Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [98]
When, in fact, he was the double of Faye Greener, in Nathaniel West’s novel The Day of the Locusts: “None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the red plush of the chair. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions was that they didn’t really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure. It was as though her body recognized how foolish her words were and tried to excite her hearers into being uncritical. It worked that night; no one even thought of laughing at her. The only move they made was to narrow their circle about her.”
Kindred noted the similarity to the lives of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and John Lennon, all “passive and vain,” who relinquished their lives to others in so many places, saying they’d be right back and then forgetting where they put those lives. Ali was just wandering when he and Veronica divorced. She got the big house and $750,000; Ali the dining table inscribed in Arabic. Herbert said he told Ali, above all, to get a prenuptial agreement, but “she talked him into tearing it up.” At this time, it was becoming apparent Ali needed someone to take care of him. With Lonnie, he had married a “new boss.” At first he had the habit of taking off in his Winnebago, stopping in college towns to set up a card table and hand out Muslim pamphlets; very unprofitable. Understandable (when one nourishes the soul), among the fifty most marketable athletes, the market has an aversion to billboards in decline. All of that would end with Lonnie and her tight circle of pushers.
Serious effort was made to reestablish him as a seminal figure, a legend worth some money, for advertisers and investors looking for a name to front businesses. Why they would go to him was baffling; his business history of failure could be a model at the Wharton School of Finance. But this was a subtle game, involving groupie writers. He had to be kept on the move: lucrative autograph sessions, $200,000 for appearances, to deflect emphasis on his health. To the press, Joe Louis had been for years a poor, broke, venally used mummy. Now, to some of the press—mainly in New York—the image evolved of Ali as just a man afflicted with Parkinson’s, not a careless fighter who had had his brain cells irradiated in the ring; rather neat. If you needed a good picture that speaks to the new channeling, it was there in a photo of him taken in a New York magic shop: Ali dressed up as the medieval trickster Merlin. The circus had been lunatic in the early days, but now, with heaving and puffing, a new one was going up with meticulous calibration. Ali would be on the road over two hundred days a year.
There was no telling where he would turn up next, rigid and glazed of eye, the “man of peace and good will.” He showed up in Vietnam at long last, he showed up at the bedside of a London fighter named Michael Watson, doing the Ali Shuffle for the brain-damaged kid. He was found in Syria deep into fasting, flanked by doctors who were monitoring him and saying: “He’s much better. He’s off the thirty pills he takes a day.” In Egypt, he was said to have made out a $750 traveler’s check to a street urchin. We even had word of his ascension to the higher reaches of the paranormal, while traveling with Thomas Hauser through Pennsylvania. Ali suddenly contorted in pain. According to Hauser, a close member of the circle, Ali said, “In two days there’s gonna be a plane crash in South America.” We are told that two days later a Surinam Airways