Quote of the Day (Anjelica Huston, on Ryan O’Neal)

“I think you also get the face you deserve. Have you seen it lately?”—Actress Anjelica Huston, answering whether abusive ex-boyfriend Ryan O’Neal got “the career he deserved,” quoted in Andrew Goldman, “In Conversation: Anjelica Huston,” New York Magazine, April 29, 2019

The face you see here was not the one Ms. Huston had in mind when she made this remark. This one was taken in 2008 by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, after Ryan O’Neal was arrested, along with son Redmond, on charges of drug possession.

Granted, nobody is going to look good in a mug shot. And O’Neal has looked even worse since then. That would be normal to expect for a leukemia and prostate cancer survivor who, as it happens, also turns 80 today.

But Ms. Huston would have it that the actor—a romantic heartthrob since his days on the primetime 1960s soap opera Peyton Place and the 1970 weepie, Love Story—is finally paying the wages of sin. In other words, the once-handsome actor now looks as ugly as the way he once acted towards others.

In a period when she was separated from longtime companion Jack Nicholson, Ms. Huston took up with O’Neal. It’s a safe bet to say, judging from her recollections, that this relationship-on-the-rebound is one she deeply regrets.

O’Neal, an amateur boxer before he started his acting career, not only exhibited his pugilistic skills onscreen in The Main Event, but also during an argument with Ms. Huston, according to her 2014 memoir Watch Me:

“He turned on me, grabbed me by the hair and hit me in the forehead with the top of his skull. I saw stars and reeled back. Half blind I ran away from him.”

Even as his celebrity has dimmed over the years (his latest roles were guest appearances on Bones), O’Neal has had a tabloid half-life because of the drug use of three of his four children, as well as their charges that he acted violently towards them when they were growing up. 

Pointing to how their lives turned out, the actor has acknowledged he was a “hopeless father,” admitting he wasn’t ready for parenthood in his early twenties. But his defects are worse than a substance abuse problem: well into his sixties, he was a narcissistic roue to an extraordinary extent even for Hollywood. (At the 2009 funeral of longtime lover Farrar Fawcett, according to this article from Huffington Post, he made a pass at an attractive younger woman—who turned out to be his Oscar-winning daughter Tatum, from whom he’d been estranged for years.)

For all his tabloid exploits, O’Neal was fortunate indeed that Ms. Huston’s charge of abuse (which he does not appear to have denied) came a few years before the #MeToo movement. The noise afterward might have been deafening.

Watching a onetime celebrity—with looks ravaged by disease and time—can be disheartening. But some, having lived their lives with dignity, go out the same way, while others who made grave personal and professional mistakes successfully grab at a last shot at redemption.

For the longest time, O’Neal did not follow that script. Within the last year, he has been photographed with his troubled offspring, in an image long thought unthinkable. Whether that reconciliation will hold, given this troubled family, is another matter.

But while he was at it, it wouldn’t have hurt for him to try to make amends—even publicly—with Ms. Huston, in the hope that others might learn from his example of taking responsibility for domestic violence.

This Day in Boxing History (Sugar Ray, LaMotta in “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’)

Feb. 14, 1951—“I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, it's a wonder I don't have diabetes,” Jake LaMotta has marveled in old age. In their sixth and final bout, Robinson pummeled LaMotta, a tough adversary who had closely contested their prior matches, winning on a technical knockout (TKO) in the 13^th round to take the middleweight crown from the "Bronx Bull."

This was their first fight with a title at stake. Robinson was the reigning welterweight king, and LaMotta had been the middleweight champ for the last year and a half. With so much on the line, each fighter gave it everything he had, with Robinson, recently acclaimed “the greatest all-around fighter pound-for-pound in any division” by sportswriter Nat Fleischer, dishing it out and LaMotta, to an extent that even surprised longtime observers of his style, taking it.

The bloodletting, combined with the Chicago locale, quickly led boxing fans to label this the sport’s “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” 

The denouement of the fight became the subject of one of the most memorable scenes of Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film classic, Raging Bull. When the referee mercifully stops the match, Robert DeNiro’s LaMotta stands bloody but unbowed in the ring, staggering over to Ray Barnes’ Robinson and saying, “You never got me down, Ray.”

When one thinks of the great boxing rivals, Robinson and LaMotta rank with Tunney and Dempsey or Ali and Frazier. The post-career relationship, however, resembled more of the mutual respect between Tunney and Dempsey than the animosity between Ali and Frazier. “Sugar Ray was the greatest fighter who ever lived,” LaMotta recalled in a January 2013 Esquire interview. After their September 1945 bout, a split decision for Robinson, the winner from Harlem acknowledged about his rival, “LaMotta is the toughest man I’ve ever fought. I’ve fought him five times and hit him with everything I know how to throw, but he still stands up.”

It was not really an ability to take a punch that aided LaMotta, however, but rather the instinct to avoid the worst of the blow. “Lot of guys can take punches,” LaMotta told Esquire. “The idea is not to take unnecessary punishment. I explain taking a punch this way: In baseball, when someone throws a hardball at you and you don't have a glove, if you want to catch it, your palm moves back with the ball at the last second. That slight movement saves you from taking a hard blow. If you move the same way when a fist comes at you, it takes away more than 50 percent of the power. The secret is to move with the punch.”

LaMotta dealt Robinson the first loss of his career, after 40 fights, in a unanimous decision in their second encounter, in February 1943. But in that earlier match, Robinson, a natural welterweight, was outweighed by 16 pounds by LaMotta. Eight years later, LaMotta was only five pounds heavier. More crucially, he had slowed down in the last six years, making him an easier target for Robinson—and, after eight rounds that were pretty even, that latter disadvantage would prove decisive. 

The four-minute Raging Bull scene I mentioned above captures the atmosphere of the bout’s last stage: the blood that splattered onlookers, the horrified fascination of a larger audience (it was the first and only one of their bouts ever aired on television), and the manner in which time held momentarily still for LaMotta as he awaited the final onslaught from Robinson. 

Just how much he endured might best be described by sportswriter Red Smith:

In the third minute of the 13th round Ray Robinson hit Jake LaMotta for-what was it? – the thousandth time? The five thousandth? Jake was hung on the ropes like a picture on the wall, like an old, wrinkled suit in the attic closet. Now he came off the hook, sagged forward, bent double at the waist. He embraced Robinson about the drawers and the referee, Frank Sikora, pushed in between them and motioned to Robinson to desist. The greatest fist fighter in the world was middleweight champion of the world, and one of the toughest had suffered the first believable knockout of his life.

LaMotta, Smith practically gasped, had been “slugged, tortured, flayed, bloodied and bludgeoned… stripped of his title and nearly detached from his intellect as well.” What was surely on the mind of Smith and other observers was Robinson’s successful defense of his welterweight crown in 1947 against Jimmy Doyle. The latter, who had defied doctors’ orders not to fight again after being knocked unconscious for 15 minutes in a prior bout, ended up going to the hospital again, where he died the afternoon after his eight-round loss to Robinson.

Perhaps what has allowed LaMotta to live into his 90s was not just his ability to “move with the punch,” but also the sense of when to get out. He lasted another three years and 10 bouts (including four losses) before deciding to leave the ring. Robinson, two months older, did not stop until 1965, 24 years after he began. (He needed the money badly: he had not been attentive to the side businesses he had started, and in the mid-1950s the Internal Revenue Service came after him, even garnishing some of his earnings.)

That almost certainly was a mistake. In 1989, he died of what was diagnosed at the time as Alzheimer’s Disease. More recently, however, his case has given rise to speculation that he might have fallen victim to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain disease that has come into the news because of its impact on football players.

Robinson and LaMotta had the mental toughness that made them champions. Unfortunately, they could not control outside the ring the aggression that brought them to the top of their profession. Raging Bull detailed in unmistakable and unflattering terms the domestic violence that LaMotta inflicted on his beautiful second wife Vikki, and his younger brother and manager Joey. (After seeing the movie, the boxer asked Vikki if he had really been that bad. "Even worse," she replied.)

It was less well known that Robinson did the same against his beautiful second wife, Edna Mae, when she discovered his flagrant infidelity. The African-American sportswriter Sam Lacy expressed his dismay about this behavior this way:  “I have said many times that Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest athlete in a given field I have had the pleasure of observing. I have also said many times that he can be one of the most disgusting figures one is compelled to meet in his business.”

Song Lyric of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on ‘Some Kind of Trouble’ With ‘Luka’)

“If you hear something late at night

Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight

Just don't ask me what it was.”— Suzanne Vega, "Luka," from Solitude Standing (1987)

The singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega might have been born 55 years ago yesterday in Santa Monica, Calif., but she is far more associated with the city where she grew up, went to college, and set one of her most famous songs, “Tom’s Diner”—i.e., New York. Even “Luka” seems more a product of East Coast alienation than the sunny West Coast.

In fact, she saw a child by that name outside her apartment building. Thin, sensitive, he also seemed like he could be a tough kid. Above all, he “seemed a little bit distinctive from the other children,” so she grafted a history onto him to explain why he seemed so set apart: the abuse he suffered at the hands of a parent.

“Luka” works through ambiguity and implication. Start with the child’s name: it’s probably, but not necessarily, a boy’s. He could come from a number of countries.

Nowhere does the boy, the song’s narrator (itself an act of creative daring), come right out and state that he has been hit. But he keeps coming close. The second verse, the one quoted above, observes that “Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight” might be observed; later, he thinks he might be “clumsy” or “crazy,” as if blaming himself for the trouble; and the last verse notes that “they only hit until you cry,” with the “you” the thinnest linguistic veneer that it could be someone else, except himself, being hit.

Earlier in the song, “you” is used more conventionally, yet subversively. “I live on the second floor,” Luka says, “I live upstairs from you.” This is more than a child meeting an adult in the song; “you” is now the listener who might find an example of child abuse right where he or she lives. "You" is implicated now in what is told: What are "you" going to do about the suspected violence?

In a transcript for the show “The Infinite Mind,” Vega related how, while performing the song at an Albany, NY appearance on behalf of the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, she was startled by the sight of a crying woman in the audience. It wasn’t until after the show that she could identify the woman: Hedda Nussbaum, the abused partner of Joel Steinberg—the man who had killed their adopted daughter, Lisa Steinberg, in one of the most heinous instances of domestic violence of the last few decades.

(For more about Vega--specifically, her song "Caramel"--please see this prior post of mine.)