Low life
Heavyweight friends
Jeffrey Bernard
What a fight it would have been if he and his friend, Rocky Graziano, my boyhood hero, had met. As it was, Jake and Rocky just used to send each other up. Rocky told me, 'I once told Jake that his wife was cheating on him with his best friend so Jake went home and shot his dog.' Jake retaliated by saying, 'You know those books on such-and-such a city on a dollar a day, well, Rocky has written one called New York on nothing a day.' Rocky, it is true, never bought me a drink in all the times I sat at his feet and listened to him telling stories of his amazing past — the film Somebody Up There Likes Me with Paul Newman was Rocky's story — but then, in fairness to him, I wouldn't allow him to.
Jake seemed to me to be more of a cigar-chewing, happy-go-lucky simpleton. I certainly wouldn't have believed that a World Champion could have been cruel and mad enough to beat up his wife, but Robert De Niro did just that plus kicking his brother, Joe, to pieces and the film was, of course, authenticated by Jake him- self.
One of the hardest men I have ever met, though, was Tony Zale who lost and then won his title back from Rocky Graziano. When I met him he was a greeter in a Gal- lagher's bar. Known as 'The Man of Steel from Gary, Indiana', he had eyes the colour of dirty ice. Killer's eyes, and yet he was the most coherent of them all in that golden age of middleweights.
I hate to think how badly one might be tempted to behave if one could hit as hard as any of those three men. But, for a start, I certainly wouldn't have been mugged, as I was three years ago. Most likely I would have been arrested for manslaughter.
What a pleasure it was to have known two such diverse men as Rocky Graziano and Graham Greene. The rich mix of other people from Jake LaMotta to Francis Bacon has been a marvellous bonus to this boring life. I sometimes sit here on my sofa thinking how extraordinary it is that I have ended up meeting and knowing most of the people I ever wanted to years ago.
I sometimes wonder why fighters used to hold so much fascination for me but, apart from the fact that they are invariably nice men, they seemed to me to be like gladia- tors when I was a teenager. Our own Henry Cooper is a delightful man without the glamour that surrounded those naughty American middleweights. But Rocky was a real American folk hero. It seemed as though everybody in New York knew him and loved him.
You could walk down the street with Rocky and everybody from newspaper sell- ers to Wall Street tycoons would stop him and say, Rocky, how'ya doin?' Mar- lon Brando's ex-fighter in On the Water- front was a lot closer to Rocky than Paul Newman's take-off of him in Someone Up There Likes Me. I suppose that, at their respective peaks, Zale was the best of the three of them. But I felt strangely sad when I read that Rocky had died about five years ago. He was a New York institution where- as Jake LaMotta, (particularly De Niro's LaMotta) was and is a mixed-up mess. I like to keep my high-life and low-life in separate compartments. and I suppose it keeps me on my toes, in a way, never to know whether I am about to address the Oxford Union or Jake LaMotta. Either 'Let's ask Archie. He once ate a Ph.D.' could give you a rough ride. The guests at the first celestial dinner I shall give in heav- en will be an odd bunch. I think that Byron and Rocky Graziano will hit it off.
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