Jake la Motta is still raging at 80
Steve Bunce
It is an image the cinema gave boxing, a sentiment all fighters understand and the dialogue was worth an Oscar. It is Jake la Motta looking in a mirror and telling himself he could have been somebody and it happened most nights for 20 years in nightclubs, blind pigs and taverns all over the United States.
It really did. Jake told me. He puts his fork down on top of his tuna at La Maganette on 3rd Avenue in New York he has been a regular at the same table and seat for 20 years and reaches across to grab my hand. He then gets my eyes and he starts. He is now 80, a small man in a crazy cowboy hat with Denise, who will soon become the seventh Mrs La Motta, at his side.
She carried on eating as he started. I think she has heard parts of the story before. I could be wrong. It was Robert De Niro playing Jake playing Terry Malloy talking to his brother, Charley, in the back of a cab in the scene from Budd Schulberg’s On The Waterfront. “It was you, Charley. You and Johnny.” It lasted a few minutes because he is old and he does the face. He has the face to do the face.
“That was word perfect, I can guarantee you. You know once I remembered 10000 words for a show called A Night with Jake La Motta,” he adds as he goes back to his food. It would be impossible to get a pea past the lump in my throat. A few diners nod their heads and tip their glasses, and the piano player dedicates another tune to “Jake” and tinkles something by Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett.
There are still parts of the urban wilderness of Manhattan that belong to people like La Motta and when they tell you they love the city, they mean it. The hours pass. “Let me tell you about my wives,” he begins. “I bought one a waterbed, her side froze, I called it the dead sea. The first wife divorced me because I clashed with the drapes.
“My second wife ignored me all the time and that just ain’t right. I hate ignorance. The third one divorced me because of a bit of advice I gave her. I told her that her stocking was wrinkled. How was I to know that she wasn’t wearing any stockings?”
His eyes have softened. He is on stage, perhaps transported back to the first topless joint back in 1972 when he found the crowd that loved him and a way to avoid a dismal life by telling stories. La Motta was world middleweight champion from 1949 until the night he lost to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951 in a fight dubbed the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
He was stopped on his feet in round 13 and many consider the beating he took to be the worst ever in a ring. In Raging Bull, De Niro taunts Robinson because he has not dropped him. That never happened. “I never said a word. I was tired but I probably would have said something like that. I never cared about anything when I was in the ring. Nothing.” La Motta also beat Robinson and was unlucky in two or three of their six fights. “I guess that makes me a good fighter.” It does: a very good fighter.
After the ring, which he finally quit in 1954 after 106 fights, he lingered in Miami at a nightclub bearing his name. “I was the number one playboy in Miami Beach,” he insists. “I had dates with Hedy Lamarr, Jane Russell, Ginger Rogers, Jayne Mansfield and others. All big stars but I never got laid by any of them. Something always happened.”
“Yeah,” says Denise. ‘Your big mouth is what happened.” He just gives a rueful shrug. Miami was a failure and La Motta lost a lot of money, fell head first into two bottles of scotch every day for a year and ended up on a chain gang in Florida.
“I was charged with procuring. I was innocent but it was not good. The chain gang was the low point. I was in the box. I was innocent. I had three days in the box with just water. I said how low can I get? The champion of the world to this.”
His ring reputation also suffered when he admitted he had taken a dive in a 1947 fight. Nobody was surprised but it still hurt. He was the Bronx Bull, a tough guy. “You know people never understand what makes a man do desperate things. I was desperate. I was the uncrowned world champion for six years and back then I could have got killed by the Mob because I refused to play along.
“I should have been dead a number of times but I knew no fear. You know I ignored the Mafia but then I got the chance to be somebody when I threw just one fight. I had to in the end and I would do it all again.”
It is getting late. The lights are on and people have passed on their way to the street to say goodnight. We leave in a cab for Elaine’s uptown.
“I was real low before the film [1981]. I was barely surviving. The book came out, I started to get interviews. The stand-up took off and the movie hit. Then the Oscar, that was it. I was famous again. De Niro knew more about me than I did. He studied me for a year. He knew me. He stayed the night with Vicky, my second wife. I asked him if he had sex. He said no.”
Later, at two in the morning on the street outside his apartment on 57th Street, next to the East River, the old fighter is tired. It is cold for early autumn. “You know I made a good fighter out of De Niro, he could have been a pro. They made a good movie out of me. A good movie.” He still has his cowboy hat on as he disappears inside the lobby and shuffles to the elevator. He could have been an actor. He was more than a contender, and the old man still has a lot of class.