Katie Up and Down the Hall: The True Story of How One Dog Turned Five Neighbors Into a Family (9 page)

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.