Confessions of a Park Avenue Plastic Surgeon

by Cap Lesesne

  “But we want you,” Joanna said.

  “Yes, we want you,” Theresa said.

  I held my ground.

  The next day I got a call from the father – at least, the sperm donor – of the girl.

  “They really want you,” he said.

  I told him it was best that I passed.

  America’s Sweetheart

  In the summer of 1999, Janice, an agent for TV personalities, came to see me about a growth on her face. After I removed it for a biopsy (it would turn out to be benign), she asked me if I was single. I was.

  “I have someone you should meet,” she said. “Katie Couric.”

  I nodded. “Who’s Katie Couric?”

  She smiled – waiting, I later realized, for me to smile at my obvious put-on.

  “You don’t know who Katie Couric is?” she said.

  “No.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “Who is she?”

  Janice stared at me sideways, as if making extra sure I wasn’t pulling her leg. When I say I don’t get out much, I mean it.

  “That’s so perfect,” she said, accepting my word finally. “She’s a TV news anchor.”

  “I don’t watch TV,” I said.

  Janice shook her head and chuckled. “That’s so perfect.”

  I scribbled Ms. Couric’s phone number on my prescription pad. A week later, with great hesitation, I called her at home. I know blind dates can work (though the odds are not good), but I wasn’t used to that kind of near anonymous setup and didn’t want to make a fool of myself.

  I shrugged it off. How much harm was there in getting together for a cup of coffee with the TV person? On the phone, I awkwardly introduced myself. With each sentence, though, I felt more comfortable, and a marvelous thing happened: What I’d expected to be a brief chat to set time and place for coffee turned into a two-hour conversation. We had mutual friends from the University of Virginia, where Katie had gone to college, and also in the media world. After twenty minutes I realized I was talking with the world’s most wonderful, easygoing conversationalist – which would not have surprised morning-TV-watching America, given what Katie has done so well for so many years. To me, though, it was a revelation. I wasn’t infatuated but was certainly curious.

  A few evenings later, I sat at a little bistro off Madison Avenue, getting stood up. Six thirty, our appointed time, came and went, then 6:45 and 7:00. At 7:15, tired of wasting my time and a little miffed, I finally left. Not three paces into my walk uptown, a black limousine pulled alongside me. The window rolled down. It was Katie. Nice timing. She apologized profusely for being late.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked, and I said I was. “Forget coffee,” she said. “Let’s go to my favorite restaurant.”

  She got out and we walked to Coco Pazzo, on Seventy-fourth and Madison. As soon as we entered, everyone, it seemed, came over to greet her. She was New York royalty. I’d been out with notable women before, but never someone this recognizable. We were given a quiet table for two. Katie didn’t bother to look at the menu. “What are you having?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’ve eaten dinner with my children.”

  Over (my) dinner, she told me, for the next hour and a half, about her kids, whom she obviously adored, and about her late husband, Jay, and his battle with colon cancer, which had ended a year and a half before. (After his death, Katie used the Today show to raise national awareness about colon cancer, even televising her own colonoscopy.) I liked listening to her talk. I couldn’t help but smile at the role reversal: As she told her stories and shared her thoughts, I was experiencing the exact opposite of what Katie Couric does all the time, when she asks the questions and listens to the responses. It was clear that she had not yet healed from the loss of her husband, and I think that my ability – any good physician’s ability – to provide a sympathetic ear was a balm to her.

  By the end of our hour-and-a-half meal, I had long ago forgotten her tardiness.

  After dinner, we walked down Madison Avenue for a block until I stuck out my hand to say good night. “Let’s walk a few blocks,” she said. We could not advance more than fifty feet without a fan recognizing her, or an acquaintance coming up to say hello. Each time they did, I retreated several steps. She was clearly comfortable with her fame, but I did not want to intrude on it. After walking six blocks, I again stuck out my hand to say good night. “I really should go,” I said.

  “Let’s walk a little more,” she said.

  I guess things were going well, though I wasn’t sure. I walked her to her building and stuck my hand out once more.

  “Aren’t you at least going to walk me up to my door? What’s wrong with you Princeton men? Even we Virginians know better than that.”

  Red-faced, I walked her upstairs and gave her a peck on the cheek.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of the date. The next day I called Janice to thank her for introducing us and told her I liked Katie. “Well, I think she likes you,” Janice said. Given all my supposed insight into the opposite sex, I should have understood that “I think she likes you” means “She likes you.” Instead, I just thought that, you know, she liked me.

  I called for a second date, this time dinner for both of us. After a day of performing surgery, I walked over to her place. She had just come from spending the afternoon with her kids. She and I walked into the early twilight of a New York summer evening, one of those magical times where the city almost feels as if it’s flaunting how romantic it can be.

  “Let’s walk up the avenue and see which restaurants look good,” I said.

  As we strolled, Katie and I talked, in a jokey way, about how this could really work out between us. She had to be up for work at five; so did I. She didn’t really drink; neither did I. Professionally, we seemed equally driven. The conversation was, as it apparently couldn’t but be with her, delightful and fast-paced and constant. One indication to me that I liked her was that my PSR was turned off. My first impression of her, physically, was that she was extremely cute but a little shorter than my type. And like any plastic surgeon – like any man – I started to scan her face for the quick readout. But none came. No “bone structure this” or “jawline that.” My radar simply stayed off. And that’s not meant to be a back-handed compliment.

  We passed a charming French restaurant on Eighty-ninth Street but decided it was too beautiful an evening to be inside; it was a night made for sipping wine in Central Park. I poked my head inside the restaurant and told the maître d’ what I wanted – and he told me, with regrets, that it’s against the law in New York City for a restaurant to sell a bottle of wine to take out. I tried to coerce him but he wouldn’t budge. I pulled out the one trump card that always works with the French: French. I pleaded with him in his language. C’est notre deuxième rendez-vous, monsieur, I told him. (This is our second date.) Regardez, comment elle est jolie! (Look how pretty she is!) N’est-elle pas adorable? (Isn’t she adorable?) Katie had no idea what I was saying or at least she smiled graciously and played dumb, but the maître d’ finally cracked. Feeling sorry for me – and appreciating the Gallic lengths to which I was going for romance – he sold me a bottle of his best cabernet and two glasses to go, and Katie and I headed for the park. We never reached it. We commandeered a bench on Sixty-eighth Street, just outside the park, opened our bottle, and drank wine and talked for hours as the world passed by. This time, no one approached Katie. I don’t know if it was dumb luck, or if everyone was in his own world on this gorgeous night, or if she and I were just in our own cocoon. But it was simplicity itself. At the end of the evening, I walked her all the way back to her place – ever the good Princeton man this time – and kissed her on the cheek.

  I was warming to her. It had been an inarguably great beginning to what might become a wonderful relationship.

  While I found my romantic life improving, professionally I found myself facing one of the greatest challenges of my car
eer, a somewhat ironic one at the moment: I was determined to help one of my patients to get just one date.

  Natalie, fifteen years old, was wheelchair-bound from growth abnormalities in her spine. She also suffered from agenesis of the mandible – meaning she’d been born without a lower jaw. The condition caused her to drool and her speech to be garbled. Before I saw her, she had undergone several operations to reconstruct the jaw with “nonvascularized” bone grafts. This means that blood vessels were not directly attached to the new bone. Without the blood vessels, these grafts reabsorbed over time. Scar tissue developed in the area and she would require a more major, cutting-edge procedure and treatment. The plan was to harvest a free fibular graft from her leg and attach it to the blood vessels (an artery and two veins) in her neck. This would create a lower jaw with its own blood supply. With the better blood flow, the bone would survive, grow, and one day allow artificial teeth to be implanted. Natalie couldn’t really smile, but her eyes could. She was excited about the operation. Her new jaw would not only give her a prettier face, but would allow her to eat more normally.

  For Natalie, though, that was secondary. Like any teenager, she wanted to go out on a date. She wanted to go on a date more than anything else in the world. I promised her that if she didn’t get a date in six months, I’d help her find one. Her eyes lit up. I told her we were embarking together on this journey to reconstruct her jaw.

  The operation involved certain techniques I no longer did frequently. I recommended her to a team at New York University that specialized in bone-graft microsurgery. They performed the operation, after which Natalie was sent back to the children’s hospital in Westchester, where she could heal and rehabilitate.

  At least, that was the idea.

  In the late summer and early fall, Katie and I went on several more dates, usually in quiet restaurants, sitting away from the crowd. She seemed happy to take things slow, keep it low-key. I respected the special and delicate position her celebrity often put her in. We spoke on the phone nearly every day.

  One afternoon, she suggested we go that night to Elaine’s, the renowned Upper East Side establishment. I agreed, but wondered aloud at the wisdom of frequenting such a public place. To top it off, that evening, before I met Katie, I had the gathering sense that I was being followed. By whom, I couldn’t tell. But twice I saw a gray car gliding slowly down the street, a proper distance behind me. (New York cars not in traffic never move that slowly unless they’re trolling for a parking space.) At first, I suspected it might be someone associated with the politician from Istanbul on whom I’d just done a necklift. She was spending the night, postoperatively, at the Waldorf. Giselle, one of my two private-duty nurses, was going to spend the night in the hotel suite caring for her. As Giselle and I took a cab down to the Waldorf, I shared my suspicion that we were being tailed.

  “You’re paranoid,” she told me.

  After stopping in at the suite to check on my patient, I left Giselle to meet Katie at her building – and now I was more convinced than ever that I was being followed, this time on foot. Leaving the Waldorf, I walked over to Lexington Avenue. At one point, I turned, and a man about thirty yards behind me stopped, looked momentarily fitful, then disappeared randomly into the nearest store.

  But why would he be working for my Turkish patient, tucked away in her hotel room and healing nicely? What was the point in tailing me after the operation? Maybe it was an agent for another powerful patient-to-be, making sure I was professional and discreet, not a drinker and a weirdo? Before their employer committed to come see me? It wouldn’t be the first time. I had clients whose security people had me ship them my Botox and collagen, in an Igloo container, in a 727 provided by them, so that their own chemists could make sure I wasn’t going to poison their majesties.

  I caught a taxi back downtown, still haunted by the feeling that someone was watching – so much so that I had the cabdriver drop me off blocks from Katie’s building. I walked this way and that to make sure I had rid myself of any followers, not quite serpentining.

  At Katie’s building, I again asked her about the wisdom of going to Elaine’s. “Are you sure you want this?” I said. “Once we set foot in there, word gets around.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  At Elaine’s, we met friends of Katie’s and had a wonderful evening.

  Walking back to her place afterward, Katie said, “Aren’t you going to put your arm around me?”

  This time I did so without hesitation. It was funny to me that she was much more comfortable with our being publicly affectionate than I was. After dropping her off at her place, I was about to exit the lobby … when something told me not to. Instead, I went out the side entrance.

  A few days later, Katie called me. A security guy at NBC News, she said, had received an anonymous call saying, “Cap Lesesne is trouble. Katie Couric should watch out.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked me.

  I told her I had no idea.

  “You don’t know anything about this?” she said.

  “Not a clue,” I said, flummoxed and disturbed. “I have no idea.”

  She was completely understanding. “Maybe we need to be a little more careful when we go out,” she said. I agreed; that had been my stance from the beginning.

  A few days later, after nine hours of surgery up in my Westchester office, I walked exhaustedly down the hall toward the exit, eager for dinner and a night’s sleep. As I stepped outside, an explosion of flashbulbs went off, blinding me.

  Dazed, I looked around. Five photographers stood in a small circle in the parking lot in front of me. “Hey, Doc, look here!” one of them yelled, and reflexively I did. More flashbulbs exploded. Before I could think to say anything, they were in their cars and speeding away.

  Raising Eyebrows

  It’s impossible to say how a person will act right before an operation. You can make an educated guess, based on how they’ve behaved to that point – Were they insecure during the consultation? How often did they call the office in the days leading up to the surgery? How many times did they ask the same question? etc. – but even there you can just as well be dead wrong. Women tend to ask more questions than men, and waffle about what they want done – but that’s before they’ve decided to go through with it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the two crucible surgical moments: the one right before the patient is put under, and the one, post-op, when there’s actual physical discomfort and pain to deal with. It’s in those two moments that you find out a lot about people.

  Few patients had hounded me more before an operation than Gerald, a fifty-four-year-old investment banker who had come in to discuss a browlift and an eye lift. They are two of the simpler procedures I do, and nothing about Gerald’s situation made them anything other than ordinary (he had a full head of hair). But he called my staff at least twice and often three times a day, every day, for the week leading up to the surgery, and at least half those times insisted on being put through to me. He asked questions (fine, of course), then different questions (fine), then repeats of the earlier questions (still fine), then repeats of the earlier questions again (not so fine), then repeats of repeats of the later questions (enough). I was certain that right before the surgery, and then in the hours and days following, Gerald would be a pain in the ass.

  But the morning of the operation, he was quiet – not frightened or morbid, just cool, ready, and confident.

  I don’t buy it, I thought. Then I thought, Ha! He’s saving all the complaining for afterwards!

  When the surgery was over, Gerald remained in the recovery room for ninety minutes, a standard post-op period for his procedures. No complaints, nothing. Giselle told him he could get dressed.

  As he walked out the door with his daughter, he waved at me.

  “We’ll hear from him in about sixty seconds,” I predicted to Tanya and Giselle, looking at my watch.

  I heard from him once more. Three weeks later. T
o thank me.

  That was it.

  Gerald was the lesson I needed just then. To remind me that life is full of surprises.

  A week later, a photograph of me – tired, my hair a mess from wearing a surgeon’s hat all day – appeared in all the tabloids. The Globe, the Enquirer, the Star, and the New York Post all referred to me as “Katie Couric’s boyfriend,” her first since the death of her husband. Rush Limbaugh noted the liaison on his radio show. Friends and patients called to chide me for looking so awful in the photograph. “Wow,” one of them said. “Katie’s really scraping the barrel.”

  I called Katie with a chagrined apology. “I’m sorry you’re going out with such an unkempt dork.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, but her voice was laced with more than a little concern.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “There may be other things to worry about.”

  “Like what?” I asked dumbly.

  Katie told me she’d been informed by a source that my ex-wife, along with her previous ex-husband (#2), had spoken to the Globe about me. They were going to report that she said I had abused her.

  “What?” I said, incredulous.

  Katie wanted my side of the story.

  “It’s shameful,” I said. “What my ex-wife and, or, her ex-husband have done is shameful.”

  I explained to Katie how, three years before, when things were particularly sour between Elsie and me, we’d gotten into a fierce argument. (In retrospect, we’d argued too frequently for our marriage ever to have had a chance.) I described to Katie how Elsie had thrown a liquor bottle at me. How I’d thrown her out of the house – actually, grabbed her and forcefully led her out – not just to save myself from getting conked in the head but to defuse the situation and keep her from trouble. How I’d been the one to call the police. But that because I had physically removed her the way I did, I was guilty of third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, and I’d spent a night in jail. How the charges had been dropped by the DA and my ex-wife.