Of course, Shaw had always been interested in boxing. I would never imagine that Shaw could have been a team player. He needed an individual sport and boxing supplied it for him. He followed the boxing news. He read of Tunney’s defeat of Carpentier in 1924 and was intrigued. When Tunney defeated Dempsey, he made an effort to meet the boxer. Eventually they made contact and Shaw was delighted with this oddly compelling, bookish young man. After all Tunney seemed like Cashel Byron brought to life: a pugilist who loved the arts, who married well and who had risen from a New York Irish working class background to become a major celebrity.
So here are the Tunneys and the Shaws on an island in the Adriatic. The press thought it must be a strange Shavian joke, but as Jay Tunney makes very clear, this just wasn’t the case. I won’t reveal the highly charged event that brought them so close. That’s the heart of the book. But I can say that it moved me and more than anything else that I have read about Shaw, it described a man who I only half suspected might be there — the human being, the vulnerable and compassionate G.B.S.
At one point Jay Tunney writes about the similarity between his father and Shaw. They were both surprisingly private people. The boxer, after his marriage to an intensely discreet wife who hated to see herself even mentioned in the press, was particularly shy of reporters. And yet both men were celebrities and knew it. Shaw exploited this public interest. Tunney, pursued by reporters who never believed that a boxer could read for pleasure, did everything he could to avoid the publicity. Shaw, in private, became the politic and caring father that Tunney wished for, just as he had been the theatrical father that Granville Barker never knew.
This book has sent me scurrying around my own library looking up Gene Tunney in William Lyon Phelps’ autobiography — there’s a chapter devoted to him — finding a reference in Rupert Hart-Davis’s life of Hugh Walpole, realizing that we had a mutual acquaintance in Thornton Wilder. (My connection was fleeting.) A small but important association in the life of a major literary figure has come to life in a most remarkable way. And the story provides a source for incidents in two of Shaw’s later plays and that’s always of interest because ideas seldom occur in a vacuum. There are always connections.
Tunney and Shaw agreed on so many things, but they disagreed about Russia. Shaw, the old Fabian, had always been sympathetic towards the Soviet Union and Stalin. Tunney, the American businessman, was not. But he wanted to see for himself. There’s a curious incident that resonated with me. In the ’30s, Tunney on a visit to Russia arrived at a factory where thousands of church bells, many of them beautiful works of art, were being melted down to make armaments.
I think it was in 1990 — it was certainly the year when Leningrad reverted to its old name — when Cameron Porteous and I were in Russia. We’d spent a day in an artists’ village outside St. Petersburg. In the evening we hopped on a suburban train and arrived at another village. It started to snow and when we got off the train, the Russians in our party suddenly stopped. “Listen. Listen,” they said. We couldn’t hear anything unusual. “Bells,” said the Russians. “Bells. The lost sound of the Russian soul. We haven’t heard bells for sixty years.”
In every town we visited, they were putting the bells back into the churches.
This book is a bit like that. This story of the boxer and the playwright has helped to put the soul back into an author who hid his humanity behind a screen of words. It is a particularly personal book. At times I felt the same fear of intrusion that Jay Tunney’s mother must have felt during all those public years with his father. It is an odd and intriguing book about an odd friendship and a strange and intriguing event.
CHRISTOPHER NEWTON
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR EMERITUS, SHAW FESTIVAL
Gene Tunney reading a newspaper in Chicago, following his defense of the championship in 1927 (Chicago History Museum).
Preamble
The heiress, once a great beauty, was now 100 years old. She moved in slow but deliberate steps toward the straight-backed chair set up in front of the windows. The chair was facing out, so that from her second-floor bedroom, she could see across the treetops and down onto the rolling lawn which sloped away from the house to the rock garden she had planted so many years ago. With help, she sat down and reached toward the back of the chair for a sweater, which was handed to her. Her hair, once a glowing chestnut, was gray and pressed against her head under a hair net. Her hearing was still sharp, but her eyes were watery and clouded.
Somehow, she managed to see the distant trees she had presided over for three quarters of a century, trees that Daniel Chichester, the farmer who had built the house in 1735, may have planted himself. She had always loved trees, as if they were family. She had learned that from her mother. She could tell you about the tall tulip tree near the garden, the dogwood trees that spilled their white petals around the pond, the great oak, the sycamore, the elms and the old hickory so near the house she said it seemed to whisper to her in the wind. She was blessed with hundreds of trees, and when she needed more after Gene died, she started a Christmas tree farm in one of the meadows. That was in 1978, and some of the blue spruce and cedar had grown so large, they could never grace the inside of a home for the holidays.
“Love, love, love,” she used to say when she left voice messages. And then, “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”
“Mr. Shaw used to do it,” she said, her mouth curling upward with pleasure at the memory of it. “He used to have a little wave, and he always said ‘Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,’ and I kind of picked it up. It sounded so sincere, you know. Like a little song. I loved it.”
She smiled and looked over at the dozens of photographs on the bureau next to the bed, pictures of her four children and their children, pictures of a wedding, the schooner Endymion in full sail, and an old black-and-white image of a young Gene holding a rosary. Her eyes came to rest on a photograph from the 1920s that showed two men standing together deep in conversation as late-afternoon shadows fell languidly across their path.
“Let’s talk about Brioni,” she said. “It was a beautiful time. I’m the only one left, you know. I’m the only one who can remember.”
It was her favorite story, and she wanted to start at the beginning.
Gene’s first communion, 1907 (Mary Agnes Mcintyre Anderson Collection).
Chapter 1
The Altar Boy
“In the home of my rearing, prayer was regular and fervent.”
GENE TUNNEY
It was the last weekend in May 1907, and Gene was doing what he always did in his spare time, sitting at the kitchen table reading with his head down, dark unruly curls falling over his ears, his arms flung over the sports section of the paper and legs dangling off the side of an old wood chair. Today, a Saturday, was his tenth birthday, and there was, praise God, no school and no Mass. A Saturday meant he had time to pore over Bob Edgren’s column in the New York Evening World and the big, bold, black-and-white drawings of fighters punching and whacking, each one labeled with details to memorize.
Gene read slowly, mouthing each word quietly to himself, following the type to the end with his fingers, then methodically going back again and again to make sure he understood it perfectly, each word, each phrase. It took him a long time, but he knew he was good at it. Once he understood a passage, he remembered it, and when he wanted to feel the sound of the words in his mouth, he could beckon them back into his mind. The priests said he was their best altar boy because he memorized the liturgy, and the nuns told his mother he liked to use words that other boys hadn’t learned. His chest swelled with pride. Once Gene read something, he tried hard never to forget it.
Sisters and brothers dashed in and