Nothing to Declare

...Penal coloAt first glance, Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali His Life and Times has all the earmarks of a very bad book...

...In 1858 he was expelled from the Garrick Club for insulting fellow member William Makepeace Thackeray, much as Tald was heaved from Gstaad's Eagle Club for assaulting the preposterous Aga Khan with a custard pie...

...Of course...

...With the exception of Frazier, who still seems genuinely to dislike Ali, his contemporaries tend to feel that it was an honor just to step into the ring with him—even when, like Ken Norton or Jimmy Young, they were probably cheated of victories by the judges...

...Unfortunately, so is Don King...

...Miss Wolf cites surveys of undergraduate males in which 61.7 percent say it would be exciting to use force to subdue a woman, 91.3 say they like to dominate a woman, and 30 percent say they would commit rape if they could get away -with it...

...Miss Wolf looks forward to what she calls a "pro-woman redefinition of beauty," but she does not tell us what that might be...

...Before being knocked silly by Ali in a dreary 1975 fight, Wepner had given his wife a blue negligee with instructions to wear it the evening of the fight because "after the fight, you'll be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world...

...24.95 Joe Queenan 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991...

...I can offer no magic solutions for this sorry state of affairs and how to improve it, not even after one month of first-hand experience, but what does seem clear to me is that we need to search for both the culprits and the motives...

...there's a roof over his head...

...But there is no whining here, no sophistry or phony orchestration...

...Do all rich Greeks own ships, while their poorer countrymen only run restaurants...

...On page 275 comes the description of the awesome punishment Ali subjected himself to in his 1974 victory over then-champion George Foreman, when he allowed the hardest puncher of the past quarter-century to wear himself out pummeling the Great One's body...

...Hauser does not report how many stitches she took...

...I was familiar with the incarceration of Yank actor Stacy Keach, who in 1984 had been tossed in Reading Gaol for nine months after attempting to ease through Heathrow customs with a stash of cocaine hidden in a shaving cream tube...

...If people wish to live in a brutal and lawless climate, why must the taxpayers bear the brunt...

...MUHAMMAD ALI: HIS LIFE AND TIMES Thomas Hauser/Simon and Schuster/544 pp...

...She simply instructs her female readers to let themselves go, to be "greedy," to "eat, to be sexual, to age," to allow their bodies to "wax and wane," to "cover up or go practically naked, to do whatever we choose in following—or ignoring—our own aesthetic...

...The most striking thing about Hauser's book is the ceaseless outpouring of affection for the now apparently brain-damaged Ali by the great fighters he taunted, reviled, and humiliated outside the ring before taunting, reviling, and humiliating them inside it...

...Another delightful passage records the outrage of the Mobutu government when Ali warned Foreman that when he got to Zaire he would be put in a pot and eaten...

...And, of course, I've also learned about the prisoner's bitterness toward society...

...And it is true that women are among the victims of the violence that is so lamentably rampant in modern civilization, but Miss Wolf simply adds to the climate of fear...

...ut to judge from Nothing to Declare, his unblinkingly candid recollection of his three months inside the medieval precincts of Pentonville, Taki is far from your standard-issue jet-setter...

...Bro...

...Yet it was the wearing of just such corsetry which for generations had enabled a woman to mold her silhouette to the shape she chose, to present herself to the world in whatever slender or curvaceous form her fancy took...

...What's more, the most interesting, touching, or hilarious remarks are by and large made by the men who actually got into the ring with the greatest fighter since Joe Louis, and arguably the greatest boxer of all time...

...Hauser lets Ail off easy on such subjects as marital infidelity (boys will be boys), and his embrace of the sinister Elijah Muhammad (who kept Malcolm X away from Ali's camp before the first Liston fight...

...This is what you hear on the rare occasions when prisoners admit that a crime took place...

...Taki was in there...

...with the exception of the final fifty pages, when the book gets a bit misty-eyed, Hauser has done an excellent job...

...Beyond the zaniness and glitter of the High Life, Taki reveals himself as yet another perfectly ordinary man seeking credibility and approval...

...Hauser reconciles none of the contradictions inherent in being a pacifist heavyweight champion of the world, exonerates Ali of any involvement in the scads of cruddy financial scams that have been engineered by shysters capitalizing on his name, and tiptoes past Ali's ludicrous visit with Saddam Hussein last fall...

...The fact that the book was written with Ali's cooperation provides further cause for trepidation: it is hard to imagine any written documents that are consistently less informative or truthful than books about jocks that have been written with the full cooperation of those same jocks...

...Iaki proposes that penal colonies may be the best solutions for career bad guys...

...She fails, however, to acknowledge that it is feminist reforms that have provided the opportunity and the market for plastic surgeons...

...While Taki's short course in criminology is incomplete at best, one is reminded once again that reality is the midnight mugger of rosy intentions...

...the man's still eating...

...On the lighter side is an anecdote by Ali's physician Ferdie ("The Fight Doctor") Pacheco regarding cornerman Bundini Brown, who unwisely showed up just before the Foreman fight in Zaire in the company of a white showgirl...

...T he book is not for the squeamish, however...

...Despite the whining of liberals that prisoners are for the most part pathetic victims who flunked toilet training or were denied bedtime stories, Taki discovered a mob of miscreants operating on a moral plane below that of normal society: What have I learned about my fellow inmates...

...They are already following their own aesthetic, which is precisely that of the "beauty myth" Miss Wolf derides...

...The man's still living...

...Most of the time they do not...

...This is a Champions-Only Paragraph...

...He chroniBrock Yates is the author of the new book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races (Doubleday...

...In the 1850s, Yates wrote a column for the London Illustrated Times called "The Lounger at the Clubs," and it was Yates who first reported such heady matters in the first person singular, which Taki today employs with notable elan and candor...

...When asked about Ali, Leon Spinks, no stranger to speech difficulties and aberrant behavior himself, says: "What for should I feel sorry for Ali...

...They disliked my opinions, even disparaged them...

...As for less violent scoundrels: "Take away every penny from them, I say...

...cled the flashy legions of mountebanks, philistines, and barbarians who, he charged, were giving civilized debauchery a bad name...

...11\l' othing to Declare is, in the end, the chronicle of a man born to wealth and privilege, by his own admission spoiled and dilettantish, who is brought to earth by his own profligacy and arrogance...

...with fourteen books under his belt, spent a couple of years tracking down just about everyone who played a significant part in Ali's life, and because just about all of these people had something interesting, touching, or hilarious to say about Ali...

...He ruminates over this human failing throughout: I was imprisoned for too short a period to really qualify as a con, but the few times I have given my views in public, the so-called experts took offence...

...But the heart and soul of Taki'sI D memoir is Pentonville, a world of obscene filth and cynicism, a dingy Hell populated by evil, self-serving, unrepentant inmates and case-hardened prison guards vilified as "screws...

...he assumed Liston would destroy the young Cassius Clay, and didn't want his Nation of Islam associated with a loser...

...Do I go to the champ's room, or does he come to me...

...Harry, then an amateur sports car racer and the owner of Connecticut's Lime Rock Park race course, was clearly the more placid of the two, and has been written off as a bit of a stiff by his more pyrotechnic sibling...

...And Yates was a troublemaker...

...Taki's jaundiced eye and acid prose are aimed at the bozos and status slaves who pollute the upper classes and degrade the "High Life:" While my own origins are unspeakably more plebeian than Taki's, his journalistic efforts have been of considerable interest to me owing to a shirt-tail ancestor of mine and friend to Dickens named Edmund Hodgson Yates...

...No rehabilitation happens in jail...

...he's making money...

...Unfortunately for Miss Wolf, the modern American woman does not have that old-fashioned German aptitude for metaphysics...

...But Taki's imprisonment for the same offense in the same year had slipped my mind, in the main because he was more famous in England and on the continent than in the USA, and because when it happened I had dismissed him as just another rich twit who had gotten what he deserved for dabbling with a dangerous and thoroughly anti-social chemical...

...Ali's remarks were damaging our image...

...As Pacheco remembers it, "This was supposed to be an all-black show: a black promoter, two black champions, a black country, the height of black consciousness," so Brown's gaffe was enormous...

...Taki, the famed patrician diarist for the London Spectator...

...But, once compelled by her liberators to put on unisex underwear, bike shorts, and other unflattering garments, a woman could only achieve the shape she wanted by getting a cosmetic surgeon to work on the body itself...

...Her alternative proposal will seem to them as alien as that of the late-nineteenth-century Naturphilosophen, who unlacedtheir flabby torsos to cavort on the shores of the Baltic, secure in the syllogism that, since they were part of nature and all nature was beautiful, they too must be beautiful—despite the n a crisp spring morning several ki years ago, a friend was driving me through South London aboard an ancient Aston Martin Ulster when he yanked his hand away from the juddering steering wheel and pointed at an ominous brick fortress on the right...

...Don't you hear what I've been saying...

...he yelled over the assorted groans and whines issuing from the old crock...

...I would guess that more than eighty percent of the inmates think they were framed by the police...

...Her remark: "Okay, big-shot...

...The book has a conventional chronological structure, with the author punctuating his own highly adulatory account of Ali's life with hundreds of comments from fighters, cornermen, promoters, managers, journalists, wives (four and counting), public nuisances like Howard Cosell, and Ali himself...

...NOTHING TO DECLARE: A MEMOIR Taki/Atlantic Monthly Press/216 pp...

...Brown bailed out by persuading the woman to wear a headband and try to pass herself off as an Indian...

...Mutual friends had described Taki as a witty wastrel with an Olympian tolerance for wine and women...

...Criminals commit crimes because they are misguided, disturbed or unhappy...

...Also, to expect their abrupt shows of personality, born of their longing to be somebody, which only leads them to try to assert their individuality by being aggressive to other cons...

...All very well for the svelte and sensuous Miss Wolfs of the world, most women will reply...

...Taki's adventures with the late Sean Flynn, Errol's bairn, who was murdered at a remote outpost in Cambodia (while tripping on LSD, according to Taki), and the actress Linda Christian (for whom he hocked the family silverware and was exiled to one of his Papa's factories in darkest Sudan for two years) are the height of sophisticated nonsense...

...After thirty years of fights, press conferences, and extravagant public relations stunts by Ali himself, not to mention the scores of books, films, television programs, plays, and documentaries dealing with one of the most famous and least timid men on Earth, the reader may feel that he has a legitimate quarrel with Hauser's assertion that "the true Ali is largely unknown...

...Whether the speaker is trainer Angelo Dundee discussing the loose ropes in Zaire or a physician from UCLA examining whether Ali has Parkinson's syndrome or is merely punch-drunk, the book is fascinating from start to finish, one of the few books I have reviewed in the past couple of years that does not seem like a couple of magazine articles padded out to manuscript length...

...She raises "rape-awareness" to such a fevered pitch that young female readers will close the book terrified of dating their classmates...

...They are self-sufficient...

...Finally, on page 325 there is the spectacle of the ruined Joe Frazier, with both eyes firmly closed, hauling himself out of a hospital bed after the 1974 Thrilla in Manila to attend a "victory party" given by his own entourage, and even belting out a few numbers with the band...

...Aficionados of the manly art will notice that chumps like Gerry Cooney and Jean-Pierre Coop-man ("The Lion of Flanders") do not figure anywhere in the paragraph I have just written...

...Hauser treats Ali's refusal to fight in Vietnam the way History has treated it: Ali told everyone to go to hell, and paid the price, forgoing the best years of his fighting life...

...No wonder so many all-American boys nowadays prefer to go out with Chinese, Korean, Filipina, and other foreign girls, who are still sweet and serene and not tensed up with fear of "date rape" from reading books like this one...

...His Spectator columns elevate social commentary (and we mean social in the most elegant and exclusive context) to a level infinitely more cerebral than the sycophantic gossip-mongering that litters the pages of many popular journals...

...We live, unfortunately, in the era of the excuse...

...evidence of the photographs...

...And most of them seem to feel that, despite the retired champion's terrible condition today, as he turns 50, Ali has had a nice sojourn on the planet...

...He managed to keep a journalstteng verboten—between the lines of his copy of Paul Johnson's Modern Times...

...His Spectator column was an odyssey of ramblings between Athens and Gstaad, London and New York, punctuated by drunken flings with brittle, over-sexed women and allnighters with idle aristocrats and titans of industry and literature...

...surely he couldn't be all bad...

...Pentonville Prison...

...Other critics have faulted the book for its loose editing, but I do not agree...

...nies are run by the inmates themselves...

...19.95 Brock Yates THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 37 Taki's prison friendships—most of them, interestingly, with blacks—did little to dissuade him from his feeling that criminals are endemically deluded individuals with no sense of guilt...

...On page 252, we get to the first Kei Norton bout, when an out-of-shape AL went the distance while shielding a jaw that had been broken in half during the second round...

...he asks...

...Just containment...

...There is also a wonderful story about the young Ali suckering Life magazine into doing a photo-essay about his rigorous daily underwater training regimen...

...Once he became inured to the omnipresent reek of human excreta and the suffocating confines of his seven-by-thirteen cell, Taki's vivid powers of observation took root...

...Most of my friendships in this place are with people who wanted to be somebodies but are too weak to really try...

...On page 164, Ali's 1967 victim Ernie Terrell charges that Ali pushed his eye down into the socket, breaking the bone and giving Terrell double vision for the rest of the figh...

...And best of all, whatever happens, he'll- always be Muhammad Ali...

...I had known his brother, Harry Theodoracopulos, in the 1970s when he ran the American office of the family's vast shipping empire...

...For it was feminists, as Miss Wolf notes with satisfaction, who liberated the bodies of American women by persuading them to stop wearing girdles...

...In other words, male undergraduates are dangerous animals...

...By and large, he feels that Ali can do whatever he wants, because he is larger than life...

...The reader who can wade through the extraneous ramblings of the Wilfrid Sheeds and Sylvester Stallones, concentrating instead on the comments of George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Floyd Patterson, Ernie Shavers, and all the other headbangers who once, twice, or thrice climbed into the ring with this guy, is in for a real treat...

...To put it succinctly, my view was, and still remains, that the liberal experiment of throwing restraints to the wind, of blaming society for the crimes committed by habitual criminals, of coddling perpetrators, resulted in an even bigger failure than Communism...

...The Zairean foreign minister called Ali's manager to remind the fighter that cannibalism was not practiced in that fine country, and that "Mr...

...Muhammad, Muhammad...

...Ali, it turns out, could not swim, and rarely went anywhere near the water...

...After taking twenty-three stitches in his face, which hadn't really looked all that good before the fight, Wepner got back to his hotel room to find his wife in bed, wearing the negligee...

...It is worth reading because the indefatigable Hauser, a New York lawyer Joe Queenan writes for Barron's and other publications...

...Then see how many white-collar criminals remain...

...One is further dismayed by the knowledge that the book includes musings by such intellectual flyweights as Bryant Gumbel and James Michener, such roving weirdos as Ramsey Clark, and such pugilistically irrelevant observers as Hank Aaron, Jimmy Carter, Julian Bond, and Kris Kristofferson...

...Better yet, Yates was in the vanguard of literary prisoners, having spent seven weeks of 1885 in the Holloway Gaol for libeling Lord Lonsdale...

...The combination of urban decay, squalor, boredom and grinding poverty makes for crime...

...There is always somebody in authority ready to rush in and explain why a crime was perpetrated...

...Interwoven with Taki's account of his nightmarish life inside Pentonville is the informal autobiography of a rich Greek who was fitfully educated in American prep schools, dabbled in internationaltournament tennis, then gained a legitimate reputation as a war correspondent and columnist...

...First, that prisoners are exceedingly quick to take offence...

...And they serve the purpose of allowing violent people to build a society in their own image...

...His childhood under the Nazi heel in Athens is hardly as amusing, nor is the story of his fumbling attempts to get closer to his imperious father...

...And yet, all this notwithstanding, Muhammad Ali is actually worth reading...

...The situation is especially bad in America, because American men do not take their jobs easily, as British and Australian men do—they work hard, and keeping up with them clearly takes a grim toll on the energies of American women...

...For those in authority, and inmates as well, can never admit that a crime is ever committed because someone is bad, greedy or malicious...

...Described on occasion as a "terrorist among the rich," he has gained a reputation for riddling poseurs with high-velocity verbal ordinances (while of course taking a few incoming rounds of his own...

...Second, that their chief characteristic is their irresponsibility and their propensity for violence...

...Bad people exist and, as Tald discovered, most of them end up behind bars...

...Although Miss Wolf's attack is on "the male gender" in general, she singles out cosmetic surgeons as being particularly sadistic and rapacious...

...M y favorite passage concerns Chuck Wepner, the stumblebum Heavyweight Champion of New Jersey who served as the inspiration for Sylvester Stallones moronic, subliminally racist Rocky films...