American Giants, if he could try out for first base. Foster invited him to take morning batting practice to see what he could do. No one knows whether Johnson ever turned up. (James A. Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. New York, 1994, p. 436.)

^* Also according to Stump, a reporter once asked Johnson for the secret of his staying power. “Eat jellied eels,” the champion answered with as straight a face as he could manage, “and think distant thoughts.” (Stump, “The Rowdy Reign of the Black Avenger.”)

^* It was a decision for which Mrs. Terry would never forgive him. Nor would she ever understand what Etta had seen in him.

^† Within hours of Etta’s death, the Pekin Theater had begun promising to show exclusive film of her funeral. Johnson’s friend Bob Motts had died, and the new white owners of the Pekin thought they would make a killing. Their crew captured seven thousand feet of film of the cortège. Johnson was furious. “This exhibition,” he said, “which is unauthorized by me, may cause the impression to go abroad that I am profiting financially from the pictures. I am going to fight hard against anyone who tries to show the pictures.” Before the film could be processed, Johnson obtained a restraining order against showing it, then personally called on the chief of police to make sure nothing got onto the screen. (Chicago Defender, September 21, 1912.)