D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A I’d missed Richard Zanuck’s remarks that David had “appeared” to him the night before last. “I have good news and good news,” he said David had said to him. “The first: I’m okay. The second: I can look right at everyone I love.” Such reports fascinate me. I have never personally experienced such a thing. Although nine years ago when my friend Judy Green (who was also a friend of David and Helen) died late in the night on September 14, 2001, another mutual friend told me that she had been awakened from her sleep in the middle of the night by a cold breeze. At the foot of her bed was Judy, who said to her: “Goodbye sweet
friend,” and then the image disappeared. Another book party. One night Judy Licht and Jerry della Femina had one at their Upper East Side townhouse for their friend Dr. Gerald Imber, who is considered one of the top three plastic surgeons in New York. I know that he got into his line of work because one day, when he was a young resident working in a hospital in California, the doctor he was working under asked him if he’d ever considered surgery. He advised Imber to look into it because he had “very talented hands.” Because he respected this particular doctor, he took his advice, followed through, and a distinguished medical
career was born. When I learned that he’d written a book, I assumed that it had something to do with cosmetic surgery. I was wrong. The book is titled Genius On the Edge: The Bizarre double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted. Dr. Halsted, who was born in 1852, was one of the early staff members of Johns Hopkins Hospital (which had been planned with a grant from Mr. Johns Hopkins in 1873, but did not open until 1889, with the medical school coming four years later in 1893). In 1882, at age thirty, he performed a surgery (on a kitchen table) on a jaundiced
seventy-year-old woman, having determined that she had an infection of the gallbladder and had gallstones. The emergency surgery was successful—the first known operation to remove gallstones—and his mother’s life was saved. When he was thirty-two, following the experiments of Sigmund Freud with an exciting new drug, Cocaine alkaloid, and its possibilities as an anesthetic, he learned to produce a reliable dental anesthesia and performed minor surgeries using cocaine as a local anesthesia. He also tried morphine, then used to relieve anxiety, nervousness and sleeplessness, and as
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