Cinderella Man Read online

A uniformed chauffeur pulled open the back door. Gould nodded to the driver and ducked inside. Braddock copied Gould, nodding and ducking just like his manager. As the car took off, Braddock settled into seats with backs higher than his living room sofa and leather softer than his oldest pair of gloves. There looked to be enough room in this ride for a baseball team, he figured, plus gold trim and fixtures so polished Jim could see his broad nose, square Irish face, and amused brown eyes reflecting back.

  Gould grinned. “So I’m saying it.”

  Braddock glanced out the dark window. “No you don’t. You’ll jinx it.”

  “That’s ten in a row,” Gould said anyway, pulling a small brown bag from a leather pocket in the limo door. “Ten in a goddamned row.”

  Jim allowed a little smile. Knockouts, like tonight’s, were what the fight fans wanted, and Gould knew it. Sure, Jim could outmaneuver a guy for the duration, dance around his opponent all night like a ballerina, but his big right cross, his power punch, was what brought the thunderous roars and the big paydays. Jim had learned fast that pleasing the paying public was what scored dollars for the promoters—and boxers who scored serious dollars were taken seriously.

  Gould reached for a glass from a fixed gold tray and opened the fifth in the brown bag. He poured his scotch in silence, not bothering to offer Jim one. The boxer would just decline it, like he always did. It had nothing to do with the Volstead Act, or being famously abstinent like the current heavyweight champ, Gene Tunney. Braddock would take the occasional glass of beer or wine. But he performed better off the hard sauce.

  Braddock watched Gould knock back a few. Jim waited. Then waited some more. Finally, he laughed.

  “What?” asked Gould.

  “Just seeing how long you could stay quiet is all.”

  Gould shot him an irritated look.

  Horns were blowing up ahead, and Jim leaned forward, curious, to peer past the lowered partition. The driver was trying to crawl through a crowded intersection. The light was green for him, but a tipsy group of partyers in fedoras, overcoats, and furs were defying their own red light. While cars honked, a giggling ruby-cheeked debutante in a headband and full-length sable began to dance the Charleston in the middle of the jammed avenue.

  As the driver carefully crawled through the crowd, Jim noticed they were passing the famous 21 Club, a restaurant and two bars now bursting with swank customers. Braddock had never been inside, but Gould had. He’d once told Jimmy the owners had created a secret chute where bottles could be tossed during a raid. Even Braddock’s wife, Mae, knew about it from one of her favorite gossip columns.

  “Behind Twenty-one’s doors,” she’d read to Jim one morning in a playful voice, “lovely little heiresses, the intelligentsia of Wall Street, Broadway, and Fashion Avenue gather at any hour to discuss the news of the town. The speakeasy has become the coffeehouse of our age.”

  A cop fan of Braddock’s once told him that since Prohibition started, almost nine years earlier, thirty thousand illegal bars had opened up in Manhattan. Judging from the way drunken crowds routinely plugged up traffic, Braddock figured that estimate was low.

  “You’re getting stronger every fight,” Gould said as he nursed his scotch. “I been seeing it.”

  Braddock leaned back. Gould’s tone was serious, but Jimmy still quipped, “So you’re not blind, after all.”

  Gould well knew Jimmy had worked long and hard for tonight’s upset. Before they’d even dreamed of setting foot in the Garden, before Jim had become a headliner, before he’d even turned pro, he’d boxed more than one hundred matches and earned the New Jersey light heavyweight and heavyweight amateur titles—both in the same night.

  “You may favor the right, sure, but you got no stage fright or nerves,” continued Gould in his assessment. “And you never been knocked out.”

  Braddock shifted his weight on the luxury seat. Not having a left was a sore spot for him, but he let it go. It hadn’t mattered tonight anyway. Like Gould said, he’d never been knocked out—and as far as he was concerned, he never would.

  Gould leaned close, took the cigar out of his mouth. The next thing out of it was no joke. “You’re in line now, Jimmy. You’re gonna get your shot.”

  Braddock nodded, couldn’t help but feel the shiver. He glanced away a moment, saw his reflection in the dark window, confident, prepared. Everything was falling into place.

  Outside, crowded sidewalks rolled by, the city’s dazzling lights bathing raucous revelers in a golden glow. Theater marquees shined with a glory that dispelled the night, as if the Strand, the Embassy, and the Globe’s Ziegfeld Follies were all bragging, “So who needs the sun anyway?”

  Beside the limo, an expensive roadster pulled up. Inside, two well-dressed young men laughed and clinked glasses. They looked more like kids really, playing at drinking scotch and holding fat cigars. Top of the world, they were—and why not? Braddock thought. It was the fifth straight year of the boom. Everything was going up, skyscrapers and stocks alike. The market had been driving upward, punching through records month after month, and everyone seemed to be getting rich. Braddock and Joe had wanted a piece of it, too, so they’d sunk their winnings in deep. Together they’d invested in another venture as well, a taxicab company, and Jim was certain they could only get richer.

  That’s right, thought Jim, he was a winner in the market and in the ring. More than that, he was going straight to the top of the highest skyscraper in the fight game. With Gould talking up the right promoters, setting up the right opponents, Jim was going to get his shot at knocking them all down, and becoming the Heavyweight Champion of the World—

  “We need to get you out, being seen,” said Gould. “Flash-flash, bing-bing. Satchmo’s playing the Savoy. And there’s this new jinny uptown.”

  So that’s why the driver had turned north, thought Braddock. Gould was trying to hijack his hide, throw him in with the up-all-night crowd again. Jim had been holding out hope he might be the first passenger to cross the George Washington Bridge. But that crossing was still under construction—and this was one husband and father who wasn’t going to any celebration that didn’t include his wife.

  Braddock shot Gould the usual look. “Home, Joe.”

  Gould had a comeback. He always did. But Braddock beat him to the punch—

  “Home.”

  With familiar resignation, Gould shook his head. Leaning forward, he called to his driver. “Jersey, Frank. For Mr. Adventure.”

  They reversed direction and headed downtown to the Holland Tunnel, a feat of engineering that had opened just the year before to become the world’s first underwater vehicular roadway. Newspapers said the ventilation system was a model for similar tunnels planned around the world. That’s what Jim loved about this city. Like a fighter, it never stood still, even punching under rivers through rocky earth to come out the other side.

  Jim’s parents had done that, too. Started on one side of an ocean and come out another, emigrating across the Atlantic to make a better life. The year Jim was born, Joseph Braddock and Elizabeth O’Toole Braddock had moved across water again for the same reason. With their six boys and two girls in tow, they traveled over the Hudson to relocate in West New York, New Jersey, once known as Bergen Hills. The peaceful residential township of churches, stores, and small houses, with the occasional outcroppings of the underlying Palisades’ prehistoric rock, reminded Jim’s parents of the old country—more so than the crowded concrete at 551 West Forty-eighth Street anyway.

  In Jersey, Jim had grown up a typical American boy, playing marbles and baseball and hanging around an old swimming hole on the edge of the Hudson or under the Hackensack River Bridge. He’d endured Saint Joseph’s Parochial School, where a classroom of thirty-five boys engaged him in constant fistfights. His chief nemesis had been a kid with the same name. Jim and Jimmy had tangled more than thirty times, with Braddock’s best friend, Marty McGann, holding his coat and keeping score. Sometimes Jim won, sometimes he lost, but always the
fight was interesting.

  It was another friend, Elmer, who’d been Braddock’s first KO. Some argument over marbles had led to Elmer’s going at it with Jim, the kids in the schoolyard running over to look on, eyes wide. Suddenly, Jim landed a terrific right on his pal’s chin. The kid went down like he’d been hit by an axe, then his head hit the sidewalk and he lost consciousness.

  “Elmer is dead!” some kid yelled and Jim had frozen in terror.

  A doctor came and Elmer woke again, but in the time it took, Jim had gone through a sickening scare. He’d never felt he was cut out for school—books, math, history, none of it connected. So a few months after Elmer dropped, Braddock dropped out for good.

  At fourteen, he started working a series of unskilled jobs. Along the way, his older brother Joe had started to box and made it all the way from an amateur welterweight championship to a professional rating. One day, he and Jimmy got into a brotherly argument. The fists started flying, and to everyone’s astonishment, including Jim himself, the skinny younger brother held his own against the older, more experienced fists. It was the first time Jim thought maybe he could be a winner in the ring.

  Finally, on the night of November 27, 1923, at the age of seventeen, he’d climbed through the ropes in Grantwood, New Jersey, using the alias Jimmy Ryan. The alias was necessary for two reasons. His brother Joe had already put a Braddock on the card that night, and Jimmy had been paid to enter the bout—a grand total of three dollars. Jim Braddock wanted the chance to prove himself, but he knew a professional match on his record would derail his ability to fight as an amateur. Thus, to prevent the New Jersey state amateur boxing authorities from finding out, he’d used the “Ryan” moniker.

  Jim’s opponent that night was Tommy Hummell, a member of the Fort Lee police department. During the bout, both boxers went down more than once, but they came back every round. Newspapers wrote about it, calling it the best fight they’d seen that night, which was as good as the church blessing to a young boxer who’d just fought the first professional match of his life.

  These days, Braddock lived in Newark, New Jersey, the state’s largest city, with a thriving business district, green parks, and neighborhoods that had buildings from the time of the Revolutionary War still standing. To the west, the gently sloping woods of the Watchung Mountains overlooked a city center of skyscrapers, built up among the remnants of an old seaport town. To the east, the city faced the gaunt flatlands of the Hackensack tidal river, with Jersey City and New York visible from taller buildings. The industrial area was also to the east, where freight lines ran from Port Newark’s docks past large factories, electric plants, great garbage dumps, and Newark’s poorest residential districts.

  Braddock and his family lived far from those bleak industrial areas. His recently purchased home sat in a sedate, old suburb north of the city center, where Victorian and colonials occupied large, well-tended yards. As Frank, the limo driver, turned down Braddock’s wide, tree-lined street, Gould dipped into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of green.

  “We’ve got eight hundred eighty-six for Jeannette,” he said counting out bills for Joe Jeannette, the veteran heavyweight who’d opened a gym on Summit Avenue in Union City, the place where Braddock trained and he and Joe Gould had first met. “Two hundred sixty-four each for the two bucket kids; three hundred for the ring fees; my two thousand, six hundred fifty-eight; and your three thousand, two hundred forty-four makes eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty dollars.”

  Gould handed Jim his share of the prize money.

  “You could come in for a drink?” Braddock offered as the car pulled up to a stately white colonial. “The kids would love to see you.”

  Gould paused a moment. “You still married to the same girl?”

  Braddock gave a little smile. “I was this morning.”

  Gould chomped his cigar. “Maybe a rain check. And tell her I undercharged on the gym fees, and no load on the towels, would ya?”

  “I’ll point it out.”

  As Braddock climbed out of the limo, he bit his cheek to keep from laughing. Fearless Joe had chased down some of the meanest junkyard dogs in boxing, yet when it came to tangling with the headstrong lady inside Braddock’s own home, the man turned his taillights and ran. Then again, thought Braddock, watching the limo speed down the road, the way Mae grilled Gould on the splits, Braddock could hardly blame him.

  Jim turned toward his house to find the front door swinging wide. Framed in the golden glow of the vestibule light was a woman too lovely to be any man’s wife, let alone a big, tongue-tied bastard like him.

  From the moment he’d met Mae Theresa Fox, she’d knocked Jim out. It was the only time in his career it had happened—and that was just fine with him. He moved toward her, his gaze traveling over her chestnut hair and slender curves, primly wrapped in a flowered dress with an intricate lace collar—like a gift specially bound with a delicate ribbon only her husband could undo. He took in her serious face and wide-open eyes, full of that unusual combination of good sense and longing, and deep inside his body, Jim felt the familiar stirring, the impulse to touch her more powerful than the need to breathe…

  ROUND TWO

  The bridegroom was a positive picture of health and carried no black eyes. And Mae Theresa was a distinctly lovely bride.

  —Ludwig Shabazian, Relief to Royalty,

  James J. Braddock’s authorized biography, 1936

  When Mae finally saw her husband striding up the fieldstone walkway, her eyes refused to blink. Jimmy was here again. Her lean, strong husband had come back to her on his own two feet, whole and unharmed. Alive. The realization instantly lifted the dark cloud, released the suffocating weight. She could breathe again. Feel again.

  Fight nights were always like this for Mae. Jimmy would kiss her good-bye in the afternoon, and half the evening she’d feel paralyzed, whispering prayers, watching the clock. Then he’d come home, and the exhilarating relief would release her from all those hours of fearful numbness.

  Men died in the ring. It was not an uncommon occurrence. And if they didn’t die they got hurt. Bad. The whole thing was a spectacle of injury and pain, and Mae didn’t completely understand it. But she loved her husband, so she tried her best.

  It was a cold Saturday in January, at a 9:30 A.M. Mass in West New York’s St. Joseph’s of the Palisades Roman Catholic Church, that Mae Theresa Fox had vowed to take Jim Braddock in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad.

  Mae had been a telephone operator. She’d lived in Guttenberg, New Jersey, close by the Braddocks’ home in West New York. Her brother, Howard, had been a friend of Jim’s. Next to Marty McGann, the kid who used to hold Jim’s coat while Jim fought in the schoolyard, Howard was one of Jim’s closest pals.

  Mae’s brother used to bring Jim back to the Foxes’ for something to eat, and it was Mae who liked to set the table—mainly because she liked to be around the handsome, shy smiles of one Jimmy Braddock.

  Although Jim had loved Mae from the moment he’d met her, he didn’t get around to actually telling her so for quite some time. As a suitor, he’d been timid and reserved. Yet Mae had come to understand that although James was a person of few words, he was a considerate and generous man, and when he did have something to say, his wry sense of humor was usually evident, as well as his decency and quiet strength.

  It took Jim a great deal of nerve to pop the question. He’d told Mae he’d wanted to wait until he had enough money to set up a nice home. When his boxing winnings had given him a small fortune of $30,000, he presented his case. Some of the money was in the bank, he told her, some in stocks and bonds, and the remainder invested in a West New York taxicab company. The money didn’t matter to Mae. She’d have married Jim Braddock no matter the figures on his balance sheet. But he hadn’t been certain of her feelings, and as he waited for her answer, she noticed he was shedding nearly as much perspiration as he did during one of his fights. Her yes gave him such obvious relief, she could
n’t stop herself from laughing.

  After their wedding, a home and family quickly followed. For Mae, she discovered that old saying was true. With each passing day in a good marriage, the love for your spouse grows stronger than the day before. But because of her husband’s profession, this meant Mae’s fears for him had grown as well.

  Her Jimmy was moving closer now, toward the doorway. He paused a moment, just to gaze at her. She searched his wide-set brown eyes, his square, rugged Irish face for any sign of tonight’s outcome. Jimmy was a man unaccustomed to losing—only twice in the two and a half years since he’d turned pro. Mae knew tonight’s fight had been a long shot for Jim. The fighter named Griffiths had been favored to win. For a moment, she was hopeful, but then Jimmy looked down.

  I can’t ask him, she thought. I can’t. She let her eyes do the awkward work of questioning. Jim’s answer was a slow shake of his head.

  Mae looked away. She couldn’t stand to see her husband suffer. Not physically—which was why she no longer went to his fights—and not like this either. Losing to Griffith had to be a terrible blow. But boxing always let men down, sooner or later. For Jimmy, Mae always knew this moment would come—

  Just then, a tiny chuckle made her look up again, back into her husband’s face. The tragic frown had disappeared. In its place was a roguish grin. The storm had passed. The flood was over. The world was new.

  She closed the distance.

  “I could kill you.”

  The words were soft in his ear, just so he knew killing truly wasn’t what she had in mind.

  “I like the sound of that.”

  Jim was already pulling her slight form against his solid frame. His big, callused hands traveled down her slender curves, his mouth moved over hers.

  Mae sighed longingly. When they were newlyweds, after his fights, she used to let him carry her right up the staircase and into their bedroom. But they weren’t newlyweds anymore. There were kids to be seen to, a guest right behind her.