De Niro: A Life (36 page)

Beauty and the beasts: with Jake LaMotta and Meryl Streep
(ImageCollect)
.

Many happy returns: celebrating his birthday on the set of
The Deer Hunter
with Michael Cimino (in sunglasses)
(Photofest).

The two Jakes: before and after his weight gain in
Raging Bull (Kobal).

A
FTER THE BARRAGE OF PRESS FOR
N
EW
Y
ORK
, N
EW
Y
ORK
, De Niro wouldn’t consent to a significant interview with a journalist for some four years. But on March 9, 1981, just three weeks before the Academy Awards for 1980’s films would be handed out, he sat patiently and answered hours of questions about his work at great, careful length. His interrogators weren’t members of the film press, however. They were attorneys representing Joseph LaMotta, brother of the boxer Jake, who was suing De Niro, Scorsese, and the Chartoff-Winkler production company over the way he was depicted in
Raging Bull.

De Niro had finally, against significant obstacles, managed to realize his dream of seeing Jake LaMotta’s story to the screen, inspiring Scorsese to create a film even more potent than
Taxi Driver
and delivering a performance that was recognized as an all-time classic the moment it appeared. But in the arduous process of wrenching a filmic narrative out of LaMotta’s painful story, liberties were taken, corners were cut, and mistakes were made. Joey LaMotta had a legitimate beef and his lawsuit had merit, and all De Niro could do throughout his hours of legal deposition was explain how the film came to be and express regret for an unpleasant legal situation he could only bring himself to refer to as “this.”

R
AGING
B
ULL
HAD
its genesis more than a decade earlier, when Jake LaMotta, his childhood friend Pete Savage (né Pete Petrella), and journalist Joseph Carter collaborated on the book of the same name, with
an eye toward making it into a film. Savage was already something of a moviemaker, having written, produced, and directed about a half dozen independent films, including three—
The Runaways
(1965) and
Cauliflower Cupids
and
House in Naples
(both 1970)—that featured LaMotta in key acting roles.

As soon as the book appeared, Savage knocked together a screenplay and spent a few years trying to get somebody interested in making it. In 1974, when De Niro was still bouncing back and forth between the Italian set of
1900
and New York, where he was incubating new film projects, usually with Scorsese, Savage got a copy of the book and the script to him.

De Niro had no interest in the script, but the book genuinely compelled him. Written in the first person, but in an engaging combination of crude street talk and thoughtful reflection,
Raging Bull
was an astonishingly frank and disturbing account of a deeply flawed man’s emotions, struggles, attitudes, and deeds.

LaMotta had been one of a generation of Italian American champion and near-champion boxers that included the likes of Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, Two-Ton Tony Galento, Tony Janiro, and Carmen Basilio, among many others. He was a street kid—born in Philadelphia, raised in the Bronx—who was in trouble with the law from a young age and first learned the rudiments of boxing in reform school. Billed as “The Bronx Bull” and “The Raging Bull,” he was known for an ability to take a beating from opponents and keep charging forward. He held the world middleweight title from June 1949 to February 1951, and he was famed especially for his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson, fought over nine years, the second of which marked the great Robinson’s first professional loss (and the only one of the six bouts in which LaMotta was victorious). When he retired in 1954, just before turning thirty-three, LaMotta had a career record of eighty-three wins, nineteen losses, and four draws, scoring thirty knockouts in the process: an estimable record by any account.

But the story of a once notable boxer was hardly the stuff of a compelling movie or book. In fact, what fascinated De Niro about LaMotta wasn’t his boxing record (De Niro never was much of a sports fan) but his astounding confessions and his fearless attitude toward physical
punishment, which, the book indicated, he seemed to invite almost as a form of self-imposed justice, punishment for his bad deeds.

To wit: Jake LaMotta stole, sometimes using near-lethal violence in the act; he forced himself on women so violently that it would have been no exaggeration to call it rape; addled with jealousy and resentful at being domesticated, he beat his wives, causing one to miscarry; he went so far as to use his hands on Savage, his closest friend, who avoided him for decades after an especially grisly encounter; he defied the local gangsters who ran the boxing game until it became clear that he would get a shot at the title only if he cooperated with them, and then he threw a fight at Madison Square Garden to line their pockets and pave his way to the championship; after retiring and, naturally, squandering all his money, he served time in a Florida prison for the sexual corruption of a minor, an underage girl who worked as a prostitute from the harbor of a nightclub that he owned (albeit, he always maintained, without knowing what she was doing or how old she was); in total he was married seven times (“I hate the Jews so much I married three of them to make them miserable,” he joked), most lately in 2013, not long before his ninety-second birthday.

In his book, LaMotta confessed bluntly to much of this, and
that
was the fellow who fascinated De Niro: brutal, self-lacerating, darkly driven, haunted by his misdeeds, painfully honest about his failings, funny and crude and sardonic and ugly and real. And he was a boxer, which meant a film about him would allow an actor to take his place in a great tradition of Method-acting pugilists, from John Garfield in
Body and Soul
through Paul Newman in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, from such near-Method performers as Robert Ryan in
The Set-Up
and Kirk Douglas in
Champion
to, chief of all, Marlon Brando, who created such an ineradicable icon of Terry Malloy in
On the Waterfront
as to set the standard portrayal of the weary palooka without ever stepping into a ring or donning gloves. Playing LaMotta would allow De Niro to claim the championship of acting, if such a thing could be said to exist. It would be the role of a lifetime … 
if
the character could be captured in a screenplay.

A
S REVEALED IN
the pages of the March 1981 deposition and the extensive production files of both De Niro and Paul Schrader, the process of forging LaMotta’s autobiography into a screenplay took the better part of eight years, with at least a half dozen complete drafts, some radically different from the others, and a similar number of writers. And it also entailed gaining the trust, interest, and funding of a movie studio, which would naturally be loath to back a picture about such a disagreeable protagonist, and of a director, Martin Scorsese, who was struggling with demons, dark deeds, and destructive habits of his own.

At first it seemed a straightforward matter. De Niro had broached the subject of a film about LaMotta with Scorsese as early as 1974, when the director visited him in Parma during the production of
1900.
Scorsese wasn’t interested at first—“A boxer? I don’t like boxing,” he said. But De Niro wasn’t deterred. In 1976, while making
Taxi Driver
, he acquired the rights to the book from LaMotta and Savage during dinner at the famed Times Square Italian restaurant Patsy’s.
^*1
Later on, while finishing
Taxi Driver
, Scorsese read the book and, his head turned by the darkness of the story and the themes of guilt, purgation, and redemption, agreed to at least pursue a film based not on the Savage-Clary screenplay but on the book itself. The job of adapting went to Mardik Martin, who was working for Chartoff-Winkler on a number of projects. Delayed by the chaos of
New York, New York
and his work on Ken Russell’s
Valentino
, Martin didn’t submit a draft until March 1978; then, with significant input from De Niro, he turned around another draft the following month.

At this moment, the project was known as
Prizefighter
and conceived of in a radical fashion: De Niro wanted to stage it as a play on Broadway, directed by Scorsese, and then film it simultaneously. “
I had an idea to do a play to be done like a movie,” he said, “and we almost did it in
Raging Bull
. We were gonna do it as a play and then we were
gonna shoot it once we had mounted it. We were gonna shoot it in the day, and do it at night, and theatrically what we would get out of it during the day would apply to the scenes in the play at night, and I was just curious how it would have turned out, because on a movie it is looser. In a play you have cues and it’s locked.”

But Martin’s scripts weren’t, they felt, sharp enough for either the stage or the screen; in fact, they read like straightforward transcriptions of the book. And really, the whole thing was moot because Scorsese was a wreck. His woes made up a sobering list:
New York, New York
had flopped; he had been removed from the stage play that he had been working on with Liza Minnelli; his marriage to Julia Cameron was over and she and their daughter were living in Chicago; he had a new roommate in Robbie Robertson of The Band, whose rock-and-roll lifestyle and circle of friends unhealthily amplified Scorsese’s increasing use of cocaine and pills; he had managed to make
The Last Waltz
, a great concert movie, but he was unable to focus on a new feature film; he was living in Southern California like a vampire, bouncing between superficial relationships with women, watching movies all night with a coterie of chums in a garage with blacked-out windows, drugging himself awake and asleep. It got so that the alcoholic John Cassavetes, still a mentor and a fan, upbraided him at a Hollywood party for wasting his talent.

De Niro kept trying to interest Scorsese in the film, but Scorsese was in no shape to work on it, and the inadequacy of the scripts gave him an easy out. Still, he didn’t want to put De Niro off entirely. In the late spring of 1978, they decided between them that they would take the project away from Martin and give it to Paul Schrader, who had begun directing as well as writing films. De Niro visited Schrader on the set of his second film as director,
Hardcore
, and got him to agree to come to dinner with Scorsese to discuss the project. Schrader was doing his own thing, but agreed, reluctantly, at the price of $150,000 plus expenses, to have a look at the book and Martin’s scripts and rewrite the film.