Sugar must have been somewhere between London (where he lost a decision to Terry Downes) and Vienna (where he was scheduled to fight Diego Infantes on October 17) when he heard the news. It would be weeks before he learned the details of the divorce—the grounds and other incidentals. A year before, when Edna Mae had been granted a legal separation, she was given custody of their child and Sugar was ordered to pay her two hundred dollars each week, maintain a checking account with a balance of at least six hundred dollars for household expenses, and make a number of other payments as well, based upon a percentage of his overall earnings. All these provisions remained in place in the final divorce settlement, and Sugar was also stuck with all of Edna Mae’s legal fees, which totaled twenty-five hundred dollars. In the succeeding years she would be in and out of court trying to get her delinquent ex-husband to fulfill his obligations.
Another gnawing financial matter involved his agent, Joe Glaser. Glaser had brought nearly a $100,000 judgment against him based on Sugar’s failure to pay off a loan. According to Glaser’s attorney, Emil K. Ellis, Sugar had borrowed the money and used his property as collateral. Sugar’s real estate firm, R.G.S. Realty Corporation, had defaulted in its payment on the mortgage by failing to meet installments that were due in July 1959. A foreclosure order was signed in Supreme Court in March 1962, and three of Sugar’s buildings on Seventh Avenue had to be auctioned off in order to pay the debt. “Tenants living in the buildings, who have been paying rents to the receiver, attorney Harold Lipton, for several months, were notified…of the pending foreclosure sale to satisfy the judgment with costs and expenses.”1 Sugar had apparently embarked for Europe with this among the other burdens on his mind.
Among Sugar’s troubling concerns, as he and Millie toured Vienna, was how to propose to her. They had become officially engaged on their way to Lyon. His victory over Infantes, whom he’d sent to the canvas for good in the second round, reassured Sugar and boosted his flagging confidence after he had for the first time in his brilliant career suffered back-to-back losses, to Phil Moyer in Los Angeles and Terry Downes in London. Oddly, Sugar didn’t make an appearance in Paris during this trip. Months before he’d begun to plan this European tour, his resourceful promoter there, Charlie Michaelis, was drumming up a possible match for him with an opponent to be chosen by a poll and fought in Paris. The poll ran for weeks in a French paper, and did a good job of inflaming passions. There seemed to be a definite thirst for Sugar to return, no matter who would be selected to fight him. But nothing much came of this publicity stunt, and Sugar’s next fight in France was eventually in Lyon.
In Lyon, on November 10, he knocked out Georges Estatoff in the sixth round. But Sugar’s European conquests barely got a mention in the press, even in boxing magazines that had followed his movements like a bird dog. As Sugar’s star began to wane, many boxing pundits turned their attention to other developments on the boxing horizon, in the heavyweight division. In one thudding round and after one thunderous punch in Chicago at Comiskey Park, Floyd Patterson was on his back as his conqueror, Sonny Liston, pranced and glowered nearby. It had taken the powerful Liston only 122 seconds to do away with Patterson, who was outweighed by more than twenty-five pounds. Two months later, on November 15, before more than 16,000 spectators at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles, twenty-
year-old Cassius Clay smashed forty-eight-year-old Archie Moore with such menace and mayhem that the referee had to step in and call a halt to the evisceration. For once the cobra had bested the mongoose. The audacious Clay also had some fighting words for Liston, who was at ringside: “You go eight seconds with me and I’ll give you the fight.” The die was cast, the gauntlet thrown, and the pretty boy from Kentucky was ready to do some “bear hunting.”
Freed from Sugar, Edna Mae returned from Mexico to face an avalanche of bills. The house note was overdue, the money she had expected each Friday as part of the divorce settlement had not come, and during a cold spell that gripped the city, there was no oil. When she called the oil company to find out why none had been delivered, she was told that the bill had not been paid. “I had to call my grandmother and have her send me money for house and living expenses,” Edna Mae recorded in her notes. Ray II recalled how outdone his mother was about not being able to pay the bills and take care of herself. “One day my mother went to a major department store to make a purchase and was told that a stop had been placed on her credit card. Soon, even her charge cards at the food store were stopped; everything now had to be C.O.D.,” he said.
Added to these bills, the landscaper wanted his back payment before he would do any more work around the house, and a sundry of other invoices jammed her mailbox. She had no money to defray any of them. In one way she was free of Sugar, but in another way he was very much on her mind and in her curses. There was no alternative but to take him to court. “After many months passed we obtained a thirty-thousand-dollar judgment against Ray in the Bronx court,” Edna Mae wrote in her memoir. “But it was never paid.”
Having to endure the humiliation of family court unnerved her; she looked at all the other battered women with crying children and almost walked out of the waiting room before picking up the necessary paperwork and meeting with a clerk. Her lawyer persuaded her to stay and confront Sugar, who arrived late and sashayed into the courtroom like he owned it, as Edna Mae recalled. The female judge asked Sugar why he hadn’t been paying child support. Sugar said: “Darling, you must know that if I didn’t pay it, I didn’t have it.” The judge bristled at the comment and responded: “Mr. Robinson, in the first place I’m not your darling, and you are entirely out of order.” Sugar apologized immediately and was told he had a few hours to get the money and return to court. He obeyed the order and promptly returned with the money.
Meanwhile, much to Edna Mae’s dismay, Sugar had put all of his businesses in his mother’s name in order to protect his earnings from the court. Despite spinning deeper into debt, Sugar continued to live in the lavish way to which he had grown accustomed, directing bill collectors and the IRS to his ex-wife’s door. To get some relief from her awful misery and to earn some money, Edna Mae enrolled in Wilfred’s Academy of Hair and Beauty Culture to become a licensed cosmetologist. She was even able to convince Sugar to finance her in a business venture as a way to pay back some of the money he owed her. He agreed. But then came a major setback.
One day Edna Mae came home to find Sugar waiting at her doorstep. It was not a good sign, and it was even worse than she thought. As she entered the house, the mess she saw told her immediately what had happened: The house had been burglarized. “All my furs and jewels, plus all my son’s jewelry, was gone,” she said. Among her furs had been a full-length ranch mink coat, a Russian lynx coat, a Persian lamb broadtail coat, a platinum mink jacket, a platinum mink stole, and a silver-blue mink stole, in all totaling about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of furs. “All the beautiful leather folding doors in our home had been slashed open and the thief had gone through them. The pity of that was that the doors were not locked.” The valuable ermines and minks that she wore with such panache, glamorizing cocktail parties and nightclubs from coast to coast, were gone forever—even the mink she’d worn in 1951 when she was the cover girl on the premier edition of Jet magazine.
Gone too was the possibility of getting any compensation from her insurance company, Lloyd’s of London. “The renewal time came just after Ray and I had legally separated,” she continued, “and he refused to renew my premiums, telling me that it made no sense to him to pay Lloyd’s costly premiums when we were no longer together. I surely could not pay it, so the burglary was a total loss for me.”