Angel on a Leash
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PHOTO: WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB/MARY BLOOM
American heroes at Walter Reed spend some time with Uno.
PHOTO: MARY BLOOM
Three young heroes compare notes at the House.
PHOTO: MARY BLOOM
Andrea and Uno at the House, where he was a regular visitor.
PHOTO: RONALD MCDONALD HOUSE CHARITIES OF EASTERN WISCONSIN
Uno made things happen at the Milwaukee House.
PHOTO: MARY BLOOM
Marine hero Josh Bleill joined Uno on a visit to the House.
PHOTO: MARY BLOOM
Uno and Laura at the House.
PHOTO: ROB GERITY
David and John O’Hurley have been the on-air cohosts of the National Dog Show presented by Purina on NBC since its inception in 2002.
PHOTO: CHESTER MAH
Transfiguration Church and School is an important part of David’s life.
PHOTO FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
Playing a dog show judge on Sex and the City wasn’t too much of a reach for David; the win went to Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and her dog, Elizabeth Taylor.
PHOTO FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
David’s dad, Jerry, was a P-38 photo recon pilot in the South Pacific during World War II.
PHOTO FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
David at about five years old on a fishing trip with Dad.
PHOTO: EUGENE REGISTER-GUARD
David’s dad on the field as the Oregon football coach, shown here with one of his favorites, Ken Woody.
PHOTO FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
David’s brother, Terry Frei; his dad, Jerry; and David in Eugene, Oregon, in the early 1990s for a reunion of Jerry’s Oregon teams in his honor.
PHOTO: JOHN TABER
Artist Susan Bahary, David, and Bill Wynne.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WILLIAM WYNNE
War hero Smoky–“Yorkie Doodle Dandy.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF WILLIAM WYNNE
The memorial in Cleveland Metroparks by Susan Bahary is one of six memorials nationwide.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WILLIAM WYNNE
Smoky just may have been the first recognized therapy dog.
PHOTO: MARK SELIGER
Family portrait: Belle, Teigh, and Angel (FRONT) with Cherilyn and David.
PHOTO: DAVID FREI
With three dogs in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, it’s a good thing that they love each other!
PHOTO: DAVID FREI
Angel was especially protective of Teigh in his final days.
PHOTO: DAVID FREI
Grace and Angel at Teigh and Belle’s gravesite.
PHOTO: MARY BLOOM
David the dog walker on the streets of New York with Angel (LEFT), Uno (FRONT), Teigh (BACK), and Belle (RIGHT).
PHOTO FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
David and Grace one morning at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Elizabeth Taylor and Me
Occasionally, someone recognizes me in public from my television work (“Hey, you’re the dog guy” or “Hey, Westminster!”). That’s not a big deal to me, but it can be fun. I’ve been doing Westminster on TV since 1990, after all, and the National Dog Show since 2002. There are millions of people in the viewing audiences, so I hope that I come across some people out there who have seen the shows.
There was one time in particular when I was very pleasantly and genuinely surprised by the recognition. In late 2003, the people at Sex and the City asked me if I would be interested in playing a role in one of their final episodes. This was very exciting for me; I loved the show and had watched it from its beginning in 1998. As the series was coming to an end, the world was watching.
They wanted me for the role of a dog show judge, so it wasn’t a huge stretch. I read for the role and answered their questions about how I thought the scene should play out so that it would be (mostly) technically correct from a dog show standpoint while still allowing for some creative license. I guess they liked what I had to offer, because I got the part. They also accepted my suggestion to use my friend Wayne Ferguson, president of the Kennel Club of Philadelphia/National Dog Show, to play the dog show PA announcer. I felt great about how they involved me, and I was excited to be a part of it.
We were scheduled to shoot the dog show, the so-called “Astor Classic,” one evening on location in New York City at the world-famous Roseland Ballroom. They brought in a bunch of show dogs and handlers from the tri-state area, many of whom were friends of mine. The way everything was set up, the grooming area and the ring, I really did feel like I was at a dog show. Well, a small dog show, anyway.
I had my own little dressing room in one of the production trucks; that was a kick, and I was loving the whole experience. When my makeup call came, I headed for the makeup truck. It was a couple of hours before our scene was to be shot, but I imagined that they were getting us lesser players out of the way so they could make their four female stars even more beautiful.
They put me in a chair at the far end of the truck, probably where they put all the rookies. As they were working on me, I saw a few people come in and sit down, but I couldn’t really tell who they were. I chatted with a man and a woman in the chairs next to me; they had been in the show in small roles before (“no small roles, only small actors”), and they told me how much they loved the crew and the stars in personal, stand-around-and-visit situations.
When they were through making me up, I got up to leave and had to walk behind all of the other chairs to get to the door. Just as I got to the door, I glanced to the left and saw Sarah Jessica Parker sitting there, looking back at me in the mirror. I smiled, and before I could say anything, she said, “Hey, I know who you are; you’re the dog guy! I watch you on TV all the time!”
OK, take me now, God; I have everything I’ve ever needed in my life. I have been watching Sex and the City since its very first episode and considered myself a faithful fan, especially of Sarah Jessica, so to hear that from her, well …
I laughed and replied, “Thanks. I watch you all the time, too, Sarah Jessica. I am a great fan. Thanks for having me here tonight.” I spent the rest of the night thinking of all of the things I could have possibly said that would have been wittier and more charming.
In the show, I was judging the Toy Group, which included Charlotte (played by Kristin Davis) and her Cavalier, named Elizabeth Taylor, competing against a number of my friends. And here’s a surprise: Charlotte and Elizabeth Taylor were my winners. Admittedly, I hardly looked at her dog or any of the other dogs. That’s the way it was written, and I didn’t have any trouble following the script. Here is the way that the episode synopsis from HBO describes it: “Elizabeth takes first prize, largely due to the judge being sweet on Charlotte.” My friend John Mandeville, the columnist for Dog News, used the word lecherous in his description, but I thought that was a little strong. Smitten … that would be OK.
We shot the end of the scene the next night. I brought Belle to the shoot that second night, which brought me into a long conversation with Sarah Jessica, who told me that she grew up with a Brittany as her family dog and loved the breed. I was grateful to have this “do-over” from my previous night’s meeting with Sarah Jessica in the makeup truck, and I thought that I was witty and charming this time. She was as gracious and elegant and beautiful in person as she is on television and in movies.
The episode (“The Cold War,” episode #91) aired on February 1, 2004, and was one of the final episodes of the series. I had a couple of close-ups, and my name was in the credits for one of the hottest shows on television—and I got a paycheck. I could go through life like this. As a bonus, all these years later, I still get an occasional residual check for a couple of dollars each time the show airs somewhere, along with phone calls and emails from friends (“Hey, your Sex and the City episode is on right now”), which are nice reminders of the entire experience.
Kristin Davis was a sweetheart, too. We had a lot of “hurry-up-and-wait”
time between takes of our scene, and I felt like I was hanging out with a friend. A couple of years later, in 2006, Kristin came to Westminster to plug the release of her new movie, The Shaggy Dog, and we had a little visit on the air, reminiscing about her dog show handling experience and my judging in Sex and the City.
The winners always like the judges, of course. And even though her win was scripted, I think Kristin was caught up in all of the Westminster hoopla and felt like she and Elizabeth Taylor had gotten a big win under me. She fit right in at Westminster.
My Character-Rich World
If I had a dollar for every time someone asks me about the movie Best in Show, I could retire and live on that income (along with my hefty residuals from Sex and the City, of course). Well, that may be a bit of an overstatement, especially since my residuals are down to about $2, but I could still get a lot of good dinners.
My stock answer is that I love Best in Show, I love the fact that the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is a big enough part of the American landscape that it could be the subject of this brilliant satire, and I love that Best in Show lives on and on, just like Westminster itself. This movie came out in 2000, and I still get asked about it every year when I go on the publicity circuits for both Westminster and the National Dog Show.
Yes, there are a lot of things in the movie that could well happen in the dog show world in which I live, where we have a character-rich environment. I tell everyone that I do in fact know many of the characters in the movie and that my wife has indeed yelled at me when our “Busy Bee”-equivalent toy was not in the dog’s show bag (“You go back and get her Busy Bee!”).
The movie is as quote-rich as it is character-rich. I liked the yuppie couple the most, played by Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock, and the talk of their meeting at Starbucks and the quote about being lucky to have been “raised amongst catalogs” were perfect. I still laugh when I think about Harlan Pepper’s (Christopher Guest) nut-naming, Buck Laughlin’s (Fred Willard) TV color commentary, just about anything from Gerry Fleck (Eugene Levy), and really anything else from the movie, for that matter. The advice given by one of Harlan’s friends as Harlan and his Bloodhound set out for Philadelphia: “If you get tired, pull over; if you get hungry, eat some-thing”—still gets quoted on any road trip I am a part of.
This movie is a big part of my life—not just because I walk around quoting the dialogue. It’s because it brought about the creation of the National Dog Show on NBC.
It all began when Jon Miller watched the movie and found it to be hysterical. Jon is the creative genius who is now president of programming for NBC Sports and VERSUS sports network. He’s the guy who came up with the hugely successful National Hockey League Winter Classic, the outdoor hockey game played on New Year’s Day and broadcast on NBC. He oversees 8,000 hours of sports programming, including every big sporting event you can think of, from the Kentucky Derby to Wimbledon to Notre Dame football to the Dew Action Sports Tour and more.
He started thinking about how entertaining the dog show concept was and what he might be able to do with it. He found Wayne Ferguson, show chairman for the Kennel Club of Philadelphia. Wayne is my best friend in dogs, so I am biased, but anyone can tell you that he is an astute businessman, too. He created Cherrybrook Pet Supplies years ago from the trunk of his car and built it into a multimillion-dollar operation.
So these two smart guys got together, and the concept was underway. Jon found a sponsor, Purina, and now all they had to do was to get the show on TV in a good time slot.
NBC had walked away from broadcasting NFL football games on Thanksgiving a few years prior and had been showing movies, such as It’s A Wonderful Life, after the popular Macy’s parade, but the movies weren’t getting much in the way of ratings in spite of a handoff from the highly rated telecast of the parade. From a business standpoint, in spite of huge ratings, the telecast of the parade was not an advertising bonanza, as retailers were unable to purchase advertising for the parade telecast because it was a Macy’s exclusive. Low-rated movies that followed were not the answer for advertisers.
So Jon took a swing for the fences, asking for the time slot following the parade. His NBC bosses bought into it. The National Dog Show presented by Purina was born. Wayne told Jon that he wanted me for the television commentary, and Jon liked that idea. I asked Chet Collier if he would approve of my doing the commentary for another dog show. Chet thought it would be a good way to promote the sport and that it would have great value for promoting the Westminster telecast as well, so he gave it his blessing.
At the same time, the NBC guys went directly to John O’Hurley (Seinfeld’s Mr. Peterman) to see if he would host the show. They had gotten to know John well from the American Century celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe every summer and thought that he would be a good host. They landed him, which was a huge catch for the show.
Sears, Target, and Best Buy signed on. And for that first dog show on Thanksgiving Day in 2002, some 20 million viewers came along for the ride, staying tuned to NBC following the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
John and I had a great time, our numbers were huge, and everyone seemed happy. Not long after this, General Electric (which owned NBC) bought USA Network, bringing my two dog-show-carrying networks together. I couldn’t have drawn it up any better.
John has been a great partner over the years. Thanksgiving 2011 will mark the tenth year of the show and our tenth year together. That’s a long partnership; compare it with the Westminster telecast on USA, where I have had eight partners in twenty-two years (one of them, Joe Garagiola, for nine of those years). In spite of how that may sound, I’m really not that hard to work with!
John is an entertainer and is perfect for our two-hour, produced-for-television, family show. I’ll be sitting there, and I swear that I hear Mr. Peterman speaking. I find myself laughing out loud at lines like these:
“A sheep has crashed the competition!” (Bedlington Terrier)
“Oh Whoopi, we found your hair!” (Puli)
“Here’s one that we usually see at the other end of a Frisbee.” (Border Collie)
“This dog looks like it incapacitates its quarry by saliva.” (Bloodhound)
Besides that great wit, he is smart and always has good questions for me, asking what he knows would be of interest to the people watching at home. The greatest pressure he brings me is his status as one of the world’s sexiest men (according to People magazine). He’s tall (6'3"), has great hair and a great voice, and is a Dancing with the Stars champion. It’s tough standing next to him; I’m always worrying what that makes me look like!
John is a star, and he’s fun to be around because in spite of that star status, he doesn’t take himself or the rest of the world too seriously. We have become great personal friends, too. Cheri and I have had a lot of wonderful times with John and his wife, Lisa, and that helps our partnership in the telecast. We have stayed with them in Las Vegas to watch him perform in Spamalot, and we have seen him in Chicago on Broadway. Cheri arranged for her colleague and our friend Monsignor Thomas Modugno of St. Monica Parish in New York City to baptize their son, William.
When John was writing his first book, It’s Okay to Miss the Bed on the First Jump (2006), he wanted to include something about therapy dog work. I lined him up with Greer Griffith, our director of programs for Angel On A Leash, and he shadowed her on her regular visits with her dog, Fauna, at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. He wrote a wonderful chapter about the experience, demonstrating that he really did get it. That didn’t surprise me, as I had been listening to his stories about his dogs, Scoshi and Betty, for a few years, and I knew how he loved and lived with them.
We tape the show the week before Thanksgiving at the Kennel Club of Philadelphia dog show, and then the crew comes back and edits it into a two-hour show for TV. We do the voice-over work in the studio on the Tuesday before the show airs on Thanksgiving.
NBC has been a great broadcast partner and a wonderful s
upporter of the concept that show dogs are real dogs. The network has always welcomed my therapy dog stories and have been supportive of Angel On A Leash as well. In fact, Rufus, the Colored Bull Terrier who was Best in Show at the National Dog Show in 2005 and at Westminster in 2006, has had his legend grow with his work as a goodwill ambassador and Angel On A Leash therapy dog for the National Dog Show since his retirement from the ring after those wins.
Cheri and I also spent a lot of time with Andrea Joyce, the great NBC sports reporter who did our backstage stories from the National Dog Show for years. Andrea was about to get a Goldendoodle, and Cheri was convincing her to make him a therapy dog. Soon Andrea was visiting at Ronald McDonald House New York with everyone’s buddy, the indomitable, happy, beloved Reggie.
In 2008, the Year of Uno, United Features Syndicate invited Uno to ride on its Peanuts float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a first for a Westminster winner. I went along to be sure that he didn’t fall off, one of those “other-end-of-the-leash” jobs. This experience ranked right up there for me with being on Sex and the City. Since our National Dog Show followed the parade, NBC gave us a great plug.
From the live telecast describing the Peanuts float:
Meredith Vieira: “United Features Syndicate brings us the forever-young Peanuts characters and Snoopy’s doghouse. Woodstock finds high ground atop Snoopy’s abode, waving flags, ready to guide the Flying Ace toward a safe landing.”
Matt Lauer: “With their love of Beagles, Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown play with Uno—he was on our show, remember, [the] first-ever Beagle to win the Westminster dog show. Along for the ride is every dog’s best friend, David Frei, host of the National Dog Show, which airs immediately following today’s parade right here on NBC.”