A Writer's Life Read online

  It was he who later proposed that I work in the sports department, which he made no secret of criticizing for what he saw as its tendency to cover games in the same serious and stodgy manner that the Times then covered everything else; but for some reason he singled out the sports section for reform, hinting that the writing there might be more diverting, original, and (since the Times did not publish comics) more entertaining. And while he said nothing clearly disapproving of the sports editor, a rotund and rosy-cheeked elderly man known in the office for his long lunches at Longchamps, I somehow got the impression that the career prospects of the sports editor were no more auspicious than those of Red Drew.

  As an ambitious young sports journalist, I nevertheless continued to read and be influenced primarily by writers of fiction, although my tastes were no longer exemplified by the lingerie literature that had heated up my hormones in high school. At Alabama I had read novels and short stories by William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and other southern-born writers who had been urged upon me by Turner Catledge’s nephew, who himself possessed such poetic sensibilities that he swore to me in advance that he would never do what I would later do so eagerly—capitalize on his uncle’s connections in journalism.

  Each day in the Times building I made note of the authors whose names I saw on the covers of the books held under the arms of my elders in the elevators, and sometimes I overheard discussions about these books while lunching in the cafeteria. Since I was now reading literary supplements and subscribing to The New Yorker for the first time, I was becoming aware that even some renowned fiction writers occasionally dealt with sporting events and athletes in their novels and short stories. When reading examples of these, I kept reminding myself that what I was reading had been imagined; these efforts were, after all, labeled “fiction.” And yet after finishing a short story by John O’Hara, for example, one in which the esoteric game of court tennis was precisely and gracefully described as it presented itself within the oddly angled interior walls of the New York Racquet & Tennis Club—a locale that I had visited and was familiar with—it did not seem to matter in this case whether or not O’Hara was writing “fiction”; insofar as he had woven into his story the facts and details about the club and the game, he had met the demanding standards of accuracy as upheld daily by the desk editors in the Times sports department.

  I had moreover been impressed by O’Hara’s ability to make me feel as if I was there within the Racquet & Tennis Club, watching the game from a bench overlooking the court; and I was also there, on a football field, rooting for a swivel-hipped halfback who elbows his way toward a touchdown in Irwin Shaw’s story “The Eighty-Yard Run”; and there on a snow-covered golf course, shivering next to a lovelorn caddy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams”; and there in the dining room of a racetrack, sitting next to a horse trainer, who, looking up from his meal, notices that he is about to be joined by a jockey friend—an aging, ill-tempered rider presently experiencing much difficulty in controlling his weight—and the trainer is overheard saying in a voice that the jockey does not hear (but is quoted in the excerpt of Carson McCullers’s “The Ballad of the Sad Café” that I had read in The New Yorker): “If he eats a lamb chop, you can see the shape of it in his stomach an hour afterward.”

  I wanted quotes like these in my sports pieces, but I also knew I could not make them up. I was a reporter, not a fiction writer. And yet if I could get close enough to some of these athletes I was now meeting in New York and could convince them to trust me and confide in me as had many of the players I had known back in high school and college—when I used to commiserate with them and encourage them after each defeat; I was the Miss Lonelyhearts of locker rooms—I might be able to write factually accurate but very revealing personal stories about big-time athletes while using their real names, and then get these stories published in the straitlaced New York Times, which Mr. Catledge was trying to loosen up in the area where I worked. Again, without faking the facts, my reportorial approach would be fictional, with lots of intimate detail, scene-setting, dialogue, and a close identity with my chosen characters and their conflicts.

  And so while I sat in the back of the sports department one afternoon interviewing a glamorous visitor named Frank Gifford, the star halfback of the New York Giants, I was thinking about “The Eighty-Yard Run”; and when I was at Yankee Stadium trying to communicate with the unglamorous Roger Maris, a home-run king on a team led by the beloved Mickey Mantle, I was as empathetic as I usually am with those who are designated second-best; and after I had befriended an up-and-coming pugilist named José Torres, I shortened my sentences, like Hemingway, and wrote:

  At 22, the prize fighter has sad, dark eyes. He has jagged, small facial scars and a flattened nose that has been hit by obscure amateurs he has already forgotten.

  He has had six professional fights as a middleweight. Nobody has beaten him. In the closet of his $11-a-week furnished room at 340 Union Street, Brooklyn, he has eight suits, a dozen silk shirts and fourteen pair of shoes. He also has a girl named Ramona. Both were born in Puerto Rico.

  Each week Ramona, who is also 22, and her mother come to clean the fighter’s room. The mother complains that it is always dirty, that he never picks up his socks, that he has too many shoes. Soon, he says, he will marry Ramona and will move to Manhattan, close to Stillman’s Gymnasium, far from the mother.

  Although baseball as played by the Yankees would continue to command my emotions as a fan, it was the realm of professional prizefighting—as personified by boxers who were inevitably disappointed, who were often ignored in defeat, and who just as often contemplated comebacks—that I tried hardest to ennoble in the sports pages of the Times, being joined in this quest by a nearby novelist or two who were regulars at ringside. It was fortunate for me that during the late 1950s into the 1960s the heavyweight ranks included a remarkably candid and articulate champion named Floyd Patterson, whom I got to know so well that I often thought of him as my literary property. I wrote more than thirty articles about Patterson during my nine years as a Times reporter (from 1956 through 1965); and although I left sports in 1958 in order to have access to the more varied subject matter available in general news, I nonetheless continued to volunteer constantly for sports assignments—particularly if it was a World Series game involving the Yankees, or a heavyweight fight in which Patterson was a contestant.

  On the late afternoons of fight nights I would sometimes spend an hour or more talking to him near his bed in a hotel suite, surrounded by his trainers and sparring partners, who were either playing cards on the dining room table or snoozing on one of the sofas. Later, as fight time approached, and I squeezed into the limousine that would transport him and his invited guests to the arena, I could feel my sweat rising as I anticipated what might be inflicted upon the body and face of this amiable, well-mannered man who sat silently in the back, glancing out at the sidewalk with seeming nonchalance, indistinguishable in his conservatively tailored suit and subdued silk tie from an average black executive who might be employed by IBM. Soon he will be standing nearly naked in the ring, I kept thinking, along with other thoughts that might seem simplistic and melodramatically banal except at times like this, when I feared that he was a few hours away from becoming seriously hurt, battered and knocked senseless because he was not really vicious and talented enough, and because he was also very light for a heavyweight, perhaps twenty pounds lighter and with a much shorter reach than his primary contenders—the menacing Sonny Liston and the arrogantly confident Muhammad Ali, both of whom would eventually annihilate him.

  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 st
ories 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.

  “It is not a bad feeling when you’re knocked out,” he told me. “It’s a good feeling, actually. It’s not painful, just a sharp grogginess. You don’t see angels or stars; you’re on a pleasant cloud. After Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about four or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you’re knocked out. You feel lovable to all the people. And you want to reach out and kiss everybody—men and women—and after the Liston fight somebody told me I actually blew a kiss to the crowd from the ring. I don’t remember that. But I guess it’s true because that’s the way you feel during the four or five seconds after a knockout.…

  “But then,” he continued, pacing the room, “this good feeling leaves you. You realize where you are, and what you’re doing there, and what has just happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt—not a physical hurt—it’s a hurt combined with anger; it’s a what-will-people-think hurt; it’s an ashamed-of-my-own-ability hurt … and all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring—a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room instead of having to get out of the ring and face those people. The worst thing about losing is having to walk out of the ring and face those people.…”

  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 vacillat
ing 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.