Good Jake La Motta Read

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/more_sport/article2434600.ece

He is standing at the doorway of his apartment on the corner of 57th Street and 1st Avenue and exuding the menace that has shadowed him since he forged his demonic reputation on the streets of the Bronx in prewar New York.
Jake La Motta: self-confessed ****** to read his 1970 autobiography, wife-beater, misogynist and former middleweight champion of the world; the first boxer to lick the great Sugar Ray Robinson; the man lauded as having the most indestructible chin in the history of the ring; the sociopath immortalised by Martin Scorsese in his seminal 1980 biopic Raging Bull. “What’s the emoygency,” he growls as I quicken my pace to shake his hand.
He beckons me through the door of his studio apartment. Tiny but comfortable, it is on the seventeenth floor of a portered block in a slick part of midtown Manhattan. Sir Harry Evans, former Editor of The Times, and Tina Brown, the author and columnist, live across the street and around the corner is the home of the late Katharine Hepburn.
La Motta, 86, is wearing nothing more than a pair of colourful Bermuda shorts, which seems to exaggerate his distinctive top-heavy anatomy: large head on a short body. His torso is lean and healthy. “Take a seat,” he says, gesturing to a chair in a mirrored corner of the room. His weathered face is a complex study in irritability, complacency and charm.


It is the autumn of 1938. Franklin D. Roosevelt is President, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is on general release, the Munich Pact has just been signed and the Great Depression is eating away at the fabric of American society. The 17-year-old La Motta is living with his family in a rat-infested tenement building in an immigrant Bronx slum and, despite his youth, has already forged a reputation as a violent small-time hoodlum.
The youngster has spent the day figuring out how to mug Harry Gordon, a local bookie, who always carries a few bucks in his pocket after doing the rounds in the neighbourhood. Gordon tends to take the same route home and, as the clock ticks past midnight, La Motta is poised in a dark corner with a length of lead piping wrapped in a newspaper.
Gordon appears, walking slowly, and La Motta creeps up behind. He whacks his quarry around the back of the head with the lead pipe; Gordon staggers but stays on his feet. La Motta is so enraged that his victim has not lost consciousness that he loses control, bludgeoning Gordon again and again across the skull until he crashes to the ground. La Motta then reaches inside his coat pocket, removes his wallet and vanishes.
The story in one of the next day’s newspapers is depicted as follows: Harry Gordon, 45, with a record of bookmaking arrests, was found beaten to death in an alley off Brook Avenue in the Bronx at 4 o’clock this morning.
“Harry Gordon played on my mind for a while,” La Motta says. “For more than ten years I thought I had killed the fella. It kind of messed me up a bit. I felt that I had done something I hadn’t paid for. I was in stir as a youngster at Coxsackie [a notorious reform school in New York] but for something else [the attempted burglary of a jewellery store]. I guess it felt like a safe place to be whilst the cops were looking for the murderer.
“It was only in 1949 that I found out what really happened. I was celebrating after beating Marcel Cerdan for the championship and this man with scars on his forehead comes over. It was Harry. ‘You remember me?’ he says. It was like a ghost had turned up. Turns out Harry was so bashed up when he got to the hospital that the newspaperman thought he was a goner. We didn’t know any better because he moved out of town as soon as he was released from hospital. He’d decided the Bronx was too rough.”
How did Harry react when he found out that it was you who half-killed him that night? “He never found out,” La Motta says. “I didn’t damn well tell him and by the time my book came out he was dead.”
La Motta’s phantasmagoric life contains some of the darkest episodes in 20th-century sport. He turned to boxing as a teenager as the only quick-buck alternative to the Mob but soon found himself at odds with the local hoods. He raged at everyone and everything: at his close friends because he feared they were shafting him; at his various wives because he was paranoid that they were cheating on him; at the Mob because they wanted to control him; and at himself because of his terrible knowledge of the crimes he had committed.
He has been angry for as long as he can remember: a man trapped in a labyrinth of intolerable emotion. “When I was 8 I was already getting mad at people,” he says. “I would clock them for talking to each other because I thought they might be talking about me. Sometimes I would get so crazy at nothing that I didn’t give a damn what happened, whether I killed them or they killed me. There could have been an explosion across the street but I wouldn’t have heard it.”
La Motta’s homicidal unpredictability was such that even the Mob feared to go heavy on him when he declined their overtures in his early days as a prize fighter. This was a time when boxing was less a legitimate sport than an extension of the criminal underworld, with many fighters forced to hand over 50 per cent of their purses to the shadowy figures that haunted the gyms of the big cities.
It was only after seven years as a leading contender without a sniff of a title shot that La Motta finally fell into line, throwing a bout with Billy Fox in one of the myriad gambling scams masterminded by the New York Mob. La Motta was too proud to drop to the canvas but the contest was waved over as he stood on the ropes taking dozens of unanswered punches. Within two years he was given a shot at Marcel Cerdan for the middleweight championship of the world.
“They blew the Fox fight out of all proportion,” La Motta says. “I testified to the Senate committee [which had launched an investigation into corruption in boxing in 1960] but people went crazy saying that nobody should ever throw a fight. I was only talking so that people would know what it was really like in boxing. That kind of stuff happened all the time and if I hadn’t done it I would never have got a shot at the title.”
Even after achieving his dream of becoming champion, La Motta remained as volatile as ever. His jealousy and paranoia were causing ructions with family and friends. On one occasion he heard a malicious rumour that Vicky, his second wife, and Pete, his best friend, had been seeing a lot of each other. He drove home in a blind rage, battered Vicky in their living room and then drove around to Pete’s workplace and beat him to a pulp. He and Pete did not talk for more than a decade.
I ask whether he feels any sense of guilt for having beaten Vicky and his other wives. “If you had a girl and she was beautiful and other people were trying to invite her out and seduce her, wouldn’t you get angry?” he says.
“That’s the thing. I saw these obvious jerks and schmucks coming on with their lines and it bothered me. I never really and truly hit my wives. If I had hit them properly they would be dead. You know how it is: you slap around a broad just a little bit and everything is blown out of proportion.”
As the conversation progresses it is increasingly clear that La Motta has not come to terms with his past. One had expected to meet an old man who had taken the time to empathise with those who suffered at his hands; someone who had sought and found atonement. Instead, La Motta is a man in denial; an ageing thug seeking to escape from his crimes despite cashing in on them, not only through his 1970 autobiography but in a recent deal that could lead to the cinematic release of Raging Bull II.
When I ask him about his **** of a young woman in New York, which is harrowingly described in his book, La Motta reverts to type, attempting first to deny and then to evade responsibility.
“****?” he says. “I never really raped anybody.” “But what about the woman you describe in your autobiography?” I ask. La Motta pauses for a long moment. “Well, I suppose I gave her a little push or something,” he says. “You know what it’s like to give a little extra pressure. It often happens when women get their first sex, they pretend that they didn’t want it to happen. It’s a game to them.”
Meeting La Motta in the flesh is to realise that even Scorsese’s commendably unsentimental depiction fails to get to the heart of the matter. Raging Bull portrays the violence and pathos of La Motta’s life but fails to capture his essential narcissism. His violence was not merely the product of his inner rage but of his sociopathic indifference to the suffering of anyone but himself.
On one occasion after necking a few drinks he punched his first wife so hard that he thought he had killed her. His first reaction on coming out of his alcohol-induced slumber was not one of remorse but of how the murder might affect his boxing career: “Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. A minimum of three years.” But Joey, his brother, has a plan: “Throw her in the river.” It turned out she was alive but unconscious.
After defeating Cerdan in 1949, La Motta defended his title twice before being dethroned by Sugar Ray Robinson on Valentine’s Day in 1951. He continued to fight for three years but was at the end of his rope, finally retiring to open a nightclub in Florida. In 1957 he was imprisoned for six months for acting as a pimp to a 14-year-old despite claiming that he did not know the girl in question. For the past half-century he has made a living from personal appearances, book signings, acting and stand-up comedy.

 

http://www.nerve.com/PersonalEssays/Cook/StarFirsts/LaMotta.asp

Jake LaMotta, boxer Bull In A Car Backseat
I remember clearly that the first time I got laid there were five of us in this car and it was snowing and we were driving around in the Bronx, not doing anything, just driving. It was night. There was this guy driving — I've forgotten his name — and there was this dame in the middle of the front seat, and me, and Pete was in the back with this other broad. Pete was trying to make out and he seemed to be going along pretty good, and I was trying a little of it with the doll in the front seat, but with her it was strictly no, no, no, I'm a virgin, so I gave up. What the hell was I gonna do, **** her? Like I said, I didn't know how to go about it, and suddenly I looked in the back seat — we'd stopped at a traffic light — and I'll be a son of a *****, Pete had it made. He was going at it hot and heavy. After he finished he looked up and saw me, and my mouth must have been so wide open you could have put a punching bag in there. And he sat up, fixing his clothes, and motioned to ask if I wanted to come in back. And the doll was fixing her pants and muttering, "Oh, Pete, how could you do a thing like that? I'm not that sort of girl at all. I didn't know you were going to do anything like that." And when we stopped for another traffic light Pete slipped out of the back seat and around to the front and I went to the back seat. I put my arm out for her and she gave me the same business the one in the front seat had — no, no, no — after I'd just watched her getting laid. Enough is enough! I got her in a lock where she could barely move and I shoved my hat in her face so she couldn't talk and pushed her down and got on her. Not what you'd call a real big romantic deal, but most women only got one thing going for them anyway, so why screw around? (late 1930s)

from Raging Bull: My Story, by Jake LaMotta with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage (Prentice-Hall, 1976)

 

A lot of people excuse what he did because it was the 30's. But that's crap if you ask me.