Jake LaMotta was standing in his kitchen on the East Side of Manhattan the other day, wedged in front of his refrigerator, puffing on a Marlboro in the dark. He was blowing smoke out the window and tapping ash into a small bowl of water. LaMotta, 90, is the onetime middleweight champion of the world, a boxing Hall of Famer who retired with 30 knockouts; but his soon-to-be seventh wife, who is nearly 40 years his junior, will not let him smoke in his own apartment.  It was an hour before his curtain call, and LaMotta — known as the Raging Bull — was killing time, having come to the end of his day’s routine. He got up, as usual, at 8 a.m. and read The New York Post. He ate a banana and some yogurt. He rested and then rehearsed his lines for his star turn in an Off Broadway show about himself that closed Sunday night after a brief engagement at the Richmond Shepard Theater on East 26th Street.  And what does he do the rest of the day?  “I play solitaire,” he said in a throaty Bronx rumble, “and wait for something to happen.”  At least for the length of its two-week run, that something was “The Lady and the Champ,” a 50-minute, cabaret-style revue, recounting LaMotta’s life in the ring through video clips, old jazz standards, boxing stories and campy jokes (“I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times it’s a wonder I don’t have diabetes”). The sweet science offers any number of metaphors for the savage beating LaMotta took for all of this from his reviewers. But let’s speak plainly: the show got panned.  “Sheer mortification,” winced The Post in a review headlined, “Aging Bull.”  “Appallingly conceived,” wrote The New York Times.  Not that this gave any pause to LaMotta, a ’50s-era brawler known in his prime for a cinder-block chin and a serpentine talent for rolling with the punches. Could the unmanly jabs of a critic really compare with a Marcel Cerdan uppercut or a thundering Robinson right? Of course not, LaMotta said. The theater is that place to which the aging fighter turns in his retirement — no more, no less. “I’m not so steady on my feet these days,” he confessed. “It gives me something to do.”  His physical condition is perhaps to be expected. His hair has thinned; he has age spots and a wattle; a slight palsy affects his right hand. His old pug’s face has the shrunken look of a jack-o’-lantern left out in the weather after Halloween. His attention sometimes wanders. “I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times it’s a wonder I don’t have diabetes,” he said again.  The show, in which he co-starred with Denise Baker, his seventh fiancée (“Lucky seven,” he insisted), gave him something to look forward to. Baker, an actress, is best known for her unclothed appearance in the 1974 production of “Let My People Come” (a musical about “sexual freedom,” she said) and had been thinking of a play about her beau for several years. Last year, she wrote a script with Bonnie Lee Sanders, a songwriter, and prevailed upon the management at Feinstein’s, a nightclub at the Regency Hotel, to put it on for a night. By chance, the performance was attended by Tina Louise, who played the role of Ginger on “Gilligan’s Island.” Louise, a LaMotta fan, also knew people at the Richmond Shepard. Thus, the two-week run.  It was 6:30 on Saturday night when Baker and LaMotta arrived by cab for the show’s penultimate performance. “Hey, the champ’s here!” said Mark Alhonte, LaMotta’s agent. Alhonte was standing in the humid air outside the theater’s locked door — the box-office girl, who had the keys, was running late. LaMotta shuffled up in costume: a cream-colored Stetson, a black velvet blazer, a paisley pocket square. He looked a little lost; his fly had come undone.  Audience members were starting to arrive, among them Linda Baylis Mallia. Finding the champ outside with hoi polloi, Mallia walked straight up to him and said that her father, Max Baylis, a tailor from the Bronx, had talked about him all the time, in his heyday, in the ’50s.  LaMotta said, “There’s a lot of people all over the world that talked about me.”  Mallia said, “But my father said nice things.”  Finally the door was unlocked and LaMotta went inside to his dressing room. It was a small room that seemed to double as a storage space for stage lights. He was joined there by one of his fellow actors, Carl Shimkin, who is also working on a LaMotta documentary called “Moving Forward.” Shimkin started taking footage of the champ with an iPhone. “So what’s your favorite part of the show?” he asked. LaMotta, looking up, said, “What show?”  Moments later, a stocky man in an Adidas T-shirt and a Golden Gloves necklace stepped into the room. This was Vito Antuofermo, middleweight champion, 1979.  “Hey champ,” Antuofermo said. “You remember me?”  “Arturo?” Antuofermo said, sounding puzzled, vaguely offended. “Jake, come on, what’s Arturo? I’m Vito.”  When LaMotta’s sister, Annie Ramaglia, who is 88, arrived, they sat together in front of the lighted mirrors, discussing old times. Ramaglia reminisced about the nightclubs of the Bronx, the songs they used to sing, how the local kids would call LaMotta “Primo,” after Primo Carnera, the Italian heavyweight. “You remember a lot,” LaMotta said, gazing at her softly. “I forget stuff. Guess I took a few too many punches.”  Then, with the curtain due in 20 minutes, the champ sat up and suddenly said: “Are people coming? Is it crowded out there?”  In fact, it was: standing room only.  At the five-minute call, Baker and LaMotta assumed their positions in the hall outside his dressing room, pressed to the wall, arms at their sides, like suspects posing for a mug shot. The house lights dimmed at 7:45 p.m. “You ready, champ?” Shimkin said.  He led LaMotta by the elbow, down a corridor and into the house, in darkness.  The lights went up and, at least for the night, Jake LaMotta had returned to center stage, to where he belonged.
At 90, Jake LaMotta, the former boxer known to many as the Raging Bull, has ended a two-week run in a biographical Off Broadway show, unfazed by savage reviews.