Lewis Berman, an Upper East Side doctor whose calendar was studded with appointments for patients with boldface surnames like Kissinger, Warhol, Trump, Bacall and Kennedy, paired with less familiar given names like Chappy, Buzzy and Spike, died on Dec. 16 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.
Dr. Berman, a veterinarian to the dogs, cats and other animals of celebrities (and many less notable clients) for more than six decades, died of complications of congestive heart failure, his wife, Amanda Berman, said.
His career took shape early on, after a benevolent vet successfully treated one of young Lewis’s childhood pets.
“He made the dog well,” Dr. Berman told Town & Country magazine in 2014. “I thought this was magic.”
But while he had originally hoped to care for farm animals as a country doctor, he discovered in college that his arms were too short to perform obstetric exams on cows. So in 1961, after he graduated, he opened Park East Animal Hospital on East 64th Street, treating mostly pets in a neighborhood that was, then as now, home to many luminaries. Soon, his reputation grew by word of mouth.
“He was the quintessential local vet,” Jim Kelly, a friend and the former editor of Time magazine, said in an email, “except the local part was the Upper East Side of Manhattan, home to a wealthy, often famous and always very doting clientele, some insanely so, on their pets.”
Dr. Berman’s first celebrity patient was a dog belonging to the composer Cole Porter. He examined the animal at Porter’s apartment at the Waldorf Astoria and was paid $100.
“If I hadn’t needed the money,” Dr. Berman told Town & Country, “I would have saved the check and framed it.”
His largest patient also happened to have a Waldorf connection: a Great Dane nearly the size of a calf that belonged to the Shah of Iran, who was staying at the hotel.
“Lewis’s true gift was with people,” Michael Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell University and a former dean of its College of Veterinary Medicine, said in an interview. “He was always calm, capable and compassionate, even in the midst of a medical emergency, and his clients — from the person off the street to the titans of finance, politics and entertainment — loved him for it.”
Dr. Berman would make house calls to treat Buzzy, Walter Cronkite’s springer spaniel. If he arrived at his office in the mid-1970s to find Secret Service agents stationed outside, he figured that Henry Kissinger was visiting his Labrador, Tyler, who was often receiving long-term care. (Mr. Kissinger, lying on the floor and kibitzing with the dog, once told Dr. Berman, “I was on my way to a board meeting and I wanted to get Tyler’s views.”)
Dr. Berman’s patients also included Cavalier King Charles spaniels belonging to William F. Buckley Jr. and to Lauren Bacall; Lillian Hellman’s standard poodle (“She loved that dog,” he said, but “she didn’t like people very much”); other poodles owned by the fashion designer Carolina Herrera; Jerome Robbins’s longhaired terrier; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s Pekingese; John F. Kennedy Jr.’s childhood gerbil and, later, his shepherd mix; Tennessee Williams’s Boston terrier; and assorted pets belonging to, in addition to Andy Warhol, luminaries like Rex Harrison, Cindy Adams, Oscar de la Renta, Betty White, Joan Rivers, Halston, Julie Andrews, Caroline Kennedy, Burt Bacharach, Ralph Lauren and Henry Fonda.
Chappy, a black poodle who belonged to President Trump’s first wife, Ivana, was a patient. (In her 2017 memoir “Raising Trump,” she wrote that Mr. Trump and the poodle “had issues with each other.”)
Dr. Berman sold Park East Animal Hospital to Pet Partners in 2012, and it moved to East 72nd Street. He retired in 2016.
He believed the kinship between humans and their companions was, in part, chemical.
“Pets,” he wrote in 1984, in one of his regular columns in Family Weekly magazine, “actually trigger physiological changes in people, in which enzymes are secreted that directly alter their moods.”
He insisted, though, that he had never been tempted to treat humans. “The animals are easy,” he said. “The people sometimes give us problems.”
Lewis Howard Berman was born on Jan. 7, 1935, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, a descendant of immigrants from Poland, sold woolen goods. His mother, Lena (Joseph), had been born in Hungary and managed the household.
Lewis grew up in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan and graduated from Stuyvesant High School, where he played the clarinet. Had he not become a veterinarian, he said later, he probably would have aspired to a career as a professional musician. (An opera aficionado, he especially liked Wagner.)
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1951 and a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from its veterinary college in 1957, he spent two years in the Air Force. He earned the rank of captain after serving as a base veterinarian in Okinawa, Japan.
In 1958, he married Deborah Weissman in Okinawa; she had arrived for the ceremony with the dog he gave her when he left for Japan. That marriage, and a second one to Sandra Orzack, whom he met when her pet was one of his patients, ended in divorce. Dr. Berman married Amanda MacIntosh, whose parents were his clients, in 1976.
She survives him, along with a daughter, Michelle Marchildon, from his marriage to Ms. Weissman; another daughter, Meredith Lovejoy, from his marriage to Ms. Orzack; and four grandchildren.
Over the years, Dr. Berman owned at least nine cats; several Jack Russell terriers, including a deaf and arthritic one named Smudge; and an ocelot, which wasn’t shy about sharing hamburgers served to dinner guests.
But no pets survive him. (“The worst part,” he said about being a veterinarian, “is that animals will not outlive their people.”)
“People do think of their animals as children,” he said. “In emotional moments they’ll call their dog their son; they’ll say the dog is their best friend. That’s a sad commentary on humans, I think. But animals are a great substitute for children, friends, spouses. I have always recognized that.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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