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Always Leave Them Laughing

Diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago, and given only months to live, Sam Simon is still alive and still racing to spend the fortune he made as co-creator of The Simpsons on causes he loves, whether he is rescuing grizzly bears (and chinchillas and elephants) or funding vegan food banks. As Simon's friends and fellow activists gather for his 59th birthday, another friend, Merrill Markoe, reveals how a force of comedy faces his own tragedy.

BY MERRILL MARKOE

OCTOBER 2014

http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/09/sam-simon-terminal-cancer-philanthropy

JUST ONE MORE THING Sam Simon and his Cane Corso, Columbo, at home in Pacific Palisades, California.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SELIGER.

It’s 8:30 on a Friday morning at the Van Nuys airport, in Los Angeles, as a Gulfstream IV is preparing to take off for the two-hour flight to Denver. The passenger manifest sounds like the setup to a joke, or a road movie:

There’s Tyson, a tattooed dog trainer, seated on a couch with his pit bull, with whom he communicates using nonsense syllables and telepathy. On one side of a polished wood table that holds a fresh-fruit basket and a backgammon board is the actress Jennifer Tilly, glamorous even in torn jeans and a pair of Converse All-Stars. The tousled-haired guy in the window seat beside her, wearing a Bruce Lee T-shirt and drawstring pajama bottoms, is her boyfriend, World Series of Poker champion Phil Laak. In the seat facing mine, looking lovely in a platinum pixie-style haircut, sits Pamela Anderson, wearing no makeup, somehow managing to be dressed up and dressed down at the same time in a short but otherwise modest black dress and ankle boots with four-inch heels. She looks up from a phone—its pink case has the words “Mrs. Salomon” written in sparkly letters on it—and grins.

We are all headed to the 720-acre Wild Animal Sanctuary, just outside of Denver, where we’re hoping to catch a glimpse of six newly born bear cubs. The two new mothers were among 17 bears, fated to live their lives pacing back and forth in the concrete holes of a grim roadside bear-pit attraction in rural Georgia, subsisting on white bread and soda thrown to them by tourists, until our host for this trip paid to facilitate their release. We will also pay a visit to Marley, another rescued female grizzly, who is recovering from the two broken legs inflicted on her as a last-minute parting gift when she was badly beaten by her previous owners. Her surgery was also paid for by our host.

He is Sam Simon, 59-year-old comedy force of nature, co-creator of The Simpsons, animal-rights activist, ardent vegan and philanthropist, art collector, poker champion, and a friend for 30 years. In the field of comedy writing, full to overflowing with the sedentary, the professionally whiny, and the proudly self-involved, Sam Simon stands out as an anomaly. Diagnosed with terminal colon cancer in 2012 and given three to six months to live, he is now focused like a laser, in a race against time, making sure that all that money—hundreds of millions of dollars—made from his years of work on The Simpsons and other television shows is being channeled directly into the charitable causes he loves.

Sitting across the table from Tilly and Laak, next to makeup artist Kate Porter, a current girlfriend, is Sam himself, completely bald from the chemo but looking fit and even radiant in a black hoodie with a rainbow appliqué and white jeans. His most recent chemo was two days earlier. That means he probably doesn’t feel all that great today. But he seems to have more energy than anyone else on board.

RESCUE ME “My doctors have never said they can cure me,” says Simon. “They are extending my life and doing a remarkable job.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SELIGER.

“I’ve really just gotten to know Sam personally over the last few months, when we started working out together,” Pamela Anderson, also an animal-rights crusader, tells me later. “To be able to be so generous at this time in his life is so inspiring. I feel honored to know him.” Sam has already told me about the exercises he now does, taught to him by a trainer Pam brought over to his house. They allowed him to keep walking after neuropathy hit so hard that he became unable to feel his legs below the knees.

Jennifer Tilly is Sam’s ex-wife and now one of his best friends. She has accompanied him to all of his chemo sessions since the cancer hit, even making sure she got one day a week off to fly to Los Angeles written into her contract while she was performing in a play in New York.

As the plane taxis down the runway, Sam opens up a briefcase full of medical-marijuana-laced snacks. “Mention I have a vegan pot chef,” he calls to me. He holds up a container of strawberry cannabis lemonade and laughs. Sam punctuates most of his sentences with a distinct laugh. It starts out a big deep rumbling guffaw, which longtime Simpsons writer and producer George Meyer describes as “startling, like the squawk of a macaw,” except that it keeps on going, longer than you’d expect, “until it fades into a whoosh, like the last squeeze of a Sriracha bottle.” The laugh happens whenever Sam says something he knows is funny, which is often. And also when he says something that is dark and horribly unfunny. Like when he’s talking about an undercover PETA operation that recorded one of the roadside-bear-attraction owners talking about his bears.

“If they got a cub, they would kill the adult,” Sam tells me. “The cubs make more money—they’re cuter.” Then they’d eat the adult. “They said, ‘There’s nothing tastier than a bear raised on white bread and soda pop.’”

Sam laughs.

Sanctuary

‘I’ve got sun bears, moon bears, grizzly bears, Syrian bears, brown bears,” Sam tells me as we approach the Wild Animal Sanctuary a few hours later. “I have 11 bears in Dallas and 23 in Colorado—but they just had six cubs.” There are also two rescued chimps at a sanctuary in Florida, a racehorse in Virginia, and some 500 chinchillas rescued from a chinchilla ranch in California. If all goes well, an elephant will soon join the roster.

The last time Sam visited the sanctuary was when the newly rescued bears had just arrived. He insisted on being the one who opened the cage door to welcome one of the 500-pound grizzlies to a life of freedom.

“Why was I doing shit like that?” he asks me, now slack-jawed as he views the CNN footage of himself, from January, standing an inch from the uncaged grizzly bear. “I don’t understand. It’s extremely dangerous. Dying young, you learn that life is precious, and you think, Why the fuck did I almost kill myself?” He laughs.

Unfortunately, when we arrive at the Wild Animal Sanctuary, the cubs are off in their dens with their mothers, choosing not to make an appearance. None of us, including their benefactor, gets so much as a glimpse of them. We do, however, pay an extended visit to the hospitalized Marley, who doctors say is recovering nicely from her successful antibiotic implants. As she roams around a cage full of bear toys at the sanctuary’s medical facility, her still-crooked front legs and the places where the hair hasn’t yet grown back make her look like an enormous man in a bad bear suit.

Sam approaches her cage and crouches down so they are eye to eye. He offers her a biscuit, which she gently accepts.

“I always try to tell them, I know the past few days have been rough, but everything’s going to be O.K. from now on,” he says later when I ask him what he was thinking when he was inches from Marley’s enormous head. “I used to say it out loud, until Jennifer Tilly overheard me.”

Dysfunctional Start

Sam Simon was born in Los Angeles in 1955 to a beautiful, volatile, and occasionally violent mother who owned an art gallery in Venice Beach called the Functional Art Gallery, which featured “one-of-a-kind artist-designed home items.” Throughout Sam’s childhood, Joan Simon frequently entertained contemporary artists in their Beverly Hills home. “I did know a lot of famous artists growing up,” Sam recalls. “Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Kienholz. Definitely all the California guys, like Chris Burden and Baldessari.”

Arthur Simon, Sam’s father, played basketball at U.C.L.A. until he lost a leg in World War II. He ended up owning a factory in Los Angeles that made a women’s line of designer-knockoff clothes called Sun and Sand. The Simon family lived comfortably in a two-level, midcentury home in the kind of celebrity-filled Beverly Hills neighborhood where, when the family dog went missing, “it was returned by my neighbor Elvis Presley in a limousine,” Sam tells me. “This was during a period when he wasn’t such a big deal,” he adds, and was considered “kind of schmaltzy.”

His parents’ marriage was rocky. “I think drinking fueled a lot of it,” he says. Sam’s relationship with his mother was “tempestuous.” “My mother hit me once for not making a martini dry enough, when I was nine years old,” he recalls. “We used to fight all the time and have extended periods where we didn’t talk.” He shifts into an oversize theatrically whispered aside, “I would have to say there were no winners,” then mutters, “I have cancer. You’re supposed to let go.

“I have to be very careful about how I phrase this traumatic childhood memory,” Sam tells me, recalling an incident, when he was five, between his mother and a famous neighbor. “I walked in on Groucho Marx and my mother in my parents’ bedroom. They were both on the bed. They were fully clothed. I saw him jump off the bed into my sight line, and then she was sitting up.” Sam starts chuckling. “I don’t know exactly what happened. My mother might have been fighting for her honor.” He laughs again. “Though I think I may have overheard Groucho saying, ‘I can see you in the kitchen, bending over a hot stove. Now I can’t see the stove.’ “ He laughs harder.

By the time Sam was in grade school, he was considered an art prodigy. His carefully crosshatched drawings were so articulate for a child that he became a recurring guest on a local television talk show, where he would stand at a drawing pad and illustrate any portion of a children’s book that the hosts read out loud. Eventually his abilities landed him at a lunch with Walt Disney, who predicted that one day Sam would come to work for his company.

During his years at Beverly Hills High, Sam wrestled and played offensive tackle and middle guard on the football team. But it was his cartoons for the school paper that won him “Most Humorous” and “Most Talented” in the yearbook. In fact, for his application to Stanford he “just cut out a bunch of my cartoons and sent them in.” But as a freshman, he was kept from entering the Stanford art department. “They said I would take up the room of a student with talent,” Sam says laughing. “And that’s burned in my soul for nigh unto 44 years. Take that, Professor Richard Diebenkorn!” By his senior year, Sam was selling cartoons to the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner.

After graduation, in 1977, a friend of Sam’s parents’ showed his drawings to the owners of Filmation, a production house that made “horrible Saturday-morning animation,” and he landed a job drawing storyboards. It soon transitioned into a job writing and designing new characters. But Sam grew restless.

“I wanted to be successful, but I didn’t see it happening in Saturday-morning cartoons,” he says. “So I wrote an episode of Taxi on spec and they bought it. I got a job. And it happened to be on the best show on television.” He was 25 when he became one of the show-runners of Taxi.

To Live and Tithe in L.A.

After three years on Taxi came Shaping Up, a 1984 sitcom set in a gym that starred Leslie Nielsen, written and produced with Sam’s then writing partner Ken Estin. The show was short-lived—five episodes—but introduced Sam to his first wife, Jennifer Tilly, when she was cast as one of the leads. It was followed by stints as a writer and producer on Cheers and as a writer and consulting producer on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. Then, in 1988, came an invitation from James Brooks to help develop a new series based on animated shorts commissioned from Matt Groening for Fox’s The Tracey Ullman Show. When The Simpsons launched, a year later, it was Sam who chose the writers and ran the writers’ room. He also designed the look of some of the characters. “Mr. Burns—I did,” he tells me, showing me some of his original sketches. “Dr. Hibbert. Chief Wiggum. Eddie, Lou, Bleeding Gums Murphy. All the black people.

“The No. 1 pleasure by far was how great everybody was,” Sam recalls. “It just doesn’t happen that everyone in the room is so great. So original.”

But there was oft discussed tension between Sam and Matt Groening. In The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, Groening calls Sam “brilliantly funny and one of the smartest writers I’ve ever worked with, although unpleasant and mentally unbalanced.”

“We would get into discussions of theoretical stuff,” says Sam. “I would say, ‘Guys, we’re 13 and out.’ This apparently sounded like surrendering to Matt. If I’d known it upset him I would have explained to him what it meant. I was not confident that the show would be a hit, but I always had the confidence that we could do 13 great episodes that we could always be proud of.” More than 550 episodes later, The Simpsons has gone on to become the longest-running animated show in the history of television.

“The show tore through the culture like a cyclone,” says George Meyer, who stayed with it until 2005. “But in Sam’s office, where we pitched our stories and re-wrote scripts, the mood stayed remarkably calm and unhurried. We did our work, had some laughs, and went home at six, because that was Sam’s style. He was confident and decisive, an aristocratic autocrat. And unlike many comic geniuses, he seemed to thrive on success.”

That version of Sam had a reputation for being hilarious but also combustible. “Full of passion that bled into anger” is how Sam prefers to explain his own volatility. “I was under a lot of pressure. I just wanted to make everything perfect. People who were trying to help me, I would hear them trying to sabotage me. I’d give some unclear instruction on an edit or something, and here they had stayed late to try and do it, and I would see it and get pissed off if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

“In the pressure cooker of a TV show, it’s a little bit of a witches’ brew. I completely think I’m capable of being crazy. I probably was crazy when I was doing The Simpsons. But my pulse used to be really low, my blood pressure used to be really low, and I could be screaming at someone on the phone, yelling at the network, I might even be throwing some stuff, but my blood pressure wouldn’t go up. My heartbeat wouldn’t go up. Because I was doing a bit. Shtick. Pretending to be that mad to get my way. Which is not a good way to do it. I don’t suggest it.”

And so, in the fullness of time, it came to pass that almost 100 episodes of The Simpsons were completed, most with Sam at the helm, thus ushering the show into the lucrative world of international syndication. Then, in 1993, he left. “I can’t honestly say we were getting along as well at that point as when the project started,” he says. (The terms of his departure included a non-disclosure agreement.) “But it worked out for everyone. Everyone should be happy.” His settlement gave him a percentage of everything relating to the show—including the licensing and merchandising—worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. “I make tens of millions of dollars a year, which may not sound like a lot, but over 25 years it adds up.” Sam laughs.

“I’m an atheist, but there’s a thing called tithing that a lot of religions do. Ten percent was the minimum you were supposed to give to charity every year. And I always outdid that,” Sam explains. In 2002 he started the multi-platform Sam Simon Foundation, one arm of which rescues animals from Los Angeles kill shelters and trains some of them to be service dogs for the hearing-impaired and veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Then there’s the mobile veterinary clinic, also in Los Angeles, which offers free surgery and free spay and neuter services. But it’s not just animals; another arm of the foundation funds the Feeding Families program, a vegan food bank that offers free meals to some 400 Los Angeles families a week. “We’re on track to distribute over a half-million pounds of food to more than 65,000 people this year,” its spokesman tells me. Sam is also the largest individual donor to Save the Children, which just announced a new global philanthropic community called the Simon Society.

The Giver

With each succeeding year, the scope of Sam’s philanthropy has grown. By 2012, he had given the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an international nonprofit organization involved in marine-wildlife conservation and anti-whaling efforts, a gift of a 184-foot former Japanese whaling vessel, worth millions of dollars. Renamed the Sam Simon, the ship is now handsomely detailed with a black-and-white dazzle-camouflage pattern to make it look like an iceberg from a distance.

“I was supposed to go to Antarctica with them, but I was diagnosed a week before I was going to leave,” Sam says. “I knew I was in no shape to go on a three-month sail in the furious 40s, or whatever they call it in the frozen Southern Hemisphere.”

The Sea Shepherd is the kind of hands-on results-oriented charitable organization that has been attracting Sam since he became aware that his personal clock was ticking. “With the Sea Shepherd, you don’t go, ‘What have they done?’ “ he tells me. “They made them stop whaling! They rammed a ship! They shut ‘em down! With PETA you don’t go, ‘What have they done?’ With PETA you get victories every week.”

Sam began working closely with PETA in 2002. He eventually became such an active donor and participant in its campaigns that it renamed its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, the Sam Simon Center.

To Sam, PETA head Ingrid Newkirk is one of the “angels” who have given him hope since he was initially diagnosed. “I’d just had an emergency colostomy; I’d spent a month in the hospital. I wasn’t healing. And I got a call from Ingrid,” he tells me. “And she was very curt. She said, ‘The dedication of your center will be March 1, and you will be there.’ And the reason I say she was being an angel is that was the first time I traveled. She gave me some tough love and showed me that I can still do the things that make life worth living for me. So I go, ‘Well, I can’t fly commercial. It’s not practical. I need to have a nurse. I need to have medical supplies and emergency supplies. I need to have a driver. But I can still go around the world and keep trying to leave it a better place.’ “

“Since he became sick, it’s like his vision has expanded,” says Jennifer Tilly. “I hate to say this, but little things used to bother him. He was always a very Type A personality. And I think he realizes that a lot of things that maybe would make him crazy, they’re just not important. He’s discovered what’s important in life. Such a difference. A lot of the stuff he does he doesn’t even talk about.”

Home Is Where the Art Is

At the end of a private driveway in Pacific Palisades, just past a Rodin sculpture, is Sam’s spacious, light-filled, contemporary main residence, one of several buildings on the 1.4 acres of his compound. Upon entering the house, the first thing you see, hanging in the entryway, is a specially commissioned 27-foot Dale Chihuly blown-glass chandelier in the colors of the ocean—a brave purchase for a man who had to completely rebuild his house twice, following an earthquake in 1994 and a fire in 2007.

We are headed for the large home theater, filled with rows of cushioned theater seats that face a floor-to-ceiling screen. Sam refers to this as “the TV Room.” The walls are lined with his extensive collection of pinup paintings by Vargas and Elvgren of women who have just learned, while innocently pursuing reasonable hobbies like painting or tennis, that their clothes have begun to fly right off of their bodies. In a glass case, on the far side of the room behind the wet bar, sits a beautifully detailed scale model of the Sam Simon.

“Sam has impeccable taste,” Tilly tells me. “Every time I come over I’m struck by how beautiful everything is.” The living room has a fireplace Sam had made from a piece of petrified wood that dates back to the Jurassic period. And positioned beside it, outside the nearest window, grows a living version of that same kind of tree, imported from Brazil. The walls of the living room showcase paintings by John Singer Sargent, Thomas Hart Benton, Richard Estes, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Eric Fischl, Robert Williams, and Mel Ramos. They are only a part of Sam’s massive art collection, all of which is now destined to be sold at auction—with the profits going to the Sam Simon Foundation—when Sam has left the building.

These days, during any meeting with Sam, I’ve learned to expect at least one appearance by Nurse Irene. She’s been in residence since Sam was unexpectedly released from a hospice earlier this year. Today she appears with a hypodermic needle and a glass of fresh-squeezed green juice. “I feel like Lyndon Johnson. Avert your eyes,” Sam says as Nurse Irene injects him in the rear.

“My doctors have never said they can cure me,” he says. “They are extending my life and doing a remarkable job of it. My scans from back when I was diagnosed, my doctor said, ‘If I showed these scans to my colleagues, half of them would say you’re dead, and half would say you’re immobile and can’t get out of bed.’”

Heading for Sam’s office, in a smaller, contemporary structure, we exit through glass doors that look out onto the infinity pool. “I said I want the weirdest, most unusual stuff,” Sam tells me, pointing out decades-old camellias, a plumeria that has been grafted together so it blooms in three different colors, and cycads from the Jurassic period. “The oldest plants living on earth,” he adds. There’s also Sam’s guesthouse only a few feet away.

“You know that house is called the Bailey House. It’s a Case Study House,” Tilly tells me when we talk a few days later, detailing how Sam bought it from a neighbor and then incorporated it into his compound to protect and maintain it. Designed in 1948 by Richard Neutra, it’s a registered Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

The Bailey House abuts an enormous, lush green lawn on the far end of which sits one of Robert Indiana’s Love sculptures. And just beyond that is a casting of Rodin’s The Thinker. “I think it’s the only one not in a major museum,” Sam says, forgetting to mention that it’s perhaps the only one that has rubber snakes scattered on its base to protect it. “I used to pay a statue-cleaning company $3,500 four times a year to come out and wax the statues. And there would be birdshit on them the next day. So I went to Amazon and bought 13 rubber snakes for eight dollars. You know, as a PETA spokesman I have to talk about how smart birds are, about the fallacy of this whole birdbrain stuff. But I can’t believe they haven’t figured out that those snakes are rubber.”

As we arrive at the smaller building that houses Sam’s office we’re joined by Sam’s dog, Columbo, a 120-pound, jet-black Cane Corso. Sam adopted Columbo when he came to the attention of the foundation after he and his mother were found starving, locked in a chicken coop owned by a drug dealer.

“Walking your dog is one of life’s great pleasures,” he says as we head inside. “I don’t get why anyone would want a dog-walker. It’s like paying someone to fuck your wife.”

Sam laughs.

Simon Says

‘In many ways I’m consciously crafting my death,” Sam tells me after we sit down at his desk. Behind him are his nine Emmys, stretched out in a straight line with the exception of the one that broke at the ankles during the earthquake. That one leans. There are also other awards, on a separate set of shelves, some of which are for boxing and poker.

“The liberations of the roadside zoos and circuses,” Sam says, taking a pull on the cigar he’s been working on all day, “this I don’t see as philanthropy at all. This is part of my therapy. I’m pacing my life looking forward to these things, and I enjoy them. I enjoy bringing my friends. The arguments against doing them, which you can see on every bulletin board every time I do something like that, I understand completely. It’s not a cost-effective way of doing anything except making me happy for an afternoon. I like to live my life with these goals ahead of me. But it also has to do with alleviating suffering.”

Among his future plans is funding PETA’s purchase of land in India for the Animal Rahat Sanctuary. There’s also the ongoing saga of Sunder the elephant. Today, according to Sam, is “a crushing day. Do you know who Sunder the elephant is? He is probably the most abused elephant in the world.” Sunder, who has been beaten and trapped by spiked chains inside a dark pot shed in India for seven years, remains stuck between brutality and bureaucratic red tape. “There was a chance I was going to get him today. I had these trucks waiting at the rescue.” No less a figure than Paul McCartney has tried and failed to win Sunder his freedom.

“People say I’m trying to buy my way into heaven, which I don’t believe in. So that can’t be true,” Sam says. He paid for those atheist billboards that make news from time to time. Like the one by the Lincoln Tunnel, in New York, that read, IT’S A MYTH, on a picture of the stars over Bethlehem.

Fight Card

‘What’s your answer to the question ‘Why did you leave The Simpsons after only four seasons?’ “ I ask.

“I wanted to do other stuff,” Sam says. “Anything else but The Simpsons.” In 1994 he co-created The George Carlin Show with Carlin. Then he worked as a consulting producer on The Drew Carey Show. “I directed about 70 of them,” he adds.

It was during this period that writing, producing, and directing became only one piece of how Sam was spending his professional time. He played and won an assortment of World Series of Poker events, and in another memorable game found himself victorious after a final showdown with Jennifer Tilly, herself a professional poker player. So serious was he, so deeply immersed in becoming a contender as a poker pro, that he hired a former F.B.I. agent to teach him how to read body language.

At some point during this period of Sam’s life, I got a phone call from our mutual friend George Meyer. “Did you hear that Sam is managing the heavyweight champion of the world?” To which I replied, “What do you mean? As a joke?”

Actually, it was more of a professional hobby.

“When I turned 40, I was looking for a new type of workout, and I went into a boxing gym and loved it. And I was good at it,” Sam says, explaining how he began to fight in amateur contests, in the heavyweight class. “I’ve sparred with champions—they’re going easy on me, don’t get me wrong—and I did it a lot with this particular fighter, Lamon Brewster. And then I heard that he had managerial problems.”

Sam was part of the team managing “Relentless” Lamon Brewster when he knocked out Wladimir Klitschko in the fifth round to win the W.B.O. heavyweight championship in 2004. In retrospect, Sam thinks that his most important contribution was probably helping to negotiate Brewster’s contract. “I’m the best contract negotiator in the world,” he says. “But I had help. I had lawyers and stuff. Relative to the average person Don King negotiates with, I think we were bringing somewhat of an advantage to the situation.” Sam laughs as he recalls a memorable dinner with Don King at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. “So, I call the lawyer in, and we start talking about a contract to join the stable of fighters that Don King promotes and hopefully to get a shot at the heavyweight championship of the world. We negotiated for three and a half hours, running back and forth, making Xerox copies in the lobby. I just remember how thick the thing was; even though it was only about eight or nine pages, there’s so much sweat from people handing it back and forth and all the scribbling and initialing. Anyway, Don King says, ‘O.K., we have a deal. And I’m going to have my lawyers type up everything that we’ve discussed. So: Here. Sign the bottom of this blank piece of paper. And let me get all three of your signatures. And then I will have everything else typed in above it.’ ”

Sam laughs. Hard.

Sam’s Club

‘I will possibly be celebrating my final birthday in a few weeks with two ex-wives, an ex-girlfriend, and a current girlfriend,” Sam tells me the next time we talk. In addition to Tilly, Sam’s second wife, Jami Ferrell—the January 1997 “Playmate of the Month”—has R.S.V.P.’d. “Probably, my social life is more active than it’s ever been. Astonishingly. And that’s because of my fine choice in women throughout my life. In my time of need they’ve all come back to comfort me.”

When I marvel at the precarious nature of this guest list and wonder if any feathers will get ruffled, Sam confesses that in fact that did already happen. Party co-organizer and current girlfriend Kate Porter was briefly taken aback. “But I named a grizzly bear after her. Then we were fine,” he explains.

A few days before, I had gotten word separately from Jennifer Tilly and Ari Solomon, Sam’s animal-activist partner in a weekly Internet radio show, that a surprise party was in the works. Somehow it took only a couple of days for Sam to find out about it.

The day before his birthday, Sam gets an early present: Sunder the elephant has been freed. There are pictures of Sunder departing in a truck. There are more pictures of him at a sanctuary, near a pond full of other bathing, rescued elephants.

The celebration of Sam’s 59th birthday is a wonderful thing to behold. Sam is strutting around his backyard in a vintage black brocade dressing gown he told me he had worn to a pajama party at the Playboy Mansion. There are vegan replicas of fish-and-chips, tacos, and sliders. Longtime Simpsons director David Silverman is singing and playing tuba with his New Orleans-style jazz band. Sam’s animal-activist friends are there: Captain Paul Watson, from the Sea Shepherd; Ric O’Barry, from the Dolphin Project; Lisa Lange, from PETA; Chris DeRose, from Last Chance for Animals. Celebrity animal activists include Pamela Anderson, Alexandra Paul, Beth Ostrosky, L.A. radio host Mark Thompson, and, of course, Tilly. A phone call from Dan Mathews Sr., a senior vice president of PETA, surprises Sam with a live rendition of “Happy Birthday” from Chrissie Hynde. The Simpsons contingent includes Al Jean and Mike Reiss, Tom Gammill and Max Pross, Jay Kogen, John Vitti, David Stern and George Meyer. Old friend Drew Carey is there.

Ari Solomon, his husband, Mikko Alanne, and Porter and Tilly have made a film for the birthday boy filled with video highlights from all the rescue work Sam has done this past year. There he is in Canada with Pamela Anderson, offering the guys who club baby seals a million dollars if they will just stop. There he is at Talladega raceway, in Alabama, with a car he sponsored in order to publicize the documentary Blackfish, which detailed the treatment of orcas at SeaWorld. There he is in Taiji, Japan, helping shed more light on the killing of dolphins that was first exposed in the movie The Cove. And there he is opening the cage for that grizzly at the Wild Animal Sanctuary, unprotected and an inch away from an unrestrained 500-pound bear.

After the movie, Sam gets up to say a few words. “I’ve been reflective. I’ve been looking back on my life. Don’t ask me why,” he begins, getting a big laugh. “But I’m so glad that I saw my favorite movie of my life just now.

“The last year, there’ve been some challenges,” he continues, “but I know that part of what kept me going are the extraordinary people in this room. My friends. And some of you have done things for me and come through for me in ways that I would never imagine possible. I can honestly say this last year has been the happiest year of my life because of the people in this room.”

Sam just smiles.

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The Facebook Hateicator by Paul Watson

The Facebook Hateicator 

Paul Watson

September 10 at 5:22am ·

Facebook, more than any other media illustrates the level of animosity and hate directed towards an individual or a cause.

I call it the Hateicator and it is a valuable tool for gauging the impact of thoughts and actions.

I have always felt that social media feedback ranging from insults to death threats gives a good measure how much the opposition is being offended.

As Captain James Tiberius Kirk once said,

“The best defense is a good offense and I'm ready to offend”

Over the last year the number of hate comments that I have received has literally numbered in the thousands. The most vicious comments have come from the Faroe Islands from pro-whalers and that is understandable considering the impact of Grindstop 2014. The next largest barrage of hate messages came when I criticized the idiotic TV series the Duck Dynasty suggesting that the guys who fake sexual come-ons to ducks should not be equating homosexuality with bestiality. Lots of very un-Christian comments from fake Christians erupted as a result of that. The Duck Dynasty fans were the most amusing and also the dumbest bunch of crazies I’ve ever seen in my history of cataloguing hate comments.

The third largest feedback of hate messages and threats came from Denmark in response to my article about the killing of the baby giraffe by the Copenhagen Zoo. This was surprising. I was amazed at the number of Danes who jumped to the defense of the slaughter of this innocent animal.

Between the Faroes and the Copenhagen Zoo I think I aroused an agitated spurt of Danish nationalism, as in my country right or wrong.

I still get a steady stream of hate comments from Newfoundland supporters of baby-seal bashing. I do not get many comments from Japan over Taiji about the slaughter of dolphins but that can be attributed to both the language barrier and the culture of apathy in Japan. Or they could just be much more polite than their equally vicious dolphin killing bretheran in the Faroe Islands.

The most flattering reaction has been the number of anti-Sea Shepherd and anti Paul Watson facebook pages. When people take the time and the energy to actually set up websites and facebook sites to attack you, you know you’ve got their attention.

On my facebook sites, I make a practice of banning people who make insulting or threatening comments. I do so because such people are my indicators of success. I send them to my Facebook dungeon of banned and undesirable persons. This way I can keep track of the numbers. I think I have close to 5,000 on the banned list but considering that I have close to 500,000 on my fan page, that is only about 1% so that’s a very healthy ratio. 99% supporters (or people who post nothing) and 1% haters.

For anyone contemplating being a social activist you need to accept that haters are going to hate and there is no need to be upset about it. In fact if you don’t get any hate messages or threats, you’re probably not doing anything that is making much of an impact. You need this negative feedback to gauge how effective you are.

Also don’t take any of the feedback personally. You don’t know these people. They are simply rising to the defense of that which you are opposing.

To be hated by some because you champion life, conservation and environmentalism is a compliment to your activism.

In other words, you can say to your detractors, “you hate, therefore I am effective.” Although I advise everyone to not bother to respond directly to your critics. They are useful as indicators but it’s a waste of time to engage them, unless you do so out of curiosity, challenge or amusement.

And remember, anyone who has done anything or achieved anything has had their legions of haters. In fact last year when I wrote a tribute to Nelson Mandela, there was a hate reaction by people who hated Mandela.

And it does not matter how good you are, how successful you are or how noble your cause. There are people who hate the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, Bill Gates, Tom Hanks, Paul McCartney, Ophrah Winfrey and well everyone really. In fact every single one of us has people who hate us even if we don’t always realize that they do.

That is however almost always compensated by the fact that we have far more people who respect or love us.

Remember hate works in the same way that any action brings forth a reaction. No matter what your stance, position or standing is on any subject, there will be people who agree with you, people who disagree with you and people who will hatefully disagree with you.

As a student of media, having been a communications major in my university days, I have seen the evolution of social media and the accompanying evolution of behavior molded by each new media. Facebook has given rise to the commenting coward. These are people who unleash their vitriolic vileness at every provocation from behind their craven cover of anonymity. They bark but they don’t bite and although barking may be annoying it can easily be rectified by blocking the barkers. And I do love to block the barkers.

Another interesting phenomena is the parasitical facebook hater. This is an individual who becomes obsessed with someone and makes it their personal crusade to attack, insult, annoy and irritate you. Anyone who is anybody on social networks has one or more of these strange characters attempting to hound them. Some even resort to posting You Tube rants and it is truly amazing the investment of time and resources they put into obsessing over people they do not know and have never met. In the real world these crazies are called stalkers and more to be pitied than feared. Again an easy solution – block them.

Ban, delete and block are the three mechanisms that Facebook provides to deal with vile people and vile comments.

I do however value and appreciate my haters. They keep me uplifted with the knowledge that if I am provoking such emotions from them I must be making progress in championing a cause they oppose.

And I keep them all safely tucked away in my little cyber dungeon where once I’ve counted their heads for the benefit of my hateicator, I need not hear from them ever again.

I’ll leave you all with some quotes about haters:

“Haters are the people who will broadcast your failures and whisper your success.”

“Behind every successful person lies a vicious pack of haters.”

“You are not successful when people tell you are awesome. It’s when they start to hate that you know you have their attention.”

“I love haters because they give you all their attention.”

“They will hate you if you’re pretty. They will hate you if you’re not. They will hate you for what you lack and they will hate you for what you got.”

“Haters are like crickets. They make a lot of noise. You can hear them but never see them, then you walk right by them and they are quiet.”