Читать книгу The Prizefighter and the Playwright - Jay R. Tunney - Страница 23

Chapter 4

Adelphi Kid

“The prizefighter is no more what the spectators imagine him to be than the lady with the wand and the star in the pantomime is really a fairy queen.”

G. BERNARD SHAW

Gene stood in the puddle, rain dripping down his face, a towel over his shoulders, his shoes and trunks sopping, and allowed his right glove to be raised in the air. The first few seconds in the ring had been the longest of his life, but it was over. A tumultuous ovation like a tsunami’s howl cascaded in waves down the canyons of screaming spectators even before the judge’s final decision was announced. More than 145,000 fight fans, the largest crowd ever to attend an outdoor spectacle, had seen him upset Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world, the climax of seven years of unrelenting work and focus.

He had willed himself to succeed, had demanded of himself that there was no other option, and he had won decisively. It was one of the first heavyweight championships of the modern era to be decided on points for skill, speed and strategy. The beaten Dempsey stumbled laboriously across the ring, blood dripping from a gash under his right eye, his left eye closed completely, his mouth bleeding. Gene moved toward him as the crowd parted. They reached out to embrace, and the torrents of rain didn’t stop.

At London’s Rialto Theatre, the playwright Shaw would see moving pictures of the fight several times over. “Punches that travel with the velocity of a streak of lightning and footwork that the most flickering shadow would envy cannot be followed intelligently,” reported The Times of London after its correspondent watched the movie. But it was interesting, the correspondent noted, to have “pictorial proof of Tunney’s British style of boxing.” Except for the referee, who Shaw thought resembled a churchwarden and ought to get out of the way, Shaw was elated with the outcome of the fight. In fact, so many Britons were enthused that an English boxing promoter made the first offer for a return bout, proposing Wembley Stadium in London, which seated 150,000.

Gene had triumphed in the most important night of his life and had done it his way, discounting naysayers, creating his own training regime and ignoring the sniping and salvos from the press. On the day of the fight, in a joyous jab at being his own man, he had stunned newsmen by climbing into the passenger seat of a blood-red Curtiss Oriole, piloted by stuntman Casey Jones, and lifted off toward a fog bank to fly from his training camp to Philadelphia, 85 miles and an hour and a half away. It was a year before Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic, and air travel was still seen as highly risky. “That son of a bitch!” yelled promoter Tex Rickard, furious that millions of dollars in revenue could be lost.

A reporter asked Gene if he’d been worried.

“If I’d crashed, it wouldn’t have mattered,” he replied philosophically. “It’s Rickard’s show, but it’s my life, remember.” Then, adding a sentiment often heard from his mother, he added, “The longest life is very short.”

Fifteen million people, the largest radio audience ever, had heard the broadcast from ringside. News accounts of his victory appeared on front pages, not only in the United States but around the world. In a year when the average annual wage in the United States was $1527, he had won $200,000 for a 30-minute fight. In half an hour, the poor boy from the docks had made more money than most Americans would earn in a lifetime.

The bells of Saint Veronica’s Church, his childhood parish, pealed in celebration, and candles were lit throughout the sanctuary for parishioners to give thanks. Gene couldn’t walk on the sidewalk without being stopped or visit a shop without a crowd gathering outside to peer in the windows and wave. People surrounded his car if it slowed in traffic and streamed by his table if he went to a public restaurant. He planned to take advantage of the moment and of his celebrity.

“Winning a championship and being a champion provide perhaps the most elating experience the modern world regularly affords, a mighty feeling of triumph,” he said. Three weeks later, after thousands of hometown fans had greeted his return by train to New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, and after Mayor Jimmy Walker had spoken kind words on the crowded City Hall steps, Gene prepared himself for another, more businesslike mission. At this point in his career, almost anyone would willingly grant him an interview.

“Don’t you think I am beginning to talk like a businessman?” Gene had jokingly written his friend, Sam Pryor. “The trouble with my business is that I must make hay while the sun shines. Tomorrow,” he told Sam, “everyone will have forgotten.”

Earlier in the year, Gene had gone to Hollywood as the lead in a silent movie serial called The Fighting Marine. He’d played a former Marine who becomes a newspaper reporter (an ironic choice of casting that did not go unnoticed by him). The reporter comes to the aid of a titled young lady forced to reside in a rough mining town or forfeit her inheritance.

Gene had yet to see the film, but he believed studio executives who told him that in playing the starring role of Dick Farrington, he had been an unqualified success and that with his glamorous looks he could be a star. They called it “the greatest serial ever produced” and said it hadn’t mattered that he refused to kiss the leading lady, an obstacle rarely encountered in Hollywood, or that he hated the fake blood and rouge. Gene had liked sunny, casual California and felt that if the praise was a reflection of his talent, he might be as successful in acting as he was in the ring.

“I find this new experience surprisingly interesting,” he wrote to his friend Sam. “I thought before leaving New York this was going to be the most irksome and boring kind of work imaginable. Much to my astonishment, it has proven itself, so far, to be quite to the contrary. As a matter of fact, I find this somewhat pleasant.”

Gene knew that John L. Sullivan had tried acting, touring the country with a tear-jerker called Honest Hearts and Willing Hands. Jack Johnson was paid $25 to clank onstage in chains leading prisoners in the triumphal scene in the opera Aida. And boxing commissioner William Muldoon was remembered for a scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It when, as Charles the wrestler, he was hurled to the floor so realistically he landed with a thud. “Jesus Christ!” roared Muldoon, in an ad lib that became part of boxing lore. Even Dempsey had earned money acting.

“Gene is one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with,” said Spencer Gordon Bennet, the producer later known as the “serial king” for his achievements with Zorro and Superman. “He is much better right now than some men who have been in the game for eight or ten years. I think Gene would go a long way in the movies.”

“Opportunity knocks once, maybe twice,” Gene always said. “If you don’t answer it, you’re not going to hear it again.”

Gene’s supreme confidence in himself as an actor and his immense pride of accomplishment in winning the heavyweight boxing championship encouraged him three weeks after his triumph in Philadelphia to make a telephone call to the biggest, most important producer on Broadway, Lawrence Langner. Langner was Bernard Shaw’s theatrical agent in New York and had co-founded the New York Theatre Guild, which by the mid-1920s had produced the most successful shows on the Great White Way.

An appointment was made for mid-October at the Guild offices.

The boxer whom Langner would meet still retained the earnest, boyish presence, good humor and clear blue eyes that had charmed the nuns, and the honesty and polite manners that had made him John McNamara’s best butcher boy. Gene did not have a fighter’s face. No sign of the fractured nose received from Greb. No cauliflower ears. The only telltale mark was a raw, hoarse throat, the result of a savage left hook by Dempsey in the fifth round in Philadelphia. The punch had smashed into his Adam’s apple and crippled his larynx, preventing him for the rest of his life from ever shouting or talking without a slight rasp in his voice. He moved with the upright, easy gait of an athlete, and his fine, chiseled features and erect carriage would cause people to stop and look, even if they hadn’t recognized him. He returned smiles, patted children on the head and was quick to respond if someone needed a door opened, a package carried or help crossing a street. Fastidious about style now that he could afford it, he dressed like a business executive, with the best shoes and blue serge suits, even a gold watch chain on his vest.

Langner was well aware of Shaw’s “keen interest in boxing and prizefighting” and said Shaw “prided himself on his knowledge.” The producer had no idea what Tunney wanted to discuss, but he was delighted at the opportunity to meet the new heavyweight champion personally, if only to tell his main client more about him. He also would have been aware that sports celebrities, anxious to take advantage of their fleeting fame, frequently looked toward the theatre, vaudeville or film as a way of expanding their franchise and earning money between sporting events.

They met on a fine autumn day in Langner’s private office, its walls hung with dozens of black-and-white theatrical photographs depicting scenes from plays featuring Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Helen Hayes and others. There was also a photograph of Winifred Lenihan in the title role of Saint Joan, the play that had prompted Shaw’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.

“Shaw’s best,” said Gene, referring to Saint Joan. “A masterpiece! But how did you resolve the demands to cut it?” The play, as produced, was three and a half hours long and didn’t finish until about 11:30 pm. New York commuters complained bitterly that they couldn’t make their trains, and Langner said that indeed a considerable amount of pressure had been put on Shaw to trim the dialogue. Langner felt the length of Back to Methuselah, another Shaw play, had sabotaged its appeal. But Shaw, he said, wouldn’t budge, and rarely did on matters he felt were important. Shaw, he said, was a genius.

At a time when the English stage trafficked in romantic frippery, he said Shaw had awakened audiences to social ills by challenging conventional morality, ossified institutions and bourgeois respectability.

“Before the advent of Shaw, the theatre of ideas was like a church in which a little congregation of so-called intellectual theatregoers took itself so seriously that its influence was confined to a group which regarded itself as the elite custodians of modern thought,” Langner would write. Shaw, he said, transported the theatre of ideas into a wider world of the popular theatre.

Gene noted that Pygmalion, starring Lynn Fontanne as the flower girl Eliza Doolittle, was sold out for its November opening. Gene had read the play, had seen it produced and was especially struck, he said, by the transforming concept of elocution as a way to help change one’s social status. (The idea of perfecting pronunciation was one he had adopted for himself. Gene was inspired by the makeover of the urchin Eliza, who, with lessons in proper speaking and manners, becomes a lady.) Langner invited Gene to be his guest for the new production of Pygmalion. Up to this point, the discussion had been so congenial that Langner almost forgot that the bright young man sitting across from his desk had come with an agenda.

Sitting back in the armchair, Langner’s visitor crossed his legs, straightened his jacket, cleared his throat and made his pitch: he, Gene Tunney, wanted to take the lead in a stage production based on Bernard Shaw’s novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, the fourth of five novels Shaw had written before turning to playwriting. The new champion wanted to be an actor.

If he was surprised, Langner, an amateur actor himself, didn’t show it. Lawrence Langner was a man who took risks in the theatre. He knew that Shaw had been furious over the theatrical misappropriation of his boxing novel 30 years earlier, but it was also the only one of Shaw’s novels still in print. Tunney was a champion with potential box office appeal, and he was offering himself up for what might be a huge commercial success. Women had gone to Tunney’s fights in increasing numbers, attracted not by the fighting but by the boxer’s sex appeal. Among the 8000 or so women who saw him win the championship were many who had swooned loudly as Tunney arrived.

Women at the fight had repeatedly shouted, “Isn’t he handsome!” Ladies saw him as the boxer who read Keats. Newspapers quoted one woman as trilling, “He knows his dictionary.” A woman in a black gown embroidered with gold dragons called out, “Has he got a book under his arm?” “Show your Irish, Gene!” women yelled during the fight. “I wish I could hear the sock of the gloves,” gushed a female fan. Sex appeal. What better credibility for a stage or movie audience?

Langner showed Tunney around his offices, and Gene noticed on one wall a familiar picture of the English poet John Masefield, who had spent his early days working in a saloon owned by Luke O’Connor, one of Gene’s earliest patrons. A stunned Langner wrote Shaw that the boxer “told the entire Theatre Guild, to their amazement, that he had read many of his works and knew Masefield had worked in a saloon down in this part of town when he was a young man. In fact,” Langner continued, “though it sounded like a fairy tale, one can almost envisage Tunney as a literary connoisseur who wins world championships to pay for his library.”

After cabling the playwright in London, Langner followed up with a letter to Shaw describing the champion as a handsome young man with a charming personality.

“I was impressed with the possibility of his doing a good job of the play,” Langner wrote Shaw. “I am extremely favorably impressed with the character of the boy and his ability to play the part. He has none of the characteristics of a prizefighter other than a magnificent physique, which strikes you the moment you see him, but there is nothing brutal or animal about him, like Dempsey. In fact, as everyone who saw the fight testifies, his performance was a fulfillment of your own prophecy, made to me several years ago, that Dempsey would some day be beaten by a boxer.”

Leaving Langner’s office, Gene almost skipped down Broadway. He was elated at the outcome of the meeting, and at the prospect of being linked up with George Bernard Shaw, a man whose intellect and fame surpassed virtually all other cultural icons of the era. He felt vindicated that he could carry on a two-hour conversation with a man like Langner, discuss Shaw and the theatre, and hold his own. His future, he thought, might be coming together. He was more optimistic about his prospects than he had ever been and felt he had a clearer vision of the life of culture he might pursue beyond the ring.

“Mr. Shaw doesn’t usually respond by cable,” cautioned Langner. “He feels they cost too much.” But Langner said he was in regular contact by mail and would add his endorsement to Gene’s proposal. Gene didn’t expect to actually meet Shaw but felt that the mere possibility of acting in a film or play with Shaw’s blessing would be validation that he had within him talents beyond the boxing arena. Not only that, but the story of Cashel Byron was one he felt destined to play; indeed, it was a story he was actually living.

One of his closest friends, the multimillionaire department store scion Bernard Gimbel, had given him a prized copy of Shaw’s novel. “Since our first meeting in 1919,” wrote Gimbel, “I’ve always described you as Shaw’s Cashel Byron.” Willie Green, the boxing thespian in the Village who by smashing him to smithereens taught him to defend himself, told Gene he was so handsome he had to be a movie star. And hadn’t Jim Corbett, his childhood hero, played Cashel on stage a generation earlier?

Gene, the confirmed bachelor, also had someone he wanted to impress, someone who didn’t know anything about boxing and didn’t seem to like boxing. But the girl in question, Mary Josephine Lauder, known to her friends and family as Polly, greatly enjoyed going to the theatre and the cinema. She liked moving pictures so much that she had bought her own projector and rigged up a home theatre to show Charlie Chaplin films and other movies to her family. Gene had written Sam about her from the Hollywood Athletic Club in May while he was working on his film. He had met Polly just before he traveled to Los Angeles.

“Had a most splendid evening with Kay and Ed Dewing and Kay’s sister Polly, who is a perfect peach,” Gene wrote. “A very interesting girl,” he added. “She seems to possess plenty of intellect and character, and is one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. She has an odd personality, being terribly shy, but very attractive, sweet and amiable.” Sam knew the young woman well, liked her immensely and, knowing she was the daughter of one of the leading families in his hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut, had arranged for Gene to meet her sister, Cot, at various parties given at his father’s home, The Pryory.

Gene’s warm reception at the Theatre Guild and his eagerness for a possible deal with Shaw had not faded when, a week later, he and Dempsey were to make their first post-fight appearance at Madison Square Garden, the heart and soul of the boxing crowd, and one of the most famous sporting arenas in the world. The Garden was the hometown venue where Gene, the big-city boy, had hoped to fight Dempsey.

As a 16-year-old, Gene had gone to the Garden with his brother John to see their first championship fight. They sat crammed into the cheapest seats, coughing and inhaling the heavy haze of tobacco soot. But he remembered his thrill in watching the swells in suits and hats crowded at ringside, listening to the ear-splitting waves of screams and yells of fans cheering fighters in the ring, and he caught onto the idea that boxing was more than Village smokers for boys. It was an entrée into a high-stakes world of money and uptown society, a ticket away from the docks. Gene wanted nothing more than to be part of this tumultuous new world. As preposterous as it might have been naïve, the brothers made a vow: to make Gene, the older brother, a champion.

In the long, sad, autumn after his return from the Great War, after repeated visits alone to his brother’s grave, Gene sat on a bench in Madison Square Park, in the shadow of the Garden. He read books and imagined that the brothers’ dream of a Tunney capturing the game’s biggest prize could come true. Now his heart swelled with pride at the thought that he would stand in center stage at the Garden as world champion.

As Gene entered the big amphitheatre, he was relaxed, smiling and waving to friends, eagerly anticipating the triumphal moment when he would receive the symbolic wreath of laurels. As honored guests, the former champion and the new champion were both to be introduced and presented with championship belts by the Metropolitan Boxing Writers’ Association.

Dempsey was introduced first and climbed into the ring, drawing a thundering ovation with some 2000 spectators cheering lustily, programs and newspapers flying through the air, feet stamping heavily on the floor, fans standing on the bleachers, waving their hats and shouting, “Dempsey! Dempsey!”

Then Gene was introduced. As the new champion began his climb between the ropes, the mood in the big arena suddenly shifted and soured. From the bowels of the Garden, there were boos, hisses and then hooting, a guttural rage that smoldered then swelled in volume so great that it took the announcer long moments to quiet the crowd. Gene realized as he stood to wave that the boos were aimed at him, and he felt sickened.

Silent and uncomplaining, he kept the festering humiliation bottled up inside. He smiled, accepted the prize and left the ring. Though he was an avid student of boxing history, he had neglected to appreciate or understand that to become number one is not necessarily to become an idol to the masses. Even Dempsey called the outburst an outrage. Gene said nothing.

“Practically overnight, I became the most unpopular of all the heavyweight champions,” he recalled. After he’d won, he had criticized newspapermen for their doubts about his abilities. Too late, after his words were in print, he realized it had been yet another public relations mistake. “I could have been a more gracious winner. I goaded and goaded. I richly deserved what I got.” The humiliation at the Garden did, however, lead to a business decision that helped make Gene wealthy: he never entered a ring again unless he was given 50 percent of the gate receipts. Hecklers, he said, would pay for the privilege: “There would be no free boos.”

Increasingly, Gene erected walls around his family and friends, becoming one of the first major celebrities to aggressively try to protect his right to privacy. “I had reached the top. Acclaim, publicity, spotlight, trouble, annoyance — all the fame and fortune the prize ring bestows.” He began to realize that his name was bracketed by books and haughtiness. The more he tried to revise his image, the more cynical the press became. Proud of his achievements and certain that the public’s understanding of him would come with his preeminence, he tried to ignore that some thought he had become a caricature and that sports reporters felt they knew everything about him they needed to know.

Gene also had private reasons for shielding himself from the press. He was aware that Polly Lauder and her friends in Greenwich were not the kind of people who wanted publicity. Polly’s mother was a prominent member of the Social Register, which held headlines and hype in contempt. One’s name in the newspaper should appear, if at all, at one’s birth and death. The wealthy, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families constituted the old-money elite who primarily represented descendants of early English or Dutch settlers, the merchant class that had built Manhattan. Polly was related to 17th-century immigrants, including Richard Varick, an aide to General George Washington and one of the first mayors of New York City.

In this world of privilege, persons were shunned as outsiders for their scandals or peccadilloes, even for simply pursuing “undesirable careers.” Gene had been reminded of this when the Sunday after he’d won the championship in Philadelphia, he and Pryor were invited to the sprawling Lauder estate for lunch and great effort had been made to keep the visit out of the newspapers. The Lauders did not want to be associated publicly with a boxer — or an Irish Catholic.

And then there was Gene’s mother. Nana was so terrified of seeing her name or picture in the newspaper that she refused to speak to reporters and well-wishers who called to congratulate her on her son’s achievement. She left instructions to tell them all she had gone to bed. When Gene went to visit his mother’s home, he had to plead with reporters to stay away.

Whatever the future held, Gene knew that to get ahead, he had to continue boxing until he decided it was time to quit, and he wanted to do it on his own terms, earning as much money as he could, while leaving his honor and reputation intact. As champion, he decided he could handle the public by himself, the way he did most things: by being cordial and by bulldogging through it, like a good Marine. He would simply say what was on his mind, regardless of the consequences.

Shortly after becoming champion, Gene spoke in an interview about Shaw’s novel. “Because of my pugilistic viewpoint,” he said, “I like particularly Shaw’s prize-ring story of Cashel Byron’s Profession.” Gene was fully aware that his first influences from Shaw came from that novel, and it comforted him by strengthening his resolve. With Cashel as a role model, Gene had permitted himself to envision a gentlemanly life beyond the ring as a realistic alternative, not a pipe dream. Even more significantly, Shaw’s Cashel allowed Gene to consider marriage beyond his own class, to a woman far removed from his world.

The book also helped him appreciate the role of pugilism in 19th-century literature, a subject Gene began to include in speeches. “Every popular English novel becomes a gospel of pugilism,” Shaw wrote in the preface. Shaw’s examples of pugilism ranged from Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott to Charles Dickens and Lord Byron.

Gene kept the full extent of this new knowledge to himself, but the novel as a primer became part of his traveling baggage. When interviewed, he said his recommended book list also included Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables; My Unknown Chum (about a year’s trip to Europe), as well as Shakespeare and the poets Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, “especially Shelley.” He had a long list and said that he could go on forever naming books. No one but teachers and publishers wanted him to go on naming books.

Langner had not heard back from Shaw about doing a theatrical production based on the book, so he had suggested the idea of starring Gene as the fictional Cashel Byron to Hollywood movie producer Jesse Lasky. Lasky contacted the playwright in England and offered him $75,000 for rights to a movie to be adapted by Shaw and starring Gene as Cashel. The offer was met with silence.

Gene was used to being in control, and as the weeks went by, he couldn’t figure out what the delays meant. Even worse, he had seen the first installments of The Fighting Marine, the series that was destined to make him a movie star. “A timely subject — it’s a knockout!” said a handout from Pathe Films. “The Fighting Marine with Gene Tunney did a gross business about 200 percent higher than the usual Monday night!” boasted the Colonial Theatre in Depew, Iowa.

Gene had chosen the old Provincetown Cinema, a theatre he used to frequent in the Village, and he was pleased to be by himself on familiar streets. He ducked his head while buying his ticket so he wouldn’t be recognized by the teller, then slipped inside. It was midday, with only a handful of people in the theatre. He chose a seat in the back, probably mulling over his impending stardom and the chance to appear on the big screen like Garbo and his friend Valentino, whom he had often visited on the studio lot in Hollywood. The marquee headlined The Fighting Marine. A lobby poster showed Gene on horseback looking like Robert E. Lee. In another picture, he was standing at the top of a broken stairwell scowling darkly at the pile of bad guys he had whipped conclusively in a fight.

Some minutes into the film, Gene was startled out of his reverie, jarred by what he saw on the screen: jerky black-and-white images of himself with a monocle and mascara running off his lashes. His pulse quickening, he watched the Gene-actor lose his monocle as he slugged it out with stuntmen who didn’t know a right cross from a left, couldn’t hit a post in front of them and would have fainted on facing even a flyweight in the ring. In playing the part of reporter Dick Farrington, he thought he looked like a blithering idiot. In a sweat, he left hurriedly, before the film ended.

No amount of subsequent fan mail would change his mind: it had been a total flop. He silently blamed the director he had trusted, and he blamed himself for getting talked into doing it. He made certain that no one in his family ever saw it. Meanwhile, in order to keep his name before the public, his manager, Billy Gibson, had already convinced him to sign a contract to do a 14-week stint in vaudeville, which he could not cancel. He was frustrated and anxious to get back to boxing, where he felt he could control his surroundings.

Four weeks after his initial visit to Langner’s Theatre Guild, word came from London, not by letter, but reported in The New York Times. Shaw had received Lasky’s offer and wanted time to think the matter over. He reportedly thought the novel might be worth a quarter-million dollars, but admitted — in what seemed to Gene a snide aside — that he might change his mind. Later, Shaw asked for $100,000, coupled with the suggestion that Dempsey appear as the novel’s ring mauler who loses to the skillful Cashel. Lasky, who felt he was being toyed with, refused and countered with his original offer of $75,000. Again, there was silence from London.

Gene felt uneasy, and he worried that the deal he had proposed to Langner was going to make him look foolish. He was concerned that with his popularity slipping, if his aspirations beyond the ring came up short, he could fall into a life defined only by pugilism, surrounded by criminals and racketeers. Mobsters in the underbelly of the fight world routinely raked in tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal betting payoffs by bribing boxers to fix fights or take falls. Gene had spoken out so often about dishonesty in the sport that he was derisively called “Clean Gene.”

Not everyone accepted that he couldn’t be bribed. “Gene was approached by henchmen from the mob used to making big bets to fix fights,” recalled Jimmy Hourihan. Jimmy’s grandfather, Dan Hourihan, one of Gene’s sparring partners, also lived in the Tunneys’ apartment building. Dan and Gene’s policeman brother Tom were both over 6 feet tall. They were pugnacious, muscular, fearless Irishmen who knew the streets, and both relished a good brawl. “Tom and Dan ordered the hoodlums to back off, but they returned — only more aggressively, directly threatening Gene and the family,” said Jimmy. Nana was frantic. Tom Tunney moved back home into the apartment building, first sitting on the steps with two loaded revolvers for several weeks, then sleeping in front of the door, guns at the ready. “There’s no doubt that Tom would have shot them,” said Tom’s daughter, Rosemary. The mob finally backed off, but Gene moved his family out of the city to suburban Riverdale, New York, and took up residence at a premier hotel with more security.

The Breslin was a luxurious, old-world-style hotel at the corner of Broadway and 29th Street, within walking distance of theatres, trolleys, restaurants, office, and clubs. It had a carpeted marble lobby with columns and vaulted ceilings, which gave it a feeling of grandeur, and a staff who treated Gene like visiting royalty, bowing slightly as he passed by.

“Hello, Mr. Tunney.” “Visitor for you, Mr. Tunney.” “How was your day, Mr. Tunney?” Gene loved it.

An interview with the New York Sun was scheduled in mid-November, and Gene had asked the reporter to meet him in his hotel suite rather than in the noisier atmosphere of a newspaper office or a restaurant. The interviewer was new to him, and Gene said later that if he had known what was coming, he would have hidden Shaw’s novel, which was in plain sight on his dressing table. The reporter saw the book and turned the questions from boxing to Gene’s proposed acting career.

By this time, more than a month after he had met with the producer Langner, Tunney was beginning to feel like a slab of beef for sale, a feeling made all the worse because details were being reported in the press before he heard about them from either Langner or Lasky. Gene had spent a lifetime being told by his father that he was trying to overreach, and he was highly sensitive to being made to feel the chump. He was going to put a stop to it. To save face, he had to get the upper hand on the deal and say something, because Langner and Lasky had not.

“The character of Cashel Byron is badly drawn, and the story is silly,” he was quoted as saying. “Frankly, I had not read the book until there was some talk of my making the picture, and I was very much disappointed in it.” This was not correct, but once he began uttering opinions, the interviewer was silent. The reporter, as reporters are wont to do, saved the spiciest comments for the story. “When Shaw conceived the idea of writing a novel around a boxer, he had a splendid opportunity, but he missed it. In the beginning of the book, there is a promise of fine things to come, but the promise is not fulfilled. Shaw understands neither the temperament nor the psychology of the professional boxer, with the result that Byron is made to appear as no more than a blundering vulgarian. There are no gentlemanly traits about him, save a dash of chivalry.”

The Irish say pride means not admitting you’re wrong, even when you know you are. One might have thought Gene would stop his critique, realizing that Bernard Shaw was a writer he much admired and it had been his own idea to play the role of Cashel Byron in the first place.

But once cornered, Gene was never one to hold back a punch or an opinion, even if it was misguided, and he was angered that the playwright had not responded directly to Langner privately. He then blasted the fictional Cashel, saying he was “scarcely a character to excite the admiration of anyone.” And he even had an opinion on Cashel’s love interest: “That the girl in the book, reared in an atmosphere of culture and refinement, should fall in love with a man whose only appeal was a magnificent body, is absurd.”

Gene went on to say that he regarded Shaw as “one of the greatest minds among living men — possibly the greatest — and Cashel Byron’s Profession must be viewed only as a product of his immature years. He would be incapable of writing such a book today.” (He did not mention that in the book’s preface Shaw said that he regarded himself as an “immature poet” when he wrote the novel.)

“I certainly would not lend myself to the filming of the book as it is written,” said Gene, reflecting comments he had heard from the movie producer. “I would insist that the scenario merely be based on the story, as is done in many film versions of famous works.” With changes, he said the fictional Cashel would be a stronger, finer character, and the story “would proceed along more rational lines.”

Once again, Gene’s literary comments were news — and not just on the sports pages. “Tunney Takes a Swing at Shaw” read the bold headline on the Sun story. As if to reinforce Gene’s gaffe, there was a story on the same page about Shaw’s plan to forfeit the money he had won earlier in the year for a Nobel Prize in Literature. (Shaw accepted the honor and gave the prize money to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation’s trust fund.)

Gene realized belatedly that he had said too much about a book that he had himself promoted, thus jeopardizing any chance of a stage or movie deal with Shaw. As soon as he read the interview, side by side with the Shaw story, he rebuked himself for running off at the mouth, and he knew there would be some sort of reaction. He just didn’t anticipate that it would come from Shaw himself and would once again be in the newspapers.

“If the book were modernized for a film,” Shaw told the London Daily Mail, “it would upset its character a good deal. I think it would be rather amusing to bring the book up to date and make the fight in it that between Dempsey and Tunney. I haven’t time to do it now,” he said, “but I might do it sometime.” Shaw told London reporters that he also considered the book immature, but said he was not sure “whether Tunney knows what 19th-century boxers were like.” He pointed out that “Cashel would be glad to get a guinea for a fight, while Tunney might want a hundred thousand dollars.”

“If Tunney thinks he can rewrite the book, and improve it, he’d better do so,” said Shaw. “He ought to know more about it than I.”

Reading Shaw’s remarks had been embarrassing for Gene, and the headlines had been worse. “G.B. Shaw Answers Tunney’s Criticism,” said The New York Times. “He suggests that the champion rewrite novel which fighter called immature.” A United News story was headlined: “Bernard Shaw Bows to Gene.”

When Gene arrived in Youngstown, Ohio, for an appearance two days later, he did what politicians and countless other celebrities have done: he alibied. He said he did not mean to tell Shaw, whom he had never met, how to write a book, that he was misunderstood when his remarks were interpreted as a literary criticism.

“I never criticized the book’s literary merit, for I feel I am unqualified,” he said. “But I did say that the story would have to be changed somewhat for modern screen adaptation. I think Shaw one of the greatest literary minds of the day. I would not attempt to advise him now how to finish a work of literature any more than I would expect him to advise me how to box an opponent.”

“Tunney takes poke at George Bernard Shaw,” said a headline in the Modesto News Herald. “Tunney spurns movie offers,” said the Ogden Standard-Examiner. The back-and-forth had brought to the forefront Gene’s habit of speaking about books instead of boxing, and it reinforced the fight crowd’s growing perception that they had a heavyweight champion who would rather be in a library than in a prize ring.

“In the matter of Gene versus Bernard,” said The New York Times, “Mr. Tunney must have thought he was being placatory when he hastened to assure Bernard Shaw that in commenting on Cashel Byron’s Profession, the champion was speaking from the technical and not the artistic standpoint. This only makes things a little worse than before. It is not a friendly act to suggest that Bernard is unqualified to offer advice to anybody about anything. He always does. He specializes in the human race and concentrates on the Cosmos.

“For the American people, the incident offers reason for a fine glow of pride,” continued the Times. “It is something to have produced a heavyweight champion capable of putting up a good pair of fists to Bernard Shaw. Who among the enterprising publishers will seize the opportunity to expand the exchange of cable dispatches into a full-sized octavo debate between Champion Gene and the ‘Adelphi Kid?’” (Shaw lived at Adelphi Terrace in London.)

A few days later, roughly two weeks after Gene’s first newspaper comments on the book and a month and a half after Langner’s cable to the playwright, front-page stories in newspapers from London quoted Shaw as saying he was flattered to hear that Tunney was to pay him a visit to discuss the controversy. A British promoter said he would put up $25,000 for Gene to visit Shaw in London. It was the last straw.

Gene had never said he wanted to visit Shaw to discuss “the controversy.” He had no intention of rewriting anything Shaw wrote, and he had never meant to get into a dialogue with a world-famous author about a book written before he was born. Shaw, well accustomed to tabloid-style newspaper coverage and known for the severity of his responses in the press, had been courtly in his reply, surprising reporters who assumed that the playwright would take Gene to task over his comments. No backlash was forthcoming. Instead, the playwright seemed intrigued.

“Did Tunney actually say those things?” Shaw asked reporters. ”If he did, the young man must have some literary taste. I’d like to meet him.”

With the flap over the book, the talk of a movie deal died. Jesse Lasky refused to pay more money for the screen rights and said Shaw’s idea of putting Dempsey in the film was ridiculous. Gene was now so disillusioned by his own performance in The Fighting Marine that he wanted no part of the celluloid world. He vowed never to discuss Bernard Shaw in public again. Dead authors, he reasoned, were safer.

Within weeks, he was fulfilling his contractual obligations in vaudeville, first on the East Coast. The New York and Boston newspapers generally left coverage to the entertainment writers, who treated him like a curiosity brought in to drum up business. Spectators paid from five cents to 50 cents and saw a show, which typically included a reluctant Gene sparring with another boxer he was extremely careful not to hurt and a movie or another song-and-dance act.