“You can get away with anything,” an older friend of mine once told me, “if you’re wearing an expensive watch.”
What he meant was that people rapidly scan each other for status markers. Some do it professionally: If your clothes are nice, the security personnel at a nice hotel won’t notice that you’ve come in just to use the bathroom. Some do it unconsciously: A person in a Mercedes just has more gravity than a person in a Chevrolet Spark, and there’s no use pretending otherwise.
It matters, to some people, where you sit at certain restaurants. Years ago, I was lucky enough to have lunch in the White House Mess, the small dining room in the White House that’s run by the Navy. When I proudly mentioned this to a Washington-insider friend of mine, he immediately wanted to know where I was seated. When I told him, he shrugged. “That’s nice for you,” he said, unimpressed.
And we all know that there’s a difference in prestige, if not in actual financial reward, between winning an Oscar, an Emmy, and a People’s Choice Award.
What I didn’t really know until a few years ago, when I suddenly found myself scheduled for a bone marrow biopsy (spoiler alert: I’m fine), was that there’s a status hierarchy to that, too.
“Where are you going?” a friend of mine asked at lunch when I told him about my little health issue.
When I told him, he shook his head violently.
“No. No. No,” he said. “Don’t go there. I have a guy. He’s wonderful. He’s a concierge medicine guy, so you know he’s good. He was the guy who did this for, I want to say one of the Eagles? Maybe Hall? Or Oates? I’m going to call him. He’s the best.”
“I have a doctor,” I said.
My friend was trying to be nice, and I appreciated it, but what I was really looking for was more along the lines of a “hey, too bad about the bone marrow biopsy, let me buy lunch” kind of thing.
“Who is your doctor?” he asked.
I told him.
“I don’t know who that is,” he said.
“Why would you?” I asked. “You’re a patent attorney.”
“Where did you find this doctor?”
I told him that he was the closest in-network doctor who also had a headshot on his website. I was comforted by that for some reason.
“Are you kidding me?” my friend shouted. “That’s a terrible way to choose the guy who is going to tell you that you have bone marrow cancer.”
“I’m actually hoping that he —“
“With things like this, you work your network. You ask around, you get names, you find the most successful, richest friend or friend-of-friend you can, or in your case, I guess the widow or heir of that person, and you ask for a referral. Why is this hard for you? You’re in the entertainment industry. Isn’t that how it works back there?”
He had a point. The entertainment business is what they call a “relationship business,” in which these personal connections make all the difference. And even when you can’t have a celebrity-endorsed doctor perform your procedure, you can at least choose the venue. My cousin was an ambulance driver in Los Angeles, and he told me that years after comedy legend Lucille Ball’s death, his passengers would still remove their oxygen masks and croak out a request: “Take me where I Love Lucy died.” He’d then head over to Cedars-Sinai hospital, where, in fact, Ball had passed away of a ruptured abdominal aorta.
“That doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “I like my doctor. He’s wearing a nice suit in his photo. I’m happy with him. Plus, it’s a $10 co-pay.”
“OK,” my friend said. “It’s your cancer. But if it were my cancer, I’d want to go to a doctor with a little more connection.”
He was about to say more, but the bill arrived, and he became preoccupied with getting my credit card so we could split it. A few weeks later, the test results came in, and it turned out that it was just an odd blood anomaly.
“I still think you should’ve gone to my guy,” my friend said when I told him the news. “My guy could’ve found something.”
He may have been correct. You get what you pay for, I suppose, and I just didn’t want to pay for the deluxe, high-status option. I didn’t want to spring, in other words, for cancer.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
