Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [119]
In 1925 Dempsey married an actress called Estelle Taylor and moved with her to an expensively decorated hacienda-style house complete with its own pool, golf-course, bridle paths and Rolls-Royce in the garage. Estelle persuaded Jack to have his nose fixed. When Dempsey and Kearns fell out over Doc’s spending of Dempsey’s winnings, Estelle, hoping Jack would give boxing up altogether, encouraged him to sack his manager.
Kearns had been taking half of all Dempsey’s earnings, when the legal limit for an agent was a third, without declaring his income or paying tax on it. At first, Dempsey admitted, he had been so thrilled to be making so much money that he had not thought to question Kearns’s high-handed appropriation of his earnings, but when he began to feel that Kearns was mistaking “gratitude for stupidity” he had no choice but to get rid of him (while maintaining his links with Rickard).
One of the early issues of the New Yorker in the spring of 1925 carried a typically arch profile of Dempsey whom it described as having “learned that the camaraderie of poverty cannot survive the blight of wealth. Splitting the first dollar with a friend is not so much, but sharing the first million is a large contract.” Dempsey, the New Yorker reported, had the high, piping voice of a teenage boy and could not sit still. He didn’t take himself seriously and—hardly surprisingly—he didn’t read much. His appeal to women was admiringly noted, and his apparently happy surrender to the trappings of respectability commented upon. “If he is ever invited to become a Rotarian, he will accept, eagerly.”
Paul Gallico saw Dempsey’s Hollywood years rather differently. The wild animal had been “caged in a silken boudoir… He moved in those days through those absurd frills like a tiger in the circus, dressed up for the show in strange and humiliating clothes.” Dempsey was as intimidated as he was attracted by his beautiful, ambitious wife and her sparkling friends. Every now and then he’d realize that he “didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.” “I tried like the devil to fit in and couldn’t,” he admitted. He felt excluded and lonely; Estelle worried that “being married to a pug” was ruining her career.
While from a boxing point of view, Dempsey had been softened by the luxurious life he was leading, from a domestic point of view he was still too close to what Gallico called “the disgusting things that every prize-fighter needs in his trade.” He could not leave behind the savagery that he had once relied upon to win, and that had brought him his success; but it terrified Estelle. That was why she put so much pressure on him to retire—and that, ultimately, was why their passionate, turbulent marriage was doomed to failure.
For Gallico, Dempsey’s wildness only “added to the picture rather than detracted from it, because I like my prize-fighters mean. Cruelty and an absolute lack of mercy are an essential quality in every successful prize-fighter…His brutality and viciousness are carefully cultivated, fed, and watered like a plant, because they are a valuable business commodity.” But the qualities Gallico so admired in Dempsey’s fighting were gradually being eroded by his comfortable new life. By the time Dempsey agreed to defend his title in 1926 he had virtually retired, having fought professionally only twice (against Carpentier and Firpo) in the past five years.
The man Tex Rickard pitted against his 31-year-old world champion was Gene Tunney, a First World War veteran from Greenwich Village billed as the “Fighting Marine.” As with Carpentier, this was a gladiatorial battle of opposites. Twenty-nine-year-old Tunney was a sensitive, intellectual type as compared to Dempsey’s