De Niro: A Life (40 page)

Jake isn’t entirely horrible. With his dapper 1940s wardrobe, gorgeous body, and killer grin, De Niro sells us on the fellow’s appeal. LaMotta’s “no Olivier,” as he himself confesses in the film’s brief opening scene, nor is he a Cary Grant. Among the local hoods there are several, including the unctuous Salvy, who have better manners, slicker clothes, more stylish miens. But Jake has panache, a sense of play, an occasional twinkle in his eye. On his first date with Vicki, when her ball disappears into an obstacle at a miniature golf course, he’s positively endearing when he responds to her question “What does it mean?” by saying gently, “It means the game is over.” You can see why, even if he weren’t semi-famous, he’d catch a girl’s eye.

But he is a haunted man, and the demons inside him will find a way out, whether in boxing or in some other medium. Often his behavior in and out of the ring seems identical. At times Scorsese slows down the action as the camera gets near to Jake’s perception of things, so that Vicki and the men with whom she interacts seem as much of a threat to Jake as his opponents in the ring. De Niro indicates Jake’s vigilance and predation with just a shade; he never
quite
reaches the verge of violence. But we know that there is hell brewing inside of him, and the slight churning behind his eyes is almost more frightening than anything he might unleash.

There is tenderness in him, as evinced by the remarkable scene in which he and the underage Vicki come close to having intercourse before his rematch with Robinson. Battered from the first fight (which was just a week or so prior), he insists that she get intimate with him: “C’mere, before I give you a beatin’… Touch my boo-boos.” But then, aroused, he douses his passion by standing in front of a bathroom mirror and pouring ice water on his erection (which,
pace
United Artists brass, is never shown). The scene is a gripping blend of eroticism and denial, pleasure and punishment, classical beauty (both Moriarty in her lingerie and De Niro with his sculpted abs and chest) and grotesquerie.

But that one blissful idyll is wiped away by the things that happen when he succumbs to his worst impulses. Lost in a jealous rage, he beats his brother and then his wife, holding her face up before punching her, just as he had done to a recent opponent before destroying him. Even though he has thrown a fight and will later be convicted of procurement, this is the worst deed of his life, and it’s no coincidence at all that he subsequently allows Robinson, in their final meeting, to beat him to a bloody pulp. “I done some bad things,” he has told his brother, and at this moment we cannot imagine that he will be able to claw his way back into the good graces of his family, his God, or, most of all, himself.

The final space in which LaMotta’s inchoate self-loathing is realized is the tiny isolation cell of a Florida lockup. There are no mirrors; there is no crowd; there is no opponent other than himself. Howling “I’m not that bad” like a beast, weeping (De Niro was never a good movie crier, but this is prime stuff), he beats his head at least a dozen times against a stone wall, as well as delivering literally scores of punches to it. (The wall, of course, was made of Styrofoam.) He has long sought to bring some sort of vengeance down upon himself, some sort of punishment for his perceived inner evil. Finally, he is left to do it himself. De Niro throws himself so fully into this moment, more violent than anything he’s done to anyone else in the film, in or out of the ring, that we wince in sympathy for the pain in his hands, his head, and especially his heart.

Somehow, though, there is a path to salvation through this abyss. LaMotta emerges not so much a man intact as a survivor; life, like Robinson, has failed to knock him down. We leave him at the film’s end just where we met him at the beginning, in a dressing room at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, rehearsing his extremely dubious cabaret act in a mirror before donning his tux. Preparing for the stage, he recites some of the lines Brando spoke in the back of the car in the famous “It was you, Charlie,” scene from
On the Waterfront
, an actor playing a washed-up fighter imitating an actor playing a washed-up fighter.
^*6
There’s something strangely pacific in this bloated shell of a man finding a means to express something inside without resorting to violence, whether against a boxing opponent, a family member, or even (maybe especially) himself.

Despite the wishes of the studio executives who didn’t want to green-light the film, we are not meant to empathize with LaMotta, not in the traditional sense in which a movie’s lead character is an object of identification for the audience. Rather, his journey is emblematic of human struggle through pain, darkness, weakness, and temptation toward solace, strength, peace, and light. He
seems
to get there, heading off for the stage having pumped himself up with a few flurries of sparring jabs and the mantra “I’m the boss, I’m the boss, I’m the boss, I’m the boss.” But he may be no more cured or healed than Travis Bickle, a cannon that has been strapped back into place but which might again get loose and threaten everything around it, including itself. As a character, he is not a warm figure or a figure of admiration. But he is so fully realized—and the frame in which he has been mounted so exquisitely wrought—that he has become an
immortal
character, and an astounding achievement by the men who conceived and created him.

It’s hard to recollect a film so widely regarded as superb and so widely reviled at the same time. In
Sports Illustrated
, Frank DeFord put it this way: “Has any movie ever so utterly lacked soul and yet been so rewarding?” Like the executives at United Artists, critics were thoroughly repelled by Jake LaMotta and his story—and deeply puzzled about Scorsese’s desire to bring them to the screen. In the
New Republic
, Stanley Kauffmann compared watching it to “visiting a human zoo,” and in the
New Yorker
, Pauline Kael sounded a similar note, writing that De Niro and Scorsese “are trying to go deeper into the inarticulate types they have done before; this time they seem to go down to pre-human levels.” (This was not proffered as praise.)

But even those who felt an almost visceral repulsion to the film acknowledged De Niro’s power. “If you respond,” Kael granted, “possibly it’s not to LaMotta’s integrity but to De Niro’s; he buries the clichés that lesser actors might revel in.… With anyone but De Niro in the role, the picture would probably be a joke.” Conceded Kauffmann, “Behind his false nose, he assaults us with force, engulfing force so
sheer that it achieves a kind of aesthetic stature.” In
Time
, Richard Corliss wrote, “When the film is moving on automatic pilot, De Niro is still sailing on animal energy.” And David Denby in
New York
quite aptly captured the dichotomies the film presented to critics: “The truth is that De Niro doesn’t want us to identify. His furious, cold, brilliant performances are a way of saying, ‘Don’t try to understand me, because you can’t.’ In
Raging Bull
,… he brings all his cruelly eloquent physicality … to a man with a soul like a cigarette butt. He is extraordinary and repellent.”

For all these stellar notices, De Niro could be thin-skinned with anyone who didn’t fully embrace the film. He annotated his copy of Pauline Kael’s review, scribbling defensively in the margins, “
That’s the idea, that’s right,” and “So? That’s right. That’s him.” And when he was told that the film was “a brutal portrait,” he insisted otherwise: “
Raging Bull
is like a little domestic spat compared to what people can really do to one another.”

D
E
N
IRO RECEIVED
an astounding array of letters from his peers congratulating him on his work in
Raging Bull.
Al Pacino joked that it was a bad precedent to write in admiration because he’d create the impression that he
wasn’t
impressed henceforth if he
didn’t
send a note. Jane Fonda described De Niro’s work as “beyond any acting I’ve known about.” Paul Newman wrote, “
Dear Robert, I can’t remember being humbled by an American actor for many a year. Well, you did that in spades. Can’t add much to that.”

But the public failed to respond, frankly staggering Scorsese, who was coming off a series of commercial disappointments. As was the practice at the time, the film received a slow rollout, starting with an exclusive run of several weeks in only four theaters and escalating gradually to a wider audience. While word of De Niro’s performance clearly compelled some viewers to buy tickets, more people seemed to have been turned away by what they heard of the film’s grim tone, foul language, open-eyed violence, and dark moral core. In a year in which such relatively breezy films as
The Empire Strikes Back
,
9 to 5
, and
Stir Crazy
dominated the box office,
Raging Bull
was a poor earner,
grossing barely $23 million, placing it in twenty-seventh place among the year’s releases, behind films such as
Popeye
and
The Jazz Singer
, which were widely seen as flops.

Money was never really the thing, of course.
Raging Bull
would surely find its redemption in the form of awards. Yet there, too, the film ran into rough seas. When the critics started polling themselves at year’s end, De Niro walked away with almost every possible prize, being named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Golden Globes (his only loss was in the polling of the National Society of Film Critics, which went instead for Peter O’Toole in
The Stunt Man
). Joe Pesci and cinematographer Michael Chapman also collected nice hauls of prizes. But Scorsese’s sole accolade, for a film that in retrospect would be among the great masterpieces of a great director, received only the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Director; elsewhere, he lost out to the likes of Jonathan Demme for
Melvin and Howard
, Roman Polanski for
Tess
, and Robert Redford, who had made his directorial debut with
Ordinary People.

And the Oscars turned out to be a mixed blessing for the
Raging Bull
team as well. In all, the film was in the running for eight Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Sound, tying
The Elephant Man
for the most nominations that year. De Niro was the prohibitive favorite to win, in competition against O’Toole, Robert Duvall (
The Great Santini
), John Hurt (
The Elephant Man
), and Jack Lemmon (
Tribute
). But after the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild selected Robert Redford as Best Director of the year, Scorsese’s chances looked dimmer and dimmer.

The Oscars were scheduled for March 30, 1981, but early that day a psychopathic loner named John Warnock Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and three other men outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There was no protocol for handling an awards show in the shadow of such a situation, and rather than risk celebrating themselves while the president fought for his life, Academy officials decided to postpone the telecast for twenty-four hours. Reagan, quite
fortunately, would recover from his wounds. But the pall that the assassination attempt cast over the Academy Awards would only deepen the following day, when America would learn that Hinckley, in the sort of coincidence that wouldn’t pass muster with anyone reviewing a script for a thriller, had been inspired to shoot the president by his obsession with
Taxi Driver
and, more specifically, his wish to impress Jodie Foster with a holocaust of violence like that depicted at the end of the 1976 film. As Scorsese, De Niro, and Schrader were waiting to hear if they’d been rewarded for the exceedingly bitter
Raging Bull
, it appeared as though their earlier collaboration had inspired someone to a wild act of real-world violence.

At the start of the telecast, though, almost nobody at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion knew about the connection between Hinckley and
Taxi Driver
. In fact, when De Niro arrived, his attention was grabbed by a reminder of another sensational crime. Emerging from his limo, he noticed an ABC-TV page named Thomas Rogers wearing a green ribbon on the lapel of his suit. Curious as to the meaning of the symbol, De Niro learned that it was part of a nationwide effort to show solidarity with the citizens of Atlanta, Georgia, where a serial killer was preying on young black men. De Niro asked if Rogers had one that he could wear during the evening, and Rogers gave the star his own ribbon. Thus did De Niro inadvertently become the first celebrity to be seen sporting what became known as an “awards show ribbon” in support of some humanitarian cause.

Inside, as word of the Hinckley
/Taxi Driver
connection started to spread, the evening slowly slipped away from
Raging Bull.
Editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Chapman were awarded Oscars, but Pesci and Scorsese were overlooked. With only three awards left to be distributed, Sally Field, who’d won Best Actress the previous year for
Norma Rae
, came out to present the Best Actor award. To no one’s surprise, the name in the envelope was De Niro’s.

Six years earlier, his director, Francis Coppola, had accepted his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for him. But now De Niro was present to speak for himself, and he did so rather fumblingly, reaching into his tuxedo jacket for a slip of paper and joking, “I forgot my lines, so the director wrote them down for me.”

“I want to thank everyone,” he declared, and he more or less did, acknowledging the film’s costumer, casting director, sound man, makeup artists, writers, and producers. He mentioned Pete Savage: “If Pete wasn’t involved in the film he wouldn’t have gotten it started … I’m a little nervous, excuse me … the film never would have gotten started.” He thanked “Vicki LaMotta and all the other wives, and Joey LaMotta, even though he’s suing us. I hope that settles soon enough so I can go over to his house and eat once in a while.” After the audience laughed, he continued to a list of even more important thank-yous: “And of course, Jake LaMotta, whose life it’s all about. And Marty Scorsese, who gave me and all the other actors and everyone on the film all the love and trust that anyone could give anyone and is just wonderful as a director. And I want to thank my mother and father for having me. And my grandmother and grandfather, for having them. And everyone else involved in the film. And I hope that I can share this with anyone that it means anything to and the rest of the world, and especially all the terrible things that are happening. I love everyone.”