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How the First Gay Superstar Changed WWE
Pat Patterson
with Bertrand Hébert
This book is dedicated to the memory of Louie Dondero.
You made me the man I was, and you gave me the opportunity to be the man I am. Thanks for being there. I will always love you, my friend.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Vincent Kennedy McMahon
Introduction
Chapter 1: Montréal
Chapter 2: The Roar of the Paint and the Smell of the Crowd
Chapter 3: Straight out of Montréal
Chapter 4: Boston, My Love
Chapter 5: Portland and Everything In-between
Chapter 6: Ready for My Close-up
Chapter 7: I Left My Heart in San Francisco
Chapter 8: The Blond Bombers
Chapter 9: Looking for Myself in Florida and Minneapolis
Chapter 10: New York! New York!
Chapter 11: Around the World . . . And Back!
Chapter 12: What Does a Vice President Do, Anyway?
Chapter 13: Goodbye, My Friend
Chapter 14: Wrestlemania, the Royal Rumble, and the Montréal Screwjob
Chapter 15: From the Stooges to the Rock
Chapter 16: The Fruits of My Labor
Chapter 17: Legends’ House
Chapter 18: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .
Photos
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
FOREWORD
I’ve had the privilege to have Pat Patterson as my best friend for over forty years, so I am truly honored to have been a part of his remarkable life and to write this foreword.
Pat’s passion to perform began very early in life. The fourth of nine children, Pat grew up in the poorest neighborhood in Montreal. It was a difficult childhood, but Pat never stopped dreaming of the big time. In 1960, at the age of nineteen, Pat borrowed money from his sister for a bus ticket to Boston. With just twenty dollars in his pocket and speaking no English at all, Pat finagled his way into joining a local wrestling organization, and the rest is history. Pat went on to become one of the greatest superstars of all time, selling out Madison Square Garden and arenas all over the world.
Pat Patterson’s path to stardom had obstacles most of us could not even imagine today. Despite his extraordinary work ethic, his passion, his loyalty, and his integrity, Pat Patterson was different in an era when “different” was not something to be celebrated. While some people persecuted and humiliated him for his sexual orientation, Pat persevered and eventually earned the respect of everyone he ever met and worked with, including his life partner of forty years Louis Dondero, as well as Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, André the Giant, and the great French Canadian Maurice Vachon. Notably, Pat would come to mentor a young man who would later become known as “The Rock.”
Pat’s stellar in-ring career came to an end in 1984 — but an equally impressive career began when he joined WWE as an executive. If not for the magnificent creative mind of Pat Patterson, I can honestly say WWE would not be anywhere near where it is today. Pat Patterson will always have my undying respect and admiration. I hope you enjoy his life story as much as I have enjoyed being a part of his life.
— Vincent Kennedy McMahon
February 2016
INTRODUCTION
Even after all these years, and all my travels, I never thought I would find myself writing a book. It’s my life — and it felt pretty normal to me. People who know me, however, have always said, “Pat, you ought to write a goddamn book. The life that you have had is amazing.”
As time went on, they got me seriously thinking about this project. And you know what? When I look back at my life, it is amazing that I’m still here doing what I love. After all, my friend Louie and I were almost killed in a car wreck before the whole thing even got rolling.
Still, I didn’t want to write a book to “put myself over,” to tell you how many championships I’ve won, or how great my wrestling matches were. I know some fans like that stuff, not that there is anything wrong with that, but most of it can be found with the simple click of a button. Why write a book about that? Most fans I meet today know more about my career than I do. Yet Vince McMahon himself kept telling me I should do it. “It’s a great story, Patrick,” he said.
Though wrestling will always be a part of my life, I always felt that my life was a lot more than just that. In fact, it was something entirely different from my career. Wrestling has never been the be-all and end-all of my life, even when I was headlining Madison Square Garden four times in a row against Bob Backlund for the WWE Championship. But people ask me, “How did you get here?” and when I seriously thought about my life and what I have accomplished, I realized that there might just be a story worth telling. I’ve laughed, loved, experienced sadness, and lived incredible adventures with wonderful people along the way.
How did I get here? How did a poor French Canadian kid, who didn’t speak English (some people say I still don’t, by the way) become what I’ve become? I didn’t have a master plan when I left home to wrestle in Boston; I didn’t know then that I was an artist trying to find a way to express himself. My life has been a never-ending story — I understand that now — and I love telling stories. But where to start, when there have been enough shenanigans for two lifetimes?
I even stopped being a wrestler at Vince McMahon’s request and became a senior vice president who worked in an office — and I had quit school so I would never have to work in an office. Funny, how life throws you curve balls. I still have no idea what a senior vice president does, but I know wrestling. That’s still what I do today.
Here I am again, talking about wrestling, no closer to figuring out how to start my book . . .
But if you’re still with me after all this rambling, then I think you and I will have some fun. I, for one, cannot wait to go on this trip down memory lane, as I try to figure out how I went from sharing a bed with my brother to staying in the fanciest hotel suites in the world while working for WWE.
Wait a minute, that’s it. I know where I need to go to tell my story.
It all started in Montréal, more than fifty-eight years ago . . .
MONTRÉAL
“For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught”
I was born on January 19, 1941, in Montréal, in a tiny apartment near the corner of Frontenac on Rouen Street, in the Ville-Marie borough. Back then, it was known as the Faubourg à m’lasse, the suburb of molasses. That is to say, the people were poor and ate a lot of molasses. I don’t really remember it that way, but that’s where I grew up — and we sure did eat a lot of molasses.
My father’s name was Gérard Clermont, and he was a good provider, though I was never particularly close to him. My mother, Simone Lupien, was the most wonderful mom anyone could have had. I was very close to her; she was the only member of my family who understood me from the start and always accepted me as I am.
My mom took care of our family of eleven, while my dad worked as a milkman. He would walk to work at 3 a.m. and pick up his horse and carriage at the stable to start his deliveries. People would leave two empty bottles on the front porch and Dad would leave them two full. He did that 365 days a year, no matter the weather — even through Montréal’s frigid and snowy winters. He did the same thing every day to provide for us. Later he worked in the shop at Canadair, building plane parts, and it was a good, secure job. That’s not to say being a milkman wasn’t a good job back then, it just didn’t pay as well. All his life, my dad sacrificed a lot for us.
I had four brothers and four sisters. The first born was And
ré. My mother lost a second child, though we only learned about that fairly recently. My father then proceeded to make sure my mother was pregnant on a regular basis: Claudette, Suzanne, Pierre, Normand, Lise, Annette, Michel, and finally Richard.
If you are wondering, I’m the Pierre on that list, Pierre Clermont. God, I hated that name. It was so common. Everyone around me was a Clermont. I wanted to be different and unique. Later, I changed it to Pat Patterson — but we’ll get to that, don’t worry.
Let me be blunt: my childhood was awful. I feel worse about it today than I did back then when I didn’t know any better. We had a two-bedroom apartment; one was for my parents, and the other had six of us sleeping in it — one bed with two children and one bunk bed with two more on each level. Six people sharing a tiny room barely bigger than the bathroom in most hotel rooms I stay in today.
Me? I wasn’t lucky enough to have my sleeping quarters in a bedroom.
There was a little hallway when you came into the apartment, and at the end of this hallway was a small closet. Inside we had a folding bed; you had to fold and hide it every morning and take it out of there before going to bed at night. I slept in that bed right in the hallway with my brother Normand. You can imagine how much fun that was. When someone wanted something from the closet, they had to take the whole bed out. Richard, the youngest, slept in the kitchen on another folding bed. He was always the last one to go to sleep, even if he was tired the earliest, as he had to wait for everyone else to go to bed. Can you imagine that? I lived it and I almost can’t believe it was real. As a small child, I was already living in the closet. There was never any room anywhere in that place and never any privacy. It was crazy. There was no way to be alone with yourself, if you know what I mean.
(From left to right) Normand, Claudette, André, Suzanne, and me. Annette, Mom, Dad, and Lise. Finally, Richard and Michel.
Still, we were lucky we lived on the third floor of a building owned by my grandmother on my father’s side. There were two apartments beside each other on each floor. My uncle and my aunt were our downstairs neighbors, and on the first floor was my grandmother. Beside us was a couple with one child in the same amount of space that we had for eleven; we thought they were living the life of the rich and famous. When that family finally moved out, a year or two before I left the house, we removed our restroom, broke through the wall, and created one big apartment for us.
There was no bath, no shower, and no hot water. Any time we needed hot water, we had to boil it, even to wash our hands. You could only get so clean like that, as you couldn’t be naked in the middle of the kitchen in front of everyone. Imagine it: eleven people washing up one after the other. “Who’s next?”
In Montréal, we had public baths since most apartments didn’t have hot water. The baths were where real personal hygiene took place. Ours was called Bain Quintal. All that’s left of those establishments today are a few public swimming pools. Twice a week, my mom would give us a little piece of soap and we would go there by foot, at least a thirty-minute walk. Few people had cars back then, and certainly not my family. At Bain Quintal, there was a guard posted at the entrance who would yell, “As-tu du savon?” Do you have soap?
(Pardon my French, but it is my first language and I still use it today. It feels more authentic to keep some of it in my story. Don’t worry, I will use my best English to translate.)
“Oui!” we would answer in unison.
“Vas-te laver,” he would shout back. Go wash yourself.
We were always dirty. Going to the public baths twice a week was not enough. As alien as the concept of public baths might seem today, it was fun for us because after we bathed, we went in the pool to swim. The guard would make sure we had cleaned ourselves properly in the shower before being allowed to use the pool. My mother would give us a towel with that little piece of soap. And she would remind us all the time, “Rapporte le savon.” Bring back the soap.
Ain’t that something? That’s how poor we were: not even a whole bar of soap and we had to bring it back home with us.
My loving mother, Simone, and my dad, Gérard.
My mother made sure nothing was ever wasted. If she cooked ground beef, do you think she would throw away the leftover grease? Oh no, she would use it to cook something else. We were poor, but we never missed anything truly necessary, and there was always something to eat. There was only one mealtime, however, and if you missed it, you wouldn’t get anything else. Dessert every weeknight was molasses, and on weekends, we would be treated with two cookies each. Sometimes, at Christmas, my mother would buy a cake or make one. It was the best — a real treat. With eleven of us, it never lasted long; once we each got a piece, there was rarely anything left.
When we were all going to school, my mom could not keep up with the chores. We had a small place but my mom needed help. My parents took my oldest sister, Claudette, out of school when she was sixteen, so she could help at home. Even today I need to remind her that she’s not my mother. Don’t get me wrong, I love her dearly, but she was quite young to be given so much responsibility. It still affects her. She helped our mother with washing our clothes, cooking meals, and cleaning. She spent four or five years helping my mom like that. Then she got a boyfriend and a job, and the next sister in line took her place. They learned everything from my mom, so when they decided to get married, they knew how to take care of their home. Things were like that back then.
I was never really close to anyone in my family except for my mother. Looking back, it seems like I was never living in the same world as everyone else. I think my reality was always different.
I never had the chance to know my paternal grandfather — he passed away when I was very young — but, by all accounts, he was the person most like me in my family. He was a creator, kind of like me in a sense. Our apartment building was right beside the school and the church, and a lot of people passed by every day bustling from one place to the next. My grandfather made something that made people stop, that they just could not believe: a giant spinning Christmas tree with blinking lights. It was unheard of in the early forties, and people would stand in front of our house admiring the tree in the window for ages. My grandmother had her hands full with the youngest of her own children, so I barely had time to get know her but the stories she told me about my grandfather still fascinate me. The man built a pool table by himself from scratch. He even handcrafted the balls from wood. He must have been an amazing, creative soul. People were very ingenious back then, but it was more than that with him. My grandfather would invent things. Everyone who knew him told me he was a genius. I wish I could have known him; I feel we would have a lot to talk about.
The one luxury we had was a radio set, and it was very important to the whole family, and me especially. Listening to music on the radio, I could escape reality. I would listen to Les découvertes de Billy Munro (my best translation would be Billy Munro’s Discoveries). I liked that show a lot. Today, one of my favorite television shows is America’s Got Talent — a very similar concept. My dad later bought a mechanical piano, which played music by itself. I could have listened to it forever.
When I was young, all my friends played hockey. But not me. I practiced figure skating. During the winter, there was an ice rink in almost every park in the city. I had girls’ skates, bought at the Salvation Army, which I painted black. I was doing all the fancy stuff you could imagine and even performed duet routines with girls. I wanted everyone to watch me. This is probably the first time someone called me a “faggot.” In French, the word is tapette. I didn’t let it bother me: I really didn’t know what it meant, or even who I was yet. In those days, that kind of thing happened and there wasn’t much we could do about being called names. Today someone like me could end up going to the Olympics, but back then I was everyone’s laughingstock. Still, I had a crowd in front of me, so I was in heaven. I loved it enough that I went to see the Ice Capades or the Ice Follie
s (I’m not sure which) in the hopes of auditioning with the troupe. They told me I was too young. I must have been thirteen or fourteen.
Christmas memories with my family are not all great.
In my family, as for a lot of French Canadian Catholic families, Christmas was only for Mass and the baby Jesus; gifts were exchanged on New Year’s. We went to Mass again on December 31, but when we got back, gifts were waiting for us on the kitchen table. It wasn’t ever much, and many years we got a few pairs of new socks and things like that.
I remember one year I had seen what they called la machine à vue in a store — a projector that would let us watch a film on the wall or on a white sheet. You could even rent 8mm movies to create your own little cinema at home. I really wanted one, but my dad made it clear we didn’t need it. My father didn’t change his mind easily, so I gave up and forgot about it. Well, guess what was on the table with all the gifts when we returned home from church? La machine à vue! I jumped on it and told my dad thank you. I was overjoyed! But then came the crushing words: “It’s not for you.”
I was devastated. It was for my brother Normand. I got a toboggan that year. What was I going to do with that? I didn’t like sports, except for skating. I was so disappointed. My brother couldn’t care less about la machine à vue, but Normand would rarely let me play with it because it was his gift. My dad explained to me that my brother had better results in school than I did and that’s why he was rewarded with the movie machine. It was the only time I wished I’d had good grades. Since I hated school, I was neither good nor bad at it, I just didn’t try.
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