Hot summer nights when the air’s rank and smelly
Losing my lunch at the Carnegie Deli
Nightclubs where drag queens are treated like kings
These are a few of my favorite things…
Marc also wrote new lyrics for “I’ll Take Manhattan”：
I own Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, too
And yet I’m not a Jew
Who knew?
The crooner: Donald Trump. They rehearsed it on a gold-plated piano at his apartment in Trump Tower. “The Donald,” as he was called before he became “the president,” was a good sport. Believe it or not, back then, he was able to laugh at himself.
Years later, Lisa and I would again join forces, along with Hollywood heavyweights Sherry Lansing and Laura Ziskin, my college friend Kathleen Lobb, and several other type A women, to create Stand Up To Cancer. Our goal was to shift the cancer research paradigm—to get scientists to collaborate rather than compete. To date, we’ve raised over $600 million and our scientists have helped gain FDA approval for nine new cancer drugs. I don’t like to think about my obituary too often, but when I do, I hope the first line will be “Katie Couric was a tireless advocate for cancer awareness and research.”
49
Emily
POURING MY HEART and soul into cancer advocacy had a healing effect. It helped so much to realize I could turn my nightmarish familiarity with the disease into something positive—deploying the top-notch network of specialists I’d built, along with my media connections and my incredible friends and family. I’d never call it turning lemons into lemonade, but it definitely felt good. By now, Tom Werner had worn me down. He seemed gaga for me, and I gave in.
One time when I was visiting Tom, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was on the West Coast and scheduled an appearance on The Tonight Show. I loved being a guest. Debbie Vickers, Jay Leno’s longtime EP, was terrific; the writers were always great to work with; and the dressing rooms, complete with your name nicely lettered on the door, were stocked with fresh fruit and cheese plates and lots of snacks that I’d stuff in my purse for later.
After the segment, I was still high from the crazy energy of a live audience and the easy banter between Jay and me, which belied the acute stress of having to be on your toes every second, mind racing to find the wittiest possible comeback. Feeling like I hadn’t embarrassed myself, I bounced back to the greenroom where I knew Tom, Alan Berger, and NBC publicist Allison Gollust were waiting to whisk me off to dinner at Mr. Chow.
Normally I’d be greeted by a chorus of “That was great!” But instead, Allison looked at me in a way that let me know something terrible had happened.
“Your sister Emily called,” she said. “She needs to talk to you right away.”
I fished my phone out of my bag. “Emily, it’s me, what’s going on?”
Her voice was strangely calm. “Don’t worry, this isn’t about Mom or Dad.” She knew I was always anxious about my parents’ health. “It’s about me. I’ve been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It’s all over my liver.”
She said it again: “I have pancreatic cancer.”
I started to shake. This couldn’t be happening. Jay…now Emily…facing a ferocious kind of cancer. All over my liver. I knew from experience what that meant; it was almost certainly terminal. If I thought my crusading colon cancer work or the fact that I’d already been through cancer hell had immunized me, I was wrong.
Tom herded me to the car and we headed to Beverly Hills. I was practically catatonic at Mr. Chow, staring at the diamond pattern of the black-and-white floor tiles. Once again, I felt a jarring dissonance between the public, high-gloss side of my life and the feeling that my world was crumbling.
I KNEW EMILY’S NEWS would crush my parents. They’d felt Jay’s death so deeply, and he wasn’t even one of their own. For their first child to be diagnosed just a year and a half later, at 53…
By now I was well aware of the statistics, that one in two men and one in three women would be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. But for our family to be sucker-punched a second time so quickly—it felt profoundly unfair.
Emily and I looked alike. While she’d inherited our paternal grandmother’s tall, thin frame, and her face was more angular, with an aquiline nose, we both had our dad’s lively eyes that turned down at the corners and a wide, inverted-triangle smile that turned up at the corners. Both smiles were gummy—we were cursed with the same small teeth that must have afflicted some distant relative.