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.