By spring, Sugar was once more in Europe, and once again back with Edna Mae. On this trip he had an even larger troupe than before. Sugar, the middleweight champ (he had to relinquish his welterweight title because it became too difficult to make the weight), was shopping for fresh adversaries. His favorite promoter, Charlie Michaelis, had scheduled fights that would take him across the Continent, including a bout in England.
While the Toast of Harlem was in Paris, the Toast of Paris was in Harlem. May 20, 1951, was Josephine Baker Day in Harlem, and the chanteuse/dancer rode at the front of a long motorcade throwing kisses to a crowd of cheering fans—estimated at one hundred thousand—who lined the streets, braving a gloomy wet Sunday. The police convoy had a hard time keeping a gaggle of admiring kids from leaping onto her car. When the caravan completed its run, the festivities continued at the Golden Gate Ballroom, where diplomat Ralph Bunche, a recent Nobel Prize winner, presented Baker with an award for her work against prejudice in the theater. The daylong celebration concluded that evening at the newly reopened Savoy Ballroom. Throughout the day, former dancer and later to be the first New York state assemblywoman, Bessie Buchanan—who was also the wife of the owner of the club, Charlie Buchanan—was Baker’s personal escort (and rumored to be her ex-lover), making sure everything went off as planned.1
Comedian Timmie Rogers, songstress Thelma Carpenter, Duke Ellington, Billy Daniels, Juanita Hall, and the Whites—Walter and Poppy—were among the famous entertainers and political leaders who dropped what they were doing to come and honor “La Baker.” The eighteen-hour-long celebration was sponsored by the New York branch of the NAACP, and Baker went nonstop “from the moment she left the Statler Hotel in Boston until she went to bed in her suite at the Theresa that night.”2
On May 21, Sugar arrived in Paris to fight Kid Marcel, the French welterweight champion, who had put on extra weight for the match. Sugar was welcomed by a massive turnout. The French cheered him lustily, many of them thanking him for beating LaMotta, who had beaten their champion, Marcel Cerdan. Later, with the Kid Marcel fight behind him, Sugar caused quite a stir at a reception when he kissed the wife of the president of France, twice on each cheek. At first, the action stunned the upper crust who’d witnessed Sugar’s goodwill gesture. But they, like the first lady, Madame Vincent Auriol, quickly warmed to the occasion, and applauded, particularly after the champion placed a check for ten thousand dollars from the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research in her hands. Some of the dignitaries at the reception, which was held in a gilded salon near the Arc de Triomphe, were a bit put off because of Sugar’s late arrival. “I got lost in traffic,” Sugar apologized after stepping from his pink Cadillac wearing, according to him, a pink tie, a neat gray suit, and a gleaming white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Michaelis had imposed only one condition on Sugar’s sojourn—that he bring his Cadillac this time. After Sugar’s speech, a crush of grave old men and women with diamonds glittering from every part of their personages pushed to meet him.3
A few weeks after Sugar’s glorious reception and his knockout of Marcel in the fifth round, things took a turn for the worse: He was asked to leave Paris’s luxurious St. Cloud Country Club at the request of members. Sugar felt the request to bar him from the links and a few rounds of golf had been made by American members of the exclusive club. “I was told we could only play in the mornings, when not many golfers are on the course,” Sugar told the press. “Finally, they asked both myself and two friends to leave.” The club’s manager said the exclusion was a result of Sugar’s violation of a rule that permitted nonmembers to play only three times every six months, and only on a member’s invitation. Apparently some members became disgruntled when they noticed that Sugar was bringing along his friends with him. If the specter of racism entered Sugar’s mind, he never expressed it.4
Extremely hurt by his treatment at the club, Sugar packed his golf clubs and headed for Italy for a scheduled warm-up bout with Cyrille Delannoit in Turin, Italy, before meeting Randy Turpin in England for the biggest match of the tour. Sugar easily bested Delannoit, knocking him to the canvas to stay in the third round. This provided some solace for Sugar and his wife, who two days earlier had reported to the police that her watch and diamond ring, together valued at seventy-five hundred dollars, were missing. They could not say if the items had been stolen or lost.5 A greater loss was awaiting them in London.
In Randy Turpin, the black Englishman and former bricklayer, Sugar found more than he bargained for. He was hoping it wouldn’t be a repeat of the fiasco that had occurred in Germany two weeks earlier against Gerhard Hecht, when he had been disqualified for landing a blow to Hecht’s kidney area. (Later the commission reversed its ruling and called it a “no-decision.”) The West Berlin fans were so upset by the outcome that they began hurling bottles into the ring, one narrowly missing Sugar’s head. Sugar and his crew had to scramble for their lives.
There were no bottles raining down on them in London, just Randy Turpin’s unorthodox style, his way of yanking his head back to avoid a punch. One would have thought that Sugar would have little trouble with Turpin, since Turpin had lost to Jean Stock and Sugar had bopped Stock in two rounds. But that logic doesn’t always apply in boxing. One fighter may have less difficulty with a puncher than with a skilled boxer. Other factors, such as one’s psychological disposition or physical preparation, or one’s tactics, might be the right ingredient against one fighter and absolutely wrong against another. In Sugar’s case, it was mainly a lack of preparation; Turpin’s awkward style did baffle Sugar.
Photographer Gordon Parks, sent to cover the highly publicized fight for Life magazine, recalled that Sugar was not mentally or physically ready for such a grueling slugfest. “There were no workouts,” Parks said. “Sugar Ray played at golf through the days, and at card tables late into the nights.” Meanwhile, Turpin, “a dockside brawler,” trained like a man possessed. He certainly was possessed with a determination to take the title, while Sugar took long snoozes, worked the links, and upped the ante at frequent poker sessions that went on to the wee small hours of the morning. Moreover, his popularity, the constant badgering from fans, had made it impossible for him to find quiet lodging in the heart of London. Gainford found him and Edna Mae a room over a pub in the suburbs, where it was a bedlam of unbroken noise after midnight. Consequently, when Sugar wanted to get some rest the mayhem below kept him awake. He was irritable, rest-broken, and unprepared to fight even a lesser talent than Turpin.
The fight took place on July 10, 1951, and it was going Sugar’s way until the sixth round, when Turpin miraculously recovered from a sound pounding to deliver some of his own punishment. By the last rounds—it would go fifteen—Sugar was in trouble; Parks saw it, and when he looked across the arena and saw Edna Mae’s face, he knew she saw it too. At last, when Turpin’s hand was raised declaring him the winner, the roar shook the stadium. Sugar’s eye was so badly damaged that Dr. Vincent Nardiello, who had come over for the fight, decided to stitch it right in the dressing room rather than back at the hotel. It took eight stitches to close the gash, and according to Edna Mae, it was done without any painkillers, other than a couple of aspirins. “Sugar didn’t return to his hotel that night,” Parks recounted in his memoir, Voices in the Mirror. “He didn’t want to see the reporters, the crowds, Edna Mae, or anyone else. The two of us slipped out a side door and I found a cheap obscure hotel near the stadium. Early the next morning the two of us took the boat train to Paris. The pink Cadillac, Sugar Ray’s wife, and the fifteen-man entourage would come later. Thankfully no one on the train recognized him in the dark glasses and the slouched hat lowered over his forehead. ‘I’ll kill him the next time. So help me I’ll kill him,’ Sugar said over and over again.”
Parks wrote nothing about their time in Paris or France, particularly on the Riviera. Dr. Nardiello had advised Sugar to soak up as much sun as possible to help the healing of the tear above his eye—and to avoid the casinos. Telling Sugar to stay away from the gambling tables was akin to throwing a rabbit into a cabbage patch and expecting him not to eat until he bloats. “Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck, the movie producers, were vacationing there then [in Cannes],” Sugar related in an article he wrote for London’s Sunday Express. “The three of us were regulars in the baccarat game. We’d put up about a thousand dollars apiece every night and we were the bankers. We lost so much that they reserved our seats. They wouldn’t let anyone play until we got there.”6
Despite his surprising loss to Turpin, the son of a British Guiana soldier and an Englishwoman, Sugar and his horde were loudly cheered upon their return to the States on the French liner Liberté. Hundreds turned out for ceremonies at City Hall and in Harlem to give him a hero’s welcome. “I promise you that on September twelfth I’ll do my sincere utmost to again bring the middleweight championship back to America,” Sugar told a throng of well-wishers after Mayor Vincent Impellitteri’s introduction. He made no excuses for his defeat, brushing aside an insinuation that his diet might have been to blame. “Turpin was eating the same kind of food,” he said, promising not to take it easy in the early rounds of the rematch as he had done in London. “It’ll be a different story next time.” Incredibly, in his eleven years of professional boxing, this was only the second loss Sugar had ever suffered, and the first to a black man.
Sugar’s speech was followed by remarks from newscaster and columnist Walter Winchell, who praised him for his numerous contributions to the Runyon cancer campaign, to which he had donated nearly forty-seven thousand dollars in proceeds from various bouts. At City Hall, the mayor presented him with a scroll citing him as one “whose interest in the welfare of his fellow human beings, as manifested in his varied activities as ambassador at large for the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund for Cancer Research, had secured the heartfelt appreciation of the people of the City of New York.” Sugar stood next to his mother, while Edna Mae stood next to the mayor as they listened to music provided by the Police Department Band and a serenade by the Police Athletic League Glee Club.7
A similar outpouring of love and affection greeted Sugar and his group when they reached Harlem, accompanied by an eighteen-car motorcade. Following the usual speeches and accolades, Sugar was asked about rumors that he was going to be making movies. Those rumors were almost five years old by now. Ever since his first fight with LaMotta, there had been overtures from producers seeking to get the photogenic Sugar in films. In fact, both he and Edna Mae were courted to star in a love story that would be a black version of Body and Soul, made famous by John Garfield. But Sugar had been doing so well in the ring, with such lucrative contracts, that the thought of being in movies was brushed aside. However, now that his popularity had increased and there was the promise of more money than before, Sugar apparently changed his mind. Gainford responded that his fighter had agreed to make a couple of films, but only after he had regained the crown. When that was accomplished, he continued, Sugar would appear in Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute, to be filmed in Paris, with another project planned for Rome. Gainford added that Edna Mae had also been offered roles. If Sartre’s play was ever made into a film, it did not include Sugar, although the combination of Sugar and Sartre might have had some special appeal. But make-believe was one thing Sugar didn’t have too much time for; he had to focus on the dangerous threat Turpin represented.
The rematch was held two months later, on September 12 at the Polo Grounds in Harlem. Two hours before the fight, the tickets were sold out. More than sixty-one thousand spectators crammed into the stadium, including such luminaries at ringside as Toots Schor, Joe DiMaggio, Walter Winchell, and even General Douglas MacArthur, who had just been relieved of his command in Korea.
Over the first nine rounds of the fight, Sugar was slightly ahead on points, but not in command, as he usually was. In the tenth, a head butt from Turpin opened a deep gash over Sugar’s left eye. This riled Sugar; there is nothing like the sight, smell, and taste of blood to motivate a top fighter. “It was either do or die,” he said after the fight. He went after Turpin savagely, pelting him with a series of combinations that left him bewildered. Then came a perfectly timed right cross, and Turpin went down, but he was up at the count of nine. The crowd unleashed a bedlam of cheers and squeals that carried all the way to Lido Pool, where Sugar had met Edna Mae. The roar alone was enough to quell Turpin, who was unable to protect himself anymore. In twenty-five seconds, Sugar hit Turpin with thirty-one punches. At the 2:52 mark, referee Ruby Goldstein stopped the fight and Sugar was once more at the top of the heap, the cream of the crop.
His mother had been a prophetess—she had told Sugar he would win it in the tenth round. “There has seldom been a more thrilling round than the tenth in that Turpin fight,” Jimmy Cannon, the great sportswriter, reflected several years later. “There was a gash over Robinson’s eye. The blood ran in a rill down his face. Most fighters would have stalled until the round closed, so that the crude surgeons in the corner could attempt to close the cut. But Robinson proved his greatness by turning it on and he punched until the referee ended the fight.”8
Turpin felt he had been robbed—that Goldstein had stopped the fight too soon. “I felt that Sugar was losing on points,” he told a reporter. “Everything was going just as I planned it. I knew that I was outboxing him, especially when I cut his left eye wide open. He looked hurt and worried.”9
Turpin said that when the referee halted the match, he was just “clearing the fog out my head” and waiting for the end of the round, just eight seconds away.
There would never be a third bout for Turpin to attempt to prove his superiority.
On September 13, 1951, a day after Sugar had regained his middleweight crown from Randy Turpin, thousands of Harlemites jammed the streets in and around the Theresa Hotel, waiting for their hero to appear on the second-floor balcony. Not since Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in the first round in June 1938 had there been such a massive demonstration by boxing fans on the streets of Harlem. Boxing historians often talk about the eruptions of joy in the black community when heavyweight champion Jack Johnson celebrated Independence Day by manhandling Jim Jeffries, “The Great White Hope,” in Reno, Nevada, in 1910, or how jubilant the Senegalese immigrants in Paris were the evening the colorful, flamboyant Battling Siki blitzed Georges Carpentier for the light heavyweight championship in 1923, but those celebrations couldn’t have been any more jubilant, than the one up and down 125th Street, where traffic came to a standstill. The police estimated the Harlem crowd at more than ten thousand frantic residents, all of them dancing and singing, and screaming for Sugar to appear.
“Down at my café,” Sugar said, “about thirty blocks from the Polo Grounds, most of the rounds were on me that night. By the time I got there, there wasn’t anyplace to park for blocks, except for the spot reserved in front for my flamingo Cadillac. That was Cadillac Night on Seventh Avenue. It looked like an assembly line.”10 Bop singer Babs Gonzales, then living in a kitchenette at Hamilton Terrace, said of the Cadillacs, “There were hogs everywhere.”
“After Sugar had regained his title from Randy Turpin,” Edna Mae said of her and Sugar, “we were proud and happy.” The first thing they did was to take a break from the city and venture south to Miami. This was an opportunity to give Sugar’s torn and battered eye a chance to heal, and for him to rest uninterrupted by friends and acquaintances. It also put him in the tender love and care of Lucia, Edna Mae’s grandmother, who applied effective home remedies to Sugar’s swollen eye. “We could afford to take a vacation because our enterprises were doing more business, on a consistent basis, than any other spot in our area…We were enjoying life in our apartment in Harlem…Ray had hired Mr. Wilfred Springer (the real estate agent who had sold him his mother’s first home) as a business associate in whom he placed great trust and greater responsibility. Mike Headley, a former musician, was made manager of the bar, and an old friend of mine was also hired, Mr. Herman Du Bois, as an alternate manager and chargé d’affaires. They all seemed to be doing credible jobs. Harlem was also growing, and black property owners; proprietors of good, thriving business ventures; and leaders in civic and community projects were universally prospering.” Little did they know that someone among those they counted as friends would betray them.
Though the sojourn in Miami lasted only a couple of weeks—Edna Mae had to get back in order to prepare for a fashion show-cum-cabaret in Washington, D.C., at the Lincoln Colonnade on October 14—the good times continued for the couple and “baby Ray.” Christmas, 1951 was almost ideal, the only disappointment being Joe Louis’s loss to Rocky Marciano in October. It was then that Sugar promised himself he would never end up like his friend. Louis had squandered a fortune and was forced to box even after he had lost his great skills in order to pay debts he owed Uncle Sam. Sugar vowed that once he retired that would be it; there’d be no coming back like Louis, to be beaten and embarrassed.
The new year dawned with good news for Sugar: Sport magazine had named him its Man of the Year. Along with the plethora of plaques, citations, and trophies that preceded and followed this honor, he enjoyed the pride of seeing his businesses booming. There was cash enough now for him to buy his mother a new house in Riverdale near where she used to live; he and Edna Mae moved in on 248th Street when she moved out. For the next several months, Sugar broke in his new home, supervised his operations, and tried to be a good husband and father.
Sugar and Edna Mae’s dream house commanded the cover story of the September 1953 issue of Ebony magazine. The house was an imposing ten-room, four-story structure with a two-car garage built into the ground level. Though lavishly decorated and plush, the home was by no means ostentatious, the article reported. “Equipped with a keen business sense, Ray kept his expenditures well in hand so that the estimates of his total costs did not exceed fifty thousand dollars—and the bulk of this was spent for remodeling, decorating, and furnishings.” Dominating the huge living room was a sectional sofa designed by Edna Mae, complemented by a marble-topped circular coffee table imported from Italy. Sprawled here and there were ten thousand dollars’ worth of fine rugs and carpets.
There were four toilets, four television sets, and an intercom system so they could talk to each other in the vast house. A solarium was furnished with tropical furniture made of bamboo, and matchstick blinds shaded the expansive windows. Spread over the baby grand Steinway piano, which had been in the house since 1948, was a shawl that had been in Edna Mae’s family for four generations.
It was a commodious love nest Edna Mae had obviously conceived to curb Sugar’s wanderlust, his need to rove away from home and find comfort in someone else’s arms.
“Moving to Riverdale was great for us, and I was so happy to have so much beauty surrounding us and the direction of our lives taking on such positive dimensions,” Edna Mae enthused in her memoir. “We met so many fine residents of the area who involved themselves into all phases of decent life and humanitarian pursuits. Andrea Simon of Simon & Schuster [one neighbor] was my introduction into the most satisfying relationship.” Indeed, the Simons would play a decisive role in breaking down some of the racial barriers that normally kept blacks from living in the vicinity.
The house’s showpiece, a seven-foot-diameter circular bed with a mirror above, occupied the master bedroom. Once it was over between them, this bed (minus the mirror) would be one of several things Edna Mae retained until her death in 2002.