If You Lie Down On Your Private Parts With Dogs, You’ll Come Up With . . . Very Odd Cindy Adams Stories!

When profiles of Cindy Adams are really chugging along on all four cylinders they tend to take on a surreal quality, something you might dream while nodding off on the subway:

“Hello! I’m your hostess!” Cindy Adams was saying as she stood in the entryway of her Park Avenue apartment, welcoming a small group of women to a ladies’ tea for Marianne Williamson, the New Age author, and Ellen Burstyn, the actress and memoirist. Adams did not know all her guests, since the party had been conceived in Burstyn’s public-relations office rather than in the generous heart of New York’s saltiest gossip columnist, but she struck a note of instant intimacy.

“Can I tell you, these crappy dogs just cost me nine hundred dollars to do their teeth, and that’s with the fifteen-per-cent discount the vet gave me?” Adams asked, as her two Yorkies, Jazzy and Juicy, swirled around her feet in a brown-and-black blur, before disappearing behind a concealed door into the kitchen.

. . .

Adams’s attachment to her own small animals was clear: mid-party, she lay down on the marble tiles of her hallway and fed a pastry to Juicy from her mouth, a transfer requiring much licking and wagging from the canine party. Shortly afterward, Adams retreated to her tabloid-papered inner sanctum and, when asked if she considered herself a spiritual person, struck a note of uncharacteristic gravity. “I am somebody who is a seeker,” she said. “There are two parts to every person. There’s the brittle part that everybody sees. And then there’s the part that would rather lie on the floor with the dog. The private part.”