De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  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.

  AS 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.

  Right away, he knew that there was a good movie in Raging Bull but that Martin had been too faithful to the source material to find it. He began doing research of his own—he hired an assistant and did interviews with Jake LaMotta, his brother Joe, his ex-wife Vicki,*2 Pete Savage, and various other acquaintances, dug into newspaper clippings about LaMotta’s career and post-boxing spiral, visited key sites in LaMotta’s life, and watched kinescopes of LaMotta’s fights. As he worked, Schrader came to believe that the problem with Martin’s scripts—and with the film as it was being conceived—was that Savage had inserted himself overly into the Jake LaMotta story and was being granted a little too much input into the prospective film. As he explained to a Writers Guild arbitration board when the final credits for the film were disputed in 1980:

  Mr. Savage had involved himself in the film project of “Raging Bull” just as he had in the book. In both cases, he had exaggerated his role in Jake LaMotta’s life. It struck me that the true story of “Raging Bull” was not one of Jake, Peter and Joey but was a story of the “Fighting LaMotta Brothers.” As young men, Jake and Joey were both better than average middleweights. Their personal and professional styles contrasted drastically. Joey was a dancer, Jake was a bull; Joey was a fast talker, Jake was painfully shy and inarticulate; Joey had a way with women, Jake did not. After two years of professional fights, Joey made the decision to give up boxing and manage his brother. Therefore, the drama of the LaMotta brothers: Joey had the freedom to give up boxing, Jake did not. Joey was able to establish a normal family life, preserve his body and mind—albeit from the sidelines. Jake, in some ways less of a fighter, could only go out and wear his opponent down. This sibling trade-off of roles and responsibilities I took to be the core and the theme of “Raging Bull.”

  By the end of May, Schrader submitted a draft, which differed from Martin’s in the use of key fight scenes to break up the domestic and psychological drama, and in framing the film with scenes of the older, retired, and out-of-shape LaMotta working in nightclubs. Then, after he finished post-production on Hardcore, Schrader spent five days in Palm Springs and Las Vegas working on a thorough rewrite, which he submitted to Scorsese and De Niro
in early July. The character of Pete Savage was still in the film as part of a troika with the LaMotta brothers, but, Schrader felt, he had been whittled down to more appropriate dimensions.

  Still, though, Scorsese remained elusive, unable to focus on a new film while his personal life whirled and deteriorated. Then, around Labor Day 1978 he hit rock bottom. At the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where he’d traveled with De Niro, Mardik Martin, and Isabella Rossellini, whom he’d started dating seriously and would soon marry, Scorsese collapsed. The whole group of them, Martin later claimed, were using some badly compromised cocaine on the trip, and Scorsese, his system almost entirely shattered by his unhealthy regimen, started coughing up blood and blacked out. He was rushed to New York and admitted to a hospital in grave condition, just in time for doctors to begin reversing the damage he’d been doing to himself. De Niro, who would prove over the years to be loyal and helpful to friends who hit health crises, particularly those involving drugs, came to see him in the hospital and put the idea of Raging Bull to him once again. Scorsese had originally been repelled because the character of Jake LaMotta seemed so dark and irredeemable to him. Now, though, at his own nadir, he could see the power of the project. “We could do a really great job on this film,” De Niro said to him. “Do you want to make it?” Somewhere Scorsese found the resolve. “Yeah,” he said.

  They faced new problems, though, when they thought about shooting Schrader’s script. For one thing, there was still the question of Pete Savage. Schrader had trimmed him down as much as possible but felt that the best thing to do was to remove him from the story altogether, a revision that De Niro, who had been working with Savage for almost four years, was loath to consider. Then, too, there was the brutality and frankness with which Schrader had imagined the film, culminating in a scene a couple of pages long in which the imprisoned LaMotta tries to masturbate by conjuring the women in his life, only to lose his erection when he recalls how cruelly he treated them all; add that to a scene depicting LaMotta becoming sexually active with Vicki before a fight but then dousing his erection with ice water to preserve his strength, and you had something that would be unimaginable to shoot or to screen—or, of course, to finance.

  Money, pointedly, was the next obstacle to making Raging Bull at all. Chartoff-Winkler had a production deal with United Artists, where they had scored a tremendous success a few years prior with Rocky (which had beaten out Taxi Driver as Best Picture at the Oscars), and they were already engaged in Rocky II for the studio. With this kind of leverage, Irwin Winkler felt able to convince the studio to budget as much as $18 million for Raging Bull, even in the wake of New York, New York and the poor performance (which, to be fair, nobody blamed on De Niro) of 1900 and The Last Tycoon.

  On a wintry day late in 1978, Winkler had Steven Bach and David Field, relatively new production executives at United Artists, accompany him to a meeting with Scorsese and De Niro at Scorsese’s East 57th Street apartment. The pair had read Schrader’s most recent script and had some legitimate concerns, and they wanted to at least pay the would-be star and director of the film the courtesy of having a meeting to discuss them. Bach, as he would later write, had significant issues with the script, which he called “brutally depressing and depressingly brutal.” And he wasn’t very comfortable in Scorsese’s apartment, which, because the director had only just decided to move back to New York, had the bare-bones feel of a dorm room and was filled with mysterious and vaguely creepy friends and hangers-on.

  Bach was further disquieted when he realized that one of these odd folks, a skinny guy in jeans and bare feet who wandered in from another room and greeted the executives in near silence, was in fact De Niro, who sank into a chair in the living room and contributed not one word to the ensuing conversation. After Winkler pitched the film to them, Bach allowed Field to take the lead in stating the studio’s objections to and hesitancies about the project. For one thing, Rocky had created a new fad for boxing movies, and in addition to its sequel there were as many as a half dozen other fight films in some stage of production—a lot of competition, in other words.

  There was also the matter of censorship, which Schrader’s script would surely entail. United Artists would not put its name on an X-rated film, as that designation had come to be associated with hardcore porn; they would find it impossible to book an X-rated film into normal theaters or, indeed, to advertise it in newspapers. Raging Bull would have to be delivered as an R, Field reminded them, and “this picture as written is an X.”

  “What makes you so sure this is an X?” asked Winkler.

  “When I read in a script, ‘CLOSE UP on Jake LaMotta’s erection as he pours ice water over it prior to the fight,’ then I think we’re in the land of X,” Field retorted.

  Winkler explained that his team wasn’t happy with the script yet, either. Field countered that UA’s concerns went deeper than a few scenes. “It’s the whole script.… We have a real question whether this story can ever be made as a movie any audience will want to see, whatever the rating.”

  “Why?” Scorsese asked.

  “It’s this man,” Field replied. “The problem is will anyone want to see any movie about such Neanderthal behavior? Can any writer make him more than what he seems to be in the scripts we’ve seen?”

  “Which is what?” Scorsese wondered.

  “A cockroach.”

  The room went quiet. The deal was nearly dead.

  Then De Niro spoke for the first time since his mumbled greetings: “He is not a cockroach. He is not a cockroach.”

  It all ended with the status quo in place: De Niro and Scorsese had a script that no one was ready to make.

  BUT DE NIRO had made Taxi Driver happen because he determined that he wouldn’t be dissuaded from doing it. Similarly, he had been focused on making Raging Bull for years, and he wasn’t going to give up. He’d been working with the same boxing trainer who’d prepared Sylvester Stallone for Rocky, he’d maintained a strict diet and fitness regimen even while working on The Deer Hunter, and he had become increasingly involved with Jake LaMotta himself.

  LaMotta had spoken with Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, and of course with Pete Savage and his book- and screenplay-writing partners, but he and De Niro had developed an extremely intimate bond over the previous few years. And now that De Niro was focused exclusively on Raging Bull, the actor pushed the relationship even further, enlisting the old fighter to teach him to box in the exact style he had used; visiting the home LaMotta shared with his fifth wife so often that she mentioned De Niro in her 1979 divorce claim (“He was in the apartment constantly, for nearly two years”); probing him like a therapist about scenes from his past, about his emotions, fears, drives; trading admiration and understanding for the chance to dig into the very soul of the man. The movie, and LaMotta, had gotten under his skin.

  De Niro was, LaMotta told a reporter as far back as 1977, “more qualified to be a psychiatrist than a psychiatrist. He goes very deep. He’s telling me things about me that I never knew. I thought I was a pretty bad guy for a while, but he made me realize I’m not. I’m a pretty good guy.” (He added, as if slightly unnerved: “Every once in a while I catch him looking at me. He studies me.”)

  In fact, De Niro relied on a combination of skills to comfort and probe LaMotta by turns. “I just kept repeating in his ear, ‘You’re not so bad, you’re not so bad,’ ” he said. “People did not like him. Jake had done some low-life things that were supposed to be bad, but I felt that the drama in his life—with the brother and all that stuff—was real.”

  There was a limit to how far De Niro could get, even with great tact, sympathy, and sensitivity and a subject who was game to be mined. “I admired the fact that he was at least willing to question himself and his actions,” De Niro said. “But what’s he going to do? Should he be like a college professor and try to say, ‘Well, I think the reason I did that was because …?’ He would talk that way sometimes, but he was more cunning. He’d look at
you deadpan, or he’d laugh about certain things. He would protect himself sometimes, but then he would say, ‘Aah, I was a son-of-a-bitch.’ ”

  Finally the actor exhausted even himself: “I tried to ask him every kind of question,” De Niro later admitted, “but it’s hard to get somebody to be straight and honest about himself, because he is not even sure himself.” Or, as he put it another time: “You can only go so far with people. Like I can only go so far with you here. There are things I can’t tell you, I can’t consciously or unconsciously give them up.”

  There was one thing, though, that LaMotta offered that gave De Niro and Scorsese the last impetus they needed to apply themselves successfully to the film. During one of their lengthy conversations, LaMotta stood up and started banging his head against a wall. As Scorsese said, “De Niro saw this movement and suddenly he got the whole character from him, the whole movie. We knew we wanted to make a movie that would reach a man at the point of making that gesture with the line, ‘I am not an animal.’ ”

  WITH THEIR DEEP knowledge of LaMotta, and with Paul Schrader’s suggestion that they jettison the Pete Savage character from the script, De Niro and Scorsese decided to make a retreat of sorts to the Caribbean island of St. Martin, where they planned to take one final stab at getting the thing right. They spent two to three weeks there—Scorsese suffering from the tropical climate, De Niro patiently taking care of him—working and reworking the pages. Somewhat reluctantly, because Savage was still connected to the project, they did as Schrader suggested: no trace of Pete was left in the final film.

  Or, rather, no trace of a character named Pete was left. Fatefully, they took some of the actions, words, and situations involving the real Pete Savage and the character Pete Savage and ascribed them to the character (and, by implication, the real man) Joey LaMotta. Some of these were innocent things, but a few, including a beating given to a mobster acquaintance who was caught by Savage squiring Jake’s wife to a nightclub when the fighter was out of town, amounted to defamation. To make matters worse, they had been so busy working with Savage, Jake, and Vicki that they somehow neglected to obtain Joey LaMotta’s permission to use his name and likeness in the film. They had, in effect, stolen his life rights and then defamed him, which was why De Niro wound up being deposed in a lawsuit.