Max Palmer: The Mississippi Giant Who Played Monsters, Wrestled as Paul Bunyan and Preached as Goliath for Christ

20 hours ago

9 min read

Collage of Max Palmer as a young basketball player, a smiling close-up, a crusade flyer and a photo beside a policeman, with headline text

In January 1947, a 19-year-old cotton farmer turned up in the pages of TIME magazine for the crime of being too tall to play basketball against. His name was Max Palmer, his teammates called him Shorty, and he was still a freshman at a tiny Mississippi high school. Over the next 37 years he'd be a Hollywood monster, a TV curiosity, a wrestler billed as Paul Bunyan, a drunk, a bouncer and finally a travelling preacher who called himself Goliath for Christ.

Nobody ever quite agreed on how tall he was. That turns out to be the least strange thing about him.

Quick Answers

Who was Max Palmer? An American giant, born in Mississippi in November 1927, who worked as a film actor, professional wrestler and evangelist.
How tall was Max Palmer? TIME measured him at 7ft 7in in his socks at 19. Later claims ran as high as 8ft 6in, and his 1984 obituary rounded him off at eight feet.
What films was he in? The Sniper (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953) and Killer Ape (1953), where he played the title monster opposite Johnny Weissmuller.
What was his wrestling name? Paul Bunyan, after the giant lumberjack of American folklore. He wrestled from about 1955 to 1960.
When did Max Palmer die? On 7 May 1984 in St Louis, Missouri, aged 56. He was buried near Pontotoc, Mississippi, in a nine-foot coffin.

A Normal Mississippi Boy Until 14

Max Palmer came from the Mississippi Delta, though even his birthplace gets muddled depending on who you ask. Wrestling databases give Pontotoc, his obituary says he was born there too, and plenty of 1950s press called him the Clarksdale Giant. When TIME found him in 1947, he was farming in Quitman County.

By his own account, nothing about his early childhood hinted at what was coming. A 1953 profile in the Memphis magazine Night & Day, dug out of the archive by Memphis Magazine's Vance Lauderdale, said he was a normal-sized boy until he hit 14. Max summed up what happened next in four words: "Then something went haywire."

Black and white street photo of Max Palmer towering over a man and a woman as they walk past a shopfront

He kept growing until he was about 19. His mother was only around five feet tall and his three sisters were all of ordinary height, which made Max look even more like he'd been dropped into the family from somewhere else.

The same Night & Day piece listed his measurements like a tailor's order book. He wore a size 10 hat and a size 64 suit, had a 22-inch neck and 19-inch hands, and took a size 20 shoe on his right foot and a size 21 on his left. He weighed around 450 pounds.

The Basketball Freshman Nobody Could Guard

Here's the bit most write-ups skip. Before Hollywood came calling, Max was briefly a sporting sensation. In a short TIME piece from January 1947 titled simply "Shorty", the magazine described a 19-year-old freshman at Walnut Consolidated High who played forward and just stood under the opposition's basket.

His teammates would win the ball, lob it to him and he'd drop it in. He could reach 11 feet with a jump, so there wasn't much anyone could do about it. Against Friars Point, he scored all 24 of Walnut's first-half points, and earlier that same week he'd put up 78 in a single game.

It got so lopsided that Walnut's own fans started booing, and the coach benched him for a quarter to give the other side a fighting chance. Walnut still won 53 to 14. Max missed one basket in the final quarter and shrugged it off afterwards with: "I had a bad night."

Max Palmer dunking a basketball in a school gym while men in suits watch from the side

TIME pointed out he was six inches taller than the tallest known college player in America at the time, Boston College's 7ft 1in Elmore Morgenthaler. He slept in a nine-foot bed, could pick up to 300 pounds of cotton a day, and had only recently stopped playing in his socks because the University of Arkansas had tracked down a pair of size 16 tennis shoes for him. Arkansas seemed to have the inside track on signing him, though the magazine was blunt that he was slow, clumsy and an average student.

Later accounts say he went on to a spell with the professional Rochester Royals. There's nothing solid backing that up, though, so it's best filed under legend rather than record.

Hollywood Comes Calling: Mutants, Man-Apes and a Foot of Free Height

Max drifted west, picking up odd jobs on the way, and ended up in Los Angeles in the early 1950s. His first film was The Sniper in 1952, Stanley Kramer's thriller about a serial killer stalking San Francisco. It was a tiny, uncredited part, but it got him in the door.

In 1953 he landed two monster roles in quick succession. The first was Invaders from Mars, the Cinecolor sci-fi film told through the eyes of a young boy who watches a flying saucer land behind his house. Max played one of the towering green-suited mutants who serve the Martian Intelligence, alongside Lock Martin, the man who'd been inside the Gort robot suit in The Day the Earth Stood Still. One modern review notes that Max was even taller than Martin, which is saying something. He was uncredited again, but the film has since become a proper cult classic.

Max Palmer in a shaggy fur costume and boots beside a baby elephant on an outdoor film set, with a man in a suit nearby

The second was Killer Ape, a Columbia Jungle Jim picture starring Johnny Weissmuller, the former Olympic swimmer best known as Tarzan. This time Max got the title role and his name on the credits. Shooting ran for just ten days, from 3 to 12 February 1953, and Max spent it in a fur costume with a face mask built by Columbia's head make-up man Clay Campbell. Bullets and knives don't stop his man-ape. In the end, Jungle Jim sets fire to the villains' supplies and the creature dies in the flames.

Columbia wasn't satisfied with 7ft 7in, either. The studio added a foot to his height for publicity, which goes a long way to explaining why so many wildly different figures still float around today. One pulp film blog that reviewed Killer Ape described his costume as a pimp's fur coat and a putty nose, which is about as fair a description as the film deserves.

He also turned up on television. He's credited with appearances on The Jimmy Durante Show and the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Comedy Hour, and he played a bartender in an episode of the western series Bat Masterson. Rotten Tomatoes also lists him in a 1955 comedy called The Big Bluff. But the big parts never came. A giant is a special effect, and Hollywood only needed so many of those.

Paul Bunyan Enters the Ring

With acting work drying up, Max did what plenty of very large men did in the 1950s and went into professional wrestling. Based out of Salt Lake City, he was billed as Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack of American tall tales. Memphis Magazine's columnist called the name rather unimaginative, and he's not wrong.

His Cagematch profile has his in-ring career running from 1955 to 1960, billed at 7ft 7in and 499 pounds, and its German-language notes describe him as the tallest wrestler of all time. Other rankings have put him second. IMDb records him working for Manhattan Wrestling Enterprises in 1957, and wrestling historian John Perin noted that he faced Dick the Bruiser on an undercard at the Cincinnati Gardens on 7 March 1959, in front of a crowd of 15,299.

Max Palmer in wrestling trunks, stooping slightly to fit inside a doorway

Wrestling was where the height stories really went off the rails. Some promotional photos stated 8ft 2in. Bleacher Report's list of the biggest wrestlers in history put him at 8ft 2in and over 500 pounds, while admitting records ranged from 7ft 8in all the way to 8ft 6in. Either way, standing in a 1950s ring opposite men of six foot, he must have looked like something out of a fairground.

If you've read our piece on Exotic Adrian Street, you'll know wrestling has always loved a gimmick. Max's gimmick was his body, and it only took him so far. His career was cut short by drink, and later on he was open about the fact that alcohol and drugs were what finished him in the ring.

Bartender, Bouncer and Bottom of the Bottle

The years after wrestling are the hardest part of Max's life to pin down, and probably the hardest part he lived through. His 1984 obituary from United Press International lists bartender and bouncer among his jobs, alongside wrestler and movie actor. Being eight feet tall would make you a natural on the door, but it's not much of a career plan.

He'd later describe himself as a recovered alcoholic and drug addict. Given how quickly he'd gone from TIME magazine to monster movies to the wrestling circuit and then out of all of it, it's not hard to see how a man who could never blend in might have reached for something to take the edge off.

Goliath for Christ

Then came the turnaround. Somewhere in the mid-1960s, usually dated to 1963, Max got sober and found religion. He took to the road as a travelling evangelist and gave himself the best stage name he ever had: Goliath for Christ.

It was a clever bit of branding. In the Bible, Goliath is the giant brought down by the shepherd boy David. Max flipped it round and made himself the giant who'd switched sides. Flyers from the period show him on the bill at Baptist crusades, and he became a regular on the circuit across the United States.

Flyer for a giant evangelistic crusade at Fremont Street Baptist Church billing Max Palmer as the world's largest Christian

He didn't just preach to Sunday congregations, either. His ministry focused on people struggling with the same problems he'd had. UPI's obituary says he spent nearly 20 years preaching to alcoholics and drug addicts about his own experiences, and other accounts mention him working with troubled kids.

He's an interesting contrast to some of the other preachers we've covered. Marjoe Gortner was ordained as a child and later filmed himself exposing the tricks of the revival trade, and Jimmy Swaggart built a TV empire before it all came crashing down. Max never had money or television. What he did have was a body that drew a crowd and a story that matched the message.

A woman standing on a sofa to reach Max Palmer's head in a living room, showing how much taller he was

Marriage, Missouri and the Arnold Giant

In May 1975, Max married a woman called Betty, who stood barely five feet tall. They settled in Arnold, Missouri, a suburb south of St Louis, where locals knew him as the Arnold Giant. He's said to have left behind a daughter called Amy and a son called Marshall.

Betty said her husband was never self-conscious about his size. "He felt God had given it to him for a reason," she told UPI after his death, adding that he'd never have been satisfied being normal height. For a man who'd been booed for being too good at basketball and paid to play monsters, that's quite a place to end up.

The Bits That Don't Add Up

Max's life has gathered a fair bit of confusion over the years, so it's worth flagging the main ones.

His height. 7ft 7in in socks at 19 is the most reliable measurement we've got, because TIME actually reported it before anyone had a reason to exaggerate. Night & Day claimed 8ft 6in in 1953, Columbia added a foot for Killer Ape, wrestling promoters billed 8ft 2in, and UPI settled on eight feet.
His middle name. Most sources say Max Edmund Palmer, but TIME's 1947 piece calls him Max Edward Palmer.
His birth year. You'll see both 1927 and 1928. TIME had him at 19 in January 1947, which fits a birth in November 1927.
The Jim Palmer story. IMDb's trivia page says he was the stepfather of Baltimore Orioles Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, through a marriage to Jim's mother Polly Wiesen. Treat that one with real caution. His own obituary names only his wife Betty, whom he married in 1975, and it looks very much like two different men called Max Palmer have been merged together somewhere along the line.

Death and a Nine-Foot Coffin

Max Palmer died on 7 May 1984 at St Anthony's hospital in St Louis, aged 56, after an attack of phlebitis. Heart disease is usually given as the underlying cause, and that's sadly common among people with his kind of growth. The body simply isn't built to carry that much frame for that long.

Black and white portrait of a smiling Max Palmer in a jacket and open-collared shirt

He was taken home to Mississippi and buried near Pontotoc in a nine-foot coffin. It's a familiar ending for very tall men. John Rogan, who refused every sideshow offer going, had his grave sealed in concrete, and the stories of giants like Madame Abomah show how often their lives were treated as a show rather than a life.

What sets Max apart is that he got to choose his last act. The farm boy who couldn't hide on a basketball court, the man in the ape suit and Paul Bunyan in the ring all ended up in the same place: standing in front of a crowd that came to gawp at the giant and left having heard about getting sober.