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Out of Left Field |
 Schulberg, in his youth, does a little ring sparring. |
Back in the Ring Again! |
The author plans a film with Spike Lee
about the second Louis-Schmeling bout
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
IT IS AN EXCITING prospect:
Budd Schulberg doing a movie on the epic second Joe Louis-Max
Schmeling fight, June 22, 1938--directed by Spike Lee. It is
a thing so choice Lee had better get some other projects out
of the way so he can film the script Schulberg wrote that has
the working title, “Save Us, Joe Louis.”
Schulberg is a great fight fan, a self-admitted junkie about
boxing . He has written well and good about boxing with the novel,
“The Harder They Fall,” patterned after the life of
Primo Carnera and also a collection of essays entitled “Sparring
with Hemingway.” He has covered fights on special assignments
for magazines and newspapers.
Schulberg worked on the Louis script with boxing publisher and
all-around character Bert (The Fedora) Sugar. When they mentioned
this to Spike Lee at an HBO party, Lee liked it and said he would
do it. He immediately set a researcher to work on Louis’
history.
Schulberg said, “I knew a lot about Joe. I had done a 90-minute
documentary on him about 15 years ago called, ‘Joe Louis
for All Time.’ Yet Lee’s man came up with 5,900 index
cards of information about Joe, and I read them for a few months
before getting into the script. If all goes well the movie will
show in 2003.”
He once met Louis at a training camp when Louis was helping to
ballyhoo a Floyd Patterson-Ingemar Johansson fight. “I was
even photographed with Joe tapping lightly on my jaw,” he
said, “but I didn’t know him well.”
Louis was a sad figure at the end, broke and hounded by Internal
Revenue agents.
“Society punished him,” Schulberg said. “That
was a shame. They never let up on him for taxes though he twice
fought for nothing, donating his purse to Army relief. He risked
his title against Buddy Baer and Abe Simon and got nothing for
it. His tax problems were all due to screwups because checks
for those fights were made out to Joe, though he didn’t
cash them.”
Louis-Schmeling II took on a dimension far greater than a boxing
bout, of course, because it was the time when Germany’s
Adolph Hitler was menacing the world and the fight was seen as
the noble American fighting the sinister representative of the
master race. Louis’ one-round knockout of the man who had
humbled him two years earlier was seen as a victory for democracy.
In retrospect it stands as the single most significant fight
of the 20th century so it demands a huge effort.
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Steiger in a scene from 'The Harder They Fall,' the classic 1956 boxing film, based on Schulberg's novel. |
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Even though some of the high literary types might not see Schulberg that way, I regard him as a significant literary figure of his time. This is the man who wrote one of the best Hollywood novels, “What Makes Sammy Run.” He stirred the pot with the controversial novel, “The Disenchanted.” Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's friends objected to the alcoholic portrait of the Fitzgerald character based on a time Schulberg collaborated with him on a movie at a low point in Fitzgerald’s career. The classic film "A Face in the Crowd" with Andy Griffith was based on a Schulberg story.
Schulberg also wrote the movie “On the Waterfront,” in which the lead character was ex-fighter Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando). It won a host of Oscars in 1954, including one for Schulberg's story and screenplay. It also won as best film of the year.
Wryly, Schulberg said, “I was in the hospital recently. When some of the people I shared a room with heard I was a writer, they asked what I had written. I mentioned “Sammy” and they didn’t know it. They didn’t know ‘The Disenchanted,’ either. But they were impressed when they heard ‘On The Waterfront.’”
His wife, Betsy, said, “People today don’t read much, do they?”
This was several weeks ago on the patio of the Schulbergs' comfortably rambling home on a sylvan creek in Quogue, a lovely, quiet outpost that is the westernmost of the stretch of hurly-burly Hampton towns that reach some 50 miles east to the tip of Long Island at Montauk Point. Schulberg is 87, a ruddy-complexioned, curly gray-haired soft-spoken man who speaks with a stutter that is no great distraction when he is talking about his rich background.
Schulberg’s humility belies his eminence. At a Hemingway conference I heard him describe his first meeting with Hemingway when Hemingway, resentful of Schulberg’s success with “The Harder They Fall,” tried to ridicule his knowledge of boxing by asking him to identify relatively little-known fighters, all of whom Schulberg knew only too well, thereby infuriating Hemingway.
‘We approach Schmeling with a great deal of sympathy,” Schulberg said. “After he knocked out Joe the first time, he came back a hero to the Germans. Hitler paid tribute to him and they made a documentary glorifying him. But he had Jewish friends and he hung out with artistic people--playwrights and artists and the like who were anti-Nazis. He would notice how such people would be missing each week. We show him saving a Jewish family on the night of kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass” when the windows of Jewish homes and stores were shattered, this only a few months after the second Louis-Schmeling fight). The family of the guy who was the head of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas was saved by Max.”
He said that Schmeling, now 96, lives outside of Hamburg. “He was broke for a time. He made a comeback when he came back from the war and retired after a loss when he was 43. Jim Farley, the onetime Postmater General under FDR who was the CEO of Coca Cola, was looking for a non-Nazi, and made Max the head of Coke in Germany. That made him a rich man. He gave Joe money when Joe was down. When Max’ Jewish manager, Joe Jacobs, died, Max came to the cemetery to pay his respects. He looked up to Louis. He told Joe it always bothered him that he had words put into his mouth by Goebbels spouting master race nonsense.”
Schulberg started writing as a high school stringer for newspapers when he was growing up in Los Angeles. His father, the movie producer B.P. Schulberg, was a fight fan and Budd’s hero as a seven-year-old in 1921 wasn’t a movie star like Tom Mix or Douglas Fairbanks or baseball immortal Babe Ruth, but rather the Jewish lightweight champion Benny Leonard, who his father knew. In his essay on Leonard in “Sparring with Hemingway,” Schulberg vividly recalls the details of the Leonard knockout of Richie Mitchell as it was told to him by his father; it is as good a description of a fight as any report by an actual eyewitness.
He said, “I’m an old warhorse. I would love for somebody to assign me to cover the [then] upcoming Trinidad-Hopkins fight or the heavyweights” [Lennox Lewis and Hasim Rahman].
He is at work on several projects besides the one about the Louis-Schmeling bout, notably a second volume of his memoirs. He said, “I had a multiple bypass operation 14 months ago, but I’m still pretty sharp. I don’t even think about losing it.”
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs. The photo from "The Harder They Fall" is © 1956 by Columbia Pictures.
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