A Hospital With Celebrity Status

Most people don’t keep diaries of their workdays, but as April 18 began to unfold, Ron Wise, spokesman for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, thought he’d better.

That morning, during an anti-abortion demonstration outside the center, Gary Morton, Lucille Ball’s husband, telephoned to say his wife was suffering chest pains and he was bringing her to the hospital. Shortly afterward, Wise said, “a tidal wave” of calls from concerned fans began to light up the hospital’s switchboard.

“She was in the OR for 2 1/2 hours,” Wise said, “and in the middle of all this, Ruth (Mrs. Milton) Berle died.”

Still, the clamor for news about Ball’s condition prompted Wise to ask Ball’s doctors to do something they almost never do after heart surgery at the hospital: hold a press conference. During the conference, Wise said, in addition to providing updates on Ball, he announced Ruth Berle’s death.

And, before the day was through, Wise had to deal with inquiries from reporters who had seen actor Gene Wilder arrive at the hospital earlier in the day and had guessed--correctly--that his wife, comedian Gilda Radner, had checked in for treatment related to her battle with cancer.

“I stayed on the phones all night,” Wise said with a weary look. “We got hundreds of calls from all over the world that first day Lucille was here.”

That day, however, was unusual for Cedars-Sinai only in its intensity and not necessarily because of its celebrity cast of characters. The staff of Cedars-Sinai, after all, is accustomed to seeing famous faces about as often as the parking lot attendants at Spago.

In fact, the wife of Wolfgang Puck, the owner of the trendy restaurant, had a baby last week at Cedars. As did the wife of actor Michael J. Fox--the same day. As has the wife of actor Tom Selleck.

James Garner, Milton Berle, Ella Fitzgerald and George Burns all have undergone heart surgery at Cedars. Sid Caesar, Totie Fields, Peter Lawford and Henry Fonda have been treated there. And other members of the Southern California entertainment community have anted up hefty endowments to fund medical programs and construction at the facility.

The mammoth 1.6-million-square-foot Cedars-Sinai complex has been called “the hospital of the stars,” but that is a handle that the medical center’s staff finds a bit irksome. The hospital’s 1,120 beds are not routinely filled with celebrities, they say.

A Routine Presence

But celebrities, if a relatively tiny percentage of the patient population, are a routine presence there. One reason, medical director Jim Klinenberg said, is that “We catch ‘em where they work and catch ‘em where they live. We are very close to Beverly Hills and Hollywood, where many celebrities live and work.”

And, beyond mere proximity, many of the 2,300 physicians on the center’s staff are the personal doctors of many stars, Klinenberg said. Since the institution’s early days, when it operated as two hospitals, Mt. Sinai and Cedars of Lebanon, it has been “tied to show business,” he said. As a consequence, he added, a “referral network” evolved through which celebrity patients recommended their doctors to other celebrities. And Cedars happened to be the home base of many of those doctors.

Still, staff members say, the final determiner is the hospital’s broad capabilities for treatment. The largest nonprofit voluntary health-care facility west of the Mississippi, Cedars-Sinai is the second-largest medical facility in Los Angeles, outstripped in size only by the publicly funded County-USC Medical Center. It is known, among other things, for its newborn and pediatric facilities and its cardiac care, research and technology, which Klinenberg said are among the finest in the world.

“We’re a giant internationally in the field of heart disease,” he said, “and people recognize that. And when we’re talking about celebrities, we’re talking about people who can afford the best. They might fly to Boston or to the Mayo Clinic for their treatment if there were no Cedars here.”

Well-Endowed Center

The center is also the recipient of a handful of whopping private endowments, some of which have been provided by famous names in the entertainment community. George Burns (for whom one of the center’s interior streets is named) donated $2 million to the hospital’s endowment fund, former 20th Century Fox owner Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara, gave $5 million for a research building, and director Steven Spielberg came up with $5 million that has been earmarked for the refurbishing of a pediatrics facility and the funding of a chair in pediatrics.

Still, said Tom Priselac, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the center, riches aren’t a prerequisite to admission. About 35% of the estimated 40,000 admissions each year are Medicare patients, he said (which accounts for about 50% of the center’s gross revenue), and there are about 42,000 emergency patients annually. The center also provides an estimated $8 million in free and part-pay care each year and continues to operate one of the city’s few trauma centers.

Luxury Is Available

However, luxury is there if patients want it and can afford it, and, Wise said, celebrities usually do and can.

Which means they usually opt for the eighth floor, which offers the cushiest options in the hospital. While all the rooms at Cedars-Sinai are private, single-bed rooms, patients on the eighth floor can spring for a “deluxe” room, a kind of suite complete with couch, chairs and conference table, a small refrigerator, and perhaps a private-duty nurse (provided through an independent service) and a special “luxury” menu that can include such un-hospital entrees as New York strip steak, salmon and lobster.

It all costs extra, of course. At $790 per day, a deluxe room runs $275 more than a regular room.

By comparison, rates at the 998-bed private Long Beach Memorial Medical Center run $480 a day for a semi-private room and $550 for a private one.

Privacy usually is the motivation for acquiring a room on the eighth floor, and that part of the center was constructed with seclusion in mind, Klinenberg said (“When they’re sick, that’s the one time when people really want their privacy”), but residence there doesn’t preclude flamboyance.

Entertainment executives have set up a kind of satellite office in their rooms, complete with private secretaries, phones and office machines, Wise said. Other patients have brought in what Wise called “really extraordinary audio-visual equipment.” One patient hired a violinist to play during dinner.

Comedians sometimes try out material on doctors, nurses and the most captive of audiences--other patients. Klinenberg said that during her hospitalization comedian Totie Fields joked constantly with patients and staff, and Milton Berle and Morey Amsterdam “would walk around the halls and just kid with people. We’ve found that celebrity patients have been extraordinarily nice about inquiring about other patients.”

George Burns, Wise said, turns the hospital into a kind of extended nightclub. When Burns recently arrived for a benefit event, Wise said, “he just came up and kind of hooked his arm in mine and we walked through the lobby and he just started working everybody. Everybody was hysterical. He’s like that.”

The rare celebrity patient, Klinenberg said, arrives with a large ego in tow.

“Most of them are no different than other patients,” he said. “So occasionally there will be one who can be difficult. There’s only one I can remember who we had to ask to leave. If people are famous, they possibly may want to try to manipulate the world around them. But on balance they appreciate what’s being done for them.”

Friendships Begin

And, said Ann Mancini, a nurse who has worked on the eighth floor for the last three years, celebrity patients often form friendships with the floor staff.

“I think that you see someone’s true colors when they’re sick,” she said. “With some people, you can tell that they’re genuinely funny in their day-to-day life. Sid Caesar (hospitalized for treatment of a hip infection) was just a wonderful man. We just laughed and laughed and laughed when I was in the room. And some patients will send food baskets or plants with really heartfelt notes attached. Some form good relationships with certain nurses and they’ll ask for them again.

“Most of them are quiet about the fact that they’re in the hospital,” Mancini said. “And it gets to be kind of second nature after a while to have celebrities with us. You put aside the fact that they’re famous. They’re your patient.”

However, she said, she was impressed when musician Barry Manilow walked in to visit a friend soon after Mancini began her tenure on the eighth floor.

“I come from a small town in Nebraska,” she said, “and I’d never seen a celebrity in my life. I kept asking, ‘Is that. . . .? He looks like . . . Is he?’ These are people I’d seen on TV and all of a sudden they’re walking through here.”

While Mancini and the rest of the center’s staff get used to taking the pulses of the famous, the fact that a show business luminary is ill often stirs the world outside the hospital’s walls, depending on the gravity of the illness.

‘More Flowers’

Hospitalized celebrities at Cedars “don’t really get any more visitors than any other patient,” Wise said, “but they get considerably more flowers. And my office can be like a branch of the U.S. Post Office. Sometimes I can expect to go a minimum of 48 hours straight. These people live their lives in the spotlight and sometimes it’s kind of hard to turn that spotlight off.”

Hospital security can be uncommonly tight. While Tom Selleck’s wife was recovering from the delivery of the couple’s baby, Wise said a man with a camera appeared at the hospital asking where the nursery was, explaining that he “just wanted to take a picture of the babies.” He was asked to leave.

“Just try to walk around on the third floor (which houses the maternity section) and look a little strange,” Wise said.

Least of Problems

Concerned fans, however, are the least of the hospital’s worries, Wise said.

“You would think that they would be a problem,” he said, “but the fans really tend to respect celebrities’ privacy when they’re ill. There’s not a great deal of drama or pyrotechnics. With Lucille, her fans were among the most courteous I’ve encountered. There were no crowds standing outside the medical center, but the phone would ring about every 20 seconds with people very courteously and briefly asking about her condition and wishing her well.”

If there is a single rule, a kind of game plan, for dealing with celebrity patients, Priselac said that the Cedars staff has found the best idea to be the simplest: business as usual.

“With the thousands of patients we deal with each year, you have to keep a perspective on the number of celebrities in that population,” he said. “Over the years we’ve learned how to deal with it, and now it’s a well-oiled machine. But (celebrities) certainly add a dimension that doesn’t exist in other hospitals.”