I was leading a double life. On the show Monday through Friday, I put on a brave front for an audience of millions. And not just a brave front—I had to be the upbeat, cheerful Katie viewers had come to expect. During the brief commercial breaks, I’d shoo away my anxiety and fear, chatting up the crew, running upstairs to survey the now-tired platter of bagels in the greenroom—anything to keep my mind from going to the dark place. My makeup artist would come and powder me with such tenderness it left me feeling loved and cared for, although so many times, I was just one tender-powdering away from losing it.
I didn’t want people to know how serious Jay’s situation was. This was his body, his life. I guarded his privacy fiercely because insider information about me, about us, was trading high.
One day, a mother from Ellie’s preschool stopped me on the street and said, “A friend who was visiting her mother at the hospital told me about Jay. She said it was really, really bad.” The idea of anyone gossiping about something so personal infuriated me. What is wrong with people?
As I waited in Jay’s room during the surgery to reverse his colostomy, a nurse walked in, pulled out a tabloid, and said, “Look, you’re in the paper!”
In fact, I was on the cover looking grief-stricken next to the screaming headline “Katie’s Private Pain.” I wanted to kill her.
This was the dark side of celebrity. I hadn’t realized how little privacy we had until we desperately needed it.
Earlier that morning, I’d picked up a cup of coffee at the hospital café on the first floor. And I’ll never forget walking down the cavernous marble hallway, rounding the corner, and seeing the unmistakable shock of white hair and wire-rimmed glasses, the seersucker suit…my dad, waiting for me on the bench situated between two elevator banks. He had taken the train from DC to New York to be with me. It was so unlike him—he was not a spontaneous person. My surprise gave way to overwhelming gratitude.
He sat with me during the surgery and made me feel safe enough to fall apart. I told him I couldn’t believe what we were going through. “Why is this happening to me?” I said two or three times, catching my breath between sobs.
To which my father gently replied, “Katie, this isn’t happening to you. It is happening to Jay.”
NOW THAT JAY’S illness was public, a steady stream of supportive letters poured in from around the country. Some viewers sent literature about natural therapies—the magic of milk thistle, the beauty of bee propolis. Other notes overflowed with optimism bordering on na?veté: You should have every faith in the world that Jay is going to be just fine, a neighbor shared in neat print. Jacqueline Onassis’s nephew Anthony Radziwill wrote about his own metastasizing nightmare （which would kill him less than two years later）。 Jay’s reaction: “I don’t know why people think they have to take me through every detail of their treatment. I know they are well intended, but it doesn’t help me. I don’t want to be part of this club.”
His hair was falling out in clumps. My makeup artist Barbara Kelly’s father, a famous wigmaker whose creations were featured in a number of Broadway shows, made a piece for Jay that looked amazingly like his real hair （with a little less gray）。 Jay wore it for his TV appearances and even for a job interview at another network. He also recorded his daily caloric intake in a small leather notebook: Ensure—250 calories. Banana—80 calories. Yogurt—290 calories. It seemed like Jay had his eye on the future. But his cancer was on the march, surging northward; that summer, a scan revealed tumors in his lungs. The sword of Damocles was getting closer.
WE SPENT AS much time in Millbrook as possible. It’s where Jay could do the things he loved—go riding; plop Ellie on a pony at a nearby farm, hoping she’d one day share his equine passions; chase Carrie around on the rolling lawn behind the house. The three of them would sit on the sofa watching The Little Rascals, Jay’s favorite show from childhood, which he wanted to share with his girls. After they went to bed, we’d watch some of Jay’s favorite movies, like Gunga Din, all about bravery and battle; he knew the Rudyard Kipling poem by heart.
One muggy August day in Millbrook, I came the closest I ever would to acknowledging that this might not end how we desperately hoped. I was splashing around in the pool with Ellie; the way the late-afternoon sun filtered through the trees made me feel an almost spiritual connection to something bigger than us. Somehow I mustered the courage to say, “I just can’t imagine coming to this house if you’re not here.”