Last night was a busy one in New York. There was a big fete for the Paris Review over at Cipriani 42nd Street. A year has passed since the Review’s leader and one of its main founders, George Plimpton, suddenly left this world. Last year’s benefit was all about George whose personality was so big that it’s hard to imagine that this year’s wasn’t also a lot about George. I was planning on going except I was distracted by something which was more compelling for personal reasons which I will go into in a moment.

Also down at Capitale, there was an Aid for AIDS benefit, the annual “My Hero” award. The guest list included a wide array of artists, designers and supporters including Patricia Cisneros, Alejandro Santo Domingo, Jackie Weld Drake, Rory Kennedy, Violy McCausland-Seve, Nan Richardson, Chelsea Clinton and Ian Klaus and Ross Bleckner.

Elizabeth McCormack

I, however, went over to the Time-Warner Center where the Asian Cultural Council was holding a celebration of their 40th anniversary, commemorating the council’s four decades of funding cultural exchanges between Asia and the United States, in honor of ACC Chair Elizabeth J. McCormack, as well as paying tribute to the ACC’s founder, the Late John D. Rockefeller III and his late wife, Blanchette Rockefeller. The evening was hosted by Bill Moyers and featured dance and music performances by leading Asian and American artists. The artists were introduced by ACC director Ralph Samuelson and the concert was performed in the brand new Jazz At Lincoln Center Allen Room with its back wall of glass framing Columbus Circle, Central Park South, the southern end of Central Park and in the distance the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There is no way to articulate the breadth and scope of the visual experience except to say that it reminded me of those movies and documentaries of the City moving at night, like a Gershwin rhapsody or the background to a jazz concerto. Brilliant.

Bill Moyers told us that this evening, honoring this very remarkable woman, Elizabeth McCormack, was sold out six months before the invitations were even sent out. There were more than 500 guests attending.

My special reason for attending was one of personal curiosity. I had never met Elizabeth McCormack. Her brother Dr. George McCormack was my doctor until he retired two years ago, and in our “in office” conversations he had told me a bit about his sister whom he admired and respected with a kind of reverence that Irish boys usually hold only for a saint.

George McCormack was a very special person to me. I’d met him ten years ago last March, at a birthday party for my friend, the now late Dorothy Hirshon. I was seated next to his nurse and companion Mary Murray. At dinner I told Mary how I was without a doctor (and money to pay a doctor, amidst my financial struggle at the time). It so happened I’d had pneumonia the summer before and because of my financial situation avoided a doctor until I felt so ill (I didn’t know I had pneumonia) that I went to see a friend’s doctor who diagnosed my condition. Mary said: “did he give you Biaxin?” Yes. Mary nodded knowingly and said: “the next time you have a problem call me.”

It so happened that two weeks later I woke one morning with a terrible ache in my side. Something like a stomach ache, but in my side. As the morning wore on, it grew worse – the worst physical pain I’d ever experienced. Finally, out of desperation, I called Mary. She told me to get right over to George’s office, which was at 79th and Park. I went in, he told me to lie down on the doctor’s bench. He did those “knockings” on your abdomen that doctors do and in one place it hurt so much I almost went through the ceiling.

“It’s your gall bladder, Dave,” George said gently with certainty, “and it’s got to come out.”

“When?” I asked.

“Today.”

Today because, he explained, in men, the gall bladder can lead to complications and death if it’s not taken care of right away.

It was then that I told George my reality: I had no money and no insurance. Without even so much as a shrug, or my asking, he got on the phone and started calling surgeons. I heard him say to one: “we can’t let the guy die just because he doesn’t have insurance, can we?”

A few minutes later, he wrote down a telephone number and told me to get up to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital right away, instructing me to give the phone number to the girl in the emergency room. I did as I was told and within minutes of arriving at the hospital I was on a gurney in the receiving room of the Emergency ward. While lying there waiting to begin the process leading up to surgery, a hospital administration woman came in and said very loudly: “Is there a Mr. Columbo in the room?”

“It’s Columbia,” I replied, annoyed and probably moreso because of the pain I was in, “like the name of the hospital you’re working in.”

“Oh, well you must be very important,” she said to me.

“And why’s that?” I asked dumfounded.

“Because we got a call from the president of the hospital and the chairman of the board of trustees asking us to take good care of you.”

I was dumfounded since I didn’t know who she was talking about. “Well thank you,” I said.

A few minutes later I was wheeled down a long hallway and into an elevator and therein began a series of pre-op tests.

Testing over I was taken to a private room and given some shots and told that they’d come for me when it was time. They came about midnight. I was fearful because I’d never had surgery before and afraid especially of the anesthesia. The doctors who were present when they wheeled me into the OR, however, were gentle and reassuring, concerned for my comfort and like loving brothers. Just before they were about to administer the anesthesia, I said a little prayer to myself, unplanned and later intrigued by my sudden choice. I thanked my god for all those whom I loved and all who had loved me and then I asked for a safe passage.

About three a.m. I came back into consciousness in the Recovery room, hearing the voice of a Philippina woman quickly sorting plastic syringes and complaining to another woman about her children, her husband, her lunch, her coffee break, and just about everything else in her life. While this litany was airing, all I could think of was that I was “ALIVE!” and so so grateful to be alive. The woman’s complaints to these ears somehow soothed by my own revelations taught me a life-lesson about “attitude.”

Later that day, I had a visit from George McCormack in my room. I’d never really had a conversation with him before. He asked me all about myself, my family, where I came from, what I did, what I thought. He was a white-haired man with a soft but deliberate voice just this side of a whisper. There was an assuring gentle intimacy in his tone and I found myself telling him everything about myself including those things we usually conceal from strangers because they might feel embarrassing. After about forty-five minutes, he stood up and, ready to leave, stood at my side, tapped my arm and told me that he was glad to have met me. Disarmed by his kindness, I said: “George, you have a great bedside manner ... what’s you’re secret?”

“Just being nice to people, Dave,” he answered. “That’s all it is.” And then he left to continue his calls.

I recovered nicely from my surgery thankfully, and I went back to the office on 79th and Park to see the man who saw me through my health crisis so quickly and so compassionately. I later paid the surgeon’s bill and the other medical bills, although I never got a bill from George. In fact, I never got a bill from George for additional visits I made with other complaints. I was relieved because truthfully at the time I was very low on funds.

However, one day a couple of years later, after a visit, I told him I wanted to pay. He asked if I could. Yes. Okay. And I did.

It was during these visits he told me about his sister who started out her adult life as Sister Elizabeth McCormack and had become the president of Manhattanville College in Purchase. She made, according to her brother, a lot of revolutionary changes in the school during her tenure. After she left, she went to work in the Vatican for a year, and then after that, she left the sisterhood and went to work for the Rockefeller Brothers as a financial adviser. She also met and married a man named Jerome Aron.

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