It`s Wednesday lunchtime, and the Cauliflower Alley Club is holding its weekly meeting in the coffeeshop of the Dunes Motel on Sunset Boulevard.
The deep-red leatherette banquettes are filling up. It`s a colorful bunch. Mostly older. Mostly men. Some wear cowboy hats; others are in checked, loud sports coats.
Maria ”The Tigress” Bernardi wears Mike Mazurki`s ear around her neck. It is a solid silver mold of the fused left ear of the club`s late founder and now the club`s official symbol. It`s a registered trademark, in fact.
Bernardi sits beneath her signed portrait, gnawing her lip. There`s too much Hollywood here today, not enough of the club`s real members, retired pro wrestlers. Even Barbie Dahl, whose picture in full wrestling garb is on the wall (dedicated ”To Gang at Dune`s, Hugs and Hammer Locks”), hasn`t made it today.
There are boxers though, and other sports and show-business hangers-on.
”The only thing square in the fight game is the ring!” shouts Terry Garabedian across the tables. He fought some in his youth, mainly in the ports where his ship landed. ”In my first four-round fight, the guy hit me with everything but the lamppost.”
”The difference between wrestlers and boxers,” says Joe Palumbo, a one- time boxer and now a promoter, ”is that wrestlers are one big family. Boxers are, well, clannish. Status-conscious.”
”Egomaniacs,” growls the Tigress. ”Invite wrestlers to a function, like our annual party, and they`ll find their own way here. Boxers-they want their limos, their hotels paid for, they don`t want to mix with boxers below them.”
”I was an endurance dancer,” Jack Stanley tells Gus Pherson, a former
”Our Gang” child actor sitting next to him. Stanley is 79. Strictly show biz. He has a long bassett-hound face that droops out from under a cowboy hat incongruously festooned with badges. ”We danced 1,400 hours-1,400 hours! And that only got us third place. The winners danced on to 3,200 hours. Those days we worked. I won $500 with my partner for that.”
Pherson isn`t saying much.
Tim O`Sullivan, on the other hand, is: ”That`s Timothy Aloysious O`Sullivan, if you please!”
O`Sullivan, 75, boxed six years in his youth and served six years in the Marine Corps and 30 years in the New York Police Department. He knows lots of big-wigs in the fight world, but he`s proudest of his voice. ”I sing,” he says, ”like Bing. I do `The Star-Spangled Banner.` In one year I do it over a thousand times. The Navy League, the ring, the Troopers` Club . . .”
”We all come here to cut up jackpots,” says 84-year-old Emilio Antonori, alias Jack Thomas. ”That means talk about the past.
”I knew Eleanor Holmes-she did the water show-Johnny Weismuller, Fanny Bryce, Billy Rolls . . . you don`t know Billy Rolls? The world`s fastest typist! Died with $52 million. Gave $50 million to Israel, $2 with $52 million. Gave $50 million to Israel, $2 million to his wife.”
Antonori, say his friends here, is ”next in line to being the world`s greatest escapologist.” He could get out of a straitjacket faster than Houdini, they say. While Houdini writhed around on the floor struggling to free himself, ”I would do back flips while I got out of it,” Antonori says. ”I`ve always been escaping. I ran away from home. Chicago. When I was 11, I escaped from three correctional institutions. It was born in me. I rode the trains. Then in a ballpark in Spokane where I jumped off a train, I met this kid who`d been a `plant` for Houdini at a fair. We made a straitjacket. We started working our way in the fairs towards Hollywood. My friend had a cousin who was a cameraman. When we got there, we both started off as pantry boys (kitchen help) at Universal. That was 1919.”
He looks dreamy for a moment. ”Seventy-two! I did 72 movies for Universal. Now I`m Universal`s oldest living employee! I was a foot soldier in `All Quiet on the Western Front.` I still remember them throwing mud in our faces and making us dig the trenches! That whole movie/war was done in Tustin (Calif.).”
Pretty soon, Antonori and Richard ”Happy” Hall are arguing over how much money Houdini spent on his own publicity.
”At least $75,000 a year-in the 1920s!” says Hall, whose thing is tap-dancing on roller skates on top of a drum on top of a table. He`s still doing it at 68.
”Houdini may have been more famous than me,” says Antonori, ”but he died broke in 1926, and I`m alive in 1991 and have three apartment houses.”
”You were faster, that`s for sure,” says Wally Cassell, who got Antonori work at several of the World`s Fairs in the 1930s. ”Ten seconds!
Houdini was never near that!”
Cassell seems younger, richer than the rest. He arrives today in a Mercedes. He lives ”by the Hollywood sign” with his wife, actress-dancer Peggy Ryan. After five minutes, he`s up, off to a TV studio to help launch his wife`s ”50-PLUS Fitness Tape . . . A Positive Lifestyle Program for People 50 and Over.”
Never say cry
Maria Bernardi has heard all this before. It all seems far from the sweaty world of mats and ropes and the roaring of blood-lusty crowds that fueled her life. She may be the most genuine Cauliflower Clubber here today. Even Art Abrams, a former boxing journalist who is sitting next to her and runs the club with her assistance, was never inside the ropes.
”I was a professional wrestler by the time I was 12,” says Bernardi, 66, ”but I started when I was 3. I was a mean little devil in those days. When my little sister was born I was jealous, so my dad would take me to the ring. He was a pro wrestler all his life. I thought he was playing. I wanted to play. When he threw me around and I cracked my head, he said I couldn`t play if I cried. So I stopped crying. I thought it was the most normal thing in the world. It kind of went from there. Dad liked it, Mom hated it. She wanted me to be a lady.”
Bernardi didn`t become a lady. Instead, she became the Tigress. She got the name from a fight in Mexicali, the border town, in the `30s, when promoters brought in female wrestlers to boost the houses.
”The match was going our way. The fans tend to get real excited down there,” Bernardi says. ”They cornered me. Alone. One guy came up and hit me. Thank God I can take a punch. I hit him back. Knocked him out. Ballpark! I walked up to the men`s dressing room, defying the crowd to attack me. I made it. I asked the men why they didn`t come out and help me. `What do you want us to do?` they said. `Go out there and get killed?` Men!”
She got her current cauliflower ear 26 years ago; it was the third time she had been cauliflowered. (A cauliflower ear occurs when the ear is bruised, causing internal bleeding and resulting in a deformed ear.) Twice before she`d had it successfully drained. But that third time her promoter wouldn`t give her time off. So her ear has stayed fused to this day.
She never got equal pay with men. In those days she might average $20 to $50 a night. ”But I was tough,” Bernardi says. ”I`d pull hair. I`d hit with closed fists. I didn`t care. I always took the `bad guy` role. It came naturally. I`m just mean, I guess.”
World champion
Being mean took her around the world. It took her, finally, to Rome, where in 1948 she won the Italian Championship. She is proudest of that-and of winning the World Championship soon afterwards in Los Angeles.
”I felt very emotional that night,” she says. ”And I held on to both titles till I retired in 1963.”
It`s getting late. About 4. On the table is a copy of the glossy newsletter, ”The Cauliflower Alley Club, Ring of Friendship.” A photo of
”the ear” heads the title page. Inside are pictures of people with their arms around Archie Moore and Cesar Romero, and folk with monikers like Henry W. ”Treacherous” Phillips.
A ”New Members” page welcomes Robert F. ”Way Cool” Allen, Edwin
”Bubba Storm” Bray, Richard ”Dirty Dick” Barkley Jr. The next page,
”Ten Count,” has tributes to the recently departed. Members like Aldo Ray, the film tough guy who died last March. (”In a video appearance at a Cauliflower Alley Club luncheon, Aldo told how he hated violence, especially boxing, with the possibility of head injury. Naturally this interview was never used for fear of alienating many boxing members. . . .”)
Bernardi starts to get up. She suffers from arthritis now, from all those falls. It`s a common price for the rough-and-tumble life of these practitioners of man`s-and woman`s-oldest sport.
She`s apologetic that there aren`t more ring vets here today.
”You should come to our annual reunion banquet,” she says. ”That`s when you see everybody from Lou Thesz-he just retired from the ring this year, at 74!-to Archie Moore. This year it was great: 450 from around the world! New Zealand, Japan, Mexico. . . . My boss Art Abrams and I organized it. But next year-that`s our 25th-we`re hoping for 1,000.”
Bernardi looks at her watch. Time to return to the world her kid sister dragged her back into 28 years ago. Bernardi now manages an apartment block nearby. One thing you can be sure of: Law and order are alive and well in those apartments.
She shakes hands, swings out through the glass doors and makes off down the street.
For a moment, all you can see in the glare, swinging and flashing around her neck, is Mike Mazurki`s ear.
