she and Jimmy would come to the funeral,” said Zeil. “I went to pick her up and she came to the door in her robe and said, ‘I’m not going and Jimmy isn’t coming home.’”
When D’Amato retired to Catskill in 1971, Jacobs stayed in the apartment for a few more years. He grew much closer to handball protégé Steve Lott and in 1972 hired him to work at Big Fights. In 1974, Jacobs and Lott moved into different apartments in a building on East Forty-fifth Street. They were inseparable. They walked back and forth to work together each day, and frequently traveled overseas with each other to buy fight films. “Jimmy always referred to Steve as his ‘clone,’” said Zeil.
In 1975, Jacobs became friendly with a neighbor, Loraine Atter. Slowly, she replaced Lott as Jacobs’s primary companion. Loraine was forty-five years old, of Italian descent, and originally from Florida. She worked as an executive at a paper manufacturing company. She was known as an emotionally reserved, fastidious woman, and, according to Zeil, she “worshiped Jimmy.” She was the sort of woman who “took care” of her man. Loraine bought his clothes, arranged his social life, decorated his apartment, indeed did everything but cook. They ate out in restaurants every night. And most important, perhaps, was that she met the approval of Jacobs’s mother. Said childhood friend Nick Beck: “His mother didn’t think any of Jim’s girlfriends were suitable, until Loraine.”
Still, no one who knew Jacobs well expected him to marry her. They did, secretly, in 1981. Beck was shocked. So was Zeil. She suspected that her brother was talked into it. But what neither Zeil nor Beck nor anyone else except Jacobs, his mother, and Loraine knew was that in 1980 Jacobs had been diagnosed with chronic lymphoid leukemia. Death, he was told, could come within seven to eight years. No doubt they married because they were in love. But Jacobs may have also wanted the experience of marriage for its own sake before he died.
Jacobs wasn’t content just collecting and producing fight films, no matter how much money he made. He wanted to manage a boxer, preferably a champion and ideally a heavyweight. One early flirtation came in the late 1970s when he worked as a booking agent for white South African heavyweight Kallie Knoetze. He had D’Amato assert in the boxing press that Knoetze would, without doubt, become champion. Despite D’Amato’s training tips, Knoetze did not advance beyond journeyman status.
Jacobs turned to the lower weight classes where there were far greater numbers of available prospects. In 1978, he used $75,000 of Big Fights Inc. money to buy the managerial contract of Wilfred Benitez, a promising young welterweight. Jacobs and Cayton guided Benitez to a championship title in 1979. Soon after, Jacobs and Benitez split up over a contract dispute, and Benitez’s career fizzled.
As a team, Jacobs and Cayton earned a reputation for being tenacious about getting their boxer the easiest matches for the most money—and being honest about purse cuts. They tried to maintain a unified front, as if there were no really significant division of labor and no personal tensions existed. Jacobs functioned as manager of record. He initiated negotiations for fights, dealt with other managers, selected opponents, and schmoozed with the sports media. Steve Lott worked as his assistant in charge of the day-to-day business of the training camp. That included getting sparring partners, making travel arrangements, and generally catering to the fighter’s daily needs. Cayton preferred to work in the background on the contract negotiations with television networks and promoters. Jacobs and Cayton split the manager’s purse fifty-fifty.
Jacobs strutted about as the boxing expert, fight film nabob, and historian. Whenever news stories were done on their fight film ventures, Jacobs the former handball champion took center stage. He claimed that according to a boxing encyclopedia, he was the world’s leading expert on the sport. Jacobs failed to mention the fact that he wrote the entry himself. Privately, to friends, he derided Cayton as a boxing dilettante. “Jim wouldn’t come out and say anything overtly critical of Bill,” said Nick Beck. “He was more insidious about it. He told me that Bill didn’t know much about boxing and didn’t care about it either. It was just a business to him.”
Jacobs also overstated his status in the team. He told people that he had come to Cayton with an enormous film library and plenty of his own money, and that they had pooled their resources and, as equal partners, made boxing film history. One of the first people in boxing to see through that fiction was Larry Merchant, a boxing analyst for HBO Sports. In 1980, Jacobs came to Merchant with an idea to do a comprehensive fight documentary series on videotape. It required transferring thousands of images from film and using advanced video technologies to create special effects such as slow motion and stop-action replays. Jacobs envisaged selling the series to television, then renting out videocassettes. Merchant would narrate, for which he’d get a fee plus a share in the gross rentals. “When I mentioned to Bill [Cayton] what the deal was, he was shocked. Jimmy never told him about it,” said Merchant. After that, Jacobs never brought it up again.
Jacobs also claimed to Merchant, among others, that his father owned a chain of department stores in St. Louis. In other variations, his father owned a construction business. When his father died, Jacobs claimed to have inherited millions of dollars. “Jimmy talked about all his money. He told me that his father gave him fifty thousand dollars in 1960 to stake him in the fight film business,” said Merchant.
Cayton was aware of Jacobs’s public posturing and outright lies but never confronted him with it. “I found the stories about his supposed wealth very amusing,” said Cayton. “First he told people he had ten million dollars, and when he got away with that the figure went to twenty million, then thirty million.” In Cayton’s value system, they were in business together and as long as they prospered, he didn’t care about Jacobs’s idiosyncrasies. “Essentially, Jim was my employee. I did all the business deals with the fight films and all the boxers. Jim was the front man, the public image. Every deal was made right here, at my desk.”
In fact, Jacobs did have a higher opinion of himself than did his associates in the boxing world. “I liked Jimmy. I was curious about his insights on boxing. So were a lot of other people. But he wasn’t liked as a businessperson. He had a code in a deal. He gave you his idea of what it was worth and that was it—no other opinion was valid. He didn’t negotiate. He said, this is it, take it or leave it,” Merchant added.
According to Cayton, on more than one occasion he had to temper Jacobs in a contract negotiation. “Early on, he was a bit too blunt,” said Cayton. “I taught him everything he knew.”
Perhaps he did. Jacobs was a quick study and a man, once he learned the basics, determined to do it his way to the end. By claiming such high ground, Cayton tried to disguise a measure of envy. Merchant was aware of that: “The ever-popular Jimmy, the astute manager and boxing expert liked by everybody: that’s how Bill perceived Jimmy, and he [Bill] resented him for it.”
Cayton had an almost mirror-opposite existence to that of Jacobs. Besides not ever being athletic, he suffered from recurring back problems and endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart valves. He was lean, and tall, but frail-looking. His personal manner was stiff, formal, unengaging, dispassionate, almost cold. He tried to offset that with frequent smiling, but to no avail. The smile looked forced and far too self-consciously affected. It had a Cheshire cat aspect, as if Cayton were pleased with himself in advance with whatever was about to transpire—probably at the listener’s expense. “Bill was a taker, not a giver,” said Camille Ewald. He avoided social outings, except when it concerned business. Not a single person in boxing claimed him as a friend. “Money and business. He’s all business,” added Ewald.
Not entirely. Cayton had one other abiding interest that may explain part of the reason for his emotional reserve. Every night Cayton would take the 6:40 commuter train to his house in Larchmont, just north of the city. Every weekend is spent at home. One of his three children, a daughter, was born premature in 1947, and then mistakenly given too much oxygen in the incubator, causing blindness and severe retardation. Cayton and his wife, Doris, raised her by themselves at home. “Nothing, no one, could help. Doris devoted herself to her,” said Cayton. Apparently, the younger woman will not eat dinner, or go to bed, until he returns home each night. Whatever Cayton is in business, there must be another, far different man at home. Cayton diligently protected that aspect of his life. He rarely gave out his home telephone