Jake LaMotta, the boxing great who inspired Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” is about to face his seventh round in the ring of matrimony.
LaMotta, 90, will tie the knot for the seventh time on Jan. 4 in Bisbee, Ariz., with longtime fiancée Denise Baker, who is younger by nearly 30 years.
“We’re getting married at a justice of the peace,” Baker, 62, told Page Six, adding she and LaMotta have been engaged for 12 years (though widely reported as 14). When we asked if there will be a honeymoon, Baker joked, “At Jake’s age, we’ll have to come home and take a nap.”
Baker further told us they plan to have a larger party two days after the ceremony (“everyone’s invited”), and the bash will serve as a sneak preview for “The Bronx Bull,” a feature film about LaMotta originally called “Raging Bull II.” It was originally billed as a sequel to the Scorsese masterpiece starring Robert De Niro until a legal dispute with MGM over the summer forced the movie — starring William Forsythe as LaMotta, with actors Joe Mantegna, Paul Sorvino, Tom Sizemore and Penelope Ann Miller — to change its name, and publicly state it had no affiliation with the 1980 original. Bronx Bull was LaMotta’s nickname in his fighting days.
The movie will be unveiled for guests at the Bisbee Royale cinema the weekend of the wedding before it has an April premiere in New York. Baker recently directed and starred in a stage show with LaMotta, “Lady and the Champ,” off-off-Broadway.
What’s unclear is whether any of the former six Mrs. LaMottas will be at the wedding, and where many of them are. (LaMotta joked in the stage show of his past wives, “My first wife died from eating mushrooms. My second wife died from eating mushrooms. My third wife died of a skull fracture. She refused to eat the mushrooms.”)
When we asked where LaMotta’s exes were these days, a source close to the champ quipped, “I think all of them were eaten.” The boxer’s second wife, the late Vikki LaMotta, was portrayed in “Raging Bull” by Cathy Moriarty.