LIFE WITH FAT CATS (&DOGS)
Home vet’s tails of affluent animals
The animals are tame, but some of the stories are wild.
In her new book “Pets and the City: True Tales of a Manhattan House Call Veterinarian,” animal doctor Amy Attas dishes on what she’s learned about the lives of New York’s wealthy and well-known by visiting their homes to care for their four-legged family members.
Attas launched her mobile practice, City Pets, in 1992. Joan Rivers, whom she had impressed with her no-nonsense approach to treating the comedian’s Yorkie, Spike, at Park East Animal Hospital, was her first client.
Other notables followed, including Billy Joel, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Wayne Gretzky, Erica Jong and Steve Martin.
Creature comforts
On an evening in the early 2000s, the vet got a call from Cher — Rivers had recommended her — who was on a plane from Italy with a stray dog she’d adopted there, named Pippo.
Attas diagnosed him with mange and warned that the skin condition was very contagious.
Cher was aghast. “Well, that explains it. Does the rash on humans look like this?” the superstar exclaimed as she flung open her robe to show, Attas writes, “her iconic body in its naked entirety.”
Other clients revealed themselves to Attas in different ways.
Twice a week, she would give a cat named Sophie a medicated bath, sometimes letting herself into the multimillion dollar apartment on East End Avenue.
One day, when she went to retrieve Sophie from under a bed, she found her client’s husband in the sheets with another woman. She felt obligated to tell the wife, a down-to-earth mother-of-two who was one of her best customers.
“It was a really, really awful experience,” said Attas, who has caught clients in affairs at least a half a dozen times. “It’s happened more times than I ever wished it would have.”
She learned the rich play by different rules. Billionaire oil heir Gordon Getty and his late wife Ann once summoned her to their apartment to vaccinate their cats before they moved to London.
She warned that the international move would require complicated paper- work and a quarantine, but Ann said it wasn’t a problem. They were flying private — and their jet had a bedroom they could lock the cat in to avoid immigration officials.
Despite clients’ wealth, payment can be an issue.
Valerie, the “vampy second wife of one of the most successful Italian restaurateurs in Manhattan,” always paid cash.
One day, she suggested they arrange a barter, which Attas assumed meant exchanging her medical services for restaurant meals.
Attas racked up $2,500 in credit and went out for dinner at the husband’s place. Assuming Valerie was taking care of the $800 bill, she left a tip and left. A waiter chased after her, saying she needed to pay.
It emerged that the husband had no knowledge of the deal. He had been giving his wife $1,000 in cash to pay Attas every time she came.
“He now figured out,” Attas writes, “she instead spent that money on cocaine.”
Some famous clients have been reluctant to take Attas’s advice. One example was a “Fifth Avenue doyenne” the vet calls Mrs. Beach.
The woman was frantic after her heirloom sapphire ring went missing. An X-ray showed it was halfway through her West Highland terrier Tricky’s colon and likely to come out on its own. But Mrs. Beach couldn’t stomach the idea of the dog pooping out the jewels and insisted on an unnecessary surgery.
As she and Attas argued, Tricky did her business and the ring emerged, covered in excrement.
Mrs. Beach declared, “I may never wear that again.”
In stitches
Joan Rivers, however, was hesitant to put her pup under the knife. The plastic surgery-loving comedienne was obsessed with appearances and didn’t want to amputate the leg of Boston terrier Lulu when the dog was stricken with bone cancer.
“I’m not going to look at her Frankenstein stitches every day!” Rivers told Attas, with whom she grew quite close over the years.
Attas and Rivers’ staff teamed up to make tiny tutus that would cover the incision site with colorful tulle and convinced Rivers to go through with the surgery. Lulu lived for several more years.
“Rich people love their pets as much as we love out pets,” Attas told The Post. But “their behaviors are markedly different.”