Karen Duffy is gorgeous, famous, fabulous. And she's got sarcoidosis, a deadly illness that may kill her. She's written a book about all four of her conditions.
Spend an irreplaceable hour or two of your life reading these 250 pages of the glorious life of Karen, and you'll be ready to tell this drop-dead babe to do just that.
Karen Duffy is a fashion model, a former MTV veejay, and now author of Karen Duffy: Model Patient, My Life as an Incurable Wise-Ass: Embracing the Chaos of a Life-Threatening Illness with Style (Harper Collins, $24). This is Brian's Song for the celebrity-obsessed, a heartstring-tugging story of a working-class girl who gets some lucky breaks, rockets to the top of wise-cracking 20-something slacker society, then must deal with sarcoidosis, chemotherapy, heartbreak, and the grueling cruelty of New York life.
It could be inspiring, if it weren't so self-consciously cute and breezy. Ms. Duffy shares with us her working-class childhood in New Jersey, her training as a nursing-home recreational therapy worker, and the offhand way she picked up “these modeling gigs” (a.k.a. Ford Agency, Almay, and Calvin Klein jeans.)
The celebrities are everywhere you look: Revlon CEO Ron Perelman, Woody Allen, Lisa Marie, George Clooney ... they're all her “good friends,” people she runs into at the cleaners or out walking the dog.
While working as a trash-talking veejay at MTV, she meets Whitford “Whit” Crane, front man for flash-in-the-pan rock group Ugly Kid Joe. What follows is a drug-and-alcohol fueled relationship of two years, full of public indecency, wild spending, and two-timing sleaze. Somehow, it's supposed to be wacky and zany: “Whit was a booze hound, a dirtbag, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and being with him was magical,” Ms. Duffy writes.
But finally, country music star Dwight Yoakam wakes her up to the world of Real Men, by filling up her bungalow at Chateau Marmont with hundreds of roses. She catalogs his gifts: matching pearl necklace, bracelet, and earrings, and a diamond-studded locket he designed himself.
“We went out off and on for about two years, or, as I like to say, about 60 carats worth,” she says. What a class chick.
Other odd habits she glories in are her planned collection of celebrity body parts, including a gallstone from her Dumb and Dumber co-star Jim Carrey, Mickey Mantle's liver, and an Elvis wart - ones OK for young readers.
Meantime, the author has a run of stratospheric luck, even after she leaves her MTV job. She appears on several tabloid TV expose shows, and suddenly, somehow has journalistic credibility enough to become a contributing editor at a mass-market magazine.
It's true, evidently, the beautiful and famous are different than you or me.
Even when they get sick.
When “Duff” passes out on the kitchen floor, she's drinking exotic mango juice. When she needs a doctor, Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax Films, takes her to New York's finest neurologist. (No one mentions HMO co-pays or provider referrals in this world.)
After many tests, doctors find a lesion on Ms. Duffy's spinal cord, a growth that slowly presses into her brain. It's hard not to pity a woman who suffers so with depression, horrible pain, and neurology tests. She buries her pain in Frank Sinatra albums, a touching, human response. But that's not enough for Duff. Some anonymous benefactor tells Sinatra about this suffering fan, and he sends an autographed 8-by-10 of himself. Then, days later, a crate arrives, bearing one of Sinatra's original watercolor paintings.
“It was incredibly moving to know that this man I'd never met, my idol, had wanted to share something so personal and special,” she writes.
The story moves on through her bouts with drug-therapy ugliness (she somehow manages to continue appearing in Revlon and Almay cosmetics ads), loneliness (she snags an investment banker and elopes to Jamaica, and we get all the details of the celebrity wedding reception that follows.)
This is all the “oh, gee, you think I'm pretty?” twittering you hated about those Girls Who Had It All back in high school. Ms. Duffy's suggestions on what to bring to a long hospital stay could be helpful (if your oncologist doesn't mind rhinestone tiaras and cocktail gowns on the ward); but her attacks on alternative medicine are shrill and unjustified.
Proceeds from Model Patient may help this lovely young thing pay her hospital bills and get on with her life. But there's little reason why readers should expose themselves to her swollen ego.
First Published January 8, 2013, 11:56 p.m.
