Patti LuPone's Dog 'Was the Glue that Held Our Family Together'

The upcoming book No Better Friend: Celebrities and the Dogs They Love compiles more than 50 touching and entertaining essays written by celebrities about their beloved canine friends. The tributes, which were assembled and edited by author Elke Gazzara, come from Kathie Lee Gifford, Mark Ruffalo, Bernadette Peters, and many others. In the weeks leading up to the book’s release, we’re publishing a series of excerpts. The third and final, from Patti LuPone, is below.

My husband and I have always had dogs. I’m a cat lover myself, but growing up in my family, both my cats and the family dogs have lived somewhat harmoniously all of my life.

My family’s dogs have been boxers named Colonel or German shepherds named Shep or Alsace. My husband’s family has always had dachshunds, and Matt’s dog was named Happy. Matt always wanted a yellow Lab, so for his birthday thirteen and a half years ago, I found a female Lab. She was an English breed: short snout and built like a sausage. Matt named her Indiana after his native state.

Indy was the rock and soul of our family. She was pure white when we brought her home at eight weeks old. Docile, she had a dog smile but also sad eyes. Our 7-year-old son looked down on the bundle of fur with the sad eyes and asked us if she could be his sister, and so Indy became Josh’s sister, Matt had the dog he wanted, and, in a moment of emotional upheaval, she became my solace.

She was a stoic dog, not terribly affectionate, just a little bit lazy. She often started to run, then ground down to a walk, so unlike a dog. But she was our protector.

We live in the country, and Indy protected the chickens and loved the rabbit that Josh brought home and the cat that found us one winter night. In the evening or in the dead of night, when something threatened the barnyard and our home, she demanded to be let out to bark and howl at the potential predators. But her bark and howl were laughable. It was a cartoon bark that started low and fierce, then sailed upward, ending in a long, high howl that trailed off into the ether. We actually worried about her because of her laziness. She wasn’t a fighter; she wasn’t an alpha dog. She was just a content animal.

Speaking of her howl, one day as I drove my son and his friend through a small New England town, the firehouse whistle blew at noon. Out of nowhere, Indy picked up the note of the whistle and held that note as long as that whistle blew, longer than any note I’ve ever held. My son, his friend, and I gaped at her in awe and wonder. She’d never done that before. She rarely barked.

When she was just a pup and I was working onstage, Matt brought her into New York City. She just had to meet everybody, anybody. She pulled on her leash and declared, Hi! I’m Indy, a dog! Who are you? Better yet, pet me. Matt called her a chick magnet.

Her demeanor so impressed our vet in Connecticut that he told Matt we should breed her. We bred her with a Lab named Lazarus, and she gave birth in our house to ten pups: six boys and four girls. She mothered them, but she wasn’t happy about any of it. A friend remembers that when he came to visit one day and Indy saw him, she got up and dropped all ten nursing pups along the way to greet him. We kept two of the girl pups, Scout and Pearl. Now there were three dogs in our house, and Indy became mine.

Labs are eaters, if you know anything about them. One Thanksgiving I put a tray of cheese and crackers on the coffee table and left the room. When I returned after a brief trip to the kitchen, I found a huge dog bite in a block of cheddar cheese and wasabi peas strewn all over the rug. She didn’t care for the wasabi peas.

She loved her car rides, though. Whenever she saw one of us leave the house, she ran to the door and insisted we take her. If it was just me, she rode in the front seat, and on occasion we held paws as I drove.

She was bred to jump straight up as if her legs were pogo sticks. It happened mostly around feeding time. Straight up she leapt, a seventy-pound dog whose body looked liked ten pounds of sausage stuffed in a five-pound casing. It was one of the things I loved most about her. She was a leaper, but she was also the clumsiest dog I had ever seen. She ran into things or just fell over, but she exhibited grace as she recovered as if her fall was meant to happen.

Once, when I was in distress over some stupid show-business nonsense and having a breakdown in the middle of the night, my husband Matt tried to console me. It wasn’t enough. I fell to the floor, embraced Indy, and sobbed and sobbed. Indy held her head up and absorbed the weight of my anguish, calming me down. I don’t know why I went to Indy. Perhaps because she was our protector, clumsy and lazy as she was.

It’s so hard to write about her, though, because she just died after a long illness. She is missed so much. She was the glue that held our family together. My husband, Matt, took such good care of her while she was sick. He hardly slept through the night, tending to her needs. She wouldn’t go, just refused to leave her family. She was our protector.

When she finally gave in to her age and illness, she went serenely. She was a noble dog. There will never be another Indiana for us. I write this through tears, my husband at my side, both of us crying. She was the queen. RIP, beloved Indiana. We miss you so much.

Excerpted from the book No Better Friend: Celebrities and the Dogs They Love, by Elke Gazzara. Copyright (c) 2013 by Elke Gazzara. Used by permission of Globe Pequot Press, www.globepequot.com.