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  As each promised match with a leading contender faded, the Robinsons’ debts mounted. To get away from her often ill tempered, disgruntled husband, Edna Mae began doing volunteer work for various charitable and political organizations. Her work with an African research and medical organization that raised money to build medical mobile units and to transport patients over rough terrain in Africa was very fulfilling, she said, despite an incident involving jazz musicians Miles Davis and Max Roach. Davis, through Edna Mae’s influence, had been contracted to perform for the foundation. According to Edna Mae, this date at Carnegie Hall was Davis’s first concert engagement in New York City as a leader. “In the middle of Miles’s classic solo on ‘Someday My Prince Will Come,’ Max Roach walked onto the stage and sat down in the middle of the floor. Miles stopped playing and walked off the stage.” Roach, whose black nationalism was widely known, was there to protest an event in which money was being raised to assist the apartheid government of South Africa. After Roach was bodily removed, Davis returned to the stage as though nothing had happened and resumed playing.6

  When she wasn’t lending a helping hand to institutions and organizations, Edna Mae was doting over her child. Ray, now ten, was ready to be confirmed, and Edna Mae made sure it was a memorable occasion. Sugar was there, and beamed as his son received the blessings from the priest. If he was not entirely absorbed in the ritual it was because he was thinking about a conversation he’d had with Langston Hughes about taking a role in his play Tambourines to Glory. “Looks like Sugar Ray might play Buddy in my show,” Hughes wrote in a letter to his close friend and associate, Arna Bontemps, in November 1959. “He phoned yesterday for the book to read. And seemed interested and excited.” Bontemps, in his reply, opined that Sugar would be just right for the role. “And he’s bound to be a draw in his first play.” It took until 1963 for Hughes to find funding for the gospel play, by which time Sugar was struggling to add a few more years onto his boxing career. The role went to Louis Gossett.7

  Make-believe was an enticing possibility for Sugar, who never saw a stage he didn’t like, but the reality of a looming fight date in Boston on January 22, 1960, with a fairly unknown fighter named Paul Pender called for real, and serious, preparation. “Paul who?” Sugar had asked his manager when given the name of his next opponent. Gainford told him that Pender was the New England middleweight champ and that Sugar had been guaranteed seventy thousand dollars for the bout. “For that money, I’d fight Paul Revere in Boston,” Sugar said, laughing.

  Pender was a skinny, seasoned veteran with ten consecutive victories over equally unknown fighters, and Sugar may not have taken the match that seriously. He should have. Pender, using his speed to elude Sugar’s advances, took a surprising split decision and added the world championship belt to his collection. Sugar’s manager was beside himself with anger, charging that it was “highway robbery.” A rematch was set for June. To Sugar and his management’s dismay, Pender won another fifteen-round split decision.

  “These defeats had more to do with the promoters’ desire to bolster the career of an up-and-coming local favorite than it had to do with rendering a fair judgment,” suggested Dino Woodard, one of Sugar’s most dedicated and loyal sparring partners. “Sugar lost many of his remaining fights to unknown fighters whose careers would be enhanced if they could add a victory over Sugar to their record. Either he had to knock them out or beat them decisively. The close calls, at this stage of his career, went against him. This is something we all came to understand as part of the territory for the ex-champ.”

  Sugar had been so consumed with winning the second encounter with Pender that he’d had little time for the usual throng of admirers who sought his attention, even if they were upcoming heavyweights such as Cassius Clay. Clay, whose amateur record was almost as unblemished as Sugar’s, came to Harlem to meet his idol, but when he arrived at Sugar’s café, accompanied by another boxer and sportswriter Dick Schaap, Sugar was not in. They decided to walk around Harlem and kill some time in hopes that Sugar would soon be back.

  According to Schaap, Clay was fascinated by the street corner speakers who held forth near the Theresa Hotel and Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial Bookstore on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. Like the speakers in London’s Hyde Park, the Harlem radicals often addressed controversial issues, including scathing indictments of “racist America,” and many of them called for a return to Africa. Carlos Cooks, Pork Chop Davis, Dr. Yosef ben Jochannan (Dr. Ben), James Thornhill, Bessie Philips, Charles Kenyatta, and Malcolm X were among the more celebrated and commanding speakers who were guaranteed to arouse spectators. It is not clear who Clay heard during his walk, but he was amazed that they could get away with what they said without being hauled off to jail. And given the flamboyance with which he himself spoke, he was probably fascinated by their elocution, seeking ways to garnish his own spiels and limericks. After circling the central district, they headed back to Sugar’s place just in time to see him pull up in a purple Caddy, which by 1960 had replaced the pink one.

  Schaap was a bit apprehensive about this meeting of the two flamboyant boxers. Would Sugar acknowledge Clay? Would Clay open his big mouth and upset the legend? But “Clay was humble, even hesitant,” David Remnick summarized in his book King of the World. “Robinson gave him just a few moments. With a bored and superior air, Sugar Ray said hello and then strode on past them into his bar. Clay was goggle-eyed. ‘Someday I’m gonna own two Cadillacs—and a Ford for just getting around in.’” Years later Clay would recall being sloughed off by his hero, and promised he would never behave like that to any of his fans.

  In his autobiography, Sugar offers another take on this meeting. In fact, he devoted a whole chapter to Clay, discussing how they first met and what they talked about. They had quite a long exchange, he said, with Clay asking him to be his manager. “But that’s impossible,” Sugar told him. “I’m still a fighter myself. That’s a full-time thing. I couldn’t possibly be fighting myself and managing you at the same time.” Clay, in his customary garrulity, was not about to take no for an answer. “Maybe after you retire, you’ll be my manager,” he continued. Sugar wished him luck in Rome in his quest for an Olympic medal and ducked into his café. As he stood at the bar with a customer, he looked through the window, and Clay was still standing there with Schaap. “If that kid can fight like he can talk,” Sugar said, “he’ll be something.”

  Sugar suffered a third consecutive defeat when he and Edna Mae separated. They had agreed to disagree, Sugar wrote. “We had enjoyed some beautiful times, but we had battled through some bad times,” he said. “She never liked the idea that I was the celebrity in our marriage, not her. I never got used to her show-biz habit of letting guys kiss her, guys I didn’t know.” Agreeing to go their separate ways for a while was all the room Sugar needed to rekindle an off-and-on affair with Millie Bruce, who resided in California. It had been the one fling that Edna Mae had instinctually felt threatened by.

  Now, in the summer of 1960, Millie visited New York City as a member of the Rinky Dinks, a social and civic organization that did charity work; like Edna Mae, she spent time working with charitable organizations. Millie told Sugar she was staying at the Park Sheraton, at about the same time that Edna Mae was returning to the city with Ray II from Florida, where they had gone for a short visit. They were riding in a taxi when they passed the hotel and Ray saw his father’s car in the parking lot. “He wanted to stop and to go find his dad,” Edna Mae said. “I knew better and asked him to escort me home first and then we’d call his dad. When we called the hotel, the switchboard operator said, ‘Mr. Robinson is not in, but Mrs. Robinson is. Would you like to speak to her?’ I said, ‘But of course.’ The next voice was that of the California lady. I asked is this Mrs. Robinson and she said, ‘Well, no. But who is this?’ I answered I’m Mrs. Robinson also. Will you tell my husband that we’re home from Florida and his son wants to see him? Later, Sugar went and picked up his son, took him for ice cream, an
d then brought him home.” Sugar didn’t, however, leave, but rather cuddled up in the bed with Edna Mae.

  Things continued as up and down as they’d ever been with the couple, but by Thanksgiving their relationship hit a more disturbing bump on the marital road: Sugar told Edna Mae and his son that he would be having dinner with his “other” family, and not with them. It was then that she decided to file for legal separation. Within a few weeks, though, Sugar had charmed his way back into her life—though they remained separated—and resumed stopping by occasionally to see Ray. These were also times when he would badger his wife into preparing him a meal, which she obediently did, until the day she discovered a pair of ladies’ shoes in his car. What really miffed her was that he had come by and asked her to prepare him a lunch. “I realized I had prepared their lunch,” she said. “The man was incredible.”

  CHAPTER 23

  MILLIE AND THE MORMON

  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.