Giant George (25 page)

But stars need their rest, especially before a big premiere, so we had to drag a reluctant George away from the circle
of his clearly adoring fans. An AA manager greeted us and escorted us out of the airport, taking us and the driver, who’d come inside to meet us, straight to a limo—a limo!—that was waiting outside and would take the three of us straight to our hotel.

George loved that limo—and how. He was up and into it like it was exactly what he’d expected, hopping right up onto the long seat that ran the
length of it, stretching out languidly and looking right at home. But however comfortable he looked, I was still a bit anxious, because despite all my confident talk about the size of his bladder, I was worried he might need the bathroom. He wasn’t showing signs of any obvious distress, but, even so, when I asked the driver to stop and we got out, it was soon clear I’d been absolutely right. That
done, we made the rest of the forty-minute journey, enjoying the sights of a city Christie and I had both visited in summer, but which looked so gloriously different on this crisp winter’s day.

They’d given us a room in the Omni Chicago Hotel, a really classy place right in the heart of downtown, where we
could rest until we were due to be picked up early the next day. Till then, after the panics
of the previous day and evening, all we wanted to do was veg out in front of the TV, order room service and sleep.

Once again, when we arrived outside the hotel, we were given a great reception. We were escorted inside via a special back entrance, like they do with the president so there’s not a huge fuss. And what a room it turned out we’d been given. We’d assumed it would be nice—it was a pretty
nice hotel, after all. But when the guy opened the double doors and showed us inside, I think all our jaws dropped, including George’s. It was huge. And so opulent, a real palace of a place and a million miles away from that Phoenix hotel where we’d been holed up with George when Christie had lost the baby. Here he was actually the guest of honor.

“It’s the governor’s suite, sir,” the guy explained
proudly.

And it was certainly fit for a governor. It was fit for a king. It was massive, with a huge sitting room, a separate grand bedroom, an en suite you could hold a small party in, if you wanted to, a bar area, a dining area… it was amazing. But then we realized there was a fly in the ointment in all this high-living: there was no place in the suite for George to sleep.

“Tell you what,”
said the desk clerk, when we called him with our problem, “I’ll have someone come right up with a roll-away bed for him.”

We thanked him and got on with the all-important business of calling home to check on Annabel and working out what we wanted from room service. It was some menu, and the choosing would take time.

Minutes later, the rollaway was duly delivered, we tipped the bellboy and started
to set it up.

“It’s a bit small, isn’t it?” was Christie’s considered opinion, once we’d pulled off the sheets and pillows and blankets and coaxed George to climb up and give it a try. She grimaced as it seemed to quiver gently beneath him.

“And I’m not sure it’s going to take his weight either.”

“We need to put the mattress on the floor,” I agreed. So we pulled the mattress off, rolled up
the bed frame, cleared the blankets, and relocated the mattress to the floor.

We both looked and shook our heads once again.

“We need another rollaway, don’t we?”

Christie got back on the phone, this time to order some dinner and wine for us and another rollaway for Georgie. The guy who came up—the same one—looked at us like we were mad, but we didn’t care. The star needed his sleep.

As did
we. We gazed lovingly at the huge, fluffy king in the master bedroom. We would sleep well tonight.

We removed the bedding from the second rollaway and pulled off the second mattress, lining it up lengthways beside the first one.

“Hey, Georgie,” said Christie. “Come try this out, will you? It’s not perfect, I know, but it’s oh so much better.” George tried it. He turned circles, turned some more,
then flopped down.

“Done,” I said, as we heard a soft knocking at the door. “Time for our dinner now, I think.”

I’d ordered steak and Christie had ordered salmon, accompanied by a bottle of Silver Oak Cabernet. It was a real treat,
because the prices here were way higher than in Tucson, but as we’d been told that Oprah would foot the bill for us, it was fair to say we were very much looking
forward to our meal—even more so once it was set up at the elegant table by the fire. We were ready to tuck in.

And we did, but we weren’t long into our meals when Christie paused and nodded toward Georgie. “He looks uncomfortable on that,” she said. “Hon, do you think he looks uncomfortable?”

I looked across at him. And yes, he did look pretty uncomfortable. The two mattresses, being rollaway
ones, were pretty thin, and even pushed together they weren’t wide enough for him. Infuriatingly, they wouldn’t stay together, either. He had his head on one mattress and his back end on the other, but his stomach was sagging onto the carpet.

“Yup,” I agreed, putting a forkful of steak into my mouth. “You’re right. That looks pretty uncomfortable.”

“Maybe, after we finish dinner,” Christie decided,
“we could move that chair over there”—she raised a hand and pointed—“to stop the mattresses from sliding apart.”

“Good idea,” I said. “And maybe we could shove those pillows against the head end. That’ll at least give us a little bit more length to play with.”

“Good idea,” Christie agreed. “That’ll probably do it.”

Except it didn’t, and right after we finished our dinner, we spent a frustrating
half hour, George looking on patiently, trying to maneuver things to make a bed for him that was both wide enough for his bulk and wouldn’t move. The trouble was
that every time he moved, the mattresses moved too. It was hopeless. Even bordered by the chair, it was hopeless. The mattresses were just so thin and bendy that they crumpled up under his weight.

I felt so sorry for him, I handed him
a piece of my steak. “You know what we
really
need to do?” I said in jest (I’d had that wine now, of course). “We really need to give Georgie
our
bed to sleep on, and have the two roll-aways in this room ourselves.”

Christie looked at me, and I could see I’d made a fatal error. She didn’t realize I was
joking
—not at all.

“You’re absolutely right,” she said, hauling herself back up. “D’oh! Why
didn’t we think of that in the first place?! Come on, let’s get these beds set up.”

An hour later and the three of us were done for the night. We’d gathered up the mattresses, remade both of the rollaways, put the stray bits of furniture back in the right positions, gotten undressed, cleaned our teeth and crawled into separate beds, where, from our pair of puny, thin rollaway mattresses, we stayed
awake plenty long enough to see our boy go to sleep. He was lying sprawled, eyes rolled up in blissful doggie-dreaming, in the huge, fluffy king-size in the governor’s suite of the terrifically swanky Omni Chicago Hotel.

“Well,” whispered Christie, as her rollaway creaked beneath her. “It
is
George who is the star here, after all.”

You know you’ve arrived when you get your own green room—not that we were sure what it was we’d arrived at, exactly. Playing a pair of chaperones to a superstar felt like a pretty lofty place to be, though.

Neither Christie nor I had ever been near a TV studio before, so the whole experience blew us away. But the
people at
Oprah
were lovely. They made everything so nice for us, right down to allocating the room for our personal use and making a huge comfy bed on the floor for George to rest on; and, in case we were hounded by overenthusiastic fans, they’d even gone so far as to make a sign for the door. The sign said: “
Unless you are a member of Team Giant George, please don’t ask to see him till taping
is over
.” And pretty much everyone ignored it.

Not that we minded, and George didn’t either. They told us he was more popular with the staff at the studios than most of A-list Hollywood actors and actresses who passed through the show’s hands.

As they would, I guess—everyone knew that an appearance
on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
was just about the best publicity ticket ever, because the show, which
had been around for a quarter of a century, was simply the biggest, most famous talk show in the whole of America, not to mention the rest of the world. No wonder celebrities scrambled over one another to get a place on her sofa. So, when you thought about it, the people who worked on the show—and there were lots of them—must have been pretty used to having this movie star or that sports star show
up with their entourage and their demands for this and that.

But here, in our Georgie, they’d found a real people’s hero. And a perfect guest too: one who hadn’t arrived primed with a long list of riders; one who counted himself happy just to have his ears scratched. No wonder they loved him so much.

It had been another early start. We had woken up early—unsurprisingly, given our night on the
rollaways—and I’d taken George out for a walk, so he could go to the bathroom before we left. There was still plenty of snow around, but not so much that he got twitchy about where he was stepping; the sidewalks were mostly clear, and the bulk of the snow sat in big grubby piles at the road edge. That done, and after a quick room-service breakfast, the three of us were in reception at 7:30 sharp,
waiting for the driver who’d take us to the studios. Another day, another limo. “This is surreal,” Christie said. She was right. I had butterflies in my stomach—a first for maybe twenty-plus years.

It
was
surreal, too. It was a world away from our lives in Arizona, both in terms of where we were and what we were doing. It seemed incredible to think that we were off to one of the most famous TV
studios in the country.

Both the studio itself and the Oprah Winfrey production company are named Harpo—which is “Oprah” spelled backward, of course. It’s the only studio complex in the world (I went online and found out this fact before we left home) that’s owned by an African-American woman. Oprah Winfrey, in short, is a legend.

The studios were on Washington Boulevard, in the Near West Side,
about a twenty-minute drive from the Omni. Though I was feeling nervous, at least it wasn’t going out live—the show would be taped today to be aired the following Monday, so I reassured myself that if George or I made any bloopers it maybe wouldn’t be
so
bad. Even so, as I saw the big Harpo Studios sign in the distance, my nerves jumped up a notch or four.

Shantel was there to greet us and welcome
us to the studios, and she was as great in the flesh as she’d been on the phone. Right away you could see why she did what she did; she was in her thirties, I guess, and just oozed warmth and confidence. She hugged us both warmly and couldn’t get over George; you could see right away she was a real dog lover.

Our green room was lovely, and very starry. The bed for George was a thoughtful touch,
and there was a whole bunch of stuff—fruit, fresh coffee, dainty pastries and soft drinks,
which we were encouraged to dive right into. Neither Christie nor I was hungry, but George eyed the pastries.

“Oh, no you don’t, Georgie,” Christie warned him. His expression in response to this mild caution was wonderful to see. It said, “Hell, Mom, I’m the star here, okay?”

“Right,” Shantel told us,
“this is what’s going to happen. We’re going to go down now and do a dry run in the studio—get George used to what’s down there, all the people and cameras and stuff, okay? We find it helps to get everyone acclimatized to it. It can seem a little daunting if you haven’t been in a studio before.”

She was right too. Leaving Christie in the green room, George and I went down some stairs and along
a bunch of long corridors, and eventually found ourselves in this cavernous hangar, the middle part of which I recognized from TV, except that it seemed to be made of chocolate!

“Oh, that’s one of the segments,” Shantel explained, sounding like a TV set made of candy was nothing particularly out of the ordinary. “The whole set behind us”—she cast an arm around her—“is made out of Godiva chocolate.
Seventy percent cocoa solids, of course,” she added, grinning while I looked at it in amazement.

But even taking all that in, the place was amazing. It was such a massive operation. Behind the scenes—or more correctly, behind the chocolate scenery—was this whole mishmash of cameras, enormous cameras set on trollies that moved like the Daleks from the
Doctor Who
show in the UK, as well as bright
lights and cables, like a writhing mass of serpents,
and people wearing walkie-talkies and oversized headphones, pointing, hugging clipboards and running everywhere.

There was no audience at this stage. They’d be coming later. But with what looked to be around fifty or so staff in the studio, it felt pretty packed as it was. And hot. How on earth would all that chocolate hold up? Once again,
though, I was amazed by how relaxed Georgie was; he just strode around with me, sat as directed and stood up again, without it ever feeling in the least like he was antsy about anything. He was one amazingly cool dude.