Max Baer and the Star of David

Foreword

1 | Star of David

2 | Champion of the World

3 | Scenes from Childhood

4 | War

5 | Enchanted Hills

6 Brothers

Coda

When, on November 21, 1959, in Garden Grove, California, Max Baer, a former heavyweight champion of the world, died at the age of fifty, my father, Horace Littlejohn, was at his side. Thirty-six years later, on June 11, 1995, in Canastota, New York, when Max Baer was posthumously inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, I was there, standing beside Max Baer’s eldest son, my half-brother, Max Baer Jr. By this time, Max Baer Jr., who had no knowledge that I was his blood relation, had become an actor best known for his role as Jed Clamplett’s nephew, Jethro Bodine, in the television show
The Beverly Hillbillies
(in which show the ill-fated Sharon Tate, murdered along with four others by followers of Charles Manson, played an employee of Beverly Caterers), and a man as celebrated by the public as his father had been.

I was born on May 30, 1938, a half year after Max Baer Jr. came into this world, and I grew up with him during the years my father was Max Baer’s “Man Friday,” and my mother, Joleen Littlejohn, was Max Baer’s housekeeper and tutor to his children. My parents were people of color, my father’s skin a rusty brown-black with tones of violet lending it a slightly luminescent caste, and my mother’s coloring, which I had the good fortune to inherit, a rich shade of mocha-brown that, in summer, took on a pale gossamer-thin veil of crimson. Known to one and all as my father Horace’s wife, my mother was, in actuality, my father’s sister, and it was not until the day I came of age, on May 30, 1956, that she informed me this was so, and that it was Max Baer, and not Horace Littlejohn, who was my biological father. She also, on that day, swore me to secrecy concerning this matter. “Incest,” she declared, and with her endearingly mordant wit, “was but an infrequent and rarely talked-about pastime in our family.”

She hoped I would understand that although Max Baer acknowledged privately that he had fathered me—thus his liberality in allowing me to be playmate to his children, and his generosity in providing for me an education equal to theirs—it was Horace Littlejohn who was more truly my father, since it was he who, with her, raised me and was instrumental in the cultivation of those skills and values that have enabled me to live a life of not inconsiderable achievement.

Educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago Graduate School, Union Theological Seminary, and Christ College, Oxford, I hold two doctorates (one in classics, and one in medieval European history), along with a master’s degree in divinity. I am fluent in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and have become a biblical scholar of some note, with two slender, well-received books, and a fair number of published essays, the majority of which concern The Song of Solomon (more accurately, The Song of Songs, Which is Solomon’s, although Solomon had no hand in writing it). I have also written extensively on two related texts, Ecclesiastes and The Book of Job, which texts, like The Song of Solomon, remain at odds in theme, content, and philosophy with all other canonical texts, and whose inclusion in the Hebrew and Christian Holy Bibles remains an anomaly that has provided me, as it has other scholars and theologians, with many happy hours of inquiry and speculation.

Despite the rabbinical attempt to transform it into an allegory of God’s love for Israel, and Christianity’s attempt to transform it into an allegory of Christ’s love for the church, The Song of Solomon is, has been, and will ever be a poem in praise of the natural world (God’s name, in fact, does not appear in the text), and of physical love between a young man and young woman. That I was, early on, enormously taken with it was doubtless influenced by my mother’s extreme devotion to it—to its reveling in the sensual joys of young love—along with the presence, during my childhood and coming-of-age, of Max Baer, who was second to no man or woman I have ever known in his capacity to delight in corporeal pleasures.

As will be seen from the manuscript to which this note is prefatory, I inherited from my father, along with an openness to sybaritic indulgences (my parents, if less visibly or flamboyantly, also sought out and knew, as the document here attached reveals, a considerable range of worldly pleasures), a style of expression some might regard as mannered, but a style—more exactly, a sensibility—that prepared me well for studies in classical rhetoric, and for being able to set down from time to time, with, I trust, a clarity and vividness comparable to his, experiences and thoughts I have deemed worthy of preservation.

In his lifetime, Max Baer was renowned for possessing the most powerful right hand in the boxing world. He was also considered something of a clown, this reputation enhanced by his career in films and in vaudeville (where he performed comical routines with the ex-boxer, “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom). It would be more accurate, however, to see him not as a comic figure but as a man of biblical stature, a claim I do not make lightly. Like King David, Max Baer was a great warrior who represented and advanced the cause of the People of Israel at a time when they were subject to oppression, humiliation, and the threat of annihilation. Like King David, Max Baer was a great admirer and lover of women, and like King David and other biblical figures, beginning with the first patriarch, Abraham, he often loved several women concurrently, his wife included, while fathering children by his wife and others. More: like King David, who declared that his love for King Saul’s son, Jonathan, was “wonderful, passing the love of women,” Max Baer, too, gloried in his love for another man even while news of that love had the power to bring him low. And like King David, who made a covenant with Jonathan that was to prevail through all generations so that death would never divide them, and who honored this covenant by adopting Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth as his own following upon Jonathan’s death in battle, Max Baer, in effect, adopted his lover’s son, although he did so without formalizing the relationship, or revealing that the son was his own. Like King David, too, Max Baer was responsible, by the exercise of his God-given power, for the deaths of innocent men.

It is now seven years since I passed the proverbial three score and ten, and I have recently received from my physician the unwelcome news that I will not in all probability live to pass three score and ten by a sum of eight. I have therefore completed the preparation of the accompanying text, “The Max Baer I Knew,” dictated to my mother by my father before his passing on September 22, 1999, when, his eyesight failing, he could no longer see well enough to set down the story himself, and given to me by my mother before her passing seven months later, on April 17, 1999.

Quotations at the beginnings of chapters, from the King James version of The Song of Solomon, are of my choosing, as are the chapter titles. I have edited the text for minor matters of spelling, punctuation, and consistency, but have changed nothing substantive. I commend it to readers with the words of a common Latin valediction often attributed to Ovid:
finis coronat opus
, which I translate freely as: May a grand work crown a good life!

Here, then, my father’s story, in his own words.

HORACE LITTLEJOHN JR.

Sacramento, California

30 May 2015

I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk; eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved. (5:1)