With Only One Life to Live, Amy Levitt Chose Boxing Over Acting

Written by Christopher Benedict

Boxing and show business have long gone hand in hand. In many ways, the two are inseparable and sometimes indistinguishable. The roll call of professional prizefighters who appeared on film and television either during their career or after they hung up the gloves is a lengthy one and includes the likes of Jack Dempsey, Archie Moore, Muhammad Ali, Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb, Lucia Rijker, Mike Tyson, and the list goes on and on. Even Jack Palance, Anthony Quinn, and Tony Danza boxed in the paid ranks before they became famous actors.

But what about the other way around? One name that immediately comes to mind is Mickey Rourke, the star of 9 ½ Weeks and The Wrestler whose face got busted up so badly while fighting professionally in the early 1990s that he underwent a succession of plastic surgeries that have rendered him unrecognizable in the autumn of his years as the handsomely gritty young punk who swaggered his way through Diner and The Pope of Greenwich Village forty years ago.

Allegations that at least two of his eight pro fights were fixed, and that his boasts of a Golden Gloves-winning amateur career were as fictitious as anything written in a Hollywood screenplay, left many wondering whether Rourke was boxing like an actor or acting like a boxer. He had, after all, written (under the pen name Eddie Cook) and starred in the 1988 fight film Homeboy.

However you look at it, one incontestable fact is that Rourke’s crossover from the silver screen to the squared circle was not without precedent.

“I hated Hollywood,” confessed Amy Levitt in a 1981 interview with the Weekly World News. “I couldn’t understand that world—the shallow people, the phoniness and the lack of values. I realized that I loved life too much to waste it on a career as a Hollywood actress. That was when I found boxing.”

Born and raised in New York, Levitt studied acting at Pittsburgh’s esteemed Carnegie Tech and, for a spell, in London. After first treading the boards in repertory and stock theater, Amy made her Broadway debut in 1969 by playing Ophelia for a 45-performance run of Hamlet at the Lyceum Theatre. Levitt soon after joined the cast of ABC’s One Life to Live, which at the time was only in the second year of what would be an eventual four-plus decades on the air.

Her stint on the popular daytime soap opera was over and done by 1971 at which time Amy landed her first movie role, in a comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and titled Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? Levitt was reunited with Hoffman four years later for her only other feature film, Sidney Lumet’s bank heist classic Dog Day Afternoon, in which she played a clerk named Maria.

In between these Hollywood gigs, Amy briefly returned to Broadway where she was an ensemble member and understudy in The Merchant of Venice (among her castmates were a young Christopher Walken and future RoboCop, Peter Weller), and a standby in Veronica’s Room later that same year. A highlight of Levitt’s acting career was a recurring role that had her appear in all four parts of the 1976 TV mini-series The Moneychangers, based on the bestselling novel by Arthur Hailey and featuring Kirk Douglas, Christopher Plummer, and Joan Collins among others.

“Everybody thought I was crazy. I got no support from anyone,” said Levitt in her unmistakable New York accent regarding her pugilistic aspirations. She first took an interest in competing as a boxer in 1977, not long after her last of two visits to The Streets of San Francisco, training for a solid month before regrettably allowing herself to be talked out of it. “People say, ‘What if you get hurt…if you break your nose?’ That hurt is nothing compared to the hurt you suffer in life when you don’t stand up for yourself.”

This existential imperative hints at the deeper reason behind her desire to flee La-La Land and its vampiric ecosystem, beyond just the bad taste it left in Amy’s mouth that Hollywood was founded upon and enabled artifice and superficiality.

“I found the acting profession particularly battering and victimizing. I never got the respect and love I thought I deserved. It was devastating for me,” she said. “You are in life what you are in your career.” Leaving herself no other choice, Levitt ultimately decided by the end of 1979, “I MUST do this.”

There was even more to it than that. Amy had been pushed around by the acting profession but also, far worse, by boyfriends and an ex-husband who himself was a boxer.

“Violence and fear were things in my life I didn’t understand, and boxing is an extension of them. I figured that if I had to deal with them, it should be in a ring,” Levitt philosophized, viewing her entry into the fight game as a simultaneous escape from the abusive relationships as well as her own passive mindset that she admitted to being plagued by in the past. “I thought, ‘Maybe in the ring I’ll have a chance. Maybe if I study and understand them, I’ll have a chance. It’s a way for me to face certain feelings about myself. It puts everything into a clear perspective and I can’t play games with myself or my life.”

Amy not only worked out at the Olympic Gym in Los Angeles, she worked there too. Her daily routine began as the gym’s receptionist and equipment salesperson and would “deal with the fighters” as she put it. “I like this place and what it represents,” Levitt professed, though she worried how long she could last on an income that was just enough to put food on the table.

After punching the time clock when her day shift was over, she would go about punching faces in sparring sessions with both men and women, like bantamweight phenom Lydia ‘Squeaky’ Bayardo. “Female fighters are more difficult. They put out a deadly vibe,” remarked the 5-foot-4, 116-pound Levitt. “Men are quicker and they’ll hit you, but women have been oppressed and that goes very deep.” Additionally, she would run for about an hour each day, hit the heavy bag, improve her hand/eye coordination on the speed bag, jump rope, and shadowbox.

“One day I was shadowboxing outside the supermarket and this old lady comes up and says, ‘Don’t tell me you’re a fighter!’,” Amy recalled. “When I said I was, she replied, ‘Well, go in there and fight our battles for us!’ I look at what people say to me for inspiration.”

By January 1980 Levitt was ready to step between the ring ropes for real, doing so opposite fellow novice Denise Coleman at the Santa Rosa Veterans Auditorium. “She wanted to make her boxing debut away from Los Angeles,” explained promoter Johnny Dubliss. “She felt she’d be too nervous otherwise, with all her friends watching her.”

Headlined by Shirley ‘Zebra Girl’ Tucker and featuring a mix of male and female fights, the card was mocked by Bay Area sportswriter Jack Fiske as a carnival sideshow-type “half man, half woman show.”

Fiske’s derision notwithstanding, Amy was successful in her first pro bout, earning a four-round decision and a $300 paycheck. “I accept the world of boxing and I understand it,” said Levitt. “It’s sometimes frustrating, painful, and lonely when the world doesn’t understand me,” she conceded. “But it’s a challenge.”

Amy accepted that challenge wholeheartedly, returning to the ring on April 9 for a four-round showdown with Nancy ‘Little Rock’ Thompson, fighting out of San Diego. Even if Levitt and Thompson traveled to San Bernardino by invitation, neither promoter Don Georgino nor matchmaker Mickey Davies made them feel at all welcomed.

“Frankly, I’m opposed to women’s boxing. We want to show quality, not a circus,” bellyached Georgino. “But we thought we’d try it just this once.” Davies was similarly disinclined toward showcasing female fighters but was forced to concede that “something a little different” might attract curiosity seekers and boost Five Star Promotions’ recent dip in ticket sales.

Since the arena was not equipped with a separate locker room that could accommodate the women, Amy and Nancy had to contend with the inconvenience of showering and changing into and out of their boxing gear back at the hotel they were put up in. Wearing a white tank top and gold shorts, Levitt tried to make good use of her graceful footwork and sharp left jab but found herself overmatched against the bigger, stronger Thompson who muscled her way to a split decision win.

Accompanied by drunken catcalls, their performance was otherwise ridiculed as “an exercise met by indifference” and “at best, an impersonation of a fight” according to the obviously unimpressed David Leon Moore writing for the San Bernardino County Sun. Condescending attitudes such as this, and the sexist stereotypes from which they originated, were significant stumbling blocks on the path to acceptance and legitimacy that female boxers of this generation and before had to fight against.

Levitt’s initiation into the hurt business occurring when it did also worked against her, as opportunities began disappearing for even the best female boxers of the day with each turning of the calendar page throughout the early to mid-1980s. This may help explain why Amy never had another fight. Rent, gas, and groceries certainly weren’t going to pay for themselves, so difficult decisions had to be made.

With fights impossible to come by, Amy occasionally stepped foot back into the acting realm, voicing one of the characters in director Ralph Bakshi’s 1981 animated feature American Pop and serving as an understudy to Marsha Mason in a West Coast production of Mary Stuart at the Ahmanson Theatre. Even so, she refused to turn her back on the sport that changed her life for the better.

“Boxing is my most profound spiritual vehicle,” said Levitt. “I love the art of boxing—the movement, the intellect, the science, the necessity to control your emotions. It doesn’t have to be looked on as such a brutal and violent display.”

In addition to training her boyfriend, bantamweight journeyman Ruben Solorio, Levitt had dedicated her time to going with Zebra Girl Tucker and Lady Tyger Trimiar to the Olympic Auditorium office of promoter Aileen Eaton where they would meet with members of the California State Athletic Commission.

Some of the issues that were addressed had to do with the limited number of rounds imposed upon female boxers, how infrequently they were featured on fight cards, the stingy purse money paid out to them when they were, and the appropriate weight for the gloves to be used by women in different divisions.

Boxing might not have been profitable from a monetary standpoint for Amy Levitt, but the empowering self-respect she took away from it was something you can’t begin to place a value on. “If a woman can fight, anyone can. We all can fight,” she proclaimed. “People have to stand up for what they believe in.”

Sources:

Pam King. Showbiz (The Scrantonian, April 20, 1980)

David Leon Moore. Ex-actress in Arena Ring Tonight (San Bernardino County Sun, April 4, 1980)

David Leon Moore. Contreras Kos Aguirre in 5th Round (San Bernardino County Sun, April 5, 1980)

Phil Roura, Tom Poster. People (New York Daily News, November 25, 1983)

Is SR Boxing Card Grievous? (Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 9, 1980)

Pretty Actress Gives Up Showbiz For New Career As A Brawling Boxer (Weekly World News, January 6, 1981)

Loa Angeles Times, May 20, 1981

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