If not for a question I couldn’t answer back in 2000, “DeForest Kelley Up Close and Personal, A Harvest of Memories from the Fan Who Knew Him Best” probably would never have been written.
When DeForest Kelley’s biographer Terry Lee Rioux asked me, “How did you go from being a fan–on the outermost reaches of fandom–to being at Mr. Kelley’s bedside when he died?” I was thrown for a loop. I stuttered, “I have no idea! That’s something you would have had to ask De. I can’t speak for him.”
Terry persisted: “You know the answer. You just have to connect the dots. . .”
The question pestered me. My 30-plus year association with DeForest and Carolyn Kelley had all just seemed so miraculous to me. That’s because I hadn’t yet come to grips with the reality that De and Carolyn Kelley weren’t just being kind to one of their most ardent fans. I had become a friend.
At the end of his life, I became his personal assistant and caregiver.
Although #DeForestKelley gave me permission to write this book it took Terry Rioux asking me The Question that led me to drag out my scores of journals and the four behemoth three-ring binders that were filled with the conversations I had transcribed after each visit and call. This is how I finally discovered, for myself, how it all came to be.
What threw me as I looked through my archives was that I had forgotten so many of the details of our conversations and interactions. You wouldn’t think, as crazy about the Kelley’s as I was, that I would have forgotten a single word. But I had. There they all were, in exquisite detail, just as I had laid them down right after they happened.
My hope for this book is that it will bring you as close to meeting “the real McCoy” up close and personal as I was blessed to experience.
The reviews are great.
Requests for interviews are coming in. You can hear the first of them at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBg_1l4iQWE
The emails I’m getting as a result of sharing my saga are heart-warming. If you loved DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy or as a rowdy cowboy in the many westerns he did, you will love getting to know “the REAL McCoy” up close and personal. I sure did!
