Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family

by Glenn Plaskin

  At our farewell outside his house a few hours later, his advice to other fathers? “Let your children know you love them. That’s what matters.” And then the evening ended.

  Times like these were, of course, exhilarating and moving, but more often than not, my associations with famous subjects continued to be a source of anxiety.

  So while interviewing was good for my career, the pressure of it wasn’t always so good for me. And all of it was taking me further away from Katie. Although my dog was happy with Pearl and Arthur as her daytime keepers, I could tell she missed me.

  Each night, when I finally got home, I’d knock on Pearl’s door, and while waiting for her to open it, I’d get down on my knees on the carpet, ready to greet Katie at face level. The door would open, and Katie would practically leap out, flying into my arms, whimpering with a mixture of ecstasy and anxiety. “Dad, you’re home! I missed you,” she seemed to be telling me, underlining my guilt at being absent for such a long stretch from morning to night.

  In mid-March of that year, when Katie was eight months old, I took her back to the vet, Dr. Simon, to perform the spaying operation. I hated the idea of having my dog put to sleep for any reason and was anxious the entire day.

  “She’ll be fine, don’t worry, go home, come back at six,” Dr. Simon told me, shoving me toward the door just like De De always did. When I returned, Katie was lying down calmly inside the kennel, snoozing. As the door opened and she saw me, she ran into my arms as if we’d been separated a week.

  Like any dog, she hated being alone. But unlike most high-rise city dogs, who do, by necessity, spend long periods of time alone—napping, bored and lonely, or being taken out for fifteen-minute walks by dog walkers and then promptly returned to their solitude—Katie was virtually never alone thanks to Pearl and Arthur.

  In fact, my dog was a lot less lonely than I was. When I was on the road for business, there was nothing emptier than a hotel room. I hated it and missed the comfort of having Katie next to me at night. Sometimes when I’d call Pearl from Los Angeles, she’d put Katie “on the phone,” and I’d talk to her. Pearl would tell me that her tail would wag, though I doubt she got the “connection.”

  In short, like any working “parent,” I had a real problem. I didn’t know what to do about it until I decided to do the same thing on the job as I had done interviewing for jobs—take Katie along with me to work.

  One or two days a week, I’d sneak Katie into the Daily News building via that shopping bag, and she’d snooze on a blue desk chair right next to mine, her head resting on the armrest, oblivious to anything or anyone. Puppies need their sleep. Most of the reporters liked seeing her around and came by to pet her, while a few grumbly ones resented her presence.

  In fact, it wasn’t long before the New York Post, our rival tabloid, ran this item in Richard Johnson’s widely read column, PAGE SIX:

  Daily News writer Glenn Plaskin can’t understand why his co-workers don’t like his dog. Katie, a blond cocker spaniel that Plaskin occasionally brings to the office, has accompanied him on interviews with Leona Helmsley, Peter Jennings, and her namesake, Katharine Hepburn. Contrary to the story making the rounds in the newsroom, “Katie has never, ever relieved herself in the office,” Plaskin told Page Six. “The fact is, she’s better behaved than some of the people at the News.”

  Uh-oh! That item didn’t make me too popular, though Katie did have her fans. One day, for example, the style editor dropped by and said she was writing a story titled “Fashion Goes to the Dogs.”

  “Would Katie like to model sweaters for us?” she asked.

  Yes, she would!

  As the story would explain, “pet clothing is going to be a tremendous fashion movement.” Proving it, there was Katie in the cover photo, snuggled in the arms of a young female model, both of them in matching $250 beige-and-cream hand-knit wool sweaters.

  “During a puppy’s first winter,” the story advised, “you should put on a sweater when the temperature is below 40.” Katie was happy to do the job because she got a brand-new sweater out of the deal. And not long after that, Family Circle magazine invited her to model in a summer picnic pictorial, a huge platter of fried chicken nearby (most of it taken home by us in a doggy bag).

  At these photo shoots, and at others to follow, Katie would typically be perched up on a raised white or clear pedestal, surrounded by bright lights and reflecting panels, obediently taking direction from the photographer and his assistant—none of it bothering her.

  “Over here, Katie,” the photographer would say, snapping his fingers and holding his hand up where he wanted her to focus. “Look straight ahead now”—and so she would, remaining perfectly still, staring straight at the camera, holding the pose. Then the assistant would go over to turn her head to a different angle, and she’d stay put.

  True, I was sometimes behind the camera, holding up a biscuit, saying “Stay,” but even when I didn’t, she remained attentive, as if to say, “Dad! This is fun. Don’t bother me.”

  One time, when the shoot was over, she didn’t want to get off the platform and kept climbing back up on it. Finally, she rolled on her back and spread her legs wide. The photographer noted, “We’re not that kind of magazine!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Prancing with the Stars

  Now that Katie was perfectly housebroken and had mastered all her commands, she was up and out of the house more than ever—Miss Sociable, parading in and out of our building with Pearl and Arthur, who now treated her as their very own dog. (Some of our neighbors thought Katie was their dog.)

  But whenever I could wrest my dog away from her second parents, I had plans of my own.

  To make my job more fun, I decided to defy Katie’s critics at the News and to take her along with me on as many interviews as possible. And she was soon rubbing shoulders (and noses) with a host of celebrities.

  In November 1989, for example, I had a long interview with Ivana Trump, then president of Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, which was, at the time, owned by her soon-to-be ex-husband Donald.

  The tall, bubbly Ivana—glamorously outfitted in a hot pink suit and amethyst-and-diamond earrings—was more exquisitely groomed than any celebrity I’ve ever met.

  Sitting in her Plaza Hotel office (not far from the gold-leafed Palm Court that she had meticulously restored to its lush glory), Ivana told me all about her bleak early years in Communist Czechoslovakia working at a shoe factory, bent over an assembly line.

  As I wrote, “Ivana serenely gazes now at her custom-made silk pumps, and contemplates their continuing lesson, vowing ‘that I was never—EVER—going to do that kind of work again.’” Indeed not.

  I was taken by Ivana’s infectious energy, self-discipline, and determination to prove herself as a businesswoman.

  She was also an avid dog lover—and told me all about her beloved Choppy, a miniature black poodle who sometimes skidded across or slipped on the expansive marble floors at the fifty-room Trump Tower apartment where she and Donald lived.

  A few weeks after our interview, when I stopped by the Plaza with Katie to say hello, Ivana swept into her office, threw her fur coat on a nearby chair, and beamed with delight. “So this is Kaaaaatie,” she exclaimed. “What a beauty! Let me see.” She effortlessly swept my one-year-old up in her arms and held her high in the air. (Katie looked none too pleased trying to defy gravity.)

  “I have a meeting with our board of directors now,” Ivana told me. But she was game for some fun. “Let me introduce her,” and off Katie went in Ivana’s arms, looking back at me curiously, as if to say, “Who is this, Dad?!”

  A few minutes later, Katie was returned and Ivana departed, giving her a kiss good-bye. “Everyone loved her! She’s the greatest.”

  At Christmas of that year, Ivana’s secretary called, inquiring about the name of Katie’s groomer. Figuring that Ivana liked Katie’s haircut, I told her all about De De’s Dogarama, though uptown dogs of Choppy’s ilk were usually groomed at
the much more exclusive Le Chien. It wasn’t a day later that Katie got a wonderful Christmas present from Ivana in the mail, a gift certificate for a full year of grooming at De De’s! Ivana was now the greatest in Katie’s book.

  That same year, I had an interview with Farrah Fawcett, who was then starring in a TV movie, playing the legendary LIFE magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White. Over tea in the Bar Seine at Manhattan’s Hôtel Plaza Athénée, we were talking quietly when Farrah’s long-time companion, Ryan O’Neal, unexpectedly burst into the room. The chemistry between them was electric.

  “Give me a kiss!” exclaimed Ryan, bending down toward Farrah as they passionately embraced, the actor almost stepping on poor Katie, who was sprawled out on the carpet chewing on a bone. “Dad, he’s bothering me,” she seemed to say, hightailing it under my chair. High-strung Ryan looked none too receptive to Katie either, though Farrah fussed over her.

  “Isn’t she adorable?” whispered Farrah in her distinctively buttery voice, music to a dog’s ears. I supposed Ryan thought it odd that I had brought a dog to the hotel.

  “So nice to meet a fellow blonde!” Farrah laughed, stroking Katie’s ears. Farrah then took a sip of champagne and held hands with Ryan as the couple started chatting, speaking lovingly of the child they had had together, Redmond O’Neal.

  When I asked them about their long-term (off and on again) relationship, which ultimately lasted almost thirty years, Ryan boomed, “Farrah and I have no plans to marry [they never did], neither do we have plans to separate.” (They did separate in 1997, though they remained extremely close, and nearly did marry toward the end of Farrah’s life in 2009 during the time before her death when she was being treated for cancer.)

  “He’s always wanted to marry me,” Farrah added softly that day once Ryan left the room, “from the first time we slept together. After we make love, he’ll say, ‘I’m not kidding you, you’ve got to marry me.’”

  After our rather intimate talk, Farrah and I took Katie for a long walk up Park Avenue, onlookers fascinated as Katie, not yet set on her leash manners, kept pulling on it, at one point tangling up the former Charlie’s Angels star, who was such a good sport. Sensitive and so down to earth, Farrah was a pleasure to talk to—and Katie gave her a big lick good-bye.

  That same week, Katie met the renowned interior designer Mario Buatta, known as the “Prince of Chintz,” the acknowledged master of the English country style that featured yards of swags, bows, and ruffles, plus lots of dog paintings.

  Irreverent—despite such clients as the Forbeses, Barbara Bush, and Blair House (the president’s guest house)—Buatta was notorious as a prankster. He once showed up at a Peggy Lee concert with a monkey on his lap, strolled through Central Park in an all-blue chintz suit, and arrived at a masked ball wearing a lamp shade on his head.

  When I met him, he was rather tame in a dark blue suit, and just as funny as I expected. “My mom once told me,” he said, “‘maybe you’d like to be a psychiatrist or an actor or a lawyer’—but I combined all three and became an interior decorator!”

  Months later, after we had become friends, Mario came over to my apartment one evening, bringing along as a present one of his signature dog pillows with a painted spaniel curled up on it. This was a gift for me, though Katie started ripping away the tissue paper as I took it from Mario’s hand.

  “This isn’t for you!” Mario lectured Katie, who scrammed away, as she was never comfortable around tall people (Mario was over six feet tall). But this didn’t stop Katie from requisitioning that pillow. When I wasn’t looking, she knocked it off the couch and I found her napping on the carpet with it under her head. When he said good-bye, Mario commented that Katie’s fur would make a nice glazed wall color.

  That night, I discovered that Katie was doing a little redecorating of her own. She had pushed the pillow into her kennel and arranged it carefully with her paws. She napped on it nearly every afternoon thereafter.

  Mario told me about a married couple who sold reasonably priced animal paintings out of a mobile truck. On his advice, I soon had hunting dogs, spaniels, and assorted other canines decorating my living room walls.

  “Now you’re English!” he joked.

  In addition to such meet-and-greets with local interview subjects, I was also determined to take Katie with me on flights to Los Angeles. In past years, traveling on business always left me feeling incredibly depressed and disconnected from my routine, friends, and, of course, my dog. So I came up with a plan to permanently rid myself of loneliness on the road—take Katie along with me. It was the perfect solution, much better than Prozac.

  But flying with a dog, even then, wasn’t the easiest thing to do. And I had no intention of “checking” Katie in the luggage compartment—a requirement of most airlines unless you had a very small dog that could fit into a kennel placed under the seat. Otherwise, a dog like Katie, weighing twenty-eight pounds, was relegated to the cargo hold—subjected to possible changes in temperature and air pressure that could be fatal to a dog, not to mention the terror of being trapped for six hours in a cage, alone in the dark!

  I had to avoid this. So I hatched an underhanded, though pragmatic, plan. I persuaded our vet to write a letter stating that Katie was a “hearing dog,” specially trained for the hearing-impaired and therefore allowed to travel freely through the airport and onto the plane.

  It worked. So after being escorted through security, Katie would march through the airport in her hat and coat, arrive at the gate, and jump onto a chair in the waiting area, quickly inundated with admiring new fans. Stressed-out travelers practically lined up to pet her. Kids wanted to feed her snacks. Several people wanted to take her picture. A Marine stopped by and said it did his heart good to see a dog.

  Sometimes she’d offer her right paw to “shake,” fascinated by the stream of visitors. Other times, she was too busy to bother, chewing on a bone, not interested in making new friends, as if to say, “Dad,… I’m busy… I can’t talk to everybody!”

  Then we would board the plane. We were usually put in the bulkhead at the front, with Katie snoozing on the floor, though if there was no passenger next to me, she snuggled on the seat, sipping water out of a cup or eating a few nuts or potato chips. Anytime the flight attendants passed by, I was careful not to answer unless I was looking right at their lips. To Katie’s credit, she never had an accident, not once.

  In retrospect, I should never have billed Katie as a hearing dog, out of respect for hard-working service animals who alert their owners to fire alarms, knocks on the door, telephones, kitchen timers, or even prowlers. But I wanted Katie with me and was desperate to protect her from that cargo hold.

  Once we got to the Beverly Hills Hotel (where I frequently stayed) and were taken into a bungalow behind the main building, Katie would prance around, poking her nose here and there. She would run outside into the lush gardens and savor the California sun like a true Hollywood hound.

  On one memorable trip, I was to interview Bette Midler. The night before, we settled into bungalow 7A, one shaded by beautiful palms and a wild array of flowers and vines. Having Katie with me was like a tonic, erasing loneliness and anxiety. That night, even though Katie had been groomed a few weeks earlier, she looked a little rumpled, so I decided it would be fun to give her a bath, something I never did. What a mistake.

  Katie winced when she got shampoo in her eyes, it took forever to rinse her off, and she slipped and slid all over the porcelain tub. I was surprised how much work it was handling her, not unlike a slippery watermelon. Finally, I was so soaked with water that I got into the tub, naked, not expecting the impact of those sharp nails from her paws. Ouch!

  When Katie was finally all blown out and dried and fluffy, I opened the bungalow door ready to take her out for a walk, but she escaped in a flash. I went frantically looking for that naughty mutt everywhere along the winding pathways.

  “Is this yours?” a man asked a few minutes later. And there, standing in the
doorway of a nearby bungalow was the comedian Alan King, with Katie wrapped in his arms, a guilty look on her face.

  “She looks familiar, but if you’d like to take her off my hands….”

  He handed her over to me with his left hand, puffing on a cigar with his right. “Best offer I had all day,” he laughed, closing the door.

  The next morning, we met the Divine Miss M in a suite at our hotel. Accustomed to seeing her in wildly extravagant stage costumes and elaborate makeup, I was taken aback by this understated, diminutive, rather serious-looking woman. She was dressed casually in black pants and a white sweater, wearing green-framed glasses and no makeup—so down to earth in every way—and delighted to see a dog, instead of just another probing journalist.

  “This is going to be different,” Bette exclaimed wryly, noticeably more interested in Katie than me. “My, my, my girlie, you’re just adorable,” she cooed, lifting Katie up by the front, her back paws hanging in midair. “How old is she?”

  “Two—the terrible,” I laughed, explaining her recent escape.

  “Would you mind if I hold her in my lap?”

  Not at all.

  And for the next two hours, as Bette discussed her movies and the course of her life, Katie slept soundly on Miss M’s lap, curled into a ball. One minute, Bette was serious, shy, and vulnerable, the next, funny, flirty, and sly.

  “There are,” she told me that day, “two people living in this body. I have a duchess and a tramp mentality. I love the low life and still have an affinity for it.” Not so different from my mischievous dog. But through it all, Katie never moved.