A Writer's Life (3 page)

But even after they did, leaving him puffy-eyed behind dark glasses and with his ribs so sore that he winced with each breath, Patterson allowed me to go to his home for a postfight interview, in which he replied to questions that I might not have asked had other reporters been in the room. In 1964, after a first-round knockout by Liston, and after an assignment editor at the
Times
told me that the paper was at this point satiated
with my stories about Patterson, I spent a weekend with him in order to do an article for
Esquire
, in which, among other things, he described what it is like being knocked out.

Although he had never complained that he had perhaps been too open with me in the long and revealing piece that appeared in
Esquire
—indeed, I later coauthored a shorter piece with him in the same magazine, and we continued to see each other socially until we approached our senior years and his memory began to fade, and he could not always remember my name—my own lingering regret about that piece was that the editors had entitled it “The Loser.”

While it is true that Patterson was never a match for Liston or Ali, and that he had probably been knocked down more times than any highly ranked heavyweight in history—he went down
seven
times in a
single
fight in 1959 while losing his title to Sweden's Ingemar Johansson—it is just as true that Patterson was the all-time heavyweight leader in getting up off the floor. He was climbing to his feet after Johansson had decked him for the final time in 1959, but the referee stopped the fight. In a return match
a year later, Patterson knocked out Johansson, becoming the first man ever to regain the heavyweight title; and he subsequently stopped Johansson in their third and final fight. And so instead of thinking of Floyd Patterson as a “loser,” I consider him an exemplar of perseverance, a man who never quit and always tried to get up, even during moments of staggering disappointment and defeat.

Not long after Patterson had retired from the ring, the Yankees also became known as losers, having fallen from first place in the American League in 1964 to sixth in 1965, tenth in 1966, and ninth in 1967. The Yankees were owned by CBS, which had become the controlling partner in 1964, but I never knew what, if anything, the network's ownership had to do with the team's uncharacteristically poor record. I myself was now out of New York regularly, and I rarely went to see games in Yankee Stadium. After leaving the
Times
in 1965 to freelance for magazines and write books, I spent much of my time between the mid-1960s into the 1970s residing in hotels and apartments in various parts of California—in Beverly Hills to do a profile of Frank Sinatra during his autumn years; in San Francisco to write about the fifty-one-year-old Joe DiMaggio still mourning Marilyn Monroe, and also wondering what was wrong with the present-day Yankees; in San Jose, where I completed research on a book about the exiled Bonanno crime family, which had been driven out of New York by rival mafiosi in the late 1960s after losing the “Banana War”; and in Topanga Canyon, near Malibu in Los Angeles County, where I frequently hung out, from 1971 through 1973, in order to interview dozens of nudist freethinkers and free-love couples in a commune called Sandstone, which was one of the locales I used while researching and writing a book that outlined the historical and social trends that I believe made America in the 1970s so much more permissive and less prudish than the postwar, pre-
Playboy
days of my youth, when my confessed admiration for Frank Yerby's novels prompted my parish priest to predict, perhaps rightly, that I was predestined for degeneracy and an afterlife of purgatorial punishment.

One evening, while I was residing in Topanga Canyon, I drove down to Beverly Hills to dine with a writer friend I knew from New York who was now making a fortune in Hollywood working on scripts that, as far as I know, were never made into movies. He was a Yankee fan, and as we were finishing dinner, he introduced me to one of the restaurant's managers, who was a devotee of the Red Sox—a charming and gregarious Irish-American in his early thirties who stood more than six-four and wore a trimly tailored double-breasted suit and a bow tie and was named Patrick Shields. After joining our table for a while and treating us to an
after-dinner drink, Shields took the opportunity to toast the continuing decline of the Yankees.

I saw him in the restaurant a few times after that; and before I had returned to New York during the spring of 1974, we had exchanged phone numbers and had made tentative plans to meet during one of his East Coast visits, which he said he would try to arrange while the Red Sox were playing the Yankees at the Stadium. I next heard from Shields a year later, when he phoned to inform me that he had moved to New York and wanted me to be his guest at a private dining establishment and disco that he was managing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

His place was called Le Club, and, as I would learn from frequent visits, its membership included many of New York's business tycoons who were not only sports fans but sometimes investors in one or more of the local teams—they might own a piece of the Yankees, the Mets, the Jets, the Giants, the Knicks, the Nets, the Rangers, or morsels of several of them. In any case, they traveled by limo to sporting events and usually sat in commodious, glass-walled mid-level boxes that, while offering an expansive overview of the playing area, muted much of the noise and spirit emanating from the crowds in the nearby seats and the spectators and athletes below. And yet—because most of these enclosed boxes had air-conditioning, heating systems, upholstered furniture, bartenders, waiters, and buffet tables offering a variety of seafoods, meats, and salads—the tycoons and their friends, both male and female, were able to attend games without being deprived of their accustomed comforts and amenities, to say nothing of their option to do here (as many of them did) what they might have done had they stayed home—watch the game on television, since there were usually two or more screens affixed to the walls of the boxes.

After the game was over—and often long before, if it was not a very interesting contest—the men and their friends would perhaps be driven back to Le Club for a late supper or nightcap. I enjoyed watching Patrick Shields moving and mingling among them at their tables near the dance floor; what most impressed me was the ease with which he comported himself while in the presence of these affluent and at times abrasive and fickle individuals who, having hired him, could also have banded together at any time to fire him. But to me he never seemed to be concerned or deferential in the manner often exhibited by maître d's even in New York's more exclusive restaurants. It was as if he
had
something on these people, something more than the usual extramarital dalliances that most restaurateurs discreetly accept as part of the decor of a New York dining room. Or maybe what Patrick Shields had going for him was
merely the fact that he could seat these people wherever he wished, which in itself would make him a force, at least during the evening hours, when I believe most people's sensibilities and stability undergo an altering process that makes them more dependent upon the flattering light and ego-feeding rooms that good restaurants and clubs can provide, along with the choice tables that such hirelings as Patrick Shields could reserve by way of confirming the status that most of these people take for granted during the day.

I have long believed that in such vast and vacillating cities as New York even some very significant citizens can often feel insignificant at night, in part because their offices are closed and they are remote from their support systems and the attentions of their underlings, and they are sometimes even forgotten by their limo drivers, who await them in front of restaurants but have fallen asleep behind the wheel, and will wake up only after a few sharp knuckle raps on the side window or windshield. And so the nocturnal necessity of restaurants as extensions of important people's daytime prominence are essential ingredients that have nurtured the successful careers of all the great culinary figures—the legendary Henri Soulé of Pavillon, Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque, Elaine Kaufman of Elaine's, and dozens of younger restaurant owners and men like Patrick Shields, who, though not an owner, was akin to them as an enterpreneur of the evening.

He was also an excellent conversationalist, and, as he passed out menus to his guests while towering over their tables, he forthrightly expressed his opinions on those subjects that were most often under discussion—the national economy, local politics, and professional sports.

Each morning, Patrick read five newspapers—the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Times
, and three local tabloids, including
Women's Wear Daily
, whose editor was a member of Le Club. During the latter part of the afternoons, while the waiters were preparing the tables for dinner, he was on the phone with his broker discussing some of the stock tips he had picked up the night before while cruising the tables. His bachelor apartment was in a high rise in the neighborhood, and what hung from the wooden hangers in his closet were bicoastal rows of tailored jackets and suits purchased from the finer shops of Rodeo Drive and Madison Avenue; and parked below in the garage was his leased Lincoln Town Car, which was spacious enough to accommodate his long limbs. Among the attractive women whom he escorted around Manhattan when he took a night off from work—and was not playing backgammon or bridge in the tearoom of a Park Avenue hotel with a few trophy wives he had met at Le Club—was his friend the actress Jennifer O'Neill, as well as some other performers he
had known in Los Angeles or had met since moving to the East Coast. He himself might have qualified for camera work. His lean and handsomely haggard facial features and blue eyes reminded me at times of the film star Peter O'Toole. But Patrick Shields's height—he was nearly six-five, as I said, and his proudly erect posture and lean frame made him seem even taller—might not have served his potential acting career as much as I think it helped to define his role as an uncommon character at Le Club, as a man who, as perhaps I have emphasized too much already, could not be cast as a glorified servant.

I have actually never known very tall people to be obsequious. Such individuals may be shy, or, as I saw Patrick Shields on occasion, reserved. But because of their stature they are rarely challenged, I think, because shorter people—even those who might be known as Napoleonic bullies in their offices—tend to modify their behavior, to become less assertive when facing men who hover over them, as Patrick Shields did every night at Le Club, casually conversing with CEOs, real estate moguls, corporate lawyers, and other people who might own a percentage of a basketball team but whose view of tall men was usually limited to what they saw from luxury boxes or courtside seats in Madison Square Garden. And yet this
was
close enough for them to note that there surely were advantages to size and reach, and they could observe as well how aggressive tall men can be in action—as, for example, the Knicks player Latrell Sprewell, whose acceptance years later by the local fans all but smothered the notoriety he had earned after choking the coach of the West Coast team on which he had previously played.

I am certainly
not
hinting here that there was anything threatening or ill-tempered about the demeanor of Patrick Shields. I am merely suggesting that his being very tall was perhaps a factor in his capacity to be both beholden to and independent from the men who paid his salary at Le Club. Whether his height, along with his general efficiency and geniality, was entirely responsible for his apparent sense of security at Le Club, I do not really know, but my impression nonetheless was that he was very comfortable with the membership, and it is certain that they sometimes invited him as a single man to dinner parties in their homes, and also provided him with tickets to sporting events and even passes allowing him access to their boxes. One individual who did this, somewhat to my surprise, was the owner of the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner.

Patrick Shields never concealed his ongoing affection for the Red Sox after he had moved to New York, and among the board members of Le Club who were aware of this was the Yankees owner, who was known in the media for his indifference to people with opinions other than his
own. As a tabloid cartoon subject, Steinbrenner was sometimes portrayed as an antedated, barrel-chested Prussian military officer with a square-jawed scowling face partly hidden under a large spiked helmet. But since acquiring the Yankees from CBS in November 1973 (after the team had finished fourth for three straight seasons), he immediately put his considerable wealth and win-at-any-cost attitude into the organization and saw it improve within the next eight years to five first-place finishes, three trips to the World Series, and two world titles.