Sugar wasn’t the only notable Harlemite with his marriage on the rocks. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was also experiencing marital woes. His marriage to pianist/vocalist Hazel Scott ended in a Mexican divorce, and Powell wasted no time tying the knot again in Puerto Rico with Yvette Diago, his twenty-nine-year-old Puerto Rican secretary. Now Harlemites had some juicy gossip to replace all the fading hoopla over the visit Fidel Castro had made in September.
Still, for many residents, such as Maya Angelou, it would take years to erase that memory. In her book The Heart of a Woman, the famed poet captured the moment when Castro embraced Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev on the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, his metal, made-in-Moscow teeth bared for all to see. “It was an ole and hallelujah time for the people of Harlem,” she wrote. A celebration for Harlem was a propaganda defeat for the U.S. State Department. Another witness to Castro’s stay in Harlem at the Theresa Hotel was attorney Conrad Lynn. He recalled that “crowds of black people stood outside the Theresa night and day, and when members of the delegation walked the streets of the ghetto they were followed by admiring throngs. Blacks on the street absorbed more political education on these occasions than they had from any lesson since the Great Depression.”1
All the hullabaloo about Castro, who had outlawed professional boxing in Cuba, and his visit to Harlem were of little consequence to boxing fans. They were eager to see if the Sugar man could whip Fullmer again. At stake was Fullmer’s National Boxing Association crown—Pender held the world title at that weight. Sugar was promised 20 percent of everything. The deal was sweetened considerably when Sugar was told the fight would take place on December 3, 1960, in the new Sports Arena in Los Angeles. This venue would put him near Millie, and a long way from Edna Mae. The two women had met in a supermarket during one of Millie’s visits to New York. Millie was with Sugar’s mother when Edna Mae ran into them. “I thought she was certainly as lovely as so many others that had preceded her were,” she said of Millie. “I felt no malice. I knew I was over whatever battered esteem that had prompted my incredible martyrdom…I felt free.”
And Sugar was free to carouse as much as he desired now; his separation from Edna Mae had become official. While training for the fight, he stayed in the desert near San Jacinto. He invited Millie and one of her girlfriends from San Francisco to spend the weekend at the camp with him and his team of handlers and trainers. Millie and her girlfriend slept in the room with Sugar, but as he related: “With me in training, they were safer than they would have been in a monastery.” Apparently, a little sexual exercise to relieve the tension was not ordered by his manager, as he had several times before.
Sugar wasn’t aware until late the following morning that one night that weekend, in the early hours before dawn, a prowler had been outside his cabin. It was Millie’s ex-boyfriend, spying on them. He had come in the cabin and asked Millie to return with him, but she’d refused. Sugar asked her why she didn’t wake him, and she explained that to have done so might have caused more trouble. Infuriated by the incident, Sugar fumed several minutes before his manager stepped in and told him to save the anger for Fullmer.
Finally, the day of the fight arrived—somewhat anticlimactically. For after fifteen rounds of exchanging punishing blows, Sugar and Fullmer saw the bout end in a draw. Sugar’s thirty-nine-year-old body was stretched to the limit, and his quest for a sixth championship had gone for naught. Throughout the contest, Fullmer was wary of the left hook that had flattened him in Chicago. He kept his right forearm high to protect his jaw from a left hook or any other “secret” weapon Sugar might deliver. But there was to be no secret punch. Sugar’s disgust with himself was mitigated somewhat by a fifty-thousand-dollar payday, part of which he spent while he and Millie celebrated.
Celebrate they did, but Sugar’s temper put a damper on the fun. Not long into their relationship, Sugar had begun to slap Millie around. According to Edna Mae, it happened with enough frequency that Sugar’s mother had to step in on at least one occasion to help contain his rage. Edna Mae recounted several other instances in which Millie was apparently assaulted by Sugar, so badly that she was seen in a photo wearing a cast on her arm necessitated by a blow from Sugar, Edna Mae said. The beatings occurred with such regularity that Millie begged Sugar to see a counselor. She even volunteered to stay in the hospital with him if he would seek treatment. Still the battering continued, and there were snide remarks from a few close associates that Millie was simply his latest punching bag and sparring partner as he prepared for yet another tangle with Fullmer.
In his autobiography, Sugar has a long chapter called “The Woman in White.” Separated from Edna Mae and with Millie in California, he was free for anything fancy, and that fancy came in the form of a beautiful white woman he called Beverly, but who several informants believe was a French actress, either Denise Darcel or Martine Carol.2 Darcel’s bio lists only two films of any note—Vera Cruz, starring Burt Lancaster, and Dangerous When Wet, featuring swimmer Esther Williams. Her roles were as brief as Sugar’s would be when he performed in a series of B flicks. Like Sugar, she would also be a mystery guest on the popular television game show What’s My Line.
At a time when his boxing career was in great jeopardy, when his debt was mounting and his personal life in disarray, Sugar began a torrid affair with this lover, who toward the end of their affair was insisting on matrimony. But Sugar lectured her on what that would mean to his current quest for the championship, and do to them as a couple. “Everybody would beat you down, and beat me down too,” he pleaded. She quickly countered his fears of an interracial marriage. “But other prominent Negro men have married white women—Sammy Davis, Harry Belafonte.” His reply was: “They’re not Sugar Ray Robinson.” After exhausting her stock of feminine charms, “Beverly” finally gave up, and literally drove off into the sunset.
It could have been Martine Carol. Carol was born Maryse Mourer, the name she used early in her stage career. After some experience on the French stage she debuted on screen in 1943, working her way up to starring roles by 1948. It was reported that she attempted suicide in 1947 by jumping into the Seine River. A voluptuous blonde, she was France’s biggest box-office attraction in the early fifties, occasionally appearing seminude. With the rise of Brigitte Bardot, she was overshadowed as a sex symbol, and her career declined in the late ’50s. Carol attempted without success to revive her popularity in international films, but died of a heart attack in 1967 at forty-five.
Sugar’s affair with Beverly was over by early 1961, at a time when there was an increase in black pride and awareness, and when he might have been ridiculed for being associated with a white woman.
The date for the rematch with Fullmer also meant dates with Millie, since the fight would take place in the West—this time in Las Vegas. One week before the fight, Sugar checked into the Dunes Hotel on the neon-lit strip. He wanted Millie to see his new Lincoln Continental, which was being driven to the Coast by one of his friends, Kelly Howard. Howard also said that he often was a “beard,” or front, for Sugar’s trysts when they stayed at a hotel. “I would get a room under my name and Sugar would use it to meet his ladies.”3
Though, for the most part, he was impervious to the lure of the casinos, he was a sucker for the nightclubs, especially when the likes of New Orleans trumpeter Al Hirt, Nat “King” Cole, and Sammy Davis, Jr., were among the headliners. He was extremely excited to learn that his close friend King Cole had an engagement at the Sands. At that time he was an honorary member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, who were in Vegas celebrating JFK’s election. Each night Sugar was there in the audience for Cole, and the singer returned the favor by showing up each afternoon to witness Sugar in the final stages of his training in a makeshift ring set up in the lobby of the Dunes.
Things were moving along quite smoothly for Sugar and his coterie until Dr. Joseph C. Elia, chairman of the Nevada Boxing Commission, who had pulled the strings to get Sugar the title shot with Fullmer, suddenly resigned after severe discord with his fellow commissioners. This meant that all the promises he had made to Sugar about reduced costs on hotel accommodations for the large contingent of African Americans slated to arrive to see the fight could not be met. Even worse, Dr. Elia’s resignation left Sugar at the mercy of a local boxing promoter, Norman Rothschild. Sugar remembered Rothschild as a promoter from Syracuse who had handled some of Basilio’s fights. “Any friend of Basilio was not a friend of mine,” Sugar said.
Compounding this dilemma, another person associated with the fight had siphoned money from sixteen ringside seats, selling the $40 tickets for $1,000 each. This person told Sugar the profit, $960, would go to Sugar’s favorite charity. “You’re playing with my money,” Sugar fumed. He insisted that since he was supposed to get 25 percent of the gate, and sixteen tickets had been sold for a total of $16,000, he had $4,000 coming.
There was another problem that had to be resolved. Sugar discovered that the ring was smaller than the regulation-size twenty square feet; it was sixteen feet and six inches. Moreover, the padding was too soft and thus an advantage for the plodding, slower Fullmer. Sugar relied on his speed, his ability to bounce around the ring—the larger the ring, the more room he had to roam. Yet another snag occurred when Sugar was told that they would not use the six-ounce gloves he’d expected. He had hoped for the smaller gloves in order to deliver that patented left hook that had dropped Fullmer for the full count in May 1957.
The prefight contention between Sugar and Fullmer almost ended with a laugh when they both wanted to wear white trunks, a choice belonging to Fullmer, the champ. Rothschild blurted that they both could wear white trunks. But a television producer yelled that wouldn’t do. “Nobody will be able to identify them.” Sugar and Fullmer looked at each other, both trying not to laugh. But Sugar’s glee was short-lived. The next day a far more serious obstacle jeopardized the fight. The promoters wanted to delay the bout by a day so that it could be shown in South America. Once again Sugar was upset, realizing that such an arrangement would cut into the movie rights as far as South America was concerned. “The fight’s off,” Sugar told the promoters. To coax Sugar to their point of view, the promoters called Governor Grant Sawyer in Carson City. Sugar then spoke to the governor and explained the situation. Not only was he unhappy with the size of the ring and other details, but the promoters had also hired a referee who Sugar felt would not help his cause. “If I can get you a twenty-foot ring, will you fight?” the governor asked. Sugar said he would.
Things had been bad outside the ring for Sugar, but they were no better inside the ring against an aggressive Fullmer. The fight went the distance, with Sugar’s face bruised and bashed almost as bad as it had been after the fights with Randy Turpin in the summer and fall of 1951. Fullmer got the verdict and Sugar left the arena physically and pridefully hurt. During the bruising third round, Sugar had taken more consecutive powerful blows than at any other time in his career.
Later, he found out that the ring had not been twenty feet after all. “The tape was at the twenty-foot mark,” Sugar recalled, “but three feet had sheared out of the tape, and the two ends had been soldered together to fool George [Gainford] on purpose.” Only in Las Vegas, Sugar exhaled.
There was comfort in the presence of Millie and some compensation in the check for nearly $85,000. Still, would this be Sugar’s last title match? The night after the fight Sugar talked to Milton Gross of the New York Post. “He was still in bed,” Gross reported. “His body still ached from the beating. His face seemed drained. He left me with the impression that nothing could coax him back into the ring again. But a man who lives the princely kind of life Sugar has must feed his fancy and fill his ego. There is more than one kind of hunger, but there is only one place where Robinson can appease it.”4
Sugar must have questioned himself at this time about the limits of the human body and how much punishment he could take. According to Dr. Ira Casson, an expert on boxing and brain damage, symptoms of brain damage “usually begin near or shortly after the end of a boxer’s career. On occasion they are first noticed after a particularly hard bout. Symptoms develop an average of sixteen years after beginning the sport, although some cases have occurred as early as six years after becoming a boxer. Symptoms have been reported in boxers as young as twenty-five years of age. Although the disorder has been reported in amateurs, it is more common in professionals. It can occur in all weight classes but is seen most often in the heavier divisions, and champion boxers run as much risk of sustaining chronic brain injury as less skilled journeymen.”
Sugar was no longer the resourceful and resilient young man of twenty-five, when he could laugh off a series of hard punches, answering them with his arsenal of blows. Repeated thuds against his head must have left some concussive damage. Edna Mae wrote that she began to notice the effect the punches were having on his memory and moods. If Sugar needed any warning signs, all he had to do was to remember what had happened to his idols, particularly Henry Armstrong. He had stayed in the ring far longer than he should have, practically battered into dementia. But with his usual bravado, Sugar shrugged off any notion of mental or physical decline. What he couldn’t shake off was a blow to the inner heart, and Edna Mae was about to deliver one.