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

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 atthe 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 softlythat 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