Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [118]
Some observers said that Dempsey fought foul, but it was more that he recognized that any ideas of fair and foul were irrelevant in the ring, where all that mattered was winning or losing. “Sometimes, with a touch of macabre humor, he liked to test out the courage and opposition of his opponent with a few low ones,” said Gallico, “but he was simply unconcerned with such niceties and obvious decencies as a belt line…When the bell rang he ran out and began to attack his opponent, and he never stopped attacking him, trying to batter him to the floor, until the bell ended the round.”
“Many said I was ruthless in the ring,” said Dempsey, looking back on his career. “How I’d stand over a fellow who was down and clout him again as he tried to rise. How I would get behind an opponent staggering back to his feet and flatten him with a sucker punch as he turned to face me. Guilty! . . . Why shouldn’t I have been adept at such tactics?…It was part of the rules—or lack of rules—through many of my ring years. I’ve been beaten into a coma in rings. I’ve been knocked down too often to remember. I’ve been knocked out…But I never lost a fight on a foul. Nor was I ever thrown out of a ring for not trying.”
In the 1920s stardom beckoned anyone with a saleable talent. America was looking for idols, and when it found them, it sent them to California. Increasingly celebrities were “normal” individuals who had transformed their circumstances through their own efforts, rather than men who had greatness conferred upon them by their rank or office. Few people in the 1920s would have called politicians or industrial magnates “great”; instead they venerated popular heroes like Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey as their own. But while high-minded Lindbergh resisted Hollywood’s siren calls, Dempsey was utterly seduced by them.
After winning his title in 1919, Dempsey had starred in a series of short films called Daredevil Jack. In late 1923 he returned to the West Coast and resumed his career as an entertainer. He had always done traveling vaudeville work—shadow boxing, rope skipping, laying out a stooge from the audience, offering $1,000 to anyone who could knock him out—but now a circus paid him $45,000 for a three-week tour.
In Hollywood, Dempsey found a group of people like himself from poor backgrounds who had suddenly made it big. As he put it, they were all just “freaks of nature,” handed success, vast wealth and popular adulation because of a good profile or a pretty mouth, or in his case a mighty punch. Until he died of a heroin overdose in 1923, Dempsey’s best friend in the film business was the matinee idol Wally Reid, “the best looking and most reckless of them.” Douglas Fairbanks took Dempsey under his wing; he made friends with Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, and went to Marion Davies and W. R. Hearst’s parties at San Simeon.
Dempsey was becoming more of an entertainer than a boxer, a product of the press and the movies rather than the world of the ring. The only fight Rickard planned for Dempsey in 1923 after his meeting with Firpo was against Harry Wills, a black contender for the heavyweight title, but fears that a mixed-race bout would cause riots resulted in its being called off. Rickard was content for Dempsey not to fight because he realized that the less often people saw Dempsey in the ring, the more they would pay when he did defend his title; Doc Kearns, milking Dempsey’s new Hollywood income, was equally happy to let him enjoy the softer side of success.
Dempsey