Pearl also took excellent care of me—treating me as the grandson she never had. Like my own grandmother had, she kindly picked up my favorite rye bread with black seeds, spoiled me with Nova Scotia salmon and cream cheese, and did neighborly things like getting the mail or taking packages in when I was out of town.
And although she wasn’t very physically demonstrative, I could sense her love and affection just by the way she looked at me or touched my shoulder or arm.
She was a great date and we sometimes went to movies together (leaving Arthur at home reading, as he preferred it), to Broadway shows, out for dinner or shopping, or on long walks along the Esplanade with Katie.
Pa-Re-El and I now shared a unique closeness. But “the child’s” daily antics, needs, and moods remained the centrifugal force that bonded us.
In 1992, Katie turned four, celebrating it with a carrot cake. The cream cheese frosting covered her mouth as she munched happily away on it, pulling each piece off a fork held by Pearl.
By this point, I noticed an almost mystical bond between Katie and Pearl, notwithstanding Katie’s close relationship to Arthur as well.
My dog simply worshipped Pearl. She lay on her kitchen floor when she cooked, napped on the living room couch when she cleaned, and lounged on her bed as they both watched TV—typically the Food Channel.
One day when Pearl was watching the Oprah Winfrey Show, Katie irritated her by pressing her paw down on the remote control (something she saw Pearl do all the time) and accidentally changing channels.
“No!” snapped Pearl, taking the remote away from Katie and switching it back to ABC.
But Katie persisted, grabbing it back again, and slapping down her paw on the buttons. It seemed that she understood the connection between her action and the changing of pictures and sounds. And I could tell by her mesmerized expression that she was enjoying the mischievous game.
“No!” Pearl repeated, hiding the remote under her pillow and leaning against it as Katie attempted to flush it out again.
“She’s Queen Katie,” Pearl told me later that day, “but smart as a whip.”
She was also, of course, hungry all the time. Katie especially irritated Pearl when she used the remote control as a dog bone, biting into it with gusto. “That girl knows what she wants and she’s spoiled rotten.” I knew that well, as I was the one who had spoiled her.
Whatever that dog wanted, she got.
Sometimes when Pearl was on the phone, Katie would sit up on the bed rather regally and slap Pearl on the arm with her paw, “telling” her to get off the line and pay some attention to her.
“Come on, Pa-Re-El,” she seemed to say, “Let’s play!”
At other times, she’d seduce Pearl into a nap by stretching out on her back, placing her head on Pearl’s pillow, and pulling Pearl over in her direction.
More than once, I’d find them snoozing blissfully together, the Food Channel lulling them both to sleep. On nights like those, I didn’t dare wake them, so Katie got a sleepover, while Arthur got a surprise.
CHAPTER TEN
Everything That Goes Up…
The year 1992 was a wonderful one for me.
On May 15, as I blew the candles out on my birthday cake at an outdoor fortieth birthday party set up overlooking the Hudson River, everything in my world seemed just about perfect.
The weather that night was sublime, warm and breezy, with sailboats drifting by as we picnicked on the shore.
Katie was in great spirits, spunkier than ever, trotting around the guests outfitted with a pink birthday hat that was perched crookedly on her head.
Pearl and Arthur had their “girl” on a red leash as they talked animatedly with my family, friends, and colleagues from work.
And to top it all off, I had completed a new book that would be published in the fall. It was titled Turning Point: Pivotal Moments in the Lives of America’s Celebrities, a compilation of 120 interviews featuring celebrities who had talked to me about how they’d overcome crises in their lives, based upon the column I was writing in the New York Daily News.
Here were conversations with everyone from Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Burnett, Dolly Parton, and Paul Newman to Calvin Klein, Malcolm Forbes, Walter Cronkite, and Joan Kennedy.
I dedicated the book to you-know-who. Her picture graced the title page with this inscription: “To my baby, Katie, the sweetest turning point I’ve known—a daily reminder of innocence, loyalty, and love.”
Pearl and Arthur were my full-time “grandparents,” proud, doting, and excited about the book and also eager to read my magazine stories. The lineup that year would include Elizabeth Taylor (“Behind the Mask: AIDS & the Celebrity Crusade”), Marla Maples (“The Marla ‘Follies’”), Kathie Lee Gifford (“Believe It!”), Michael Jackson (“Soul Survivor”), Al Pacino (“Happy at Last?”), and Cher (“Total Cher”).
Each time I got an advance copy of one of these stories, I took it right home for a ritual “show and tell,” which always took place around Pearl’s trusty dining table.
One day, I remember Arthur opening up the pages to an interview with Sylvester Stallone, while Katie pushed around him, poking her nose into the magazine pages and scratching them with her paws, vying for attention.
“Calm down, girlie, and eat your bone,” he ordered, gently pushing her away as he became engrossed in the story.
Beyond being my most avid reader, Arthur was a trusted friend and advised me on anything and everything—house repairs, choice of suits, financial investments, medical care for Katie, and strategies for handling my boss. I found the soothing sound of his raspy baritone voice calming, and he always put things into perspective for me as nobody else could.
And Pearl was no less helpful, handing out advice and recipes, conveying the latest health tip she’d heard on the radio, reminding me about neighborhood events, and giving me the thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a prospective date or friend.
We were a family.
I couldn’t have loved my own grandparents any more than I did Pearl and Arthur. We seemed to fulfill within one another a deep need for connection—and it didn’t hurt that we were so accessible to one another, separated by just forty-five feet.
By fall of that year, I was promoting Turning Point, first on the Oprah Winfrey Show, which devoted an entire show to the book, featuring four of my interview subjects, each one of them talking about challenging moments in their lives. There was Marla Maples (on Donald Trump), Rod Steiger (on depression), Angie Dickinson (on her sister’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease), and Annette Funicello (on her battling multiple sclerosis).
Oprah, as always, was astutely sensitive as she navigated through people’s darkest moments, finding the uplifting lesson in each of them.
And then, the lightest, most entertaining moment of the show came when Oprah asked me about Leona Helmsley’s “turning point,”—going off to jail.
“What did she tell you?” Oprah asked curiously.
I offered just one sentence—“LET ME OUT!”—which brought us to the commercial break with good-natured, uproarious laughter.
After this broadcast, both Sally Jessy Raphael and Geraldo Rivera followed with shows of their own on the book, though the most lighthearted approach to the turning point theme was on Joan Rivers’s show, as few could equal her dry wit and appetite for mischief.
Joan had been my first celebrity interview back in 1983, and over the years, I’d interviewed her many times, most emotionally after her husband, Edgar, had committed suicide.
I was always struck that such a brilliantly funny woman was, off-stage, so serious and thoughtful, though onstage that day we reveled in some mildly risqué celebrity hounding.
The most entertaining part of the interview was when she asked about Joan Collins’s past marriages and predilection for younger men. I told her, “Joan says the sex is better with younger men… much better… and no back pain!” The audience started laughing while the faux taken-aback expression on Joan’s fac
e made the moment even funnier.
The book tour ended on a high note with a mid-December appearance on Larry King. The studio was freezing, as I remember, but Larry struck me as incredibly warm and down to earth, welcoming a noncelebrity like me as if I were one.
For the book, Larry had discussed his recovery from a 1987 heart attack, “If you want to know the moment, the turning point, it was opening my eyes after the surgery. ‘Mr. King, you did terrific!’ is what the nurse said. From that moment on, my life changed. After that,” he told me, “I threw my cigarettes in the Potomac,” along with the Oreo cookies and pizza, determined to change his habits. “Now I’m on the treadmill every day and went from 190 pounds to 160.”
“Happy at last?” I asked him.
“I’m a nine on the scale—still that little Jewish kid from Brooklyn wanting approval from the outside. There’s no ten. Maybe next year.”
As for me, on a scale of one to ten, I certainly felt as if 1992 had been a ten. After the show that night, sitting in a Washington, DC, hotel suite, I counted my blessings.
And a week later, on New Year’s Eve, Arthur, Pearl and I ushered in the New Year with champagne. Katie wore a New Year’s hat and had a few sips before snoozing her way into 1993—just slightly tipsy.
Then everything crashed—and it happened so fast.
One minute I was answering questions from Larry King’s viewers about how people overcome crises; and the next, I was having a crisis of my own.
Just two weeks after Larry’s show, in January 1993, my professional world as I knew it imploded—everything I had built up was quickly taken away.
The newspaper where I worked, the financially beleaguered Daily News, had been sold by the Tribune Company to the new owner, Mort Zuckerman, and 180 employees were fired—including me. I suddenly had no job and no income. Gone were the syndicated column, the Sunday magazine cover stories, the TV shows, the access to celebrities—and along with them, my position in the world.
Now I was on the unemployment line. God does have an excellent sense of humor. Looking back, I can now see that my ego had become supersized—inflated with all those stars who made me feel more important than I was. Clearly, I was not indispensable. And although I tried to get another job, the market was flooded with deposed Daily News troops, and it just wasn’t happening.
By the late winter of 1993, I was truly demoralized. I had gone from hero to zero in a matter of weeks. And despite my past productivity, I felt like a complete failure.
Superdisciplined, I was used to being out of my apartment by 7:30 a.m. and gone until 9:00 p.m. But now I was home all day, disoriented by this turnaround. It’s easy to feel satisfied when things are going your way, but feeling good under adverse circumstances takes a lot more strength than I had. That’s when you really need your friends, family—and your dog.
Although I was off-kilter, Katie insisted on keeping to her routine—racing down the hallway right after breakfast to Pearl’s just as before, though I did manage to snatch her back in the afternoons, going out for long walks with her and giving her more of my attention than she was accustomed to.
As for Pearl and Arthur, they were, as always, nonjudgmental and encouraging. “Something will turn around for you,” said Arthur. Most therapeutic were our dinners together when we talked about Katie and the neighborhood rather than focusing on “the problem.”
Then, one March day, with a snowstorm blasting Battery Park City, I was outside walking up a steep hill, feeling rather morose, when my back snapped, the muscles locking in spasm. I had always had back pain, which tended to worsen with excessive sitting, bending, or stress, but this had rarely happened. I could barely move and hobbled home bent at a ninety-degree angle.
Over the next weeks, Pearl mobilized into action, more helpful than ever. My injury seemed to energize her. (That made one of us.) She took Katie outside for walks and ministered to all the dog caretaking—feeding her, playing with her, brushing out her coat. She also helped me change the sheets on the bed, picked up medicine at the drugstore, went food shopping, and collected the mail.
And most nights she’d come by with an entire dinner in hand: hot soup, a salad, grilled salmon, spaghetti, tuna casserole, or breaded chicken cutlets, followed by a tart or cake.
Katie licked her chops, stealing as much of the food as possible while cheering me up as I sat there against pillows with either an ice pack or heating pad under me.
“The child now moves a lot better than you do!” joked Pa-Re-El, marveling at Katie’s gymnastics as she jumped on the bed, dragging a sock over to me for a game of tug-of-war.
Katie, Pearl, and Arthur did more to boost my spirits than any job could have. I appreciated them now, more than ever, and having them close to me was incredibly comforting.
Over the next few months, after visits to an orthopedic surgeon, a chiropractor, pain specialists, and a physical therapist, I learned that I would have to drastically change my lifestyle—no more sitting for long periods writing, no bending, no running, limited exercise, and no more working.
Now I was really depressed. How did I go so quickly from being “able” to “disabled”? Sure, I could walk and do the basics, but my world, as I had known it, was drastically changed—and all in three months.
I needed help (and not just the physical kind). And I found it, in early January, at a Community Center located on West 13th Street in Greenwich Village. This was a fantastic place offering social events, support groups, twelve-step meetings, and a wide array of health, youth, and family services—a total of 14,000 activities per year.
I started attending support groups almost daily, which immeasurably helped jolt me from depression and connected me to my peers. People talked about everything here—from their finances and job challenges to the ups and downs of relationships, family issues, physical health, and addiction matters as well.
One freezing day in February, when I brought Katie along with me into the dog-friendly Community Center, we were just hanging out in the main reception area on the ground floor, enjoying the parade of people going in and out.
Amid all the adults, I noticed a tiny little boy racing around the room, making wide loops, whooping it up, giggling uproariously as he circled us. He was the cutest kid imaginable, with brownish-golden bangs that fell into those beguiling brown eyes, his plump little face lit up with a sparkling smile.
Outfitted in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, blue corduroy pants, and black-and-white sneakers (with blinking red lights that illuminated when he ran), he reminded me of Dennis the Menace—a boy filled with high spirits and mischievous plans.
Katie, who was ordinarily frightened of kids and loud noises (and averse to having her space invaded), jumped out of my arms and stood still as a statue, legs spread in combat position, warily watching this boisterous boy.
“Don’t be afraid, he won’t hurt you,” I soothed her, giving her a pat on the butt and nudging her forward, encouraging her to play.
“But Dad,” she seemed to say, “I’m not so sure. That kid looks dangerous… but running looks like fun. I do like to race!”
“Then go ahead,” I told her, letting her off the leash.
In a flash, Katie threw caution to the wind and took off, skipping after the exuberant boy. When she caught up to him, she started off hesitantly, sniffing his leg, but she was soon chasing him.
The boy became even more energized, running faster, delighted to have a companion. They whirled together, around and around the room, disturbing everyone in their wake. Katie’s tail stood up in delight. The little kid let out a mock scream, as if he was threatened by her pursuit, though I could tell he knew he wasn’t in any danger.
This had never happened before. Katie had always disliked kids and avoided them—but now she was elated. She actually bounced up against the boy to embrace him, offering her paw to “shake,” a big grin on her face, her tongue hanging out, breathless with happiness.
“Hi girl!” the boy smiled, stopping for just
a minute to pet her, then screaming, “Now let’s GO!” And off they went again, fast new friends, the boy dodging people drinking their coffee as he led the way around the perimeter of the room.
“But who is that little dude?” I asked, talking half out loud to myself, wondering why he was left unattended.
“His name is Ryan—and I’m his father John!” laughed a blond-haired, affable-looking guy in his late thirties, coming up behind me.
I’d seen John in the support group before, and he was a very approachable person—warm, talkative, and relaxed. He wore glasses and had blue eyes and an easygoing smile.
Midwestern in appearance, he was dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, corduroy pants, and a bulky ski parka, both rugged and slightly bookish looking. Here was a real person with solid values, someone with no pretense or artifice. He put me right at ease.
I had heard him describe the challenges, and rewards, of raising a son as a single gay dad, and I knew that he was active as one of only three men in the Community Center’s single parents’ group—part of the “Center Kids” program. One thing that came across loud and clear was his utter devotion to his son.
“Ryan’s two-and-a-half and he loves dogs,” John told me, pulling up a chair. “In fact, as you can see, he never leaves home without one.” And there, tucked under the boy’s arm was a raggedy stuffed animal, a golden retriever.
“That’s Puppy!” John told me, “though it looks like Ryan has found a new puppy.”
“I’m a single parent too, kind of,” I joked. “That’s Katie—and she never does this. In fact, she hates kids—but not today.”
As John and I chatted, I discovered that we had much in common. After graduating from Stanford in computer science, he had gotten a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and now worked at the New York Times. I told him about my fall from grace at the Daily News and he commiserated, though our focus was mostly on our “kids,” one human, one canine.
Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family Page 9
