When Johnson took up with a pale-as-alabaster nineteen-year-old courtesan within weeks of his first wife committing suicide, public fury prompted legal action. After his future mother-in-law charged Johnson with kidnapping her daughter, Lucille (who would eventually marry Johnson in a bid to avoid testifying against him in court), authorities closed in. But it was an earlier tryst with another working girl, Belle Schreiber, that ultimately led to his Mann Act conviction on May 13, 1913.
A larger-than-life embodiment of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen had recently called “conspicuous consumption,” Johnson swaggered through the early twentieth century at odds with the established racial mores of the United States. Like other hell-raisers of his era—Abe Attell, Stanley Ketchel, and Ad Wolgast—whose days and nights were perpetual scandals, Johnson lived life without a speedometer. Unlike his fellow rowdies, however, Johnson was black. That fact, combined with his audacious attitude—his defiance, his drinking, his omnivorous sexual appetite—in an age when black men were still targets for lynch mobs, made Johnson the object of near-hysterical outrage. Whereas his title-winning knockout of Tommy Burns had merely caused shock, his thrashing of Jim Jeffries in 1910 spurred race riots across the country. Not only did Johnson pummel Jeffries, but he also humiliated “The Boilermaker,” boldly taunting and grinning, gold-capped teeth glittering in the sun, as he dealt out nearly fifteen rounds of punishment.
In the wake of the Civil War, institutionalized slavery morphed into “Jim Crow” laws, a series of municipal rulings whose sole purpose was to disenfranchise blacks throughout the South. But Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, an active seaport that naturally functioned, for commercial purposes, as an international zone. Under these utilitarian circumstances, Galveston found itself both racially mixed and relatively tolerant. Compared to growing up in Mississippi or South Carolina, childhood in Galveston seemed almost idyllic. “No one,” Johnson said, “ever told me that white men were superior to me.”
Whether Johnson consciously took on the role of racial revolutionary or not, his actions required extraordinary courage. He stood out, virtually alone, on the bleak horizon of pre–civil rights America, a symbol of resistance to many black Americans. “I always take a chance on my pleasures,” he once said.
Sentenced to 366 days in prison for his reckless disregard of all that Jim Crow prohibited, Johnson fled America on June 24, 1913, an outlaw on the run certainly, but with his overriding sense of joie de vivre still intact. He toured England, Argentina, France, Germany, Barbados, Spain—all without a Baedeker at hand.
Two years later, however, he was an exile to himself. As champion, Johnson earned more than the racist cartoons and rotogravures his notoriety generated. No matter how loathed he was by a public that viewed his personal excesses as a blatant disregard for the retrograde moral order of the ironically named Progressive Era, Johnson was an exemplar of sporting supremacy in an age when the heavyweight championship could still be viewed in near-mythical terms. That status, left behind in Havana, could no longer help him in exile. A few days after being stopped by Willard, a dejected Johnson boarded a steamship bound both for Europe and for several unsettled years of a life that had long since spiraled out of control.
When Johnson arrived in London in May 1915, he was not met with the fanfare that had greeted him on previous trips. Without the distinction of being heavyweight champion, Jackson was already on his way to has-been status. His revue, Seconds Out, played to waning box-office receipts, and his personal life, which is what ultimately led to his prosecution in America, prompted mass revulsion. In addition, his quicksilver moods—he was sued for assault at one point—soured everyone around him. In January 1916, Johnson was ordered to leave England under the Aliens Restriction Act. With World War I raging across the Continent, he ultimately decided that neutral Spain would be his safest option.
In Barcelona, Johnson was still enough of a curiosity to attract his share of attention. He opened a short-lived advertising agency called “The Information,” performed in parody bullfights, revived his vaudeville act, and played the carefree boulevardier for a retinue of hangers-on. Even without the 24/7 digital age paparazzi of today, Johnson remained part of the international glitterati. In fact, he might even have been the generator of the worldwide press he received while in exile. Wire stories about Johnson could be read from Australia to England to Toronto to all the major cities in the United States. If “The Information” could be said to be a functioning enterprise, then it was on behalf of Johnson himself. Here is Johnson single-handedly destroying a submarine; there is Johnson ready to run for mayor of Barcelona; and now a report or two on how Johnson has acquired King Alfonso as a patron.
Ultimately, however, Johnson knew that making enough pesetas to continue living high style under straitened Old-World circumstances would involve his fists. Nearly a year after losing his title to Willard, an out-of-shape Johnson returned to boxing by scoring a dubious seventh-round stoppage over Frank Crozier on a theater stage that doubled as a ring in Madrid.
As a pro in America during the last lawless era in boxing, Johnson understood the lucrative kinship between prizefighting and carny sideshows. With that in mind, he hooked up with one of the unlikeliest figures ever to step into a boxing ring. Born in Switzerland in 1887 to British parents, Arthur Cravan, whose real name was Fabian Lloyd, was one of the first personalities to kick-start the Dada movement in art. Cravan was a one-man modernist-wrecking crew who published an irreverent literary journal called Maintenant filled with pre-surrealist verse and diatribes against his contemporaries. For years, Cravan had idolized Johnson, and he included “Lil’ Arthur” on his list of cultural heroes alongside Rimbaud and Wilde. “After Poe, Whitman, Emerson, he is the most glorious American,” Cravan rhapsodized. “If there is a revolution here, I shall fight to have him enthroned king of the United States.”
Inspired by seeing Johnson perform his vaudeville routine in France a few years earlier, Cravan transformed poetry readings and lectures—where he often held forth wearing only a jockstrap—into free-for-alls, sometimes firing a pistol into the air and, more often than not, hurling objects as well as insults at the startled crowd.
Despite their apparently unbridgeable backgrounds, Cravan and Johnson were remarkably similar. Both men were nomads who had crisscrossed the world; both men were provocateurs who had been thrown in jail more than once. And, of course, both men were boxers, although Cravan gloved up mostly in salons and ateliers when boxing was a fad among artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Miro. In fact, his only distinction as a fighter was winning the amateur light-heavyweight championship of France in a walkover.
One last similarity brought them together in Barcelona: both men were on the run. Despite his riotous approach to life and art, Cravan was obsessed with avoiding conscription and thereby the killing fields of Europe. As the carnage spread across Europe, Cravan wound up in Spain, where he and Johnson hatched a plan to meet in the ring. They made arrangements not as opponents but as co-conspirators: Johnson, low on cash, looking for a quick fix, and Cravan, a rootless draft dodger trying to amass ship fare to New York City, where even the bohemian crowd of Greenwich Village would be startled by his sociopathic antics when he got there.
On April 23, 1916, Johnson and Cravan squared off at the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona. Over the years, the events surrounding the Johnson–Cravan fight have been embellished to the point of being fictionalized. This, in part, is because so many chroniclers have relied on the memoirs of Blaise Cendrars, a poet and eccentric who elevated the imagination above all else. His recollections of the Barcelona affair are as reliable as the war reminiscences of Baron Munchausen.
In his whimsical account of the fight, Cendrars claimed that Johnson kayoed Cravan in the first round and that the crowd erupted into a riot, rushed the ring, and set the arena on fire, forcing officials to throw Johnson into jail overnight for his own protection. None of this was true. With pioneering Spanish film director Ricardo de Baños on site to record the events, Johnson and Cravan were prepared to extend their travesty for as long as possible in hopes of cashing in on theater replays. There would be no first-round knockout. But what was meant as a profitable lark turned into a full-fledged hoax