My Ears Are Bent (11 page)

“After him I bring in Ivan Poddubny, which I called Ivan the Terrible. He is dead now. He had a big mustache. His real name was Zaikin, but I thought Poddubny sounded better, more class. He was also a Russian, a real Volga boatman.

“After him I bring in the famous wrestler without a neck, Ferenc Holuban, from Budapest. He was built like a barrel without no neck, shaved bald-headed. Nobody could take a headlock on him. Each time I brought in a freak with a different style, and my next one was Fritz Kley, a German, a contortionist. Like a snake you couldn’t hold him. As a wrestler he was fair, not good, not bad. What I didn’t like with him and with all these freaks was the minute they got paid it was rush off to the post office for a foreign
money order. They didn’t invest a cent in this country. Also, they ate too much.

“Oh, well, my friend, the show must go on, like with Ringling Brothers. The next one was Leo Pinetzki, a Polish boy. He had the longest arms in the world, an arm reach of eight feet. He was from Lodz. His disposition was good, for a freak. Next I brought in a wrestler which started the epidemic of whiskers. I give him the name of Sergei Kalmikoff, after a famous Cossack big general in Siberia. His real name was Orloff, no class. He was the original first man I brought with whiskers. After him we got a deluge. He wore a Russian blouse, and we called him the Siberian Gorilla, which he liked. He didn’t know what it meant. He thought it was a title like General or Mister.

“After Kalmikoff all wrestlers had to have whiskers. You would see these college boys that took up wrestling. They would be clean-shaven, and they would look human. Then they took to leaving the hair on their faces. To make a few dollars they would look ugly. Their wives they hated them, and the children were scared. They looked like ugly monkeys. I started the style and I should complain.

“Kalmikoff was my last gorilla from Europe. After him I use only clean-cut American boys. Like I used college boys from football teams, flying tacklers. No grunts. They was like rubber balls in the
ring. But sooner or later most of them got whiskers. When he sets his mind to it nobody can look so mean and ugly as a college boy.”

Mr. Pfefer is a paradox. He actually does like music, and he turns up at quite a few concerts and operas. He thinks of himself as an artist, and he has a blown-up photograph of himself in a Russian blouse, staring into space—“Me when I was with the opera,” he says. He used to play the piano.

“I give it up as I am a palooka player,” he said. “I don’t like no palooka jobs.”

He carries an ivory-headed stick with a flourish, and he is sometimes mistaken for Morris Gest, which pleases him. He looks like Morris Gest with a hangover. He dresses like an opera star. He sits around his reasonably fantastic office in shirtsleeves, and he wears elastic bands around his sleeves. When he gets nervous he snaps the bands. He is intensely religious, he says. There is a mezuzah nailed up on his office door, and he touches it every time he goes out or comes in. He also has a mezuzah nailed up beside the door of his hotel room, he said. A mezuzah is a Jewish religious object, a metal strip with a tiny scroll inside. He kisses his fingers before he touches it. He is a member of Congregation Ezrath Israel, a synagogue popular with theatrical people, at 339 West Forty-seventh Street.

“I’m a steady there for years,” he said. “I have my steady seat.”

He said that some of his wrestlers are impressed by his piety. His father was Schoel Pfefer, one of Warsaw’s sternest rabbis. He was born in Warsaw when it was still a part of Russia. He says that he sleeps only four hours a day, working twenty. He likes to eat in delicatessens around Broadway, and it delights him when a boxing writer describes the way he rips a herring asunder.

It angered him when Jim Londos, with whom he is on terrible terms, had a photograph taken sitting in meditation like Rodin’s “Thinker.” He thought Londos was presumptive. He tacked the photograph up among the dead wrestlers and wrote this legend on it:—“Jeemy, no use scheming. You will never come back like all this fellows on the same wall.” He writes the same way he talks. The worst thing he can think to call an enemy is “schemer.”

“Londos is so far from Rodin like I am from Governor Lehman,” he said, snorting angrily. “He is not ‘The Thinker’ but The Schemer. I just changed a little bit the title.”

With his stable of wrestlers—he has about sixty on his string now—Mr. Pfefer has traveled all over the republic. However, he will not stay away from Manhattan long. He thinks it is a perfect city for a
man who lives by his wits, and he is content when he can sit in his office above Times Square among his photographs, among his respectful wrestlers, five minutes away from his favorite delicatessen. He expects to make another trip to Europe soon, a sentimental trip to Palestine, where his sister, Tauba Pfefer, teaches in a Hebrew school in Tel-Aviv. He carries a Palestinian coin around in his pocket for good luck. He will not stay long, however.

“With a derrick they couldn’t get me from this city,” he said, snapping the pink elastic band around his left sleeve. “No difference if they make me Governor of California and give me with salary an automobile.”

The only lady prizefighter I ever saw was Countess Jeanne Vina La Mar. I saw her in a room at the St. Moritz. The room smelled like a gymnasium. She was wearing cleated shoes, gym pants, two sweaters and a sweatshirt. She had just come in from a jog around the Reservoir in Central Park and was sweating like a field hand. For the first ten minutes I was in the room the Countess sat placidly on a sofa, her hands folded demurely in the lap of her gym pants, and told how she had been persecuted by Jack Dempsey (he wouldn’t help her get fights), the owners
of Madison Square Garden, the New York State Boxing Commission, Hollywood and the American public.

Suddenly she leaped upon a rug and began shadow boxing. Following up a terrific left jab, the Countess knocked a painting of a pirate off her grand piano. Then, mildly startled, she sat down again. She explained how it feels to be the unchallenged champion female bantamweight and featherweight boxer of the civilized world.

“Look at me!” she cried, thumping her stomach to show that it is as substantial as it was in 1923, when she began begging female cinema stars to challenge her. “Look at me! I am quick as a panther. In all my years in the ring I have never been smacked down. I am ladylike, modest and a world’s sensation. I have made boxing a beautiful sport.

“Look at those muscles! How do you think I got them? I got them fighting with plug-uglies. Always with men. I can’t get a fight with a woman. I brought boxing into the realm of art, and what did I get out of it? Not a cent and no appreciation and no respect. They still consider it no good for women to box. Has it hurt me? I ask you. Are my ears cauliflowered? Don’t I look like a lady?”

The Countess has a license good in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The New York commissioners have
been holding out on her. She does not need a license in Florida, and so most of her exhibitions are held there.

Her most famous fight, in fact, was held in Florida. This ring battle of the century was held in Miami in
1931
and her opponent was the late W. L. Young Stribling. Johnny Risko, who refereed, called the three-round fight a draw. The Countess agreed.

“Stribling was a tough baby,” said the Countess. “He gave me a poke in the eye, the bum. In the first place, I don’t like to fight with men. And when I fight them I want it called an exhibition and not a contest. They called the fight with Stribling a contest. I was in the ring before I found out, and I said, ‘I beg your pardon, but this is just an exhibition.’ Then I stung Stribling with a solid right to the jaw, and he woke up. He put up a stiff fight.”

The Countess does not sanction prizefights between women in burlesque houses or on the vaudeville stage. She thinks women should be allowed to fight at Madison Square Garden, but her enemy, Jimmy Johnson, is strictly against the idea. And it has been difficult for her to find an opponent. She has challenged Mary Pickford, Clara Bow and most of the huskier female stars without success. They do not answer her letters.

“I would like to have one round with Clara Bow,” said the Countess.

She said that her other interest is the Vina Science Health and Art League, of which she is the president, founder and organizer. She works out in her apartment and in Central Park. She jogs and prances around the Reservoir every morning.

She is a French-American. She married an Italian count when she was fourteen and came to the United States the next year. She said she has always left the underworld alone and has always fought clean. She feels she has been persecuted.

She is a dramatic soprano. When she gets tired of smacking the punching bags she sings a few songs from “Carmen.” She has been married twice—once to the Italian Count and once to Paul La Mar, or “Chicago Kid” Gleason. She owns a sewing machine and makes her own clothes.

“I am just a ball of fire,” said the Countess.

One of the most interesting athletes I ever interviewed was the Rev. William Ashley (Billy) Sunday, the second-rate ballplayer who became the most raucous evangelist in the history of Christianity. I saw him a few months before he died, painfully, of a heart attack in Chicago. He had expanded his heart by tossing chairs around and pushing pulpits out of his way during revivals; his zealous widow once said she saw his heart under a fluoroscope in a doctor’s office and
it was “tremendously enlarged.” It may be blasphemous to say so, but toward the end of his career I think he got a little tired of fighting the devil. The afternoon I saw him he lay in bed in his room at the Salisbury Hotel and gathered strength for the old-fashioned revival sermon he planned to deliver that night in Calvary Baptist Church.

When I went into his room the slangy, tired old man reached under the blankets and scratched his back lustily.

“I got on my winter underwear,” he explained. “I can’t get along without it—no, sir! I don’t know what I would do up here in New York City, N.Y., if I hadn’t put my woolen underwear in my grip.”

“I just had to put Dad to bed,” said Mrs. Sunday, who insists on being known as “Ma.”

“I wanted to take me a walk around town,” said the evangelist, a trifle plaintively, “but Ma made me get in bed and take a nap. I haven’t had a chance to get around town yet.

“I had quite a few visitors. There was a sculptor, and there was one of the men who ushered for me when I held my previous meeting here in 1917, when 65,492 souls accepted Christ as their Saviour. That was a great meeting. We took up $120,000 in collections.”

“And don’t forget,” said Mrs. Sunday, “to tell about the $100,000,000 we collected in the Liberty
Loan drive around the same time. Of course, we’re not bragging, but we do feel proud of collecting that money for Uncle Sam.”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Sunday, “and another visitor was Mickey Welch, who used to pitch for the old New York Giants years and years ago. As a matter of plain fact, he quit playing ball in 1892. I played against him many a time.

“He brought up the story about the time I was scheduled to run a race with Arlie Latham—fastest man on the St. Louis team. I was the fastest man on the Chicago team, of course. Well, in the meantime I got converted at the Pacific Garden Mission, in Chicago.

“So I was very put out, as a practicing Christian, when I heard they were going to hold this race on a Sunday afternoon. I went around to my manager and I said, ‘I’ve been converted and I can’t run in this race on a Sunday.’

“And he said, ‘The hell you can’t. I got all my money on that race, and if you don’t win it I’ll have to eat snowballs for breakfast all winter.’ So I said, ‘The Lord wouldn’t like for me to run on a Sunday.’ Well, the manager looked at me and said, ‘You go ahead and run that race and fix it up with the Lord later.’”

The evangelist roared with laughter. He laughed so hard he shook the bed. Mrs. Sunday also laughed.

“So,” said Mr. Sunday, “I ran the race and won.”

The evangelist was asked if he drank beer when he was a baseball player.

“No,” interrupted Mrs. Sunday, “he never drank any beer. The other ballplayers did, but Dad never liked it.”

“Well,” said the evangelist, “I guess I drank a little, but not very much. I used to like to chew tobacco, though. If a man drinks beer it creates a taste for the hard stuff and he’s a drunkard before he knows it. I never would compromise with the liquor traffic.

“I believe prohibition is the best law a nation ever enacted, and it will come back, as sure as you’re born. But, I don’t know. I never dreamed they would destroy that law.”

“Now, now,” said Mrs. Sunday, “that’s all done and over with. Let’s forget about that.”

The evangelist began to talk again about his days as a baseball player, and how efficient he was at stealing bases, and he was asked if it is true, as Heywood Broun reported, that he used to put his off heel in the water bucket when he was up to bat.

“Well, now,” said Mr. Sunday, looking at the ceiling, “well, now, to tell you the truth, I never was a champion hitter. But I sure was good at stealing bases.”

“And he was good at bunting, too,” said Mrs.
Sunday. “I often heard how good he was at bunting. Didn’t someone say that you were one of the players who originated bunting, Dad?”

Mr. Sunday did not answer. He appeared to be meditating.

“No,” he repeated, “I never was a champion hitter, but I sure was good at stealing bases.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Sunday, “we’re not talking much about religion.”

“That’s right,” said the evangelist. “Well, seeing Mickey Welch got me to thinking about baseball. Well, young man, I’m still preaching the gospel. I been at it thirty-eight years now. No, it’s been years since I preached in a tent and had a real sawdust trail. The tabernacle I had in New York in 1917 would seat
20,000
souls, and the church I’m in now only seats about 1,200. Times are changing. Nowadays, when I extend the invitation to come forward and accept Christ it’s not anywhere near like it used to be years ago. Of course you have to take what you can get …”