"I thought you had us all booked into the Park Lane," I said.
"Get moving and don't worry about it," he croaked. "I'll meet you at the Plaza. Don't waste any time."
"WHAT?" I screamed. "What am I doing right now? I have a Friday deadline, Harold, and this is Sunday! You call me in the middle of the goddamn night in Colorado and tell me to get on the first plane to Chicago because Muhammad Ali has all of a sudden decided he wants to talk to me -- after all that lame bullshit in Vegas -- so I take the insane risk of dumping my whole story in a parachute bag and flying off on a 2000-mile freakout right in the middle of a deadline crunch to meet a man in Chicago who treats me like a wino when I finally get there. . . And now you're talking to me, you pigfucker, about WASTING TIME?"
I was raving at the top of my lungs now, drawing stares from every direction -- so I tried to calm down; no need to get busted for public madness in the airport, I thought; but I was also in New York with no story and no place to work and only five days away from a clearly impossible deadline, and now Conrad was telling me that my long-overdue talk with Ali had once again "gone wrong."
"Just get in a cab and meet me at the Plaza," he was saying. "I'll pull this mess together, don't worry. . ."
"Well. . ." I said. "I'm already here in New York and I definitely want to see you, Harold -- so yeah, I'll be there. But --" I paused for a moment, fascinated by a scene that was suddenly running very vividly behind my eyeballs as I stood there at the pay phone in the concourse "-- let me tell you what I'm going to do at noon tomorrow, if you don't pull this mess together."
"Not now," he said. "I have to get going --"
"Listen!" I yelled. "I want you to understand this, Harold, because it could do serious things to your image."
Silence.
"What I plan to do when I wake up in the Plaza at exactly eleven o'clock tomorrow morning," I said calmly, "is have a few Bloody Marys and then go down to the hotel drugstore and buy some of those sheer pantyhose, along with a black wig and some shades like yours, Harold. . . Then I'll go back up to my room and call the Daily News to say they should have a photographer at the Plaza fountain exactly at noon for a press conference with Ali and Bob Arum. . . and, yes that my name is Hal Conrad, the well-known boxing wizard and executive spokesman for Muhammad Ali."
"And then, Harold," I continued, "exactly at noon I will leave my room in the Plaza, wearing nothing but a pair of sheer pantyhose and a wig and black shades. . . and I will take the elevator down to the lobby and stroll very casually outside and across the street and climb into the Plaza fountain, waving a bottle of Fernet Branca in one hand and a joint in the other. . . And I'll be SCREAMING, Harold, at anybody who gets in my way or even stops to stare."
"Bullshit!" he snapped. "You'll get yourself locked up."
"No," I said. "I'll get you locked up. When they grab me I'll say I'm Hal Conrad and all I wanted to do was get things organized for the upcoming Ali-Arum press conference -- and then you'll have a new picture for your scrapbook, a frontpage shot in the News of 'famous boxing wizard Harold Conrad.' "
I suddenly saw the whole scene in that movie behind my eyes. I would intimidate anybody in the elevator by raving and screeching at them about things like "the broken spirit" and "fixers who steal clothes from the poor." That, followed by an outburst of deranged weeping, would get me down to the lobby where I would quickly get a grip and start introducing myself to everybody within reach and inviting them all to the press conference in the fountain. . . and then, when I finally climbed into the water and took a real stance for the noon/lunch crowd, I could hear myself screeching, "Cast out VANITY! Look at me -- I'm not VAIN! My name is Hal Conrad and I feel wonderful! I'm proud to wear pantyhose in the streets of New York -- and so is Muhammad Ali. Yes! He'll be here in just a few moments, and he'll be dressed just like me. And Bob Arum too!" I would shriek, "He's not ashamed to wear pantyhose."
The crowd would not be comfortable with this gig; there was not much doubt about that. A naked man in the streets is one thing, but the sight of the recently dethroned Heavyweight Champion of the World parading around in the fountain, wearing nothing but sheer pantyhose, was too weird to tolerate.
Boxing was bad enough as it was, and wrestling was worse: but not even a mob of New Yorkers could handle such a nasty spectacle as this. They would be ripping up the paving stones by the time the police arrived.
"Stop threatening me, you drunken freak!" Conrad shouted. "Just get in a cab and meet me at the Plaza. I'll have everything under control by the time you get there -- we'll go up to his room and talk there."
I shrugged and hung up the phone. Why not? I thought. It was too late to catch a turnaround flight back to Colorado, so I might as well check into the Plaza and get rid of another credit card, along with another friend. Conrad was trying; I knew that -- but I also knew that this time he was grasping at straws, because we both understood the deep and deceptively narrow-looking moat that eighteen years of celebrity forced Ali to dig between his "public" and his "private" personas.
It is more like a ring of moats than just one, and Ali has learned the subtler art of making each one seem like the last great leap between the intruder and himself. . . But there is always one more moat to get across, and not many curious strangers have ever made it that far.
Some people will settle happily for a smile and joke in a hotel lobby, and others will insist on crossing two or even three of his moats before they feel comfortably "private" with The Champ. . . But very few people understand how many rings there really are:
My own quick guess would be Nine; but Ali's quick mind and his instinct for public relations can easily make the third moat seem like the ninth; and this world is full of sporting journalists who never realized where they were until the same "private thoughts" and "spontaneous bits of eloquence" they had worked so desperately to glean from The Champ in some rare flash of personal communication that none other would ever share, appeared word for word, in cold black type, under somebody else's byline.
This is not a man who needs hired pros and wizards to speak for him; but he has learned how to use them so skillfully that he can save himself for the rare moments of confrontation that interest him. . . Which are few and far between, but anybody who has ever met Muhammad Ali on that level will never forget it. He has a very lonely sense of humor, and a sense of himself so firmly entrenched that it seems to hover, at times, in that nervous limbo between Egomania and genuine Invulnerability.
There is not much difference in his mind between a challenge inside the ring, with Joe Frazier, or in a TV studio with Dick Cavett. He honestly believes he can handle it all; and he has almost two decades of evidence to back him up, at this point; so it takes a rare sense of challenge to get him cranked up. He had coped with everything from the White Heavies of Louisville to Sonny Liston and the War in Vietnam; from the hostility of old white draft boards to the sullen enigma of the Black Muslims; from the genuine menace of Joe Frazier to the puzzling threat of Ken Norton. . . and he has beaten every person or thing that God or even Allah ever put in his way -- except perhaps Joe Frazier and the Eternal Mystery of Women. . .
And now, as my cab moved jerkily through the snow-black streets of Brooklyn toward the Plaza Hotel, I was brooding on Conrad's deranged plot that I felt would almost certainly cause me another nightmare of professional grief and personal humiliation. I felt like a rape victim on the way to a discussion with the rapist on the Johnny Carson show. Not even Hal Conrad's fine sense of reality could take me past Moat #5 -- which would not be enough, because I'd made it clear from the start that I was not especially interested in anything short of at least #7 or 8.
Which struck me as far enough, for my purposes, because I understood #9 well enough to know that if Muhammad was as smart as I thought he was, I would never see or even smell that last moat.
Wilfrid Sheed, an elegant writer who wrote a whole book titled Muhammad Ali without ever crossing the sixth or sevent
h moat, much less the ninth, has described that misty battlefield far better than I can. . . but he was paid a lot better, too, which tends to bring a certain balance to situations that would otherwise be intolerable.
In any case, here is Sheed recounting the agonies of merely trying to talk to the subject of his twenty-dollar-per-copy book:
". . . Ali moves so fast that he even outruns his own people, and no one seems to know for sure where he is. I am about to head for his training camp in the Poconos one more time when word arrives that he has broken camp for good. What? Where? Rumors of his comings and goings suddenly rival Patty Hearst's. His promoters say he's in Cleveland, and the Times says he's in New York, sparring at the Felt Forum, but he hasn't been seen at either place. It is a game he plays with the world: dancing out of range, then suddenly sticking out his face and pulling it back again. . .
"Meanwhile, his elusiveness is abetted by one of the cagiest inner circles since Cardinal Richelieu. Anyone can see him publicly -- I think it is his secret wish to be seen by every man, woman and child on the planet earth -- but to see him privately is harder than getting a visa from the Chinese Embassy."
Well. . . I have beat on both those doors in my time, meeting with failure and frustration on both fronts; but I have a feeling that Sheed never properly understood the importance of speaking Chinese. Or at least having the right interpreter; and not many of these are attached to either Muhammad Ali or the Chinese Embassy. . . But in Ali's case, I did, after all, have my old buddy Hal Conrad, whose delicate function as Muhammad's not-quite-official interpreter with the world of white media I was just beginning to understand. . .
I have known Conrad since 1962, when I met him in Las Vegas at the second Liston-Patterson fight. He was handling the press and publicity for that cruel oddity, and I was the youngest and most ignorant "sportswriter" ever accredited to cover a heavyweight championship fight. . . But Conrad, who had total control of all access to everything, went out of his way to overlook my nervous ignorance and my total lack of expense money -- including me along with all "big names" for things like press parties, interviews with the fighters and above all, the awesome spectacle of Sonny Liston working out on the big bag, to the tune of "Night Train," at his crowded and carpeted base camp in the Thunderbird Hotel. . . As the song moved louder and heavier toward a climax of big-band, rock & roll frenzy, Liston would step into the 200-pound bag and hook it straight up in the air -- where it would hang for one long and terrifying instant, before it fell back into place at the end of a one-inch logging chain with a vicious CLANG and a jerk that would shake the whole room.
I watched Sonny work put on that bag every afternoon for a week or so, or at least long enough to think he had to be at least nine feet tall. . . until one evening a day or so prior to the fight when I literally bumped into Listen, and his two huge bodyguards at the door of the Thunderbird Casino, and I didn't even recognize The Champ for a moment because he was only about six feet tall and with nothing but the dull, fixed stare in his eyes to make him seem different from all the other rich/mean niggers a man could bump into around the Thunderbird that week.
So now, on this jangled Sunday night in New York -- more than fifteen years and 55,000 olive-drab tombstones from Maine to California since I first realized that Sonny Liston was three inches shorter than me -- it was all coming together, or maybe coming apart once again, as my cab approached the Plaza and another wholly unpredictable but probably doomed and dumb encounter with the world of Big Time Boxing. I had stopped for a six-pack of Ballantine Ale on the way in from the airport, and I also had a quart of Old Fitzgerald that I'd brought with me from home. My mood was ugly and cynical, tailored very carefully on the long drive through Brooklyn to match my lack of expectations with regard to anything Conrad might have tried to "set up" with Ali.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.
-- Muhammad Ali
Indeed. . . And that is also as fine a definition of "Gonzo Journalism" as anything I've ever heard, for good or ill. But I was in no mood for joking when my cab pulled up to the Plaza that night. I was half-drunk, fully cranked, and pissed off at everything that moved. My only real plan was to get past this ordeal that Conrad was supposedly organizing with Ali, then retire in shame to my eighty-eight-dollar-a-night bed and deal with Conrad tomorrow.
But this world does not work on "real plans" -- mine or anyone else's -- so I was not especially surprised when a total stranger wearing a serious black overcoat laid a hand on my shoulder as I was having my bags carried into the Plaza:
"Doctor Thompson?" he said.
"What?" I spun away and glared at him just long enough to know there was no point in denying it. . . He had the look of a rich undertaker who had once been the Light-Heavyweight karate champion of the Italian Navy; a very quiet presence that was far too heavy for a cop. . . He was on my side.
And he seemed to understand my bad nervous condition; before I could ask anything, he was already picking up my bags and saying -- with a smile as uncomfortable as my own: "We're going to the Park Lane; Mister Conrad is waiting for you. . ."
I shrugged and followed him outside to the long black limo that was parked with the engine running so close to the front door of the Plaza that it was almost up on the sidewalk. . . and about three minutes later I was face to face with Hal Conrad in the lobby of the Park Lane Hotel, more baffled than ever and not even allowed enough time to sign in and get my luggage up to the room. . .
"What took you so goddamn long?"
"I was masturbating in the limo," I said. "We took a spin out around Sheepshead Bay and I --"
"Sober up!" he snapped. "Ali's been waiting for you since ten o'clock."
"Balls," I said, as the door opened and he aimed me down the hall. "I'm tired of your bullshit, Harold -- and where the hell is my luggage?"
"Fuck your luggage," he replied as we stopped in front of 904 and he knocked, saying, "Open up, it's me."
The door swung open and there was Bundini, with a dilated grin on his face, reaching out to shake hands. 'Welcome!" he said. "Come right in, Doc -- make yourself at home."
I was still shaking hands with Bundini when I realized where I was -- standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Muhammad Ali was laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him: they were both eyeing me with very different expressions than I'd seen on their faces in Chicago.
Muhammad leaned up to shake hands, grinning first at me and then at Conrad: "Is this him?" he asked. "You sure he's safe?"
Bundini and Conrad were laughing as I tried to hide my confusion at this sudden plunge into unreality by lighting two Dunhills at once, as I backed off and tried to get grounded. . . but my head was still whirling from this hurricane of changes and I heard myself saying, "What do you mean -- Is this him? You bastard! I should have you arrested for what you did to me in Chicago!"
Ali fell back on the pillows and laughed. "I'm sorry, boss, but I just couldn't recognize you. I knew I was supposed to meet somebody, but --"
"Yeah!" I said. "That's what I was trying to tell you. What did you think I was there for -- an autograph?"
Everybody in the room laughed this time, and I felt like I'd been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else's movie. I put my satchel down on the bureau across from the bed and reached in for a beer. . . The pop-top came off with a hiss and a blast of brown foam that dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.
"You scared me," Ali was saying. "You looked like some kind of a bum -- or a hippie."
"What?" I almost shouted. "A bum? A hippie?" I lit another cigarette or maybe two, not realizing or even thinking about the gross transgressions I was committing by smoking and drinking in the presence of The Champ. (Conrad told me later that nobody smokes or drinks in the same room with Muhammad Ali -- and Jesus Christ! Not -- of all places -- in the sacred privacy of his own bedroom at midnight, where I had n
o business being in the first place.). . . But I was mercifully and obviously ignorant of what I was doing. Smoking and drinking and tossing off crude bursts of language are not second nature to me, but first -- and my mood, at that point, was still so mean and jangled that it took me about ten minutes of foulmouthed raving before I began to get a grip on myself.
Everybody else in the room was obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful hoot out of this bizarre spectacle -- which was me; and when the adrenalin finally burned off I realized that I'd backed so far away from the bed and into the bureau that I was actually sitting on the goddamn thing, with my legs crossed in front of me like some kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda?. . . Ah, fuck these wretched idols with unspellable names -- let's use Budda, and to hell with Edwin Newman). . . and suddenly I felt just fine.
And why not?
I was, after all, the undisputed heavyweight Gonzo champion of the world -- and this giggling yoyo in the bed across the room from me was no longer the champion of anything, or at least nothing he could get a notary public to vouch for. . . So I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and I thought, "Well, shit -- here I am, and it's definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I've been. . . Nice view, decent company, and no real worries at all in this tight group of friends who were obviously having a good time with each other as the conversation recovered from my flaky entrance and got back on the fast-break, bump-and-run track they were used to. . ."
Conrad was sitting on the floor with his back to the big window that looks out on the savage, snow-covered wasteland of Central Park -- and one look at his face told me that he was finished working for the night; he had worked a major miracle, smuggling a hyena into the house of mirrors, and now he was content to sit back and see what happened. . .