Sweet Thunder Page 28
Langston Hughes was right: It did seem as if everyone, save himself, was leaving for Paris that year. Following his bout against Dykes, Sugar Ray immediately embarked for Europe, sailing from Manhattan on the good ship Liberté. He was traveling with nine others, including his valet, his barber, and his lovely sister Evelyn. They were all stalwart members of his nightclub set, prideful Negroes elevated—as if by helium—in the wake of his footsteps. Their bustling caused a stir on deck. As Robinson knew, “It wasn’t usual for nine Negroes to be sailing on the Liberté, and sailing together.” They nodded at the curious stares from fellow passengers. A steward glided past and Robinson overheard him say to another: “The boxer, Sugar Ray Robinson, and his entourage.” The boxer rolled the word around in his mouth and delighted in it. “Entourage”: an old French word meaning a group of attendants. Robinson cackled and proclaimed to his sister and the others that he no longer had assistants—but an entourage!
He would have one bout each in Geneva, Brussels, and Frankfurt. There would be two matches in Paris. All the bouts were fairly uneventful: five fights, five wins. With his music and entertainment leanings, he couldn’t help but be charmed by the City of Light. Paris had long welcomed black American artists—Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, and Lena Horne most recently—into its cultural bosom. Parisians by the thousands clamored to greet the American fighter, whose sense of style and decorum were so attractive to them. He ate at elegant restaurants, always in suit and beautiful tie. Other patrons ogled as he dined with the great French fighter Georges Carpentier, who had been light heavyweight champ from 1920 to 1922. Carpentier had fought against Jack Dempsey in 1921 before eighty thousand in Jersey City. Dempsey would claim a fourth-round knockout, but Americans were impressed with Carpentier, and he would always have friends across the Atlantic. Robinson strolled the Champs Elysées, shopped, befriended local musicians, saw the naked dancing girls at the Lido, and practiced his French. A new snack was suddenly on the menus at some of the cafés of Montmarte: They were made of sweetened rice and called Sugar cakes, in honor of the visiting American fight champion. The Chicago Tribune reported that Robinson had “captured Paris more completely than Hitler.” He might well have lingered longer on the continent—Paris seemed to melt right into him—but there were pressing opportunities back in America.
Sugar Ray Robinson had begun considering the inevitable—jumping to another weight class. It was a prospect that made him think of a far loftier goal than previously imagined: a Joe Louis–like parting of the curtains and the kind of attention mostly reserved for heavyweights.
While Sugar Ray Robinson was in Europe, Jake LaMotta was grappling with the darker forces of his own nature. The ebbing away of marital love can be a lethal blow to any man. LaMotta wrestled with that, but also something else: mobsters who fixed fights. The combination plunged him into the same darkness he had experienced early in life and that had put him behind bars.
Fighters want what they can’t have; fighters in the serious hunt for a championship belt often get prizes they would otherwise miss.
She was Bronx-born, beautiful, tall, blonde, and when lounging on the beach in her two-piece swimsuit (it wasn’t for swimming), her legs were as devastating as torpedoes. Her real name was Beverly Rosalyn Thailer, but she changed it to Vikki; her friends didn’t believe “Beverly” had the right seductive timbre. Her father, a small-time gambler, would go into rages and beat her: it was her beauty, it was her staying out late; she couldn’t understand the abuse nor the silence of her mother. She got a job working in a nightclub where the men dressed like women. The cross-dressing bewildered her, but she needed the money. Sometimes she herself danced onstage. One night a gangster promised her and another girlfriend a good time—dinner, some drinks. Instead he raped her, took her virginity, and she was too frightened to go to the police. Life darkened: “Yet here I was, fifteen years old. I’d been beaten by my father and found no one to protect me. I’d been raped and hadn’t told a soul what happened.”
The woman-child, gorgeous though quite bruised, let it be known she wanted to meet the local Bronx fighter everyone was always talking about. As soon as she was introduced to the Bull, he was mesmerized. “She looked like a beauty-contest winner, like the blonde who plays the lead in one of those movies about the queen of the campus,” the non-collegiate LaMotta would remember of their first meeting. He reminded her of John Garfield, the tough-guy actor. They married in 1946—within three months of their initial meeting—and it was largely because she had become pregnant. She was sixteen years old.
His hovering seemed, at first, warm and protective, but then it turned into outright control, his paranoia stoked by her every move. “He was jealous of other men—I couldn’t talk with the butcher or grocer—but he didn’t want me talking with other women either.” The beatings would be followed by makeup sessions, and now Vikki LaMotta—in furs and jewelry paid for by her husband’s fists—was living in torment again. After one assault, she told him she’d rather be dead than live any longer with him. They made up. Fears of abandonment lashed at the cursed Coxsackie child: “I remember one of the Robinson fights, Robinson had me but I just wouldn’t give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of knocking me down, so I told the referee I’d murder him if he tried to stop the fight. I got my arm wedged around one of the ring ropes and stayed there defying Robinson to knock me down. He couldn’t, but I got about as bad a beating as I’ve ever had. So help me God, I’d rather take a beating like that than listen to my wife tell me she’d rather be dead than living with me.”
The more Jake LaMotta scanned the boxing world, the angrier he became. He could glance across the calendar of 1946 and notice that Robinson had gotten his crack at fighting for a championship belt—but Jake LaMotta had not. He had ignored the entreaties from mobsters, and where did that get him? He felt punished. He slept in the arms of a woman who had the beauty and mystique of a mermaid, and yet he was still full of anguish. His paranoia convinced him he didn’t have her true love at all.
His brother Joey—long hovering like some kind of spectral tempter at his brother’s shoulder—took Jake to meet some people.
On March 14 of 1947, LaMotta defeated Tommy Bell in New York in ten rounds. In June he bested Tony Janiro in New York, also in a ten-rounder. But on September 3 he suffered a defeat at the hands of Cecil Hudson in Chicago. The Hudson setback wobbled his confidence at getting a title shot.
It was soon announced that LaMotta would fight Billy Fox of Philadelphia on November 14 in New York. Fox’s record was stunning: He was 49–1. He was only twenty-four—two years younger than LaMotta—and there were many in boxing circles who admired him. But the consensus was that LaMotta would beat the young fighter. James Dawson, the Times writer, predicted that LaMotta would “be trying his rushing, crashing, close-range fighting style, against a combination boxer-fighter, who also boasts a paralyzing punch.”
On the night of the fight, a strange aura circled the ring beginning in the second round. While LaMotta fought in his usual hard-charging style against Fox in the first round, it was different from then on. In rounds two and three he seemed to vanish, taking unreturned blows from Fox. “Then he backed across the ring under a right to the head and acted as if his knees were buckling,” Dawson wrote. Many in the audience thought LaMotta—as he was sometimes wont to do—was simply playing possum; that the fury would be unleashed in due time; that the Bull was about to make the youngster pay. There were more than eighteen thousand on hand; the box receipts exceeded $100,000—the most money taken in for a fight in the Garden all year. In the early part of the fourth, Fox snapped LaMotta with a sharp right. It drove LaMotta into the ropes, where he surprisingly cowered. Upon bouncing back to the center, LaMotta was met again by Fox, who proceeded to pummel him with “numerous lefts and rights.” Then, in the same round—cries of “Stop the fight!” being howled now, an unfamiliar sound in the ears of the Bull—LaMotta, standing at center ring, took another volley of blows from Fox. The r
eferee had seen enough and stepped in and stopped it. Jake LaMotta had been beaten, upset in the fourth round. FOX KNOCKS OUT LAMOTTA IN FOURTH ROUND BEFORE 18,340 AT GARDEN, the six-column Times headline screamed.
It was an amazing victory for young Fox. Both fighters quickly made their way to their dressing rooms, and New York state athletic officials quickly followed. They peppered LaMotta with questions about having fought such a lackluster bout. LaMotta pointed to Fox’s record, said the kid was the better fighter on this night. Officials seemed to accept the explanation, but decided to withhold both purses until further investigation. LaMotta soon offered another explanation: that he had a hurt spleen and had kept quiet about it. The fighters received their money, but LaMotta was suspended from fighting for seven months for concealing his injury. (A more sinister truth lay in the shadows: The people his brother Joey had taken him to meet were mobsters. LaMotta admitted to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1960 that he had thrown the Fox fight—on orders from Frankie Carbo, the mobster—for a chance at a title shot. Fox had long been a Mob-linked fighter.) But in 1947 the public was led to believe LaMotta had been suspended because he had been untruthful about his injury—the New York athletic investigators were none the wiser themselves.
LaMotta stewed during his suspension, a cheater, a faker, a man hoarding a secret because he believed it would get him to the ultimate goal: that championship bout. His brother Joey delivered news of the okay from Carbo and his gang: Jake would now have his chance at the belt. However, he had to fight—and keep winning—before it could happen, in order to remind the public that he deserved the opportunity.
LaMotta fought and won five times in 1948. He started out 1949 with a ten-round loss, however, to Laurent Dauthuille—a vicious-punching French Canadian—in Montreal. His next three fights, though, were impressive victories. Then it was announced: On June 16, LaMotta would go up against world champion Marcel Cerdan (“the Moroccan Bomber”) at the outdoor Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (Before he faced off against Cerdan, though, the Mob demanded $20,000 as matchmaker’s fee: Vikki had to pawn her engagement ring to help raise the dough.)
Cerdan, the French champ, was dashing and elegant, a figure whom the French loved because he loved their Edith Piaf. They were a smashing couple—Piaf sang to him from the stage whether he was in the audience or not—and each constantly buoyed the spirits of the other. (Cerdan was married. Piaf ignored this inconvenient fact and the French, being the French, didn’t seem to mind.)
A half dozen French writers trailed Cerdan from Europe to Detroit to witness the first defense of the crown he held. The excitement surrounding the bout was not only due to an American challenging a foreigner but because the locale was Detroit—a city that had long embraced LaMotta. “The popularity of LaMotta here is explained by the fact he has engaged in fifteen local bouts,” wrote the New York Times man James Dawson, “all of them exciting, including a victory he scored over the world welterweight champion, Ray Robinson.”
On June 15, the day of the bout, rain muddied the Briggs Stadium field, and organizers—among them Joe Louis, in temporary retirement mode and employed by the recently formed International Boxing Club as their boxing activities director—had to huddle to debate a day’s postponement. All parties agreed to reschedule, but when the Cerdan camp learned that in keeping with LaMotta’s wishes there would be no new weigh-ins the next day, they exploded in anger. Lew Burston, who was Cerdan’s American representative, believed the move favored LaMotta, whose weight monitoring was always a last-minute worry. “I want an authentic world middleweight championship bout,” Burston fumed. “I do not want Cerdan to defend the title against a light-heavyweight, and LaMotta will be a legitimate light-heavyweight unless he is compelled to weigh again tomorrow.” At ten-thirty the next morning, the two men stepped again onto the scales, and shouts of delight were heard as both fighters made weight. That evening, the rain held off.
There were more than twenty-two thousand on hand at Briggs Stadium. Vikki had never seen her husband fight in person: Afraid to see his face bloodied, she preferred listening on the radio back at a hotel. But Jake pleaded with her to sit ringside on the night of the Cerdan fight, and she did. Before the fight, LaMotta—so fond of Detroit, the city where he had defeated all those Negro boxers, where he had shamed Sugar Ray Robinson—promised his wife Vikki that he’d win.
Paranoia, shame, anger, confusion, and a tawdry kind of gleeful-ness followed him into the ring that night. He knew he had critics—sportswriters and fans of the fight game alike—and he cared not at all about them.
Not long into the first round the two fighters became entangled; LaMotta wouldn’t let go. He had emerged from his corner in the first round in a state of agitation. Still entangled, he finally shoved Cerdan off; the Frenchman slipped and grimaced as he landed on his right shoulder. LaMotta was quickly waved away by the referee. Cerdan got to his feet again, but for the rest of the fight he seemed at a disadvantage. The Frenchman fought gamely in the second round, though, connecting with a flurry of left punches. It was also in that round that LaMotta broke a knuckle on his left hand. Still, utilizing his demonic grit in rounds four, five, and six, LaMotta punched with strength and savvy; his cornerman Al Silvani was screaming at the top of his lungs for him to keep it up. Vikki LaMotta was beside herself; this was her husband, in the flesh, at the top of his game: a fearless and remarkable punching machine, outboxing a world champion right before her eyes: “And it was a thing of beauty to watch,” she would remember of the night. The crowd began to sense a shift. By the end of the seventh as he made his way to his corner, Cerdan—five years older than LaMotta—looked both exhausted and unsteady. His cornermen suggested he give up in the eighth round; Cerdan adamantly refused. But he had nothing left.
When the Frenchman couldn’t answer the bell for the tenth, the noise started rising; the police contingent started moving closer around the ropes, and Vikki LaMotta’s eyes lit up. And then there he was, the Bull, at center ring with his arms raised. The world middleweight champion; up high, the gallery gods were twisting and turning. There were some boos, but LaMotta ignored them, offering only his hard dockworker’s grin. Then he paraded around the ring, side to side, so everyone could see him, so the photographers could get their pictures, so that all those who had counted him out all his life—just another wop, a dago, a fool—could see this: Jake LaMotta, champ. Cerdan had come up short, as one reporter put it, “against a huskier, stronger, more savage” foe. And there now was Vikki in the ring, too, looking, with her porcelain beauty, like something that had descended from the bright ring lights. And then there appeared inside the ring Sugar Ray’s old Army buddy Joe Louis. Joe’s soft face gleamed against the light. He was holding the specially designed belt—of gold, sapphires, and rubies, at a cost of $5,000—in both hands, the way someone might hold a fur coat walking across a dirty puddle. When he handed the belt to Jake, deep emotions caught the Bull. His eyes watered.
Later that night—after all the noise and handshakes and bear hugs and tears—Vikki and Jake retreated to their spacious hotel suite. At long last, a night they would remember forever. Vikki slipped into the bathroom. When she emerged, she was wearing “white silk stockings, a white string bikini, and the championship belt.” The Bull might as well have been in heaven: His wife knew that “That was Jake’s moment. “He was at the summit with the woman and the title of his dreams.”
Few would deny that Cerdan deserved another chance at LaMotta. Many boxing observers believed that were it not for that first-round shoulder injury, the results might well have been different. LaMotta had no choice but to grant Cerdan a rematch, since just such a clause had been written into the original contract. The bout was announced for December 2, 1949, to take place at Madison Square Garden.
The great Frenchman—a bigger-than-life hero in both France and Morocco—arrived at Orly airport in Paris on October 27 for his Manhattan-bound flight, leaving himself plenty of time to set up training headquarters. Photograph
ers had trailed him and began clicking away. For days leading up to his departure, he had been the topic of excited conversation in Paris cafés. Many recalled the 1948 fight against Tony Zale in Jersey City when he had captured the championship crown. At Orly, Cerdan was accompanied by his manager and cornermen. He was in a jubilant mood. “With all my strength I want to get back that title that I so stupidly lost,” he told a group of well-wishers. “For those who say I’m washed up I can say that, despite my thirty-three years and 110 fights, I feel myself at my peak.” And shortly thereafter, the Air France jetliner was cleared for takeoff and zoomed skyward.
About 1,500 miles out, the pilot sent a simple message: “Having accomplished first part of trip normally, ready to land at 2:55 on Santa Maria Airdrome, Azores, weather being clear.” But the plane suddenly hit a stretch of terrible weather, rain and fog; villagers below heard the boom against the mountainside. All forty-eight on board were killed. It took rescuers the better part of a day to reach the wreckage. The grief was wide and deep, especially in Morocco and France. The sudden loss “had plunged the nation into mourning,” the great French boxer Georges Carpentier said. Edith Piaf, who had long felt thwarted by the promises of love—that is, until she met Cerdan—collapsed when word of the crash reached her. She kept singing her songs (“La Vie en Rose,” “La Marseillaise”) but told her friends she’d never be the same again.