The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
August 6, 2009
RIBERA, N.M. — Over the last 11 summers Don Imus and his wife, Deirdre, have welcomed nearly 1,000 children with cancer to their cattle ranch here in northern New Mexico for weeklong stays intended to be more work than play.
But this is the first season they have done so since Mr. Imus himself learned that he had cancer. In March a biopsy confirmed that Mr. Imus, the outspoken talk show host, had Stage 2, or intermediate, prostate cancer. Though he was initially advised to begin radiation treatments, he has so far chosen to treat the disease holistically. He has been dutifully ingesting habanero peppers and Japanese soy supplements as part of a regimen partly devised by his wife, a natural foods proponent, and monitored by a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center.
Marc Holm for The New York Times
Don Imus, on horseback, and Deirdre, his wife, encourage Emma Wider during a rodeo at the Imus Ranch.
“The kids want to know why, if I have cancer, I have so much hair,” Mr. Imus, 69, said in a recent interview in the Imus Ranch kitchen, rustling his shaggy, reddish-gray mane.
When asked if he drew strength from his young visitors, he said: “I used to think if I was ever in the kind of shape that some of them are in when they come here, I’d put a bullet in my head. But they don’t do that.”
Mr. Imus’s cancer diagnosis has done more than alter the dynamic at the ranch, where as many as 10 children at a time — most with brain, blood or tissue cancers — must be healthy enough to rise before dawn, muck stalls, ride horses and ultimately compete in a rodeo. His condition has also changed the tone of his syndicated radio show, which he resumed in December 2007 on Citadel Broadcasting and its affiliates, after his firing seven months earlier by CBS Radio and MSNBC over remarks roundly considered racist and sexist.
“Don’t you know I have cancer?” Mr. Imus invariably asks guests on the show these days. He does so more as a self-mocking plea for mercy than sympathy. The other morning he laid his guilt-inducing question on Bob Schieffer, himself a survivor of bladder cancer, who responded in kind.
“You and I have actually talked about it at some length,” Mr. Schieffer, the host of “Face the Nation,” said via phone from Washington, “which shows that you also have dementia.”
Sometimes the on-air conversation has been more professorial, as when Mr. Imus recently spent 10 minutes quizzing Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, about the side effects of his treatment for prostate cancer (including with radioactive seeds) while in office in 2000. “It gives you cold sweats, which are kind of embarrassing, particularly when you’re the mayor of New York City at the time,” Mr. Giuliani said.
One thing Mr. Imus has not done is to use “Imus in the Morning” — heard on about 65 radio stations by more than two million listeners each week, according to estimates by Talkers Magazine — to urge male listeners to be tested.
“I’ve always found it annoying when people who do the weather forecast tell you what to wear,” he explained the other morning, away from his microphone. “Like you couldn’t figure that out.”
He added, “None of us wear those lame yellow wristbands.”
During the four decades he has been on the air Mr. Imus has always used his life as fodder. There was his alcoholism, cocaine addiction and, later, sobriety, as well as his emphysema and the broken ribs and collapsed lung he suffered after falling from a horse in 2000. “It’s my act,” he said.
While talk of illness doesn’t tend to make for great radio, Mr. Imus’s audience appears to be growing. On WABC in New York, the flagship station for Mr. Imus’s radio show, he attracted an estimated 130,000 male listeners ages 25 to 54 each week in the most recent ratings period, in June. That represents a 3 percent increase from the same period a year ago, according to Arbitron.
Most weekday mornings this summer he is broadcasting his show live from a studio at the ranch, beginning at 4 a.m. Mountain Time. (The rest of the year the show, which is also simulcast on RFD-TV, originates in Midtown Manhattan.)
The elevation of Mr. Imus’s cancer to a regular on-air topic represents the second major change in his program in two years. After his firing he pledged to make the discussion of race a staple of his new show, and he has, by including two supporting players who are black — the comedians Tony Powell and Karith Foster.
The Imuses modeled the ranch, which is set on more than 4,000 acres dotted with juniper and pinyon trees, at least partly on the 35,000-acre working cattle ranch in Arizona where Mr. Imus grew up. After establishing the ranch as a nonprofit organization, Mr. Imus raised $40 million in donations for it, some from companies whose names appear like billboards on ranch buildings, like the Aflac Rodeo Arena.
Over the years the couple have contributed $10 million of their own money to the ranch, they said, and Mrs. Imus said they also pay the ranch’s annual administrative expenses, which are more than $250,000. (In 2005 The Wall Street Journal reported that Eliot Spitzer, then the New York attorney general, questioned some personal use of the ranch by the Imuses, but his inquiry concluded with no finding of impropriety.)
To anyone who might imagine the ranch as Neverland on the mesa, the Imuses have a ready retort: a central philosophy is that its young guests not be treated as if they are fragile, or special.
That was made clear to Cory Trout, 15, of Las Vegas, a visitor to the ranch in mid-July as part of a weeklong program not for children with cancer but for those who had lost siblings to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a group for which Mr. Imus has also raised money.
“This is not a good job,” Mr. Imus told Cory just after breakfast, as he stood over the boy’s freshly made bed. “See how your sheet is down to the floor? It needs to be tucked in.”
Soon after, Mr. Imus instructed Javier Rivera, 12, of New Jersey, on the proper way to wear his blue jeans. “Pull up your pants, Javier, or I swear I’m going to put you on the next plane back to Newark,” Mr. Imus said.
Mr. Imus said his holistic regimen appeared to be having a beneficial effect. In initial follow-up tests, key markers — including his PSA levels — had dropped. Although he is forgoing more conventional treatments for now — like other patients, he worries about side effects like impotence (or, as he puts it, “the dead noodle”) — he is not ruling them out.
Among those who said they felt a connection to Mr. Imus’s experience was Natalee Lauro, 13, a recent ranch visitor who learned five years ago that she had a malignant brain tumor. Though her equilibrium is unsteady, she said she had been encouraged by Mr. Imus to enter a ranch relay race, which she won.
“At first he’s really intimidating,” she said by telephone from her home in Mesa, Ariz. “He comes around.”
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