A Passion for Perfection Rules an Equestrian Life

Patty Mayer may be the only lawyer in America whose employment contract contains a horse leave.

She is 41 years old and hasn’t gone on a date in eight years. She says it’s because she’s over-educated and unattractive. That’s not it. She leads precisely the life she wants.

Patty, as her father put it, is in love with her horse.

At 5 feet 4, Patty is compact and trim. Oval tortoise-shell glasses frame her hazel green eyes. She is the kind of person neighbors drop in on, if they can find her, and even acquaintances ask for advice. But she has little time to develop a romantic relationship and can’t be bothered with her appearance. She occasionally vows to start wearing makeup and tinting her frizzy brown hair to cover strands of gray. The resolution is as long-lived as a fruit fly.

Patty rides dressage, in which rider and horse execute maneuvers and gaits, the elite equestrian equivalent of figure skating. At the top, or Grand Prix, level, in which Patty competes, riding is a form of expression, an art like painting.

By many standards, Patty is wealthy. But she sinks most of her six-figure salary into her horses. She paid a trainer to fly from Germany to help her for five days as she competed for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. And she’ll pay him to return Monday. As a result, she has little in savings, and for shows she splits a room with a groom at budget motels.

When each day is packed like an overstuffed suitcase, it’s a question of choices. If it’s getting a haircut or riding, the horse wins. After six months without a cut, Patty trimmed her hair in her office with desk scissors.

She gets up every weekday at 4:05 a.m., drives from her Culver City home to the Agoura stable, which has an indoor ring so she can ride despite darkness or rain. She brushes and rides two horses. She takes special care with Exakt, her competition horse, pressing hot compresses on his legs before she rides and using cold afterward. A rider without a horse is a musician with no instrument.

She bandages her horses’ legs and fastens their blankets just as stable hands arrive to feed them grain and hay. Then she drives 70 minutes to Santa Monica. She usually reaches her office by 9 a.m.

As a lawyer and senior vice president negotiating movie contracts at MGM, she oversees a staff of nine, works 10-hour days and has never called in sick. On a good night, she gets five hours of sleep. She’s done this for eight years.

In the lingo of modern psychology, Patty’s riding is “serious leisure,” a devotion to an endless quest to improve. This passion can be so mesmerizing, so absorbing that the individual becomes oblivious to anything else. Athletes refer to it as “entering the zone.”

Today, an unprecedented number of individuals have the economic freedom to explore activities that provide meaning and structure to their lives. Some scientists believe people who have a passion live longer, healthier and happier. But devotion to an activity also can become obsessive, disrupting relationships and careers.

Why some people and not others latch onto such a passion remains a mystery.

Patty has a shot at making the U.S. Olympic team. As sweet as that would be, it’s not what pries her from bed before dawn. For Patty, it is the challenge of a sport that can never be perfected.

“Each day, it’s striving rather than achieving,” she says. “You always judge against yourself. You always feel like you’re improving or you hope you are.”

It is about those elusive moments when horse and rider are in harmony, melded together, the horse moving in accordance with the rider’s thoughts. The power is exhilarating; Exakt’s extended trot feels as if Patty holds a jet about to soar off the runway.

“You can ride Exakt to the edge,” she says, “between control and explosion, between joy and exuberance.”

Rider and Horse Work as One

Dressage is a pas de deux in which the rider counts on the goodwill of a 1,200-pound animal with a golf ball-size brain. In competition, a Grand Prix horse and rider, wearing a top hat and tail coat, perform alone in the arena. The test calls for various movements, such as a pirouette, at spots marked by letters posted around the ring.

The toughest are the passage, where the trot is suspended in mid-air, and the piaffe, where the horse trots in place. When the test goes badly, it is the longest nine minutes of a rider’s life.

Grand Prix riders must learn the test so that it’s in their blood stream; they must think and respond with each step, trying to anticipate the horse’s reactions. They will be judged on the horse’s responsiveness, elasticity and expressiveness.

Patty went all out for the Olympic team qualifier in Indio last week. She assembled a skilled crew, flying in the German coach Albrecht Heidemann, and she hired a groom. Exakt is 13; this would be Patty’s last try for the Olympics with the horse she has trained for 11 years.

On the day of the horse show, Patty schooled Exakt early in the morning. Then the groom bathed the big bay horse and Albrecht braided his black mane into tight little knobs. Gel and hair spray controlled hair that poked free. Exakt’s nose was wiped clean and his hooves greased. White chalk made his four white stockings and the white blaze on his face even whiter. His saddle and bridle were polished.

Patty donned white breeches and white gloves. Her dark hair was plastered to her head in a brown net. She wore an undershirt and a white stock tie with an enamel sea gull pin. After her tail coat was on, only the tie would show. Her tall German black riding boots, once zipped, would hide her mismatched socks. Patty would be the second of 13 riders.

Standing on a folding chair, she hopped onto Exakt’s back and rode to the warm-up arena. When the first rider went into the ring, the groom handed Patty her jacket. It was the wrong one. It was an old coat brought as a backup. Too late to run to the barn.

“My God, I hope I can fit into this,” Patty said. Buttoned up, the jacket bulged. The bell rang.

Patty cantered Exakt into the arena and halted in the middle. For Grand Prix tests, three judges are seated at different vantages outside the arena. Patty looked into the eyes of the judge directly ahead. It made a judge think you were confident. Then she lifted and dropped her right hand and nodded her head in salute.

Seeing Beauty in a Horse’s Flaws

Not every horse is capable of Grand Prix dressage, the highest of nine levels of competitive dressage. Picking the right horse is something like predicting which toddler will turn into a professional baseball player. Top riders devote at least four years to training before they can tell whether a horse will be capable of movements like the piaffe.

A Grand Prix horse is much more sensitive than the average trail horse; it’s like comparing a racing car to a Volkswagen. Every action matters; the shift of a rider’s weight alters the horse’s speed and direction. An imperceptible flex of a pinky finger on the rein instantly halts a cantering horse.

When Patty looked for a horse to buy 11 years ago, a breeder showed her a white-faced 2-year-old named Exakt that he had been unable to sell because of his huge head and unusual markings: a big white splash on his belly and one brown eye and one blue eye. His feet were the size of cantaloupes. With a long back and short legs, he looked like a draft horse. But he was so ugly that he was charismatic.

Exakt, a Dutch warmblood, trotted proudly; his white-stocking legs seemed to float. Patty bought him for $8,500. He had never been saddled.

When Exakt was 3, Patty rode him in a lesson with trainer and two-time Olympian Hilda Gurney. It was only five weeks after Exakt had been saddle broken. The horse was rhythmic and athletic. “If there were 1,000 horses out there, the one you look at is Exakt,” says Gurney. “He’s got that special something.”

After the third lesson, Gurney told Patty, “You can take this horse to the Olympics.” Patty believed her. Later, she’d realize that Gurney made that comment to many riders. But Patty thought Gurney was right about Exakt.

Competing Against the Best Riders

Of 100 riders campaigning nationwide for the Olympic team, the majority are full-time horsemen and women. Riding and sailing are the only Olympic sports in which men and women compete against each other.

Many Grand Prix riders rely on sponsors, who lend them top-caliber horses costing up to $2 million. Thirteen of the top 20 horses competing for the U.S. team are owned by sponsors. Sponsors are horse enthusiasts who often pay competition expenses that can run up to $60,000 a year. The reward is not monetary--though the value of a winning horse can rise considerably--it is the prestige and glory of seeing your horse win.

Guenter Seidel, a German who moved to San Diego, suffers an embarrassment of riches: He will ride four horses, all provided by sponsors, in a bid for the team. Seidel, a lanky 39-year-old with a handsome, chiseled face, rode in the 1996 Olympics with the U.S. team, which placed third. In dressage, he is the It-Boy. Most dressage riders want to be Seidel. Even neophytes recognize his ability.

Once, Patty’s father watched a competition and asked: “Why can’t you sit still like that guy?”

It isn’t just physical talent that distinguishes top riders; it’s also a gift for feeling and responding to the horse. Seidel has both. Plus, he has nerve and attitude.

Patty knows she doesn’t have Seidel’s ability. “I’m not an extremely talented rider; I’m an extremely thoughtful rider.” But that doesn’t detract from her devotion.

Patty has no sponsor, nor a trust fund (She is not related to the Mayer in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) Yet she competes against Seidel and others who ride six or eight or 10 horses a day and against riders with unlimited resources.

She faces another problem: Exakt was laid up with a torn ligament for seven months last year. Patty herself lost six weeks of riding time in the fall because of an operation on her hand to correct an injury prompted by excessive typing. Could Exakt compete after being off the show circuit for more than a year?

“Oh well,” Patty shrugs. She uses the phrase in a let’s-move-on-shall-we fashion, the way teenagers say “whatever” as a shield against further discussion. Horses, she says, are not motorcycles. She knows the odds are against her. But she watched the 1996 Olympic dressage competition and thought Exakt was as good as many in the arena.

Four horses and riders will be selected for the U.S. Olympic team. Seidel, of course, would make the team, Patty figures. So would two other riders who were on the U.S. team in Atlanta. That leaves one open spot.

Living a Life Jammed Full

The door to Patty’s house is painted, showing Exakt in a green pasture. These days, Patty’s home feels more like a launching pad. Sugar is stored in the refrigerator; she had neglected the burned-out bulb in the living room for weeks; and papers, magazines, videotapes were piled on the dining room table where they had been dumped on various evenings. Grey Kitty and Black Kitty look startled when the front door opens.

Patty is accustomed to being busy. Caffeine, she says, is one of the major food groups. Red eye, coffee mixed with espresso, is her favorite brew. When she drives, she chats on the phone with friends and business associates or listens to books on tape. She brings a cell phone and laptop when she travels to horse shows and signs on even when she is technically on vacation.

For 15 years, she read plays for the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, providing four synopses a month to help theater officials decide which to produce. But she stopped two years ago because it had become too difficult to leave her office in time for the theater’s monthly 7:30 p.m. meetings.

And it’s not that Patty doesn’t want a romance; it’s more that she doesn’t have time to find the right person. “If I wanted it more than other things, I would make it happen,” she says. “But if you are crazily obsessed with something, it’s hard to have a relationship.”

Patty’s last serious boyfriend was a “totally nice guy” who had graduated from high school, she says, “but it’s unclear if he remembered much.” He was a surfer, a good cook, and liked to drink beer while watching wrestling.

A suitable mate for a woman who graduated UCLA with honors in three years, attended graduate school in Cambridge, England, then law school at UCLA?

“Oh well,” Patty says, changing topics. Questions that pry too deep set her toward safer ground, such as what constitutes a good piaffe. Patty is more comfortable being social than intimate.

“Someone will have to tell me why I don’t get dates,” she says. “I’m not happy about it.”

Looking Presentable

Patty drives from the stables to work. Occasionally, she goes directly to her spacious corner office and fields calls in breeches. Usually, she heads to the restroom, peels off the riding pants and shirt--stiff with dried sweat--and buttons on her dress. With luck, she will have remembered to shave her legs and bring stockings for her flat pumps. There are no showers. She splashes her face with water.

Inside the office and outside the dressage ring, bosses and colleagues have talked to her about her appearance. Put more effort into making yourself presentable, people urged. If you want to be my lawyer, you’d better look like my lawyer, a former supervisor said. Patty stopped wearing T-shirts, jeans and leggings to the office. Her corporate dresses and suits are furnished largely by her mother.

“The world is not all about substance; it is about form,” she shrugs. If Patty could redesign the world, she would change this. Ideas would be important; packaging would not.

Of course, much of dressage is all about form. But that is a Patty Mayer paradox she chooses not to dwell on.

Several of Patty’s friends have cautioned her about her appearance at horse shows. She may have a wisp of hay in her hair or Exakt’s slobber smeared across her shoulder.

For dressage shows, many female competitors arrive in French braids, wearing spotless white breeches and carrying freshly pressed tail coats wrapped in plastic. Their makeup is precise; boots and satin top hats are brushed to shine.

“You want to create the right expectation and I never do,” Patty says. Even when Patty hires a groom for horse shows, she cannot sit idle and stay clean. She shares chores. It is not how most riders interact with grooms.

But Patty has her own rules. She’s shown up in breeches for an austere gathering at her parents’ Benedict Canyon home. She has invited a dozen friends over for dinner on a Saturday evening and not started planning until 3 p.m.

“Patty never worries about what other people think about her; she doesn’t try to conform clothes-wise or hair-wise,” says her father, Roger Mayer, a lawyer and business executive. “She does things as she thinks they should be done.”

Parents Are Puzzled

Many teenage girls are smitten with horses, but most release the connection as they become adults. Why this turned into a lifelong passion for Patty is something even her parents can’t fathom.

When Patty was 3, Pauline and Roger Mayer took their daughter to Beverly Pony Land, where she would walk around a ring atop a pony. Roger likes to say Patty has ridden ever since.

Initially, Roger Mayer was the horse enthusiast in the family. He enjoyed the racetrack. He fondly remembered riding as a child at summer camp and at a dude ranch.

It was not an interest shared by his wife, Pauline, a newspaper book reviewer and a beginner rider. But she joined her husband on occasional trail rides when their children were little. During one ride, Pauline’s horse reared and fell backward, landing on her. She broke bones in her arm, jaw and back and cracked her coccyx.

Two years later, Pauline, unfazed by her accident, persuaded Patty to take lessons. “I thought any new experience was a very good thing,” says Pauline.

Patty, a third-grader in a Beverly Hills public school, was hooked after the second class. Every Saturday morning at 7, Patty and five other girls piled into her father’s Studebaker and headed to Foxfield Riding School in Thousand Oaks. The girls spent the day riding, learning to jump and tending the horses. When they weren’t at the stables, they pretended they were horses leaping the driveway privet. Patty loved the independence and responsibility; adults didn’t hover at the stables.

Patty wasn’t a natural. Her arms flapped and her toes stuck out--a habit that prompted one instructor to say, “My God, if your feet were machine guns, we’d all be dead by now.” Over jumps, her head ducked to the left.

But Patty kept going, even when her friends stopped. It didn’t matter that Pauline and Roger wouldn’t buy her a horse. She would break young horses or muck out stalls in exchange for rides.

For Patty, it was deeply satisfying. Each horse was unique; solutions that worked with one wouldn’t necessarily help another. When a horse pulled, should she loosen the rein so there was nothing for him to lean on, or turn in a circle to distract him?

These were split-second decisions. It was a matter of matching will and wit with an animal whose instincts were neither sensible nor logical.

Surely she would outgrow this hobby, her parents thought. During the few times that Pauline Mayer watched her daughter ride, she fastened her hands over her eyes as Patty cantered to jumps and asked her husband to tell her when it was over.

The depth of Patty’s commitment troubles her mother. “I worry that she will be alone in her old age,” says Pauline. “She’ll have lots of friends and a brother and sister-in-law, but it’s not the same as having a family of your own.”

He’s a Huge Horse

It wasn’t until Patty bought Exakt 11 years ago that she became serious about dressage. He worked with an exuberance that made Patty feel he genuinely loved the movements. His ears tilted forward and his eyes were bright.

Exakt slowly grew into a huge horse, suitable for a very large man. He demonstrated plenty of talent; he soared across the ring during extended trots and canters. But he was also a skittish, 1,630-pound baby. He would spook at a truck or flower box. He would shake at the sight of a tractor with its bucket up or the sounds from plastic garbage cans. In the warm-up area before competitions, he bucked like a colt and galloped with such abandon that riders fled, fearing their horses might get hurt.

“It was like a WWF wrestler trying to do ballet,” says Jim Higdon, a former assistant to trainer Hilda Gurney.

Year after year, Patty competed. Other riders rolled their eyes. While most riders warmed up cautiously, guarding their horse’s energy, Patty cantered endlessly, hoping to tire Exakt. She or Higdon walked Exakt for hours around show grounds with the horse plunging and cavorting at the end of a lead rope.

At one show in Colorado, Exakt shied at flags flapping in the wind by the arena. He refused to halt so Patty could salute the judge. He would not circle the ring. He and Patty came in last.

“It was heartbreaking. Most people would have rethought what they were doing. She never gave up,” says Higdon. “If I had one word to describe Patty, I’d say resilient.”

In recent years, Exakt began to mellow and Patty learned to cope with his foibles. They flourished, winning championships from the U.S. Dressage Federation, the American Horse Show Assn. and the California Dressage Society. They represented the U.S. in Brazil. They qualified for lists of contenders for Olympic and World Cup teams. Patty attracted a following. She even got some letters from working women, saying she was an inspiration.

Like most top dressage riders, Patty wanted to take Exakt to Germany to polish their skills. For several decades, German dressage riders have dominated international competitions.

Patty arranged 12 weeks of study with Conrad Schumacher, a renowned instructor. She invoked the horse leave in her contract. She had helped the company win an important case and gotten a bonus; otherwise she would have taken out a second mortgage.

Just before Christmas in 1998, Patty depleted her savings and she and Exakt flew to Frankfurt. Schumacher taught six days a week. He insisted that top horses should be able to perform with a gentle bit in their mouths so riders could use their seat, legs and body weight rather than relying on their hands for control.

Initially, Exakt barged around the ring, pulling relentlessly against the light bit. What was she learning? That she never knew her shoulders could hurt so much? But Exakt started moving better than ever.

After eight weeks, Exakt stubbed his right front toe while trotting. The next afternoon, his leg was swollen. He had torn a ligament. The news got worse. He would never be sound again, the German vet said. Patty wept.

“It was like watching everything you worked on for 10 years going down the tubes and knowing you’re responsible for it,” says Patty.

If a horse in Guenter Seidel’s barn went lame, sponsors would trip over themselves offering him another. There were no such calls for Patty. “Exakt and I are looked at as a pair; one does not exist without the other,” says Patty.

Eyes on the Olympics

Her other horse, Olissa, was too young. Exakt will be near retirement before Olissa is ready.

Uncertain about Exakt’s recovery, Patty’s parents helped her buy a third horse, an 8-year-old named Jem Twist. But Patty’s bad luck continued. Three days after Jem’s purchase, the mare went lame.

By last July, Jem was still unsound and Exakt had healed. Patty slowly got Exakt fit; they could campaign for the Olympics.

When she entered the show ring last week, she felt poised. Her first walk pirouette, where Exakt turned on his hindquarters, seemed OK. The second felt better. His passage felt buoyant and powerful, as though she were sitting on coiled springs.

Three-quarters through the test, Patty relaxed. She was safe. Exakt had always done beautiful flying changes of leads at the canter--a movement that looked like a child skipping, one leg forward and then the other.

But Exakt lost his rhythm and bobbled. It was the first time in ages they had screwed this up. Later, Patty would scold herself for taking the movement for granted. She regained her focus and finished.

The judges gave her a score that places her 19th among the 100 contenders nationwide. She must do better. There are two other qualifying shows; the next is a week away. She’ll pay coach Albrecht Heidemann to come from Germany again. Patty and Exakt will keep trying.

Two days after the competition, she got up at 4:05 a.m. and drove to the barn in Agoura, chugging black coffee. Exakt was at the vet. She carefully cleaned Jem’s hooves--the mare was finally sound. She unwrapped her leg bandages and buckled on protective ankle boots. After she rode, she ran cold water on Jem’s forelegs. A rider without a horse is a musician without an instrument.