The Marvelous
Mouth
ONE THING THAT STUCK
IN MY MIND, FOR SOME REASON, was the way that Cassius Clay and his
brother, Rudy, and their high-school pal, Tuddie King, and Frankie
Tucker, the singer who was opening in Brooklyn, and Cassius’ pride
of “foxes,” Sophia Burton, Dottie, Frenchie, Barbara and the
others, and Richie Pittman and “Lou” Little, the football player,
and everybody else up there in Cassius’ suite on the forty-second
floor of the Americana Hotel kept telling time by looking out the
panorama window and down at the clock on top of the Paramount
Building on Times Square. Everybody had a watch. Cassius, for
example, is practically a watch fancier. But, every time, somebody
would look out the panorama window, across the City Lights scene
you get from up high. in the Americana and down to the lit-up clock
on that wacky Twenties-modern polyhedron on top of the Paramount
Building.
One minute Cassius would be out in the
middle of the floor reenacting his “High Noon” encounter with Sonny
Liston in a Las Vegas casino. He has a whole act about it,
beginning with a pantomime of him shoving open the swinging doors
and standing there bowlegged, like a beer delivery man. Then he
plays the part of the crowd falling back and whispering, “It’s
Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay.” Then he
plays the part of an effete Las Vegas hipster at the bar with his
back turned, suddenly freezing in mid-drink, as the hush falls over
the joint, and sliding his eyes around to see the duel. Then he
plays the part of Cassius Clay stalking across the floor with his
finger pointed at Sonny Liston and saying, “You big ugly bear,”
“You big ugly bear,” about eighteen times, “I ain’t gonna fight you
on no September thirtieth, I’m gonna fight you right now. Right
here. You too ugly to run loose, you big ugly bear. You so ugly,
when you cry, the tears run down the back of your head. You so
ugly, you have to sneak up on the mirror so it won’t run off the
wall,” and so on, up to the point where Liston says, “Come over
here and sit on my knee, little boy, and I’ll give you your orange
juice,” and where Cassius pulls back his right and three guys hold
him back and keep him from throwing it at Liston, “And I’m
hollering, ‘Lemme go,’ and I’m telling them out the side of my
mouth, ‘You better not lemme go.’” All this
time Frankie Tucker, the singer, is contorted across one of the
Americana’s neo–Louis XIV chairs, breaking up and exclaiming,
“That’s my man!”
The next minute Cassius is fooling
around with Rudy’s phonograph-and-speaker set and having some fun
with the foxes. The foxes are seated around the room at ornamental
intervals, all ya-ya length silk sheaths, long legs and slithery
knees. Cassius takes one of Rudy’s cool jazz records or an Aretha
Franklin or something like that off the phonograph and puts on one
of the 45-r.p.m. rock-and-roll records that the singers keep
sending to him at the hotel.
“Those are Rudy’s records, I don’t
dig that mess. I’m just a boy from
Louisville”—he turns his eyes up at the foxes—“I dig rock and roll.
Isn’t that right?”
All the girls are hip, and therefore
cool jazz fans currently, so most of them think the whole thing
over for a few seconds before saying, “That’s right.”
Cassius puts a 45-r.p.m. on and says,
“This old boy’s an alley singer, nobody ever heard of him, he sings
about beans and bread and all that old mess.”
Cassius starts laughing at that and
looking out over the city lights, out the panorama window. The
girls aren’t sure whether he is laughing with or at the alley
singer.
Cassius scans the foxes and says, “This
is my crowd. They don’t dig that other mess,
either.”
The girls don’t say
anything.
“Is that your kinda music? I know it’s
hers,” he says, looking at Francine, who is
sitting pretty still. “She’s about to fall over.”
And maybe at this point somebody says,
“What time is it?” And Rudy or somebody looks out the panorama
window to the clock on the Paramount Building and says, “Ten
minutes to ten.”
Cassius had just come from the Columbia
Records studio, across from the hotel at Seventh Avenue and 52nd,
where he was making an album, I Am the
Greatest, a long pastiche of poems and skits composed wholly
in terms of his impending fight with Sonny Liston. The incessant
rehearsing of his lines for two weeks, most of them lines he had
sprung at random at press conferences and so forth over a period of
a year and a half, had made Cassius aware, as probably nothing
else, of the showman’s role he was filling. And made him tempted by
it.
After cutting up a little for Frankie
Tucker and the foxes and everybody—showing them how he could
act, really—he went over to one side of the
living room and sat in a gangster-modern swivel chair and propped
his feet up on the panorama-window ledge and talked a while.
Everybody else was talking away in the background. Somebody had put
the cool jazz back on and some husky girl with one of those
augmented-sevenths voices was singing “Moon Over
Miami.”
“What’s that club Leslie Uggams was
at?” Cassius asked.
“The Metropole.”
“The Metropole, that’s right. That’s
one of the big ones out there, ain’t it?”
His designation of the Metropole Café
as “a big one” is an interesting thing in itself, but the key
phrase is “out there.” To Cassius, New York and the hot spots and
the cool life are out there beyond his and Rudy’s and Tuddie’s
suite at the Americana and beyond his frame of reference. Cassius
does not come to New York as the hip celebrity, although it would
be easy enough, but as a phenomenon. He treats Broadway as though
these were still the days when the choirboys at Lindy’s would spot
a man in a white Palm Beach—brand suit heading up from 49th Street
and say, “Here comes Winchell,” or “Here comes Hellinger,” or even
the way Carl Van Vechten’s Scarlet Creeper treated 125th Street in
the days of the evening promenade. Cassius likes to get out amongst
them.
About 10:15 P.M. he motioned to Sophia
and started leaving the suite. All five girls got up and followed.
The procession was spectacular even for Seventh Avenue on a crowded
night with the chocolate-drink stands open. Cassius, six feet
three, two hundred pounds, was wearing a black-and-white-checked
jacket, white tab-collared shirt and black tie, light gray
Continental trousers, black pointed-toe Italian shoes, and walking
with a very cocky walk. The girls were walking one or two steps
behind, all five of them, dressed in slayingly high couture. There
were high heels and garden-party hats. Down at the corner, at 52nd
Street, right at the foot of the hotel, Cassius stopped, looked all
around and began loosening up his shoulders, the way prizefighters
do. This, I found out, is Cassius’ signal, an unconscious signal,
that he is now available for crowd collecting. He got none on that
corner, but halfway down to 51st Street people started saying,
“That’s Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay, Cassius Clay,”
the way he had mimicked it back in the hotel. Cassius might have
gotten his crowd at 51st Street—he was looking cocky and the girls
were right behind him in a phalanx, looking gorgeous—but he headed
on across the street, when the light changed, over to where two
fellows he knew were standing a quarter of the way down the
block.
“Here he comes. Whatta you say,
champ?”
“Right, man. Hey,” said Cassius,
referring the girls to the taller and older of the two men, “I want
you all to meet one of the greatest singers in New York.” A pause
there. “What is your name, man, I meet so many people
here.”
“Hi, Pinocchio,” said one of the foxes,
and the man smiled.
“Pinocchio,” said Cassius. Then he
said, “You see all these queens are with me?” He made a sweeping
motion with his hand. The girls were around him on the sidewalk.
“All these foxes.”
“That’s sump’n else, man.”
Cassius could have gotten his crowd
easily on the sidewalk outside the Metropole. When it’s warm, there
is always a mob out there looking in through the front doorway at
the band strung out along the bandstand, which is really more of a
shelf. If there is a rock-and-roll band, there will always be some
Jersey teen-agers outside twisting their ilia to it. That night
there was more of a Dixieland or jump band on, although Lionel
Hampton was to come on later, and Cassius entered, by coincidence,
while an old tune called “High Society” was playing. All the foxes
filed in, a step or so behind. The Metropole Café has not seen many
better entrances. Cassius looked gloriously bored.
The Metropole is probably the perfect
place for a folk hero to show up at in New York. It is kind of a
crossroads, or ideal type, of all the hot spots and live joints in
the country. I can tell you two things about it that will help you
understand what the Metropole is like, if you have never been
there. First, the color motif is submarine green and Prussian blue,
all reflected in huge wall-to-wall mirrors. If the stand-up beer
crowd gets so thick you can’t see over them to the bandstand, you
can always watch through the mirrors. Second, the place attracts
high-livers of a sort that was there that night. I particularly
remember one young guy, standing there at the bar in the
submarine-green and Prussian-blue light with sunglasses on. He had
on a roll-collar shirt, a silvery tie, a pale-gray suit of the
Continental cut and pointed black shoes. He had a king-size
cigarette pasted on his lower lip, and when the band played “The
Saints,” he broke into a terribly “in” and hip grin, which brought
the cigarette up horizontal. He clapped his hands and hammered his
right heel in time to the drums and kept his eyes on the trumpet
player the whole time. The thing is, kids don’t even do that at
Williams College anymore, but they do it at the
Metropole.
This same kid came over to ask Cassius
for his autograph at one point. He thought “The Saints” was hip,
but he must not have thought autograph-hunting was very hip. He
wanted an autograph, however. He handed Cassius a piece of paper
for his autograph and said, “It’s not for me, it’s for a buddy of
mine, he wants it.” This did not score heavily with
Cassius.
“Where’s your pen?” he
said.
“I don’t have a pen,” the kid said.
“It’s for a friend of mine.”
“You ain’t got no pen, man,” said
Cassius.
About a minute later the kid came back
with a pen, and Cassius signed the piece of paper, and the kid
said, “Thank you, Cassius, you’re a gentleman.” He said it very
seriously. “It’s for a buddy of mine. You’re a real
gentleman.”
That was the tone of things that night
in the Metropole. Everything was just a little off, the way Cassius
saw it.
From the moment he walked into the
doorway of the Metropole, people were trying to prod him into the
act.
“You really
think you can beat Sonny Liston, man?”
“Liston must fall in
eight.”
“You really mean
that?”
“If he gives me any jive, he goes in
five,” Cassius said, but in a terribly matter-of-fact, recitative
voice, all the while walking on ahead, with the foxes moseying in
behind him, also gloriously bored.
His presence spread over the Metropole
immediately. As I said, it is the perfect place for folk heroes,
for there is no one in there who is not willing to be impressed.
The management, a lot of guys in tuxedos with the kind of Hollywood
black ties that tuck under the collars and are adorned with little
pearl stickpins and such devices—the management was rushing up. A
guy at the bar, well-dressed, came up behind Cassius and touched
him lightly at about the level of the sixth rib and went back to
the bar and told his girl, “That’s Cassius Clay. I just touched
him, no kidding.”
They sat all the foxes down in a booth
at about the middle of the Metropole Café and gave Cassius a chair
by himself right next to them. Lionel Hampton came up with the huge
smile he has and shook Cassius’ hand and made a fuss over him
without any jive about when Liston must fall. Cassius liked that.
But then the crowd came around for autographs, and they wanted him
to go into his act. It was a hell of a noisy place.
But the crowd at the Metropole hit
several wrong notes. One was hit by a white man about fifty-five,
obviously a Southerner from the way he talked, who came up to Clay
from behind—people were gaggled around from all sides—and stuck the
blank side of a Pennsylvania Railroad receipt, the kind you get
when you buy your ticket on the train, in his face and said in a
voice you could mulch the hollyhocks with:
“Here you are, boy, put your name right
there.”
It was more or less the same voice
Mississippians use on a hot day when the colored messenger boy has
come into the living room and is standing around nervously. “Go
ahead, boy, sit down. Sit in that seat right there.”
Cassius took the Pennsylvania Railroad
receipt without looking up at the man, and held it for about ten
seconds, just staring at it.
Then he said in a slightly accusing
voice, “Where’s your pen?”
“I don’t have a pen, boy. Some of these
people around here got a pen. Just put your name right
there.”
Cassius still didn’t look up. He just
said, “Man, there’s one thing you gotta learn. You don’t
ever come around and ask a man for an
autograph if you ain’t got no pen.”
The man retreated and more people
pressed in.
Cassius treats the fact of color—but
not race—casually. Sometimes, when he is into his act, he will look
at somebody and say, “You know, man, you lucky, you seen me here in
living color.” One time, I remember, a CBS news crew was filming an
interview with him in the Columbia Records Studio A, at 799 Seventh
Avenue, when the cameraman said to the interviewer, who was moving
in on Cassius with the microphone: “Hey, Jack, you’re throwing too
much shadow on Cassius. He’s dark enough already.”
All the white intellectuals in the room
cringed. Cassius just laughed. In point of fact, he is not very
dark at all.
But he does not go for any of the old
presumptions, such as, “Put your name right there,
boy.”
Another wrong note was hit when a
middle-aged couple came up. They were white. The woman struck you
as a kind of Arkansas Blanche Dubois. They looked like they wanted
autographs at first. They did in a way. They were both loaded. She
had an incredible drunk smile that spread out soft and gooey like a
can of Sherwin-Williams paint covering the world. She handed
Cassius a piece of paper and a pencil and wanted him to write down
both his name and her name. He had just
about done that when she put her hand out very slowly to caress his
cheek.
“Can I touch you?” she said. “I just
want to touch you.”
Cassius pulled his head
back.
“Naw,” he said. “My girl friends might
get jealous.”
He didn’t call them foxes to her. He
said it in a nice way. After she left, though, he let her have it.
It was the only time I ever heard him say anything contemptuously
of anyone.
“Can I touch
you, can I touch you,” he said. He could
mimic her white Southern accent in a fairly devastating
way.
“Naw, you can’t touch me,” he said,
just as if he were answering her face to face. “Nobody can touch
me.”
As a matter of fact, Cassius is good at
mimicking a variety of white Southern accents. He doesn’t do it
often, but when he does it, it has an extra wallop because he has a
pronounced Negro accent of his own, which he makes no attempt to
polish. He only turns it on heavier from time to time for comic
effect. Once I heard him mimic both himself, a Louisville Negro,
and newspapermen, Louisville whites, in one act.
I had asked him if the cocky act he was
putting on all over the country, and in England for that matter,
surprised the people who knew him back home. What I was getting at
was whether he had been a cocky kid in Louisville back in the days
before anybody ever heard of him. He changed the direction
slightly.
“They believe anything you tell ‘em
about me back in Louisville. Newspapermen used to come around and
I’d give ’em predictions and they’d say, ‘What is this boy
doing?’
“I had a fight with Lamar Clark, I
believe it was, and I said [Clay mimicking Clay,
heavy, high-flown, bombastic Negro accent]: ‘Lamar will fall
in two.’ I knocked him out in two, and they said [Clay mimicking drawling Kentucky Southern accent]:
‘Suht’n’ly dee-ud.’ (Certainly did.)
“I said, ‘Miteff will fall in
six.’
“They said, ‘Suht’n’ly
dee-ud.’
“I said, ‘Warren will fall in
four.’
“They said, ‘Suht’n’ly
dee-ud.’”
Clay had a lot better look on his face
when people came by to admire what he had become rather than the
funny act he puts on.
One young Negro, sharp-looking, as they
say, in Continental clothes with a wonderful pair of Latin-American
sunglasses, the kind that are narrow like the mask the Phantom
wears in the comic strip, came by and didn’t ask Cassius when
Liston would fall. He shot an admiring, knowing look at the foxes,
and said, “Who are all these girls, man?”
“Oh, they just the foxes,” said
Cassius.
“Man, I like your choice of foxes, I’m
telling you,” the kid said.
This tickled Cassius and he leaned over
and told it to Sophia.
The kid, meantime, went around to the
other side of the booth. He had a glorified version of how Cassius
was living. He believed Cassius as he leaned over to the girls when
the waiter came around and said, “You get anything you want. I own
this place. I own all of New York.” (Sophia gave him a derisive
laugh for that.)
The kid leaned over to one of the girls
and said: “Are you all his personal property?”
“What are you talking about, boy. What
do you mean, his personal property?”
“You know, his,”
said the kid. He was getting embarrassed, but he still had traces
of a knowing look salivating around the edges.
“Why do we have to be his personal
property?”
“Well, like, I mean, you know,” said
the kid. His mouth had disintegrated completely into an embarrassed
grin by now, but his eyes were still darting around, as if to say,
“Why don’t they level with me. I’m a hip guy.”
Cassius also liked it when a Negro he
had met a couple of nights before, an older guy, came around and
didn’t ask when Liston would fall.
“I saw a crowd on the sidewalk out
there, and I might have known you’d be
inside,” he told Cassius. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, I’m just sitting here with the
foxes,” said Cassius.
“You sure are,” the fellow
said.
A young white kid with a crew cut said,
“Are you afraid of Liston?”
Cassius said mechanically, “That big
ugly bear? If I was worried, I’d be out training and I’m out
partying.”
Cassius had a tall, pink drink. It was
nothing but Hawaiian Punch, right out of the can.
“How you gonna beat him?”
“I’ll beat that bear in eight rounds.
I’m strong and I’m beautiful and I’ll beat that bear in eight
rounds.”
“You promise?” said the kid. He said it
very seriously and shook Cassius’ hand, as though he were getting
ready to go outside and drop off a couple of grand with his
Weehawken bookmaker. He apparently squeezed pretty hard. This
fellow being a fighter and all, a guy ought to shake hands like a
man with him.
Cassius pulled his hand away suddenly
and wrung it. “Don’t ever squeeze a fighter’s hand, man. That
hand’s worth about three hundred thousand dollars,” he said, making
a fist. “You don’t have to shake hands, you doing good just to lay
eyes on me.”
The kid edged off with his buddy and he
was saying, “He said, ‘Don’t ever squeeze a fighter’s
hand.’”
By now Cassius was looking slightly
worse than gloriously bored.
“If they don’t stop worrying me,” he
said, “I’m gonna get up and walk out of here.”
Sophia leaned over and told me, “He
doesn’t mean that. He loves it.”
Of all the girls, Sophia seemed to be
closest to him. She found him amusing. She liked him.
“You know, he’s really a normal boy,”
she told me. She threw her head to one side as if to dismiss
Cassius’ big front. “Oh, he’s got a big mouth. But aside from that,
he’s a real normal boy.”
The foxes were beginning to stare a
little morosely into their Gin Fizzes and Brandy Alexanders and
Sidecars, and even the stream of autograph seekers was slowing
down. It was damned crowded and you could hardly hear yourself
talk. Every now and then the drummer would go into one of those
crazy skyrocketing solos suitable for the Metropole, and the
trumpet player would take the microphone and say, “That’s what
Cassius Clay is going to do to Sonny Liston’s head!” and Cassius
would holler, “Right!” but it was heavy weather. By this time
Richie Pittman had dropped in, and Cassius motioned to him. They
got up and went out “for some air.” At the doorway there was a
crowd on the sidewalk looking in at the bandstand, as always. They
made a fuss over Cassius, but he just loosened his shoulders a
little and made a few wisecracks. He and Richie started walking up
toward the Americana.
It was after midnight, and at the foot
of the hotel, where this paseo-style sidewalk pans out almost like
a patio, there was a crowd gathered around. Cassius didn’t miss
that. They were watching three street musicians, colored boys, one
with a makeshift bass—a washtub turned upside down with a cord
coming up out of the bottom, forming a single string; a drum—a
large tin-can bottom with spoons as sticks; and one guy dancing.
They were playing “Pennies from Heaven,” a pretty good number for
three guys getting ready to pass the hat. Cassius just walked up to
the edge of the crowd and stood there. One person noticed him, then
another, and pretty soon the old “That’s Cassius Clay, Cassius
Clay, Cassius Clay” business started. Cassius’ spirits were rising.
“Pennies from Heaven” stopped, and the three colored boys looked a
little nonplussed for a moment. The show was being stolen. Somebody
had said something about “Sonny Liston,” only this time Cassius had
the 150-watt eyes turned on, and he was saying, “The only thing I’m
worried about is, I don’t want Sonny Liston trying to crash
my victory party the way I crashed his. I’m
gonna tell him right before the fight starts so he won’t forget it,
‘Sonny,’ I’m gonna tell him, ‘Sonny Liston,
I don’t want you trying to crash my
victory party tonight, you hear that? I want you to hear that now,
‘cause you ain’t gonna be able to hear
anything eight rounds from now.’ And if he gives me any jive when I
tell him that, if he gives me any jive, he must fall in
five.”
A soldier, a crank-sided kid who looked
like he must have gone through the battered-child syndrome at about
age four, came up to take the role of Cassius’ chief debater.
Cassius likes that when he faces a street crowd. He’ll hold a press
conference for anybody, even a soldier on leave on Seventh
Avenue.
“Where you gonna go after Sonny Liston
whips you?” the kid said. “I got some travel folders right
here.”
“Boy,” said Cassius, “you talk about
traveling. I want you to go to that fight, ’cause you gonna see the
launching of a human satellite. Sonny Liston.”
The crowd was laughing and carrying
on.
“I got some travel folders,” the kid
said. “You better look ’em over. I can get you a mask,
too.”
“You gonna bet against me?” said
Cassius.
“Every cent I can get my hands on,”
said the kid.
“Man,” said Cassius, “you better save
your money, ’cause there’s gonna be a total eclipse of the
Sonny.”
Cassius was standing there looking like
a million dollars, and Richie was standing by, sort of riding
shotgun. By this time, the crowd was so big, it was spilling off
the sidewalk into 52nd Street. All sorts of incredible people were
moving up close, including sclerotic old men with big-lunch ties
who edged in with jag-legged walks. A cop was out in the street
going crazy, trying to prod everybody back on the sidewalk. A squad
car drove up, and the cop on the street put on a real tough tone,
“All right, god-damn it,” he said to an old sclerotic creeper with
a big-lunch tie, “get up on the sidewalk.”
Cassius looked around at me as if to
say, “See, man? That’s only what I predicted”—which is to say,
“When I walk down the street, the crowds, they have to call the
police.”
The autograph business had started now,
and people were pushing in with paper and pens, but Cassius wheeled
around toward the three colored boys, the musicians, and said,
“Autographs are one dollar tonight. Everyone puts one dollar in
there” (the musicians had a corduroy-ribbed box out in front of the
tub) “gets the autograph of Cassius Clay, the world’s strongest
fighter, the world’s most beautiful fighter, the onliest fighter
who predicts when they will fall.”
The colored boys took the cue and
started up with “Pennies from Heaven” again. The kid who danced was
doing the merengue by himself. The kid on the bass was flailing
away like a madman. All the while Cassius was orating on the
corner.
“Come on, man, don’t put no fifty cents
in there, get that old dollar bill outa there. Think at all you’re
getting free here, the music’s so fine and here you got Cassius
Clay right here in front of you in living color, the next
heavyweight champion of the world, the man who’s gon’ put old man
Liston in orbit.”
The dollar bills started piling up in
the box, and the solo merengue kid was dervishing around wilder
still, and Cassius wouldn’t let up.
“Yeah, they down there right now
getting that Medicare ready for that old man, and if I hit him in
the mouth he’s gonna need Denticare. That poor ol’ man, he’s so
ugly, his wife drives him to the gym every morning ’fore the sun
comes up, so nobody’ll have to look at him ‘round home. Come on,
man, put yo’ money in that box, people pay good money to hear
this—”
The bass man was pounding away, and
Cassius turned to me and said, behind his hand, “Man, you know one
thing? If I get whipped, they gonna run me outa the country. You
know that?”
Then he threw his head back and his
arms out, as if he were falling backward. “Can you see me flat out
on my back like this?”
The colored kids were playing “Pennies
from Heaven,” and Cassius Clay had his head thrown back and his
arms out, laughing, and looking straight up at the top of the
Americana Hotel.