T.G.I.H.A.F.
pugilist edition
The Washington Post
February 17, 1997
Punches to Punch Lines; At 75, Former Middleweight Champ Jake LaMotta Still Knocks 'Em Dead
Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer
Jake LaMotta, at 75, says: "I still do 10, 15 minutes shadowboxing every morning. I get up, I throw thousands of punches, thousands. Naked in front of the mirror."
This is during an afternoon at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, where Jake is sitting absolutely still at a table, watching his old fight films on a TV by the bar -- the Bronx Bull, 106 fights, won 83, lost 19 (taking a ridiculous dive on one), drew 4; had one middleweight championship, two jail terms, six marriages and divorces, four grandchildren, one film biography -- "Raging Bull," which won Robert De Niro an Oscar for Best Actor in 1981. Beware his numbers. He'll say he's "going to be 75" when bio after bio has him 75 last July. He wrote an autobiography so preposterous, he once defended it by saying "there's a lot of truth in that book."
The lunch crowd has left. The sunlight is turning orange and crawling around the walls, more like shadow than light, a February orange. There's a table of women ordering more drinks and singing "Happy Birthday." There's a blond hostess who is 20 and walks past Jake's table in a navy blue Bebe pantsuit, walking fast so the fabric moves a lot. She's got a tight smile of the you 'n' me babe variety, and a good wink, if you like winks. Jake told her she reminds him of Vickie, his second wife and the love of his life, but he doesn't look at her when she walks past, which she does quite frequently.
Jake watches the TV, where it's Chicago, Feb. 14, 1951, the 11th round of his sixth and last fight against Sugar Ray Robinson, a fight known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. He is losing, fighting from a coverup crouch, a kind of zombie carcass-posture he'd assume in his later fights when he didn't have so much strength and he had to pick his moment.
He watches, and you watch him for body English, a head twitch, the ghost of footwork under the table. Nothing. The stillness is all, a boxer's reflexive obedience to the laws of conservation of energy and matter, except when he's putting antipasto in his mouth or lighting a cigarette. He has a way of smoking where he talks through a lot of smoke and then the cigarette just vanishes, like a prop in a magic act. He has that kind of ease. He doesn't sit still, he is still, a dense, sullen, spottily-shaven monument so still you think you can study him like a zoo animal but then he looks back at you and you change your mind.
His hair is thin enough now that you can see liver spots on his scalp, no more black wavy pompadour like in the autographed pictures he sells. A huge head and a nose of many shapes. When he smiles the corners of his eyes droop and his lips move like a preoccupied sea snake, something undersea or underground about him, something chthonic, to be precise, with a smile that runs through tired, suspicious, sad, knowing and satisfied in about .04 seconds. You see the tips of his teeth and a lot of tongue.
He watches. The boxing is very good, not like the clown shows on HBO now.
"We fought a lot more back then. I fought Sugar Ray six times. Pound for pound the greatest fighter who ever lived. I fought Sugar Ray so many times it's a wonder I don't have diabetes," he says.
He loves this joke. He'll do it tonight in a stand-up comedy act for the $ 125-suspenders-and-Cuban-cigars crowd: The act he started 40 years ago after Vickie left him, he lost his Miami nightclub and spent six months on a chain gang for a morals bust involving a 14-year-old girl.
"I been in jail twice. The first time was reform school, they got me for carrying burglar's tools, something like that. The morals charge was a frame-up."
He watches the fight, waiting for the moment when he'll explode with a thousand punches. He was famous for this, playing possum, feigning injury, then exploding.
"I'm making him miss me," he says.
And moving forward, the bull; "a brutal will to win," as the Boxing Register puts it.
"Forward, always moving forward, from the time I can remember, a kid. I was short and the big guys would take advantage; I had to turn myself into a body puncher. By that time I was in reform school, they'd have a boxing match every week, they'd bring guys in from outside to fight me. Always forward, I'd go in without any regard for defending myself. I hypnotized myself so in my subconscious I believed I couldn't get hurt. And I don't mean 'believe,' I mean believebelievebelieve. Like in the animal kingdom, they wanted so much to survive, they'd change. Plants change color. Insects. Because of necessity, nature prepares you, different things, I can't think of the right word, the wolves and the animal that's like a deer. Not elk. Caribou. The wolves develop that technique like an army, they split up and divide the herd."
Waiting, waiting, covering up and swaying. Then he explodes with the thousand punches. Sugar Ray looks startled, amazed, almost insulted -- like, how can you fight against this? Jake puts him on the ropes and unloads everything, full automatic, a human avalanche.
"My final barrage," he says. "This is the end."
Jake stops. He steps back with a modesty that verges on grace.
"I couldn't hold my arms up after that. I went into that fight weak, I lost 30 pounds in training, I spent the night before the fight in the steam room. If I don't make the weight, 160, I lose the championship."
There were two more rounds, Robinson hitting LaMotta at will in the splendid medieval horror-spree of boxing, pounding Jake's face into road kill, but Jake didn't go down, the referee had to stop it.
He staggered over to Robinson's corner and told him: You won, Ray, but you couldn't get me down.
"I didn't want to go down," he says now -- not so much an explanation as a statement of fact, doctrine, natural law. "It was a macho thing. Nobody had ever knocked me down."
The birthday party at the next table is breaking up. You get the feeling that alimony is securing payment of a good part of the bill, but you could be wrong.
Does he still like the ladies?
"I can still function pretty good," he says.
One of them approaches Jake's table. She has a forearm sheathed with a piece of metal jewelry that makes you think of a gladiator. She grabs his upper arm.
"This is called a Hollywood handshake," she says. "Do you know what a Hollywood handshake is?"
She puts her hand in his. You see a piece of paper go from her palm to his. She backs away with eyes hard and soft at the same time as if she's just given him the hand grenade of happiness and pulled the pin. He doesn't move.
When they're all gone, he unfolds the paper.
The paper has a name, address and phone number. It is written in the kind of perfect filigreed handwriting taught to girls who weren't supposed to go out with guys like Jake LaMotta, not ever, not even if the girls were Italian.
Jake LaMotta was every Italian American's nightmare, the monster they feared was inside them, and knew was scaring the hell out of the rest of the world -- an animal, a berserker-jealous, wife-beating Ace-comb Adonis in the sleeveless undershirt still known in New Jersey as the "Guinea tee" -- a cafon', as Italian guys would call each other the way some blacks call each other bamas or whites call each other rednecks, hating it but loving it at the same time, giving rise to the horrible joke of ethnicity: You think we're bad, we'll be your worst nightmare about us, because that's our nightmare, too.
"Raging Bull" has a lot of this.
"A very negative movie," Jake says.
Where would he be without it?
"I'd be in bad shape," he says. "It made me champ all over again. It gave me a whole new crop of young people as fans."
He's selling LaMotta's Tomatta Sauce, with him in his Bronx Bull crouch on the label. Raging Bull Enterprises Inc. sells photographs in black-and-white and color, posters of four Ring magazine covers, miniature boxing gloves (red or blue), regular boxing gloves (leather or vinyl), boxing trunks, movie posters, on and on, autographed in "your choice of black, blue, liquid gold or liquid silver ink."
Near the beginning of the movie you watch him warm up in his corner, shadowboxing with his leopard-skin robe snapping and floating like a flag in slight slow motion and the soundtrack brings up the Intermezzo from "Cavalleria Rusticana," pound for pound maybe the most graceful, noble, sad and beautiful piece of music ever written, and here it's being played for Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull, the champion, the dive-taker.
Jake LaMotta, American hero.
"My good things, my bad things seem big. I'm on a different level. A guy lost his car, his home, it's the biggest thing in the world to him. With me it's losing the championship. Everything's relative. I hope I explained that right."
But the movie makes him look like a cafon', somebody says. This thought gets his smile going for a while.
The movie makes Italian Americans look bad, and Italians were, in fact, despised and persecuted in America. In New Orleans one day in 1891, 11 Italians were lynched.
"C'mon," LaMotta says. "They lynched black people, they lynched Jews. I don't think of myself that way. Being Italian is not a big thing. It doesn't mean a lot to me. I was always a loner. I've been a loner for a long, long time. I wasn't into being friendly. I fought all the black guys that the other white guys wouldn't fight. That's how come I got so many fights -- 1943, I beat four undefeated middleweights in six weeks, and the last one was Sugar Ray, the first loss of his career. Three weeks later I fought him again and he beat me. I was ranked number one for five years and I couldn't get a title shot. I had to throw a fight to get that shot."
The idea was, the mob would bet on somebody named Billy Fox, Jake would take a dive and then they'd give him his title shot. Except nobody can screw things up like the Mafia, and they were such pigs the bookies stopped taking Fox money. The whole thing blew up. The newspapers were screaming. Jimmy Cannon, a very big deal in sportswriting, said LaMotta was "the most detested man in sports."
Jake says: "Jimmy Cannon said that? I don't blame him."
Plates come, plates go. Sausage, onions, eggplant. Jake can eat.
The hostess walks past with the wink this time. Jake doesn't look at her. He doesn't look at her so much you start to wonder if he's making a move on her, like he's saying, "You've got to do better than that to get my attention."
That night, the comedy act goes over big. Some of it gets a bunch of fat guys in the corner laughing so hard they scream that fat-guy-laughing scream till you worry they may throw up all over their $ 150 shirts.
Old jokes. "I cut my drinking in half -- I cut out all the chasers."
Wife jokes. "My first wife divorced me because I clashed with the drapes. My second wife was Vickie."
The name gets a cheer -- they remember the nude spread that she installed, at the age of 50, in the retinas of American men, fabulous. "She always complained she had nothing to wear, then I saw her in Playboy."
One routine gets him shadowboxing, faster and faster, the thousand punches and the crowd goes into a deeper cheer, the applause of predators for a predator.
He stops just when people are starting to talk a lot. Now he'll work the crowd, do autographs, moving through the tables with that pageant stillness, as if he were on wheels like a wooden saint in a street festival.
There's Gordon Peterson from Channel 9 with his kids, and Joe DeFrancis, who owns Pimlico, and David Modell, who is son of Art Modell of the Baltimore Ravens, and Jim D'Orta, the doctor whose family made the James Bond movies and who now owns Pamela Harriman's old house in Georgetown. They hang around being Big Guys and smoking Romeo and Juliet cigars from Havana.
The Italian Embassy has a table where they'll tell you that Jake is famous in Italy, there's a lot of pride in emigrants' successes, but lot of embarrassment too -- the Mafia, the cafon' thing.
And there's the hostess, whose name is Joy Woodall, Trinity College, nice Catholic girl, sitting next to Jake at his table now, reminding him of Vickie.
If you're cynical you watch Joy for a hand touch, a squeeze of the champ's shoulder, a little footwork under the table.
It doesn't happen. She gets up after a while and goes back to working the door.
It turns out she knows what she's doing, she knows all about the you 'n' me smile and the wink.
"You want people to feel like they belong here, like this is the right place to be. That's what I do as hostess," she says.
You believe her. Still, you're remembering the Hollywood handshake, and you want to know: Is it possible that Jake LaMotta is sexy?
She pauses, as if she's working out how much of this is proprietary information, female eyes only.
"There's something definitely masculine and manly about him," she explains. "There's a primal urge to mate with the most masculine male, and he was the champion."
It doesn't matter. The next morning he'll get up naked and crouch in front of the mirror and throw a thousand punches.