When ‘Raging Bull’ punched up Palm Beach County
The late 1950s were not good years for boxer Jake LaMotta.
As anybody who’s seen Martin Scorsese’s masterwork film “Raging Bull” can attest.
In that 1980 film, Robert De Niro played the volatile middleweight champion from his brutal determination to win the crown in the ’40s to his disreputable fall a decade later running a nightclub on Miami Beach’s Collins Avenue. De Niro’s weighty and unforgettable transformation, where he gained some 60 pounds to play a flabby LaMotta in Florida, won him a Best Actor Oscar.
But who knew that in the same year that began with LaMotta jailed on a vice charge — remember the movie scene where he is pounding a Miami cell wall with his fists, screaming “I am not an animal” — would end with him facing another charge in a Palm Beach County courtroom?
And ac ting in a play on Clematis Street, too?
LaMotta’s legal problems began in 1957 when he was making headlines all over Miami Beach. Newspapers reported that he was charged on two counts of prostitution for allowing a 15-year-old to “ply her trade” in his club. He also got stopped for two speeding violations, including one where an officer was forced to pull his gun when LaMotta grabbed him and reared back his fist, newspaper accounts said.
In another incident reported breathlessly in the press, “a lissome 18-yearold blonde” hurt her elbow when she was “catapulted” out of his car early one morning on Miami Beach. By the end of the year, LaMotta had been convicted on the vice charge, sentenced to six months in the lockup and fined $500.
When he was released in May 1958, newspapers took notice that LaMotta had lost 57 pounds in the joint and now weighed a svelte 156. A Miami Herald headline read: “Slim Jake’s Rarin’ To Go Again.”
He was rarin’ to go to West Palm Beach, apparently.
One day before Christmas, an ad in the Palm Beach Post trumpeted that LaMotta would star in a stage revival of the Broadway classic “Born Yesterday” at the new Laroc Theater, at 413 Clematis St. (where the city library and Palm Beach Photographic Centre is today.) The advertisement said LaMotta would be backed up by an “all-star cast.” Tick-
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