The Prizefighter and the Playwright. Jay R. Tunney

      Almost a million Irish had moved into New York in the wake of the potato famine, their overcrowding exacerbated by unemployment, alcohol-ism, violence, prostitution, gang warfare and crime. Protestants and Anglo-Saxon “Yankees” were in charge, and Irish Catholics were despised as foreigners. “Dogs and Irishmen not allowed,” proclaimed tavern signs. Police vans used to collect troublemakers were so jammed with Irish that they were nicknamed “paddy wagons” after Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint. But John Tunney saw opportunity, and when he got a chance to ship to the United States, he took it.

      More than half of the Irish immigrants were single women sent by their families to get jobs and mail money home. So it was that in 1889, at a church social, the sailor Tunney met his match in Mary Jane Lydon, a spirited, strapping, take-charge young housekeeper with brown curly hair and bright blue eyes. At 6 feet, she was almost 2 inches taller than John. Mary Jane hailed from Kiltimagh, mere miles from John’s own birthplace, and was the daughter of a clan who had so angered the local parish priest that none could get jobs. Four years later, in November 1893, John and Mary Jane were married under the Tiffany windows of the Church of the Holy Cross on Forty-second Street. He was 34, a union man working the docks. Mary Jane, who had wooed him by playing the piano and concertina, mending his shirts and feeding him apple pie and chicken and dumplings, was 28.

      Their first son was born James Joseph on May 25, 1897, the third child in an eventual family of seven, three boys and four girls. Five months later, the family moved from West 52nd Street in Hell’s Kitchen to the Irish Catholic working-class section of Greenwich Village. For most of Gene’s boyhood, the family lived in a cramped, cold-water walk-up with a copper-plated gin mill in the only bathtub and wood crucifixes on the walls. The flat was situated over a general store at the corner of Perry and Washington Streets, a block from the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side.

      The neighborhood streets and alleyways were often sinister and dangerous, controlled by the Hudson River Dusters and the Gophers, murderous mobs made up largely of Irish youth who robbed delivery wagons and terrorized local merchants with fists, rocks and knives. Donnybrook, the name of a notoriously rowdy village near Dublin, became shorthand for street fights between surly young men with cigarettes dangling from their lips and God-fearing youths carrying rosaries. Gene found his first sanctuary outside of home in the local firehouse, under the protection of a toughened Irishman, Michael F. McCaffrey, a taciturn veteran of the Spanish-American War. In the beginning, Gene stayed at the firehouse after school, sequestered in a corner soaking up the camaraderie while he worked his way through schoolwork. Later on, he “took his gloves down to the station and put them on with some of the firemen.” “He was an unusually polite boy,” McCaffrey remembered, “a boy with three library cards and a vocabulary.”

      For a youngster growing up, the great, open expanse of the Hudson offered new horizons. With its constantly moving ships and barges, the river was an ever-changing panorama of light and motion, an invitation to adventure and a hideout from an apartment too small and too loud. To stand on the cobblestones at the intersection where Perry Street faced the Hudson was to make believe the city was far away. To the north and the south, the curves of Manhattan were visible, but the tall buildings, the racket of bustling carriages, wagons and wheelbarrows, and the clatter of vendors and deliverymen were almost nonexistent. Late in the afternoon, when shadows had fallen over the apartment house, the perches along the river remained sunny. A boy could watch scudding gray clouds billow and race into the orange sunset and sense the nearby sea and the brooding emptiness of the ocean. “I embrace solitude,” Gene used to say, “and even as a youngster, I sought out the quiet places.”

      With his friends and younger brothers, Gene swam off the piers and decks of ships, played baseball on the dockside staging areas and raced through smelly horse stables dubbed “the pig farm.” Scuffles and fistfights were common. Yet early on — and despite the fact that he enjoyed boxing with gloves — Gene showed little interest in purposefully hurting other boys unless called upon to defend himself or his two younger brothers.

      “I felt it didn’t pay to pick fights,” he said. “But I bitterly resented being punched around by the bullies of the neighborhood. My first interest was in self-protection. I thought less of hitting somebody than of not being hit.”

      Nana coped with most things through prayer. She taught her seven children to kneel on the cold, hard floor and pray, hands positioned fingertip to fingertip, every morning and night. Photographs of first communions were placed on the piano as a reminder that the church was central to her life and should be to theirs. During grace at meals, she preached that morality was next to Godliness, that to be honest, upright and loyal was the only way to gain God’s grace, and that character was the embodiment of the soul. Chastity was expected, and she believed celibacy and pursuing the Lord’s work were the highest goals one could attain. She didn’t drink, didn’t swear and expected her children to do the same. She nursed a deep yearning for respectability and acceptance in her new homeland.

      Gene said that his mother gave him a character and a spirituality that he liked to think was particularly Irish. But she also encouraged his learning. “It was always his mother,” recalled his eldest son, also named Gene. “His mother was the one who encouraged him to educate himself, to read the dictionary, to learn and to build up his vocabulary.” While doing chores, Nana quoted poetry, such as “A Psalm of Life” by Longfellow: “In the world’s broad field of battle / In the bivouac of Life / Be not like dumb, driven cattle! / Be a hero in the strife!”

      “Say it again, Nana!” begged one of the children. And she did. She quoted all of it.

      “Time and tide wait for no man,” proclaimed Nana regularly. “You must get up and get out and get on with life to make something of yourself!”

      As Gene grew older, his mother worried when he came home with bruises or a bloodied nose from fighting in the streets. One after-school battle went into a third day before a policeman stepped in and broke it up. “I was considered rather incorrigible by my parents, because no matter how much they punished me after each scrap, I continued to get into them at the slightest provocation,” he admitted years later.

      The hard necessity of helping with the family finances forced Gene to go to work at age 12. His bossy oldest sister, Rose, bragged that she had made the most money because she was earning pennies as an errand girl by the age of 7. By the time they were 11 or 12, the age when their father had gone to sea, all the children would have jobs, with every nickel handed over to Nana for household expenses.

      Gene worked as a butcher’s boy at John McNamara’s meat market for $2.50 a week, taking orders from customers in the morning and making deliveries after school. When he showed up late for class, which was most days, the nuns wielded their rulers like scimitars, rapping his knuckles until they were raw. But waiting on stoops for the various McTigues, O’Sullivans and Duffys to find dimes for beef allowed the altar boy to see neighbors in provocative undress and using language that he had never found in a dictionary.

      One day, Gene slipped and fell, slashing open his leg on a butcher’s knife. Summoned from home to help, Nana wrapped her son’s bleeding leg in her petticoats, hoisted him across her broad shoulders and, breathless, raced six long city blocks to the hospital emergency room.

      “I’m Dr. Van Vliet,” said the man in a white jacket. “And what shall I call you, young man?”

      Dutch-born Dr. Frederick Van Vliet, the most highly educated man Gene had ever met, dazzled him with information and the prospect that, like a storybook hero, Gene could find a path out of his humble beginnings. Gene went to work for him as a messenger and carried the doctor’s medical bag on calls. In becoming his first trusted teacher, the doctor gave much-needed direction to Gene’s life.

      “It was the books, all those treasured books that captured me, full of words and ideas. I couldn’t read fast enough, couldn’t get enough of them.” Four walls of the doctor’s office had bookshelves, not just medical books but novels, historical fiction, travel books, short stories and tomes on modern and ancient history. When the doctor was busy, Gene sat alone in a big leather chair with the sound of a ticking clock and a veritable library stacked beside him on the old, wide-plank floors. Van Vliet