by Cap Lesesne
End of story, I told Katie.
I’d been divorced for two years, separated for a year before that, but my ex-wife, along with another of her ex-husbands, had sniffed out that I was dating America’s Sweetheart and must have been out for revenge. Or maybe just cash.
I did not know how to proceed, nor did Katie. Mostly, I was stunned. We made a halfhearted promise to talk later.
At four thirty that afternoon the phone in my office rang. “Dr. Lesesne?” a man asked.
“Yes?” I said.
“I’m from the Globe, and we’re going to run a story that you were abusive to your ex-wife, and if we don’t have a response from you by eleven tomorrow morning, we’re running the story as is.”
My first instinct – anyone’s – was to tell him to go screw himself. But I kept calm. I got off the phone and called my lawyer to tell him what had happened. Given the facts – that I had been arrested, despite all the extenuating circumstances – my attorney said there was little I could do about it.
“Little?” I asked. “Or nothing?”
“Nothing,” he conceded. They could pretty much spin it all they wanted, he said.
They did.
KATIE’S BOYFRIEND’S DARK SECRET PAST! shrieked the Globe headline. On the front page.
The story was cleverly worded to keep them just this side of libel, while sounding as provocative as could be, and doing maximum damage to me.
The following day I talked with Katie. I again explained the situation, in fine detail, and she was understanding. But she was also concerned. She had children. She was alone, still vulnerable from the loss of her husband. She was in the middle of contract negotiations with NBC.
I was more concerned. My reputation and livelihood were on the line.
By the next day, my office started getting the calls.
Cancellation. Postponement.
Reschedulings.
In the proverbial blink of an eye, my greatest love and passion – my surgical career, which I’d worked hundred-plus-hour weeks for two decades to build – was officially in free fall.
A first-time consultation – a lawyer and marathon runner named Sylvie – had miraculously not canceled her appointment to see me, and I was quietly grateful. I wondered if the Globe story had escaped her notice, or if she had seen it and didn’t care. I wasn’t about to quiz her. She had a mild case of saddlebags that she wanted removed, fast.
Sure, I can do that, Sylvie, totally routine, we just lipo the fat from your outer legs, you’ll look great … but first a question: Have you not been inside a supermarket the past twenty four hours?
“When would you like to schedule that?” I asked, choosing not to point out, either, that my operating schedule in the upcoming days and weeks had suddenly become quite free.
Are you okay having me operate on you, Sylvie, what with the tabloid press and all? Or do you believe they’ve taken liberties with the truth?
“Well, I …,” she said, and now she looked down at her hands. I could see she was blushing.
Oh no. Here it comes. Brace yourself, Lesesne.
“I just started dating someone…,” Sylvie said, trying again. She looked me straight in the eye.
“Okay,” I said.
“Well, once you do the operation,” said Sylvie, “… how long will it be before he can put his hands on me?”
I wanted to hug her.
“Three days,” I told her, and we scheduled her for that Tuesday, so they’d have the weekend.
Two days after the Globe story appeared, my office phone rang. This time, it was the New York Post – and they weren’t calling to sell me a subscription.
“On Friday we’re going to run a story about you and the abuse charge,” they told me. The same garbage the Globe ran, nothing new. “And,” they told me, “we’re going to put you on the front page.”
Again, I desperately wanted to yell “Bastard!” But I held my tongue. Again I called my lawyer, to let him deal with it. Again, he said there wasn’t much to be done.
After I hung up with him, I walked out to my waiting room, shaken. It was empty. Tanya, my office manager, was wrapping up a phone call with yet another patient who wanted to reschedule.
Tanya looked up at me, her eyes glistening with tears. “Dr. Lesesne, will we have a job next week?”
I was in something approaching shock. “We’ll get through this,” I said, summoning my training as a doctor to stay calm, be rational, not panic. “Worse things have happened, Tanya. Whatever does happen, I guarantee your salary, Deanna’s, and Giselle’s for the next six months. We’ll get through it.”
It sounded nice, and I thought I believed what I said … but it wasn’t going to stop Friday from coming. The Post hit the newsstands. The front page? A picture of me under the headline KATIE’S BOYFRIEND SHOCKER.
Charming. I thought of my parents back in Michigan. Of my grandmother. Not that I needed to explain anything to them; they knew the details, the backstory. But still.
My attorney informed me, with regret, that we had to let the story run its course. Just ride it out, he said.
Easy for you to say, I thought. As soon as we hang up the phone, only one of us can continue his day below the tabloid radar.
If they were going to cloak the incident between my ex-wife and me in sinister, leading language that always stopped short of libel, my lawyer continued, then there was nothing I could really do to fight it.
So this is why noncelebrities have PR agents! I considered hiring one that very afternoon, but the damage was done.
There were more cancellations. One surgery candidate called to assure Tanya that she would most certainly be going through with her face-lift but merely wanted to “wait until Dr. Lesesne is at a more stable stage in his life.”
My relationship with Katie was noticeably cooling. I was growing remote, and she hardly seemed in it for the long haul. I couldn’t tell how much of the distance was the result of the bad press, how much the natural evolution of our relationship. If nothing else, at least Howard Stern was on my side: While I was driving to Westchester, I heard him wonder aloud on his radio show why I was being slammed when the charges were dismissed and all that the tabloids had to go on were my wife’s misleading allegations, nothing more. He told Robin to get me on the air.
“Get that Italian Dr. Luh-sain-ee on here to defend himself!” he implored her.
More than ever, the operating room was my sanctuary. I’d remembered reading about how when Michael Jordan was going through especially hard times – after the murder of his father, in particular, but also just the constant, everyday demands he faced as a walking, talking legend (not that I’m comparing myself to him) – he loved playing basketball more than ever. The moment he stepped over the line and onto the court, no one could get to him. Not media, not agents, not lawyers or family or friends or hangers-on or strangers. It was just him, the players, the refs, the ball, the basket, the job to do, the confidence that he would get it done.
I understood. I had always loved doing surgery; on those rare occasions when I was sufficiently ill that I had to postpone a surgery, I was irritated less from being under the weather and far more because I was deprived of doing my favorite thing in the world. But I had never looked so forward to doing surgery as I did during my tabloid hell. In the OR it was just me, the patient, my staff, the room, the objective. It’s pull was so strong that I was reminded of a breast reduction I’d assisted on in med school. Dr. Nicholas Georgiade, chief of plastic surgery at Duke, never lost his way. So when he paused for several seconds midoperation, we all noticed. Behind his mask he had turned clammy and gray. “Dr. G, are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, and continued to operate, doing his usual stellar job. When the surgery was over, he walked down the hall and checked himself into a bed. During the operation, he had suffered a massive heart attack.
Now, during these difficult months, I could still concentrate as well in the OR as when my mind had been l
ess burdened by outside things. I concentrated even better, in fact, as focused as the point of my scalpel. I craved getting immersed in the details of the operation. The measuring, the marking, the incisions, the dissecting, the shaping, the suturing…
When I wasn’t in the OR, I worked. I prepared lectures that for years I hadn’t found time to do. I read more professional texts and medical journals than usual.
Anything but the newspapers.
It was bad news. Very bad.
For almost six weeks since her operation, Natalie – the fifteen-year-old, wheelchair-bound girl who’d been born without a lower jaw – had been rehabilitating nicely from her jaw surgery, at Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Westchester, in anticipation of her new life and her first-ever date. But one day on my rounds, I noticed she had saliva coming out below her jawline, dripping down her neck. I recommended that she be transferred back to NYU, where they would have to operate again.
She was transported down to the hospital. I figured she’d be there for a while, then sent back up to Westchester for an uncomplicated recovery.
A few days later, after spending the morning in the Cornell Medical School library researching a lecture I would be giving to residents on analyzing the nose, I took a cab to NYU for a “morbidity/mortality” conference, a monthly meeting in which doctors review recent cases, complications, even deaths in the hospital.
The doctor began his presentation. “We have one service mortality. Female, fifteen, suffering from both agenesis of the mandible and…”
I didn’t hear the rest of it. I felt short of breath. After blinking a few times, I looked across the room and saw the microsurgeon who had performed Natalie’s surgery. He had tears in his eyes.
It turned out that, unknown to any of us, when I discovered Natalie had saliva below her jawline, she had developed a “fistula” – an abnormal connection – in her neck, where the incisions met. Saliva was draining, inside her, from her mouth into the left side of her neck, and the digestive enzymes in her saliva were eroding her carotid artery. It was impossible to tell that just by looking at her. She had no redness, no swelling; her skin looked normal. The urgency was not apparent. When she had arrived at the hospital in New York, they were minutes away from getting her to the OR when the nurse came to her room to find her in a pool of blood.
Her carotid had blown.
She was dead within a minute.
Natalie would never get to go on that date.
I was furious at my ex-wife, of course, her ex-husband, the Globe, the New York Post, the Enquirer, anything tabloid-sized … but besides anger I felt disappointment. I was sorry I’d brought any pain or embarrassment to my family, even though I knew I’d done nothing wrong, even though I knew they knew I’d done nothing wrong.
I suspected it would take time before the specter of the tabloid scandal would fade from the minds of some of those in my circle of clients who’d recommended me to friends. We are so entrusted – as doctors, as surgeons, as listeners – that it can seem a near miracle that people we’ve worked on will tell their loved ones that, yes, they, too, should put their hopes and dreams in our hands, under our scalpels.
The quality of my work needed to be unimpeachable, my manner needed to be soothing and confident and straightforward, and my standing in the community needed to be impeccable.
That last part would need some rehabilitating, no matter how blameless I was.
I was hardly the only plastic surgeon who walked, and occasionally stumbled, along this delicate line.
Through the grapevine, I heard, then subsequently read in the papers, about not one but two high-profile plastic surgeons, in other cities, who shot themselves in the same month. I heard (but didn’t read) about not one but two more surgeons, both with practices within blocks of mine, entering psychiatric wards. In each of those four cases, I didn’t know how much of a role the pressure of being an alpha surgeon had played in their downfall, but I would have been surprised to learn that it didn’t play a major one, the primary one. While my tabloid debacle had had nothing to do with my work itself, I couldn’t help but start to feel the stress of what I did. Usually it didn’t get to me; now, it was starting to.
During the day, staff at you all the time.
At night, friends coming over in restaurants, with wide, sympathetic eyes.
I’m so sorry.
Are you okay to operate?
What a tough break, Cap. You hang in there, okay?
During the day, patients wanting you to change their appearance, to make things better.
During the night, nothing. Home, reading medical journals.
There is no room whatsoever for a mistake. Personal or professional mistakes in this field do not get hidden, at least not for long. You can never be lost.
You have a greater tendency to take your life.
I never came close to harboring the dark thoughts that some of my more troubled colleagues did. Tough as it was during this period, I told myself to do one of the things I felt I was born to do.
Put on a good face.
For all the turmoil I experienced in the weeks and months following the tabloid stories (the Post would honor me by putting me on their front page twice more), something very, very good came of it. Honestly. Because, cliché as it sounds, it’s times like those when you get to see who your real friends are.
Mary McFadden, the dress designer, called with her sympathy and support and offered to help me in any way. My longtime friend Jeanette Longoria phoned with the same message. Diego, the Venezuelan oil magnate who had once threatened to kill me because he thought I had turned his penis black, called with uplifting words, including a standing offer to send a couple of “friends” to fly up to New York and break the necks of anyone I might deem deserving.
“I appreciate that, Diego, but it’s not necessary,” I said.
“Not necessary, but maybe it makes you feel better?”
“Thank you anyway, Diego.”
One Saturday, Barbara Merrill, one of New York’s most renowned socialites and the wife of a once-embattled investment banking legend, both of whom I’d met through my friend Jeanette, telephoned. “Cap,” she said, “David and I are so sorry to read about what happened to you. As you know, several years ago David was also a victim of the press. If there’s anything we can do, please let us know.” I told her I’d never been so lonely. She asked me to join them for a reception at her home a few evenings later honoring Valentino, the dress designer.
As I entered Barbara and David’s apartment, I was extremely nervous, nearly shaking. I was unsure how people would react to me. While I’d always been so at ease at Manhattan dinner parties, this time I was scared. But Barbara took me by the hand and walked me around the dining room to introduce me to all of her guests. Before each one she said, “This is my friend Cap Lesesne. He’s a great plastic surgeon.”
I’ll never forget that. David came over and gave me advice like a father. No words can say how much this support meant to me, when it seemed that my “friends” were running the other way. I’d heard that the Merrills had done this kind of thing for other people, just as they’d done for me.
Good can triumph, as any optimist will tell you. But silver linings had been difficult to come by in the previous weeks. Fortunately, my medical training (and maybe a dollop of Sunday-school education) came through once again. The experience of having seen people die, especially children, of having seen people suffer through chronic diseases, reminded me that whatever I was going through now was, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Just as I’d told Tanya, when I was trying to convince myself at least as much as her.
The terrible press was a body blow. The firestorm of cancellations and postponements continued. Katie and I saw each other perhaps four more times, but the mood had shifted, never to return. Just before Thanksgiving, I suggested we meet for a meal. It was awkward from the first moment. Afterward, she said she needed to get milk for her children and we walked to a supermark
et on Lexington. When we got outside, she turned to me. A chill was in the air.
“I think we should cool things,” she said. “You’ve got enough baggage to get yourself to Puerto Rico.”
I paused before responding. I looked at her. She could see my brain racing to pop out a sarcastic remark. But I declined. A Princeton man is always polite.
“Maybe I’ll go to the Bahamas afterward,” I said.
I shook her hand and walked away.
Sounds of Music
The nasty press had ceased. Since Katie and I were no longer an item, it would have been truly cruel (not to mention unusual) for the tabloids to pursue the story beyond my fifteen minutes of notoriety.
Even though my practice was starting to return, I was eager to get away, far away, even for a couple of days. I have always enjoyed professional conferences, so I decided to attend one held that year in London. Anne, a well-to-do patient, now a friend, graciously offered me the use of her London town house for my overnight.
I took a late flight, picked up a cab at Heathrow, and headed right for the house. It was in a beautiful section of the city, near the American embassy. The cabbie dropped me off in front of a lovely limestone town house near Grosvenor Square. The door was open. I could see all the way through the garden floor to the backyard.
I knocked loudly. I entered, put down my bag in the front hall, and called out hello. Hearing a voice somewhere in the back, I walked toward the back of the house, where I could see a classic English garden.
I spied a woman – maybe sixty-two, in a nearly see-through negligee – standing in the garden, in profile, with binoculars pressed to her eyes, staring intently at something, moving her head slightly back and forth, back and forth. It was not Anne, my friend and the owner of the house. I’d never seen this woman before. She was oblivious to my presence.