Authors: Mark Kram
Serious effort was made to reestablish him as a seminal figure, a legend worth some money, for advertisers and investors looking for a name to front businesses. Why they would go to him was baffling; his business history of failure could be a model at the Wharton School of Finance. But this was a subtle game, involving groupie writers. He had to be kept on the move: lucrative autograph sessions, $200,000 for appearances, to deflect emphasis on his health. To the press, Joe Louis had been for years a poor, broke, venally used mummy. Now, to some of the press—mainly in New York—the image evolved of Ali as just a man afflicted with Parkinson’s, not a careless fighter who had had his brain cells irradiated in the ring; rather neat. If you needed a good picture that speaks to the new channeling, it was there in a photo of him taken in a New York magic shop: Ali dressed up as the medieval trickster Merlin. The circus had been lunatic in the early days, but now, with heaving and puffing, a new one was going up with meticulous calibration. Ali would be on the road over two hundred days a year.
There was no telling where he would turn up next, rigid and glazed of eye, the “man of peace and good will.” He showed up in Vietnam at long last, he showed up at the bedside of a London fighter named Michael Watson, doing the Ali Shuffle for the brain-damaged kid. He was found in Syria deep into fasting, flanked by doctors who were monitoring him and saying: “He’s much better. He’s off the thirty pills he takes a day.” In Egypt, he was said to have made out a $750 traveler’s check to a street urchin. We even had word of his ascension to the higher reaches of the paranormal, while traveling with Thomas
Hauser through Pennsylvania. Ali suddenly contorted in pain. According to Hauser, a close member of the circle, Ali said, “In two days there’s gonna be a plane crash in South America.” We are told that two days later a Surinam Airways jet went down, killing 168. Nothing, really, according to Lonnie: “He predicted the Pan Am crash in Scotland.” Ali, thanks to Lonnie and minute reconstruction, was on the boards again—the indomitable legend, nearly effervescent to select writers.
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here were a couple of places Ali didn’t show up. Not of a piece physically, it was perhaps understandable that he made no effort to relieve the poverty of Bundini Brown or see to the meager wants of the poor and dying Luis Sarria, the one man who never asked for anything from him. He did show up at the hospital to see Bundini as he was dying from a fall. He could only move his eyes. Ali leaned down to his ear and said: “We had some good times, didn’t we?” Bundini’s eyes scraped up and down. And, most of all, he was for years out of touch with the supposed love of his life, Aaisha Ali, the mystery woman who had performed the role of a fifth wife (simultaneously with Belinda), had given him a child, and had been left to blow to pieces in severe hard-luck winds. Aaisha’s little tale reveals all the gentleness, trickery, and spite of which Ali was capable in his dealings. Ali never acknowledged that he was married to her, a point that does not upset her. Nothing much does, except the lupus that has made her an invalid.
Aaisha was once Wanda Bolton, a pretty little high school junior, age seventeen, on her way to being a doctor like her brother and, presently, to Brazil on an international scholarship when she met Ali on a visit to Deer Lake with her brother and mother. It was meant to kill time, a little summer diversion that would end with estrangement
from her father and deep regrets in her mother. Ali had just lost to Ken Norton and was getting ready for their second fight. He was talking to some fans when he picked up Wanda’s face and stayed on it. “Have you ever seen a fighter as pretty as me?” he asked. “Look, not a single scar.” His eyes captured her, they seemed controlling. He wasn’t pretty, she thought; his “head was too square.” She adds, “But there was this aura, he had an inner beauty.” Ali said to her: “You like an Indian princess. Come on, we’re going to the movies.” They went to see
Charlotte’s Web.
On return, they went horseback riding, sat after a while, and talked. Wanda said she was going to Brazil. He said he had been waiting for a blue-jeaned country girl like her for a long time. “You won’t be going to Brazil,” he said. “I have special powers. You’re meant to be with me.”
Wanda went home, “chalking it up as a wonderful memory.” Soon he was on the phone wanting her to go to Manhattan. No, her mother would not go for that. He called her mother at work and talked her into it, cinching the deal when he said her older brother and friend Kim could come, too. “I hadn’t even had a date in my life,” she says. They went to Herbert Muhammad’s apartment, and Wanda thought it strange when Herbert said: “She’ll give you many sons.” She says now, “Herbert had the same influence over Ali that Colonel Parker had over Elvis.” After that, he was at the Bolton house frequently, the two of them sitting on the porch and eating ice cream. “He had dental work in Miami,” she says, “and he wanted me to go with him. I did, too. But there was no way my parents would allow that. With a thirty-one-year-old boxer! No way. But he was clever. He hired my brother, Kelly, as a bodyguard. He told my mother that ‘we’re doin’ a documentary’ on how religion affects people. I was to give the Christian perspective.” Parents want experiences for their children; the trip was tough to pass up. “I was filled with a sense of adventure, and very much in love.”
Everyone was put up at the Fontainebleu Hotel, Ali’s favorite; mother, brother, a couple of classmates. She says: “We were all living in a warm, golden glow. None of us cared, or even realized it was really like a shadow. Often a cold and distant one of Muhammad Ali.” Ali put a full-court press on her mother, who watched things closely. Wanda roomed with her friend Jacqui. Ali kept going out with her mother on shopping trips, insisted she get her hair done. With Jacqui in Ali’s bedroom, she was giving him a foot massage when he pointed to a bag filled with money. “Count it,” he said. “There should be four thousand. Put three hundred on the dresser. I want you to keep the rest. Buy some things to take home. I have to think of something to explain the money to your momma.” Wanda and Jacqui only bought a couple of tacky watches. Ali said: “You two are so innocent. That’s what makes you so special.” They went to the dentist together. Ali left her outside, until he spied a young jogger talking to her. They had an argument.
“Men, you can’t trust them,” he said angrily. “That little nigger wanted you. It was your fault. He seen your legs in that short skirt.”
She said that everyone wears miniskirts.
“No woman of mine! Dress like a decent Muslim woman, it wouldn’t happen.”
“I should have stayed at the hotel,” she said.
“Don’t get smart with me,” he said. “See, you give a woman money, and right away she’s bossin’ you around.”
“Here, take your money back,” she said. “Money isn’t a thing to me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I get upset about other men.” He paused: “You know the real reason I didn’t want you in the dental office? I’m scared to death of needles. The Greatest, scared of getting a shot.” They went into the office. He asked if his daughter, Wanda, could go with him. “She’s got a bad fear of getting shots.” In the chair, he said
to Wanda: “Now come to Daddy. Hold Daddy’s hand…you’re going to be just fine. Ain’t nothin’ to be afraid of.”
Ali’s favorite game, says Aaisha, was Power. Once, in the lobby, Ali said: “Watch this. I can get them to do anything I want.” A group of sleek, rich women raced up to him, wanting his autograph. “On one condition,” he said. “Kneel down and kiss my hands.” Aaisha says: “I was shocked. These million-dollar Miami women did it! It’s hard to tell this story. It makes him sound cruel, humiliating. He was simply seeing how far his power could take him.” Another game he played was to carry little Wanda around the hotel on his shoulders, saying: “This is my illegitimate twelve-year-old daughter.”
When it came time for Wanda to go to Brazil, she was torn between her mother’s dream for her and the man she loved. She called Ali: “I can’t go.” He said: “You’ll never regret it the rest of your life.”
She says now: “I have no regrets. But I have a deep shame and regret for the pain I caused my mother. Having her child make a terrible mistake. By the time my mother put it all together, I was pregnant.” She embraced Islam instantly, was taught how to sew, cook, and take care of a man and children. She was called Wanda X, and Elijah would later name her Aaisha. When her mother heard of the pregnancy, she was furious. She went to Deer Lake, found Ali in the kitchen; the place went silent. She said: “You’re going to talk to me now! I feel like throwing you off this mountain!”
“Momma,” Ali said, “everything’s gonna be all right. This is my religion. I’m making Wanda my wife. I’ll take care of her. The child she’s carrying will never want for anything.”
“She’s only seventeen!” she yelled. “Her whole life’s in front of her. I don’t care about your religion. I don’t believe in it. My child is pregnant, and you did it!”
Wanda was accepted by Belinda; they were like sisters. Aunt
Coretta approached Ali one day at the camp and said: “Muhammad, you’d better do right by these girls. They’re just babies. I’m ashamed of you, Muhammad. I’m really ashamed of you.” Wanda ran with Ali in the mornings. She was a good jogger, kept daily logs, and taught him how to run to get the maximum out of his roadwork. Ali was fixated on having a boy. “But when Khaliah was born,” she says, “he was so happy. She was Odessa’s favorite.” The child who would not want for anything, so said Ali. When Ali fought in Zaire, trouble rose up. Belinda fought with him, Aaisha was hidden away. Old Cash was fond of Aaisha. He said: “Come on, I’m takin’ you with me. You’re not sittin’ in this hotel room.” Veronica, the eighteen-year-old beauty queen, was now in the mix. Cash and Aaisha showed up at the lawn party. Ali said to his father: “Are you crazy? What you bring her here for?” Veronica was there, and Aaisha could see he was smitten by her. She was already into the role of pious Muslim, but Belinda and Aaisha knew it was an act.
Back in the States, the pair confronted Ali about Veronica. “I was scared to death,” Aaisha says, “but Belinda sat right down and said, ‘We know about Veronica, and we don’t like it. She’s got to go.’” Ali became enraged. Who did they think they were? To him, they were out of line; Muslim wives were docile, not mouthy snoopers. He was going to make Veronica his wife. No, said Belinda, who knew Muslim law, certainly the one that said that there could be no other wife without the other wife’s consent. She sprung from the chair and pointed, saying: “No!” It would eventually sort out in Manila after Belinda’s angry appearance there. She returned, saying to Aaisha: “If you had any sense, you’ll get out, too. He’s disloyal, not worthy of a good woman.” Aaisha says: “The last I heard…Belinda was working in a check-cashing place in Chicago.”
Ali never thought Belinda would leave him, says Aaisha, “and I missed her sisterhood.” Veronica became pregnant, and Ali was brag
ging that he was going to have a boy. Aaisha continued to be loyal even after he married Veronica. Because of lupus, pregnancies were high risk for Aaisha. Ali became more and more critical of her. He mocked her height. Why didn’t she have leg implants, so she could be tall and queenly like Veronica? Veronica continually drove herself between Ali and Aaisha. He told her that Aaisha was there before her, and if she left Aaisha would be his wife, so get used to it. “I was batted around like a ball,” says Aaisha, “and then we had a showdown. I’m not the type to be argumentative, but something had to give. To him, I was being disobedient.”
Aaisha said, “Veronica doesn’t love you, all she wants is your fame.”
“That’s what you think,” he said.
“No, that’s what I know,” she said.
“She does love me!” he shouted.
“She’s going to be your downfall. She’s just interested in being a celebrity and an actress.”
Ali said, “She left college for me. That’s more than you did.”
“Oh, I only had to leave high school because I was pregnant with your child. At seventeen!”
“I’ve fed you!” he shouted again. “Put clothes on your back, kept a roof for you. You traveled around the world because of me! You gonna do that on a high school diploma?”
“I ate before I met you,” Aaisha said. “Traveled with my family. Yes, you have taken me around the world—in more ways than one.”
In Japan, Aaisha began to ponder what she had lost, a probable medical future and her lost adolescence. Ali’s leg was battered by the wrestler Inoki in a ludicrous grab for money. When he hit the elevator of the hotel, veins swollen, he collapsed. Aaisha held him in her arms, and the doctor with them gave him a shot to thin his blood. They got him to the hotel room all right, then he passed out on the bed. It was time, Aaisha thought, to put this madness behind her. This
wasn’t her world, all this extravagance and peacock living. Could she live without him? “I had to save,” she says now, “what little was left of me.” She stayed on for a while, then one day, with Khaliah, she went back home, leaving everything he had given her in Chicago. His constant warning replayed in her head: “You leave me, you’ll end up a nothin’, a nobody that no one will want. Anybody who’d leave Muhammad Ali is a fool.” Eventually he bought her a little two-room house in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
They would meet a year later in the Edwardian Room at the Plaza in New York. They had agreed that she should start a business, an idea she had for holistic therapy. Ali would fund it. She presented him with sixty pages of research and plans while the two dined. He glanced at then and then ripped them up. “If you really want the business,” he said, “you’ll get it on your own. You don’t want to go to bed with me, why should I make it easy for you?” She says now: “Earlier in the day, I had refused his sexual advances. I was serious about building a new life for myself.” She looked at the torn papers, then walked out, with Ali shouting after her: “Who do you think you are to walk out on Muhammad Ali! You’re gonna suffer. I’ll see to that!”
Her hundred-year-old house was in bad shape. He said he would send money for repairs. In 1983 the furnace went up, leaving Khaliah and her without hot water or heat. They had to sleep by the fireplace to keep warm. They had little to eat. She refused to go on public assistance, or go to her parents. “Backbone,” the daughter Khaliah says now, “pulled us through, made us strong.” Khaliah was a sick child, went to the hospital twice with life-threatening conditions. When the furnace exploded again in 1984, she finally called Ali. He said: “You want to be independent, you think you don’t need me anymore. Get it fixed yourself.” He thought a moment, then said, “I’m going broke. I take care of my parents, my brother and his family. Veronica
and her family. I can’t take care of everyone. I’ll try to help you.” Says Aaisha, “He never did.”